Ulduar boxing?

[Terraelf]

Is anyone boxing Ulduar? My guild is usually very fast on the progression, especially in the 25-man raids, but Ulduar overall is kicking our butt. We're running three 10 man groups and 1 25 man group. We're 7/14 in 10 man and 1/14 in 25 man. My 10 man group is the guild leader right now on progression kills and I'm seeing so much independant movement and strategies being required that I just don't see a light at the end of the tunnel on getting to multibox this place much. Can anyone report success having done so?

[emesis]

I have brought an extra DPS or two to a couple of fights (XT-02, Kologarn) when people had to leave the raid early, but they have not been very effective (i.e. better than nothing, but not much).

My guild is 6/14 on kills in 25 man, having gotten off to a slow start the first week basically not being able to raid at all. We are not that hard-core either, particularly from a schedule perspective (we are doing 2-3 hour raids 2-3 times a week).

Are the fights boxable? Sure, with some much better than others. Kologarn is actually very simple to DPS multibox, with appropriate positioning, the only thing you need to worry about is moving one of your toons back away from the eye beam if they get targeted, and you do have a couple of seconds to react. Auriaya ought to actually be quite simple to multibox as well, as everyone can stack up (although she does fear, which in combination with the fight void zones could be pretty bad if your tremors don't break the fear well).

Are 2-5 toons from a multiboxer likely to contribute as much as 2-5 decent players playing independently? No way. There are, as you say, a lot of movement mechanics in pretty much all the fights, where you need to spread out and collapse in very specific ways to maximize DPS and minimize raid damage. I would say the proportion of "boxing-friendly" encounters between Naxx and Ulduar has pretty much inverted from what I have seen so far.

I'm having tons of fun (and plenty of trouble) just playing one toon in Ulduar.

BTW, 1/14 progression in Ulduar is a pretty bad prognostic sign for progression in your 25-man groups, given that Leviathian is basically the one puggable boss in Ulduar and the only boss with a >50% kill/wipe rate in progression attempts (http://www.worldoflogs.com/stats/ulduar/). Ulduar is going to force a lot of guilds to either consolidate, weed out weaker raiders, or move from 10/25 runs to 10 only.

[Terraelf]

Yeah 1/14 on 25 man is giving me heartburn. Honestly, this type of progress is not typical for our guild. We have enough players that we were fully supporting two 25 man Naxx clears a week. We have at least 25 people geared well enough for Ulduar who can meet "normal" raid time. Week 1 was unplayable. Week 2 had several issues going on. For whatever reason the people setting the schedule thought that changing for progression on the fly would be a good idea. As a result, a lot of regulars weren't able to make the ad-hoc scheduling. A lot of time was spent on Flame Leviathan trying to get hard mode working for us and we burned a lot of progression time we could have been spending on learning other bosses. On top of that, our guild master who is usually heading up the runs had a death in the family and was gone during the latter half of the week, which is when we normally raid. He's back and I think some of the scheduling conflicts are resolved and we're going back to the 25 man raid schedule that was working for us pre 3.1 patch, which is 3-5 hours 3-4 days a week for progression focus. The fights I was in on (the schedule changes messed with my ability to attend) were Razorscale and XT. For Razor, it was our early attempts and we were figuring out positioning. We just didn't have enough time on him to get it down. Our DPS numbers were looking appropriate to succeed... for XT, we were having lots of problems with people understanding what to do when they had gravity bombs or light bombs and people weren't burning the little robots in time. A lot of times people were doing the opposite of what they should do. We hit the enrage timer multiple times with the boss only a little under 50% -facepalm-. We have 2 successful 10 man groups running (us at 7/14 and the other at 6/14) and a third one that we know will sucesfully launch now that our guild leader is back.

Anyways, back to the original topic... To take a fresh perspective, let me think about the bosses I have seen go down and here's my thoughts on multi-box viability:

Flame Leviathan - I could see 2 boxing this easy mode. Put 1 toon in a siege engine and make the other toon a gunner. Have your active window be your gunner and target and fire with number keys. Move the tank with keyclone (or whatever broadcasting method) movement keys.

Ignis - Boxable with practice. Might have some issue getting through the trash avoiding the cyclones. Should be pretty easy to move out of the flame circles.

Razorscale - Boxable mainly if DPS. Movement not much different than avoiding void zone type issues like in OS.

XT - I see challenge here. Do I stand still? Do I move? Which toon do I move and in which direction? Do I need to burn the little bots or focus on the heart? The answer can be different to the same question for each toon.

Kologarn - I'm worried about reaction time to move out of the eye beam. I feel the eye beam makes this fight about equal to Thaddius in terms of maintaining a good multibox output.

Auriya - Probably the most boxable boss I've seen... Nearly all of the work is in the initial pull. If you have a shammy w/ a tremor totem, the difficulty level of boxing goes WAY down, especially if the summoned cat doesn't get killed and you don't have to worry about a void zone.

Thorim - Hrmm.. to box the arena or the gauntlet. I've done both sides and I'm not sure which I'd prefer to box. Probably the gauntlet. As it was, I was having huge problems pulling aggro in the arena on my lock and I had to switch to more single targetting than AoE. Right now, I don't think I'm comfortable boxing this, but it's probably doable with more experience.

Freya - First time I saw this boss was last night. I haven't seen her go down yet, but I'm very skeptical on multi-box viability at this point. I might feel different later.

Reading through the descriptions on bosses yet to come, the deeper and deeper I read into Ulduar on bosses I haven't downed, the more I think "not boxable". I guess experiencing the bosses first would be a good thing before I start complaining about difficulties in boxing this in the future. ^^

[Bovidae]

I run a casual guild of 56 accounts with about 20 raiders (I account for three of them). We have 1 10man team that is 8/14 as of last night with no raid planned before reset. Last night, we finished while working on Thorim, but were having trouble balancing the two groups since I have to take three DPS either one way or the other.

Hopefully we will run a 25m after this reset.

[Marious]

Well its not an easy fight specially when people don't listen I OT for my 10 man group but I have yet to MB any of the raid encounters normally I can run all the regular 80 instances easily with the exception of UP gauntlet run that one sometimes I am good to go and do it on the first try but others its a wipe fest and I get upset and go do some other instance.

For my group FL, Razor, XT are the only one's down the damn trash for Ignus I swear is harder than any of the 10 man raid bosses. The trash hits hard I cant even imagine how much of a pain Ignus is gonna be. So for us its only 3/14 so we have a long way to go, technically all are guys are real good players but damn Uldar aint no joke on harness of the encounters.

[Alemi]

I'm only doing 10 man atm, because of all our guild drama, I'd rather progress with friends. I'll either run a multitide of 2/3/4 shamans, an actually on our first FL/XT/Kologarn kill i was running 4. Right now, we're 7/14 w/ 3 watchers down, as we skipped the optional ones to get the token bosses on farm.

Kolo isn't bad at all, as long as you watch who he's targetting and keep a target macro built into your attacks.. /target Kologarn, /target Rubble, /target Right Arm

Thorim, I find it easier to do the arena boxing. But overall, an easy encounter.

Flame Lev, I just ran 2 shamans to get launched and then ran the 2 motorcycles to pick me back up, ezmode.

Hodir... oh hodir. So much movement on this fight with icicles, it's pretty much a caster's nightmare. It's great fun, and i was running 2 or 3 ono ur kill of him. Great fight. One of my favorites, but def not an easy one to box.

Freya - is just absolute insanity. The hardest wave on 10 man is by far the 3 that rezz, but still doable with focus fired dps.

The two fights that we're working on...

Mimiron - it's boxable, but you're going to need to stay focused, move out of rockets, and have good movement control on your characters. This is by far going to be the hardest. Phase 1 is ridiculous raid damage and tank damage.... luckily you have time to spread out seperately for phase 2. Otherwise you just take far too much damage. Phase 4 == crazy...

Iron Council - I keep everyone on follow, and while I do eat some chain lightning bounces, it's kind of necessary for the rune of powers. This is the hardest one to box unless you run with specific classes becasue of the need to spellsteal/devour and interrupts on the caster. But it's doable. We wiped after 3 attempts randomly yesterday when we lost a healer but we were getting to the end of phase 2 without a problem (our druid tank kind of moved directly into a great big Overload and went boom).

[Terraelf]

Update for tonight. We decided not to go in on Freya. Instead we did Hodir and Iron Council. Downed them both so we're 9/14 now. We went in to take a peak at Mimiron. We had no intent to kill him, just go in and engaged him blind so we can get a quick looksee before we researched the boss for trying him after the reset.

I can see Hodir being boxable. It helps a lot to turn on the video setting that makes a big circle appear on the ground. Iron Council, only problem I see there really assuming you do it the "normal" way is when you are on the last boss and he flies in the air, a strict /follow might be bad cuz you could be dragging him to all your toons. I think it'd be manageable though, you just have to be on your toes. Healing through the chain lightning didn't seem too bad for our healers. Because we didn't completely understand the fight, we were getting hit by a lot of them and still downed him. I expect we'll eat less lightning next time. I didn't see enough of the Mimiron fight to have any thoughts about multiboxing. The mines were difficult to see.... just for kicks we pushed the button after we made 2 tries at him. rofl

[puppychow]

I 4 boxxed Flame Leviathan yesterday in a pug, was a lot of fun :) Just split them into two seperate siege engines, follow works fine. Both got targeted during the fights but all I'd do is turn around, speed boost, shield if he got close, etc. My two gunners were the top DPSers on the boss too! The only thing that dropped tho were 2 melee items and the healer neck :(

I'm 8/14 in 10 man on my DK as main tank, did it in a pug. To be honest I had a lot more fun playing solo than multiboxing ulduar. I can focus 100% on one char, and imo that helps a lot - we 1-3 shotted every boss in my ulduar10 pug, even though only one person had done any of the bosses previously.

[Terraelf]

Were there some unannounced changes or announced changes I missed since last reset cycle? Ulduar felt a lot easier in 10 man last night. Only 2 things I directly observed and the rest of it I couldn't put my finger on, but it just felt significantly easier. I don't think it's completely the fact that all the bosses we killed last night we killed last week so we had experience. We're 7/14 for this weeks run first night, so we have plenty of time to get the 2 we downed last week before we start working progression kills on Freya and Mimiron.

Direct observations:
On Ignis, adds only need 10 stacks before they are ready to be put in water and shattered.
Rune effect on the trash leading to Kologarn was much less damaging and much less frequent.

Indirect observations:
Ignis seemed to drop easier
Kologarn seemed to drop easier
People hit with eyebeams on Kologarn appeared to take less damage, leaving more room for error

Razorscale, Flame Leviathan, Deconstructor, Auriyea and Iron Council all felt the same as last week. We dropped them much easier, but it seemed it was more an experience thing than changes on Blizz's side.

Anyone have info on changes or observed other nerfs I missed?

[puppychow]

its up on mmo-champion, Ulduar got nerfed pretty hard this week, they did make the "hard mode" fights harder however for the hardcore raiding guilds. I got up to Yogg last night on my mage and we 1-shot every boss except Hodir (2 shotted him), the first few bosses now honestly are pretty much loot pinatas. xt for example used to do tantrum for 15 seconds, its down to 4 seconds now and the damage he does got nerfed. ignis had a lot of changes, Razorscale has fewer adds and the fire does a lot less damage.

I know some people in my guild are QQing at the nerfs but I don't mind at all, 25 man is still hard and honestly being able to sleep walk through ignis/xt/razorscale is not a bad thing, I see virtually every raiding guild on my server now recruiting so gotta do something to get more people to continue raiding.

[Terraelf]

its up on mmo-champion, Ulduar got nerfed pretty hard this week,
http://blue.mmo-champion.com/23/16474158165-recent-ingame-fixes--41609.html

Wow you're not kidding. Lots of nerfs. That also explains why the new VoA boss was a lot easier last night. From what I saw last night, VoA new boss should be going back to puggable status.

[Poetry]

I 4 boxxed Flame Leviathan yesterday in a pug, was a lot of fun :) Just split them into two seperate siege engines, follow works fine. Both got targeted during the fights but all I'd do is turn around, speed boost, shield if he got close, etc. My two gunners were the top DPSers on the boss too!
I just ran into Ulduar this morning to see what the vehicles were like. It seemed that most (if not all?) of the abilities were either cone effects or ground targeted (move the camera up to target further away, move it down to target closer). This type of targeting sounds difficult for multiboxing so I'm curious how you handled your gunners. I'm wondering if maybe employing a camera centering macro might help get everyone targeting similarly? We would likely split our group with our 4 boxer running the two siege engines as you did, put four of my crew in demolishers, and my last toon in a chopper following our single boxer who would also be on a chopper. I think we'd need to setup our own ability bars (not just the default possess bar) so that we could sort abilities in a logical way and not spam inappropriate things to our other toons. I'd love to give this a try someday.