WotLK - Trial of the Champion - (ToC)

[mrmcgee21]

Not that its very hard to begin with lol but anyways some quick strats.

Boss 1) This is mounted combat but its increadibly simple, just have your 4 followers stand in front of the dude you want to kill while riding figure 8s around it with your main keeping its shield down. Also make sure you keep all of your shields up, remember you can thrust and charge shields at the same time, seperate cd's. Also make sure your watch each toons mounts hp, if it gets low simply alt tab to that screen .. ride over and get a new mount .. takes almost no time.

Boss 2) ... I'm not even going to talk about him .. really simple free epics. .. I guess hit autofollow after he cast's radiance to reface your toons ( 4 sec aoe blind ).

Boss 3) This guy is a little tricky he has 3 phases
- Phase 1 : pretty simple just dps him, he summons a ghoul at the start just switch to it and dps him down real fast ( 50k hp ) or you can wait for it to explode later on and risk getting a nasty aoe on the shamans as he drops aggro randomly ... boss hits the tank fairly hard here so keep your tank topd off.
- Phase 2 : hardest phase imo, DPS him hard as soon as he pops up and be ready to strafe your followers quickly here. He will cast desecration on your followers at some point .. its random sometimes I didnt even get it but you have to move quick because it does 2k dmg a tick + your snared so it hurts if you dont move fast. Also he begins summoning an army of the dead at the start of this phase, about 30 sec in they will start to explode and any remaining ghouls when he dies will immediately start casting explode. Explode has a 5 sec cast time or so, be ready to strafe your alts away from any ghouls you see huddling over channeling this or they will most likely die. If your dps is fast the boss dies in about 30 sec and you can just strafe out while the phase shift happens, if your slow it gets a bit more tricky as you h ave to strafe and dps on and off.
- Save DPS cooldowns for this phase, you have to dps him down really fast because he simply does too much dps to heal through over time, he aoe bolts the entire group for 1500-3000 and then hits a single target for something like 8000 dmg every 5 sec or so. Only 277k hp per phase so its not to hard to burst him down before your healer simply falls behind, lust helps a lot for the healer here if you have it. Nothing else to it though, just blow cooldowns dps hard and heal your butt off and he should die.

[Meathead]

Nice gratz think yo ucan make a vid? :D

[mrmcgee21]

I haven't been able to make video's yet, I run 5 on one machine and recording just eats up a lot of framerate for me. Maybe at some point in the future though.

[Basilikos]

Show off.


J/K good work. Thanks for the run-down.

[Meathead]

I say get your guys in some blues n run this over n over again you will get decked out!

[Lyonheart]

i could not even beat the normal mode.. this is tough!

[Meathead]

The second boss is easy mode first is abit of a pain 3rd is lol :P

[Lyonheart]

i cant get past the 3 champs. ill have to try again tomorrow!

[rulemaker]

Patch is coming live on european servers today. I'll give it a try later.

How do you manage mounted combat?
What about your equip - fully epic?

greetz

[Meathead]

you can do it in blues and he did it in heroic if i am correct its very easy instance, 1 boss is hard but other then that...

[Lyonheart]

The 3 champs are hard.. they go in and out charging and casting shield breaker on you. please tell your secrets!!

[mrmcgee21]

Try backing your followers up to a wall, so the 3 champs have to fight in front of them where their thrust always works, then just circle out with your main and toss shield breakers as you need. Of course make sure the peice of wall you use has some fresh mounts nearby.

[Greythan]

I singled boxed this with a pretty well geared and well played group last night.

We couldn't beat the female boss who cast the "nightmare" spell that summoned a ghost. First off, she seemed to target low HP targets OTHER than the tank with a 6k smite. She had a habit of doing this right after the ghost cast "Walking Nightmare" or something like that that caused a 4 sec fear and 1250 damage per second for the 4 secs.

Once I got hit with smite, feared, and hit with smite again when the fear dropped. The timer on the two smites was 4 seconds apart. Total damage? 14k. (Was already down some.)

Until I get the tactics figured out on this boss solo, I can't see any way to five box this.

P.S. The mounted combat was beyond trivial with 5 single players.

[Meathead]

hmmm well sounds very hard for you but on normal i found it cake with a ok geared group guys in blues with 15k hp but my dk with 32k dont know why its so hard for you. :(

[jimbobobb]

I singled boxed this with a pretty well geared and well played group last night.

We couldn't beat the female boss who cast the "nightmare" spell that summoned a ghost. First off, she seemed to target low HP targets OTHER than the tank with a 6k smite. She had a habit of doing this right after the ghost cast "Walking Nightmare" or something like that that caused a 4 sec fear and 1250 damage per second for the 4 secs.

Once I got hit with smite, feared, and hit with smite again when the fear dropped. The timer on the two smites was 4 seconds apart. Total damage? 14k. (Was already down some.)

Until I get the tactics figured out on this boss solo, I can't see any way to five box this.

P.S. The mounted combat was beyond trivial with 5 single players.


Woah - I can't imagine how a 5 person group could lose any of these battles. I one-shot the normal mode, and died twice on heroic figuring out that I had to move my guys away from the ghouls to not get exploded and also once during the mounted combat. This zone is multi-boxing candyland. Running regular nets you 5 De'able purples and takes about 15 minutes. Running heroic again nets you 5 DEable purples (and even some stuff worth equipping), 3 Conqueror badges, and took me about 30 mins dieing 3 times. I'm sure you can get the heroic down under 20 minutes easily. This is going to replace my daily VH run. My guys are mostly wearing Naxx 10 level gear.



Edited to add information is regarding HEROIC (Which is also a joke)

First Three Champions (Mounted Combat until you dismount them all, and then everyone gets dismounted and you just tank/spank):

If you put your guys against a wall, the 3 groups of 3 easy mode guys sit in the middle of the arena waiting for you to engage. So you kill the first set of 3, then the second set of 3, then change horses on your main for the 3rd set so your horse is at full health. The 3 main champions don't wait in the middle they run to your group as soon as the last group of 3 easy mobs is killed. Simply put your 4 slaves against a wall so they are always facing whoever you are targeting. Have assist and follow keys and such set up for mounted combat. If you get knocked off your horse just jump on another one right there against the wall. I died between dismounting them all and going into the 2nd part of the battle where they are not mounted. If you die after you have dismounted them all, when you come back they stay dismounted, and you can simply continue with the second part of the fight which is basically just tank and spank the 3 champions.

Second Fight: Either Eadric the Pure (JOKE!) Or Argent Confessor(Meh) Who you get is random

Again there are 3 groups of 3 easy mobs that you pull before the boss. Once the last group of 3 is dead, the boss comes.
Eadric the pure is basically tank and spank. The two abilites I saw him use were a blinding light type ability, and a super hammer type ability. The blinding light ability has a cast time and a huge "EADRIC THE PURE BEGINS TO CHANNEL HOLY LIGHT" or some such announcement. Simply turn your guys so they aren't facing him. If they are facing him when the light comes out, they get blinded and will wander for a few seconds. If you tank gets blinded he will lose aggro on Eadric. I simply turned my tank only, let the other guys get blinded, and then just tapped my interact with target key/movement key to get my guys facing correct again after each blind. The other super hammer ability also has a huge warning with who he targets. It just does a buttload of damage, but had no trouble just hitting that person with a heal.

The Argent Confessor summons some random mob that can fear and does some sort of aoe. Just drop a tremor totem. Throw some chain heals/wild growths/whathave you. My druid has around 2000 spellpower and his wg kept everyone topped off no problem. You have to kill the mob she summons because she is 100% immune while it is alive. So just focus it, kill it fast, then back to her. They each have like 350k hps I think it was on heroic. It's not bad at all.

Third Fight: The Black Knight (put up shadow prot aura if you have a pally/priest/whatever)

Consists of three phases. Each phase the Black Knight has around 277k hps

First phase: Tank and spank. He summons a ghoul. Just kill the ghoul quick then him.

Second Phase: This phase sucks. What I finally did was put my guys against a wall and kept the black knight at max distance the entire fight. He summons a legion of ghouls that explode. I popped all cooldowns on this phase and just killed him asap. When he dies all his ghouls explode after a few seconds. I could not thunderstorm them away from my group during this time. I straffed my guys away from the ghouls asap the moment he died.

Third phase: Tank and spank. He does some aoe that I healed through. He marks one player and they take extra damage so I just healed that player, as he didn't seem to do that much to my tank.

This zone is amazing guys. Actual upgrades, badges, and abyss crystals as far as the eye can see.

[Greythan]

We blew through "normal" in 20 minutes. Its heroic I'm talking about.

[Dorffo]

after working out some jousting kinks I was able to do normal a couple times fairly smoothly and upgraded some tank boots even, yay! Haven't tried heroic version yet though (was sooooo laggy last night).

had no issues with the bosses after the champs - though the first time I ran into the end guy is was a very messy kill.

[offive]

I concur on the Hyjal lag last night... I left the Crusaders area pronto. Of course a while later the lovely unable to create instance errors started up.

I am hoping to try the normal 5 man tonight, or sometime this week?

[Lyonheart]

I am struggling with the 3 champs. I place my followers against the wall and assist my tank.. the problem is the 3 champs almost always 3x shield breaker me otw in. How do you over come that/? Also I'm assuming you kill one..then the next? I also seemed to notice that they get a new mount if they fall off? Someone needs to detail exactly how you do it. This seems way harder than some of you are posting, unless I'm missing something. I'm more than geared for the fights btw.

[Malekyth]

I got through to the second Black Knight phase on regular before I looked at the clock and decided I didn't want to get fired for oversleeping. I'll give it another go tonight.

I don't mind the mounted segment so much now that I've got Argent horsies working in the same Macaroon profile as everyone else (heh, [target=vehicle,exists] solves everyone's problems) ... but I wonder ... why did they leave this in? It's not particularly fun. Each group of three trash rush one character, they don't refresh Defend and don't try to Charge, so you just stand in one spot spamming Thrust until you win with almost no damage taken. This is about as challenging or interesting as listening to the announcer at the beginning.

The actual bosses I found to be a lot tougher than expected. It's sort of like MgT in some respects -- not a lot of trash to grind through, mostly bosses, excellent loot and harder than your standard level 80 5-mans. I think they struck a nice balance between stepping up the challenge and creating a barrier to players not quite leet enough for the big leagues. That mix wasn't quite right with MgT, but I think it is here.

[Dorffo]

I don't mind the mounted segment so much now that I've got Argent horsies working in the same Macaroon profile as everyone else (heh, [target=vehicle,exists] solves everyone's problems) .

can you elaborate on the [ target=vehicle,exists] I'm not familiar with that.

*edit: after some quick searching found macros of the form:

/assist focus
/click [target=vehicle,exists] VehicleMenuBarActionButton3

does that look correct?

[heffner]

Ok, so I have been trying this. Can't get past the first battle. I managed to kill the champions but they just simply go and remount. I was reading that I need to trample them or something???

Guess I'll try again....

[Dorffo]

you have to keep running over them when they get up and try to walk over to the wall to re-mount.

If you knock all three off their horses at various points and then wipe, they will be waiting for you on foot when you zone back in.

[Lyonheart]

i FINALLY cleared the normal mode..was not easy at all for me 8( BUT i got this yummy trinket >> http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/47216/the-black-heart/

I died a lot and I'm sure I am not doing stuff right. about 400 is repair bills later lol.. but that trinket was worth it!

[warbringer]

The first 3 waves of simple mobs can be tanked&spanked without mounting. You need to mount up on 1 character though to get the event started. Once, you're down to the last mob of the 3rd wave, you can mount up on all your characters and finish him off.

This will get your 5 completely fresh mounts for the 3 champions to finish off.

[Malekyth]

can you elaborate on the [ target=vehicle,exists] I'm not familiar with that.

*edit: after some quick searching found macros of the form:

/assist focus
/click [target=vehicle,exists] VehicleMenuBarActionButton3

does that look correct?

I'm at work, but that looks right. I run an FTL setup, and put vehicle checks in each of three macros (on my warlocks, Thrust is shared with a DoT castsequence, Shield-Breaker is shared with Shadow Bolt and Charge is shared with Immolate -- just because those have convenient hotkeys already assigned), on both the main and alt keys. I have a thread somewhere on "Argent tourney macros" that describes a Macaroon profile I switched to whenever I mounted up ... I just incorporated those buttons into my primary profile, combining the Argent macros with my regular DoT, tank, etc. ones, so I don't need to switch anymore. It's a bit of work but really convenient.

[heffner]

Well managed to squeek my way through to the Black Knight....still working on him though.

[Smoooth]

Thanks to all who have contributed to this, I finally cleared this after many wipes. For the first group of bosses use this macro and all you have to do is 2 button spam.

/assist focus
/click [target=vehicle,exists] VehicleMenuBarActionButton1
/click [target=vehicle,exists] VehicleMenuBarActionButton2

and

/click [target=vehicle,exists] VehicleMenuBarActionButton4

It will keep up your shield and lance when in range and shield break when further away. Keep your guys back near a wall like others have said but I found out if you are completely against the wall I kept getting line of sight issues even when they are right in front of me. I took a step away from the wall and it fixed it.

2nd boss is the easiest, just use interact with target to face after fears.

Last guy phase 2 make sure you set up your guys so they have a clear strafe path and dont get stuck on the wall. You need to get away quick or they'll get nuked. I turned my guys slightly to the left so they could strafe away to the right.


Does anyone have a macro or know how to quickly re-equip the weapons after dismounting? I got owned because I was still using the lame lances.

[pinotnoir]

I cannot get past the stupid joust. I dont know what you guys are doing but the bastards kill off my guys.

[Smoooth]

I cannot get past the stupid joust. I dont know what you guys are doing but the bastards kill off my guys.

Just make those 2 macros I posted and spam the crap out of em. You will need to get a new mount on your main after the second group and again during the bosses. When you get another mount during the bosses you will lose all the aggro and you shouldn't have a problem after that.

[pinotnoir]

I got through the joust on normal but the second bitch is killing me. She summons a guy and I cant dps the thing down before it wipes the floor with me. The problem is I get feared every 10 seconds it seems and then it aggros every person in my group and will not stay on the tank. So the thing runs around killing everyone while she is blasting away at someone too. Maybe I need at shaman in the group for this because 3 mage, druid healer and pally tank is not working.

[Smoooth]

Are you starting your casters off at max range? I do it without tremor totem and he doesnt get more than 1 hit off on another before the fear breaks. I do a quick taunt and pull him back as I face him on the dps and back up. You can also bubble and drop it immediately or try using a pvp trinket.

[pinotnoir]

No matter what I do the summoned mob will not stay on the tank. It's a constant fight to get aggro on my tank, heal others that are getting beat on and dealing with fear. It goes like this.

Bring the boss down to about 30k health she cast the summon mob. The summon mob comes I aggro it with my tank. Get a few shots off on it then it aggros someone else as it fears us. I taunt back and it stays on me for a few seconds then fears or goes bolting for someone else. The whole time this is happening the boss is casting stuff on random people too.

I dont know what the trick is but I cant keep that summon mob on my tank for nothing. I spend most of the time trying to heal my guys and taunting. Not to mention trying to get them lined up to target the damn thing after fear. Someone needs to post a movie or something. I dont think it's possible for me to kill the second boss. At least not with my group.


Oh the 3 bosses after the joust were a total pain in the ass too. The rogue aoe was nasty without any nature resist or cleansing totems. Stupid rogues.

[jimbobobb]

I have 2 vehicle macros:

/assist brik

/follow brik

Then just literally button smash 1, 2, and 4 non-stop together

Grats, you are a jousting champion. It really is a silly system.

Target one on your main, assist, then smash 1,2,4 - this will break their shields when they are at range, hit them when they're close, and keep shield up on you. Rinse and repeat. If the char they are focusing gets dismounted, just jump on a new mount (Fight against a wall near new mounts). This is literally all I do. No finesse, no nothing. Target one, assist, smash 1,2,4. Repeat.

[heyaz2]

Not that its very hard to begin with lol but anyways some quick strats.

Boss 1) This is mounted combat but its increadibly simple, just have your 4 followers stand in front of the dude you want to kill while riding figure 8s around it with your main keeping its shield down. Also make sure you keep all of your shields up, remember you can thrust and charge shields at the same time, seperate cd's. Also make sure your watch each toons mounts hp, if it gets low simply alt tab to that screen .. ride over and get a new mount .. takes almost no time.


Surprisingly, this part didn't end up being "incredibly simple"... and I'm on normal.

The mount combat is clunky and irritating, alts break follow every time you charge, and it's generally just a lot fo "out of range", "too close" error message spam on all 5 clients. Try circling, figure 8 patterns, etc.

I managed to get to the 3 elites, killed 3 of them, but it takes so long to kill them, they just walk over and mount up again really hard to keep them stunned when all my alts are dying or being chain stunned trying to get new mounts.

Any suggestions?

[heffner]

Well I tried killing the Black Knight on heroic at least 20 times. Survived past phase 2 about 5 times, but with 1 or 2 guys. Most of the time my slaves just get owned by the ghouls.

I tried both just DPSing the boss with some strafing or trying to AOE the ghouls. AOE didn't work so well for me. Thunderstorm appeared to blast them back for me, maybe not the exploding ones though?

Blech...well, hopefully I will figure it out tomorrow. Of course, now I got to manage to survive the other 2 bosses again...eeep!

For the jousting I basically did what Jimbob posted. Of course, I wiped after I got them all down...but meh, I don't care, I just zoned back in and took care of business (heh, well, took me a few tries). I downed the shaman first. I probably should have taken the caster second, but didn't. She was pretty easy on her own.
Second boss I had nfi what was going on, lol. I finally realized there were a bunch of mobs I had to kill after killing the first three and accidentally aggro'ing a second set. Priest first, monk last. The final boss I just tanked/spanked. He blinded/feared me etc... but I just hit my follow macro and it wasn't a real problem (at least this one time, we'll see tomorrow).

[warbringer]

I have 2 vehicle macros:

/assist brik

/follow brik

Then just literally button smash 1, 2, and 4 non-stop together

Grats, you are a jousting champion. It really is a silly system.

Target one on your main, assist, then smash 1,2,4 - this will break their shields when they are at range, hit them when they're close, and keep shield up on you. Rinse and repeat. If the char they are focusing gets dismounted, just jump on a new mount (Fight against a wall near new mounts). This is literally all I do. No finesse, no nothing. Target one, assist, smash 1,2,4. Repeat.

Do you keep your 4 slaves up against a wall and just run around on your leader or do you always keep your slaves on follow the whole time?

[jimbobobb]

Slaves are backs against the wall at all times. You can move your main to break shields, or move the target into melee range of your guys, and to 'trample' fallen champions. But the slaves just sit against the wall, so that way there are never any facing issues.

[Void]

wow this argent confessor on heroic is a real bitch it be kewl if she summoned the mob and stopped spamming my shamans for 6k i have to heal so much i cant even dps then fears just screw me totaly. anyone done this on heroic got some pointers?

Yea i cant get her down most ive done was got mob she summons to 45% thats ignoring healing and just trying to kill him. she can be interuped but casts so fast its nearly impossible.

[Dorffo]

Got Heroic Black Knight down last night after two trips to repair (i'm stubborn!)

The first two phases pretty much come down to being able to burn the boss fast enough to make the ghouls a non-issue (then lots of strafing out of explosions)

The third phase is where I was dieing for an hour+ He'd go all ghosty and proceed to just own the team. On the win I popped Elementals, bloodlust, Diving shield, Divine Sacrifice and went through 3 of 4 reincarnations... but he died! Snagged a main hand spelldmg and neck upgrade for one of the sham.

Gonna go back today with some resto-spec goodness and see if I can just grind him dowm through his AE.

[Greythan]

Need more updates ON HEROIC MODE if we can. I started another thread for normal.

I haven't tried heroic yet, but my first run through normal was far from trivial. Let's keep the HEROIC strats flowing in this thread!

[Meshuggenah]

The champions do back off and charge, though. And they always seem to rush the same target at the beginning of the fight, which almost instakills your mount after a few seconds. They also refresh their shields constantly. Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but I can't even seem to dent these guys. Sitting back against a wall and not using charge doesn't do anywhere near enough damage and there aren't enough mounts to refresh your ride as fast as they can damage you.

[Dorffo]

here's two vids of the jousting / champions in heroic. Very sloppy kills, and horrible videos but maybe it might give someone some ideas :)

(spectacular wipe at the end of the first video where i get surprised by green slime)

edit #2: awesome demonstration of the new Paladin argent defender talent saving the day in the 2nd clip... i'm sleepy :(

sorry for lack of 2nd two kills - I wiped twice on the second boss and forgot to hit record on the kill shot. I'll post a vid of the Black Knight tomorrow - was too hectic tonight to get anything worth watching.


http://www.wegame.com/watch/heroic_Jousting/

http://www.wegame.com/watch/postwipe_revenge/

[Greythan]

Dorrfo, that was on heroic?

[Klesh]

Need more updates ON HEROIC MODE if we can. I started another thread for normal.

I haven't tried heroic yet, but my first run through normal was far from trivial. Let's keep the HEROIC strats flowing in this thread!

We (4+1) just cleared it on heroic. Did it 4 times on normal before (still no tanking trinket, sigh). There is not much difference between normal and heroic except of increased mob hit points.

[Simulacra]

Thanks to all who have contributed to this, I finally cleared this after many wipes. For the first group of bosses use this macro and all you have to do is 2 button spam.

/assist focus
/click [target=vehicle,exists] VehicleMenuBarActionButton1
/click [target=vehicle,exists] VehicleMenuBarActionButton2

and

/click [target=vehicle,exists] VehicleMenuBarActionButton4

It will keep up your shield and lance when in range and shield break when further away. Keep your guys back near a wall like others have said but I found out if you are completely against the wall I kept getting line of sight issues even when they are right in front of me. I took a step away from the wall and it fixed it.

2nd boss is the easiest, just use interact with target to face after fears.

Last guy phase 2 make sure you set up your guys so they have a clear strafe path and dont get stuck on the wall. You need to get away quick or they'll get nuked. I turned my guys slightly to the left so they could strafe away to the right.


Does anyone have a macro or know how to quickly re-equip the weapons after dismounting? I got owned because I was still using the lame lances.

Thanks, is there a reason it has to be 2 macros? Is it because it would get stuck due to gcd?
My equip weapon macro is simply:
/equip Titansteel Guardian
on my shammies and the same sort of thing for the pally. I bound the equip to the same button I use for Avengers Shield
I use this macro before they mount up:
/equip argent lance

[Dorffo]

Dorrfo, that was on heroic?

Yeah that was heroic

[Smoooth]

Thanks, is there a reason it has to be 2 macros? Is it because it would get stuck due to gcd?
My equip weapon macro is simply:
/equip Titansteel Guardian
on my shammies and the same sort of thing for the pally. I bound the equip to the same button I use for Avengers Shield
I use this macro before they mount up:
/equip argent lance

Thanks for the macro, I didn't know you could do that.

As for it being 2 macros if it was one when you hit it, it will only go on to the next click if the previous is unusable but not on cd as in out of range. But if its on cd it will just get stuck on it.

You may be able to make a third macro that does a /click macro1 and /click macro2. I haven't tried that yet so I'm not sure if it would work.

[Meshuggenah]

How are you getting focus to work while in a vehicle? I'm using party1, etc, because none of my /assist macros work while in a vehicle.

[Dorffo]

have to re-focus after you enter a vehicle.

So I load everyone up and then my follow macro looks like:


/focus dorffo
/follow focus
/assist focus

[Smoooth]

Just cleared heroic and one thing I haven't seen mentioned is using cleansing totem on the black knight fight. It keeps all the diseases off the tank and really lowers the damage he takes.

On phase 2 I just drop a consecrate and wait about 3 seconds for some aggro. I hit bloodlust and aoe with my shadow priest and it kills all the ghould pretty quick without them exploding.

Oh and spread your guys out to reduce the damage from the desecration aoe he puts on the ground. I didn't have to move at all using this method.

5 ilvl 219 epics from a 30 min heroic is sweeet.

[puppychow]

I reactivated my shamans so I could solo this place. Some notes:

First, I recommend clearing the normal version before you tackle heroic.

Make sure you are good at jousting before you do this. I have keybinds set for interact with set focus (my tank) and assist focus, every time you mount you have to reset your focus and when you change targets you have to re-assist.

On first boss, just bunch up your guys by a wall. Take all the mounts from the opposite side you are going to be (I recommend being near the door, see next point). Fight near the wall where there aren't mounts nearby, like near door.
When you dismount the 3 champions, just zone out! When you come back, they are all at the big gate ready for you but you can buff up and take your time getting ready.
The first phase/boss can be tricky, but once you get good at it you will do it without ever having to change mounts.

For second boss if the girl (guy is super easy just nuke, rotate when he does his little radiance thing), I positioned my shamans in a nook (basically along the wall there are tons of pillars) and kept down 2x tremor and 3x grounding at all times. Nuke the lady, when add comes out have your tank taunt and build some threat before nuking it. Chain heal every now and then, refollow leader after fears, be sure to keep tank healed. I tanked the add and the boss a little bit aways from my guys and she basically mostly nuked me, and grounding totems took care of a lot of the raid dmg.

For last boss, kill add/first time, then on second one lust and just focus on boss. Keep your team slightly away, drop some AOE to get adds, but just focus on burning boss before any adds start exploding. Then just move away from adds. For last phase, nuke boss and spam chain heals every now and then too, having a blood DK tank is nice since you can VB/self-heal so much in this phase, plus AMS and IBF.

Expect to wipe a few times while learning everything, but then its not too bad and you can 1-shot it all.

[Clone]

Just completed the dungeon on heroic. Black Knight took me 5 tries to work out a tactic that suited me. Phase 2 is the real test. I popped earth elementals just as he was about to ressurect then focussed dps on him whilst ignoring the adds and spamming chain heal on my group which was bunched up. Tank was away from the group. I didnt need to heal my tank in phase 2 as my dps was so fast, I also knew that I had ardent defender and lay on hands if the tank went down. As the boss died I strafed my guys away from the remaining ghouls and cast heroism and spam chain healed my group back up to full health. Then when boss respawned similar to phase 2 I just nuked the boss whilst spamming chain heal on the main group with my healer and didnt heal the tank.

I have to admit I used some flasks of the frost wyrm that Ive had in my bags forever and never needed them. My tank is also pretty well geared with 35k health when buffed. My dps where pulling about 3.2k each.

I hope this helps someone to down him, hes a nasty piece of work!

Luckily the first 2 bosses are free epix tho just like the normal version :)

[puppychow]

I did the heroic today (was saved yesterday on my tank to a pug), didn't find it that much harder than regular, just the Black Knight really is a bitch. Some more tips/strat refinining:

- for mounted combat, I actually now find it easier to fight in "the middle". When I fought on the walls I would miss the guys getting back up, was really annoying. I'm at the point now where I can do the entire mounted phase without having to change mounts and only losing 20% or so, in heroic. FWIW when I started last night on regular I died, A LOT, in this phase, so keep practicing! I always still run out, since its way too hard trying to tank and re-equip weapons on 5 guys.

- For second boss, I kill rogue first, then shaman, then hunter. Sidestep out of poison clouds. I actually lust on the rogue, since I want him down before more than 1-2 clouds spawn. The MT takes insane dmg here sometimes, so I have to pop a lot of healing waves.

- Black Knight is tough! Phase1 is easy tank n spank, KEEP GROUNDING TOTEMS DOWN! They absorb the little curses he sends out. Kill add when it spawns. Phase 2 I lust at start and try to burn boss, group is ~20 yards away and I try to hold onto the adds. If I have to heal too much then the adds run to the shamans and its usually a wipe, so I save my blood heal cooldowns like vampiric blood, etc for this. Strafe OUT of desecration, if you don't its a wipe. I don't pop earth elementals, that would probably make it a bit easier too. Grounding totems DO absorb exploding ghouls, but only 1 afaik so you still need to gtfo! Phase 3 is burn & heal, a lot of raidwide dmg going out and I lost 2 of my guys near the end (but a blood DK can stay alive a long time).

I currently run blood DK tank, mage, and 3 shamans (all ele), might try switching one of the shamans for my resto druid and see if its harder/easier tomorrow.

[Meshuggenah]

Which addons are you guys using to incorporate vehicle control (follow, assist, etc) into your existing macros? Half the trouble I'm having is being able to control the mounts. All my assist/follow and standard spell bars disappear when I get in the vehicle. If there were some way to add the vehicle commands into existing focus/assist macros it would make everything so much simpler.

[Smoooth]

Even though your bars disappear your keybindings will still work. Set up your macros before you mount up and use keybinds that aren't on the main bar. I use ctrl` for focus and ` for following. Then I use ] for shielding and \ for lancing and shield breaking using the two macros I posted earlier in this thread. All I have to do is mount up, focus, follow, place my guys, then spam ] and \ while mouse moving.

[Greythan]

I use Bindpad for bar-independent macro assignment. I actually use it strictly for vehicle macros at this point. Everything else I do through Bartender4. (i.e., non vehicle actions)

[puppychow]

I use Bartender4 and have to do nothing special, bar1 is the "posess" bar and flips automatically into the vehicle bar when mounted -- 1 is melee, 2 is shieldbreak, 3 is charge (never use), 4 is shield -- across all 5 toons.

I have six macros setup (i use bindpad but just a bar with keybindings set to these would work too):

F1 = /focus my_main_tanks_name
F2 = /focus shaman1_name
..
F5 = /focus shaman4_name

` = interact with target (keybindings in WoW, scroll about halfway down)
shift-~ = /assist focus macro


So I mount everyone up, press f1 (everyone /focuses my tank), target an add with my tank, press shift-~ (everyone targets the new target), and press 2,1,1,1 etc to whittle them down. Remember every time you "remount" your focus gets lost so if your tank switches mounts re-set focus again.

shamans do seem to make a big difference in the fight, between being able to take hits from adds to nature/cleanse totems, lust in knight p2, and chain heal. Will report how I do tomorrow when I take my resto druid instead of a shaman.

[king.pa]

I've just managed to clean the non heroic version of this stupid encounter.

I can't get through the 3 bosses... I've only managed to get two down....
this first "boss" SUCK a lot !!!

I've tried the "wall" method, the middle one too ... rahh this drives me crazy

[Meshuggenah]

Puppychows(I think it was you) advice to exit the instance and zone back in after dismounting the 3 champions makes this instance a LOT easier. Setting up easy to use macros for the vehicle phase makes the mounts easy, zoning out and being able to set up at your own leisure makes the second phase cake.

<3

Thanks for the tip. Got this thing on farm now.

[Lyonheart]

I just can not live through the last phase of Black Night.. that ae he does while in ghost form is so fast.. i just cant heal through it and dps him 8( I even use Divine Sacrifice, no help ( heroic )

I was dieing a lot of his phase two until I spread WAY out and used earth elementals. But phase 3 has defeated me 10-0 now lol. driving me crazy!

[Greythan]

Lyon, is one of your shammies speced resto? If not, you may need to try it with a dedicated healer.

[Lyonheart]

Lyon, is one of your shammies speced resto? If not, you may need to try it with a dedicated healer.
yes. and i have tried to use healbot.. that ae he does almost one shots my team

[Meshuggenah]

I just can not live through the last phase of Black Night.. that ae he does while in ghost form is so fast.. i just cant heal through it and dps him 8( I even use Divine Sacrifice, no help ( heroic )

I was dieing a lot of his phase two until I spread WAY out and used earth elementals. But phase 3 has defeated me 10-0 now lol. driving me crazy!

My strat is pretty simple.

3 Healing streams, 1 Cleansing, ShadowResAura.

Phase1: Stack all the shamans against a wall and pull the Black Knight there. Drop consecrate and 3x magma totems (only 3, keep one wrath up). Don't even bother targeting the pet in phase1. The magma totems and splash damage from AoE's will kill it.
Phase2: Make sure you still have magmas/consecrate down. DPS the black knight for 4-5 casts. By this time your magmas/CL's/consecrate should have the adds down to 40-50%. Blow CL again and 3x TS straight after. This should kill the majority of the adds. Make sure chain heal your group back to full HP before you finish him off and begin phase3.
Phase3: You should still have relatively full mana pools on all your shamans. None of the previous phases are very mana intensive. Drop magmas and blow all your cooldowns/trinkets/etc. How fast you DPS depends on your shamans HP pool. I go with two nukes, chain heal, two nukes, chain heal.
Eg - FlameShock, LvB, ChainHeal, LightningBolt, ChainLightning, ChainHeal, repeat.

Between shadow resist, 3x healing streams and spamming chain heal, it's actually a pretty easy fight.

[Smoooth]

On phase 3 I found a better way to go about healing for me. He does a shadow bolt every couple seconds to everyone in the party. So the more people you have the more damage he does. I found out I simply don't have the healing to keep everyone alive so what I do is give priorities to heals and sort of sacrifice a guy. When I was healing my lowest hp character everyone else continued to get hit and pretty soon it would be too much to handle and everyone would die pretty close together.

So now i give heals in this priority...tank,healer,highest dps, 2nd dps, last dps. You might think this is what you do anyway but I only give someone heals if everyone above him is almost topped off. Usually I get through with only 1 dps dying but sometimes 2 will. But the good thing about when someone dies is it make healing on the remaining guys that much easier.

[Lyonheart]

bah.. i never thought about shadow aura GRR!! i knew there had to be a way to limit how big those AoEs hit for!

[Iceorbz]

Ive given about 1k gold in repairs to this damn last boss. The 2nd boss actualy was kicking my ass to not really sure why, i kept running out of mana. I think i need a little more crit heavy set to help out with that a little bit.

Last boss, I just cant get through phase 3, ive tried lol I get pwnt. No dedicated healer just 4 shaman dps / paladin tank.

[Meshuggenah]

PS, don't even bother moving in phase2 of TheBlackKnight. The "Death&Decay" type spell does next to no damage. It's all about timing your Thunderstorm to blow up the adds before he corpse explodes them. If you blow it too early, before your magma's have done enough damage, they will run back and you won't be able to kill them all before he explodes. Only move just before he's about to switch into phase3. Move off the AoE section and chain heal to full, so that you don't have to deal with phase3 damage plus the D&D if it's still on the ground.

I find bloodlust/heroism ChainHeals every 3rd spell in phase3 easily outheals the AoE damage. ShadowResAura knocks 25%-ish off the AoE.

[Lyonheart]

Normal=farm node ...... Heroic=CLEARED! ( not easy farm mode yet though hehe )

I used fire eles on 2nd phase ..keeping grounding totems down kept what little ghouls lived from killing anyone. I lost one shaman on the last phase but he went down real fast! This guy drops weapon upgrades for my dps so i HAD to figure it out! I got two nice neck upgrades though http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/47562/symbol-of-redemption/ and http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/47566/the-warlords-depravity/

[Greythan]

Grats Lyon!

Working on Paletress atm. Wish I'd get the "guy" everytime. He's cake compared to her for my mixed team.

[puppychow]

Ran regular a few times today, 1-shot everything, finally got the trinket for my DK tank, then ran heroic. died once on black knight then killed it second time. This time I subbed in my holy priest for my mage, so it was DK+priest+3 shamans. It actually felt a lot smoother/easier than DK+4 dps, as I almost never had to cast heals on my shamans so they could DPS nonstop.

Couple things, as noted above, that make things a lot easier:

1. Run out after you dismount the 3 champions, you have as much time as you want then to setup for ground fighting.

2. Eadric is a pushover, just tank'n'spank and turn around when he radiates. The chick is a LOT harder imo, what I do is drag my team over to a wall and park them there, I tank her a bit out (she doesn't run far so range becomes an issue). Have click-to-move enabled and interact with target set to a key, so after fears you can interact to face the right way and then stop move key. This is a very dicey fight, keep the tank full always since the 2 guys can whale away on your tank when feared (so unfair!). Priest is nice, since I can fearward the tank and also do some quick group heals.

3. For black knight, mesh's suggestions worked great. I dont' even bother popping out earth elementals or army of the dead in p2, I just put my guys against the wall, drop totems, REDROP GROUNDING TOTEMS EVERY 30 SECONDS, and just beat the crap out of him. One really important thing, remove the thunderstorm minor glyph that removes the knockback component! It really, really helps out a lot if you drop magma totems, and when adds are near 30% knock them back and do a tstorm to kill em/ get em away. Also its critical to ALWAYS have grounding totems down. Having a dedicated healer makes this easier, since my DPS can just go all out while I spam prayer of healing on my priest. I tried first time with my resto druid, and it didn't work at all, since resto druids don't really have a good AOE spammable heal spell (Wild Growth is on 6 sec c/d).

The key to Black Knight is having a clean p2 where everyone comes out alive and full hp. If you can manage that and not get flustered, you can burn through p3 quickly.

[pinotnoir]

I cleared normal when the guy was my 2nd boss. I still cannot get past the 2nd boss girl. She is hell on my team setup. I have a pally 3 mages and a druid. I may run that with my dk and 4 shaman just to see how easy grounding totems and tremor make it. Trying to do it without grounding or tremors sucks really bad. At this point I just reset the instance if I get that whore. The last boss is much easier than paletress.

[Prega]

i ve done multiple normal runs with 5 paladins(1 prot+4retri). nice crystals farming and some good items.
heroic mode scaring me :).
Probably multiple wipes waiting me. no tryed, busy with emblem farming. if i starts i can t stop, i know myself.

using a simple /assist /follow macro because i using blizz original +macaroon. have to remember evry time to click on this macro before use any offensive ability (these are on original blizz vehicle/mount bar)

my tactics:
- boss 1 (mounted phases) i stay near a wall where are avaible fresh mounts. kill all trash groups with melee and breaking shield. same thing on 3 champions, eventually with some charges. change horse if needed.
when all on ground use /equip for my weapon and it s easy. rogue champ is unique dangerous with is dot+aoe. running around, dispel poison and kill always him as first. orc do whirlwind aoe but all the champions are stunnable.

-boss2 (woman): can be dangerous, depends who is her summoned helper. cyanigosa is hard for me.my dps is the key. i suffers many fear before can kill the helper. sometimes wipe here. really intensive fight. many times melee facing badly etc.
boss2(man) is pretty easy i can easily fight without avoid the aoe its just a tank&spank. if aoe on all my group=all disoriented= no issues with aggro change.
in general at end of this boss i know have finished. last boss is a cake for all paladins.

-boss3 (knight)
p1: tank&spank . fight him dispelling dot, when he summon helper kill him then back to dk. in case run to recover slaves kicked away.
p2: massive aoe on summoned army of undead, dispel and run out from corpses. kill the dk.
p3: tank&spank healing who need.

[pinotnoir]

I got past the whore. It turns out my pally tank castrandom sucked after patch. Thats why I couldnt keep bosses on me. I also changed to interact with target and that helped. Now that my pally can hold aggro now it's not that hard. I didnt know 3.2 broke my cast random pally tank macro.

[Raskaz]

I finally beat it on heroic as well (Prot Warrior, 2 Ele Shamans, Resto Shaman and Boomkin).
This instance is really a gear check, something which people should not forget. I got a few upgrades for my shammies today thanks to those lovely conquest emblems and I managed to get through the last boss without a single wipe.

A few things of note even Puppychow summed it up quite nicely.

1. Make sure you you cleanse your tank (something I totally missed on my first tries since things are really hectic).

2. Avoid those ghoul explosion at all costs, especially if your toons don't have that many hps. (if you come out low on health after P2 you most likely will wipe).

I have to admit, really fun instance and the rewards are just godly.

[Reglar]

I finally beat it on heroic as well (Prot Warrior, 2 Ele Shamans, Resto Shaman and Boomkin).
This instance is really a gear check, something which people should not forget. I got a few upgrades for my shammies today thanks to those lovely conquest emblems and I managed to get through the last boss without a single wipe.

A few things of note even Puppychow summed it up quite nicely.

1. Make sure you you cleanse your tank (something I totally missed on my first tries since things are really hectic).

2. Avoid those ghoul explosion at all costs, especially if your toons don't have that many hps. (if you come out low on health after P2 you most likely will wipe).

I have to admit, really fun instance and the rewards are just godly.

Just to reinforce the gear check remark - I had a horrible time on Friday night getting this instance cleared, took me 3 hours. I spent Sat and Sun instance farming and cashing in some Conquest emblems for new gear, and Sunday it was much easier, especially on the Black Knight (got him on first try). Now I know things get easier with more practice, but honestly the extra DPS the shammies put out made a difference on all the bosses in there.

I run with 1 pally, 3 ele shammies and 1 boomkin. The boomkin's in full Ulduar, the rest are in rep, Naxx and emblem gear.

People who run with a boomkin, don't forget you can push the ghouls away just before the Black Knight dies with your frontal wave attack (I forget the name right now). Note that the push will NOT work as well after the knight dies, they only move part way (at least that's what happened to me).

[Greythan]

Just beat Eadric on heroic for the second time.

Really got lucky.

Was down to my pally and warlock (lock had 2k health) and focused on cleansing the warlock every time he cast his hammer. It was a 2 button press for me (target warlock, hit cleanse) so inefficient. Got the achievement though as he died to the rebound.

Got me to thinking. If you have a pally tank, setting up a mouse over macro that stops casting and casts cleanse will make this even more trivial. Your healer could then focus exclusively on healing the modest AE damage from his other effect and healing the MT. I'm going to work on that set up for next time as I missed 2 of them due to my inefficient key setup and lost my healer first then mage.

Again, seems like a good method of cleansing the hammer will make this guy even easier.

So, for me even though I haven't tried the last boss, I can get 3 level 219 epics every day until geared/skilled enough to beat the last boss. (Obviously, this includes gearing up on normal mode if you aren't there already.)

EDIT: 3 epics per day that Eadric is the second boss I should say. Paletress still eludes me on heroic. ;)

[pinotnoir]

Last boss heroic... Phase 2... Sucks
I cannot keep the ghouls on the tank. I consecrate and holy nova and still they run to dps and healer. I even invis with my 3 mages with no luck. Any tips?

[Smoooth]

Last boss heroic... Phase 2... Sucks
I cannot keep the ghouls on the tank. I consecrate and holy nova and still they run to dps and healer. I even invis with my 3 mages with no luck. Any tips?

Give it a few seconds before you start the dps. Use holy wrath..might be what you meant? If you lose an add taunt it back and dps it down. I kill all the ghouls before I kill him in phase 2 that way I dont have to deal with any exploding. He doesn't really do much damage in phase 2 if you focus on keeping the adds aggro instead of dpsing it down. Also spread out your guys so only 1 or 2 take the minimal aoe damage.

[rulemaker]

Normal mode is easy goin' and on "farm mode". Heroic mode still gives me a pain.
I tried it with my setup of Paladin, 2 Shamys, Boomkin, Heal-Priest and i'm still wiping a few times before finally killing the bosses.

I then swapped out my holy priest for my resto shaman and it was sooo easy. Chainhealing and multiple Totems helps a lot.

Gear is just Emblems or Heroic stuff. I had some lucky drops for my paladin
Head, Neck, Shoulder, Legs, Trinket and Sword dropped for me and giving me a huge boost.

[pinotnoir]

Give it a few seconds before you start the dps. Use holy wrath..might be what you meant? If you lose an add taunt it back and dps it down. I kill all the ghouls before I kill him in phase 2 that way I dont have to deal with any exploding. He doesn't really do much damage in phase 2 if you focus on keeping the adds aggro instead of dpsing it down. Also spread out your guys so only 1 or 2 take the minimal aoe damage.

I will try again but nothing I could do would keep the mobs on my tank. If they dont run for dps they run for my healer. My tank takes a ton of damage to that guy. I think the bastards diseases are removing my druids hots too. That may be part of the reason why I am almost about to die constantly.

On normal I just tranquility and arcane explosion the mobs. On heroic the mobs have 30k+ health so arcane explosion will not kill them fast enough. If I could get mouse broadcasting to work I could blizzard x 3 but I use keyclone and mouse broadcasting is crap.

[heffner]

Finally cleared it after 50 tries....ugh. It was phase 2/3 of the Black Knight that has been my problem. I run a mixed team (heroic and AH gear only, never been to Nax or Ulduar) and the only way I managed to reach the third phase and finally win is by just focusing on DPSing the BK and healing my butt off using both AOE heals (glyphed Holy Nova) and healing my tank with my priest.

Moved out of the AOE as best I could (had trouble with this too). Used my trees on my boomkin and my fire elemental when it was available just before phase 2 as well. It will most likley take several attempts on my next try as well, but at least I have a workable strategy now.

Also, I am not sure if it was mentioned or not, in the first part with the mounted combat I had to dismount once I dismounted and trampled all the champions. Lol, I didn't know that I had to do that and was wondering wth was going on as I trampled them forever....thought it was bugged.

Thanks for all the tips, helped me a lot.

[Razghul]

I killed him in the end with 4 fire elementals and ghouls army. I killed all the ghouls in phase 2 which made the kill possible for me. Once I succeed in killing them its an easy fight.

1DK and 4 shamans 1 resto is my setup.

Thanks for the great tips.

regards

[Iceorbz]

3 Times down so far, got a partial strat down that seems to work.

I put my group on wall, 3 shaman(ele), 1 warlock (my wife), and prot paladin out in front of them. drop grounding 3 healing stream and group is spread.

Hard dps first phase, I taunt the ghoul when he runs to my group but i dont kill him and just focus on boss. I thunderstorm about halfway through. Soon as hes down, i run towards them and chain heal prot tank, all the extra bounces to group to heal them.

2nd phase, i will either drop earth ele, or fire ele (if i wipe first time). Hard dps on boss, ignoring adds and aoe crap on ground. When adds are about 30% I blow thunderstorm and bloodlust, finish burning boss. My tank is running towards my group at this point and they are just pew pewing, im trying to get back into range to /follow them out of the aoe shit on ground.

Last phase is straight burn, I stack up on tank.. pop all cooldowns divine sac / shield and just burn.

[Lyonheart]

I have heroic on farm! The key for me was, just as another poster pointed out, killing as many of the ghouls in the second phase and coming into the 3rd with everyone alive. Last two clears I have had zero deaths. Still no http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/47569/spectral-kris/ yet though! I did get http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/47509/mariels-sorrow/ for my healer and even that would be an upgrade for my eles ( they are still using titiansteel maces )

[Raskaz]

Today has been the second time that my toons did not get dismounted (P2 of the first encounter) even I had the three champs down and a char standing on top of each of them. They were still trying to get on a horse even all of them being trampled.

Has anyone ever had the same problem?

[Niley]

well, today i decided to go into this heroic, and clear it. After everyone was telling how hard this is etc etc(i never did this instance before), i decided to flask all pumped and ready to rock....
I one shotted first boss, I one shotted that girl that's 2nd, and 3 shotted last boss, was pretty disappointed with difficulty level there.
And i also got bad lewts lol

http://www.hdimage.org/images/574l3vwz53pmwm4u3b64.jpg

[Raskaz]

Tbh with your gear I am not suprised that you steamrolled those bosses but for those who are not in that position gear wise the instance can be quite tough.

[Greythan]

was pretty disappointed with difficulty level there
Wow, way to take a giant crap on all of us struggling here. Glad you're uber.

[Dorffo]

I doubt Niley was trying to come across like that... Magister's Terrace in BC was almost exactly the same: Quite difficult for heroic-only geared toons but faceroll easy with tier 5/6 gear. For what its worth I went in all flasked up the first time with the same mentality and was as bit dissapointed as well. Thats not a comment on skill of other posters here obviously, but it does highlight the difference that gear makes.

[pinotnoir]

Gear makes a huge difference. It's a challenge doing it in heroic gear and blues. If you are decked in Naxx 25 or above that makes it much easier. I would say if you want a challenge un-equip your gear and use a mix of heroic and blue gear. That will increase the difficulty for you.

[Niley]

Wow, way to take a giant crap on all of us struggling here. Glad you're uber.
I hope you do realize that gear makes very little difference in most of boxing content, take naxx for example, when i 2x5 boxed naxx it was all about execution and in the end dps/tank gear did not matter at all. Gear at least when 5 boxing doesnt make as much of a difference as people think, there is a point when at least for heroics life is a lot easier when tank is above 28-29k hp but that's it.
I guess i should had said that I'm disappointed with design of the encounters(ie. its too simple) not difficulty of the actual instance.
MGT back in the day was harder, more interesting and more fun.
People talking about gear....shouldn't most of you be in 2/5 t8 and 2/5 t7 already? o.o

[Whowantstoknow]

Up to a certain point gear makes all the difference in the world. Once you reach that point improving your gear does not make it significantly easier.

The thing with heroic ToC is that level is higher than the other instances - specifically TBK phase 3 which is absolutely far far easier with better gear (or a second healer). Those of us in mostly 219-226+ epics (thank you conquest badges) should have no problems with this instance but I remember on patch day this was really really hard, I just did not have the dps to brute force my way through it (I wiped enough to repair twice before I got the kill the first time). These days I one shot every time.

[Klesh]

3rd phase of the black knight is very easy if you are using a pally tank and got talent points in Divine Sacrifice/Divine Guardian. Just hit Divine Sacrifice and burn him down (don't forget to switch to Shadow Protection Aura, this one helps too).

[Niley]

ok on that note, im going to stream it
http://www.xfire.com/live_video/nileys/

Im saved to heroic already..so normal it is, I streamed heroic 50 mins ago :P


rdit, done for now, streamed 2 or 3 clears.

[Whowantstoknow]

3rd phase of the black knight is very easy if you are using a pally tank and got talent points in Divine Sacrifice/Divine Guardian. Just hit Divine Sacrifice and burn him down (don't forget to switch to Shadow Protection Aura, this one helps too).

It's one of the few heroic bosses that is a true gear check- yes with certain class combinations it is easier but due to the nature of the stacking debuff it is considerably harder in worse gear. First time I did it my tank soled him the last few % but now he is trivial. My dps did not have the superior achievement the first few attempts though.

[puppychow]

the more shamans you have the more of a joke the instance is, since stuff like grounding and chain heals is almost tailor made for this place. if you run for example a druid tank + 4 mage team, the heroic is a LOT harder.

it was a lot harder the first few times too just learning the fights, nowadays i 1 shot the whole place in 15 mins and dont even have to zone out between mount/ground fights. pretty much done running the place in fact, since I think i've gotten every piece of loot I can use.

[Malekyth]

By default, I'm going to start assuming that anyone who says, "this is so easy" or "I'm underwhelmed by the difficulty level here" or "this boss is a joke" is always running shamans. :P

I can't win any fight with the initial three champions, if it includes Colosos. I've got four arcane torrents on round robin now but it's still not enough to keep ahead of his heals while trying to keep all my dps and healer alive. I haven't fought the much lamer of the two second bosses in heroic yet, and expect he'll be doable, but Paletress is way, way too hard just yet.

Buuuut ... not gonna complain, 'cause it's been awhile since I had to learn or re-gear a new fight. The last heroic stumbling block was Loken, whom I one-shot with impunity now, so it's nice to no longer be on top of the heap. I've got about half the badges I need for some gear upgrades, soooo ... coming soon.

[pinotnoir]

I hope you do realize that gear makes very little difference in most of boxing content, take naxx for example, when i 2x5 boxed naxx it was all about execution and in the end dps/tank gear did not matter at all. Gear at least when 5 boxing doesn't make as much of a difference as people think, there is a point when at least for heroics life is a lot easier when tank is above 28-29k hp but that's it.
I guess i should had said that I'm disappointed with design of the encounters(ie. its too simple) not difficulty of the actual instance.
MGT back in the day was harder, more interesting and more fun.
People talking about gear....shouldn't most of you be in 2/5 t8 and 2/5 t7 already? o.o

Gear makes a huge difference in boxing. The obvious reasons are, your tank takes less damage, dps does more damage, and healer is more efficient. To say it makes very little difference is not true. How much faster can bosses be killed if your dps does 1000 more dps because of gear? How much cushion do you have to heal when your tank is not getting wtf pwnd by the bosses? How much more efficient is it when your healer does not run oom and has better heals? Gear makes a huge difference when boxing.

I remember when I started doing heroics coming in with some crafted gear and quest/instance blues. My guys took a beating and it took every ounce of concentration to down the content. As they started getting heroic and badge gear the instances became much easier. The amount of focus I had to put in for a boss became less and less. Right now my group is in heroic gear and some badge items lvl 200. The heroic TOC instance is a challenge for my group. I run a pally, 3 mages and a druid. I am sure my shaman group would do better with tremor's and grounding totems.

You have always been super geared out because of your guild. Not everyone has the time to accomplish what you have done. I know I have little time to play now and I can never do raids. Any gear I have is something from my heroic grind. I can't wait to get the new badge gear but with my busy schedule it will take awhile. I understand the instance may be very easy for you to steam roll through. However, just because you can roll through the instance wearing uber gear, it doesn't mean the instance is a cake walk. I agree that once you reach a certain level of gear the instance becomes much easier. On the other hand, for people working up the gear ladder the instance will provide a difficult challenge.

[Greythan]

Gear makes a huge difference. I stopped paying attention to Niley's posts in this thread after he asserted otherwise.

This is far from trivial for any team. I don't run a shaman team so I can only speak to my fivesome, but its tough.

By comparison, I ran Gundrak today after gearing up my team on the normal ToC and the handful of heroic drops I've picked up from killing the first set of bosses and Eadric (the one time I drew him). Gundrak was on farm mode for me before, but after upgrading a bunch of lvl 200 purples from ToC normal, I didn't even blow bloodlust. Was in and out of Gundrak in 45 minutes and barely had to med.

I've run that instance probably 40 times so my "skill" was no different. However, my tank is now 31k HP buffed compared to 25k prior to gearing up in ToC.

Yeah, gear makes no difference. /cough

[Prega]

In heroic mode this instance is a real nightmare for my main team (5x pallys).
Normal is trivial but heroic...really hard.
Last night tryed it again. In my previous attempts i wiped always vs 3 champions.
But this time (hehe) no rogue around.
Got warrior+caster belf+hunter.
It was hard but finally doable.
2nd boss(got female) is hard but doable too (a couple of wipes).
DK is really harder in heroic. but again doable.
What i cant understand : the huge difference (at least for me) between 3 champions WITH rogue and 3 champions WITHOUT him.
Balance
cost = 600g in repair (total in 3 days)
gain =good polearm weapon x1
:)

[Greythan]

That rogues melee AE is unreal.

Its funny how the different fights seem to test the different set ups. The 3 champion combo has never been a problem for my team. However, I have yet to get Paletress.

Its a fun test. Grats on polearm!

[Niley]

edit, actually nvm, no matter what i say will change your mind, from other posts I can see that some find this easier than others. Its all about having fun and not who has the biggest penis in the end. I <3 You all!!

[Greythan]

Niley,

If you'd limited your comments to design concerns, that would have been received well. I happen to agree. Its a straight forward vanilla set of boss fights. That said, expecting something else from an arena-based instance is probably silly.


So, You've cleared instance before and after upgrades eh?
so the end result is identical other than you clearing it 4 minutes faster.
No, the end result isn't identical. I had some encounters that I didn't clear until hitting a certain gear threshold. Also, I had some fights that I'd win 1 out of 2 or 3 tries that after getting geared I one shotted there after.


Just in case you dont remember some of us cleared everything but one instance about 2 or 3 weeks after wotlk was released, and even then when NO ONE had gear it wasn't that hard.
Ss2 was the first one to clear all heroics, within a week of wotlk release iirc.
So, you cleared Oculus 2 or 3 weeks after WotLK in blue/green gear? Old Kingdom was cake then too huh?

Look, if you're that skilled a player then hats off to you. I happen to think you're blowing a bunch of arrogant smoke in this thread. Gear of course makes a difference. The entire game is based on scaling gear to take on the next challenge.

[Niley]

if you really want to continue this, i just did this in t6 gear 533 def 30k hp fully buffed and my shamans wearing mix of lvl 70 gear
http://www.hdimage.org/images/ic2jtnqqg5o5iltor83.jpg
http://www.hdimage.org/images/k6ba6ngp5gcls45go0z.jpg
2nd boss was kinda funn his hammer would one shot my shaman, so by the time i was done 2 were dead, but they have 14k hp in tier4..
You're more than welcome to join us on dualboxing irc channel(listed on top) to continue this. Otherwise lets keep this clean.
I am streaming to people that are in the channel.

[Multibocks]

Try it with 23k health on your tank =)

[Lyonheart]

Heres the simple facts.
1. Gear matters! Gear is not ALL that matters though. No amount of gear will make up for a severe lack of skill.

2. SKILL matters! You CAN complete harder content if you have high skill. Skill is not ALL that matters though! All the skill in the world will not let you live through some bosses DPS crits/AEs unless you have a MINIMUM level of HP gained through better gear!

For example, Niley admits that he DIED to Hammer of the Righteous because the gear he was using did not give him enough HP to take the hit. From his own example he proves that gear does matter at least to survive with all members alive. In the same example he proves that a lack of skill will get you killed as well. Any skilled player would know that GROUNDING totems will absorb Hammer of the Righteous, so he should have had some down. If he had, he might not have died! OR he had so little mana, HP that he was healing like crazy and had no time to keep refreshing grounding totems!

So a combo of skill and gear matters! The End! And i <3 U2 Niley 8)

[Klesh]

2nd boss was kinda funn his hammer would one shot my shaman, so by the time i was done 2 were dead, but they have 14k hp in tier4..
l2cleanse :D

[Niley]

I was trying to do the achievement :(
and i said that gear matter to a certain point, once you have tank with 28k ish hp and slaves at that level(of gear), you can clear every heroic out there.

[Dorffo]

and i said that gear matter to a certain point, once you have tank with 28k ish hp and slaves at that level(of gear), you can clear every heroic out there.

^^

It really seems silly to be all confrontational about this topic really... Anyone who's farming normal but having difficulty in heroic will likely be over any gear-related hump within a week or two anyways and then this becomes just another heroic to add to the circuit.

[pinotnoir]

if you really want to continue this, i just did this in t6 gear 533 def 30k hp fully buffed and my shamans wearing mix of lvl 70 gear
http://www.hdimage.org/images/ic2jtnqqg5o5iltor83.jpg
http://www.hdimage.org/images/k6ba6ngp5gcls45go0z.jpg
2nd boss was kinda funn his hammer would one shot my shaman, so by the time i was done 2 were dead, but they have 14k hp in tier4..
You're more than welcome to join us on dualboxing irc channel(listed on top) to continue this. Otherwise lets keep this clean.
I am streaming to people that are in the channel.


I dont know whats more sad. Your tank having more health and defensive stats in t6 than my heroic/badge gear pally. Or your t4 shaman having the same health and mana as my heroic/badge gear mages. I would like to know how you can have 15.9hp and 17.5k mana wearing t4. I call shenanigans.:eek:

[Niley]

I dont know whats more sad. Your tank having more health and defensive stats in t6 than my heroic/badge gear pally. Or your t4 shaman having the same health and mana as my heroic/badge gear mages. I would like to know how you can have 15.9hp and 17.5k mana wearing t4. I call shenanigans.:eek:
Obviously i was wearing tier pieces and most of the rest stayed lvl 80(its not hard to see that I do have tier gear on), I didn't think that was that hard to figure out, my tank was getting crit and hit for 17k at times, but again, all that is easy to heal through. You wanted me to remove gear so I did, I even streamed it had 5 or 6 people watching, want proof? You're more than welcome to join irc and talk to them.
Call it all you want, people said it was gear so i put lvl 70 gear on, now youre just looking for a hole in all, Im done posting here.
pally : http://www.hdimage.org/images/n2o0rvbc8q4j8b10s1h.jpg (http://www.hdimage.org/images/n2o0rvbc8q4j8b10s1h.jpg)
shaman in question: http://www.hdimage.org/images/5pct13yno31hp3v4nlr5.jpg
On that note, lets finish this here, and go back to the subject of people needing help that need it, be it macros/vehicle part of this or w/e.

[outdrsyguy1]

I've just started clearing toc heroic last 4 days or so and here's my tips.

Get regular on farm. Gear makes a FREAKING HUGE difference. You'll be amazed how much easier the fights are after gearing up in ToC normal (i stared in AH purples and blues).

Heroic, my strat. (i run DK tank, resto druid, ice mage, balance druid, ele shaman)

Put group in middle and not on follow, just throw shield breakers and thrust. Once the first boss is down, move your whole group to stand on top of him, then start killing second guy. Once 2nd drops, leave group on first guy, move your main onto the second guy. dps 3rd down to about 20k hp, then run for the door. Kill him at the door then run out.

Once your back in the bosses reset. I always kill healer first (shaman) because i don't have the GEAR to dps through the heals if i'm on the rogue or warrior. Rogue is second and warrior third for me. A HUGE hint for this is to stand right by the hunter, his dps sucks in melee and he rapes in range.

Quick tip, stand right in the doorway entrance they start at, when the hunter disengages, he goes into the "not allowable" deadzone and just runs right back to your tank at the edge of the arena. (i'm talking about the space it looks like you can walk up to the gate in but you are barred by invis barrier).

(rogue warrior healer champion combo makes me cry but i still get it after a few tries)

eadrich: Pretty much go nuts, expect him to 1 shot a couple of your guys so dps hard and fast so you don't get as many hammers. Pretty easy fight really if your healer isn't 1 shot first.

Paletress: (i think this is the hardest boss in the whole place BY FAR)
I find that only 50% of the time does my tremor totem work. Most times my group gets feared across the whole dam arena at some point during the fight.
Important points: purge the hot she puts on the shadow guy. this is HUGE.
2nd set up a silence focus macro. I dps shadow with paletress as my focus and when i see her casting in my focus frame i mash the interupt button which stops a lot of damage. This fight is really about keeping ahead of the dang paletress dps spam on random targets. My guys don't have the gear to take 3 shots in a row + some random aoe from the mob so this fight is really hard but doable.

Black knight.
I spread out so ghouls only explode on one player if that happens, and the aoe only hurts one person too (phase 2).
Also, when he spawns ghouls, i aoe to get them on the tank, then freeze them all with the ice block aoe thing. This buys me about 10 seconds of guys not getting beat on. I also pop all cooldowns here and usually they last about 20% into phase 3. I found that if i can get through phase 2, usually i can eek through phase 3 without cooldowns.

Good luck out there! have fun!

shadownmoon
5-80 shammies (pvp team)
80 DK, Mage, Boomkin, RDruid, Shaman - instance team
75 druid, 4 hunters (fun instance and pvp team, it's amazing what you can tank with 4 aoe tanking bears lol)

[pinotnoir]

When you said t6 and t4 I took it as meaning full gear at that level. As you can see from my armory.
http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Magtheridon&n=Sangiovese

Your pally in t6 has better stats than me. The only area I beat him is block rating, 540 defense instead of 533, and alittle bit of armor value. That goes to show you how powerful the rest of your gear is that makes up for equiping all the lvl 70 stuff to my lvl 80. I am not trying to poke holes but doing any test with a pally and 4 shaman in that instance is not a fair comparison. Having cleanse, resist, elementals, bloodlust, tremor totems, and healing streams really makes the fights in there much easier. My group of pally, 3 mages and a druid healer have a terrible time vs paletress. She is a cock block to my group composition. More power to you for owning the instance. Hopefully people are getting tips by watching your streams. For me its still a nightmare. It's so much of a pain in the ass I think one of my shamans needs to come out of retirement to join my group. I have 5 shaman but have no interest in playing them anymore.

[Malekyth]

For me its still a nightmare. It's so much of a pain in the ass I think one of my shamans needs to come out of retirement to join my group. I have 5 shaman but have no interest in playing them anymore.

hehe ... I saw your composition earlier, and it occured to me that maybe I should finish leveling some mages to 80 so I could bring in a counterspell or two, just for the first fight. :)

This isn't a new idea for me. I actually rolled the mages in the first place because my locks were having trouble in MgT and I thought it might be nice to have some polymorphs to lean on!

[Lyonheart]

"eadrich: Pretty much go nuts, expect him to 1 shot a couple of your guys so dps hard and fast so you don't get as many hammers. Pretty easy fight really if your healer isn't 1 shot first."


You only have one shaman, but if you have grounding totem down at the start, it absorbs HoR. And you should be able to refresh it in time for a second HoR. I only died once to his HoR due to not knowing the fight. Now that i know, I keep grounding totems down and never have to worry about dieing due to one shot HoRs!

[Greythan]

Group composition is a large factor here.

Eadric once I got my cleanse timing down is pretty routine. I've only done him twice on heroic as I keep drawing Paletress....

... who, like Pinot, is a dead end for me atm. I think I need to get a round robin dispel set up for her HoT and using a focus target to hit her with silence/coutnerspell/whatever-works sounds like a great idea.

I've sort of given up on heroic with Paletress for now. I'm running instances as my helm on all my toons are still blues (engineering purple on my mage is the lone exception) so I'll upgrade some and come back.

Still WAITING for the dang tank trinket to drop in normal. What a PITA running that over and over is for a single drop. ;)

[heffner]

Adding in the Purge and the Counterspell to my spam made the difference for me on Paletress. Was so much easier once I did that.

Still have a lot of trouble with the Knight though. If I manage to get through phase 2, usually 1-3 of my toons are near death or dead. I can only squeek by if I get lucky. The two times I did win only my tank was left standing.

What I have been doing as soon as phase 2 starts:

Druid drops trees
Shaman drops fire elemental if its up
Tank uses consecrate, holy wrath? (aoe spell, forget the name) and argent defender
Everyone spams on Knight
Priest spams AOE heals and tank heals
Shaman casts thunderstorm when ghouls get to the party
Strafe as soon as knight dies (at least I try to)

Properly timed thunderstorm, healer not getting bolted in phase 2 and beat on and tank getting as many ghouls aggrod as possible seems to make the difference for me. Much more micromanagement than I am used to. I might not be spreading them out enough, but I worry that if I do I won't be able to strafe away from the explosions. Ah well, just have to keep at it until I get a strat that works for me.

Team - Pro Paladin, Ele Shaman, Bal Druid, Arcane Mage, Holy Priest

[rulemaker]

I agree - Gear makes a huge difference! just started by farming nonhero for gearups and then tried heroic mode.

i run heroic mode with
Paladin (http://eu.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Mug%27Thol&n=Dapimp)
Elemental (http://eu.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Mug%27Thol&n=Bischibosch)
Elemental (http://eu.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Mug%27Thol&n=Bischibasch)
Druid (http://eu.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Mug%27Thol&n=Pîmpkin)
Diszi-Priest (http://eu.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Mug%27Thol&n=Pîmpkin)

gear is nearly everything out off normal mode and i got lucky to get all weapons on heroic - so this is giving me a good boost. just farm other heroics to buy T8,5 for emblems of conquest. i just did 2-3 raids with single chars.

And i'm still wiping on bad "champions" combination like Healer & Rogue sometimes. It's easier by swapping Resto-Shaman for Priest.

Paletress is also a pain in the ***. as soon as she casts her shadowform i'll set my toons on follow and set up tremor totems. aoe heal after massfear and try keeping shadowform next to paletress. in my opinion she will cast less spells then (might be wrong). i normally burst through her Hot and use blootlust. never tried cleansing/purging the hot.

[offive]

Went in to heroic for the first time Monday night, been putting it off in favor of badge grind. Wiped a couple times on the Champs, tried to kill the shammy first with no luck. Then I hero nuked the rogue first and it all got easier after that. Killed Era no problem. Got to phase 3 a couple times on the BK. Checked the combat log and put up shadow aura and popped hero in phase 2 which got me into phase 3 with hero still going. So it wasn't too bad. Oh and I got the achievement from pure dumb luck.

I've Had Worse - Defeat the Black Knight in the Trial of the Champion on Heroic Difficulty without any player in the group being hit by a ghoul explosion.
http://www.wowhead.com/?achievement=3804

Ran it again yesterday. No wipes but I lost shammys in phase 3 of BK. Again I nuked the rogue first, once you take him out the other two are cake no matter what combo you get. Have not seen paltress on heoric yet, so that I am sure will be entertaining.

So far no weapons for anyone, and the rifle dropped (the one I want on my original main) :(

[outdrsyguy1]

"eadrich: Pretty much go nuts, expect him to 1 shot a couple of your guys so dps hard and fast so you don't get as many hammers. Pretty easy fight really if your healer isn't 1 shot first."


You only have one shaman, but if you have grounding totem down at the start, it absorbs HoR. And you should be able to refresh it in time for a second HoR. I only died once to his HoR due to not knowing the fight. Now that i know, I keep grounding totems down and never have to worry about dieing due to one shot HoRs!

Thanks for that tidbit, that will totally make him cake :)

anyone tell me how to do the face thing where the toons face/and or run towards the boss? Something to do with interact with target but i can't get it to work. I need it when i get scattered to hell on paletress and running around to gather up the herd is tough.

[rulemaker]

if u use jamba set up your follow-focus and stop-follow button
after massfear just press follow-focus - your toons should face towards boss
then stop-follow and kick her ass =)

[puppychow]

You are actually better off setting up a interact-with-target keybinding, as many have said in the thread. Follow focus will NOT work if your toon is "far away" (out of follow range, which is like 15-20 yards). interact with target however works from all the way across the arena room.

For the guy with the mixed team, I'd suggest changing the resto druid to balance and using the ele shaman to heal (either as ele or respec to resto). Resto druids are AWESOME healers when solo playing, but terrible when multiboxing, since so much of their power is pre-HOTing people and using a wide variety of spells, which is difficult when multiboxing - their only real AOE spell, wild growth, is on a 6 sec c/d too. Holy priests are also really awesome when MBing, I can spam POH/COH every boss without going oom. A shaman just has to ES the mt, spam chain heal on himself (when team is grouped up), and lhw/hw the tank. Much easier to manage and more "on demand" group healing than resto druids.

btw niley/etc, grounding totem still lets you get the achieve for boss #2 - just remember, after its grounded press 1 on all your guys to shoot the hammer back at the boss (one of them will have it). I got the achieve easy first time I met him, just DPS him down to ~20k, then always have grounds down, wait for hammer, and smash him with it.

[Greythan]

Eadric's hammer.

I'm confused by puppy's post. While I've not drawn Eadric in a week on heroic, as I recall its a two part effect. The first is Eadric marks the intended target with a debuff. This is then followed up with the hammer hit. If you cleanse the debuffed toon before he gets the hammer off it is automatically reflected on to him. I know I got the achievement for killing him with his own hammer and all I was doing was cleansing with my paladin.

Am I missing something?

[Klesh]

Eadric's hammer.

I'm confused by puppy's post. While I've not drawn Eadric in a week on heroic, as I recall its a two part effect. The first is Eadric marks the intended target with a debuff. This is then followed up with the hammer hit. If you cleanse the debuffed toon before he gets the hammer off it is automatically reflected on to him. I know I got the achievement for killing him with his own hammer and all I was doing was cleansing with my paladin.

Am I missing something?
If you cleanse the debuff, you fetch the hammer. You'll get a new hotkey bar and have to hit "1" to throw it back at him.

[offive]

If you cleanse the debuff, you fetch the hammer. You'll get a new hotkey bar and have to hit "1" to throw it back at him.

And if you kill him with his hammer you get an achievement! I have only seen him get one hammer out in the time it takes to burn him, so meh.

[outdrsyguy1]

You are actually better off setting up a interact-with-target keybinding, as many have said in the thread. Follow focus will NOT work if your toon is "far away" (out of follow range, which is like 15-20 yards). interact with target however works from all the way across the arena room.

For the guy with the mixed team, I'd suggest changing the resto druid to balance and using the ele shaman to heal (either as ele or respec to resto). Resto druids are AWESOME healers when solo playing, but terrible when multiboxing, since so much of their power is pre-HOTing people and using a wide variety of spells, which is difficult when multiboxing - their only real AOE spell, wild growth, is on a 6 sec c/d too. Holy priests are also really awesome when MBing, I can spam POH/COH every boss without going oom. A shaman just has to ES the mt, spam chain heal on himself (when team is grouped up), and lhw/hw the tank. Much easier to manage and more "on demand" group healing than resto druids.

btw niley/etc, grounding totem still lets you get the achieve for boss #2 - just remember, after its grounded press 1 on all your guys to shoot the hammer back at the boss (one of them will have it). I got the achieve easy first time I met him, just DPS him down to ~20k, then always have grounds down, wait for hammer, and smash him with it.

I thought my druid healer would be better at heals but it takes a lot of focus to heal indivdual random team members for sure. He seems to go oom way before the casters too. I"m sure i could set him up better but your right, it's tough to fight and decide to heal big when the hots aren't keeping up.


hmm... I have "interact with target" in blizz keybinds set to the letter "i" but it doesn't make them face the target. all i've been able to do with it is loot and open up chat interfaces. How do you guys make your toons turn to face the mob using this? What else do i need to do to make that work?

[Trevski]

Oh, the lovely Heroic Trial of the Champion... one of the more difficult 5 man WOTLK heroics to heal.

[Multibocks]

I thought my druid healer would be better at heals but it takes a lot of focus to heal indivdual random team members for sure. He seems to go oom way before the casters too. I"m sure i could set him up better but your right, it's tough to fight and decide to heal big when the hots aren't keeping up.


hmm... I have "interact with target" in blizz keybinds set to the letter "i" but it doesn't make them face the target. all i've been able to do with it is loot and open up chat interfaces. How do you guys make your toons turn to face the mob using this? What else do i need to do to make that work?

You have to enable "click mouse to move" in interface options for your slaves to move to target.

[Greythan]

lol, I just realized how I didn't know about the 1 button, which I'm sure you can see coming...

Its part of my dps spam. ;)

However, I changed it so I don't hit "1" anymore. Glad I posted here so I'll know to do so on this boss. ;)

[pinotnoir]

You have to enable "click mouse to move" in interface options for your slaves to move to target.

OMG Thank you for that piece of info. I thought it was broken.

[outdrsyguy1]

thats awesome! it works great, it's going to make heroic confessor and black knight so much easier!

[heffner]

Ya, I like the click to move/interact option. I zone in, equip my lances, and click on the horses for each toon and they run over and mount =)

Also, today I got the bug where the champs had the shields on. So, I mounted up and proceed to give them the beat down. Was easier than on foot. Although, I only had rogue, mage and warrior champs. Obviously I died after the transition, still haven't been able to survive it.

[outdrsyguy1]

Ya, I like the click to move/interact option. I zone in, equip my lances, and click on the horses for each toon and they run over and mount =)

Also, today I got the bug where the champs had the shields on. So, I mounted up and proceed to give them the beat down. Was easier than on foot. Although, I only had rogue, mage and warrior champs. Obviously I died after the transition, still haven't been able to survive it.

I don't ever try and dps in the transition. just sit on the 2 champs and get the 3rd to 10% or so, then run to the doorway, turn and burn the last champ and right as you dismount, run for the door. then just zone back in and setup easy.
Sometimes i'll still lose a guy running for the door but I often make it out with 5 alive. I try to fight all the champs at the center of the ring so when they die, i have plenty of time to get out because it's a long walk for them to the next horse, and also a long walk to the entrance to kill me when i'm zoning out.

I messed around with a 5 man rogue team since you can actually keep melee in range with the interact button now. It was pretty cool. Only thing funny was if after the mob died, I hit interact and they would target different mobs and run off in crazy directions lol. I"m sure I can fix that with a focus macro though but it was funny to see them scatter across the starter zone.

[Multibocks]

So I didnt know this, but read it elsewhere. The radiance spell can be avoided by turning away from the mob. So you dont get blinded and the 6k damage component. Not sure if its worth the effort, just thought I would throw it out there.

edit: maybe just broadcast the turn key when you see it being cast and then using your /face macros to turn your dps back to facing target.

[Greythan]

Yeah, I "avoid" Eadric's AE with just may tank to keep his aggro steady.

To be honest, that fight for my team is pretty much tank n spank as long as I cleanse every hammer. Its straightforward enough that I haven't taken the time to work out trying to spin my guys away to avoid his AE.

[Multibocks]

Ok this is lame after much retardedness on my part I finally figured out how to make IS use two keymaps. However I have yet to get the faction champions down. They seem to last forever! I tried using the macros posted earlier so I could use the /clickVehiclebutton blah blah with an assist line for faster targetting, but the game wouldnt let me do it. It just kept saying, "you cant do that right now" Is this a limitation of IS?

[Whowantstoknow]

Ok this is lame after much retardedness on my part I finally figured out how to make IS use two keymaps. However I have yet to get the faction champions down. They seem to last forever! I tried using the macros posted earlier so I could use the /clickVehiclebutton blah blah with an assist line for faster targetting, but the game wouldnt let me do it. It just kept saying, &quot;you cant do that right now&quot; Is this a limitation of IS?

Doubt it: sounds to me like you are still spamming your normal dps buttons which obviously can not fire because you are on a vehicle.

[Multibocks]

Actually it seems you must use buttons other than 1234 for vehicle macros. I know I wasnt spamming normal dps buttons because I turned that map off and checked it before starting. It's alright I finally figured it out today and made it to BK, but he kicked my arse.

I've read through here and this is what I am doing for each phase, would appreciate some pointers and criticism.
setup: 3 healing 1 disease cleansing totem, 1 grounding
1. DPS, kill ghoul dps
2. BL, dps BK after all ghouls are up and on tank. This gets really hectic and it can go badly quickly. Last try I had tonight I finished this perfectly however I didnt notice a few ghouls and my team went from100% to dead. /cry
3. I have made it here a few times, but most times my team is close to death and I am trying to chain heal up before he spawns. Usually he wipes my group before he hits 50%.

Some notes, tank is 32.5k health and shaman are 2500+ spell power buffed. I have watched a few videos and it seems like I should be able to do this, but after 10 tries I gave up for the day (and 300g repair bill yuck.)

Is there a point where I should drop more grounding totems? Would that help? Right now I cant seem to keep the ghouls off the dps during p2. This phase gets ridiculous and that damn desecration makes it almost impossible to keep the ghouls off my shaman as the run around hamstringed. Worse is when they all stay on my tank and that punk explodes them all on my tank (100->0) =(

I feel like there is one or two things I am missing and once I fix it I can beat this guy.

edit: one more thing, it seems my tank is taking a lot of damage and I just can't keep up on heals for him, heals for team and dps. I might take one shaman and make him resto for this, but I really dont want to.

[Reglar]

Actually it seems you must use buttons other than 1234 for vehicle macros. I know I wasnt spamming normal dps buttons because I turned that map off and checked it before starting. It's alright I finally figured it out today and made it to BK, but he kicked my arse.

I've read through here and this is what I am doing for each phase, would appreciate some pointers and criticism.
setup: 3 healing 1 disease cleansing totem, 1 grounding
1. DPS, kill ghoul dps
2. BL, dps BK after all ghouls are up and on tank. This gets really hectic and it can go badly quickly. Last try I had tonight I finished this perfectly however I didnt notice a few ghouls and my team went from100% to dead. /cry
3. I have made it here a few times, but most times my team is close to death and I am trying to chain heal up before he spawns. Usually he wipes my group before he hits 50%.

Some notes, tank is 32.5k health and shaman are 2500+ spell power buffed. I have watched a few videos and it seems like I should be able to do this, but after 10 tries I gave up for the day (and 300g repair bill yuck.)

Is there a point where I should drop more grounding totems? Would that help? Right now I cant seem to keep the ghouls off the dps during p2. This phase gets ridiculous and that damn desecration makes it almost impossible to keep the ghouls off my shaman as the run around hamstringed. Worse is when they all stay on my tank and that punk explodes them all on my tank (100->0) =(

I feel like there is one or two things I am missing and once I fix it I can beat this guy.

edit: one more thing, it seems my tank is taking a lot of damage and I just can't keep up on heals for him, heals for team and dps. I might take one shaman and make him resto for this, but I really dont want to.

If Phase 2 is a problem, spawn fire elementals and DPS ghouls first.

You'll have to chain heal through the dmg they take.

Phase 3 - just nuke and chain heal, normally for me its dps, dps, chain heal, repeat. I haven't found grounding totems to help much in Ph 3 but it could be me.

[Multibocks]

The one I felt the was the best effort going into phase 3 I had spawned 3 fire elementals before engaging and just let them go to work. Seemed to work wonders with the ghouls. I just screwed up and thought that I could heal through the last ghouls explosion instead of strafing. Lesson learned =)

[outdrsyguy1]

Multibocks, not sure what type of tank your using or if this is regular or heroic. Heroic you can cc the ghouls and i have my dk tank aoe for the first 5 or 6 seconds, then freeze them for the next 10 (heroic only).

What did the best for me was to pop bloodlust right as he's summoning adds in ph 2. then nuke his ass. YOu'll down him quick enough that the adds won't have time to kill your team, then just back up as they explode. (i still let my down arror work so i spin the tank 180, then hit down and the whole team moves away).

sometimes i'll summon undead army at start of phase 2 or even earth elemental. just something to keep the damn gouls off my guys for 20 seconds while i nuke BK.

[Multibocks]

Heroic, I havent done regular but Im sure I can spank it since I feel Im a few seconds away from killing him in heroic. I do use BL in phase 2, but I have a paladin tank so no undead army for me.

[Reglar]

I use pally tank, 3 ele shammies and a moonkin, for phase 2 I have the casters about 35 yards away, I drop consecrate when BL pops up in Phase 2, that will aggro most of the ghouls and you can pick them up manually after that.

Anyway, sounds like you are close - good luck!

[Multibocks]

The problem I find is if I get too far away I spend more time healing my tank than dpsing the boss and that makes it almost impossible to kill him before he wipes out one or more dpsers. I'm hoping that I can use my elementals to increase survivability. Maybe I just need some more upgrades or maybe my setup isnt as good as I thought, lol.

[Malekyth]

I get that too, usually if a ghoul from either phase leaps at my priest and knocks him out of range. I'm trying to get into a habit of putting the groups' backs to a wall and measuring my max range from there.

[Multibocks]

Ya know I dont think I have tried what mrmcgee does and move my group away from the totem farm. Maybe that will keep them out of that damn snare from desecration.

[Greythan]

In regular (haven't even tried heroic BK yet), I keep my team "walled" to avoid the knockback. I set them up in a corner. I angle them slightly "out" from the corner (20 degree angle or so) so that once I've downed the BK I can strafe them away (and slightly out from) the corner/wall. Even snared, they usually make it out of range of the corpses explosions.

Is that not advisable in heroic?

[Multibocks]

I beat paletress first try. Gotta love tremor totem =D

now waiting on BL to pop so I can try all out offensive assault with fire elementals.

[Multibocks]

I just died on my tank with 5k health left on BK /cry

[Multibocks]

grrr fire elementals did great, but he dropped desecration on my shaman right before ghoul explode =(

[Multibocks]

Yes he s dead!

edit: sorry didnt mean to give the blow by blow, but that was one of the hardest bosses I ever 5 manned =)

[king.pa]

What i cant understand : the huge difference (at least for me) between 3 champions WITH rogue and 3 champions WITHOUT him.
Same thing here !!!

When I'm in front of the rogue AND the chaman healer... the only possible choise is ti burn ALL my CDs ... Earth elem + trinkets along with Heroism ... and burst the heal first...

I just down'em ... heal + mage + hunt that was very nice & easy ...

[outdrsyguy1]

here's a trick for you. If you get a hard combo (like warrior, healer, rogue) just leave the instance and reset. Even if it's heroic, you'll still get a different combo when you come back in. I've done it 2 times and each time i went from the hardest (warrior, healer, rogue) to easiest (healer, hunter, mage).

[Malekyth]

I found that out last night. :) I wish I'd known that trick *before I was able to consistently beat groups containing Colosos ...

But then last night, I also wiped on Paletress, whom I've killed before, over and over. It's my first complete disaster of a ToC in awhile. Just couldn't get the Memory down below half or so. Oh well, hopefully tonight I'll get Eadric.

[outdrsyguy1]

I hate paletress, total nemisis. I've been running without shammies so no way to avoid the fear bombs and also my mage is the only one who can remove the hot so if mage dies early, it's absolutely impossible because the hot heals for so much you can't out dps it.
I've been trying to gear up my new pally tank and swap him in for my current DK tank so i've actually been running this a lot lately with 2 healers and it takes longer, but it's easier I think.

[Multibocks]

I out dps'd the HoT =) GOGO shaman powa!

Do you not have a dispeller? I would either make a macro for dispelling OR find a way to integrate it into your dps button. Not sure how to do that though as it will make a /click sequence hang if there is nothing to dispell.

[Multibocks]

here's a trick for you. If you get a hard combo (like warrior, healer, rogue) just leave the instance and reset. Even if it's heroic, you'll still get a different combo when you come back in. I've done it 2 times and each time i went from the hardest (warrior, healer, rogue) to easiest (healer, hunter, mage).

Does it reset that goddamn jousting crap? The thing I hate most about it? You have to stand there with your dick in your hand for like 10mins while they announce the damn gladiators. Wish there was a F'ing fast-forward button. Pardon my french.

[Multibocks]

Took this guy out on second try today. I would recommend forgetting the elementals as they make it difficult to see what the golems are doing. I put them up for first fight and when I strafed after phase 2 was over I wasnt far enough away as the elementals were hiding a few. Ended up wiping on p3 with 20k health, but that was with only 3 shaman. Second go around I didnt bother dropping earth elementals and just went balls to the wall dps until phase 3 and then did 2 dps spells 1 chain heal until dead. Still lost a few shaman, but I'm getting better!

[Lyonheart]

Ok someone posted similar idea about this first tip, but I will explain what I do and maybe it will help some of you. For the 3 waves of Champs ( before the 3 grand champs ) i pre target left one with my tank and 2 of my shaman. I then target the center one with a shaman and the 3rd with the last sham. I then use the shield breaker, default #2 button, to pull the group. This removes the shield on all of them. Once they are on my group I use my macro for spamming 1 and 2 button. It also spreads out the agro and i never have to switch mounts, most the time, until I have dismounted one of the Grand Champions.

Another tip for phase 2 of black Knight, this has been said a few times but to clairify. KILL THE ADDS.. no need to burn him down.. focus all your effort in phase 2 on gathering the adds with your tank and kill them, ignore ( but keep agro ) the BK until all adds are dead. Makes phase2 easy mode as well. I use fire elementals on that phase. He never spawns another army, and focusing on him can have you lose track of an exploding ghoul. Kill those bastards first, then hes easy tank and spank!

Next tip>> Black knight Phase 3. I have found out that that ae spell he cast in this phase is DEADLY if you are at range! However! It is WEAK in melee range! keep your toons at range for phase one and two. then either use interact with target or your follow button/macro and group right up on him for the final phase. EASY MODE!

Hope this helps some of you that have not beat the BK yet!

[Malekyth]

Next tip>> Black knight Phase 3. I have found out that that ae spell he cast in this phase is DEADLY if you are at range! However! It is WEAK in melee range! keep your toons at range for phase one and two. then either use interact with target or your follow button/macro and group right up on him for the final phase. EASY MODE!Interesting ... I didn't know there was a range component to his phase three damage. I occasionally completely wipe on BK, but even more often it comes down to the tank beating down his last few hit points with four dead party members to rez. I hadn't made the connection for some reason, even after Loken. Thanks for the suggestion!


The thing I hate most about it? You have to stand there with your dick in your hand for like 10mins while they announce the damn gladiators. I've gotten into the habit of mounting up one character as soon as the mounts spawn and starting the event. There's plenty of time to mount up the remaining four and stack Defend, and it helps pass part of the time. That intro sequence is still heinous though. I wouldn't be surprised if they eventually pare it down to "please welcome ... these five guys!" and then the door opens.

[Multibocks]

Ooh didnt even notice that before, no wonder I win when my guys are huggin the tank.

[Multibocks]

Interesting ... I didn't know there was a range component to his phase three damage. I occasionally completely wipe on BK, but even more often it comes down to the tank beating down his last few hit points with four dead party members to rez. I hadn't made the connection for some reason, even after Loken. Thanks for the suggestion!

I've gotten into the habit of mounting up one character as soon as the mounts spawn and starting the event. There's plenty of time to mount up the remaining four and stack Defend, and it helps pass part of the time. That intro sequence is still heinous though. I wouldn't be surprised if they eventually pare it down to "please welcome ... these five guys!" and then the door opens.

I found out if you zone only one guy in and start it, they will only announce him and not the 4 others. Cuts down the time a little bit =/

[Lyonheart]

I found out if you zone only one guy in and start it, they will only announce him and not the 4 others. Cuts down the time a little bit =/

WOOT! i will try this

[Stabface]

I'm not sure if it's possible to kill the Confessor but you CAN damage her through the bubble. I know Chaos Bolt will will pierce it, and a Ret Paladin with Sanctified Wrath will be able to damage her (25% of normal) as well while wings are up. I have personally dropped her to ~15K left with my Ret Paladin before my wings wore off. You can interrupt or purge the Renew off while she's bubbled, too. I don't know of any other bubble piercing effects -- can anyone else thing of any??

I am not sure what happens if you actually kill her while the bubble is up -- might stop at 1hp or something, or the encounter breaks, or maybe you get free candy or something!

Can someone running a Paladin or Warlock heavy group give it a try on Normal and let us know? :)

[Multibocks]

lol nice, I believe you listed the only two abilities that can pierce through bubbles. I dont think I have heard of any others.

[Multibocks]

Blue post today saying that in 3.2.2 you will no longer have to zone out of ToC to reset champions after jousting. Good, I would sometimes lose a couple running out of instance.

[Gares]

I think I need to learn how to box this for the axe for my ret pally in pvp. Can anyone condense these notes....hehe

[outdrsyguy1]

ironically, i got the axe the first 3 out of 4 runs of HToC with my DK, then i decided to change to pally tank, and haven't gotten one in about 5 runs lol. and LOVE the pally tank btw, much better than DK, and more dps.

[Baltyre]

My quick-and-dirty video of the black knight fight on heroic TOC

It's not really a good try but it works...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nh4W00Z-PxA

[Khatovar]

Thanks, is there a reason it has to be 2 macros? Is it because it would get stuck due to gcd?
My equip weapon macro is simply:
/equip Titansteel Guardian
on my shammies and the same sort of thing for the pally. I bound the equip to the same button I use for Avengers Shield
I use this macro before they mount up:
/equip argent lance

Old post, but I just wanted to drop in the macro I'm using. What I did was go into the Equipment Manager and make a set for my main weapon {axe}, then one for the lance. {Character Panel > Equpment Manager is a little icon in the top right corner > Save > Chose Icon and Name > Equip the Lance > Save Choose Icon and Name }

Make a new macro :

#show 16
/equipset [mod:alt] lance; axe

Viola

[Baltyre]

I have one "multiusage macro" button on each toons and a lot of buttons not bind on my main.
Each button use librpc :
http://www.dual-boxing.com/showthread.php?t=5721&highlight=Librpc
And when i click on a button on my main, that edit the "multiusage macro" button on each toon for the action i want. (Like, equip lance)

Really helping when you don't want to bind something you don't use in combat.

[Havelcek]

I run a mixed group (pally/priest/boomkin/shaman/mage) and after banging my head against normal mode a lot I switched out the boomkin for a 2nd shaman and TOC got a lot easier. I added Grounding Totem to the end of my shaman DPS macro so its pretty much always being put down and I worked a lot on my Paletress fight on Normal. Finally tried Heroic over the weekend and actually did it on the first try, though my Pally was the only man standing on BK phase 3.

There's a few key points you need to master to make this instance doable:

1) Learn the jousting approach. You should get to the point on normal where this is easy, then the heroic guys just have more hitpoints.
2) If you roll the rogue then make sure you drop your Cleansing Totem(s) and move out of the poison cloud. If you roll the shaman try to interrupt his heals as much as possible. Using Grounding Totems really helps during this phase if you roll the mage
3) Get good with the cleanse on Eadric. Also either turn your guys or master the "interact with target" technique. The key on heroic is to get your DPS back on track as quickly as possible
4) On Paletress again make sure that you have your post-fear scramble technique solid. Don't bother going to heroic until you can reorient your team quickly after the fear. Once this is second-nature, heroic gets a heck of a lot easier. If you have a Shaman you MUST purge the Renew off the summoned mob. Make sure you are putting down Grounding Totems. If you do all these things then this fight will seem a lot less like a crisis and more like a tank n spank. Once I was putting down 2 totems reliably and re-orienting my guys reliably, this fight became substantially easier.
5) BK phase 1 is a gimme. No tricks here. Just make sure you have a Cleanse totem down
6) BK phase 2, try to DPS down the adds but you're going to take a ton of damage on your tank so this is a healing intensive fight. As soon as the BK is dead auto-follow your guys to get them away from the remaining ghouls and then you'll be standing on top of each other (preferable) for Phase 3. Make sure your reset your totem farm because the ghouls kill them.
7) BK phase 3. AOE heal while DPSing as much as possible. I usually pop Divine Sacrifice on my Pally just to help smooth out the damage. If you lose a guy or two don't panic, just keep at it.

[The Rupt Brothers]

Haven't played much of late but came back to try and see how things would go with ToC vs. The Rupt Brothers. Noticed that this was pretty easy after reading the great pointers here and cleared HC mode last night for the first time, so a big THANK YOU for the input to one and all.

I had a lot of problems with Paletress in HC mode but practice makes perfect, also the 2nd phase of the Black Knight fight was causing me a lot of headache which was solved with taking out the Ghouls first + quick heals.

Drops didn't go my way this time but there is always tomorrow.

[Malekyth]

On Eadric, it's not necessary to eat his blinding attack. Just turn the party around in place. He doesn't hit hard enough to really inconvenience the tank while she's facing the wrong direction. With warlocks you can use the turning-around time to refresh your DoTs.

I have to chime in that killing the ghouls on BK phase 2 is definitely the way to go. I cleared this phase once or twice by just taunting like a maniac, but oh god, it's so much easier to AOE the buggers down. I find that if I keep spamming Curse of Corruption until all ghouls are dead, they don't last long enough to get through a corpse explosion. Well, I still don't have the achievement so I must be getting hit somewhere, but I don't notice the damage so it must be just one or two ghouls that manage to explode.

[pinotnoir]

Eadric is so easy. I just use the arrow keys to turn my guys when he cast the blind. After its cast I arrow turn them back towards the boss. This guy is so easy compared to the whore. On the whore make sure anyone who can interrupt spells is casting it on her. That helps the fight a ton.

[Malekyth]

Speaking of Eadric (wrong forum, but on topic here :) ), does anyone use a macro to throw the hammer back at him? I'd like to hit a macro that's broadcast to all clients, and the toon who actually has the ability will toss the hammer while everyone else will do nothing. Would it just be /cast Hammer of the Righteousness or summink?

[Greythan]

Male, just make sure your "1" key is set to broadcast all.

[Malekyth]

Male, just make sure your "1" key is set to broadcast all.

It isn't. I'm doing the FTL thing ('1' turns into ctrl-Ins, ctrl-shift-Ins, etc.). Need to macro it. :)

[Havelcek]

On Eadric, it's not necessary to eat his blinding attack. Just turn the party around in place. He doesn't hit hard enough to really inconvenience the tank while she's facing the wrong direction. With warlocks you can use the turning-around time to refresh your DoTs.

I have to chime in that killing the ghouls on BK phase 2 is definitely the way to go. I cleared this phase once or twice by just taunting like a maniac, but oh god, it's so much easier to AOE the buggers down. I find that if I keep spamming Curse of Corruption until all ghouls are dead, they don't last long enough to get through a corpse explosion. Well, I still don't have the achievement so I must be getting hit somewhere, but I don't notice the damage so it must be just one or two ghouls that manage to explode.

I let my team get blinded by Eadric because its practice for re-orienting the team after Pale's fear bomb. Just my opinion of course.

[Stabface]

I'm not sure if it's possible to kill the Confessor but you CAN damage her through the bubble. I know Chaos Bolt will will pierce it, and a Ret Paladin with Sanctified Wrath will be able to damage her (25% of normal) as well while wings are up. I have personally dropped her to ~15K left with my Ret Paladin before my wings wore off. You can interrupt or purge the Renew off while she's bubbled, too. I don't know of any other bubble piercing effects -- can anyone else thing of any??

I am not sure what happens if you actually kill her while the bubble is up -- might stop at 1hp or something, or the encounter breaks, or maybe you get free candy or something!

Can someone running a Paladin or Warlock heavy group give it a try on Normal and let us know? :)


I finally got around to trying this and can sadly report that it's impossible to kill the Confessor while the add is alive; you can lower her to 1HP but she will not die.

[Volch0k]

Finally did it! Had some help from a Boxer at the same realm as me with the macro's and explainin everything to me in real-time, Thanks to Altsoba/Rubhen!

[olipcs]

It isn't. I'm doing the FTL thing ('1' turns into ctrl-Ins, ctrl-shift-Ins, etc.). Need to macro it.

or make an 'FTL-overwrite' key.
I do this in HKN with '<' (left of y on a german keyboard), so when I press '< + 1' i broadcast a simple '1' to all my chars.

[Multibocks]

I tried regular of ToC on my paladin group. Was loltastic. Stupid ROGUE, I HATE YOU. Why is it that groups are never really punished for bringing lots of ranged dps, yet there are LOTS of encounters I can think of that punish you for bringing melee dps. WTF blizzard.

[Malekyth]

I tried regular of ToC on my paladin group. Was loltastic. Stupid ROGUE, I HATE YOU. Why is it that groups are never really punished for bringing lots of ranged dps, yet there are LOTS of encounters I can think of that punish you for bringing melee dps. WTF blizzard.

You're not being actively punished, it's just not very evenly designed. Whirlwinds and other point-blank AOE are easy tricks when it comes to boss fights, and the developers are leaning on them more heavily than they should. They don't have anything against melee groups, but IMO they need to schedule the time to come up with some more boss attacks that don't follow the anti-melee template.

[Multibocks]

Honestly I cant think of a heroic boss that I go: Shit I wish I had some melee dps for this. In fact I think the optimal group is 3 mages 1 resto shaman and any tank. You got BL, ridiculous ranged dps and all the other necessary elements. However, I agree that they dont seem to be actively punishing melee. Just they havent really thought of anything clever to fill the void.

[Volch0k]

I cleared normal when the guy was my 2nd boss. I still cannot get past the 2nd boss girl. She is hell on my team setup. I have a pally 3 mages and a druid. I may run that with my dk and 4 shaman just to see how easy grounding totems and tremor make it. Trying to do it without grounding or tremors sucks really bad. At this point I just reset the instance if I get that whore. The last boss is much easier than paletress.

I belive this happend to me, when i cleared normal once, waited a few hours (think bosses here acctually respawn)...could not get past jousting without reset.

I still wipe a few times on the jousting part..Simply because every boss charged my paladin, making him unmount instant.....then, if they go for the same slave, he unmount VERY fast to. Is there any way to go around this? That they charge the same target?

[Altsoba]

I tried regular of ToC on my paladin group. Was loltastic. Stupid ROGUE, I HATE YOU. Why is it that groups are never really punished for bringing lots of ranged dps, yet there are LOTS of encounters I can think of that punish you for bringing melee dps. WTF blizzard.

They are stunnable and maybe vulnerable to other forms of cc. I think that if you just round robin stun him he'll be dead before he wakes up. I have pala tank and the rogue is always my first target he does almost nothing with just one hammer stun.

The shaman I dps more than he can heal so not a big problem. The warrior might be a problem in melee groups in fact but if you got both, just stun one and use bubble while killing the other. Never played full pala group though just guessing :p

[Altsoba]

I belive this happend to me, when i cleared normal once, waited a few hours (think bosses here acctually respawn)...could not get past jousting without reset.

I still wipe a few times on the jousting part..Simply because every boss charged my paladin, making him unmount instant.....then, if they go for the same slave, he unmount VERY fast to. Is there any way to go around this? That they charge the same target?

I'm always just near the instance entrance, so after killing the 3 groups, inevitably there's ALWAYS at least one boss just close to my group. So I just make sure shields are up and spam the attack macro I gave you. It'll be at least one less charge but sometimes more than one are just there. Don't wait to change mount for too long. If first charge is "heavy" start running for fresh mount at around 20%. Just keep one targeted and spam attack and shields while doing so. Sometimes I get as much as 3 unmounted but always manage to do it without wipes. Sometimes I have one dismounted killed but never ever had to get a fresh mount on an alt and did a lot of runs both heroic and normal.

Hope it helped.

[Altsoba]

...
5) BK phase 1 is a gimme. No tricks here. Just make sure you have a Cleanse totem down
6) BK phase 2, try to DPS down the adds but you're going to take a ton of damage on your tank so this is a healing intensive fight. As soon as the BK is dead auto-follow your guys to get them away from the remaining ghouls and then you'll be standing on top of each other (preferable) for Phase 3. Make sure your reset your totem farm because the ghouls kill them.
7) BK phase 3. AOE heal while DPSing as much as possible. I usually pop Divine Sacrifice on my Pally just to help smooth out the damage. If you lose a guy or two don't panic, just keep at it.

Just to add something here:
I setup the totem farm 10-15 meters from my group to the left or right so I won't have to worry anymore about it;

In heroic as soon as Ph2 starts (when he STARTS summoning army) I drop 4 Fire Elements and they immediately aggro the ghouls and they also do awesome damage. Ghouls are packed that way and I consecrate and Holy Wrath them. I kill all ghouls first then move to BK. I run 4 elemental shaman so I just heal over desecration. Thunderstorm is great for ghouls that eventually aggro (there's massive chain healing going on);
Near the end of this phase I BL so I still have enough to go to Phase 3.

I stack group in Phase 3, pop the party damage absorption of the paladin, blow mitigation abilities and just dps, dps, chain heal, dps, dps, chain heal. I seldom wipe though I accept losing 1 to 3 shaman here ^^.

Hope it helped.

[Multibocks]

They are stunnable and maybe vulnerable to other forms of cc. I think that if you just round robin stun him he'll be dead before he wakes up. I have pala tank and the rogue is always my first target he does almost nothing with just one hammer stun.

The shaman I dps more than he can heal so not a big problem. The warrior might be a problem in melee groups in fact but if you got both, just stun one and use bubble while killing the other. Never played full pala group though just guessing :p

Yes he is stunnable, but he lasts through one stun of my rets AND drops poison cloud as soon as he wakes. I have to strafe everyone out of it and then, of course, the stupid shaman heals him. It goes round like this a few times until rogue is no longer stunnable due to diminishing returns and then I wipe. With my shaman I spread them out and go full dps on rogue and he barely makes it through one stun. Kind of annoying that hes so hard on melee dps.

[Volch0k]

I'm always just near the instance entrance, so after killing the 3 groups, inevitably there's ALWAYS at least one boss just close to my group. So I just make sure shields are up and spam the attack macro I gave you. It'll be at least one less charge but sometimes more than one are just there. Don't wait to change mount for too long. If first charge is "heavy" start running for fresh mount at around 20%. Just keep one targeted and spam attack and shields while doing so. Sometimes I get as much as 3 unmounted but always manage to do it without wipes. Sometimes I have one dismounted killed but never ever had to get a fresh mount on an alt and did a lot of runs both heroic and normal.

Hope it helped.

Problem is, if i change mount on my paladin, they all 3 automaticly go for my slaves...

Its not like a huge, problem, because i manage it each day now, but still annoying to know that i will prolly wipe 1/2 times if i'm not lucky.

[Pocalypse]

I hate this buggy instance.

I pretty much have it on farm, usually no deaths, unless the mounted phase produces a bug.

Apparently, if you kill the last mounted champion while another one is jumping onto a horse, it'll bug, you/they will dismount, except for the guy that just mounted. He'll stay mounted, and start trampling your guys.
Go outside, reset.

Yesterday, after killing the 3 champions on foot (luckily, I had hunter/mage/healer, no warrior or rogue), I'm running to the center where the chest has already spawned, and the mage comes back to life and starts casting on one of my shamans. I reacted too slowly and he killed it.
I grabbed the mage, tanked him and got him down.. at which point he MOUNTS UP!
He then proceeds to trample and kill two of my guys before I can run out of the instance.

All this time, the chest is already up, I quickly looted it while running out of the instance in case it bugged too somehow.

Luckily, when I went back inside, mage was gone and I could start boss 2.

I hate this instance.

[Multibocks]

Problem is, if i change mount on my paladin, they all 3 automaticly go for my slaves...

Its not like a huge, problem, because i manage it each day now, but still annoying to know that i will prolly wipe 1/2 times if i'm not lucky.

Just making sure, but you are keeping shield up on all guys right? The first time they charge that guy will lose all 3 shields and take massive damage. Just throw shield up as soon as they charge and remember to get it back to 3 stacks of the buff or that guy will be dead by the next charge. I usually switch horses on one guy before all 3 are down. If you are remembering to keep shield up none of your slaves should get dismounted before all bosses are down.

[Pocalypse]

And more bugs, although this one was actually beneficial.

I get hunter/mage/warrior, kill them all, chest spawns. Then I notice hunter is again at full health, so kill her again, and again she's at full health, kill her a 3rd time. This time she's sitting on the ground doing nothing, but I can see dots still doing damage to her.

Worried she'll get up again, I loot, zone out and back in, see the hunter isn't where I left her, so I talk to the guy to start the next boss.

Then I notice, oops, all 3 champions are back standing at the big doorway, and they are now accompanied by the second boss (the girl, bah!).

Luckily, I can pull two groups of adds, then the champions separately without the girl. Kill them, and lo and behold, I got a SECOND chest, with full loot.

Now I'm back to having two bosses left with no more bugs.

So overall, I got loot from 4 bosses in one ToC heroic run (and my rogue friend got some boots :)).

[Volch0k]

So, I was doing a couple normal runs today, for my last haste trinket.

My first run, I unmounted all the 3 bosses in p1, but it just would not get to p2. All bosses were on the ground, had my slaves on each of em, keeping em from mounting up again. So, i reset the instance, and everything runs smooth. After that, the same bug happen over and over again, i would get them all to unmount, but the event didn't advance to the next stage. I also tried to let one of them mount up again, just to kill him, but that didn't help ether. So, then i unmount one of my slaves, to manually cast this piece of shit to death. Nope, just would not advance. This happen 4 times, until i got the "to many instances recently! message.

Yes, I'm 100% i did reset the instance, and the instance was set to normal at all times. This also happend yesterday, but only once.

Any idea whats causing this bug?

[Multibocks]

LOL you are having more problems with this instance in a few days than I have ever had. I always zone out after the mount combat, but I have not seen the bugs you are getting =/

[Pocalypse]

So, I was doing a couple normal runs today, for my last haste trinket.

My first run, I unmounted all the 3 bosses in p1, but it just would not get to p2. All bosses were on the ground, had my slaves on each of em, keeping em from mounting up again. So, i reset the instance, and everything runs smooth. After that, the same bug happen over and over again, i would get them all to unmount, but the event didn't advance to the next stage. I also tried to let one of them mount up again, just to kill him, but that didn't help ether. So, then i unmount one of my slaves, to manually cast this piece of shit to death. Nope, just would not advance. This happen 4 times, until i got the "to many instances recently! message.

Yes, I'm 100% i did reset the instance, and the instance was set to normal at all times. This also happend yesterday, but only once.

Any idea whats causing this bug?

If that happens again, try zoning everyone out and back in without resetting the instance. Hopefully, the champions will line up at the door ready to be killed.

[Volch0k]

If that happens again, try zoning everyone out and back in without resetting the instance. Hopefully, the champions will line up at the door ready to be killed.

Just forgot to mention, i did try that ofcourse. What happen was, all the pre-boss mounted guys were laying dead, but i had to start the event all over again anyway.

[bartholomeo]

after reading this whole topic, i was ready to go in.

Made the macro's for the vehicle's.

So i go in, press F11, sets focus to my DK, click on a mount for all my toons, they all run to get it.

I group back up in front of the gate, press 4 a few times to get my shields up.

Then i hit my assist focus button, and nothing happens ....

every single time i set my focus before, it resets once they mount up and use a vehicle ability.
I can't reset focus either , because i cannot target my DK. "unknown unit" is what they spam all over chat.

any solutions ?

edit: figured it out: don't use : Target deathknight, set focus, instead use : /focus deathknight

[bartholomeo]

so, i did this for a few hours. ToC normal with my DK tank and 5 shamans ( 3 ele, 1 resto )

My dk is heroic geared, mostly epics with a few blue's here and there.
The shaman's have quest gear with 2 pieces of pvp gear and blue's / greens.
The dk is hitcapped with 27k health, the shamans have around 16k.

After a few tries i got this jousting down without much trouble.
I'm having the most trouble with the 3 champions. The first time i got the shaman, hunter and warrior.
Easy mode with ele totems up, nuking the hunter, then the shaman and lastly the whirwindmachine.
I ended up with everyone alive. I went out to repair and come back ( 7 learning-wipes )

For the next boss i got lucky, i got the big guy. i rotated my guys with each repentance he did, and healed trough the rest. free epics, a nice spelldmg ring + cloth waist.

Then on to the black knight. First part was easy, tank and spank.
I died at phase 2, again, and again ... i can't deliver the dps yet. It takes too long for me to bring him down.


After that i took a break for a few hours and tried again with a fresh reset.

Again,the jousting is cake, hitting 1, 2 and 4 at the same time all the time.
But now i keep getting the worst combo's with the 3 champions.

hunter mage warrior = all dps, my tank takes a major load of dmg wich i can barely keep up.
mage, warrior rogue = I nuke the rogue, but then all my guys are dead or halfdead due to the poison.


I'm sick of it atm :) i'm gonna take a break for a night :)

btw,

i hope they nerf that fan of knives thing, waaay overpowered ( pve and pvp )

[Bigfish]

This instance is very much a craps shoot. First fight a combination of random bosses, second fight one of two possible bosses, and then Captain DPS Race. Whole thing makes me not want to bother with it.

Of course, the ilvl 219 2-handed axe dropping from the 1st encounter earns a bit of forgiveness from me. Sweet, sweet straight up DPS upgrades for my Warrior and DK.

[Phanes]

Just zone in and start the instance with one guy it saves time he only announces one member of your team. If you do not like the combination you get zone out make a different group leader and zone back in. This will reset the instance. It only takes 3 minutes after you reset to see the bosses. That is a much shorter time than recovering from multiple wipes.

[Pocalypse]

They added an option to skip the opening sequence now. Choose it, and all the champions spawn within 15 seconds, and the first group starts running at you in 20.

[suprafro]

The "skip pleasentries" option is awesome

Haven't tried normal sense patch but as of yesterday Thunderstorm no longer knocks away the HM BK ghouls, I wonder if they are immune to CC now

[Phanes]

Yeah I just noticed that option last night. I have a select chat option macro I just spam when I click on him so I missed that. It is really nice.

As for the end fight my guys are pretty well geared I just find myself AOE tanking and killing all his ghouls then killing him.

[Greythan]

Yeah, I've beat it twice in row now with a wipe or two mixed in.

I just single target kill his army of the deal in phase 2. I actually want to try to add a targeting macro in my standard dps button but I'm not sure of the exact name to put in a "/tar x" line.

Phase three, group up, spam holy nova, pop bloodlust and win.

[Rocky Rhode]

Couple of questions regarding Phase II of the Black Knight…As I slowly gear up for the event…ToC hates me when it comes to drops. I have seen the same 3-plate items drop over and over. Sad thing too is with my team still new I do not have an enchanter to DE the stuff …eeck..need to work on that…

How soon after he spawns AoD does he begin to blow them up; and secondly does he still blow them up if they are dead much like corpse explosion?

I am thinking of trying to run full out AoE directly after a Consecrate, followed by a Holy Wrath. Would it work to have the team collapse on the Tank then go all out AoE? Or will he destroy them with his explosion.

Thanks

[Multibocks]

He makes them explode after a set time, so if you go all out AE on p2 you will probably kill them all before the first one explodes. That is if your AoE is not bad =(

[Eggy]

What I normaly do is just consecrate, forgetting to use Holy Wrath and just use fire elemental totems, never had a problem on normal, and havnt had one on heroic running with my mate playing his druid(Still cant for the life in me keep up with heals on my resto shammy for heroic).

[Saoul]

The strat i found working best with my DK and 4 Elemental shammies for phase 2, was to blow undead army and 4 fire elementals -pop heroism- and just blow up the Black Knight. Healing usually consists of 2 casts of ele group lesser healing waves and pet sacrafice (if its up) on DK and 2-3 chain heals on elemental shammies (running DK tank within chain heal range if a top up is needed) slide the shammies out of exploding goul range when Black Knight pops his clogs. Regroup for phase 3 next to Black knight's body, re-drop totems qik heal if required then blow up ghost (every 3rd cast is a group heal).

[SoulSeekerUSA]

For some reason when my 4 shaman are on or in vehicles they will not focus on my main or follow. What am i doing wrong? Message I get is "You cannot follow that unit".? For now I have given up on this instance, I hate the mounted combat it is just so clunky.

[BobGnarly]

For some reason when my 4 shaman are on or in vehicles they will not focus on my main or follow. What am i doing wrong? Message I get is "You cannot follow that unit".? For now I have given up on this instance, I hate the mounted combat it is just so clunky.

Are you running a focus system? You have to redo the focus if you change/enter/exit a vehicle.

I run the following for this zone:

/focus bob
/assist bob
/follow bob

and just spam that macro before each kill.

[thedreameater]

i could not even beat the normal mode.. this is tough!

Why not? What did you get stuck on?

I tried a while back but couldn't get past the jousting. I need to L2Mboxjoust, but I am having so much fun now that I can clear heroics I haven't gone back.

When my pally targets something, my alts don't target the same thing (unlike when unmounted they attack the focus' target).

[Coyote]

Jousting was hell to learn for me, but I've finally managed to get it down somewhat. What made the difference for me was:

* Positioning. All the slaves right on top of each other close but not too close to fresh horses. Having your back near a wall helps keeping the enemies in front of your slaves (less turning/moving).
* Getting a fresh horse on the main just before killing the last add of the last trash group, and getting 3 stacks of defend up.
* Getting shield breaker volleys off every time they move out to charge, or it will take too long.
* If someone is the focus of all 3 after a charge, move them out for a fresh horse at once or they will be dismounted on the next charge.
* Once you get an enemy dismounted, park your main on top of them to keep them perma-trampled. The last thing you want is that extra dps back on your team if they manage to ninja a fresh mount while you are busy doing something else. If this puts your main out of melee range of the rest, you can assist with shield breakers while your slaves melee them.
*Remember to refresh the focus and target of the slaves. Best if you have a key or two that you can spam after getting a fresh mount with any char or changing target on the master.
*Remember to spam defend/joust/shield breaker even while moving for a fresh horse. If they are not taking damage and get up to 90% reduction every time you change mounts, they will wear you down.

In an ideal run, all 3 enemies will start charging your main, while you get a volley of shield breakers off. Once you get a fresh horse with your main, they will start targetting different slaves, and you get some breathing space to work on dismounting one of them and calmly plan when each slave will have to run for a fresh mount. With a bit of awareness you manage to keep the defend stacks of your first target down and dismount it fairly fast.
Once the first enemy falls, the dps on your slaves will be much more manageable. If you park your main on the dismounted enemy, you can keep your attention focused on replacing mounts for your alts and getting shield breakers off in the short windows you get. If you can make it to this point with 4-5 of your still mounted, you will pretty much be in control and have the encounter in the bag.

[Volch0k]

The biggest mistake i made, was to think that having a diffrent key's for shield/attack on my main wasnt a big deal. Once i changed it, so I'm only bashing 2 key's its so easy it's not even fun anymore.

If you think it's hard, wich it's it not, you just need to learn it.

[Hurricane]

This is for TOC normal and the first boss only as i see that as the most difficult encounter there based on my experience doing it with guildes on my main.

Does this look like a nice strategy. Im at work and has just read this intire thread, havent tried it on my 4 shaman + 1 pala team yet.

http://www.dual-boxing.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=66&stc=1&d=1254313967

Tank is blue and will be moving around infront of my slaves which only will use the ranged attack?

I dont have leaderless setup and is just using something like this:
on shamans, i have macro

/follow party1
and
/target party1target
/cast dps

will my stratgy work do you think? :)

[Greythan]

Follow the jimbobob's strategy posted on the second/third page of this thread for jousting, its ezmode.

Stack all four slaves up just right of the gates where the champions enter (if horde). Place them on top of the alliance mount so that you have 2 horde mounts close (1 on left, 1 on right).

Set target of slaves to first mob, target second mob with main.

Pull with the range attack and quickly switch target to third mob. (Leaving slaves still targeting the first.)

Run back to your slaves and starting mashing 1,2,4 over and over. Once your slave's target dies (it will be fast) switch them to assist you, kill, switch to third, kill.

Rinse repeat and after second set of three run to a mount away from your slaves and jump on a new wolf. (Restores HP.)

The reason I group up where I do is sometimes a slave will get dismounted when fighting the three bosses. I simply switch to their window and take one of the two nearby mounts.

[Hurricane]

What the hell is wrong with my english today. So you are basicly doing the mounted fase by melee attacking?

[BobGnarly]

I tried a lot of cute strategies until I just tried standing in one place and brute forcing them down. You have to be able to use the melee attack (button 1), the ranged attack does very little damage.

I do something similar to what has be previously suggested, except that I just stand out in the middle and take my main back for a new mount (with slaves following - otherwise they will get charged for high dmg when you dismount). The reason I do it this way is it's much easier for me to deal with the "walkers" this way. I've got it down to where I can usually finish this off with only one mount change. Plus, it's very fast. :)

[Eggy]

I tried a lot of cute strategies until I just tried standing in one place and brute forcing them down. You have to be able to use the melee attack (button 1), the ranged attack does very little damage.


Pretty important to remove their shield tho =P

[BobGnarly]

Pretty important to remove their shield tho =P

For sure, I just meant I'm not sure far you'd get if you ONLY used the ranged attack like he was proposing.

[Eggy]

For sure, I just meant I'm not sure far you'd get if you ONLY used the ranged attack like he was proposing.

Oh yeah, I wouldn't even try that, hehe.

[Hurricane]

Cleared toc normal like 6-7 times this weeked.

First event:
stack minions on top of eachother near the big "boss doorway". Refresh horse on main after the 2 first pulls.
Use shieldbreaker whenever the bosses runs out to charge.

On the real fight, I always dps down the roge if he is there or else i kill warrior first.

Have not tried this first boss on heroic yet.

2nd boss. If i get the man, its no problem. when ever he casts radiation or what ever its called i just turn my tank around and push chain heal on my shamans. while they are topping them self of i turn them manually the correct way again. easy

the woman was much much harder. the aoe fear was really messed up and i had to use my pala tank to dispell the dot. Also i had to put down tremor totems manually on my minions so that the pulse from tremor most likly would trigger at different time. When i did that i was normally not fear for more than 1 second. I think I also used the my fire elementals to get past this boss. Was lucky and only fought her once:) I think its best saving fire elementals for black knight, so some more tips for the female boss would benice.

black knight.
I posisioned my shamans where the cyan squares are, talked to the NPC. when the black knigth almost is done with his talking i drop all my totems and backpedal my shamans to the wall. That way my searing totems willl help in first phase, and also everyone is in range of buff/protection totems. Need at least one cleaning totem!
http://www.dual-boxing.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=72&d=1254743531

phase 1. i tank black knight on blue square. when add spawens i quickly kill it and then i just dps down black knight.

phase 2. I lay down concecration when black knight is, and spawn all my fire elementals and push bloodlust and cast chain lighing and chain heal. when adds is dead i just make sure everyone has full health and kill the boss. Using all defensive abilites on my pala here.

phase 3. usually i still got bloodlust and all my fire elementals alive. First i pop stoneclaw totem on all shamans for the extra shield and then i just nuke the boss.

This tactic worked for black knight on heroic also, but was much much harder :) I got saved into a half done 5 toc heroic(only black knight left) on one of my shamans so i figured out i would try:)

[Eggy]

Paltress is pretty easy if you remember to purge the HoT she puts on the shadow she spawns, if not you're going to have a much harder time, I think it's like 100k/healed a tick or something silly like that, really annoying. And like you said, stacking the tremors helps alot.

[offive]

Something I just started doing on the mounted phase, I have the tank get close and agro, but then I back up to my team near the wall. I try to keep all the mobs close so they can't breaker or charge. It helps me a lot to avoid that first burst where I always had to swap horses on the tank very quickly. Of course you get the burst when the mobs all gain distance and drop your shields, but you do gain that first round of damage with out losing a horse and time. Hope this helps.

[Bigfish]

Paltress is pretty easy if you remember to purge the HoT she puts on the shadow she spawns,

Paletress is an unholy bitch, if only for her random-target smite bitch slaps. Not really an issue with a bunch of shamans, or a druid healer, but if you don't have the right group combo, God help you figuring out this one. I had to write a macro on my priest for my melee group that would throw a PW:S on the unlucky sods she kept trying to pick off..

Also, PvP trinkets are your friend here.

[Day]

Here is my strat I use on Normal or Heroics

Mounted phase:

Stack all alt in one location 3 small adds are easy just melee them with thrust till each one is dead then move to next group. Once you are on 3 champs you pretty much just do the same thing you just have to make sure each alt attacks same target to get it down keep defend up. It can be casted at the same time as when you trust because they do not share the same global cooldown. Refresh your mounts whenever one of you team members start getting low hp. you don’t have to dismount to get a new one just jump on the next mount. Once you get them down they will auto reset to the gate you don’t have to wipe or run out I use to kite them to the door so I had time to run out and reset them Thx Blizz for new change.

3 Faction Champions:

Depending on the champs you get is how you deal with them But always kill the shaman first if he is in your order if you don’t he will just heal whoever you are attacking so I always kill him first if you have a dwarf kill it second cause she throws a poison bottle on the group that goes heavy dmg you have to move alts out of this if they get hit ASAP then kill last one. If you don’t get either of them you might get the gnome just kill him because he sheep’s random but isn’t really an issue the rest are just tank and spank.

Eadric the Pure:

Easy battle he comes with 3 sets of 3 adds pretty much tanks an spank, but I kill in this order Priest, paladin and monk for each group. Once you fight him he is easy just fight him as a tank and spank but watch for his radiance cast when he cast just turn all your toons away from him so your not facing then turn back burn him down and that’s it.

Argent Confessor Paletress:

She is a bit tougher to deal with she comes with 3 sets of 3 adds pretty much tanks an spank just like Eadric the Pure she has 2 phases. Phase1 is simple just burn her down once she is at like 20-25% hp she will summons a add (random of 23) called Shadows of the Past each one will fear so learn how to deal with this depending on your groups makeup she will cast smite on a random target at the same time healing her add so purge add and burn it as fast as possible once add is down just burn her down only 125k hp in heroic

The Black Knight:

3 Phase to this boss. I setup my alt close to a wall because he use’s death's respite (http://www.wowhead.com/?spell=67731) witch will throw you back and you don’t want your alts to get out of range. Phase1 is easy he will summons one ghoul pretty easy I just tank the black night when the ghoul comes I just taunt him over and burn it down before it explodes back on the knight and finish him off Phase2 he will summons a army of the dead little more tricky to deal with I use a pally tank so I just use consecration and try to tank as many as possible but at the same time kiting him around to stay out of his DnD and away from any exploding ghouls some ghouls may be on your alts don’t panic they don’t hit very hard just watch if they start to explode move your alt away like 5 yard range. Phase3 he will cast a aoe shadowfrost dmg spell try to have shadow and frost resist if possible and burn him down I lose one or two of my alts but down him before the groups wipes

I hope this posts helps and good luck

[Fuzzyboy]

What worked for me on heroic:

The joust

Phase 1: I used the tactic of bunching up the slaves, then spamming 1 + 2. I did have a macro for it though and struggled for a bit until I made a /click macro which clicked in this order: 2, 1, 4 - I bound it to mousewheeldown and it was actually fairly easy.

I actually found it better not to be up against the wall, since that would obscure the vision on my slave clients.

Phase 2: Blew the heroism at beginning of fight and burned down shaman asap, while moving out of the poison when needed. Trickiest phase imo. Once shaman was dead, I took poison-thrower next, but at that point it was fairly easy - just tank and spank and strafe out of the poison.

Eradric (or whatever he's called)

He's supposed to be the easiest of 2nd bosses - I didn't have much trouble, killed him in one shot. The three first waves are tank and spank - just kill the healers first. After that, spread out, heal whoever he hammers and hit your turn key at the light, and back right after.

The Black Knight

Phase one: Kill the ghoul when it spawns, the tank and spank.

Phase two: I popped heroism (had to wait a bit for it to cool down) then burned. Once the ghouls started running, I just walked forward with the slaves (they were lined up against the wall, spread out.

Phase three: AE heal and tank and spank.

[Hurricane]

What worked for me on heroic:
Phase two: I popped heroism (had to wait a bit for it to cool down) then burned. Once the ghouls started running, I just walked forward with the slaves (they were lined up against the wall, spread out.


Why did you walk forward with your slaves? Could you explain this phase more throughly? :)

[Fuzzyboy]

Why did you walk forward with your slaves? Could you explain this phase more throughly? :)

Well, my DBM said to move (i had killed TBK for that phase when I started moving) - and forward was the only way, so I just ran like a headless chicken :P They didnt get hurt though - I'm not sure if it was because of the running or because they just didn't explode because the knight was dead (in that phase).

[Bigfish]

I officially hate this instance for being a loot hog. It drops caster gear for my melee group, and melee gear for my caster group. I try to mix-and-match based on who need what, and it just doesn't drop anything I even need. Its like the Black night is just taunting me with his "A waste of a Chest" because that's what it feels like every time I open one of the things.

[Gares]

I just broke my mouse on this instance!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I've been trying for almost a week now to beat it on Heroic. Running Pally + 4 shaman but I've been trying with my DK as well. No good.

I can do the mount combat first try everytime. The 3 champions because I always get the god damn pally I can't stop him from healing so I usually wipe anywhere from 10-15 times before I beat them.

I have never gotten Eadric yet I always get Paletress and it takes me about 10-15 times to kill her. Then most of the time I die with my DK on phase 1 on Black Night (WTF), With my pally I always make it to phase 2 and the ghouls just all blow up and kill my team. I've tried to DPS them down but they all seem to exploded together even when I'm killing the boss.

[Brutala]

im absolutely clueless about second phase of first boss (3 champions), Im facing Dawnsinger, Mokra and Zultore. "SQUUIISSH" is the sound of my pala tank when he's taking something like over 8000 DPS... hes pretty well geared, more than raid ready.. My priest is able to deal with that, but not when Zultore and Dawnsinger begins reducing healt of slaves by 50% per shot...

And Im not even facing Visceri... :(

Well, I Succeded now, :-) maybe I was to quick to get frustrated. seems the way to do it just engage them where they stand, dont pull them out in the open. Most importantly do everything to kill the first champion as quickly ass possible, else they will do to much dmg!!

[BobGnarly]

I can do the mount combat first try everytime. The 3 champions because I always get the god damn pally I can't stop him from healing so I usually wipe anywhere from 10-15 times before I beat them.

Ya, the healer must die first as I think you've figured out. I did two things to make this encounter much easier:

1. I created a round-robin (I use keyclone) windshear macro for each shaman. It basically says:

/stopcasting
/cast [target=focustarget] windshear

And I use that to interrupt all of his heals.

2. If I get a bad draw on the champs (e.g. healer, rogue, war), I open with defensive cooldowns on the paly (divine protection + divine plea [I have the glyph]) + bloodlust and just blow shit up. The defensive cooldowns are just so you can concentrate on DPS until he's dead and not have to heal at all. Usually if I do this I don't even need to interrupt his heals.


I have never gotten Eadric yet I always get Paletress and it takes me about 10-15 times to kill her. Then most of the time I die with my DK on phase 1 on Black Night (WTF), With my pally I always make it to phase 2 and the ghouls just all blow up and kill my team. I've tried to DPS them down but they all seem to exploded together even when I'm killing the boss.A few quick points on paletress:
- Use grounding totems. They don't work on all her spells, but it seems to work on some.
- staggered tremor totems = fear does nothing.
- [VERY IMPORTANT] she casts renew, both on herself and the nightmare. It heals for a ton and must be purged off immediately.
- group up and chain heal. Your slaves are going to take some damage so your chain heal covers everything. Also, it's easier to recover from the 0.5s of fear you might take. :)

She is actually a cake-walk one you get those things down.

[Schwarz]

With my pally I always make it to phase 2 and the ghouls just all blow up and kill my team. I've tried to DPS them down but they all seem to exploded together even when I'm killing the boss.
I run a paladin 4 shaman team (one resto).

I have cleared the heroic maybe 5 or 6 times. I have mixed results on the black knight. Like you I have a hard time with phase 2. I have to drop 4 fire elementals to even have a chance in that phase. Even sometimes when I get past phase 2 I will experience massive aoe damage on my slaves.

So for me on the black knight it is attempt it once. Wait 20 mins for the cooldown on fire elementals to expire. Then attempt again.

I set my team up against a wall so they don't get thrown back. Watch this it is pretty much what I try every time.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAXLXWLHtiw

[puppychow]

I re-activated my accounts so I can farm halloween for mount, and spent a week leveling my 70 warr to 80 - needless to say his gear is absolute crap. I farmed h toc when it came out, but my two other tanks (pally, DK) were pretty geared and I facerolled the instance.

Well, with my warrior, who is around 28k hp unbuffed and 520 defense (lol, I know, I know!! He has some resil gear from welfare PVP tho) it was horrible. Wiped a lot.

Some tips that have made my life easier:

#1, gear up your tank as fast as you can. I crafted some gear and it made a big diff. Its fairly inexpensive to make the ulduar belt/boots, around 1500g each, and well worth it.

#2, on first 3 champs I try to kill the warrior, shaman, or rogue first (in that order). The warrior MS debuff sucks. I also lust on this boss right away so I can get it down fast.

#3, on last boss spread the team out 15 yards apart each. When I used to do it before I'd just bunch everyone up and magma totem/aoe the adds down then the boss, I barely had to heal my tank. Ooo, that does NOT work with an undergeared warrior tank!

After a lot of wiping I found it easier just to spread everyone out against the wall, and single target DPS the adds in p2 (focus on exploding ones first) while spam healing my tank. I don't drop elementals or lust even, just keep nature resist, disease cleanse, grounding, and shadow protection on the team (i run warr/holy priest/boomkin/2x ele shaman) and my priest spams poh. I do have to innervate my priest from my druid as p2 ends, but no big deal, then I just keep spamming poh until fights over.

[Bigfish]

I've got two groups I had to work this through.

Champions, I set up a macro that spams the basic attack and charge, and sets each character to follow another one. Character 5 follows 4 follows 3 and so on so they all have some space. Just spam that button and occasionally 4 to keep shields up, and ride back and forth on the inner star thing.

One we're on foot, it depends on if I'm on my melee group or my caster group. Melee group kills in the order Warrior/Rogue>Healer>Mage/Hunter. If I roll both the warrior and the rogue, I tend to reset, because I'm NOT messing with that storm of poisons and whirlwinds. If its my caster group, kill order is healer>everyone else. Doesn't really matter the order once the first one goes down.

Eadric is a pansy. Kind of sad that he made Grand Champion. Just turn around when he casts radiance and that's it.

Paletress is a Bitch. You need either really good AOE healing, or a dynamic healing macro that tosses a heal to whoever she smites, which she does to random characters. Once she spawns the nightmare, I have to taunt it to keep it from running all willie nillie, and I use a PvP trinket on the first fear for me melee group. Not much need if you bring a shaman with a tremor totem though. If it gets off more than one fear, I just gather everyone up. I don't worry about purging paletress's renew on herself, but its pretty important to clear it on the nightmare. If you can down the nightmare, Paletress herself can be dropped pretty easily. That's a big if though.

Black Knight, keep an automatic disease cleanse up on the tank. Otherwise, he's going to be taking massive DPS from frost fever and blood plague. Like 6k a tick. Each. Phase 1 is a tank and spank outside of that, making sure to kill poor Alestar Brightstar. That dude has a piss poor lot in life. Every day he announces for the tourney, gets choked to death by the Black Knight and rasied as a Ghoul. And tomorow it will be the same, and so on. Poor Bastard,

Anyway, Phase 2 is a burn phase. Just burn him down, and when he hits around 20k or less, set everyone to follow and just run out of the ghoul swarm. They'll explode harmlessly, and then its phase 3.

Phase 3 is an even worse burn phase. Set your healer to spam AOE heals and pray you have enough time to DPS the boss down before he kills everyone.

[Catamer]

I officially hate this instance for being a loot hog. It drops caster gear for my melee group, and melee gear for my caster group. I try to mix-and-match based on who need what, and it just doesn't drop anything I even need. Its like the Black night is just taunting me with his "A waste of a Chest" because that's what it feels like every time I open one of the things.

I totally agree with this, the only things that have dropped are the weapons and the trinkets. there is absolutely nothing in this instance worth going here for on my main team and they are the only ones that can take him down. if I bring in one lowbie I usually can't take him down only to find it didn't drop a single thing I can use and I have a 100g/toon repair bill. I think they weight the drops to what you don't need. I can' t tell you much much attack power leather dropped until the day I started bringing a druid along. I haven't seen attack power leather since then. It would have been faster to just do the heroics and buy the gear with badges. I always come away from this instance pissed.

[Volch0k]

I officially hate this instance for being a loot hog. It drops caster gear for my melee group, and melee gear for my caster group. I try to mix-and-match based on who need what, and it just doesn't drop anything I even need. Its like the Black night is just taunting me with his "A waste of a Chest" because that's what it feels like every time I open one of the things.

I know what you are talking about. 32 heroic runs so far, only 3 cloaks, 2 rings and 2 spelldaggers. SUCKS.

[Brutala]

Anyway, Phase 2 is a burn phase. Just burn him down, and when he hits around 20k or less, set everyone to follow and just run out of the ghoul swarm. They'll explode harmlessly, and then its phase 3.


Thank you for that tact!!, after more than 40 wipes total, I finally I beat ToC HC!! wohoo :)

[Simulacra]

I run a paladin 4 shaman team (one resto).

I have cleared the heroic maybe 5 or 6 times. I have mixed results on the black knight. Like you I have a hard time with phase 2. I have to drop 4 fire elementals to even have a chance in that phase. Even sometimes when I get past phase 2 I will experience massive aoe damage on my slaves.

So for me on the black knight it is attempt it once. Wait 20 mins for the cooldown on fire elementals to expire. Then attempt again.

I set my team up against a wall so they don't get thrown back. Watch this it is pretty much what I try every time.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAXLXWLHtiw

I watched your video yesterday and it was an incredible help, managed to clear HToC twice now - thx!
The big differences to my approach were:
1 - during the jousting positioning the team AWAY from the walls, amazing difference as I can actually target properly, don't have to worry about the champions getting a new mount and if the champions are out of los then I just take a step back
2 - Black Knight - the fire eles in the second phase works like a charm
3 - Bringing the team over to the Black Knight with the pally in the 3rd phase made him cake, didn't lose anyone in this phase

on the second bosses I had trouble with the memory of eck for some reason and wiped maybe 3 times, the fourth time I zoned in it was that dragon from VH and was pretty easy, although that time I did have some tremor totems down

the pally boss wasn't an issue, had him today and he just dropped

Thx !

[TheBigBB]

I managed to clear the instance on heroic. It's extremely hard, but I think I could repeat it. I only got one piece of loot I could use: a cloth chest for my mage.

[bartholomeo]

On phase 2 I drop 4 fire elementals + army of the dead.

Those little buggers keep the ghouls in the middle while the fire elementals burn them down. While I move away my team from the slaughter, i pop thunderstorm while running away, throwing back anything that follows back into the grinder. Then i start burning down the black knight from a distance.

[Khatovar]

I didn't really see anything mentioned about this, but this is a long thread so if I missed it, oops.

A little late to the party since I dropped a few toons and brought up another paladin {from level 1 with no RAF, ouch}. I noticed a while back during a messy Black Night kill where I had to do a LOT of moving that he'd dropped desecration on my totems. I finally got my new toon up and was able to try TotC tonight since it was the heroic daily {I was SOOO not geared for this, but anyway}.

He will indeed consider totems as "targets". Tonight I backed all my guys against the wall near the exit and dropped 2 totem sets on top of each other, then strafed everyone to the left so they were about 5 or so yards away from the totem farm but still against the wall. Every single time he dropped Desecration on my totems and not my guys. Turned out to be the ONLY fight that I didn't lose a single toon on, and it was the one I was dreading the most.

[bartholomeo]

Great tip khatovar !!

I'll try that : Drop the totemfarm and move out of the way. That would severly lower the overall dmg taken in the 3d phase.

[Littleburst]

I really don't understand how people find toc hc easy. atm i'm trying the mounted shit with my 4 shaman, naked. 3 wipes so far got 1 boss around at 80% when my main died and i quit.

vehicles......

[Gares]

Just joust them away from the other horses. I don't do this because I end up having my tank get dismounted everytime almost instantly. I always managed to waste them though. I usually have one char die though.

[jimbobobb]

Got it as my daily the other day. I still think it's pretty easy as long as you know how to do the fights:


http://www.dual-boxing.com/showthread.php?t=23186&highlight=jousting


Make sure to keep your shields up on all your guys!

[Velassra]

On the first fight, I can do the trios fairly easily. Sometimes I have to get a fresh mount sometimes not. But when the bosses charge, it's almost as if they togather 1 shot me. By the time I can get back up......(They stun?)....they have already killed another of my toons. Also, it seems if I have to switch mounts, they won't pick up focus again at all, no matter how much I mash my button.

6 times so far, best I've gotten one down, which remounted before I could get remounted again myslef. This all on regular.