Emerald Nightmare 5-man Multibox

I've managed to get the entire of Normal Emerald Nightmare down with a 5 man multibox, using a Prot Paladin/Holy Priest/Beast master x 3 team (with the exception of one fight). The gear levels were 891/886/891/887/889 with two legendaries apiece but no tier sets.

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I'm optimistic that the other raids and difficulty, with enough gear, might be able to be 5 manned too; this is kinda cool, as it means I have the raids to act as a the 5 man endgame after mythic+, that you get a sense of progression on.

Here are my notes on the various fights, in case anyone else is interested:

Nythendra: Easy; got her down weeks ago. Spread your ranged out on one side of the room and have a hotkey to move them everytime the rot manifests, slowly making your way across the room. Have the tank position her a little way away. When the breath is coming, move everyone towards her and follow the tank for a brief moment so that the ranged don't end up miles and miles away from safety. During Phase 2, run around like a headless chicken with everyone on follow, desperately trying to dodge patches of rot. There is a healing requirement, and you need a certain level of gear but in 7.2 this should be trivial.

Il'gynoth: This took a good few pulls to get down; a holy priest is VERY useful here for mass dispel. Pre pot and burst down the two tentacles. I dropped a Binding Shot as I moved to the second tentacle to give a precious couple of seconds to keep the bloods away. I then do a big loop of the area until the bloods are under the eye, another Binding Shot to stun them, then AoE them down.

I dispel on cooldown, if a blood touches someone. Often when AoEing down all of them, the entire team might take a hit and get the magic debuff: this is why our lord Hazzikostas gave us Mass Dispel. If you aren't using a priest I guess... just don't screw up? Heal through it?

I prioritize the corrupting tentacles. If possible I stand the other side of the eye to the tentacle I'm killing, so I can kill the blood immediately after: the real magic of the kill here is good blood management. I am able to get the encounter area clean before the Nightmare Horror spawns.

With enough Dps, you might be able to get the Nightmare Horror down and the bloods killed before the next volley of tentacles, which would make this bit MUCH easier. I don't have that sort of dps at the moment, so as soon as the tentacles spawn, I switch to them, handle the bloods and rely on my tank to be awesome as the Eye of Fate stacks get higher. A strong self healing tank is really useful.

Once the tentacles are down, I pop the Nightmare Horror. I stop using my dps cooldowns at this stage which seems to give them enough time for phase two. These bloods get you close, if not all the way there, to the eye going down. If not, the next little volleys of tentacles will. I take it slowly, if possible, and be certain to get as many of my cooldowns up as possible.

When the eye hits, the beauty is that, with only 5, its trivial to spread out so the damage you take on the inside is minimal. Pop Potion, pop bloodlust, get the healer dpsing, go ham; if my cooldowns are up, I can get the heart down in 1 phase with about 7 seconds to go. I had a 0% wipe as well!

I suppose there's nothing STOPPING you from 2 phasing it, but it will be nasty!

This is a very healing intensive fight that will almost inevitably require your healer to be mobile for large chunks of it. Every mistake you make handling the bloods will cost either a dispel or a reasonably large amount of throughput from your poor healer.

Elerethe Renferal: This is a messy fight with a massive requirement shoved on your healer. The holy priests numerous instant healing cooldowns were essential to surviving phase one here.

I start at one side of the platform and just stack up until she jumps up to do the large slam attack. At that point I run away with the tank, mashing both follow and my spread out hotkey. A necrotic poison will have gone out just before the slam attack; you try and keep your guys spread as best you can whilst running to the other side of the platform. This is the messy bit; I usually end up using a Holy Word: Sanctify here to keep everybody up, popping all my personal healing cooldowns (Exhilaration/Desperate Prayer) if I screwed up and took more damage than necessary.

When the adds spawn, I kill them quickly to stop the poison stacking up: they die quick. When the next Necrotic Venom comes it, its a lot more tame. I have my guys very loosely spread out and I happily let the two suckers that have the venom stand in it for a short while, before hitting the follow hotkey and getting them out. The difference between a couple of weeks before I got the boss down and getting her down is that my healer was comfortable healing through this bit.

You then have to repeat the first section's chaotic Venom/Vile Ambush overlap. If my healer is a bit behind, this might be the moment I pop all my immunities. There's no point saving a healing cooldown or a damage reduction here; we aren't going to see this phase again!

When she goes into bird form, I get everyone following the tank and dash into a position where Gathering Clouds isn't going to do something nasty. This is where I use my last bit healing cooldown: Divine Hymn. The bird phase is easy; the fight now turns upon surviving this bit and getting everybody to the second platform alive. If everyone is alive, the boss goes down in the bird phase or just after transitioning to the second spider phase.

I don't use the feathers; I jump down onto the second, less prominent web strand with everyone on follow, and pop the spiders as I run past. Once on the other side, I immediately hit my big tank cooldown as the tank is immediately going to take two Raking Talons. If the tank survives that, and everyone else is alive, you've pretty much won. Stick everyone on follow, run around like a headless chicken dodging the bad stuff, collect everyone back up together after any knockbacks, run around the boss so that everyone dodges razer wing. The damage is mostly single target here; we love when its single target because that's where our overgeared tank can put the team on his back.

If she transitions again, I suppose there's nothing stopping you rinsing and repeating, but if you have the stamina and the healer gear to survive to this point, you probably have the gear to kill her at this point.

Ursoc: The one fight I have to roster swap on. Out goes the Holy Priest, in goes another Prot Paladin. It MIGHT be possible to get Ursoc down if you switch the healer to another dps and use a Combat Res and an immunity to wipe the debuff a couple of times, but the easiest thing by far here is to use two tanks and do the fight sort of properly.

I spread the ranged away from the boss, and the two tanks either side. Pot, Lust, Pull, Dps. The fight then pretty much proceeds as normal; I set up a taunt hotkey just for him that oscillates my taunt back and forth between the two tanks and hit the button after every Overwhelm/Rend Flesh. This strategy is dependent on having tanks with VERY strong self healing (Paladins!) and that the DPS can gently top themselves up without a healer in between charges (spirit bond/exhilaration on the BM hunters).

Second potion gets popped and either you die, or the boss dies, simple as that. A gear check, essentially.

Dragons of Nightmare: I assumed this was going to be a complicated mess of an encounter that would require two tanks and a bunch of custom macros and hotkeys... then I realized that my tank could HAPPILY survive 30 seconds of stun, so I just went with my regular composition and got them down first pull. I position the ranged as far back as I can so they don't take stacks, charge the tank in then I switch to control a dpser. I get one to stand in the plant, kill any adds that spawn quickly to keep the area clean and do my best to keep everyone out of the bad stuff. I literally do not touch the tank; he might need a heal or two in the 30 seconds he's stunned, of course, but he's going to be okay otherwise. At one point in the kill I screwed up and had both the tank and the healer both stunned: and was still fine, recovered and stabilized. Way, way easier than expected.

Cenarius: Also easier than expected. Phase one is fairly straightforward; have everyone on follow, kill the adds quickly when they spawn, particularly the sisters, drag everyone through a patch of green occasionally, dodge the roots. Not a problem. Make absolutely certain you have a clean, add-less encounter area before you transition to phase 2.

Phase 2 is a bit trickier. Pop second pot and lust as soon as it starts. Sadly, immunities do NOT remove the spear debuff, so you really, really need to get him down within about 3/4 spears. Use cooldowns to survive the last two spears and keep everyone running out of the nightmare stuff. Ignore Malf; he's not going to be a big help here. Its more of a dps than a healing check here.

Xavius: This is a battle against the corruption debuff; it all adds up, so you need to do everything you can to not take stacks. Sadly, the major determining factor as to whether you win or not is basically the RNG on who gets the dream simulacra. You really need the tank and the healer to get hit at some point, because they ARE going to hit 100 at some point.

In phase one, I loosely spread the dps and go ham on the boss. You want the lurking terrors to hit the DPS, not the healer; I micromanage it as best I can, but don't lose sleep over it. When the big add spawns, I simply switch over to it and kill it as quickly as I can without popping things like second potion or bloodlust; we need the big guns for later.

You want to dispel the Darkening Soul Debuff as little as possible; ideally, you only want to dispel it once within this phase, then again in the next. This means taking around 8-9 stacks of it, which is tough on your tank but, frankly, the resilience of our tank is the one advantage that we have in shortmanning this raid, so we make use of it.

When he transitions, I hit the follow key and just have everyone run around following the tank. Its tempting to hit second pot and lust here, but its probably still more important to leave them to phase three. Use the tank to drag the boss away from the adds for as long as possible, then switch and kill them when they're close. If you have the apm and attention to use a dpser to soak them, that is ideal: the tank and the healer WILL hit 1000 corruption at some point and you want him dead before that. Plus, if you can get the dps doing the 15 second uber dps thing before the mind control during phase 3 with lust and second pot up? Well, that'd be pretty awesome.

I'm not going to lie; getting a lucky dream simulacrum was pretty essential to the plan here. You really need the corruption reset on the healer and tank, which gives you previous seconds to dps to get the boss through this phase.

Once you're in phase three, pop hero, pop potions, pop everything, clean up any last remaining adds from phase two and tunnel vision the hell out of the boss. Whether you have the time to get the boss down before the tank goes mind controlled is dependent on how well you've managed corruption up til this point.

The actual kill was a skin of the teeth just-two-hunters-desperately-kiting-the-boss-for-the-last-2% sort of thing, but they all count!

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I'm not sure those strategies are all going to hold up in Heroic, where the extra mechanics and additional damage incoming is going to stop a lot of the brute force cheese that's being used here, but with additional gear and artifact upgrades I don't see why heroic isn't doable. I'd be very interested in anybody else's experience short manning any of the raids, particularly folks who are running things like 5x Prot and 5x Hunter. Is it possible to do this with unconventional compositions? I can imagine on bosses like Elerethe that it might even be easier.

Congrats!

Extremely nice! It's nice to be able to do current expansion raids, especially under the suggested amount of players. I don't think the difficulty scales any harder until you add an 11th player. So definitely making it harder than it needs to be on top of that!