[WoW] Mana Tombs (normal)

I officially hate Mana Tombs.

Group: Pally, Priest, Mage, Warlock, Hunter
Levels: 65

Trash:

• Ethereal Scavenger
  These little bastards will drop aggro randomly and go and beat on your healer. Taunt them and it works for a second or two and then they go back to the healer again. I either CC or DPS these guys as quick as possible.
  
• Ethereal Crypt Raider
  They do a mortal strike which can be annoying with two of them and others on the tank. They also do a charge but this is one of the easier trash mobs to deal with.
  
• Ethereal Priest
  Easy. They heal, bubble and do Holy Novas. I don't think they heal others, just themselves. I usually don't worry about these guys, don't even CC them as they are by far the least problematic of the adds.
  
• Ethereal Sorcerer
  These can be a pain in the ass if you leave them up too long. They will summon two arcane elementals which can hurt if thrown into the mix while already tanking three trash mobs. The arcane elementals can be killed quickly thoughly.
  
• Ethereal Darkcaster
  SWP that ticks for 1K. Dispel quickly. On the tank I can still deal with the 1K ticks but if you aren't paying attention to the rest of the group a SWP can kill one of them.
  
• Ethereal Spellbinder
  Summons two mana wraiths if left too long. The mana wraiths do shadow bolt volleys. Similiar to the Sorcerers but these guys do an Immolate, dispel it.
  
• Nexus Stalker
  Ok, this is where the *real* problem starts. These little assholes do a GOUGE and then they go over and poison your group and the poison ticks for 1K. Dealing with 1 of them is not too much of a problem as you can burn it down quick. I can also death coil / fear it off the group. Getting 3 or 4 of them at a time is a royal pain when your tank gets chain gouged.
  
• Ethereal Theurgist
  Easy again. Nothing to worry about.
  
• Nexus Terror
  The fear is a little annoying but it doesn't drop aggro so all good, just make sure the tank doesn't get feared out of healing range. I switch to shadow resist aura for these.
  
• Mana Leeches
  No problems.

Bosses:

• Pandemonius
  I tank him on the right side of the room. I can get the entire group into a corner and the tank with her back against a tomb. The most difficult part is to get my camera positioned so I can actually SEE. I get an announcement when he shifts but not when it drops.
  
  First thing I discovered is that Shadow Resistance Aura and Shadow Protection does not stack. Annoying. I decided to go with Shadow Protection (less than the aura) to free up Auro of Retribution to help with aggro.
  
  Pally pulls with Avenger's Shield, judges, consecrates and tanks till the first shift. Once he comes out of it the DPS opens up. After the shadow bolts I top up whoever needs it while still keeping the tank up. Rinse, repeat. I also unbound my priest's jump key as things tend to go down the tubes when the priest is doing a big heal and he shifts and I hit jump to interrupt the casters and it interrupts the priest and the tank gets owned.
  
  I had numerous wipes on my first Pandemonius kill to get my strat down and I got him 2nd attempt on the 2nd kill. Hopefully 1-shot next time and maybe he will give me my shield as well.
  
• Tavarok
  Tank and spank. Really easy. Keep group topped up and Bob's your uncle.
  
• Nexus-Prince Shaffar
  le sigh
  Haven't been able to kill him yet. He comes with his 3 beacon adds that need to be dealt with asap. My intial attempt was to tank the 3 beacons and the Prince and then kill the beacons 1 by 1. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHA!!!!! The beacons do 1K+ magic damage each and the boss will hit you for 1K+ magic dmg frequently. Even if the tank can get aggro on all of them the incoming damage is way too much.
  
  Ok, new strategy. Hunter gets a beacon, mage gets a beacon, warlock gets a beacon. Pally pulls boss and at the same time the DPS opens up on their beacons. Had moderate success so far. I get the beacons down and then everyone switches to the Prince. I used a kind of sticky targeting to get the DPS to stick to their beacons till they were down. Then I discovered the sticky targeting approach completely screws me on subsequent beacons as the DPS will now "stick" to Prince Shaffar.
  
  Still working on my strat. Any tips/ideas?
  
• Escort event
  Only attempted it once and didn't get past the first room. I remember the event as being pretty difficult even for a regular 5 man group. The hardest part is to get control quickly especially when you have Spellbinders and Sorcerers thrown in that will spawn mana elementals and mana wraiths. Dealing with four mobs and getting those spawned really ruins your day.

I never had a problem with Pandemonius. I never used Aura of Retribution for anything, and still have no problem doing enough tps to effectively go all-in on dps (using Avenging Wrath naturally). Buff salvation on which ever of your toons do most threat to lower the dps threat ceiling as well. Avenger Shield alone should be enough to cover 2 normal fireballs/shadow bolts. Also, are you judging crusader? And applying Seal of Righteousness after that? You should probably do around 5-600 tps pretty easy.

Shaffar on the other hand, there's a decent challenge. I wiped 2-3 times before I took him down at level 64, and when I killed him, I still wiped by his adds and had to resrun from the graveyard, hahaha! He is unpredictable for sure. Some might think just nuke him down, but it's not really that easy. He mixes his attacks with both melee and spells, and if he decides to go and melee one of the ranged dps, who'd take aggro in a nuke situation, you'd probably not be able to save them. The trick here is to have a tank who is able to move, and keep up with Shaffar on foot when he frost novas and blinks out of range. You have a blessing that's tailormade for this type of encounter. /cast [target=player] blessing of freedom. Also you must position your dps/healers as far forward as you can without aggroing him, and be prepared to run them forward, if he blinks back behind the pile of skulls or dirt or whatever.

You should maybe multishot in the start to bring the adds into aoe range and dispose of them quickly with arcane explotion and hellfire, from here on out only dps Shaffar. You're gonna be left with 3-6 adds probably, but they go down fast in human form also. See, having 2, 3, 4 Shammies in the party would make this encounter almost too easy. One chainlightning in the beginning would rid you of one problem in about 2 seconds. Boxing 5 different classes in this encounter actually demands some effort. Good luck :thumbsup:

Edit: Actually I don't remember if the adds will move towards you or remain stationary and fire spells. You have alternatives though. If they approach you 1x explosive trap, hellfire and arcane explotion should take care of business. If they remain by Shaffar you could maybe start with 1x volley, rain of fire and blizzard just after you pop consecration. You can of course manually target one add each with your 3 dps, and do an assist on Shaffar after they're down. But I dropped killing adds after the first 3 were dead and just went for Shaffar. The encounter is waaay to chaotic to keep up with adds. Almost like Darkweaver Syth in Sethekk Halls. I just popped Avenging Wrath when the second wave of elementals spawned (to help stay above the healers threat), and nuked away with no regard of adds. I actually bound greater heal to the same button as I cast frostbolt/shadowbolt/lightning bolt, so I just had to spam that one button every 2,5 seconds. Worked wonders when underleveled/geared.

For sticky targetting, make sure that you also have an assist macro to sticky them onto something else. I'm not sure how your sticky targetting is implemented but generally all that is required is "/assist focus" to retarget.

Consider a macro for the DPS on this fight

/target *ads name*

When you see them spawn, click that, have them kill them asap, then assist the tank again to retarget the boss. Kill the ads asap and the fight is alot easier :)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by 'Shogun',index.php?page=Thread&postID=35655#post35 655

Consider a macro for the DPS on this fight

/target *ads name*

When you see them spawn, click that, have them kill them asap, then assist the tank again to retarget the boss. Kill the ads asap and the fight is alot easier :)

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Good idea. I will make a macro for this, something like /target beacon, /stopmacro [target=exists,nodead], /assist main

I had a fair bit of trouble here when I tried it at 65-66. I ended up going back to questing and came back at 70 and I tore the place up. So maybe consider coming back at 70?

I almost had it last night.

My strat was to sticky target the first 3 adds assign a DPS to each. The tank on Shaffar. It worked pretty well. I got the adds down quick. DPSed Shaffar. When a beacon spawned I used TAB to switch targets for everyone and killed it asap. Somewhere down the line a TAB screwed up and a beacon got away from me. I think I got Shaffar down to 20-30%.

Was a bit too hectic and I might have had mana issues as well. This was with everyone at 66. I am going to setup a macro to specifically target beacons as suggested a few posts back and give it another go. Once I have the beacons under control I can start paying attention to other things like healer/dps mana and dps output on Shaffar.

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AOE: I don't think AOEs are an option. The beacons don't seem to have the normal aggro mechanics. They seem to be like the Curator spawns in Kara. I rarely get the beacons grouped properly for AOE.

Tanking all 3 as well as Shaffar is not an option as it is just too much incoming damage. Assigning 1 dps to each of the beacons at the start seems the best approach for me and I seem to get through the initial pull muich better now. Mostly focusing on getting the subsequent beacons down and getting Shaffar down now.

Just a quick note about the nexus stalkers.

I used to hate these guys as a tank also, but then I remembered gouge can only be used while you're facing your target. I'd start the fight with shielding slamming one, and sundering the extras and just hope i didn't get gouged before i built a little bit of threat. Then i'd turn around. It takes a lot of healing, and they have to die fast, but it' s something i've done before in the past. Same with moroes in kara. When the fight gets a bit complex, (like my off tank died) then i'll turn around until they can get him bat res'd.

[edit] Oh, i think when you're dealing with a mob that gouges, you if shield block is up you won't get gouged. Won't help too much against nexus stalkers, but for a single target like moroes you can turn around and shield block, then face him to get a few shots in before turning back around. Not sure how a paladins blocking skills work, but this might be possible when you use the holyshield (?).

Hey that's not a bad idea Nixi, and with consecrate on a Pally you don't have to be facing them to get aggro. Of course I've always thought of tanking with you back to a mob being about like picking up the soap in prison but I guess it has it's place.

Shaffar DOWN! Finally...

All lvl 66.

I made the following macro for my 3 dps:

Code:

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/target focus
/stopmacro [target=focus, exists, nodead]
/target Ethereal Beacon
/stopmacro [exists, nodead]
/assist party1

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Initially I focused them on a beacon each so hitting the macro glues them to their focus for now. When their focus is dead the macro will target a beacon if it can find one and stop. Finally it will assist the tank. I am using AHK so I automatically trigger this macro with my DPS macros.

So I pull with the pally and start the DPS immediately, each DPS on their focused beacon. Once the beacons are down the DPS switch to Shaffar and when a beacon spawns they switch to the beacon and DPS it down. It seemed to work up to a point. I think I may have run out of mana on my DPS and the beacons stayed up long enough to change. Shaffar died with 2 of the changed beacons up. They were not doing much damage to my priest. I was able to heal through at least 1 of them beating on the priest and Prayer of Healing seemed to keep everyone up easily enough.

It was a bit tense. I was screaming KILL IT! KILL IT! and mashing DPS button like mad in the end and was extremely pleased when the bastard went down. Gave the hunter a funky new ring.

With four shammies, the fight becomes completely trivial. Almost all the damage in the fight comes from direct-damage spells that can be absorbed by grounding totems. If you spam grounding totems whenever they're off cooldown, the only damage you'll ever take is ~900 from his frost nova occasionally, and ~400 from his sissy melee.

I went back to Mana Tombs at 69 and it is pretty trivial now. I also played some more with my Shaffar targeting macros, discovered a flaw and fixed it. Shaffar was so easy this time around it was comical.

So...

This was my initial macro:

Code:

---

/target focus
/stopmacro [target=focus, exists, nodead]
/target Ethereal Beacon
/stopmacro [exists, nodead]
/assist party1

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The problem is with line 3 and 4. After each DPS killed its focus it would get to line 3 and target the Ethereal Beacon, but due to the targeting lag the /stopmacro on line 4 does not seem to work and the DPS ends up assisting the tank.

I came up with a new approach to deal with this:

Code:

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/stopmacro [target=focus, exists. nodead]
/assist party1
/targetenemy

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So each DPS focuses a beacon and the above is the assist macro that is triggered all the time.
The 1st line will "stick" the DPS to its focused target until it is dead.
The 2nd line will assist the tank which is permanently on Shaffar.
The 3rd line simulates a TAB target, so if there are any additional mobs (beacons) they will be targeted and the main target will only be DPSed when all other targets are dead.

I also noticed someone posted a macro very similiar to this recently, without the focus part, to use against any bosses with adds that need to be killed asap for instance the 1st boss in MT (yes, it works against totems!), Shaffar and a few others.

The escort was pretty trivial at 69 as well. I had problems dealing with 2x Nexus Terrors before but this time with Shadow Protection, a Fear Ward and a HoJ or two it was fairly easy. The last guy was actually an anti-climax.

I just ran tombs with my group (same composition as yours) at 65 a couple days ago. It was extremely rough. Reminded me of the first time I walked into Ramparts with level 40 gear. The first two bosses weren't too bad, but some of the trash and the last boss were sickening. Actually, I didn't ever have any particular problems on trash groups, it's just that those scavengers had a habit of killing my priest rather often. Sometimes I could recover, sometimes I couldn't, but I never wiped twice to a single trash pull.

For the first boss, I had both shadow aura and shadow protection up. (What's this? It doesn't stack? Well, I guess I won't do that again. :P ) I think I had reckoning up when he shelled once, and my tank bit it hard before I turned off attack. I was pretty good about not attacking after that, though.

I one-shot the second boss. No big deal. Keep the heals up, maybe even a prayer of healing or two, and he'll go down.

The third boss took many, many attempts. I had to actually go repair and come back and keep trying, but I finally got him down. :thumbsup: I used the "focus fire the beacons at the beginning" strategy that you laughed so hard about in your write-up. I'm not sure why it worked so much better for me. Maybe my tank has more health? I'm running close to 9000. Sadly, it's not "over 9000" yet. :thumbdown: Anyway, my problems during this fight didn't normally happen at the beginning. Most of the time, my healer would run out of mana at around 30 or 40%, then my tank would die, and the rest of the group quickly followed. This guy hits reeeeeeeally hard, and having all dps cease to kill the adds drug the fight out longer than it should have. Even when I got him down, I was tankless for the last 10 or 15%.

If you've read my other threads, you know how well Blizzard insists my hunter must be geared, for almost every boss I meet drops exclusively melee/hunter gear. Anyway, I was browsing through AtlasLoot before I stepped inside Mana Tombs and noticed a nice bow that drops from the Nexus-Prince. I took a long, hard look at it, compared it to my current crossbow (from slave pens, I think?), and said to myself, "Wow, I really do not want that bow. My hunter is fine. She does not need a new weapon. The bow is the last thing I want to get from this boss." Wouldn't you know it, I got the bow. :cursing:

On the bright side, my hunter tops the damage charts. :|

I had a really good run where I got Nexus to 20% a few times, all very messy. Still havn't killed him yet. I am 67. My priests ran out of mana at about 30% and I hadn't setup my new Shadowfiend Macros. :(

BTW those little things hit bloody hard and return almost a 3/4 mana bar to the priests, its fantastic.

After doing RoB I now have 40,000 pots so I've started using them all and I'm going to look into making one of the girls a alchemist simple for making pots.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by 'tommyg',index.php?page=Thread&postID=40988#post40 988

I used the "focus fire the beacons at the beginning" strategy that you laughed so hard about in your write-up. I'm not sure why it worked so much better for me. Maybe my tank has more health? I'm running close to 9000. Sadly, it's not "over 9000" yet. :thumbdown:

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My tank had 9K health back then as well I think, fully buffed and with warlock imp. Maybe I just got unlucky spikes. Running my tank in alone and getting aggro from Shaffar and all 3 beacons made my tank go down in seconds.

I can't believe I beat this guy on the first try at 65! Yay! :thumbsup: Horde capped the spirit tower after I killed him :( Oh well, got many more runs to go for rep...

Edit; ya, killed the prince many times, apparently he REALLY likes bows, that is what I got every time :rolleyes:

This was one of the smoothest instances for me running 5 x elem shaman - a combination of grounding totem, chain lightning and max dps worked well.