Cathedral of Eternal Night

So I haven't managed to beat any bosses yet w/ a hunter + heals team. The first boss, Agronox, casts Timber Smash (http://www.wowhead.com/spell=235751/timber-smash) on a random party member and one shots them. I don't think he's happy w/ a pet tank. Possibly a bug or maybe by design. At least for the time being it's going to be a wall unless we are able to cheese him with maybe the death prevention trink + brez.

Trash felt really rough. My team is only 870ish though, so some of you might have a better time.

I don't think the mechanics will favour an all tank team either with the Fulminating lashers, but I'll be giving it a try with my pallies too.

I did it with 5x prot Paladins on Heroic without too much trouble. Deaths happened due to being too greedy on trash pulls or not knowing mechanics. I'm sure I could clear it on Mythic. Those of you with higher ilvl Paladins will probably breeze through it.

First boss, I ended with one Pally left. I wasn't paying enough attention to the Lashers and they probably caused all of the deaths.

Second boss wasn't too bad. Read the journal and memorize his three most painful abilities. Avoid them and you'll be fine.

Third boss can get interesting. Keep away from the Aegis unless he casts Chaotic Energy. Keep the boss pointed away from the Aegis. There are a ton of adds but I ignored them and let AOE take care of them. Successful Mythic attempts will probably require clearing some of them out.

Fourth and final boss isn't mechanically friendly to a melee party, but Paladins are awesome, so it can be done. Phase one, stay out of the stuff on the floor. Phase two is meant to have someone protect Illidan in the center of the room while dps deals with the guys that spawn around the outside. If Illidan gets hit by an orb, he gets interrupted from bringing the boss back, but will slowly get there. I tried to just burn down the spawns around the outside, but died due to the stacking debuff before Illidan finished. Second attempt I kept the party in the middle and protected Illidan with the Aegis as required. The Paladin's ranged abilities were enough to kill enough adds to keep the orbs manageable. I feel like I was slowly falling behind, so I don't know if that strategy would work on Mythic, at least at my item level.

Good luck to anyone trying Mythic!

Me and Void did Mythic on full Hunters. Was surprised by how difficult it was for just being mythic but they did raise the difficulty of mythic in general.

1st boss, always seems to cast the instant kill ability on my main so I use turtle on just that one prior to it hitting. For the second cast I pop turtle on the remaining hunters, you can see from his target of target who its going on but it's too quick for reflexes.
Throw down some slow and freeze traps for the lashers that pop out and stay mobile as some of them explode. Going full DPS mode and popping lust was able to drop him before it got out of hand.

2nd boss, same as Agent mentioned, for hunters move the one about to get charged out of the way and pop a turtle.

3rd boss, I worked down the elemental adds that were doing some kind of mega cast. I didn't let them get it off to see what happened but can only assume it would be bad. Also used as much burst as possible. Tried to trap the melee adds while focusing on the boss. They seemed to come out when boss was sub 25% for me. (though it is based off time not health) it was just more advantageous to burn the boss down.

4th boss, ran into some issues when the fight shifts to illidan - I read it was bugged potentially for some. Either way, spread out your characters and go full dps. I popped a potion, lusted and got him down before phase 1 ended.
I was getting upgrades on a lot of these bosses so the difficulty vs reward is definitely there.


Void did down them all before me!! but his advice to me was burn them all, and that's what worked. Because that's 5 hunters for you :)

That's great news from both of you. I'll give it another try w/ my hunters. Didn't even occur to me to use the turtle CD...

Ahhh man, I have decisions to make. Should I go back to my 880 iLvl paladin team or keep leveling my 800 iLvl hunter team.

Its sounding like the tank team is best at first but once the gear starts coming in the hunter team will start outperforming. Just like prior to patch.

Just did a MAW+0 w/ my hunters and it wasn't a complete roflstomp like usual. So Mythics are definitely harder now, and it wasn't just a health & damage boost, it's also little mechanics you wouldn't normally see until M+5ish.

I'm going to run it with my pallies and see how it feels. I'll let ya know.

I'm not convinced hunters have ever been better than prot pallies for progression... they're just more enjoyable for farm because they drop everything so fast and can cheese a lot of common mechanics (melee range AoE for example).

Just ran it on my Pallies (1 x prot, 4 x ret), both +0 and +2. It went smoother and a bit faster than on my hunters IMO, but not by much.

Both definitely have their benefits. I also like the Paladins as well and am hopeful they can come back into the equation. Being able to do raids though has been awesome.
Interested to hear more on the 1 prot 4x ret because that was my original configuration. I just didn't like the high burst then low sustained.

I tried on mythic+0 on my 5x pali tank team (880+) and made it to the last boss, but couldn't get him down. I switched to heroic and ran through roflstomping everything, pulling up the the bosses even.

I have read reports where they feel Cathedral is way overtuned, imagine it'll get toned down soon.

As a side note, best way to gear up currently in Mythics. Did +3's last night and was getting some 895 ilvl gear on titan forging, insane for the difficulty.

Done it up to +6 on my team of Prot Paladin/Holy Priest/ BM x3 (missing the timer considerably).

Its by far the hardest dungeon at the moment, no doubt. Have NO INTEREST in doing it at the moment if there are any affixes that modify bosses; that will make it a nightmare..

Notes:

Agronox: In all honesty, don't have the strategy for this guy down yet, suspect I'd struggle against him on higher levels. My current strategy is basically to run around like a headless chicken while the adds are up and use a macro to target the adds down. He's completely fine, other than the add transition

Thrashbite: Not a problem. I position my ranged near a bookcase, tank him away from them. When he does his smash, I run towards the ranged. When he gazes someone, I run everybody behind the bookcase. After the collision, I run AWAY from the boss asap because one of the books is about to put a 90% move speed debuff on the team, and the boss does the AoE ground slam immediately after he is unstunned from the bookcase. Nice boss to multibox: punishes you if you screw up but completely smooth if you don't.

Domatrax: First time I took him down, I didn't use DBM. Second time, I did use DBM and I found knowing the timings of the slams made this much easier. My group of ranged chill out near the Aegis, but not in it. Point the boss away when he does the slam, then immediately after got the group to follow me as I run around and kill the portal adds. Repeat, then pull the entire team into the aegis for the Chaotic Energy.

The only tricky bit is the second portal phase; not sure I've quite got my management for this down. This is where I pop potions, any spare cooldowns and survivabilty stuff. I grab aggro on the first wave of Shivarra that come through, tell my followers to stop, and focus down the portal summoners. I have a target exact macro for the portal dudes in my Gnomish Sequencer macro for my DPSers. Once the portals are down, the fight is effectively over.
; dodge slams, rinse repeat.

Mephistroth: Felt similar in difficulty to Vizadu'um in Karazhan to me; Took me 15 or so pulls to get him down, but once I'd got the strategy down, it was fine from then on. Very healing intensive fight. I line up all my ranged in a vertical line along the lefthand wall, then tank the boss opposite the door, facing the wall. The ranged need to be spread enough not to take splash damage from the shadow AoE attack. When the pillars trigger, I get all my ranged to strafe right until they're on the right hand side, and move the boss across that way as well. Sometimes he does the pillars again before phase two, sometimes he doesn't; I assume he's got a HP% trigger to go into P2 as well as a time trigger? Pretty cool when he doesn't do it again, anyway. If they do trigger, I often use my full set of immunities to soak it (Divine Shield/ Aspect of Turtle/ Blessing of Spellwarding on the priest).

I had to tweak my IS boxer hotkey's for the next bit: I made one that basically removes my tanks from the standard hotkey. I then use a target exact hotkey for the Mephistroth shadows in my GS attack hotkey for my DPS. I put everyone on follow and trigger the Aegis. What then basically happens is that the DPS autolock onto the shadows as they spawn and they kill them quickly enough so they only let off one blast. I charge the tank into it with the Aegis, being careful to try not to have any of the followers in the green fel-fire. When I execute it right, it works oh so smoothly.

The big strain here is that the healer has to pump out a lot of healing whilst being mobile; I'm glad I switched to a holy priest in the weeks running up to the patch, I'm not sure I would have managed it on my old holy paladin. A druid healer probably does pretty well here too; tranquility is presumably awesome.

Once he transitions back, its a case of getting back into a spread formation and repeating phase one. Usually the repeated phase is quite short because I get him to well under 50%.

Overall, a great dungeon, though seems to be tuned way higher than the other ones. Even taking into account that I'm way more experienced on the other dungeons, this does feel way harder and way more punishing than any other dungeon. The last three fights are my favorite kind to multibox; completely do-able, but requiring me to execute perfectly. In much the same way that I now one shot Vizadu'um, where he took 20 odd pulls to take down originally, I suspect I'll gradually get better and better at this one too, and the timer will get more and more reasonable.

I reckon having Prydaz would be a MASSIVE help here as well; I'll probably be trying to target it at the Kadala-guy with my DPS.

Really!!!

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