WotLK heroics and tactics compilation thread

[Kaynin]

Making this thread for all you boxers to use, just a thread that points to all the others so to speak, since there are a ton of diff combinations and a ton of diff tactics, I thought it would be best to keep a list for much easier use. I'll keep updating the top post with links to peoples strategies. Please use the following template for clarity:

Note: This is for heroic instances and raid(normal and heroic) instances only.

Instance: <Name>
Box: <your box set up> (ex. "Prot Paladin, 4x Ele shaman")
Gear level: <pre-heroic blues/greens(70 epics count as these), heroic blues/epics, heroic epics or full epic>
Difficulty: <smooth(cakewalk)/easy(some deaths, no wipes)/normal(some wipes)/hard(learning curve+wiping fests)/Problematic(Serious issues with certain bosses and multiboxing)
Guide: <easy to read and not too long walkthrough of the instances, preferably including how to handle trash mobs, specifically if they are problematic. And a rundown per boss. Keep to the point of the instance and don't start chit chatting too much about unrelated stuff!>

<Below post possible unrelated stuff or just some remarks!>

Utgarde Keep
4x elemental shaman [Kaynin]

The Nexus
General Ranged DPS tactics that make things easier[Ss2]

Azjol-Nerub
4x elemental shaman [Kaynin]

Ahn'Kahet: The Old Kingdom
Protection Pally, 3 frost mages, 1 resto druid 5 box [Pinotnoir]

Drak'Tharon Keep
Protection Pally, 3 arcane mages, 1 disc/holy priest 5 box [Zha]

The Violet Hold
4x elemental shaman, info on three bosses [Kaynin]

Gundrak
4x elemental shaman [Ellay]
Protection Pally, x3 Arcane Mages, x1 Disc/Holy Priest 5 box [Zha]

Ulduar: Halls of Stone

Utgarde Pinnacle
3x elemental shaman + 1x resto shaman + prot paladin 5-box [Mrmcgee21]

Ulduar: Halls of Lightning
Protecting Pally, x3 Arcane Mages, x1 Disc/Holy Priest 5 box [Zha]

The Oculus
DK + 4x elemental shaman [Alemi]

(Normal) 4x elemental shaman, warrior tank [Tdog] Boss 1, Boss 2

The Culling of Stratholme
4x elemental shaman [Kaynin]

Naxxramas (normal)
4x elemental shaman, Spiderwing [Kaynin]
4x elemental shaman, Death Knight Wing, Plague Wing and Abomination Wing [Ellay]

Naxxramas (heroic)

The Eye of Eternity (normal)

The Eye of Eternity (heroic)

The Obsidian Sanctum (normal)
4x elemental shaman [Kaynin]

The Obsidian Sanctum (heroic)

Vault of Archavon (normal)
4x elemental shaman [Kaynin]

Vault of Archavon (heroic)

[Kaynin]

Instance: Utgarde Keep
Box: 4x Elemental shaman (Individual warrior tank)
Gear level: Pre-heroic blues/70 epics, tank with level 80 blues.
Difficulty: easy
Guide:
Trash till first boss:
They are all fairly easy apart from the drakes, they did not hit hard on the tank and I did not need to use hex for this part either. We just steamrolled and tank+spank our way through. On the drakes I had to keep healing the warrior a lot, even did some overhealing, as at times they seemed to ravage the tank. Also you must make sure you aren't anywhere near the drakes yourself, only the tank in its range. While keeping the health on the tank up. Doing this, it is quite doable, my tank died once but the drake died shortly after that.

Prince Keleseth:
This boss will spawn adds from the door opening on the right side of the room. On the pull, I position myself quickly on the left side of the room while having the warrior tank him between me and the door where the adds spawn. Grounding Totems seem to have no effect on his shadowbolts so keep your tank and everyone up as high as possible as he can sometimes do quite a lot of burst dps, that boss. I popped four fire elementals early on, which seemed to handle the adds greatly. Nuking the boss with lightning bolts only, in my current gear I run oom quite fast and in the end lb spam seems most mana conservative. I was prepared to drop a mana potion as well, but we got him down with me on 10% mana left.

Trash leading up to second boss:
This is all easy trash, I tend to kill casters first, specifically the ones that throw shields on people. But often switch dps. If there are wolves I instagib the wolves first. The non elite overseer packs are easily handled with 4x Thunderstorm and 4x Fire Nova Totems. On packs with four mobs I pulled with a single hex, as my tank was sufficient in tanking three, I did not bother with more then one hex.

Skarvald & Dalron
This fight is a bit tricky. There is a lot of hp to burst down. However grounding totems to their job like a charm. They nearly negate all of the caster boss' dps if you drop them the instant the cooldowns are ready again. I found it was easier to just nuke the caster first, then switch to the melee boss. Also, I stayed at max range. The melee bosss does charge then, but this wasn't a problem for me. Grounding totem spam, Lightning Bolt dps and Lesser Healing Wave for healing. I must add though that I needed to use a Runic Mana Potion this fight as I ran out of mana when the melee boss was on 30%

Trash leading to End boss:
The only extra thing here is the drakerider. Kill the rider on top first, then the drake itself. Seemed to be best.

Ingvar the Plunderer:
This boss is quite hard, but you can avoid a lot of his dps. I however had a tank with me who couldn't see the boss' casting bar. So I wiped here the first time, and nearly the second time too. But here's the tactic that should make it easy with a tank. When he uses Smash in phase one, or Dark Smash in phase two, the tank should immidiatly run through the boss to behind the boss to avoid this skill. Also when he does Sundering Roar, stop casting. I just tend to jump myself. If you do those two things right, it's fairly tank and spank and pretty easy. In my case the warrior died in phase two due to Dark Smash however, I started nuking like mad, and got the boss down just before dying on all four myself. Had to ankh to loot. But the tank shouldn't have died there to be honest.

[Ellay]

Looks good, I'll add to it what I can when I get home

[mrmcgee21]

I'm trying to use a tank for the first time running these heroics and I can't seem to make it work with 4 elementals. How do you heal? Do you have one guy dedicated to healing at all times, or do you just stop dps and top the tank off with all 4? I'm currently pondering speccing one to resto. My friend tanking only has about 19k hp though, maybe thats why?

Thanks for the info though.

[Kaynin]

I basicly just dps with all, and throw 4x lesser healing waves to top the tank when he gets too low. Chain heal to heal myself if I got the time. If the fight is very bursty, I have some extra macro's 'just in case' so two of my shamans heal the tank while my main and one other heal the mains target. But in all honesty, I rarely use those. And can manage everything with a single healing button jsut fine. Key is to target and retarget at the start of casts, so you don't loose targeting time. So when a tank needs a heal, and you just cast lb, immidiatly target tank and then heal, and when heal is casting, well, I got /targetlastenemy in my dps macro's so no problem there. my heal button if an enemy targeted also goes on the target of that target, so on bossfights who dont drop target (some do to use certain skills, some don't) I dont have to retarget at all, at most to heal myself.

Chain heal, unless blooslusted, is a slow cast time and you shouldn't use it when its too late. Healing tank always get priority, but just keep yourself up high, so when things go rough, you can last a lil longer, when you're getting aoe, heal the tank then chain heal yourself or just spamheal for a few secs while clickly rotating through targets which are lowest, this works well too in tight situations.

Anyhow, most if not all fights will have ways to avoid a lot of dps on you as a caster, so you should ofcourse prioritise on working on that.

I'd say having one resto will allow you do last longer in fights, more mana regen, prolly better gear, but at the same time you loose a lot of dps if you put one on inactive duty, and there are a lot of fights that also get easier with more dps. So it's fight dependand, but haing them all four on dps duty works for me, and until I find an encounter I need a solo healer for, I'll start considering adapting for those specific fights then. I have not encountered any yet however.

[Kaynin]

Instance: Violet Hold
Box: 4x Ele shaman + individual deathknight
Gear level: blues/70 epics, DK in greens/blues pre-heroic
Difficulty: Problematic, one boss in particular.
Guide:

I only managed to encounter two bosses in there.

Lava Hound (Corehound boss) Not too easy, but very doable.

Grounding Totem farm is essential here, it will swallow a lot of his annoying fires. It is however a very mana intensive fight. I killed this boss on my third try by dropping groundings, then moving away from them. I kept watching everytime he threw a ball of fire, if they went to grounding totem farm I knew I was safe, if it was headed for me, I instantly had to move before the ball landed. Spreading out might be an option, but due to the fact you can see the ball coming before it hits I would suggest to stick together and act quickly. The dk I had with me got seriously bursted a few times and I had major trouble keeping him up, had to drop earth elementals near the end and nuke the last bit swallowing a mana potion. With a good geared tank it might be a lot easier, but it seriously wasn't with this tank.

The Ethereal boss (Problematic boss)
This boss summons unkillable adds that need to be avoided at all costs, at the same time you have to stick close to the boss with all chars and keep moving around a lot.
I tried about 5 times, I did not kill him. First three times we just took wrong routes, we got locked inbetween to adds, had to run too far from boss, got teleported and owned, as the adds will be teleported on you as well. The last few tries were close, but quite frankly, my tank was jsut too hard to heal, I had to waste way too much time on healing and did not have much time to dps at all. This resulted in us calling it, and decided to gear up a bit more for this heroic first.

Ekerem, the birdy man with two adds, easy if done right
Don't kill the adds, just kill the boss and then the adds. If you kill the adds the boss goes enrage and ravages your tank. Whilest we found a tank is easily able to tank all three, and without the boss enraging, it's an easy fight. Tank and spank, nothing to it. Easiest I encountered so far in Violet.

[blbjtb]

/Tagged!

[mrmcgee21]

Well given my tank is kind of squishy I went ahead and spec'd one to resto, seems to have made things much, much more smooth and reliable to me. I would highly suggest to anyone having trouble with heroics, run the normals a few times it helps so much. Just learning where the pulls are, what the boss's main abilitys are and getting a general strat together on the normal helped me a lot. Anyways, we went and ran Heroic Utguarde Pinnacle so I'll share some infos on that one



Utgarde Pinnacle -- 1 prot pal 19.6k hp, under D cap lol ..., 3 elemental shammies 1200ish sp, 1 resto shammie same gear ( no resto gear yet )

- Svala Sorrowgrave - Pretty easy boss here, open up with heavy dps, lust elementals what have you. She gives you the biggest window to dps at the start, after about 30 sec she will sac one person on her podium and fly above said podium doing no damage but is still targetable/dmgable, it does no damage but you will see a sword slowly falling toward that player as a timer basically, if the sword reaches the player, RIP. You kill 3 adds around said player which frees them(25k each), you get a 5-10 sec break at this point before Svala comes back down she is targatable above the podium though so I highly suggest you pick her up asap and burn some extra dps. Just repeat this process until she dies, you will notice she spreads a bit of damage around with some random fire balls coming from the fire cauldrons in the back of the room, this is mostly neglabible was easy for me to just heal through.

Gortok Palehoof -- Somewhat complicated boss, you fight 4 mini boss's followed by the main boss in the rear of the hall 1 at a time. Each boss has special abilities but I'm just going to note the important ones and how to counter them. Also note you get a brief time out of combat between each boss to drink here. Think lass boss of Arcatraz and this is about the same, but a bit easier imo. Also its random which boss's come first. 3 things to note on the mini boss's --1) The rhino does a stomp for about 9k dmg + 2 sec stun within 25~ yds of himself, make sure you tank him away from the group obviously 2) The Gnoll hits like a mack truck, be ready to heal your tank like theres no tommorrow 3) The worm does a frontal cone AOE spit, have poison cleansing totems down to cure it quickly, be ready to chain heal because it will randomly target a person and its a wide cone, spreading out doesnt help much because your tanks most likely far in front of you from tanking the rhino ( or at least to be ready to tank the rhino ). The Furbolg is a joke hits moderately hard but nothing else, might have an aggro dump but he is tauntable. Gortok himself isn't to bad if you reach him with all 5 up and a good amount of mana + cooldowns. He doesn't hit to hard, but he will impale a random member of the group, its a massive dot for about 4k a tick. Be ready to heal the impaled player quickly ( note this is not a graphical impale, the ability is jsut called impale ). He also does a Roar effect that is like a 2k dmg aoe, nothing major easy to out heal. Just heal the impaled target, keep your tank up and its ezmode from here.

Skadi the Ruthless -- The boss himself is pretty easy, again have poison cleansing totems down because he throws a poison spear at a random player and you need to cure it (a bout 4k a tick). He also does a whirlwind and dumps aggro but is tauntable so just have your tank tank him away from your team and be ready to taunt him when he whirlwinds ( tank stays in the whirlwind ). The tricky part here is the gauntlet event leading up to this boss. You come down a long gauntlet full of elite mobs, they dont have much hp though 25k each. Its very similar to the Shattered Halls event. Just move fast and time the 2 adds that come about once every 30 sec well, takes a bit of rythem to progress down it. You can get out of combat to drink so dont panic and go to fast. The only TRICK here is the boss flying above you is on a drake, he will circle around and fly infront of some harpoons ( used once you clear the balcony to knock him off his mount ) once he flys past the harpoons his drake circles down and lights up oneside of the balcony with foam death basically, 2k/sec aura that you have to get out of quickly. You get an emote telling you the drake is about to fly over so watch for it, you can tell which side the drake will foam before he does it and you have to move preemptively. Getting caught in the foam is likely a wipe it does a truckload of damage. Just watch for the drakes foam aura, and move steadily until you reach the harpoon guns, using the harpoon guns is simple, I had my tank do it so i could focus on the adds and getting totems ready for the boss ( poison cleansing is huge on the boss, must have it ready ).

King Ymiron -- Same as on normal, he goes to each boat and picks up a random ability every 20% of his life. He will stun your party when he goes to the boat to ask for the blessing ( y ou can pvp trinket out of it to get xtra dps in ). Only 2 boats where an issue for us, our dps was so high that none of the boats effects remained up for long. The boat on the back right hand side (2nd boat) will do a rather painful AOE shadow effect based around a random player, I just stayed stacked and chain healed after each one, chain heal offset the dmg pretty well. The front left boat ( last boat ) will do something that seemed like the mushrooms in underbog, some small orbs move around the room slowly and wtf own anyone near them. What I suggest is, have a pvp trinket, trinket the stun when he goes to the last boat ( 20% hp ) and lust, burn him down at this point and make life easy. WE didnt do that, but we should have, avoiding the orbs is pretty easy, they do move very slowly but running and healing the tank is a bit tricky. This boss hits about like the 2nd boss, I think the 3rd boat gives him a bit of a melee buff but again he dies so fast he hardly keeps any of the boat's blessings long enough to notice.

[Kaynin]

Instance: Culling of Stratholme
Box: 4x elemental shaman + individual druid tank
Gear level: <pre-heroic blues/70 epics, Druid tank in mixed wotlk blues
Difficulty: Normal, very doable. First time run, not done on normal, wiped 6/7 times on the dragonkin part to come up with a tactic that worked but otherwise flawless.
Guide:
first Trash, 5 so called waves of undead elites. I killed the ghouls first, the ghoulds did a lot of dps on the tank. The druid also always entangled the big ones if they were present. This helped alot too. But mobs are quickly burnt down. Kill one target asap, pref a ghoul and the rest should be easy. On the larger pack with non elite casters, drop groundings and mix in chain lightnings, they die rapidly.

Meathook:
Well, he's basicly tank and spank. Groundings and cure disease totem or dispells are prolly needed here, or will make things a lot easier. Bit overall he doesn't do much dps. Could easily grind him down.

<More of the same trash>

Salramm the Fleshcrafter
He too is seriously easy, compared to the trash. Grounding totems seemed to help, killing his ghouls is a must too, since the corpse explosion for 6k otherwise, but my druid picked them up, I just mixed in chain lightnings, was enough to kill them. Little damage on the tank. Easy fight. Note this was our first ever CoS, Straight to heroic, we slacked a bit figuring out what to do and didn't make timed. Altho I'm positive Ill have that next go too.

Now comes the hard part!

Drake Trash making druid mash!

Ok, you done the first two bosses and you have to meet Arthas at a house further up, when you talk to him there, you will get a total of 4 spawns with drakes and then a boss. There is little time between the trash, you will get some time to rest before the boss however. The first pack of trash is easy. I just tend to kill the caster mob, then the hunter. Always leave those other warrior like mobs for last, they can put up a shield and really, you dont want to waste a second of dps on these trash. So kill hunters and the casters first.
Well, the second is already troublesome. Two casters, one hunter, one warrior drake. Now, On this pack, the druid picks up the two casters whilest I have grounding totems put down and I nuke the hunter down quickly. He will taunt the hunter when one of my chars gets hit. you might want to drop an earth elemental or two before the drakes spawn if you have trouble here. Maybe pop a bloodlust, but I suggest you keep them till later.
The third pack of dragonkin is somewhat easier. Arthas walks through a hallway and you get ambushed by four drakes, two on either side. What we did is wait a lil bit back where the two drakes behind spawn. We massacred those two asap and then quickly went to the two arthas was tanking. This is however risky, Arthas cant take much of a beating. But I found that tanking three for the druid tank with me was too much.
The fourth spawn is imo the hardest. If you get to this point, you are likely to be low on mana, likely have to down a mana pot. But the spawns come from forward. I did this pack by nuking one caster dragonkin and a hunter next, while I was on the second target I dropped two earth elementals just in case.

Chrono-Lord Epoch
This boss is the hardest boss in the instance. In my opinion however, if you could do the dragonkins leading up to it, you can do him too. He seems to sometimes go berserk on the tank, or he starts whirlwinding and moving towards you. Basicly stay at max range. keep the tank topped as much as possible but keep dps up, its a fight that eats mana, so dont want it to last too long.

Trash to last boss. Well, this is an easy part, if you keep your speed up. Have your tank pull elite after while you massacer stuff, halfway through arthas allows you a moments rest. Make sure you kill all ghouls and drink up whenever possible. But try to keep a pace and it will be easy. Obviously dont go too fast as you dont want to be overwhelmed either. Rotating thunderstorms seems a good way to deal with all the zombies.

Mal'Ganis
Is a PUSH over. I expected a hard fight, but what I got was free loot. I caught on quickly, you need to spread out for this boss, your characters about 10-15 yards apart. He doesn't do much damage so healing shouldn't be a problem. As long as you are spread. Grounding totems are essential. But basicly, you cant go wrong here. Very easy boss. Easiest in the entire instance. If you don't have grounding totems, whenever the boss changes his target, expect7-8k shadow damage on that target after 3 seconds. Because it is so predictable, you should be able to do this fine with a group without shamans too.

[ss2]

nexus advice

if your whole group gives the tree boss a hug, no one will have to worry about being violated by spikes



next, the partially visible wall will stop your ranged personnel (your tank has to be in the "arena") from being moved around during the gravity toss thing
but you can't attack her from where she is, which means your tank will have to pull her closer to the entrance by attacking her and then running backwards until she's close enough for the ranged to hit her, then run back in and tank her so she doesn't run too far and reset. You have to pull her closer again when she respawns after splitting.


in heroic there is an optional boss down the stairs to the right of her. He comes with two clerics that you should kill first, but then he's effectively tank, spank and remember the tremor totem.