What is with these obnoxious boss fights and HOW do you do it?!

[genocyde]

I have not had much trouble with my PvP team interestingly enough: Druid tank, magex3, Priest. With this group I have cleared every heroic except Halls of Stone and Utgarde pinnacle. I have also acheived most of the heroic achievements, some of which are really quite hard.

The first boss in Utgarde keep was a joke at lvl for me. I had a full s3/s4 geared priest healer and my 3x mage and druid were less than 2days /played at 70 with horrid gear. I actually had a bad habit of letting my priest tank this boss in his full arena gear so that my druid could go cat form for the extra DPS which cause me problems in heroic where my priest exploded when I attempted this. I did not break the ice chains on this boss but just kept burning the boss with the occasional heal. On heroic this also was a bad Idea but given 3x mage, disc priest the aoe was perfect for killing the adds + chains at the same time. I suggest using your tank to kill the chains with cleave or swipe or similar while keeping all your dps on the boss.

The 2nd boss in this instance (the warrior/mage pair) were really annoying as I was under geared for dps and would often run out of mana on my healer before a successful kill. Utilizing my arcane mages Slow spells made this boss significantly easier. I also just burned the mage boss down while keeping every debuff imaginable on the warrior boss. I found out quickly on this boss that
/cast [target=focustargettarget] heal spell
was the worst possible healing macro on this boss because i kept the warrior targeted at all times because the mage has constant threat wipe that makes him pretty much untankable. Therefore I only ever healed my tank while the mage boss wreaked havoc on my entire team.

The 3rd boss was a joke. stand all your ranged just within casting range. Feral charged the boss and just regular DPS on the boss until the first death. Make sure you avoid the smashes and try not to get your casters killed by the shouts. After he gets his rez blow every cooldown you can think of on everyone and kill him quickly again avoiding smash/shout where appropriate. I found feral charge very useful here as I could run to max range during the casting portion of smash and just charge back after the hit avoiding all damage and keeping him from moving.

Oculus: I can't imagine many multiboxers have done this instance just out of spite of the final fight being vehicle based.
The mage boss in here does lots and lots of Aoe damage that is a HUGE pain for boxers. Admittedly I usually bring a warrior friend of mine to tank this boss so I can concentrate on getting my guys to safety for the various AOE. One of the AOE spells forces you to run a single member away and one forces you to group up beind a pillar. This fight is terribad for a boxer but if I can suggest anything it's work out a way to tank without your tank being the focus'd screen or stay away from this instance.

Final boss: Vehicle based drake fight. Most boxers will not want to fight this boss but, heres how I do it. (2x achievement on heroic with my strat)
5x emerald drake is the way to go here. get ready to do some serious multi tasking.
The pull: You are going to be running this guy around a huge circle. Pick your direction; position 4 of your guys about 15° around your circle from the puller but AHEAD of the puller. You might consider staggering your four toons in 5° increments around the circle, it'll make sense why in a minute.

Your are going to have to get this pull right to have a chance. Throw your poison dot that heals you (first spell) on the boss with your designated tanking toon. Turn on auto run heading towards your other toons. As you run into your other toons you are going to have to start the auto running the same circle as the tank. This is where it helps to stagger your party in 5° increments as it allows you to be kinda slow in starting the auto run path. You have to keep spamming your DoT spell on your tank this entire time. This spell is capable of shooting directly backwards so no need to face the boss ever.

As soon as you've got all 5 toons on an auto run and comfortable you can start broadcasting your DoT spell button on everyone on the boss. If you feel the need the 25k nuke spell lowers the bosses dmg output which is extremely low to begin with because of the kiting strategy. The only downside to this is you have to turn all 5 of your toons around this circle path one at a time as /follow probably won't do you any good on the vehicle drakes. This means tabbing between windows to turn your guys along the circle. Also, make sure your keeping the boss at the approximate elevation as he started as going low will evade bug him and I'm not sure about a max height but it seems to be easier a little higher.

Keep moving around the circle spamming your DoT. The adds will follow him in a giant pack. DO NOT LET THEM GET YOU. They will explode you with ease if they ever catch you. Just ignore them as long as they are at a safe distance.

Now, as soon as you've got this whole thing under control and you feel your going to down him he does his neat Phase shift ability. Floating orbs come out of the boss that will explode very painfully on anything too close after a short period. I recommend turning your whole group and run straight away from the boss but not too far that you reset him. Once his phase shift is over get your tank back on the circle path ASAP and pray you keep the rest of your group ahead of the adds. (It's possible to leave your group out of the circle for one rotation just for smoothness sake but I'll leave it to you to decide if you want to or create your own strat for this because the adds can mop the floor with you if you fail at this part.)

Rinse, repeat, profit?

G/L to anyone attempting this fight. I have the no ruby drake, no amber drake achievements from heroic difficulty on this boss on all 5 toons. I'll post if I figure out how to get the no emerald on a 5 box.

Interestingly enough my PvE team of druid, pally, hunter, mage, priest has been shelved due to guild preference for now, they want my PvP team :wacko: for raiding. I'll be bringing them up from 70 - 80 soon enough and i'll post how it goes

[unseen]

I think another thing to keep in mind also is how geared people's teams were when they started in wotlk.

My team wasn't even 70 yet,so when I got to 70 I was wearing almost completely quest greens and a few blues I'd grabbed along the way. I went into UK at 70 and was able to get past the trash to the first boss and kept wiping there. I went back at 72 with better gear and continued to wipe on the first boss (best attempt got the boss to 50%).

I enjoyed the nexus a lot more. I was able to do all the trash, and I could get to every boss, but all the bosses except Ormorok were a problem. The mage boss (grand magus telestra) and the huge energy boss (anomolus) gave me the most problems. With the mage boss I could reliably get them to 50%, but I'd get destroyed by the 3 mages that appear every single time. I was able to finally down this boss after everyone on my team died except one warlock around 9%, I then used the soulstone on my priest to keep healing my warlock, the priest died again and I kept healing him in spirit form and he was able to down the boss.

Anomolus took a long time to figure out how to kill. If I took things too slow my priest would run out of mana, but I couldn't try to burn the boss down too quick because I had to deal with the portals he was spawning. I've only downed this boss once also.

Ormorok the tree shaper is cake. Typical tank-and-spank and move your guys around a bit if needed. I have actually lucked out a few times on this guy and not had to move any of my characters other than my tank to dodge the spikes he makes shoot out of the ground.

I made a few attempts at the last boss before giving up on her. I'd already been in the instance for 3+ hours trying to get all the other bosses and was pretty worn out.

My team is warrior, 3 warlocks and a priest.

[puppychow]

Major props for doing Occulus solo! I can't even imagine doing that, haha!!

Instances in regular mode aren't horrible, if you are having problems wiping just go out and level a bit and when you come back it'll be easier. Violet Hold wiped the floor with me at 75 as did Halls of Lightning, when I went back at 80 they were cake.

Heroics are TOUGH. Like a giant leap above regular instances. Stuff that I 1-shotted in regular have me wiping non stop in heroics. The good news is as you gear up it DOES get easier -- I wiped 15+ times on the first boss in Utgarde Keep heroic last week and gave up, this week after some quest/rep upgrades I went back and 1-2 shotted every boss.

Do focus on wearing tabards and getting reps up, it will help a lot.

[blast3r]

Before commenting on how your 5x shammies wipe the floor with everything, bear in mind I run a mixed group (per my sig). Has anyone running a mixed group (more than 2 classes) been able to do the new content? I have stayed out of instances since trying Utgarde out of the gate (trash was dead simple... but I can't get the FIRST boss to even 50%). So, being 75 now I thought I'd pick up the xmas hat from the first boss in Nexus... especially since people were 2 manning it.

OMFG. It was almost like they put real thought into making a boss that would be as obnoxious as possible to multiboxers. Seriously.

So, what is everyone's thoughts on this boss... and am I the only one having issues?

hehe..i hear ya. that first boss (the mage, right?) was throwing my shamans all over the room. the first and second time i tried to kill her it destroyed my motivation a bit so i waited until like level 76. Just barely killed her while dropping totems from flying around the room 20 yards in the air.

[Moorea]

one thing to know about the mage boss in nexus is while you're flying around you can still cast ! (or at least my druid can still cast the instant casts I use for healing - first time I did that boss (in a normal pug, not mboxing) I didn't know and didn't do anything while flying and we wiped...

[Hachoo]

More importantly, if you have all ranged DPS (or any ranged DPS) you can put them OUTSIDE the room and not get thrown all over by the gravity well. They'll still go in the air but they won't move around, this way when they drop back down they'll all be facing the right direction and you wont have to turn or move them at all.

With my 4 shamans, I drop 4x healing stream during gravity wells to counteract the damage, works well.

[unseen]

More importantly, if you have all ranged DPS (or any ranged DPS) you can put them OUTSIDE the room and not get thrown all over by the gravity well. They'll still go in the air but they won't move around, this way when they drop back down they'll all be facing the right direction and you wont have to turn or move them at all.

With my 4 shamans, I drop 4x healing stream during gravity wells to counteract the damage, works well.

BEST TIP EVER. Thank you!

Part of me wonders if they will change this behavior at some point. I'll have to go back in there try this out.

[Ghallo]

More importantly, if you have all ranged DPS (or any ranged DPS) you can put them OUTSIDE the room and not get thrown all over by the gravity well. They'll still go in the air but they won't move around, this way when they drop back down they'll all be facing the right direction and you wont have to turn or move them at all.

With my 4 shamans, I drop 4x healing stream during gravity wells to counteract the damage, works well.

Perfect - that is the kind of information I was looking for, thanks! Sorry if I wasn't clear up above, this IS the boss I was talking about. Gravity well seems to have no greater purpose than to make M-Boxers hate Blizzard :P.



BTW, someone made a comment above about watching videos of non-boxers doing an instance. I gotta say that is a bit like watching Bolt running the 100m to learn how to run. I have a ton of limitations that non-boxers don't even care about. If it is a movement fight... 30-50% of my DPS/healing goes out the door while I worry about moving my toons into position

[Hachoo]

LOL I'm hardly the first person to post this. The first 2-3 guides posted here for the Nexus specifically mention this tactic. Also many other sites like thottbot, etc, list this as a tactic. I'm pretty sure blizzard isn't banning people for this :P Its just clever use of physics, its not like its exploiting an actual game bug for profit.

[Ghallo]

Yay! After about 10 wipes I finally got my winter hat!

The funny thing is, playing this fight over and over again made me really think about what was going on. The tips that really helped in the end: you can cast instant casts during Gravity well, and the 3 versions of her are fearable.

The most powerful spell in the game for this fight is Prayer of Mending. If you have a mixed group like I do... make sure to hit that during each gravity well... it is like free hp for everyone.

I tried the "out of the room" tactic many times (in fact this was my first 8 wipes). I can't think it is an "exploit" because in reality she is very hard to bring into range ... so you basically lose a chunk of your DPS. Once I gave up on that tactic it took only 2 more tries to get her down (though it did let me live long enough on the other tries to figure out what she was all about). On the attempt I downed her I was at 40% mana, and no big CD's used. My mages are frost, and my warlock is Demo/Dest - the Felguard worked really well as a source of DPS as well as a "cc" for one of the aspects while I feared 1 and DPS'd the other. Water Elementals are great on this boss because they are immune to her freeze spell ... they just keep cranking on the DPS.

Ok, so specifically what I did:

1. Park casters on top of eachother right in front of her at about 30 yards
2. Run tank to the one side of her, then AS and run in, hitting her with max threat - keep her facing AWAY from your party
3. Send in Felguard, unleash all DPS - don't look at health at this point, just max DPS and Tanking
4. Freeze: Don't worry about this too much... it is pretty short. Usually I just started my priest using Prayer of Healing for a nice big AoE heal ... but PoM seemed better in nearly every situation (so save your mana for that).
5. First gravity well: Make sure all DoTs are up, Use Ice Lance on Mages, AS on Pally if it is up and hit Prayer of Mending like your life depends on it. Really. (Note: Sometimes the Gravity Well will bounce your tank into Hammer/Judge range ... if it does happen, every little bit helps.
6. Hit Follow as soon as you stop bouncing - spend a second getting aggro and start DPS'ing again. If you have an "outlyer" grab them while the other's are casting and get them on follow if you can. Don't worry too much about facing ... some will DPS and some will not. Gravity well will mess it all up in 4 more seconds anyway :P
7. Don't worry about going crazy on DPS during this part, just make sure to keep the damage coming in - this boss has low HP and you'll realize that just 1 or 2 people hitting her will do the damage you need.
8. Wash/Rinse/Repeat until she splits.
9. On split, hit consecrate, AS (hope it hits all 3) and send the Felguard at the first one you see. Fear and DoT the next one, and DPS the last. Use PoM here too ... that will help keep the Felguard up. Eventually I had to go chase down the feared one ... these guys don't have much HP.
10. Once she re-forms - make sure your team is together and your tank has her faced away. Wash rinse repeat until she dies.

Now, I know most people don't have the same party composition I do, but I thought I'd put up a non-Shaman tactic I'll post it on the Wiki after I get some sleep.