Wotlk - Ulduar - Halls of Lightning (HoL) - Ionar and Loken strat

[Psych]

As it was the double daily for me yesterday, I figured I'd give heroic HoL a try on my 5 druid group (one resto, one bear, 3 moonkin). No issues anywhere up until Ionar (with the exception of the Slag guys which are immune to nature damage, forcing me to either swipe them to death or use starfire...ugh, waste of mana!).

Ionar - initial attempt:

I'd done him on Normal before, and I could heal through everything fine, I was treating it as if I was solo and doing the "run back down the stairs" thing, but would get hit by the ball lightning each time we came back up the choke point on the stairs. In Heroic, however, this caused a wipe almost immediately. Wasn't able to move the guys backwards fast enough, nor would I have been able to get them back into position fast enough had I lasted past the first disperse.

Ionar - second (and successful) attempt:

Now, I have my arrow keys set to control only my slave toons, where W,A,S,D,Q,E control only my tank (main). What I did, was kill the group of guys on the second balcony up, after the first little steps leading to Ionar. Then, arranged my team in a spread fashion, in a line, facing directly up the stairs. They were spread about 5 yards apart, directly in a line so they were all facing Ionar.

Pulled him, did the usual fighting and such, when he throws the balls out or does any aoe damage to a someone, it only affected them or maybe one other guy. When he dispersed, I immediately strafed left with my guys and manually moved with my main. I kept straffing left and moving with the group until the far left guy was almost touching the balcony. Wild Growth'ing as much as I could while moving just to ensure they're topped up. When the sparks came in, the right toon took a few hundred damage from a hit or two, nothing major. Strafe right with slaves, move right with main, get back into position, roughly.

Rinse and repeat!

After such a horrible death on the first attempt this was really nice to nail so easily on the 2nd.

Loken:

I use a very similar strategy for Loken, strafe out as a group the second I see his Nova, super easy. Bunch up on Loken, so no major aoe damage happens, and which means this works fine for melee as well (just don't bother getting behind him, that'd be too complicated for this strategy). Nova starts casting, strafe right with the group and your main, nova goes off, stay put. Loken will come to you, I just move over a bit closer to him when he's settled in for the next beating. Strafe the opposite direction on the next nova, rinse and repeat.

My healer doesn't have the power to heal through the nova otherwise, not boxed at least, so this was good stuff.

Maybe it's been said before but just incase, there ya go, maybe it'll help someone

[Bigfish]

Real men take Lightning Nova to the face and ask for more. And Tranquility is your friend.

j/k, but seriously, grats on beating it. Ionar beat me silly before I got him down.

[Psych]

I guess with a few druids you could really chain up tranquilities back to back, one for each nova...my toons have so little hp though, think one nova would finish them off

[warbringer]

I nowadays just spam the DPS button on Loken and eat one lightning nova (which I survive with about 25% health on each toon) and then he keels over. For those of you with a shaman/hunter, a nature resistance totem/aura does miracles here.

[Niley]

but he dies in like 10s before any nova :P

[Fuzzyboy]

For Ionar I just stand still (though spread) while he's dispersed and heal through it. Don't attack, don't move, just heal :-) Once he returns, resume DPS'ing. When done that way he's really really easy.

For Loken just bunch up and DPS. Be full health when he Nova's and chuck AE heals right after (if you have to, pre cast the AE so it hits right after Nova) while continuing to DPS.

[Otlecs]

I always use the balcony at Ionar now. Spread my guys out, go pull with an earthshield up, run like the clappers back to the doorway to the balcony and open up. I just heal through the dispersal.

I still move at Loken, but I'm not sure how useful it is because I still take a whole shed-load of damage. Like the OP, I strafe left/right using a single keybind for all toons.

HoL actually seemed almost impossible when I first tried it. I had a really tough time with both Ionar and Loken, but then I dived into heroics as soon as I hit 80 so that's to be expected I reckon!

Mind you, I thought the same about other heroics - Utgarde Pinnacle and Old Kingdom come immediately to mind - and now they're all easy-mode farming, mostly due to better tactics (often learned right here) than gear!

I really should have a go at Oculus one day. There are some good strategies posted on these forums.

[Fuzzyboy]

but he dies in like 10s before any nova :P

You must have some nice gear! My DPS chars are usually at around 4-4.5k dps and he usually starts casting the second nova before he is down, which is like 30 seconds. To kill him 10s before the first nova, that means you're killing him in about 10 seconds, which puts you at at around 50k DPS (he has 512k hp in heroic). That's over 10k dps per char for all in the group including tank and healer - impressive ;-)

[Psych]

Yeah there's no real point in dismissing a strategy because you're team is fully decked out in amazing gear, you don't need a strategy then, just brute force everything

I have one toon with sub 14k health still, I think. A single nova does more than that, he would immediately be killed no matter how epic my healing was.

I really want to get some info out there for those who don't use shamans in their groups. I friggen love shamen, and wish I could slot one in without paying an acct-acct transfer fee to do it (on my main account, with my 5 box tank...alas). Four healing streams and a resistance totem would trivialize almost all encounters, as one shaman almost trivializes all encounters in a single box mode, hehe

[Fuzzyboy]

You don't need awesome gear, just to have your healing set up correctly. With the right setup, you can focus on healing during the disperse-stage and do so very precisely. I've done this with both a shammie (chain heal) and a priest healer (CoH + PoM + PoH) with a mix of blue and lvl 200 AH epics, so no amazing gear required.

As for Loke I've done him the same way in blue/epics alos, but if I hadn't had the nature res totem, I would have probably needed a nature resist hat or something like that.

Yeah there's no real point in dismissing a strategy because you're team is fully decked out in amazing gear, you don't need a strategy then, just brute force everything

I have one toon with sub 14k health still, I think. A single nova does more than that, he would immediately be killed no matter how epic my healing was.

I really want to get some info out there for those who don't use shamans in their groups. I friggen love shamen, and wish I could slot one in without paying an acct-acct transfer fee to do it (on my main account, with my 5 box tank...alas). Four healing streams and a resistance totem would trivialize almost all encounters, as one shaman almost trivializes all encounters in a single box mode, hehe