The patch is now two days old. I've done some raiding, I did a few dailies also, and I haven't written a post in over a week. That means it's time for me give my first impressions of this patch.
Trash:
"Oh my god there is a lot of trash" was my first impression of the Firelands instance. It actually wasn't so bad when I got past Shannox, but it seemed like we were killing trash forever just to get him to spawn. Combine that with the Starfall buff that was causing it to hit trash not in combat and it got hairy at times. Unfortunately for me I discovered this sad fact when we were standing near the death turtles. That was not a good time.
All in all none of the trash packs weren't too bad on there own, and they dropped lots of patterns for us, but the quantity of them was overwhelming. I didn't count at the time, but we killed at least a dozen packs of trash (and probably more) before Shannox spawned. I'm glad that they increased the respawn rate on that center trash to four hours, but that's not enough in my opinion. They need to thin it out a little bit and have Shannox spawn more quickly. As it is, I think it's worse then the BoT trash, which is not a the way you want to start an instance in my opinion.
Shannox:
Going in to the night I thought Shannox would be the easiest boss we tried. Turned out he was the most difficult of the three we attempted. The fact that all of the mobs are now untauntable threw us for a little bit of a loop like most guilds. We also used only two tanks when it sounds like a lot of guilds were using 3 or 4. However, none of that really impacts me directly.
From my perspective, I had this vision of multi doting nirvana going into the fight. Yes, there is a strong don't stand in the fire element, but that generally isn't a problem for me so I wasn't expecting big issues. It didn't work out that way. First off, the traps are tiny. When one was put directly on me I could barely see the teeth around my feet. If a trap is put in front of me, I might not see it at all due to being an overweight moonkin. As a result I got trapped a lot more then I like to admit. Second, my guild is very heavy on DoT classes. We have two moonkin, two shadow priest, and four warlocks. Not all of them were in raid at the same time, but having so many multi-doters meant we didn't have as many people consistently on Rageface as we thought and it made Face Rage a little more difficult then expected. You wouldn't think getting a 30k hit on him with an increased crit rate would be that difficult, but with only a couple DD classes, range issues, and traps it proved to be more difficult then expected.
All in all, I thought it was a good fight, but not quite what I expected going in.
Lord Rhyolith:
As a moonkin I found this fight to be quite annoying, and lot simpler then I expected. Our biggest problem of the night was accidental pulls. Without those we would have had him down in just two or three pulls. After that the big issue was multi-dotting the legs. We thought that doting both legs would increase the damage without making the boss harder to turn. We were wrong. Once we stopped doting the legs the fight was easy. My job was just to kill the adds, and once his shell came off it was a simple tank and spank.
As add dps I found the fight to be quite boring. I had quite a bit of down time waiting for adds to spawn, and the burn phase didn't feel all that threatening. On the other hand, the GM of my guild (who is also a moonkin) really liked the fight. He was helping with the steering of the boss and I can see how that could be a lot of fun.
Beth'tilic:
After reading a few strats and looking at the boss abilities I thought this one would be hard. The fight has two levels with lots of adds. I though the coordination of the fight would cause a lot of headaches, and it did until we realized a couple things.
Our first issue was controlling the Drones and the Spiderlings. We didn't organize our efforts much at the start. The spiderlings were getting to the drone, and all hell was breaking lose. To fix this we started trying to control the Spiderlings from their spawn point, and Moonkin are pretty well designed for this. With the typhoon knockback and Fungal Growth we can slow down the spiders quite a bit. The problem then became DPS on the spiderlings. Since I was starting at zero power my mushrooms, typhoon, dots and hurricane were weak, and there is no good way to get to solar quickly. As a result I had a hard time getting my set of spiderlings down in time. I'm sure with more practice I could get it, but it wasn't obvious to start.
Then we realized the second important fact. DPS on Beth'tilic doesn't matter in the first stage of the fight. Once we left all of the DPS on the ground and only sent a tank and a few healers into the web it was easy. The second stage was once again a simple tank and spank.
Lunar Shower:
First of all, there is a nice discussion going on at EJ regarding Lunar Shower. I suggest you check it out if you haven't already.
Originally I had expected to keep Lunar Shower since, I didn't have a good idea of what to spend the talent points on, but after realizing that Shannox would be a first boss of the night I ended up dropping it to improve my multi dot potential.
Obviously I can't make any lasting conclusions based on three normal bosses, but the impression I got from my first night of Firelands raiding was that using or dropping LS didn't really matter a ton. Not having it on Shannox made multi doting easier, but Shannox was more about control and personal responsibility rather then DPS so multi-doting wasn't critical and may have caused a little tunneling. On Lord Rhyolith, the fragments can be dotted, but they don't last that long, so dotting might not be ideal. Other then those adds the fight is completely single target. Beth'tilic has plenty of mobs that can be dotted, but my role in the fight was centered around control rather then DPS. On the other hand having Lunar shower to proc Solar Eclipse in the beginning could have helped. At this point I'm still up in the air.
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We 2 tanked Shannox. The Riplimb tank kited him around to traps to help the debuff fall off. It all about the offtank in that fight.
Beth was a bore. I still have no idea what was going on. We pushed P2 with her around 90%+.
Rhyo was another bore. I was on leg duty and it seemed that add duty was a bit more fun. Multi-dotting and cleaving is definitely a bad thing on the legs.
As a spoiler:
Assuming you won't be flying around for the bird boss, there's limited opportunity to multi-dot, BUT if you're extra aware of the boss's pat during P1 while you handle the adds, you can maintain your dots on him. (I need to work on this.) P2 is a joke. Dodge tornados while dpsing. P3 is a tunnel phase for dps.
Gatekeeper is a straight tunnel fight if you're not part of the 2! 6man! rotations for crystals. Even if you are, it's still slight.
Major has a bit of multi-dot opportunity (cat-phase), but I haven't killed him yet. We'll have him sorted out tonight and hopefully be dispatching Rag as well.
Note: I don't play a boomkin as a main. My alt's a boomkin on the side and not a very good one. I'm ele at heart. ;)
We spent too much time on Shannox, so it's the only boss I've done. We'll try and kill more tonight.
I really missed some kind of DoT tracking across multiple targets. TidyPlates wouldn't cut it, because the camera is never far enough to have it on screen.
Also, there's definitely something wrong with traps. I know they have an arming time, but sometimes I'd get trapped without seeing the trap under me at all. Watching my feet like a hawk didn't help, so I had to keep dancing around while reapplying DoTs at least just to make sure I wouldn't look stupid.
Forte eXorcist def helps on Shannox as the nameplates are often off camera. Of course, if you refresh all your dots at the same time, it's not needed.
Another thing that helps with Shannox is using DXE instead of DBM, it will give you the "run away, little girl" warning when a crystal trap spawns on you.
The spider boss is so freaking awesome, it's like it was made for Boomkins :D. We didn't manage to kill it, but we didn't realise we could leave all the dps on the ground to make the drone killing easy. Cheers for that tip!
We ended up going for a strategy of taunting the spiders off the ropes and over to the drone, having single-target classes stay on the drone and AOE classes aoe the drone and spiders. For the spiderlings, we actually didn't have trouble with them getting close to the drone. Running all the way over to the spawn point would be a waste of DPS time, and it shouldn't really be required. We'd meet the spiderlings half way between the spawn and the drone and get them down with time to spare using one boomkin and one hunter. Fungal growth is essential but we really need a second slow effect from somewhere to cover enough area. Glyph of monsoon was also a bit of a help, and replaced my glyph of innervate. I had no issue with getting into solar before the first spiderling spawn, I just used the hanging spiders for that.
As boomkin, my damage in this fight was absolutely ludicrous. I don't know how anyone else is finding it, but I consistently did 29-30% of the phase 1 damage in ten man. I stayed in solar eclipse for most of the fight using a high-mastery build that stops stacking haste after the 1929 breakpoint (think I'm sitting on 1950). I just kept dots rolling on every big target and used typhoon, mushrooms and multidotting to manage the spiderlings. In downtime between spiderling spawns I'd refresh dots on big targets and drop a pack of mushrooms on them for some damage and to apply earth and moon.
Am looking forward to killing that boss and trying out some of the other encounters, sounds like Shannox is going to be good for Boomkin too.
With our ability to innervate healers for 25-30% of their mana using Furor gone, I made a few changes to how I handle mana management. Dropped all points in Furor, Moonglow and Lunar Shower completely. Replaced them with Dreamstate, Fungal Growth and Perseverence. I'm DEFINITELY liking this change. Multi-dotting costs more mana, but the 50% self-innervates make it perfectly viable to still do it and stay in solar for most of a fight. Lining it up with int procs is even more ridiculous, I can't wait to get that awesome on-activate int trinket :D. 5% to a healer's mana is 1-2 casts, it's pathetic. I just told my guild that it's not worth innervating healers any more, and with the talent changes I probably save them more than 5k mana every 3 minutes by taking less damage through perseverence.
The T11 4set nerf made it a good idea to get rid of two parts and get some better itemised gear I had lying around (resto t11 hands and passive resistor spaulders). That definitely helped to stack more mastery for aoe fights, which there seem to be a lot of in Firelands :D.
Only Shannox and Beth here. Ww still didn't make it on rhyo - nice tip, will stop multidotting the legs, even if it doesn't make much sense as the damage should be compensated, but well.
About Shannox - seems a good fight to keep lunar shower, because after a round of solar multidotting you will be able to travel to lunar quicker, and then from lunar to solar again.
On Beth, what I try to do is to kill some center adds asap to move to solar before the first wave - not always possible, indeed, they go down fast as hell and we need to fit in our longer cast nuke. I had glyph of hurricane ready for that one but it wasn't needed. Me and a hunter were more than enough to clean a corner.
I've done Beth, Alys, Lord Rhyo, Majordomo, and 1 pull on Rag (was out for Shannox and Baleroc).
Beth is an awesome fight for balance druids. I had lunar showers the whole night. I ended up 1st on dmg. I'm going to try taking out lunar showers next week and see if my DPS increases. If you have a hunter trapping the spiderlings where they spawn, dropping mushrooms is very easy and a huge dps gain on them. Spamming MF/SF on them and on the spinners was what I did most of the time. The only real rotation dps I did was on the drones and on Beth when she was on the ground.
Alys is a very interesting fight and probably my favorite. I was originally killing the bird add, then the hatchling, but was swapped to solid hatchling dps due to it not dying fast enough. I tried to keep dots up on Alys while she was flying around, but realized that with our dps it was just a waste of time, since she wasnt always in front of me, or was out of range. The main thing i would say, is try to keep dots up on the hatchlings at all times if you on add duty, or vice versa.
Domo is probably my least favorite. If you can organize raid cooldowns, the fight is not terribly difficult. Infact we wiped more on the trash in front of him than the boss itself. If your raid starts off in scorpion, the fight has a good 30+ second burn phase where you just stand there and nuke. There isn't a whole lot of movement so the fight is pretty boring.
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