So we talked about Blizzard's tuning and how we're supposed to make progress in 5.2 without killing too many heroic bosses? Horridon is either the exception and needs some tweaks from Blizzard or everyone needs to step up and kill more faster, I'm seeing plenty of discussion on 16/16N guilds struggling on him. Lots of people 2 healing this to kill adds quickly enough, that means staying out of bad stuff and interrupting poison, there won't be enough dispels to clear out debuffs quickly. Get to the last phase and we should be fine.
During the entire fight the boss has three abilities:
Triple Puncture: Stacking tank debuff
Double Swipe: Conal attack in the front/back, think of any dragon fight
Charge: Charges to a target and then does a double swipe, the person who's getting charged has time to run out
There are four doors in his room that spawn trolls, only one is active at a time. Every door will eventually spawn a Zandalari Dinomancer that will attempt to heal Horridon, you need to get them to 50% and they'll drop an Orb of Control that someone needs to click on (you don't have to steer the boss or anything, it's not like BWL) and Horridon will break the door, moving you on.
Virtually every set of "big" trolls here spawn void zones of some description. Everytime you slam Horridon into a door he takes 50% more damage (which stacks) you'll also have a bit of time to clean up the adds and get some DPS in on the boss between doors.
Door 1 - Farraki
Sand trolls, DPS should focus down the Farraki Wastewalkers but switch to the Dinomancers when they show up
Door 2 - Gurubashi
Annoying poison trolls - Venom Priests cast a stacking poison volley that can be interrupted. If you have a Monk healer wait until all the venom priests are dead and have them use Revival. You want to kill the dinomancer here quickly, but it's probably better to have a few people switch to him and make sure people are killing/interrupting the venom priests first.
Door 3 - Drakkari
Annoying mortal strike trolls - Potentially the most difficult door. Focus down the dinomancer when he shows up. Some people suggest using Bloodlust for this door.
Door 4 - Amani
Trolls on bears - Kill the Beast Shaman on the bears one at a time. Focus down the dinomancer when he shows up.
Last Phase
War God Jalak shows up, if you didn't use lust before this would be a good time to use it. Gets a stacking buff and does raid wide damage. When you kill Jalak Horridon will become enraged, but it's mostly tank damage at that point. When Horridon enrages the double swipes will start killing people who don't move out of them fast enough. It has a very distinct graphic, and you can outrange it or just simple move to the side.
On 25s you can use 3 tanks, although if your raiders are good at not getting hit by double swipe it only gives you a bit better add control.
We tried 3 heals on 10m as well, and we simply couldn't keep up with the adds - Poison door was taking too long.
2 heal is fine, if your raiders are smart and aware. Always get them to cleanse themselves (I'm resto shaman, so I found myself lacking @ doors 2/3) when possible, and teach them to be far, FAR away from any sand/poison/orbs/totems. Have your non-Horridon tank kite adds away from any shit on the floor - orbs/poison have a small movement in a circle, so make sure you're well away. Make sure you're using as much of the room as possible - co-ordinate your tank position and kite paths to ensure that healers aren't out of range. Once you've got people avoid Frost Orbs, and the OT picking up all 3 big adds (the hardest hitting ones), you'll find that the damage to the raid is not too spastic. Amani door (bears/totems) isn't much harder than Sand door in terms of DPS or healing, and if your raid is alive at this point, it should be a kill.
We found that the berserk timer is pretty generous (with 2 heals) - we popped Heroism for Frost door, and had ~2m left when he died (we were 9/16H before 5.2, but our DPS isn't that awesome). Phase 4 (War God jumps down) isn't too dangerous - he hurts a fair bit, but its consistent and manageable damage, and he dies pretty quickly. Phase 5 is simply up to tanks using their cooldowns smartly and your healers not being OOM (which is mostly up to DPS being smart about avoiding damage).
Is it overtuned for 10m normal as the 2nd boss in the raid? Certainly - I would hate to be a 0/16 H guild, in ilvl 496 gear, attempting to DPS poison/frost down in time. Skill and awareness will only take you so far.
Trash is worse though
I've been trying stuff out on Horridon by pugging with different guilds of varying skill level. Right now i'm leaning towards 2 tank, 2 healer, 6 DPS. Three healers might be better if you have really good DPS but i think the main hurdle is killing the big adds in a timely manner. You want to kill the first big add before the second and third jump down and then you want to ideally kill a second before the dinomancer jumps down. It's just going to make the fight a lot more manageable. For instance on the Gurubashi door, if you have high enough DPS you can kill the first priest before it summons an Effusion, so you don't have to worry about killing the Effusion and can start DPSing the second Priest immediately, killing it before it summons an Effusion and the Dinomancer drops down. Now instead of dealing with interrupting 2 priests and killing/interrupting 2 effusions why you are trying to kill the Dinomancer and stop the small adds spawning, you have to interrupt 1 priest and kill 1 effusion. The amount of DPS you will gain by not having to target and kill the adds is going to greatly help, and your multidooters are going to have time to dot the other adds and boss up as well. It's also very reliant on class comp. For the first door you really want a shadow priest to mass dispel the magic debuff to save your healers a lot of mana. For the second door you want monks, paladins and druids to cleanse the poison, for the third you want monks, healer priests and paladins to cleanse the disease and for the final gate you want Druids, Shaman and Mages to decurse. If you have bunch of DKs, Warriors, Hunters, Rogues and Warlocks (although Afllocks do a shit load of DPS on these types of fights) you're going to have problems. Special mention goes to Mistweaver monks who can Cleanse all Poisons or Diseases at the end of phase 2 or 3 with Revival, and Resto Druids who can symbiosis a paladin for Cleanse which gives them a second Poison removal and lets them help out on Diseases.
It seems like a really punishing fight for 10 man, and if there intent was that guilds that hadn't even finished clearing normal T14 could do it like that CM said then the tuning is way off.
How are people dealing with the second gate on horridon? We were getting torn apart by a ton of effusions and the subsequent stacks of the poison debuff.
It's mostly a matter of having dps focus down effusions as they spawn, then venom priests. Marking priests and assigning focus interrupts to them will probably help a lot. Since the poison stacks on the entire raid every cast you can stop makes a big difference.
Our main healing issue was DPS getting outranged. What kind of positioning do you guys use?
We tanked Horridon between each door and the center of the room, as far away as possible from the door without outranging healers. This gives you room to move sideways if there's too much crap on the ground.
For the last phase move him to the center, since there shouldn't be any add-spawned stuff there.
This guy says Icy Veins has the priority all wrong.
]For us, the following worked out the best:
Farraki - Focus down Wastewalkers until Dinomancer spawns, then burn Dinomancer.
Gurubashi - Focus down Venom Priests and Effusions and assign interrupts so Poison Volleys don't get out. When Dinomancer appears, have one or two people swap off to interrupt heals and slowly burn, but Venom Priests have to stay top priority or poison stacks too high.
Drakkari - Focus down Warlords until Dinomancer arrives, burn Dinomancer once he's up.
Amani - Kill the Bears one at a time, and finish off the Shaman before going to the next bear. The Beast Shaman only cast chain lightning while on the bear's back, but once he's dismounted he'll start dropping totems and hexxing. You don't want all 3 doing that at once. Kill Dinomancer as soon as it spawns.
On all the doors, the instant that orb of control drops, use it to close the door. You don't want to deal with any more small adds than you have to. You should have plenty of time to clean up adds before the next door opens.
When Jalak comes out, focus all DPS on him, because if he reaches 5 or so stacks of bestial wrath, the raid dies really quickly. Horridon's enrage is not bad at all since at this point nobody but the tanks should be taking any damage at all so the healers can 100% focus on the tank. I think we ended up pushing Horridon from 70% to dead while he was enraged after several unsuccessful attempts of us worrying too much about keeping the tank up during enrage and trying to get him lower before War God came out or keeping War God up for too long while we burned down Horridon.
Edit: Wow I just looked at the Icy Veins priority list. Leaving Venom Priests up as a last priority is a godawful idea. The longer they're up, the more effusions spawn and the more puddles you deal with. Every priority list they have for adds is flat out wrong. The little adds have such low hp that they just sort of die during AoE on the bigger ones, but the big guys have got to be dealt with quickly. They hurt, and the crap they throw on the floor cannot be allowed to cover too much area because it never disappears.
Thanks for all the posts, Muta! I've also seen a lot of concern that Horridon is tuned too hard for guilds that haven't cleared Heroic content. Which is pretty silly. You shouldn't have to do Heroics to clear Normals. On the other hand, it's still very early, not even a full week yet. Though if Blizzard is going to tune Horridon, it won't be until Tuesday. They try not to change bosses during a raid week unless really necessary. We've only given it three pulls, so there's no reason to freak out. Yet. ;)
Each of the four doors has three "big" adds and an unlimited number of "small" adds plus one Dinomancer. Thus the basic goal at each door is a) kill the big adds as fast as possible, b) kill the Dinomancer when he spawns and c) clear up any small adds. In our few attempts I noticed the small adds and Dinomancer melt pretty fast, but we need to improve our time on the big ones. So long as the big adds die fast, the rest of the fight will be easy.
A big change from the PTR is the timing of the big adds. They used to come one at a time, 10 seconds apart, but now the first arrives at 20 seconds and the other two together 20 seconds later. This gives a very good DPS goal: Kill the first (or have it low) before the other two spawn. Then focus one down and finish off the last. All three big adds should be dead before the next door opens. Dinomancer should die quickly too.
Not much to say about the first door except kill everything fast, prioritizing the Big adds. Second door, the green/poison door, has the most coordination necessary. The goal here is not just to kill the adds, but to interrupt them so they cast as few poison bolts as possible. Each cast hits every raid member, lasts 60 seconds and stacks. The fewer the better! If all DPS swap to the first Venom Priest when it spawns, it should die fast. For the next two, we will assign one melee to each one. Their job is to stay on their mob and interrupt that poison volley. It comes about every 15s, so one melee should be enough to keep the casts very few.
The third door is also pretty dangerous because the consistently spawning little adds stack a disease dot on random raid members. They apparently can't be tanked. We will likely burn Heroism here and clear this door as fast as we can. Not much strat here other than "kill it fast with fire!" The final door should be a relief and the only real concern is to kill each shaman before we kill another bear. We don't want two or three shamans active at the same time. Rest of the fight is easy.
We might want to try the six DPS method if five isn't working out for us at first on Monday. This is definitely a fight where more DPS makes the healer's job much easier. It's mostly about bursting down the big adds while avoiding the damage. We should be killing of the Dinomancers fast so we can close the doors too, but on the second door we should keep the two melee on their venom priests to keep interrupts going.
Oh and everyone needs to get used to where the four doors are! Once a door is closed, we should be moving the adds to the next one. I also like the idea of tanking Horridon closer to the center and not on top of the adds. When we're more experienced with it, we can get him closer for cleave/multi-dot, but for now we need to get good at add control.
Let's put some good effort in on Monday and see how far we can get!
Forgot to put this in the post. This is the time frame that the adds currently spawn on Live. It is the same for all four doors.
0s - Door opens
5s - Small add wave
20s - Solo big add
25s - Small wave
40s - Double big add
45s - Small wave
60s - Dinomancer
65s - Small wave
85s - Small wave
If we get the Dinomancer to 50% fast, we can avoid that last wave at 85s. The next door opens 40s after the current one is smashed. If we assume that we close each door at the 80s mark, then it should look like this:
80s - Door smashed
85s - No new add waves!
120s - New door opens
Repeat from there. As soon as the door is smashed, we should all be moving towards the new door. Horridon will be stunned for a bit, which might the best time for the tank swap since the current Horridon tank will be free for a moment. MIght depend on how many adds are alive.
Despite the difficulties others have had, I think it is worth putting some time into this boss. I think many of the guilds having issues were trying to brute force it or trying tactics based on PTR that have changed on live.
The third door, the frost one, seems to be our biggest trouble spot, which isn't very surprising. I'm wondering if the random aggro of the little adds is what causes the problem. We might need to put some more effort into killing them to keep their damage more manageable. Without taking too much damage off the big guys. Maybe put one person on it?
We also tried running with just one melee this week. It was fine, but I think it'll work better on the Poison door if we have two. Helps to keep the Venom Priests from casting.
We're pretty close, we need to be a bit more disciplined about getting those big adds down faster. A little more gear will help of course.
Yep. I think it isnt a dps issue as much as it is a focus /priority issue. I found it difficult to see the dinomancers and venom priests through all the crud going on.. I'm going to try target macros for each stage to help with finding correct mob. I think once we clean up priortization and focusing on targets/interrupts, it will come together and adds will die faster.
So we talked about Blizzard's tuning and how we're supposed to make progress in 5.2 without killing too many heroic bosses? Horridon is either the exception and needs some tweaks from Blizzard or everyone needs to step up and kill more faster, I'm seeing plenty of discussion on 16/16N guilds struggling on him. Lots of people 2 healing this to kill adds quickly enough, that means staying out of bad stuff and interrupting poison, there won't be enough dispels to clear out debuffs quickly. Get to the last phase and we should be fine.
Selected discussion:
This guy says Icy Veins has the priority all wrong.
Thanks for all the posts, Muta! I've also seen a lot of concern that Horridon is tuned too hard for guilds that haven't cleared Heroic content. Which is pretty silly. You shouldn't have to do Heroics to clear Normals. On the other hand, it's still very early, not even a full week yet. Though if Blizzard is going to tune Horridon, it won't be until Tuesday. They try not to change bosses during a raid week unless really necessary. We've only given it three pulls, so there's no reason to freak out. Yet. ;)
Each of the four doors has three "big" adds and an unlimited number of "small" adds plus one Dinomancer. Thus the basic goal at each door is a) kill the big adds as fast as possible, b) kill the Dinomancer when he spawns and c) clear up any small adds. In our few attempts I noticed the small adds and Dinomancer melt pretty fast, but we need to improve our time on the big ones. So long as the big adds die fast, the rest of the fight will be easy.
A big change from the PTR is the timing of the big adds. They used to come one at a time, 10 seconds apart, but now the first arrives at 20 seconds and the other two together 20 seconds later. This gives a very good DPS goal: Kill the first (or have it low) before the other two spawn. Then focus one down and finish off the last. All three big adds should be dead before the next door opens. Dinomancer should die quickly too.
Not much to say about the first door except kill everything fast, prioritizing the Big adds. Second door, the green/poison door, has the most coordination necessary. The goal here is not just to kill the adds, but to interrupt them so they cast as few poison bolts as possible. Each cast hits every raid member, lasts 60 seconds and stacks. The fewer the better! If all DPS swap to the first Venom Priest when it spawns, it should die fast. For the next two, we will assign one melee to each one. Their job is to stay on their mob and interrupt that poison volley. It comes about every 15s, so one melee should be enough to keep the casts very few.
The third door is also pretty dangerous because the consistently spawning little adds stack a disease dot on random raid members. They apparently can't be tanked. We will likely burn Heroism here and clear this door as fast as we can. Not much strat here other than "kill it fast with fire!" The final door should be a relief and the only real concern is to kill each shaman before we kill another bear. We don't want two or three shamans active at the same time. Rest of the fight is easy.
We might want to try the six DPS method if five isn't working out for us at first on Monday. This is definitely a fight where more DPS makes the healer's job much easier. It's mostly about bursting down the big adds while avoiding the damage. We should be killing of the Dinomancers fast so we can close the doors too, but on the second door we should keep the two melee on their venom priests to keep interrupts going.
Oh and everyone needs to get used to where the four doors are! Once a door is closed, we should be moving the adds to the next one. I also like the idea of tanking Horridon closer to the center and not on top of the adds. When we're more experienced with it, we can get him closer for cleave/multi-dot, but for now we need to get good at add control.
Let's put some good effort in on Monday and see how far we can get!
For Science!
Forgot to put this in the post. This is the time frame that the adds currently spawn on Live. It is the same for all four doors.
0s - Door opens
5s - Small add wave
20s - Solo big add
25s - Small wave
40s - Double big add
45s - Small wave
60s - Dinomancer
65s - Small wave
85s - Small wave
If we get the Dinomancer to 50% fast, we can avoid that last wave at 85s. The next door opens 40s after the current one is smashed. If we assume that we close each door at the 80s mark, then it should look like this:
80s - Door smashed
85s - No new add waves!
120s - New door opens
Repeat from there. As soon as the door is smashed, we should all be moving towards the new door. Horridon will be stunned for a bit, which might the best time for the tank swap since the current Horridon tank will be free for a moment. MIght depend on how many adds are alive.
For Science!
Fatboss video.
Despite the difficulties others have had, I think it is worth putting some time into this boss. I think many of the guilds having issues were trying to brute force it or trying tactics based on PTR that have changed on live.
The third door, the frost one, seems to be our biggest trouble spot, which isn't very surprising. I'm wondering if the random aggro of the little adds is what causes the problem. We might need to put some more effort into killing them to keep their damage more manageable. Without taking too much damage off the big guys. Maybe put one person on it?
We also tried running with just one melee this week. It was fine, but I think it'll work better on the Poison door if we have two. Helps to keep the Venom Priests from casting.
We're pretty close, we need to be a bit more disciplined about getting those big adds down faster. A little more gear will help of course.
For Science!
Yep. I think it isnt a dps issue as much as it is a focus /priority issue. I found it difficult to see the dinomancers and venom priests through all the crud going on.. I'm going to try target macros for each stage to help with finding correct mob. I think once we clean up priortization and focusing on targets/interrupts, it will come together and adds will die faster.