http://www.icy-veins.com/will-of-the-emperor-detailed-strategy-wow
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dFx1BGOPzY&feature=plcp
10-man comp: 2 tanks, 2-3 healers, 5-6 DPS. The more dot classes, the better.
Another add-rush+council battle.
Emperor's Rage
The smallest adds. Fixates on random players. Fully CC-able, can be knocked back, dies pretty quick provided they're all neatly stacked up. Spawns 4 at a time on 25-man, 2 at a time on 10-man.Emperor's Courage
Fixates on one of the tanks (always the furthest tank from where they spawn, apparently?); his attacks apply a movement speed reduction debuff. Carries a big shield that deflects attacks from the front, attacks from behind go through as normal. Can be slowed. Spawns 2 at a time on 25-man, 1 at a time from alternating sides on 10-man.Emperor's Strength
Regular threat table. Does a thing which deals 100k damage to players within 10 yards where his tank was standing (the border should be pretty clearly marked), increasing by 1 yard each time he uses it. Not CC-able. This attack is their only actual ability (they don't have a regular melee), so literally any DPS can tank these. Spawns 2 at a time on 25-man, 1 at a time from alternating sides on 10-man.Jan-xi and Qin-xi
The actual boss part of the fight. Shows up after 90 seconds. Tanks will be unable to move more than 16 yards from their boss (you just get yanked back to him if you try to move further away). Their main thing is Devastating Combo, a sequence of five attacks (25-yard hemispherical slashes to either their front, left, or right, or a 12-yard-radius Stomp); getting hit by any of these deals a ton of physical damage, while avoiding all of them gives you an extra-action-button for Opportunistic Strike, which deals 1 million damage. If a boss is going to use a slash attack, there'll be blue sparks in the direction he'll slash; if he's about to stomp, he'll just raise his foot up in the air.Titan Gas
Starts flooding the room four minutes into the fight for 30 seconds, and then every two minutes or so thereafter. Deals 20k frost damage per second to everyone, and increases melee damage of everyone by 50%. Unfortunately, it also increases the damage done by the bosses and all the adds by 25%. During the first three Titan Gas phases, adds will stop spawning entirely, so use this to clean up. The fourth gas phase is your soft enrage; the gas will not go away, and adds will continue to spawn.Positioning: Tank Jan-xi and Qin-xi near the stairs; stick all but a couple of your melee on one of them (they're good for building up Opportunistic Strikes, not so good with all the adds). Ranged stand near the middle. Whichever melee aren't on the bosses will be on/near the Rage spawn, picking up and kiting Strength adds to there. Kill priority is Courage > Rage > Strength > bosses.
We'll be doing this fight very soon (RIGHT?) and there looks to be only two real elements to the fight that could wipe us.
1. Tanks must Dance!
At least from my experiences in LFR, this is a common reason for wiping. If the tanks can't do the Dance, they will get the armor debuff stacked up and get smooshed. So long as Kul and Swipe can dodge enough attacks to keep that debuff low or gone, we should be fine.
The other benefit to dancing is the Opportunistic Strikes button, which is a pretty big DPS boost if tanks and DPS can get it often. We probably have enough DPS without many Strikes, but more will make it easier!
2. Add Control
If the tanks can Dance, the only other thing that might wipe us is the adds getting out of control. There is a fairly low number in 10-man, so I'm not worried about it. The Ranged DPS should be able to keep them under control without much issue. On nights we have two melee along, we might have one help out. It'll be interesting to see what the Strength adds do. If they really have no melee attack, then any of us could "tank" them.
That's about it. Healing through the Gas phase shouldn't be a problem for our awesome healers, if we're doing the Dance and adds right. That will keep damage low in non-Gas phases. The only other possible issue is just low DPS, but we can fix that if it's a problem.
For Science!
One other note that I thought should be a separate post. I saw on the WoW forums some threads complaining about this fight being bugged. Specifically, it seems the 5.1 patch reduced the swing/activation speed of the five attacks for the Dance. This makes them easier to dodge, but the time delay actually means you can NOT get the Strike even if you properly Dance. This is fine from a "staying alive" perspective, but it sucks for beating the Enrage timer. Sounds like the DPS timer isn't a big problem on Normal mode, but we'll see!
The comments did pinpoint the Stomp as the problem. They suggested that the actual weapon Swings are fine so that if a 5-sequence consists of only Swings, it works fine and you get the Strike button. If a Stomp is involved, that messes up the timing. There was a suggestion for "fixing" it though. If the tank moves back in towards the boss as soon as the Stomp goes off, it helps the next Swing come faster. This is because the boss has to move to get close to the tank to Swing again, which is where the time delay comes from.
Anyway, we'll see! They may hotfix it before Thursday and it may not be a big deal anyway.
For Science!
The bug is fixed! Blue post on it earlier, but I lost the link.
I was also reading the forums over at Maintankadin and several tanks there swore that the only way to do this is to look for the blue lines that indicate where the strike is coming. Watching the video, they appear not so much on the ground, but as weapon slash type graphics. Other tanks, however, countered that they have been successful just watching the bosses themselves. Either way, should be a lot of fun for the tanks!
UGH!! I have only did this successful dancing as a DPS once so far...never tanked it so that may be different as I am facing the opposite usually from the tanks as I am on the back of the big bad bosses!
Darkguns - Level 90 DK
Autogun - Retired Lock
Wilygun - Druid Extraordinaire
Shamgun - Shaman fun!
I got my gear up to 472 and practiced the dance again on LFR. I'm ready to try tanking it if swipe can't make it and we have 3 other healers.
An occasional hit isn't bad, although it will reduce DPS and increase the load on healers slightly. Multiple hits are going to mean death as your mitigation gets cleaved away. Eventually we all have to learn it if we want the meta.
This site has some nice pictures of the safe areas, might help.
When doing the dance change your camera angle to overhead view and look for the slash graphics. It is possible to do it by just looking at the bosses weapon position, but in my opinion it is much easier using the slash graphics. For dps that try the dance, it seems as though you need to be in fairly close to clearly see the slash graphics (not a problem when tanking of course). Another thing to watch for is boss position. The few times I got hit by the strikes last week usually occured when I had him to close to the wall and my camera view got screwed up such that I could not see the slash graphics.
For the healers the damage on this fight will be spiky. During the dance the tank takes no damage at all for 15 seconds then gets hit hard (depending on strikes landed) following strikes. Be ready to throw out big heals right after the strikes.
Also, the little speed boosts that healers tossed out help and are much appreciated by the dancing tanks!
Last but not least anvil pointed out a very nice strategy last week for paladins of saving up holy power just before the strikes to get a speed boost (with proper talents) followed by some good shield up time following the strikes. Ill be using that next time for sure! Not sure about the bears and dk speed boosts but if you have somthing similar use it!
Kull
I could use Aspect of the Pack when the Swing sequence starts, but it's not going to be at all forgiving of errors. If you get hit with one, you'll get hit with the rest. So probably not a good idea, but it is an option.
For Science!
I know we have a speed boost so shouldn't be a problem...but I hate dancin!
Darkguns - Level 90 DK
Autogun - Retired Lock
Wilygun - Druid Extraordinaire
Shamgun - Shaman fun!