BRF - Blast Furnace

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mutagen
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BRF - Blast Furnace
mutagen
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Aanvil
We will be progressing on

We will be progressing on Blast Furnace this week. Please review the information above to refresh your recollection of the abilities and how to handle them.

mutagen
mutagen's picture
Common issues / Mind Control

The common issues from what I've seen are:

    P1:
  • Not running bombs.
    P2:
  • A single target priority fight disguised as an AoE fight, AoE makes nice numbers but won't get us through P2. Cleave off priorrity target.
  • Lack of awareness of Slag Elementals, unsure of what to do with them. Move them to Primal Elementalists
  • Interrupt Firecallers, dispell their Hots on Elementalists
    P3:
  • Unaware of Melt, unaware of where to put it.

There are various opinions on whether Mind Control is needed or useful. Without a priest MCing on each side I'm inclined not to Mind Control in P1 because we need to get both Regulators open. Also, the adjustments to P1 Furnace Engineers makes it less useful.

A single P2 MC might be useful, the guards put a 50% damage debuff on the Primal Elementalists. However, the Guards do extra damage once the MC wears off. I can grab low health Guards at the appropriate time and help with the burn. Several sources indicate that MC in this phase is unnecessary though.

Thoughts?

Aanvil
I don't have an opinion

I don't have an opinion really on the mind control. Is it an overall dps increase or does it make it more certain that we will kill a prime elementalist during the burn window? If so, then yeah, that sounds great. Icy veins seems to be saying that the Guards' ability affects the Slag Elementals, not the Primal Elementalists.

I just want to point out that during phase 2, we WILL need to keep most of the adds dead or else the damage becomes overwhelming. First priority is to interrupt and kill the Firecallers, but aoe dmg on the guards is also important. The primary focused burn phase is when a Primal Elementalist is vulnerable for a 15 second window.

Aanvil
Here is what I'd like to do

Here is what I'd like to do on Monday. I welcome discussion.

Start by overstacking on the side with Feldspar so that there is no downtime for dps. If we get this balanced correctly, we should be able to make good use of Lust on the pull so all that extra dps goes into Felspar and then lust is back up again for the beginning of phase 3.

P1: Stack on Operators. Make sure not to waste any bombs. Move stack when shields go down, and interrupt Pyroclasm/Electrocution if possible. Don't let any ticks of repair go off or you likely won't break both regulators before the 3rd wave of Operators.

P1-->P2 transition: Stack up and AoE down all remaining adds. Healing CD is nice.

P2: Sanzaru stacks on first Elementalist with Feldspar and taunts/interrupts Firecallers (picked Sanzaru for this because of his AoE interrupt). Aanvin pulls security guards away from stack, but not too far so dps can still dot them up. Kill slag, kill Elementalist, kill both Firecallers, move to next Elementalist. Repeat x4.

P2-->P3 transition: Ranged to wall, melee to boss. Lust & clear out all remaining Guards & Firecallers.

P3: Kite in a semi-circle, taunt swapping.

That said, none of this matters if we can't figure out how to burn down the Elementalists in one burn cycle. DPS need to save their short CDs for these burn phases.

Lairiel
Yikes, there's so much going

Yikes, there's so much going on in this fight it's really hard to model, hence really hard to pick an optimal strat.

Here's what I've got so far.

Feldspars health scales with raid, but was 22-26 Million for our numbers. Our best single target burn under ideal conditions is around 300kdps sustained (impossible here, but a good starting point), meaning 90 seconds to down him.

The hearts heat accumulates quickly. 2/8 seconds per loader, so 0.5/second if they are left unmolested. Even assuming we keep one of them dead with cleave, we're looking at entering the second heat tier before we even start on bombs. Burning him first with our current dps just doesn't seem viable.

Speaking of heat tiers, the reports vary a bit. But looking at our logs, seems Wowhead has it right, not some other sources (shocker) and Blasts go off every 30s until 25 heat, then every 20 seconds till 50 heat, then 15-12-10.

We never managed, even on our best attempts, to enter phase 2 with him under 25 heat. So I figure we could either
A - Work on handling bombs better and push hard on dps to enter phase 2 with lower heat or
B - Slow dps in phase 1 in favour of control, enter phase 2 with fewer adds and 30+ heat.

Control can matter a lot, since for one thing, the Big dudes become MAJOR threats when phase 2 begins. Entering phase 2 with none of them up is by far the ideal. They do a frontal aoe for like 250k. If we do have any up, having them faced away from the raid is essential.

As for bombs and the regulators. It looks like in heroic they always take 11 bombs. (1.09 million hp, 100k per bomb). The engineers seem to toss a bomb out every 6 seconds, and drop 3 when they die (would love to confirm this). So, it seems like keeping them alive but controlled until another is about to spawn is preferable to burning them down. More bombs, faster regulator death. When they DO die, we need 3 people to pick up bombs and run them, detonating them in sequence, not together. Friendly fire is bad here. And I tried to run 2 before the time running out, it's doable if they die nearby, but with any distance it becomes pretty damn difficult.

The heat makes a large difference in phase 2, since at low heat the elementals revive in 2 minutes, above 25 then get up in 80 seconds. Above 50 it's 1 minute. With 5 or 6 of them that's a pretty huge difference. He continues gaining heat in phase 2 in an unpreventable, slower rate. 1/3 seconds, and occasionally loses some too, but not enough to prevent it accumulating.

The tanks going down at transition is likely because of the big dudes turning around. They melee for 100k, and shout for a lot more. It means a very sudden burst in tank damage when the regulators close. I'm also seeing a melt armour effect in the fight description, but it's not anywhere in the logs. Not sure what's up with that.

Phase 2 and MC is a bit weird.
Seems there's no way to use it to help burn the elementalists, but unlisted is the ability of bodyguards to Taunt the elementals. Ideally you can put an elemental into position, debuff it, and blow it up, using the detonation to kill off the Body guard as well. ( which is needed since they become untauntable, and do 100% bonus damage after MC)

Also looks like we only get 15s to burn an elementals during a shields down phase >_<

sanzaru
Group:

Group:
I agree about moving more DPS to the Feldspar side. Even after we dropped a DPS we were still ahead of the curve. Let's name a few DPS as variables, where they stay on the Feldspar side unless the not-Feldspar side falls behind and needs the extra DPS.

Bombs:
Should we do something different with our bomb handling beyond "do it better"? For example, are the engineers too far away from the furnace to get there in time? I don't /think/ that's the case but I saw a few instances where we missed the bomb run.

P1:
How was Anvil dying in P1? I looked at the logs and it looks like it was "normal" melee damage opposed to anything due to mechanics. I didn't see bellows operators, but normal damage over a long period of time(15-45sec). I also dug through the logs and couldn't find any instance of Melt Armor occurring, . How many healers do we have on my side? If it's two, let's drop to one. I'm barely getting beat in P1. Or we can try a tank swap in P1 with the extra DPS heading over too. We talked about a tank swap on Thursday. The only reason it might help is because my mitigations wouldn't be on CD. We can try it, but that feels hacky to me if Melt Armor was pulled from the game.

P2:
Roger Anvil, I'm good with that.

Lairiel
I see what you're saying

I see what you're saying about Aanvin Dying. There IS a damage spike at the phase transition, but more than that there just doesn't seem to be any healing on him for like 15 seconds.

How is that happening?

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/vwxG37abYZ4fm9dC#type=healing&fight...

I thought this was weird, but checking the healing for the whole fight turns out it's really not. Looks like Aanvin gets next to NO healing from healers pretty much through the whole thing. It's almost entirely self heals. It's jus that at the transition apparently he's getting a spike, it's too much to self heal, and the healers aren't changing from what they have been doing (pretty much just hots).

Feldspar is 50% of Aanvin's damage taken, and a good third of the total. So Def should be more healers on Feldspars side.

Over and over again I find no mention of melt armour except that one place. And no sign of it in the logs. Gotta assume it was removed, or is in mythic only or something.

Bomb handling - We get 1 every 6 seconds, and apparently we're missing like half of those. Then 3 at death, and I KNOW we are only getting 1-2 of those. We missed at least 1 on every pack I saw drop.

Moving them closer can definitely help, but not too close (don't want to be in blast area). I could run 2 or 3 if they were closer. But the distance they were at, only 1, maybe 2 was possible.

sanzaru
I was looking at AMR about

I was looking at AMR about the fights and bleck. It's not pleasant. Assuming I'm reading this right...

Just phase 1:
50% hit rate on bombs. Ouch.
60% missed interrupts on repairs.

Skarn
Skarn's picture
Improvements

First off, I talked to a friend who has finished Foundry on Heroic and he confirmed that the start of phase 2 is when we should burn Feldspar. He should be 40%ish by then though, so I agree we can shift more DPS that way, so long as we aren't falling behind on the other side.

He also mentioned that the fight is mostly a series of single-target burns or "kill the oldest thing first." Cleave damage is very helpful, but single target is actually the more important part. Especially when a Primal is vulnerable! Slags aren't that important to kill since they reactivate, they're a soft enrage. Certainly doesn't hurt for them to die to cleave damage.

I was also thinking we could move another healer off of Sanz's side, sounds like they were healing the bombers more than Sanz, haha. We should make sure to assign a couple people per side to watch the Engineers. A pair of Engineers show up with the second Operator so both need to be watched.

And clearly we need to be better with the Bombs! :O

For Science!

sanzaru
Looking at our one successful

Looking at our one successful p2 transition, we had Feldspar at 50%. We also had 15 seconds of no DPS on him for that attempt.

Moar dots?

sanzaru
Improvements!

Solid attempts last night getting into P3. I scanned the logs during a conf call; here's what I learned for P1 and P2.

P1:
Tanky stuff:
Looks like me with the boss smoothed out a lot of the P1 damage (this week vs last week). Select Aanvin and Sanzaru, deselect Total; for the best view.
Bombs:
We are rocking it on the bombs. A few randomly selected attempts: 96%, 100%, 100%

P2:
Looks like we're only interrupting ~85% of the cauterize wounds. Also not great placement yet with the elementals and the elementalists: 63%, 75%, 77%.

Lairiel
The bomb measurement is not

The bomb measurement is not accurate. It's counting bomb explosions that happen after the regulators are already dead.

Narrowing it to the period during which they were alive, we're hitting 24/28 pretty consistently. 86%. Still could do better. Just not as bad as the numbers showing.

sanzaru
Oh ok. That makes sense.

Oh ok. That makes sense. New data: 96%, 100%, 100%, and one that was 120% (no idea; 20 casts 24 hits). Link for "last week" updated, choose "phase 1" to see the results.

Skarn
Skarn's picture
Primals and Slags

The Slags not blowing up on the Primals isn't necessarily a problem. Pretty sure we didn't miss any that we intended to blow up on the Primals, so if logs are showing some "misses" it's ones that died anyway from incidental AoE. I don't think killing Slags is an issue, I don't remember seeing any miss last night. That little bit of extra DPS to get the Primals down in one go should make a noticeable difference. Less Heat is less Blasts, which makes happy healers.

Once all the Firecallers are dead in the last phase, perhaps we should group up. At that point, there are no more AoE dots. The Slags do single-target damage. Blasts are unavoidable and hit everyone. The only concern with grouping up is Melt debuffs. Gotta watch those and move out of the raid to drop them, but so long as we are careful with that, we can group the raid to make healing easier.

We are very close, we can get this!

For Science!

Aanvil
Yeah, things look much better

Yeah, things look much better during the first phase and transition into the second. The challenge now is to get through the second phase faster. (The alternative would be to run an extra healer or 2 and just brute force our way through phase 3, if that is even possible)

One thing that I would recommend Sanz would be to try harder to position yourself on top of the target Primal Elementalist and switch to focusing them with your own dps when they are vulnerable. The stack on the first primal is great and everything there dies nice and smoothly. The later primals though things get spread out more. I know the firecallers can be difficult to move while they are casting and you want to interrupt their heal as much as possible. But, I think it will be worthwhile to make sure they are stacked up on top of the slag elemental and then the primal so that they will die faster and it will hopefully be easier for everyone to switch dps to the primal. Hopefully next week Severs will be able to contribute some more deathgrips. Even without that though, try using Avenger's shield and taunts to pull them on top of the primal.

For some reason Rhada's damage on the primals was really low. Is that just because his dots don't ramp up quickly? I don't know how warlock dps works. Maybe another spec would be better for this fight.

sanzaru
Yep, will do. You're right

Yep, will do. You're right about them being resistant to moving onto the elementalist, but I'll push them harder. Death grip would definitely help. I'm also thinking about how to get the interrupts better. Because AS is part of my regular rotation, there are a lot of times when it's on CD when I need to interrupt. That's not that bad because I have HoJ, but when I need to interrupt twice and they're both on CD... :( I don't want to pull AS from the rotation. I'm definitely still thinking about it.

Here's a link to the elementalist-only DPS. Skarn mentioned that he thought the DPS dropped on the fourth elementalist, but I couldn't see a big plummet on DPS. A bit less, but not drastically less.

Aanvil
Looks like this might be one

Looks like this might be one of those things that changed during your years off. You have a dedicated interrupt spell - Rebuke. ;) Combined with AS and HJ, that gives you 3 different spells. And unlike HJ, when you Rebuke them, they'll follow you afterwards wherever you want to go.

sanzaru
LOL! OMG, I don't know

LOL! OMG, I don't know whether to laugh or be embarrassed. It's... um... like wearing the wrong necklace during a heroic boss encounter. It was a ret-only spell the last I knew. So... um... yeah. That's easy to fix.

/facepalm

Serelyn
Serelyn's picture
The Blast Furnace

The Blast Furnace

Foreman Feldspar, Security Guards, Bellows Operators, Firecallers, and Engineers now have up to 15% less health on Normal and Heroic difficulties.

If you don't get him this week, I'm gonna be sad!

sanzaru
Yeah, Rada and I were talking

Yeah, Rada and I were talking about how to get that last 5%. Funny, huh?

Stonestorm
The nerf was already in-game

The nerf was already in-game when we pulled on Monday - Changes are dated 4.13.15 so...

Skarn
Skarn's picture
Welp

Yeah looks like that was already Live Monday. We'll just pretend though, it'll make everyone excited and try hard because we know we can do in now. ;)

For Science!

Stonestorm
We can do it! HUZZAH!

We can do it! HUZZAH!

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