Wednesday, December 31, 2008

Skadi Dodi, he kills mah Party


He causes trouble, he kills everybody.

Heroic Pinnacle Sucks. We got stuck at Skadi last night, 5-6 wipes on him, before we decided that we needed to exploit him to beat him.

Spoilers to Follow.

Let me give out the basics of the Skadi fight:

He flies up in the air and is only able to be targeted by harpoons which spawn on 1 mob, every other wave (so, 1 in 4 mobs) that spawn and run towards the party every 20 seconds or so. Once the harpoons hit him 6-8 times, he will land, and you have to fight him. What this means you need to go through 13-16 waves of additional mobs before you can get him to come down.

The gauntlet that spawns is 14 mobs + 2 more every 20 seconds. The harpoons that you need to reach are at the far end of the hallway, so you need to go through those 14 additional mobs as well.

What are the problems with this encounter?
1) As a tank, its impossible for me to get and hold aggro.
Thunderclap isn't good enough to keep aggro off the healer who's having to constantly heal me because I'm tanking 6 mobs at once (to try to make headway into this gauntlet). Here's how it went: I am tanking 4 mobs, 2 more adds come running up, 1 is a harpooner, they both aggro on the healer, I thunderclap, I get netted, the harpooner than stands 5 yards from me and attacks the healer.

2) To farm all the harpoons (without resetting) takes a minimum of 4 minutes of me taking damage and of DPSers DPSing constantly, not getting out of combat. Yeah. That means out of mana time is coming. That's before you even engage the 400k hp boss!
Math Warning

The heroic mobs have about 30k hps each, so, 14*30 + 16*30 (for the harpoons) = 30*30 = 900,000 hp. So you're asking your dps to do 1.3 million damage without going oom. Without your healer going oom. Your 3 dps. Crazy.

3) If you bring single target dpsers, they are all but useless. No offense to you Rogues and Elemental shaman out there, but I'd hate to try that without at least 2 aoe-ers, the mobs just wouldn't be dying quick enough at non-over geared dps levels.

A bit about our group: Boomkin, Mage, Rogue, Warrior (me) and a Priest healer. All the DPS were running 1200-1500 dps.

So, what do you do instead of running the gauntlet?

Well, you exploit it.

You farm the harpoons one run, then reset the boss. Then you run past where he spawns, to where the initial gauntlet mobs start out, and restart the event. Promptly tanking all 14 mobs at once, and aoeing them down. Then you just shoot the harpoons at the boss when he's in range, Killing the adds as best as you can, and wait for him to land.

Yeah. You kill the boss by resetting him.

After another couple unlucky wipes (he resisted taunt, and smooshed the healer) we ended up calling it a night.

We are heroic geared as a group, but that gauntlet is ridiculous. Mobs that constantly net, and don't allow a tank to get/hold aggro are insane. Especially when they are constantly spawning.

A boss that requires you to farm his gauntlet, then reset him, then run past him so you don't have to run the gauntlet (you just have to tank 12 mobs at once).... ridiculous.

1 comment:

neshura said...

Too bad you can't just buy harpoons off the AH. Be easier if you just went into the instance with a stack of them.