More raiding fun, Plague Quarter

Okay, so the weekend before last was pretty much the same as I've already discussed, VoA, Sarth and Arachnid. We did decide to go poke Noth the Plaguebringer in Plague quarter and took him down easy so when this weekend rolled around it was decided we'd go straight to Plague quarter and see how we get on.

Heading to Noth there are some annoying trash gargoyles. One or two fly around and so are targettable before you get close, but there are some on the stairs which only activate when you get close to them. The key thing about these is that with about 40% of their health left they make an odd sound which gives a warning and you've got 6 seconds to kill them before they completely regain all health. It's best to have two tanks for this, one on each of the two gargoyles either side of the stairs. Tank and kill one while the other is off tanked, then switch and burn down. Shouldn't be too bad but it did surprise us the first time we got to them.

Head down the stairs and you're at Noth. Noth is an easy fight really. You pull him, drag him to a decent spot (we use the corner where there are no skeleton piles, not sure it makes a difference or not. Oh, and just a point to remember, make sure everyone has come inside the doorway or people will get locked out of the encounter. Every now and then Noth teleports to an upper balcony and you need to deal with waves of skeletons. These guys aren't too tough, but one type does AoE so if you're melee heavy your healers will need to be aware. To be honest the damage from them didn't seem to be too high. Noth also does a curse causing AoE damage, which doesn't seem to do a lot of damage but it's advised that dps moves away when they get it to reduce stress on the healers. Our pally healer has said he finds it no problem to heal through this encounter.

Usually Noth goes down by the third teleport, and he does have an ability which acts like an enrage timer which means you do need to try to get him down as quickly as possible.

With Noth dead it was easy to pull through all the next trash on the way to Heigan. The trash here seemed exceptionally easy, not many hp and no abilities we noticed, though maybe we just killed them quickly enough that they never got to use them. Heigan is famous (or should that be infamous?) for the safety dance. Well worth watching it at tankspot because it really helps to see it before you get to him, though I'll do my best to describe it here.

Again get everyone inside the doorway to make sure that when the event starts you get everyone involved. As soon as the tank pulls Heigan everyone can start dps, ranged and healers need to go and stand on the platform he walks around when you initially enter the room. The tank must be able to see the side of the room opposite because fairly quickly green fire is going to shoot up from the floor behind Heigan. When that happens the tank must drag Heigan through to the area where the fire came up. Tank him a bit more while still watching ahead and soon more green fire will erupt upwards and again he needs to be moved. The green fire was doing about 6k damage to me every time I made a mistake, which with 35k raid buffed isn't too bad but it's nasty on the melee dps.

There are four sections that he needs to be dragged to, then turn and take him back the opposite way. When you reach section 2 again he will teleport to his original platform, and everyone needs to move to section 1, because this is where the fun starts. The pattern of the fire from the floor is the same, but the speed is greatly increased, basically you run, stop for about a second then run again, all the way across the room, back then across another section before Heigan teleports back to the party. Tank tags him, takes him back to section 1 and slowly moves him across the room.

It's fun, but difficult. If you're the main tank you need to move him to certain spots, if you're dps you need to move when the tank moves, not when Heigan does, as he'll stand there and cast. This will almost certainly take you a few goes to master, but it's the key to the fight, as Heigan's general damage output is fairly low. The one other ability you need to watch out for is when he puts an effect on anyone up to 30 yards away making spells take 3 seconds to cast. This can seriously stress your healers.

We failed mostly on the speed phase, and mostly because our priest was dying a lot. Once he managed to get it through we managed to down Heigan and get the Safety Dance achievement, which you get for everyone surviving the fight.

Much whooping and hollering at another boss down and we moved on through to Loatheb. The involves running through a room with lots of bugs, which can be aoed down. It's best not to stop much before you get to the end of the room as there are eyestalks which can be dangers, though I barely noticed anything they did.

Loatheb requires your healers to be on their toes and your dps to follow orders. He has a tonne of hit points, something like 10 million in the 10 man version. He doesn't hit too hard, but he does stack raid wide dots which get progressively worse and the hard bit for your healers is that they can only heal for 3 seconds in every 20. So they need to watch for the aura that stops healing going off and time their heals accordingly. Deadly Boss Mobs makes this a lot easier, as you get a bar which shows you how many seconds you have left to heal in. If your healers work well through this, that will never be a problem, even if it sounds bad.

The key for the dps comes in the form of spores. These spawn from certain points around the room at 30 second intervals and give a buff which increases crit chance by 50% but reduces threat by 100%. So you really don't want your tank getting this or he's going to have a tough time holding aggro. As the bear tank wasn't really needed for this fight he changed to cat and whenever a spore appeared it was his job to get the melee group to move to him to get the buff while I moved Loathed away from the spores to avoid getting the 100% threat loss. He was also responsible for dragging one to the ranged group to help them get the 50% crit chance. Basically you need your melee and ranged all critting as much as possible to burn Loatheb's health pool down before his dots wipe everyone. It was easy to be honest, he lasted something like 3 minutes and the healers never had a problem. Grats to the druid for the t7 shoulder token he dropped.

A good night all round, two new bosses down and a quarter we're sure we can soon stick on farm status.