Valithria Dreamwalker Discussion

[Docsamson]

Since nobody else started one for this beast of a boss, figured I'd throw it up since we've sort of figured out how it goes

First off, the portals are your friend.  On 10man, you need one person taking every single portal hop, absolute minimum.  This person needs to jump into every single portal, every single time they're up, without fail.  The fight has a soft enrage at approximately 6 minutes, as the adds spawn faster and faster as the fight goes on longer.  Said healer will be your "portal jockey", and should be the one to call for Heroism.  Ideally, save Heroism for right when they get out of the portal after they have 20+ stacks of the healing buff.  Seth managed to get up to 34? or so stacks tonight, and we were just at the enrage.  If your 2 raid healers need mana, they can alternate portal hops as needed to regen.  In addition,  they should be focusing the raid but still tossing heals now and then on Dreamwalker.

Now, for inside the portals.  You have to "swim" around, so get ready to go up and think in 3d.  The "orbs" you have to swim through are actually at Dreamwalker's eye-level, and inside the dream she's flying, so the first step once you go in is swim up.  As the inside healers, your primary job isn't to heal the boss, it's to keep your orb stacks up at all times, and stack those suckers as high as you can.  For the entire fight, Seth was basically chain-casting Holy Light and had 0 mana issues.  So, figure out what spells give you the highest HPS, regardless of mana cost, and spam the living daylights out of them.  Beacon works on the boss as well, so feel free to Beacon her and go to town on the raid.  As a paladin, you can also LoH the boss for a big ol' crit near the end, but I think it caps out at approximately 250k or so due to mechanics unique to the spell.

For raid healing, watch your mana and the raid.  If you're running low on mana, communicate.  Let the raid know you're low, let the other healer know you're low, and you can probably dive into the next set of portals and mana up.  One string through the portals and you'll get between 4 and 6 stacks of the buff, which is 800-1200 mp5 for 45 seconds.  That's basically enough to bring you back to full mana, all for 15s of not-healing time, and you can spam to your heart's content once you get back out for the next 45 seconds.  Just make sure people know what you're doing so they know to pop survival cooldowns and healthstones, if necessary.  You could probably even get away with taking alternate portals as raid healers for the first half of the fight, as long as you're ready.  Mostly this was used as a "last resort", but once we refine it a bit more, it will probably be more common.

For DPSers, your first priority is Blazing Skeletons.  When you get the warning from BW/DBM for them, drop whatever you are doing and go full-burn on them.  They are more important to kill quickly than any other mob in the encounter, period.  Once the skeletons are down, kill any Archmages.  They leave behind nasty mana-draining void zones, and do an AoE frostbolt volley that snares the entire raid.  After these two are down you can work on suppressers(yes that's how they're spelled in-game, yes it's annoying), Abominations, and Blistering Zombies.  Abominations leave behind rot worms, so make sure you're ready to pick them up as a tank as they'll beeline for a healer.  Blistering Zombies explode, so melee clear out when they hit 10% or so.  Casters, don't go near them, the explosion deals a lot of physical damage and it hurts.  Combined with a well-timed frostbolt volley, the explosion will kill you.

As a caster DPS, don't worry about your mana.  This fight was terrible on my mana as an spriest, due to recasting DoTs constantly and not having clear opportunities to Shadowfiend because the mobs die so fast.  If necessary, you can communicated with your healers/raid, let them know to step it up, and take a portal and regain all your mana.  I had to do this once or twice, mostly because Shadowfiend is lame and Dispersion wasn't enough to keep me going.  Also, save your mana-restoring cooldowns for the end of the fight.  Once Dreamwalker hits 90% or so HP, you're going to need to step the DPS up bigtime, and if you go OOM your lost DPS is probably enough to let the adds pile up and wipe you.

Now, towards the end, it's gonna feel like a wipe.  Our kill felt like we were going to wipe, bigtime.  The adds are piling up, DPS can't kill them fast enough, and there's no way your raid healers can keep up.  When this happens, it's time to pop all your cooldowns and pray.  At 95%, your boss healers need at most 15-20 seconds more to top off Dreamwalker and finish the encounter, since their heals are now ridiculously large and are probably hitting for nearly half a mil each.  The first 5 waves of zombies were nothing, it's the last 3 that you need to hold on to the seat of your pants for.  If you look at Seth's healing log from the fight, his *average* Holy Light was hitting for nearly 70k.  His HPS average for the whole fight was 20k.  Towards the beginning it was an average 4-5k, towards the end it was nearly 80k.  The way his CDs lined up, he popped everything he had at the beginning of the fight, I believe, then again when he had 20 stacks or so of the buff.  Once he got 25, we blew Heroism, then he skipped the next portal due to the soft enrage, blew all his cooldowns, and spammed like crazy.  If you've got a Disc Priest in the raid, make sure they give someone who's healing Valithria Power Infusion.  The mana cost doesn't matter, but the haste is amazing.  Basically, any sort of healing buff you can pump into that one person, you do it.  They are the only person in the raid who will basically have 100% effective healing, due to Valithria not being able to be overhealed.

[Kothnok]

Thanks for starting the thread, Doc.

> The fight has a soft enrage at approximately 6 minutes, as the adds spawn faster and faster as the fight goes on longer.
We based this off our experiences last night. Whether or not the faster add spawns were because of a soft enrage timer or because we had managed to get Valithria healed up to a certain percent (80+) is not certain.  There came a point approx 6 min into the fight when the BigWigs timer for the next Blazing Skeleton was way off.  Since I was responsible for watching for them, marking them, and announcing it in /rw, I noticed that after 5min, I had to forget relying on BigWigs and instead scan either side to make sure one had not spawned.

As Doc mentioned, on the attempt where we managed to heal her to full, it felt like a wipe.  We had passed the point where soft enrage was taking place and we got 3 Blazing Skeletons in the same cooldown timer BigWigs had for when "the next one" should have been spawned.  If I was not keeping a careful eye out for them, we surely would have wiped.  Those guys are distinctive, but they came out fast around 6min and if they get off more than 2 or 3 casts, we'd be doomed.  Whomever is in charge of marking these particular adds needs to focus more on this task alone towards the end of the fight.  Once Valithria is healed fully, she stands up and wipes out all remaining adds.

One step I took as Blazing Skeleton announcer was to set up two macros.  I placed the EAST macro on one of my hotbars on the left end and the other on the right end.  I also had them mapped to Shift-A and Shift-F, respectively.  This allowed me to spot them early and just reflexively press the appropriate hotkeys for which side they spawned on.  While BigWigs will mark the skeleton eventually, I found that if we waited until BigWigs did so, it was usually just before it started casting Lay Waste and therefore a bit too late to respond fast enough.  Marking them early so people can get into range to destroy these things is a critical factor in this fight.  Also, make sure the person doing this job has Raid Assistant promotion so they can actually mark them with a skull.

Code  Named: <Blaz Select Expand

/target Blazing Skeleton
/script SetRaidTarget("target",8)
/rw Blazing Skeleton <<<< EAST <<
/incoming

Code  Named: Blaz> Select Expand

/target Blazing Skeleton
/script SetRaidTarget("target",8)
/rw Blazing Skeleton >> WEST >>>>
/incoming

The /target will allow you to easily start up dps asap.  I was ranged dps during this combat and I highly recommend having a member of the ranged dps be responsible for this role.  Preferably someone who isn't topping the chart anyway since you are spending much of your time watching out for these things instead of properly maximizing your abilities for high dps output later in the fight when the adds "just keep coming" and it becomes more critical to kill things quickly.  I added the /incoming to the macro because this also gives an audio cue in addition to the /rw, although I didn't hear it on some occasions as it was drowned out by combat noise.  It also give an emote line listing who you have targeted so raid chat should see the /rw line and the /incoming emote from you.  The 8 in SetRaidTarget corresponds to the Skull and that was chosen since BigWigs uses that marking for it and we wanted to keep it the same.

I do not know if anyone else used a macro for targeting the Blazing Skeleton.

We also tried to position the Aboms on top of the Suppressers (the geist-looking things channeling on the dragon to each side).  The reason for this was to AoE them all in place.  The Suppressers don't have much health and if you kill an Abom near there, you can AoE the worms that pop out at the same time as you AoE the Suppressers.

[Tony]

@Koth

I think that last part was key in our kill. Positioning the Aboms on top of the suppressors allowed me to maximize my cleave damage as a melee. Otherwise, I spent way too much time running from point a to point b (I soooo miss rocket boots for fights just like this). As soon as the worms popped, it was much faster to dps them down while hitting suppressors. What would have been even more effective in that case is to have a Hunter MD or a TotT the incoming mobs to the tanks standing near suppressors.

From a melee perspective, the hardest thing for me was aggro management. You want to blow shit up as fast as possible, but the tanks are trying to aggro everything in the room at the same time, so OMGNUKE hurts more than it helps. Give your tanks a few minutes to aggro, then start with the priority killing, single target unless there are worms or suppressors.

From a paladin perspective, BoPing and HoPing are pretty key here as well. Keeping the worms of the healers is pretty high on the priority list. Setting up clique with grid with a cleanse and a bop really help. I also seemed to be more effective seal/libram swapping during this fight. If a Blazing Skelly was up, Veng+Libram (str proc libram) worked great for a fast nuke. For the Aboms/Suppressors, Command/Libram (for divine storm damage) was cleaving for 24+k and they were dropping like Flies. I might even switch to Seal of Righteousness for the Skellie since they have a small health pool and drop withing 3 gcd's.

After looking at our log from that night, AOE is pretty high, and if I'm not mistaken, our kill is when we decided to focus more on killing the worms together. It seems that is a very important thing to do. My highest damage was done from Seal of Command. Pallies, if you dont have this, get it. You will thank me later.

Over all, this is my favorite fight so far. Placement, aggro management, burst, 500k holy lights etc... what's not to love?

[Kothnok]

> ...if I'm not mistaken, our kill is when we decided to focus more on killing the worms together.

Thank you.  I knew there was another point I wanted to make, but couldn't remember what it was.  On our final attempt, I made of point of asking Gren and Ella to AoE the worms to keep them off our healers since they complained of worms eating them up.  They weren't on our priority list and were basically being ignored by most dps, leaving it to random splash dmg and tanks until we made that change.

Our priority on kill order turned out to be:

Blazing Skeleton > Worms > Archmages > Suppressers / Aboms / Blistering Zombie

By positioning the Aboms near the Suppressers, Worms and Suppressers could be AoE'd.  Most likely Blistering Zombies were also in that mass kill zone, too.

Just thinking out loud...
I wonder if on the 25 man version, we can duplicate the situation in the back so that the same setup is used as 10, but mirror imaged on front and back.  It would mean 4 tanks and 2 ranged dps to mark the Blazing Skeletons, but I wonder if the extra tanks really need to be in "tank mode".  Maybe just tank gear and dps talents would suffice?  I would need a healer/tank perspective to know if such a plan is feasible.

[Sethrow]

As the poratal jockey there isn't much i can say about the healers outside keeping the raid up, which by the way you guys did an amazing job, but as the Val healer and portal healer, it's very basic. First off set up a macro for quick targeting on Val, mine was as basic as " /tar Val" this allowed me to get my target  right away when i came out of the partals, now i don't know why but i tryed verious methods to set it up for my Heal bott, but each time my heal bott would lose my "set focus" target so i had to make due with the macro which in turn worked out perfect. As you start the fight position yourself right at Val's head about 9yrd back from here because the green portals tend to spawn right about there, as the fight engages just start spaming your bigest healz back to back, as a pally i tryed to beacon the tanks as often as possible without losing my focus on healing the boss. Now at the begining your going to come close to running out of mana befor the first portals pop up but you should be ok and make sure you save your CD's till after you come out of the first set of portals this will allow you to maxamiz your healing due to 6stack of buffs, and by the time the CD's are back up you should be around 20stacks and you can blow them again to get thoe's 200K plus healz that time and it will help you to get Val from that 750K HP up to 900K mark. As far as movment  when you come out of the portals try to stay near the front of her head when your in the portals collecting the clouds they spawn fairly quick and if you head towards her tail while your in there collecting the clouds your'll find you lose alot of healing because you have to run all the way back towards her head to get the next portal. Oh and yes do not miss a portal because if the healing buff/stacks wear off you'll never make the enrage timer. Fairly simple fight for the portal jockey but it's important to get do it right and efficiant because if not the raid will die. By far my fav. fight so far and can't wait to attempt it on 25man.

[Air]

For kill priority that I wanted to try was:

- Melee -
1) Blazing Skeletons
2) Suppressors
3) Arch Mages
4) Aboms

- Range -
1) Blazing Skeletons
2) Blistering Zombies
3) Arch Mages
4) Aboms
5) Worms spawned from Aboms death.

Positioning of dps is a big factor to.  Being positioned in front of Dreamwalker, so dps don't need to move around to much.