Void Reaver / Solarian learning experiences

Drumble · Post by **Drumble** » April 23rd, 2008, 7:10 am

Let me start off by saying GREAT JOB last night. Big morale booster to be 3/4 TK in just our second week there. In the interest of knowledge sharing and raid progression, here is another installment of my "learning experiences" posts. Please contribute your own experiences! What worked? What failed? What a blast! High Astromancer Solarian Stacking up was key to gathering the non-elites, seemed like the priests were going down pretty well too -- I didn't get a perspective as to whether people were doing their interrupts, but it appeared she didn't heal too much. The (obvious -- just ask Paul) key to this fight is to GET THE HELL OUT if you have the "bomb". No one is immune, she cast it on me while tanking. Just be aware that 24 raid members are going to let out a collective "aww damnit!" and you'll have to stand in the mush pot position next attempt. 20% = ez-mode, hit like a little girl Solarian's light circle was the one that was *directly* in the middle between the inner and outer rings. I think ... but for the most part, it's not like she runs at someone immediately. Pally tank would make this fight a breeeeeeeeze. Void Reaver I feel like we were a little lucky on this one considering the number of times I saw people standing STILL and getting HIT IN THE FACE with an arcane ball. Honestly. This fight seems designed for HoTs, WTB Myrdinn for VR. Omen didn't seem to be 100% accurate, there were times when I was 2nd or 3rd on the list and he still turned on me next. Must have been the pirate costume. (threatx2) I got to reckless execute!!! This was at the point where I'd gotten knocked back around 20%, and would never get back up the list ... I'm going to remember to back my biggest, slowest, most badass weapon to swap to if I'm ever in that position again. Trash HARD and ANNOYING. Requires in many situations AS MUCH CARE AS THE BOSS FIGHTS. Read that again - pay as much attention to trash as if we were fighting a boss. We wipe on the trash just as readily as we will wipe on the boss if someone stands in a bad position, if someone pulls threat, if someone does stupid things. This was a learning night, but we still had people doing stuff that they should have learned better about when raiding UBRS. Specific trash: Annoying hunters with all the dragonhawks --- that knockback is terrible, a misdirect pull would be ideal. If those hawks were on me, I wasn't able to threat on the handler at all. Annoying Devastators with the two demons/one human --- too bad we saved it for last, but misdirect pulls here are teh extreme awesomeness. In fact, we might just go ahead and start MD pulling most trash for safety sake. Annoying sheepables that keep getting unsheeped -- if you're a mage and have a sheeping target. Type /focus on it -- too many times we're calling "Rainbow is up", you need to embarrass us by having it sheeped right as we utter the words. This wasn't a huge problem last night, but it is occasionally a problem wherever we go and bears mention again. Banishes aren't as troublesome since you can't break them ... Annoying giant dragonhawks --- EVERYONE, NO EXCEPTIONS stacks on the tank. Ok .. just one exception, and that would be an OT standing at the perfect position behind the raid enough that no one gets knocked back. Please add your own learning experiences, comments, questions, etc to this thread.

Daghi · Post by **Daghi** » April 23rd, 2008, 9:40 am

I'd like to echo the great job last night, 2 shotting alar for our 2nd kill and getting 2 new bosses down is great. HYJAL INC. Anyway I've heard from a few people in BT that the trash in VR's room is some of the hardest trash in the game. Also I find the dragonhawk pulls to be extremely amusing, if we don't wipe on them that is, who doesn't live flying around the room the whole time? Solarian was a joke. Hah, i've had a harder time w/ Prince before. Calling out who had the bomb (even though people should know) seemed to be the best idea, especially for a first kill. I would say we need to be quicker on picking up the priests, there were a couple times where I saw them just standing there casting, but it's possible those were times where the tank had the bomb. and yeah this boss basically throws in the towel at 20%. VR was good. Last time I did it he targeted people before he shot the balls so the the mod would announce who they were coming towards, now he just kind of shoots them randomly and you have to actually pay attention, with all the massive bitching on the forums "void reaver is no longer loot reaver! zomg" he still seemed pretty easy, you just ALWAYS have to be watching. For ranged dps it's pretty easy, for healers i guess you'll have to pick someone to heal quickly, click your heal, look up, repeat and just like if you have the bomb, please stop casting and move when you see a ball coming toward you. you do 0 dps when you're dead.

Daghi · Post by **Daghi** » April 23rd, 2008, 9:40 am

ps. let's try vashj or kael next week for kicks.

draven · Post by **draven** » April 23rd, 2008, 10:45 am

just a few comments for melee: i think it worthwhile to mention again that melee can just stay in the middle on void reaver. the damage seemed easy enough to cos / heal / pot through. hooray for awesome healers

i wasn't paying attention to the priests at all on solarion, so i'm not sure if it would have been more useful for me to be on one of them or not? it seemed we had them covered pretty well. cos does indeed work on wrath. finally, i was pretty much useless on al'ar. skilling up throw on phase one was kinda entertaining, as by the time the adds were on the ground they were almost dead and i had to run away (hooray for awesome ranged

). therefore most of my time was spent running around in circles, although i suppose i could try going part of the way up the ramp with the tanks to see how that goes. any suggestions from someone who has more experience with the fight?
*must* watch threat on phase 2. i pulled aggro fairly easily between one of the melts and was rapidly introduced to the ground.
however, from that perspective it looked like on at least one occasion the tanks were caught up in a flame patch and mass confusion ensued, so it may be useful to designate one person who can actually see what's going on to call them out if / when it happens again, sorta like the prince fight. overall, excellent job by everyone! go team

Rockmunster · Post by **Rockmunster** » April 23rd, 2008, 10:48 am

Definitely agree with you that having a tankadin will help loads on not only Solarin, but also a lot of that annoying trash. I probably could have hacked it last night, but ideally there are a few more things i need to be completely ready to roll into into t5 and beyond content. That being said, I don't see any reason why I can't be ready to roll by next week, since i'm working pretty hard to get what I need. Can't wait to help make that place a breeze.

Tsuni · Post by **Tsuni** » April 23rd, 2008, 1:59 pm

Def a good run. And everyone picked up on stuff fast. It's really cool that we are now a 5/6, 3/4 guild, and our void reaver kill on wowjutsu will be legit.

I read on the raid forums a few weeks back that the Void Reaver balls were kinda glitchy in there animations, and there were a few times where i was looking up, and a ball would shoot off some random direction and yet I'd get hit. I wouldn't be surprised if others had this problem too at times. Seemed the best way for me to handle this was if i was healing myself to run out first even if i didn't see one coming my way, and then heal far back. (First attempt i got hit by one, started healing myself back up and another one hit me right after that didn't match the animation.)

Still really cool we did Loot Reaver the hard way. Although having said all that, in the new patch notes " * Void Reaver's Arcane orbs now generate combat log entries."

So he'll be easier again after the 2.4.2 hits live.

mahonri · Post by **mahonri** » April 23rd, 2008, 3:23 pm

I'm not so sure what happened to me that last time... My way of dealing with the balls was to keep an eye to the sky, and when there was one headed toward me I always had plenty of time to turn and blink out toward the wall. The balls never hit more than halfway up the "ramp", until the time I died a foot from the outer wall. I guess I will learn.

Benvolo · Post by **Benvolo** » April 23rd, 2008, 8:46 pm

Yeah I found out the hard way to keep my camera pointed up. Just as long as everyone stays spread out, there is no reason to get hit by the balls. Its basically like gruul, but on VR you know where the thing is going to land. So I guess that makes Gruul harder than VR. So, don't die. Its nice to get to content now that I won't grossly outgear. Woot for progression.

Ofie · Post by **Ofie** » April 24th, 2008, 8:29 pm

I was only there for some of the trash before VR and the actual downing, so I don't have a ton of input, but I did have some issues healing VR. The arcane balls are first of all really obnoxious, obviously. The problem being a healadin there is that we have no HoTs or insta-heals besides Holy Shock, so if there's a ball coming at me and I'm 3/4 done casting a Holy Light that I think Chuunks or someone else really needs, I'm gonna take it to the face. I put on my PvP gear and found that I can take 3 of the balls before it's a huge problem for me. The silence is super annoying, but occasionally I would hit someone with a 7k+ Holy Light before I got pwned with the silence, therefore making it worth it (to me at least). I know Tsuni was telling me that I should probably just jet around if I see it coming, even if I'm in the middle of a heal, and let other people deal with it. If that's how everyone wants it, of course I'm gonna do it, but if we lose some healers and I'm still up, I don't see that working too well. Having to stay stationary for all heals is really annoying. I got even more annoyed with it after tooling around with a resto druid on the arena realm. OP inc. Also, I found this really cool mod the other day where, if our other healers have it, it will tell you who is healing your target and what they're healing them with, and give you a visual representation via a colored bar of what their health is now, what it will be when the other person is done casting, and then what it would be if you start casting one of your healing spells. I think if we all had that it could improve efficiency of the heals somewhat, because I was overhealing a ton. When people start dropping and I pop a big heal, someone else did it ahead of me, and it goes off ahead of me, and then I heal them with a 5k overheal for no reason. Meanwhile, other people who taking arcane balls in the face are dropping and not getting heals because someone like me is dumb enough to heal someone who's already taken care of. Sorry, that was really long-winded.