Lord Rhyolith

[adianar Profile]

OK. 25 man reg we downed him last night, but not without a fair amount of pain. I see that the damage debuff stacks on the adds when we stomp dormant volcanoes, but I'm a bit confused with the mechanic. once you stomp an active one and our debuff gets 10 stacks removed, does that mechanic also remove the fire add "buff" the dormant volcanoes provide? We spent a long time on this guy and were consistently running the healers out of mana closing in on p2. I believe we're missing something here which is making it harder than it should be.

Some have said this to be the easiest boss of the first three. The steering is being addressed effectively, but we're having a helluva time with the outgoing damage to keep all parties up.

We saw a video last night where the ranged/heals stacked and moved together which also drew the spawned adds to that group where aoe was waiting for them. This was the only way we were able to get near p2 in 25's.

Anyone see any mistaken concepts here?

Thanks,
Soon-to-be-fire-kitty

[Konungr Profile]

When Rhyolith crushes a Dormant volcano, he gains the stacking 2% extra damage debuff. When he uses his stomp that creates adds and volcanos the stack is removed and "presumably" applied to the adds.

[adianar Profile]

OK. My question stems from that point forward. How do we clear those stacks from the adds or do we? basically, the more dormant volcanoes we stomp, the higher it gets, but can we clear that 2% buff on the fire adds ever?

It seems to be a race of stomping active volcanoes fast enough that your personal debuff stacks don't get too high. Including the dormants gets his armor off faster, but it also ramps up the outgoing damage. Is there a way to counteract that second part?

Adi

[Konungr Profile]

No, Dormants do not get the armor off faster, that's why there is a penalty for stepping on them.

[Tinderhoof Profile]

I spent a good amount of time on the heroic version of this fight (very painful). I observed a few things.
1. Jumping for stomp does not do a single thing. The stomp can miss which will give 0 damage and do no knock back, but jumping does not help this at all.
2. Our bleeds can be a bit on the OP side when it comes to driving. Not really a good thing. With about 45% of our damage coming from bleeds a 2 ferals swapping from one foot to the other can cause a lot of stearing issues (IE he don't turn). Going to try and use us on adds tonight and see if that stablizes driving.

[Sonsys Profile]

I spent a good amount of time on the heroic version of this fight (very painful). I observed a few things.
1. Jumping for stomp does not do a single thing. The stomp can miss which will give 0 damage and do no knock back, but jumping does not help this at all.
2. Our bleeds can be a bit on the OP side when it comes to driving. Not really a good thing. With about 45% of our damage coming from bleeds a 2 ferals swapping from one foot to the other can cause a lot of stearing issues (IE he don't turn). Going to try and use us on adds tonight and see if that stablizes driving.

25man HC

Spent a good few hours last night having the same issues Tinderhoof - Once I was able to maximise bleeds on a single foot. The boss was a pain to turn even with 4 or 5 melee switching specifically on one foot. The meter had some spikes moving around giving us a hard time till they dropped off.

After I stopped bleeding up the legs...I lost all dmg....but the boss was much easier to manover around.

Is it purely down to the bleed or just the scale of the dmg required in heroic mode to get the boss moving??

Also - how did it go on the adds for you? Im guessing swipe spam caused some issues with agro on new spawns.

Currently our "driving" team is.... 1x feral 2x ret 1x warrior 2x rogue 1x DK

Think it would be an advantage to switch out the higher DoT class' for Arc mages/hunters?

[Qbear Profile]

Like most guilds we use melee on the legs; however, we also stick our arcane mages on them as well.

Basically we always start on the left leg and from there when we need to straighten the boss out we have melee with low ramp up times switch right with the arcane mages. I (being high ramp up time) pool energy till I see his direction bar start to push right, usually meaning it's safe for me to open hard back on left leg. For hard switches we all switch; however, with the added arcane burst any melee dots left on a leg don't leave a noticeable effect.

As for the adds I assume you mean the ones that add stacks. Basically our range have these low on their prio list. Killing everything else on the field is so much more important, allowing him to gain more armor stacks isn't going to mean raid wipe as long as you can push him before superheated before pushing p2.

That is of course how we handle it, hope it's of some use.

Edit: reading what I wrote I don't think I made it clear enough that we have a left leg crew and a right leg crew for when boss needs to go straight. We all switch for hard turns. In hard turn moments bleeds don't seem to be an issue with melee plus arcane mages.

[Sonsys Profile]

Cheers for the reply Qbear!

We have 3 arc mages... Overkill as always 1 of them is on the large spark add just putting in the numbers on that the rest im guessing are just Arc Explosion everything else that spawns. Ill propose this to the RL and see what he thinks.

Once again - Cheers for the help!

[Tinderhoof Profile]

Q, by adds I was talking about the Fragments not the ooze. I mean we try and drag the frags over ooze when we can get 3-4 of them, but they are just targets of oppertunity.

We tried for 4 more hours on Rhyolith with very poor results. Steering seemed crazy bugged. In 2 cases we needed to go from hard right to hard left. The whole melee group (8 of us) swapped to the left leg. No movment of the bar, then we had ranged get on the left leg, bar went down to only 1 cube but still turning right. We had folks blow damage cooldowns and he got to middle but kept trying to add to the right side of the scale. Ended up drinking lava. That was pretty much our who night if the spark tank didn't die first. Pretty much hate everything about this fight.

Just to note he was on the far side of the island, so we had a good 20 seconds straight of going all out on the left leg with out him turning at all. We also had add ons to check peoples targets to make sure people were not being slow. Even still fully dps on a leg and having him not turn is pretty maddening. Glad we arn't the only ones having this issue. The wow forums are filled with rage threads on this.

[Sonsys Profile]

Ah, Again cheers for the advise Tinderhoof.

Ill have to pass this on my RL and maybe we will go Beth before Rhyolith due to the randomness of the stearing in heroic mode.

[Dysheki Profile]

Not sure, we haven't experienced too much of an issue with steering. It can be frustrating at times, but overall isn't terribly unresponsive. I even rip often. /shrug

The biggest part of the fight is getting the right amount of dps to the right targets. Get too many people focused on adds and you might not have the dps to the legs and he'll be superheated causing a wipe. Get too many people focused on the legs and you might get overrun with adds or allow his stack to get too high from the oozes reaching him/people could die from the spark/etc. You just need to find the sweet spot for your raid.

As the driver for my raid (suicidal) it's pretty smooth in how we operate now compared with originally - especially after the nerf where he will prioritize activating volcanoes in front of him. Though I will still sometimes call a wipe if a screwy chain of events occur and they are activated in spots that will take too long to hit.

Just need to put time into it and tighten up your strat. It really feels awkward and frustrating at times, but you'll make little changes here and there and you will finally make it over the hump. There was no 'aha!' moment for us, just a series of small changes. Good luck.

[Sonsys Profile]

Qbear your a legend! The Arc mage on the legs when tight turns are required worked like a charm.

No kill for us yet - But the "driving" of the boss just because seriously easy!
Even with DoT's and all kinds of random leg nukeing the 1 Arc mage could pretty much turn the boss on a 1g coin!

Hopefully we get the kill tonight... The cloak has to drop some time right

[mekell Profile]

My guild just downed this guy on 10N for the first time, I am a bit late to the party i guess, but here's my observations:

We used 1 tank, 3 healers, and rest dps.

We found that avoiding dormants was just not worth it. trying to avoid them when walking towards an active caused more problems than it solved so we would walk over dormant volcanos to get to a active, didnt seem to make much of a difference. He appeared to get the buffs regardless of which type he stepped on, but its been outlined here and in online strats that there is a penalty for stepping on dormant volcanos, but we generally ignored it. The buffs appear to be consumed when he uses a new ability like stomp or activate volcano but we weren't certain on this either and again, generally just ignored it in 10N. The big thing is to get actives down asap, because that debuff they stack up hurts especialy if there is more than one active up at a time.

We generally always turned one direction to simplify steering (Though steering didnt seem difficult, atleast after all the hotfixes, etc). We put 2 melee on the feet, our DK on the little adds and our paladin tank and the rest of the ranged on the big add (assuming little adds were dead). The steering control person would call out on vent if we needed a "hard" left or right (in the event we needed to turn a different direction), at which all dps would momentarily switch to the appropriate leg. Since we were generally always turning the same direction, free dps could always easily know which leg to hit (exception being when called out on vent)

Once we got all his armor stacks off, we were at about 40% at which point we ignored the big adds and burned the boss to 25% (p2). At the start of p2, all adds despawn and its just a burn phase. He dies very quickly in this phase.

[Grenache Profile Website]

Hi guys, we are working on H25 Ryolith (got to 7%) but we seem to be having enormous probs with people's health as we transition to P2. i.e no one is on 100% health prior to the first stomp. I watched Qbear's vid and they blow through P2 quite well, with health pools very solid early on.

Apart from telling our healers to "heal more!", is it likely to be just poor steering that is causing our stacks to get too high, making the overall damage too hard to negate? Around 40% we Bloodlust and spin him in circles on the one leg before the adds explode.

[Qbear Profile]

I'd need a little more information, the main reason my raid groups health was so stable is we managed to push him into phase 2 with zero stacks of super heated.

This made it so with just a boomkin/feral tranq the raid was more or less topped for the first stomp which of course we just rotated raid cds on each stomp till he died or we died.

Basically it all comes down to pushing with low stacks of volcano debuff and without the boss having superheated stacks yet.

[Grenache Profile Website]

We have quite good dps in our raid normally, but most of our attempts that got to P2 ended around 5:40-5:55 range, which suggests he got superheated just prior to the phase transition which accounts for the lower health at that time. I guess the only solution for that is more leg dps. Is there a way for me on WoL to see how many Eruption stacks people got due to poor driving?

[Qbear Profile]

Sadly as far as I know WoL will only show you the stacks you've revived through out the entire encounter.

I know when we were progressing we would wait until 430ish on the boss fight time and pop lust to make sure we pushed the boss with plenty of time to make it with 0 to 1 superheated stack.

So if your not already doing that I'd suggest it!

::edit:: Actually if you go to buff gained look at eruption and hit the # sign next to it you'll be able to see how many stacks and when per player.

[Tinderhoof Profile]

Something else we did to try and boost DPS to get to P2 faster was for one of our ferals to taunt the final spark shift to travel form and then kit him around the edge. That enables the dps that would normally need to kill it to go full out on the legs. Hope that helps.