Earth, Wind, & Fire

[Kulldam]

Notes on Earth, Wind, & Fire:

To simplify things, rather than refer to the bosses by name, I'll refer to them by their sub-name/elemental type. Koralon is Flame, Emalon is Storm, and Archavon is Stone.

A few facts to help us with this fight:

• Stone is the only Watcher with an enrage timer, of 5-minutes.
• Storm has no set enrage timer, but due to the mechanic of a random add growing until explosion, we must have enough DPS on Storm at all times to kill the add before it explodes.
• http://www.wowhead.com/?spell=64217 is cast on the Storm add once every 2 seconds for 24 seconds, and at 12 stacks, causes http://www.wowhead.com/?spell=64219, which deals 240% damage listed since the add has a huge damage increase buff by that point.
• Both Flame and Stone are not leashed and can be freely pulled to any portion of the VoA zone.
• Deadliest ability is by far Flame's http://www.wowhead.com/?spell=66725 as the fight goes on and his http://www.wowhead.com/?spell=66721 stacks higher and higher. Fire resist on tanks will help if we can manage it.
• Due to the unlimited range of http://www.wowhead.com/?spell=66665, DPS attacking Storm must run out when Storm uses http://www.wowhead.com/?spell=64216, or we risk both hitting same time and killing someone.

Strategy

We have two options of how to start the fight, but no matter what, the final boss has to be Storm, so ignore him for now.

Setup

Fairly obvious. Three tanks and three healers, just as we did for the three tree dudes in Freya's room.

Since Khrash and I have a gear advantage and need Khrash's Fire Resistance aura at all times, I'll tank Flame with Khrash backup and soaking Fist Damage.

The fight will start with all 10 raid members just outside of Stone's room. To begin, Rofl will be sent down the hall toward Flame with a babysitter healer and use a summoned Ghoul to agro Flame at maximum range and run him back to the raid's location in Stone's room. Obviously we could engage Flame as normal and kite him back mid-fight, but we'll lose much more DPS trying to damage him on the move than we would just spending the extra 10 seconds pulling him to us where we can stay still.

Once Flame reaches 15-18%, and Fists is not about to come off cooldown, Khrash will agro and start tanking Stone and we'll move both Flame and Stone to the back of Stone's room on top of each other.

DPS can then take this opportunity to use any cleave attacks on both Flame and Stone while DPSing Stone. Random cleave attacks (Divine Storm, Blade Flurry, etc.) should get Flame down to 10% or so by the time we get Stone to 10%.

Now, normally when fighting Stone, we'd stack up the raid so he doesn't use his hop and cloud attack, but with Flame in the mix, we cannot afford to have so many people stacked up in melee range as the fire patches from Flame will be too frequent and hard to avoid.

Therefore, when Stone jumps at someone and drops a cloud, all ranged/healers must be extremely fast in reacting and moving away, as taking ticks from the http://www.wowhead.com/?spell=58965 just after http://www.wowhead.com/?spell=58963 could combine with Flame's http://www.wowhead.com/?spell=66665 to kill someone off quickly.

Once Stone reaches 10-12%, all DPS, Rofldat (who is tank geared/specced), and Huggey (who is Resto geared/specced) break off and head to Storm's room. Once the other 6 people leave, if not beforehand, we'll need assigned healers so Wild healing me and Kheelan healing Khrash. At this point, we'll begin cooldown rotations between Khrash and myself for most http://www.wowhead.com/?spell=66725 casts. Much more detail on how our 4-man team will deal with this in the follow-up post.

Meanwhile, Rofl will engage Storm as normal and make sure to keep AE threat high so adds get on him right away. Just like a normal Storm kill, Rofl tanks him in the back of the room and all ranged/healers spread as best as possible in semi-circle out of AE range. Ideally, Huggey in the center and Kil and Ugra off to either side of him, all at or near max range. Melee DPS should also avoid standing on top of each other (triangle formation since we'll only have Kinzie, Thawfore, and Rofl in melee range at this point).

DPS must be very quick to announce in Vent and target/attack the Tempest Minion that gets buffed, as again, it must die within 24 seconds or we face near certain wipe or at least achievement failure. The minion's do not change names so /target macro will not work. Instead, use nameplates and click/cycle through targets looking for the raid icon skull (auto-assigned by DBM).

Also, because Flame's AE attack has unlimited range, flame patches WILL still appear underneath the 6 people attacking Storm throughout the fight, so as mentioned, formation by spreading out is key and watching your own feet for patches is required. Thawfore, once this 6-man team breaks off, should throw up Fire Resistance Aura to help mitigate Flame's AE while you guys kill Storm. The AE itself will hit for upwards of 8k near the end of the fight, and if people are slow about patches, even more from flame ticks, so FR aura will help that.

At this point both Flame and Stone will be around 5-8% health and we just need to communicate how low Storm is getting and whether to hold DPS on either end. Remember, the achievement allows us sixty seconds from the moment the first Watcher dies until the final one dies to get credit, so that is a great deal of time in the scheme of things.

That said, the key thing to remember is we must be certain we will get all three down once we commit to killing one, since we have no recourse of trying over once one of them dies (except waiting till the next week obviously).

Ultimately, this fight is going to come down to our DPS numbers and surviving Flame's damage output late into the fight. The total health pool for all three Watchers is 9.27m, which means if we were to engage all three Watchers simultaneously, we'd have to deal 30,900 Raid DPS from start to finish, which assuming 2k DPS per tank, is 6225 DPS per DPS player. Obviously that's not likely, but luckily this strategy doesn't require us to engage all three simultaneously so we only have to start our 5 minute timer from the moment we engage Stone.

Therefore, the real DPS race is from the moment we engage Stone to the time we kill Storm, which is a combined health pool of 5.09m, which means required 16,967 Raid DPS. Now, we'll also have to chop off about 20 seconds for travel time from Stone's room for the 6-man Storm team to reach Storm and start rotations, so our 5 min timer is really about 4:40, which increases required Raid DPS to 18,179. Since two of the tanks won't be doing damage to Storm at all, and only really two tanks will do damage to Stone, we'll assume halved tank DPS for one tank and full DPS for one tank (so 3k total), which means 15,179 DPS for our 4 DPS which is 3795 DPS, a *very* easy goal for all four to reach.

The real problem is how high Flame's http://www.wowhead.com/?spell=66721 will be stacked at this point. Based on our most recent kill, Kilwenn, Ugra, Kinzie, and Thaw are all hovering around 5k DPS (slightly more for some) on Flame, so we can assume about 25,000 from our 4 DPS and another 5.5k from our three tanks plus misc Moonfires/nukes from Healers while blasting Flame. At 30,500 Raid DPS, we can assume Flame will take us 117 seconds to get to 15% (4,180,000 * 0.85 / 30,500). Flame stacks his http://www.wowhead.com/?spell=66721 every 20 seconds, so assume six stacks by the time we engage Stone, and by the time we're ready to kill Storm, the stack could be as high as 18-20, which obviously means we must assume eventually Flame's damage will be doubled. Again, next post mentions handling this damage in more detail.

[Kulldam]

Dealing with Meteor Fists

The best bet for our success is to plan ahead and utilize Fire Resistance, similar to when we first began doing Hodir, to ensure the tank's survival. Since http://www.wowhead.com/?spell=66725 is split between the tank and the next closest target within 10 yards, Khrash and I will be on top of or close to each other the entire fight so no one else is at risk for taking these hits.

To increase our Fire Resistance, I've come up with a list of the easiest methods.

Fire Resistance Methods for Khrash/Kull:

• http://www.wowhead.com/?spell=48947 = 130 FR
• [item=30769]Inferno Tempered Chestguard[/item] = 60 FR
• [item=30766]Inferno Tempered Leggings[/item] = 55 FR (and can take 20 FR leg enchant above)
• [item=44939]Lesser Flask of Resistance[/item] = 50 FR (90 for Khrash)
• [item=44141]Arcanum of the Flame's Soul[/item] = 25 FR
• [item=11644]Lesser Arcanum of Resilience[/item] = 20 FR
• [item=38969]Scroll of Enchant Cloak - Superior Fire Resistance[/item] = 20 FR
• [item=49487]Purified Onyxia Blood Talisman[/item] = 15 FR

Total: 375 FR (415 for Khrash)

Khrash and I will need to farm up 60 Badge of Justice (depending how many we have already if any) to grab the two pieces, so if anyone is willing to help us run some 5-mans or Kara during an off-night in the near future that'd be great. Khrash, since we'll be losing some of our normal gear, it's important to check what your defense will be with this FR set so we remain uncrittable.

If we can reach this level of FR (360+), now that the resistance tables work by factors of 10%, we will always resist at least 30% of the Fire Damage from Meteor Fists. Moreover, the average resistance value will be 40% for me and due to Mixology bonus, close to 45% for Khrash.

This will obviously help a great deal in mitigating Meteor Fists damage, but once we get late into the fight, we're going to have to plan on using cooldown rotations such that one tank is always using a CD and the other is getting the majority of the heals from Khee/Wild.

Fists is once every 45 seconds, and we're assuming a maximum fight time of 400 seconds (6.67 minutes) before we win or must wipe. This gives us a Fists timer table of:

Fist #	Time
1	0:45
2	1:30
3	2:15
4	3:00
5	3:45
6	4:30
7	5:15
8	6:00

Therefore, counting backwards, our best bet for cooldown usage is probably:

Fist #	Time	Cooldown
1	0:45	Khrash Divine Protection
2	1:30	Nothing
3	2:15	Khrash Divine Protection
4	3:00	Kull Shield Wall
5	3:45	Khrash Divine Protection
6	4:30	Kull Last Stand + Trinkets
7	5:15	Khrash Divine Protection
8	6:00	Kull Shield Wall

In the above case, we could swap the order so the final F8 uses Khrash's Divine Protection, but since he's covered by Argent Defender, it's probably best to use my 40% reduction and heal Khrash with AD as his backup than to use Khrash's 50% and heal Kull with no backup on me.

We know from previous logs that Meteor Fists deals about 15,250 damage to each of the two target before resists and before any http://www.wowhead.com/?spell=66721 stacks. Therefore, with our resist sets, we can always assume 30% reduction, so by the end of the fight with 18 stacks of http://www.wowhead.com/?spell=66721 at most, Meteor Fists will deal 30,500 damage before resists, but reducing that by 30% means a maximum hit of 20,280. Based on this math, we can calculate exactly how hard each Fist will hit in our above table:

Fist #	Time	Cooldown	Max Hit on Khrash	Max Hit on Kull	Avg Hit on Khrash	Avg Hit on Kull
1	0:45	Khrash Divine Protection	3,355	11,742	839	10,065
2	1:30	Nothing	13,343	13,343	10,484	11,438
3	2:15	Khrash Divine Protection	4,117	14,411	1,029	12,353
4	3:00	Kull Shield Wall	15,478	6,633	12,162	4,423
5	3:45	Khrash Divine Protection	4,727	16,546	1,182	14,183
6	4:30	Kull Last Stand + Trinket	18,147	18,147	14,259	15,555
7	5:15	Khrash Divine Protection	5,490	19,215	1,373	16,470
8	6:00	Kull Shield Wall	20,282	8,692	15,936	5,795

Obviously a string of poor avoidance is dangerous anywhere along the way, but with the above cooldown method, the only true danger is Fist #6 where we have no actual mitigation cooldowns. I'll have Last Stand plus my avoidance trinket up and Enraged Regen to help heal, but just planning on spam heals from both Druids is required (at this point in the fight, it's likely the rest of the raid will be at or moving to Storm already so just the 4-man team is around).

Lastly, once the 6-man Storm team breaks away, Wild and Kheelan should both move into melee range or just outside it in a triangle formation similar to how melee often setup. This will prevent Stone from leaping or dropping anymore clouds which will make handling things easier for the 4 of us.

Anyway, I know it's a lot of shit to worry about and manage, but this entire thing seems very much in our sights so we'll be looking to go for it in the next couple weeks.

[Khrash]

OBTAINED[*][item=30769]Inferno Tempered Chestguard[/item] = 60 FR
OBTAINED[*][item=30766]Inferno Tempered Leggings[/item] = 55 FR (and can take 20 FR leg enchant above)
OBTAINED[*][item=44939]Lesser Flask of Resistance[/item] = 50 FR (90 for Khrash)
OBTAINED[*][item=44141]Arcanum of the Flame's Soul[/item] = 25 FR
OBTAINED[*][item=11644]Lesser Arcanum of Resilience[/item] = 20 FR
OBTAINED[*][item=38969]Scroll of Enchant Cloak - Superior Fire Resistance[/item] = 20 FR
OBTAINED[*][item=49487]Purified Onyxia Blood Talisman[/item] = 15 FR

[Rofldat]

Personally, I think having someone that can block would be better on Storm, since that negate a lot of damage from the adds.
(Not to say it's impossible to do, but having Fire's AoE in the mix, there's a chance I'll get hit by all 5 AND that at once, which most likely will kill me before the healer can react)

But since Khrash is the one with fire aura, unless Ugra take a healing spot instead of Huggey and use fire res totem(actually, why don't we use Ugra to heal more often? http://www.wowhead.com/?spell=16240 would helps a bit), Kull will have to do it.

Which would become
Stone - Rofl
Fire - Khrash
Storm - Kull

Because I can use Stoneskin runeforge, I have an easier time staying at def-cap even with fire-res set.

EDIT: Also, I checked AH earlier today, if you don't mind the pain of searching, an "of Fire Protection" green at high level will offer more fire res than the lv 70 epic

[Kulldam]

So after our experiences with various strategies on this the past few days, I'm wondering if we're not approaching the fight in the wrong way.

I say this because of one simple fact: When we wipe, 95% of the time it has been due to a death from Koralon -- either his Breath, or Archavon's Stomp in conjunction, or simply too much Fist damage late into the fight.

Now, to this point, except for a minor change in pulling strategies, we've approached the fight in the most logical order: Koralon > Archavon > Emalon. The reason for this order is simple: Archavon & Emalon have enrage timers (5 and 6 minutes, respectively), whereas Koralon does not have a hard enrage.

Consequently, we wanted the most amount of time available before enrage in which to down all three bosses.

That said, after experiencing the issues with Koralon later in the fight, I am questioning whether our entire kill order could not be improved a great deal.

First, consider that, because the achievement gives us a 60 second window in which to kill all three Watchers, the reality is we can kill Archavon at 4:55 and still have 60 seconds to finish off the other two Watchers. Or, we can kill Emalon, who has an extra 60 seconds on Enrage, in 5:55 and have another 60 seconds to finish the other two.

Second, as mentioned, consider that the only true risk in this fight comes from Koralon's raid-wide attacks and tank-only attacks, both of which are exceptionally difficult to survive/heal through later in the fight. But, what if we could find a way to engage Koralon last and still beat the enrage timers?

There are a couple possible ways this could be done, and all require, as we did before, massive DPS stacking in lieu of healing.

Stormy Monday: Emalon > Archavon > Koralon

Tanks: Kulldam (Emalon), Khrashdin (Koralon), Kheelan (Archavon w/ Khrash OT)
Healers: Thawfore (Khrashdin/Kheelan), Wildhide (Kulldam/Raid)

The timing is obviously the two major issues that must be dealt with here. By engaging Emalon first, we have 6 minutes before he must die or we wipe to enrage. Additionally, he will 'buff' an add every 30-60 seconds that has 140k health and must be killed within 20 seconds. In terms of "linear DPS", that's a measly 7,000 DPS, but in reality targeting the mob and starting proper rotations cuts into that 20 second window.

That said, there are a few things that make starting the fight this way very beneficial and this is how I predict it would go down:

1. Since we have 6 minutes for Emalon's Enrage versus only 5 for Archavon, we do not need to pull Archavon until just after the 60 second mark of fighting Emalon.
2. We can utilize Kheelan in tank gear but DPSing to attack Emalon upon engagement, which will add an additional 1kish DPS(?) during the Emalon-phase of the fight.
3. We can use Khrashdin to pull Archavon to Emalon's room just as the 60 second mark passes, which will allow all the DPS to continue killing Emalon while Archavon is brought to the raid.
4. Once Archavon is at the top of the stairs of Emalon's room, everyone stacks on him to avoid jumps and Kheelan takes over tanking Archavon with Khrash secondary agro for tank-grabs.
5. Meanwhile, ranged DPS are waiting for DBM warning/announcement that Emalon has Overpowered an add and will immediately switch and nuke the add down before getting back on Archavon.
6. Once Archavon is getting low enough (40-50%ish, we'll see), Kinzie Tricks' Khrash and sprints out to agro Koralon to the raid's position at the top of the stairs in Emalon's room.
7. If timed correctly, by the time Koralon reaches the raid, Archavon will be getting low (10%), and the raid can back out into Emalon's room a bit (Emalon is tanked in one corner so his AE won't hit people if they pay attention to positioning) while we DPS Koralon down.
8. Depending how this all pans out in terms of DPS, we should be approaching the enrage timers on both Emalon and Archavon around this time, so at whichever point we deem it necessary prior to enrages, we'll down Emalon then Archavon and burn through the rest of Koralon's health within the 60 second timer.

Now, there are a lot of assumptions and guesstimations in the above about how our DPS will fare and about approximate raid damage intake from the combination of abilities (Burning Breath + Lightning for example). However, it also presents the advantage of allowing both healers to be in range of the entire raid at all times to provide any overlap required. More importantly, because Koralon is last, there should really be no danger presented to any of the tanks by the time we get the kill.

Also, it may be that this method requires far too much raid DPS to pull off in time, but I'm hopeful given our experiences with our "normal method" using two healers that this tactic may be doable, especially since we're allowing ourselves over 4 minutes to attack Archavon and then pull and DPS Koralon before we need to kill anything and start the 60 seconds countdown. Moreover, with this setup we're adding Rofl back as a DPS, which will be higher damage than Kheelan as full DPS from last night, and on top of that, Kheelan will be able to psuedo DPS during Emalon at the start as well. That may give us 1500-2000 additional DPS over our setup previously.

In the event that no matter what, we can't squeeze out the DPS required for the Stormy Monday strategy above, we can return to our normal setup but again swap Kheelan as a tank (for Emalon) and let Rofl DPS. Again, Kheelan can then semi-DPS for the first two bosses, giving us a decent boost and letting us engage Emalon sooner, keeping Koralon's +damage stacks slightly lower. Further, I decided it may be better for me to opt for my 4-piece T8 bonus and lose 110ish Fire Resist, which gives 20% Magic Damage Reduction during Shield Block (which can be used for every Fists cast). Finally, we can have Khrash respec slightly to pickup Aura Mastery so both he and Thawfore have it, which will give us another 130 FR every 2 out of 3 Fist casts, and the 3rd cast will always have a cooldown from Khrash or myself.

[Rofldat]

"Once Archavon is at the top of the stairs of Emalon's room, everyone stacks on him to avoid jumps and Kheelan takes over tanking Archavon with Khrash secondary agro for tank-grabs."

There's a high risk of Emalon's Chain Lightning killing someone if we spread out evenly around. I'd go with triangle formation when we do this.


Alternate option:
Depending on how fast we can burn down Archavon alone(possibly with Bloodlust), maybe doing Ema + Kora first(together, that way some abilities like Living Bomb or other DoTs can be used on both of them to reduce the time we have to use to kill) then have Kinzie tag Archa to us when the other two are low might be better. Because Archa have the lowest health/damage, but his jump/stun can easily cause some death if it hit a healer.

This set up would still use 3 tanks(or 2 with me running in to soak fist/Khee go bear to soak it), but Khee would only need to wear enough tank gear to have enough HP to survive fists, so he can retain some DPS gear for better DPS.

[Kulldam]

There's a high risk of Emalon's Chain Lightning killing someone if we spread out evenly around. I'd go with triangle formation when we do this.

That's a good point; either a triangle formation for full raid except Emalon tank, or just have ranged/healers spread out as if normally doing it.

Depending on how fast we can burn down Archavon alone(possibly with Bloodlust), maybe doing Ema + Kora first(together, that way some abilities like Living Bomb or other DoTs can be used on both of them to reduce the time we have to use to kill) then have Kinzie tag Archa to us when the other two are low might be better.

I don't see how we gain anything by doing this. The entire point is to find a way to engage Koralon late into the fight so his +damage buff can't stack to crazy levels by the end. If we do Emalon and Koralon together to start, in terms of total fight time, we're still going to end up with Koralon hitting the stack numbers we saw in our original setup. Minor AEs won't be very reliable to do much damage to the untargetted Watcher, especially since 4 additional adds will be there, soaking misc AE hits instead.

Look at it another way. Here are two logs of our attempts last night:

Log 1: Before Swapping to more DPS and Fewer Healers
Log 2: After Swapping to more DPS and Fewer Healers

I've selected a small expression to illustrate the point in the two links above, but what's important is to note the time on the first entry (the point we engage Koralon) and then scroll down until the first entry where Archavon attacks me. Look at the timestamps of those two events to tell us the time taken to get Koralon from full-to-15%ish.

In Log 1, with a lower DPS setup, it took us 2:54 from Koralon Engage to Archavon Engage. In Log 2, it took us 2:03. In other words, it took us 41% longer to get through Koralon's health when using the 3-healer setup than with the 2-healer setup. And as mentioned, putting you on DPS will actually increase our raid DPS slightly, putting that Log 2 time under two minutes for sure.

Now, check those logs again and scroll down looking at the "Burning Fury" casts and stack numbers. By having the DPS to kill Koralon in two minutes, we can keep the Burning Fury stack to around seven, which is much, much more manageable than the 22 stacks we reached in our best attempt. That's the difference of Burning Breath dealing ~15,300 per cast before resists, versus ~24,300 per cast before resists. Likewise for Fists, @ 7 stack average is about 23,900 per tank, versus average @ 22 stack of 41,000.

Long story short, if we can find a way to do the pulls properly and keep Emalon's adds at bay, if we can get Koralon to near-death in 120 seconds, we can very likely get Emalon and Archavon down in less, as they have 2.8m and 2.3m health, respectively, compared to Koralon's 4.1m.

Because Archa have the lowest health/damage, but his jump/stun can easily cause some death if it hit a healer.

You're misremembering or just ill-informed about the actual events that were causing deaths: As I mentioned in my post, our deaths were due to a Koralon's abilities or a combination of Archavon's Stomp + Koralon ability. However, with the Stormy Monday tactic, if our DPS is sufficient to beat the timers, Archavon's Stomp will never endanger anyone because Koralon's +damage stack will be so low his attacks won't be high enough damage to combination kill anyone.