A Difficult Easy Fight
September 29th, 2008 Posted in Bosses, Burning CrusadeArchimonde is one of the easiest fights in the game. It’s also one of the hardest. The strategy is ridiculously simple - avoid dying for ten minutes, and do minimal dps - but execution is a problem. Any member of the raid dying can, and usually does, very rapidly turn the tables against the raid.
Last night The Hidden Circle downed him for the very first time, finally mastering the exacting requirements of clicking [item]tears of the goddess[/item] at the right time to avoid leaving a raider-shaped crater in the ground, and keeping away from the fire. As Main Tank for the fight, I avoid the first problem entirely, and to some extent the second, too, unless doomfire snakes around to target me. No, in the context of Archi, the tank’s main aims are to keep threat on the boss, keep him in place and stance dance the fears (1.5s cast, so it’s quite a bit harder than Nightbane’s).
I wasn’t happy at all with my performance last night. On a couple of occasions I was so obsessed waiting for the fear to be cast, I’d blow my stance-dance on a cast of something else while fear was up. It’s fine to be able to react so quickly, but yesterday at times I was all over the place, reacting too soon - before the cast bar had even told me what was being cast!
So, yes, Archimonde’s down. I’m not happy about it though. I feel like I could have done so much better. Next time, I will.
One Response to “A Difficult Easy Fight”
By Yakra on Oct 1, 2008
This fight played all sorts of mind games with me, as well.
First, I went full avoidance; lowering my stamina, crippling my hit (and to a lesser extent, my expertise). Coming from a heavy Effective Health background, this was hard, but it made a huge difference.
Pre-pull, I asked for a fear ward so I could build threat through the initial fear, and that gave me enough of a lead I could stop using all GCD abilities as soon as the cooldown was up on every fear after, and just camp my stance dance macro. My threat dropped during those times, but the DPS was so busy running around that they were never capped. Also, I tried to stop auto-attacking following the fear, to prevent parry-hasted attacks.