Have a hunter pet take the initial hit/thrash procs then have your tank taunt into position. The thrash issue is 100% positioning crossed with batching - you need to be where the attack will land after the batch - before the swing has gone off or it stacks a thrash and starts again.
Your tanks often lose them on Vael anyway. Along with several others. Don’t tell me you are actually zoning back out and delaying the raid to go get them again lol.
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Our guild cleared BWL week one, firemaw did wipe us once but we figured out the proper positioning and it was really easy.
This past week we killed Vael so fast our MT didnt even die to the debuff. Chromag was also no difficulty, strat is known, we even had timelapse two weeks in a row.
So a few of the big caveats that is making this super easy…
- MC has been farmed for the past 5 months, everyone has 90% of their gear, some 100%.
- Buffs, gear, comps, are optimized now more than ever. The min/max culture is certainly in effect. While I dont participate in this, a lot of others do.
- Strats are 100% known. You dont need to figure out anything, just watch a video and you know what to do. Most players are fairly competent.
I’m sure the future raids will be similar due to these phases and the amount of farm time before hand. In my opinion, they shouldnt have gated any of the content except AQ and Naxx. The phases have already proven to be pointless.
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he probably managed to dodge his mortal strikes, which non-crits for like 3k against full plate+shield with defensive stance and a greater stoneshield pot
that or he was SL with MD void and had a titans flask+GSS(for some reason) and never got crit by it
I had a mage do that too. I’m about to unload the FR gear on my ranged.
firemaw was the hardest boss for my guild.
FR + Fire protection potion will literally drop your stacks. But its all about the tank rotation at the end of the day. We literally one shot every boss in BWL on tuesday. Was not expecting that after having some issues on Vael and firemaw last week.
Firemaw is like the first and only boss at the moment that cannot be brute-forced down with raw DPS. And while not having many or terribly complicated mechanics…his mechanics actually matter and result in death if not properly handled.
I think a lot of people are just shocked being confronted with something that isn’t a training dummy after becoming complacent during MC.
Um… wrong. lol
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I don’t think it’s Broodlord that gives people trouble, but the suppression room before him.
Regardiing how hard Broodlord hits, you bring up a good point. I remember Broodlord being the one in BWL that was notorious for spike damage and the reason tanks would flask and use stoneshields. But now it’s Firemaw who is the tank killer.
That’s the way I remember it too. Not that we were top tier(closer to bottom) but we had no shortage of people ready to tell us how the top tiers did things and I am pretty sure we always had at least 12 healers. We still have all our old boss kill pics so I could pin that down at some point.
The way I recall it is every time we wiped most people would say we needed more healers.
Might be self-flattery but I feel like I usually said we didn’t need more healers. Of course I had nothing concrete to base that off, except playing a healer and knowing I could go AFK without a problem, so didn’t make much impression.
Your guild also has a 27 second kill on Razor and a 42 second kill on Vael.
I think it’s safe to say that your guild’s performance is above and beyond the people in this thread struggling on Firemaw.
This is not to mention that if your entire guild is world buffed and consumed, and ready to rock, a shorter fight automatically increases DPS across the board, since big damage buffs have higher uptime (Warriors on Luci have insane DPS beause if the fight is over in 15 seconds they had 100% crit rate for the whole fight).
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firemaw didn’t slow us down much. just had to teach the DPS to get out after 4-5 stacks. makes the fight 15 seconds longer. but everyone lives.
We just keep getting globaled by broodlord ATM.
I took a crushing blow for 1,200 - (bear)
following by a MS at 5,300K
followed by his blastwave for about 2,700
all with in 1 second at 1:44 into the fight.
I think firemaw is the first boss that requires these kinds of mechanics that people are having to learn (or relearn). Just a little learning curve and communication from the tanks that was previously unnecessary on all other fights.
tanks? more like one tank, the main tank. and he doesn’t lose buffs if the fight ends in 45 seconds
Most raid teams are probably losing one tank. But I’d wager quite a few are losing two still. Since we are specifically talking in this thread about people hitting speedbumps on firemaw, I feel pretty confident that we are talking about groups losing 2 of their tanks to Vael.
Only a handful arent losing one at all.
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still, tanks losing buffs shouldnt be a huge deal in regards to firemaw… threat is not a significant issue with melee running out to drop stacks
They lose the UBRS fire resist buff. That’s not negligible.
Lack of fr resists is our problem, also people not using hallway to clear stacks.
I find this statement rather funny… “what did blizz change about firemaw…”. The answer is nothing, but your desire to just blame Blizzard on something you can’t explain is laughable.
The answer is actually fairly simple (coming from someone who tanked firemaw back in vanilla, tanks firemaw in Classic, and firemaw gave our guild the most issues out of all bwl bosses).
- Firemaw was a challenge for most guilds in vanilla. It’s just vael was a much bigger challenge than firemaw (for reasons that do not need to be discussed here).
- Everyone had FR gear in Vanilla. No one killed rag without wearing FR gear (it was just unheard of). Therefore, everyone had FR gear for Firemaw making this fight a bit easier.
- Back in vanilla, threat was a huge issue. Starting from MC you were taught to manage threat. In MC now, no one cares or even knows how to manage threat. It’s just all out dps all the time (not a problem in MC but a huge problem in BWL). Pull agro … wipe the raid (great design mechanic imo).
- It is arguably the first fight in the game requiring an elevated amount of strategy. (Healers must heal while LOS of boss, DPS reset fire stacks, etc.).
- Tank rotation, positioning, and strategy. Your tanks need to understand boss mechanics, develop a meaningful taunt rotation and debuff reset, and also manage wing buffet. This arguably takes the longest time. If your tanks are good and did their homework then they will have it down in a couple of puls. If not, you may be wiping for a long time.
- Due to taunt rotation, healers must be quick on tank healing swaps. Boss hits hard. If heals are slow, (taunts are poorly timed-i.e. during shadowflame) then your tanks die, and again you wipe.
You add all this together and you get the results you are discussing for Firemaw. So, to answer your question: what did blizzard do on firemaw? Nothing. Players just need to develop good game play skills that have not been required of anyone yet.
P.S. It only gets more challenging in AQ and much more so in Naxx.
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Here’s a healer I know raging about Firemaw:
Healers need to make the tactical/psychological adjustments from mobs that do 2,000 damage to a tank, to mobs that do 5,000 damage to a tank…a warrior who is getting hit with a 5K shadowflame, then getting knocked 40 yards away to a position where healers would have to run 20 yards through Firemaw’s LOS to heal him, and may well get hit with a 1K+ flame buffet on the way back, and as soon as he gets back may get hit with Firemaw’s melee for another crapload of damage, is going to be virtually impossible to heal…so, week after week, the OT got wafflestomped.
That’s me…in 2006. Patch 1.12, btw. So you’re getting the authentic experience FWIW 