Bastion of Twilight: Valiona and Theralion

Bastion of Twilight: Valiona and Theralion
Twilight Sparkle Party, Cata Edition?

While my guild has downed this boss I wasn’t there, so I’m flying by the seat of my pants once more!  I also didn’t  Tank/DPS/Healify it becuase…um…that method can get terribly unweildy at times.

Basic Concepts:

• Don’t stand in bad.
• Collapse!
• Spread out!
• Collapse!
• Shake it all about!  (…don’t look at me that way.) 

General Notes:
The dragons share a their HP pool and threat.  There is a hard enrage timer of 10 minutes.  The theme of “oh my god so much going on” continues.

Strategy:

Phase One: Val Grounded
Valiona is on the ground first with Theralion in the air.  The spread out part for this is Ther’s Twilight Blasts, but you want to group up for Val’s Blackout.  If I had to guess (and I do) I’d say this is a “watch raid warnings and channel your LK skills” type fight. 

When Valiona casts Devouring Flames, your best bet is to run behind her so that you’re…well…not getting breathed on.  If for some reason you tabbed out in a bad spot and don’t think you can make it behind her in time, your second best bet is to run the fuck away.  The closer you are to her the more damage you take from it.

After two blackouts…

Transition:
Prior to transition Ther will cast Dazzling Destruction (really, Blizz?).  Don’t stand in swirly bad shit.

Phase Two: Theralion Grounded
The new group hug mechanic is Twilight Meteroite.  The new GTFO is Fabulous Flames.  Oh, and Deep Breath.  Oh, ALSO, if you have Engulfing Magic you need to run away from the raid.  Unless you’re targeted by Meteroite, because then you still need hugs.  Just uh, don’t do anything but stand there and look cute while you have EM if that’s the case, because otherwise you will kill everyone who is being nice and giving you hugs, and that’s just rude.  Got it?  No?  Don’t worry, you’ll figure it out eventually.  Or die a lot, one of the two.

There’s various methods to handling Ther’s ground phase.  The one that sounds the easiest is to split into melee and ranged groups, so you can loosely stay together for TM while running away from flames.

After to Engulfing Magics, Valiona will deep breath the shit out of the room.  Just move out of it all three times, and then she’ll land and the first phase will begin again.

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Ice Cream Social: Blood Prince Council

Blood Prince Council, AKA Twilight Sparkle Party 

being dead = photo opportunities

 

Tanks 

This is a 3 tank fight-even in 10 man.  Valanar and Taldaram (henceforce, Val and Tal) should be tanked by normal tanks.  Keleseth can be tanked by anyone with a ranged attack.  In 25s we stick our paladin on him because, well, in 25s we have 3 tanks. 

The Kel tank is going to be wandering around the room trying to pick up those floaty purple-blue orbs.  Invariably some DPS happy schmuck with AoE is going to pick up one or two, but you should yell at them and then grab all the rest.  

 

The orbs reduce the shadow damage you take, which is very important because all Kel fucking does is chuck shadow bolts.  They follow the last person to hit it, and don’t have a real aggro table.  They do fade after awhile, so you’ll pretty much be wandering around seeking more perpetually.  Try not to run through half of your raid while empowered shock wave is incoming, okay? 

The Val and Tal tanks have an easier job.  Stand there and tank shit.  In our 25s the Val tank (I think) is actually up against a far wall, allowing them and their healer to stay out of the way whenever their boss isn’t the focus.   This way there’s less screaming “stay the fuck away from me during fucking empowered vortex you fucking useless fuckwits!” at their screens.  

DPS 

Okay, I’m about to explain a very difficult concept, so pay attention.  

Stay the fuck away from each other (except for when you all need to NOT stay the fuck away from each other). 

Got it?  No?  Okay.  Basically, you need to stay 12 yards away from every fucking one.  Unless you’re melee, in which case you can continue your usual happy hump the boss’ ass pile until you see your empowered vortex warning.  Then you scatter to the winds–preferably not all in the same direction, and not all on top of healers.  We’ve actually had to assign melee DPS directions to run, and this may not be a bad idea for you, either.  The OTHER time you don’t stay spread out is when there’s a empowered fire ball floating towards someone.  Then those of you in the area kind of scoot together because it’s the old “the more people there are, the less damage there is” trick.  As soon as it’s done it’s burney thing, everyone has cooties once more. 

Ranged should just spread out and stay there, damn it.  That means you, warlock who keeps wandering into my range.  Yeah, you.  

Hunters (or some other ranged DPS, perhaps, but we have eleventy billion hunters) tend to have another task: watching for floaty orbs.  No, NOT those dark float orbs–the sparkly orange ones.   Those can NOT touch the floor.  Ever ever.  Your healers will cry at you over the AoE damage if they touch the floor.  They tend to appear long the sides/back of the room, so hunters should be assigned an area to watch.  If you only have one in your corner of the world, sic your pet on it.  As long as it’s not on the stairs, they’ll happily keep the ball off the floor by themselves.  The stairs will sometimes wig the pets out (though spirit beasts and wind serpents, due to their ranged attacks, handle things on the stairs just fine) so you might have to pew pew those on your own. 

Healers 

The tricky part of this for us is healing the wandering Kel tank.  Assigning a healer to follow them is suicide–this is where holy pally beacons often come in handy.  Beacon the Kel tank and throw some supporting heals on him whenever he happens to wander into your range.  Another option is to have two healers keep an eye on him, one for each side of the room–when he’s out of range for one, he’s in range for the other. 

Otherwise, assign your usual tank healers to the other two tanks and raid heals as normal.   If you have your Vel tank and his healer stuck over on one side, be sure that another healer is lurking within range, just in case.

Go Forth, My Minions

Today is a very special day, my friends…for today is the birthday of our ARCH NEMESIS, Arrens.

Arrens, for those of you who don’t know, is a dirty dirty ROGUE/WARLOCK who things that, for some strange reason, he deserves heals.  Naturally, we know that all rogues and warlocks are meant to be smears upon the ground, but he refuses to learn The Way Of Things.

This means that for his birthday, he gets the punishment of…

…the Blingee.

Feel free to drop by his humble blog and wish him a happy, sparkly birthday!

Where are my sparklies?

Lately I feel like I do a lot of complaining about holy paladins, which is just silly because I was the one who decided to change my main from my disc priest to the holy paladin in the first place! And while I LOVE healing as a paladin (crazy, I know. I just love pushing two buttons), that doesn’t excuse that there are sometimes serious issues with it.

Yeah, I’m talking about the lack of awesome spell effects.

Look at discipline priests – Amber gets to throw out OMG PEW PEW LAZER BEAMS, and when she bubbles someone and there’s a crit, BAM, rainbows in your face! What’s not to like about rainbow soap bubbles? Even holy priests have PoM bouncing around, and probably other cool looking things that I don’t know about, because I’ve never been a Fail Angel. Trees get little green leaves and swirls on their targets, which is pretty sweet and very fitting for the class. Shamans have some sort of water falling on your head spell that makes me go “crap, what am I standing in, MOVE” whenever it’s cast on me, because I’ve been taught that if you see something besides plain ground, you need to haul ass. Not to mention that chain heal looks pretty snazzy when it’s moving around.

What do paladins have? Itty beams of light and glitter, and the exact same beams and glitter for both FoL and HL. This is insufficient for my needs, Blizzard. I require big explosions of light – when I cast Holy Light on a tank I want to see Light dripping from his every pore. Beacon of Light? HA, those silly Elder’s moonstones that everyone’s playing with right now are brighter than my bacon. There could be no confusion amongst multiple paladins in a raid when it comes to who’s Beaconing whom if there were actually a huge pillar of light over the Beacon, rather than an animation that makes the target dispense some light beams from her armpit. Sacred Shield is even disappointing because it doesn’t look like ANYTHING most of the time.

Pally wings are pretty much the only amazing spell effect that I have at my disposal, but WAIT! I have to save those for important moments involving Divine Plea and massive amounts of damage, so they don’t even get blown on many fights unless I do it at the end, because I’m always worried that I might need them later. Their awesome is not enough to make up for the fact that the majority of my healing looks boring, like this:

Amber Edits to Add:

Here, I fixed it for you.

Crit or haste?

In the first few months of WotLK raiding, when I went holy for the first time, you would have had to pry crit from my cold dead hands. I went the way of the holy/ret build back then, because holy/prot hadn’t yet seen the changes of 3.1 that made it the viable (and my preferred) spec that it is now. I think I went insane over the fact that Soul of the Dead NEVER dropped for us from Sapphiron, week after week, and I’m pretty sure that when it finally did and I snatched it up, I let out my biggest happy squeal of all time. Torch of Holy Fire? Screw that, I’m snatching The Turning Tide away from our warlocks.

These days, I’m tooting a very different horn. I love haste and I can’t get enough of it, so much that I’m sitting well above the recommended 675 soft cap for haste rating from gear. Because we don’t always run with a boomkin in 10s and very rarely have a ret paladin, I don’t get the buffs from those classes in regards to haste, so I try to keep as much as possible on my gear, and I eat haste buff food.

Why the change? Well for one thing, crit just isn’t as good as it used to be. Critical strikes don’t return as much mana as they used to, so that benefit has gone a little out of the window, not to mention that improved gear from Naxx to Ice Cream Social and epic gems mean that mana pools are higher than ever. I can’t remember the last time that I felt truly strained for mana or felt that I would run dry with no chance to recover, even when chain casting Holy Light on fights like Marrowgar or Festergut or … everything else in ICC. Crit is nice for having those BIG NUMBERS heals, but in many cases the crits are just overheals for a class that has high overhealing anyway (not that there’s a problem with this – as long as you have mana and things don’t die, who cares about overheal?). Just sticking with the critical strike rating that’s on spell plate and other pieces, and the amount that you’ll naturally get from nom nom noming intellect gems should be sufficient – I just don’t see the benefit in gemming for crit rating when you can easily get to 30% or more holy crit from gear.

Haste on the other hand, while it has diminishing returns, is something that you can’t really go wrong with having a little more of. The more haste, the more spells you can cast. If you’re starting harder content, it can be a real life saver in terms of how much throughput you can manage. While you have a chance of getting critical strike heals that will top someone off, with haste there is a guarantee that you’ll be able to quickly put out a second heal. For me it’s a more reliable tool for OHCRAP moments, and probably the only thing that facilitates surviving fears in 5 mans (but that’s a whole ‘nother rant). I feel more secure with having plenty of haste and knowing that my heals have a higher probability of landing in time – our limitation is really speed rather than throughput or longevity. Also, this is what casting looks like when you’re hopped up on haste:

For srs.

Of course, the exception to all of this is the FoL build, in which case you don’t want haste OR crit, you want MOAR SPELLPOWER. That’s a completely foreign territory for me, but maybe someday I’ll give it a try for fun and ~SCIENCE~.