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Thursday, December 22, 2011

Heroic Hagara 10 Tanking Guide




As usual, this isn't meant to be a complete guide. I assume you already know the basic mechanics of this fight and everything here is mostly geared toward tanks.

Changes Between Normal and Heroic
  • Everything hits harder.
  • Ice Lance increases frost damage taken by 25% per hit, instead of reducing attack speed.
  • Ice Wave moves faster and there is a new snare debuff that needs to be properly taken care of if you want to stay ahead of the wave.
  • There are 8 Crystal Conductors to overload in the lightning phase. You need 2 people between each conductor to overload them.
  • You need to avoid Storm Pillars during the lightning phase, which leave a runic circle on the ground before they erupt for a large amount of nature damage.


Preparation
  • One tank. Three healers if you have very good dps, but also possible with two.
  • Physical damage reduction elixirs/flasks (agi flask for druids) or stamina flask.
  • Tanks should think about using Stay of Execution to help mitigate Focused Assault.
  • Leatherworkers should prepare some Drums of Speed. They come from a TBC rep, but require only honored and are very easy to make. Similar to the TBC haste drum rotations of old, we did the same with the three leatherworkers we had. It's also only a party-wide buff, so organize your groups accordingly. This is the macro I used. It announces when your drums begin and, more importantly, announces when they end so the next person can use their drums.
#showtooltip Drums of Speed
/p Drums of Speed used
/use Drums of Speed
/in 30 /p Drums of Speed over

Focused Assault 
  • The big damage ability that tanks and tank healers should look out for.
  • Happens about every 30 seconds that the boss is active.
  • Cannot be dodged or otherwise mitigated (except by Savage Defense and Blood Shield), so if you repeatedly die to it, that's a sign you need more health.
  • Unlike in normal mode, you can't consistently avoid the damage by running away, as she will follow you much more quickly. However, there are some opportunities where you can distance yourself from the boss if she is casting or collapsed, which will stop some of the damage. You will still have to take most Focused Assaults to the face.
  • She will cast Focused Assault almost immediately after she activates. That means a few seconds after the pull and a few seconds after she recovers from collapsing. As long as your healers are aware of this, these attacks aren't so bad because they can be partially kited and the healers have no one else to heal. I recommend using lesser cooldowns (BarskinStay of Execution) for these first attacks.
  • The Focused Assaults that you should save big cooldowns for are the ones during the Ice Tomb activation. Healers might be out of line of sight of the tank, or they might be healing other people.
  • Healers should also be prepared to use their cooldowns on the tank.

  • We could not explicitly confirm this, but it is commonly believed that Hagara will only cast this ability on people 180 degrees in front of her.
  • This means that as the tank, you should drag the boss so that no one except you is near her front half. Because of the Ice Lance ability, this means you will be moving quite a bit.
  • To get an idea of how strict this is, you can watch my video above. At 6:25, you'll see that there are people on her side, which is close enough for the priest to get annihilated by Shattered Ice. Don't let that happen.


Druid Specific Stuff
  • If you're having trouble surviving Focused Assault, try using stamina trinkets and reforging to mastery. Since you can absorb Focused Assault hits with Savage Defense, you can help out your healers quite a bit by increasing your absorbs. The extra stamina will give your healers more room for slow reactions.
  • Druids of any flavor are useful for Stampeding Roar. Just keep in mind that feral druids and other druids specced into Feral Swiftness will dispell their debuff if they happen to use it at that time. The best place to use it is if you see a few people falling behind.
  • Tanks should go cat during ice phase, bear during lightning phase. 
  • Spend the first few seconds of Hagara's collapsed phase dpsing in cat, but don't push it too far. You will get trucked if you happen to be in cat form when she recovers, and you also want to have all the appropriate tanking debuffs up before she casts her initial Focused Assault.
  • For ice phase, if you're about to be forced off a crystal due to an upcoming wave, use your remaining combo points on a Rip (as long as savage roar still has lots of time left).  Even if it's just a 3 or 4 point rip, it's better than wasting combo points and doing zero damage.
  • Use your Tier 13 4-piece Frenzied Regen during Lightning phase (unglyphed). Even though you will be rage starved, people going out of range of the healers is a real problem here, and your 3k per second will help a ton.
  • Berserk can be useful during the collapsed dps burn phase, but since you can't spend all the time in cat, it might be better to use it during an Ice Tomb phase, where you can Mangle down three targets at once.

10 comments:

  1. "She will cast Focused Assault almost immediately after she activates."

    Heehee.  Our first pull on normal was a 5 second wipe, followed by a pause, and then an "oookkkaaayyyy".

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  2. Awesome guides! Must reads if you are checking out the heroic content! Thanks a bunch!

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  3. thanks sunnier! I'm a feral tank myself and your strats always help!

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  4. Is there any mileage in saving Berserks for dealing with Focused Assaults?  Mangle-spam combined with the 2pc t13 bonus would be mean a higher uptime on S/Def in order to absorb the damage from Focused Assaults would it not?

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  5. That's really good thinking, but unfortunately Focused Assaults can't be blocked, dodged, parried, or absorbed by Savage Defense at all. As far as I can tell, the only thing that can reduce its damage is cooldowns. :(

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  6. Damn, I'd hoped that as a DK's Blood Shield absorb's the damage so would S/Def.  So much for my devious plan! ;p  

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  7. Savage defence does absorb the effect making soulshifter vortex very useful. i have like 275k hp and dodge most the normal attacks. its only ice lance  the assult thats hurts me. my savage shield is about 30k and gets up to 46-48k with vortex proc. the assult in 10man hits for 19-20k. we still learning the fight atm but my combat log shows 3 assualt hits ina row being aborbed fully by savage. 2 hits aborbed by the same savage and the 3rd after it repopped.
    regard
    Anonymity kor'gall

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  8. You're right. Turns out my UI is just not very good at displaying absorbs that disappear so quickly, though you definitely cannot block/dodge/parry those hits. I have to say I'm jealous of those giant absorbs (nearly twice my average), though that's what you get when you reforge to mastery. Since that is the case, this might be one of the few fights where mastery is better than dodge for damage mitigation. Thanks for the input.

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  9. I was dodge happy too but now going with " if its
    got mastery on it reforge to dodge, if it hasn't got mastery reforge to mastery
    " i was agility focused too but 4part bonus with a lot of stam and unglyphed
    regen is awesome. tbh apart from attacks like the assault its only really spell
    dmg that hurts me thus my meta is the 2% spell reduction. just killed hagara on
    our second night of trying :D.

    basically followed the tactics the druid
    tank is doing on this video
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=7Ua3FwE-WP8

    after
    a few tries tonight i was testing a few trinkets. soulshifter is ofc awesome but
    found Indomitable pride and spidersilk spindle to be under par and random. But
    heroic scales of life (http://www.wowhead.com/item=69109) basically can be used
    when low life that cancels out a hit from hagara during the assault using the
    distancing method in the video barkskin and the trinket and saving regen for a
    lightening phase did it for us.

    we also decided to use a rogue to reset
    her , ie looking at her weapons you can tell what the first phase is going to
    be i.e. lightning or frost. we realised lightning is the hardest for damage so
    started with that. with the 10% reduction we went into the 4th phase (frost)
    with her on 3% grrrrr. so its easily possible to get 3 phases now. Oh btw during
    the stun phases done forget to innervate a healer and in the few seconds of a
    frost phase you can get 50-60% of a tranq out.

    During frost go cat use
    sprint and stampeding when /if you get frost flake but wait for 5 or so stacks.
    no point using it and then getting it on you again due to rng.

    love this
    fight :D
    Anonymity Kor'gall

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  10. Just gotta say, you are my idol! I love your vids, your breakdowns, and your attitude towards the game, and WINTER WRAP UP! Thanks to your info I convinced my Raid Leader to let me tank heroigara with all the facts I linked him from here! :D

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