Well, last time I had wondered whether the nerfs Blizzard announced for Firelands would amount to anything in terms of raid progression. After last night’s raid, I can absolutely say it helped, though people bringing their “A” game also propelled us forward. At times, it seemed as if the bosses had been neutered or spayed. Sure, we were glad to kill the bosses, but some of us felt a bit sad for the once-manly minions of Ragnaros.
Heroic Shannox
We had one-shot this before the nerf, but we also had a new person breaking Face Rage last night. It didn’t really matter, because everything just clicked. My fat bear ass didn’t sit on any Immolation Traps, of course, but Jagged Tear and Arcing Slash didn’t seem to threaten me at all. Our pile-driving of this boss “TO THE GROUND, BABY!” set a good tone for the night.
Heroic Rhyolith
As many of you know, this boss can be a very clean tour of the Rhyolith Plateau, or an RNG-filled nightmare. Volcano spawns can destroy your raid and make sniveling babies out of your steering committee. His Concussive Stomps used to require raid cooldowns as the fight went on, and you had to keep things tight in case something horrible happened.
Yeah, that didn’t happen last night. While normally we had to worry about Liquid Obsidian adds reaching the boss and giving him armor back, people last night even had time to destroy many of them. The Fragments and Sparks died so quickly that the destruction just turned into an “LOL AOE!” carnival. Even later into the fight, his stomps only hit us for about 30,000 damage. Obviously we had no problem pushing him into Phase 2. And he also fell over far before his stacks of Superheated became even a slight issue.
Heroic Baleroc
We had only worked on this boss for one night prior to this, so we weren’t too sure what to expect. Originally, I was going to tank him, but our raid decided to have our warrior tank instead so I could go “DPS of some sort”. I chose moonkin because our RL had said fewer melee was better. In yet another twist, we had our shadow priest and frost DK soloing the first two crystals, respectively, though Dispersion beats the crap out of Anti-Magic Shell and Icebound Fortitude.
The healers also experimented with a “no-swap” method, in which one of them would be on the tank full-time, and the other on whoever was “tanking” a shard.
Eventually, we got him down to about 9 percent, and we knew a kill was in sight. The next pull, people died, but I also ran all over the place due to Countdown and shard tank duty. He then fell over. Before the nerf, our warrior tank was getting destroyed. And my dps was pretty awful, to be honest, and probably not enough to kill Baleroc pre-nerf. Here is a link to our parse for that fight.
Heroic Alysrazor
This boss … was the bane of our existence. It really was a comedy of errors for weeks. Tank deaths. Healer deaths. Deaths to tornadoes. Deaths to Lava Spew. Deaths to Smoochy. The closest we ever got was 8 percent — with most of the raid dead. We were definitely ready to fry this bird.
Our first pull went horribly, but mostly because I wasn’t close enough to the Voracious Hatchling to keep someone else from gaining the Imprinted debuff. 😦 [Sorry, Kalmia.]
So with that out of the way, we focused and found out that the hatchlings die A LOT quicker now. Whereas before we had to race to kill them and drag them behind meteors so we could line-of-sight Firestorm, now we were able to kill the birds easily and have more than enough time to hide. Our starfoxing shadow priest was amazing as always, and we actually got Alysrazor to 38 percent after the first Burnout phase.
We repeated what we did the first down phase. And just as I was going to go interrupt the Clawshaper in preparation to tank the boss, the bird fell over. Finally. Yeah, she was nerfed, but everyone in our raid was very, very happy to see her dead. We were quite sick of her whining anyway.
We will work on Beth’tilac on Thursday, so I’ll have more for you then. Then it will be time to hit the wall that is heroic Ragnaros.
thetenmanbear 
You better be sorry!
It is great to read about other people’s experiences, thank you for sharing. We’ve been killing HRhyolith for a while but every week we would always block on it for an hour or so–1-shot felt like a distant dream. It would really piss us off as one thing or another would go wrong and we’d be screwed. We were capable of doing the fight, we’d just keep doing it until one attempt just lined up and it was a kill. It always felt like so much wasted time though and made us hate Blizzard for the ‘driving’ mechanics. For HRhyolith, we were ecstatic for the nerf: 1-shot, loot, and get moving! Loved it.
Everyone in our guild hated that fight when we would get to it each week. The sheer amount of RNG involved drove us crazy. Your sentiment of “1-shot, loot, and get moving” is spot on!
Congratulations! We were able to get a few new heroic bosses down this week in our guild as well, putting us at 6/7H now, and I know exactly what you mean about Alysrazor! We had a….. similar experience. I must admit this new progression feels a little cheap, but that’s better than endless frustration sometimes I suppose.
Looking forward to reading what your thoughts on nerfed H Rag are 🙂
Call me old school or just inexperienced in the Firelands. With the nerfbat hitting as hard as it did this last go around, has the fun and challenge of downing these aforementioned bosses lessened? I had been looking forward to going in with a solid 10man and bring my A-game. Everything I had been reading about tier-12 content made it sound like a worthy challenge. I like the difficulty settings being adjusted in order to be more accessible, but just wish the change wasn’t as glaring.
Just a thought. Congratulations on steamrolling through what once was a wall of frustration.
Although we were stuck on Alysrazor for a while, we never got to see the “pre-nerf” form of Beth’tilac. We did pull Baleroc before the hotfixes. I think that a progressive buff — a la ICC — would have been the better way to go. The nerfs helped us down bosses, but maybe we kind of feel that we didn’t earn it as much as if we had killed them before the nerf hit.
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