wowwiki:Chimaeron (http://www.wowwiki.com/Chimaeron)
[video=youtube;eLa57ES3py8]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLa57ES3py8&feature=player_embedded[/video]
Quote(http://www.tankspot.com/images/misc/quote_icon.png) Originally Posted by Papapaint
Hello, and welcome to Tankspot's Cataclysm Raid Guide. My name is Papapaint, and in this video I will be discussing the strategy for Chimaeron in the Blackwing Descent Raid Instance.
Chimaeron is an extremely healer-intense fight, and requires a great deal of self control on the part of your healing team--you won't be seeing very many satisfyingly full green bars.
It is important to note that you should not begin the fight by simply hitting Chimaeron in the face. Instead, go around him and speak with Finkle Einhorn, locked in a cage next to his trusty Bile-O-Tron. After speaking with him, the Bile-O-Tron comes online, stinks up the room, and wakes up the napping triple-headed monster. As long as the Bile-O-Tron is active, your raid gains Finkle's Mixture, which prevents any members of your raid dying as long as their health is over 10,000. If a raider's health is over 10,000 and they WOULD die, they're instead knocked down to 1 HP.
In simpler terms, this means that during Phase 1, your raiders' health only needs to be over 10,000 HP---healing them past that is essentially overhealing. This is due to Chimaeron's Caustic Slime. This move will target four players, splitting 320,000 damage (two players and 280,000 in 10-man) between those players and all other players within 6 yards of them. In addition, it will apply a debuff to all affected players, reducing their hit for 3 seconds. The easiest way to deal with this is to split up, staying 6 yards apart--any player hit by the green vomit will simply be knocked down to 1 HP. Heal them to over 10k HP, and they're safe once again.
The exception to the 10,000 HP rule is, of course, the tanks. Chimaeron hits hard, and has two extra-nasty abilities to look out for: Break and Double Attack. Double Attack is exactly what it sounds like--on Chimaeron's next melee, he will melee twice in very quick succession. This means that even if your tank is over 10k, they will be hit, reducing them to 1 HP, and then hit immediately afterwards, killing them. There are a few ways to deal with this. Defensive cooldowns work well, but topping off the tank will generally allow them to survive the double hit. Break is designed to make topping off the tank more difficult--it increases the damage taken by the tank by 25% and reducing ihealing taken by 15% for every stack. This is applied every 15-20 seconds, so you'll want to have your tanks trade off every 3 stacks, with your tank popping cooldowns to survive through the 2nd stack.
The last ability of note during phase 1 is Massacre. Massacre instantly deals 900,000 damage to every player and can not be mitigated in any way. This means that every single player in your raid over 10,000 HP will be reduced to 1 HP, and all raiders below 10,000 HP will die instantly. This includes the tank, so make sure you have at least one--preferably more--healers dedicated to healing up the tank as quickly as possible while the rest of your healers rush to get everyone in the raid back over 10,000 HP.
Occasionally after Massacre, the Bile-O-Tron will be knocked offline, removing the buff from your raid and taking you into phase 2. During phase 2, Chimaeron's heads will begin fighting one another, and he will cast fued for 30 seconds. You have 15 seconds to stack up and heal the entire raid before he begins vomiting poison bombs. Without the buff to protect your raid members, it's necessary to clump up in order to split the damage amongst your whole raid. After 15 seconds, he will vomit every 5 seconds, then finish off with another massacre. Use defensive cooldowns, self heals, and help top off all raid members in any way possible. While he casts Massacre, your raid should be spreading out to resume Phase One.
At 20%, Chimaeron will take your raid into Phase 3. During phase 3, your whole raid will be afflicted with a new debuff: Mortality. This reduces ALL healing effects on your raid by 99%... so there's basically no reason to continue healing. In addition, Chimaeron will become untauntable and take an additional 10% damage. To simplify the strategy of phase 3... BURN HIM DOWN. Pop Heroism or Bloodlust, have your healers help out with DPSing, and start kiting him. Watch his aggro table to determine who he's going to attack next, and have that person run across the room. Use Iceblocks, Bubbles, Fades, Feign Deaths, Guardian Spirit, and any other tricks you can think of to keep him running as much as possible. The more he's moving instead of attacking, the more DPS time you get. This is purely a race against his ability to nom nom your entire raid, one at a time. With proper cooldown usage, some hard DPS, and clever use of aggro mechanics, Chimaeron should be an exhilarating kill.
Thanks for watching this guide. I will include the second half of this fight with some minor commentary to give you a better idea of how we handled all three phases. If you enjoyed this guide and would like to stay up-to-date on Cataclysm raid strategy information, subscribe to this video channel. As usual, comments are welcome in both the youtube comment box and on the official thread on Tankspot.
Great fight here, awesome fight for the healers tbh. Bit unlucky on some pulls caus of "mistake attacks", first time he got to phase 3 was the first time he died. Since healing has no use on phase 3 I suggest all healers start "dpsing" aswell, if they didnt do that already:P.
Also the small difference by grouping up really worked well, lots easier to heal everyone above the 10k with chain heal(didnt had it macro'ed yet, so need to do that:P).
ps. I think it should be 20 feb instead of 20 jan :)
we still need to get this fight straight, it's not possible that we keep doing this like it was the very first time each time we're there. Here's a couple of thoughts occurred to me tonight, and a couple of situations i've experienced i'd like to share.
You can tell me to stick on the main tank as much as you want, but i've seen switches before and after massacres (tho in the end it seems most of them happened after massacres), so from my point of view i will never know in which situation to expect a switch: i'm just checking the debuff marks on the tanks and guess it.
To fill up a whole tank hp pool (usual situation in a switch after a massacre) i need 2 secs and more than 7k mana for each 20k healed. In the while the tank gets hit. If you want me to fill the bar faster, i'll need 50% more mana. (we're speaking about 64k mana and 20 seconds for the normal way IF the tank is not getting hit by the boss while i heal him up, which is kinda utopistic. However, with a good rotation and some luck, i can save about 15k mana and 4 seconds, but that's still without counting melee hit while healing up).
My problem was that it takes me too much time and too much mana to heal the tanks, so evidently i'm doing something wrong there. I'm open to any good suggestion you can think of. Tonight i usually was below 50% mana before the first collapse, and was running oom until one of the tanks die short after for a double hit. About the double hit, i've checked acheron when twisted died from them, those are 2 blows in a 0.4 seconds gap one from the other that hit for about 150k each, that means the temporary main tank must be over 170k in order to survive it, and that's about 95% hp (og course, once the double hits hit, it will be all over again to prepare the tank for the next one).
So, summing up: either i'm doing something terribly wrong here (such as ignoring a fight mechanics that allows tanks not to get hit by double strikes) or i'm simply not enough to keep them alive for the whole duration of the fight. The weird thing is: in our first kill we made it with only 2 healers through almost all the fight (the 3rd died very soon after the fight started).
Again, i'm open to good suggestions.
I dont think ure supposed to top off the tank on ure own, if everyone is above 10k the other healers should help.
We should always have all healer hots on the tank for double strike... tanky cooldowns to be saved for these times also. A quick look through the logs they show almost all deaths had Caustic Slime involved in them.. How was this being handled ..It looks from the outside that no extra healing was going in that direction. The healing output is massive so we have the healing power. I just think it's not going to the right place at the right time
Quote from: Arcticfire;323329I dont think ure supposed to top off the tank on ure own, if everyone is above 10k the other healers should help.
I think that's the key to the issue Tirk mentions. The off tank shouldn't be getting heals until he pre-calls the switch (5 seconds) and at that point all healers help get him up above 170k.
But the other key is that healers need to ensure they can identify caustic slime targets and add additional heals to them as that's where the majority of deaths came from. They will get hit down to 1 HP and need some topping off again to get over 10k.
Thats why i always start casting Chain Heal a few 0....sec before masacre, so i got time to help healing the tank.
@whitey, exactly the offtank is just one of the melee.
Well, yesterday we had a bit of everything.
I lost TL, Amber lost himself, Tirk lost a tank.
We are already HOTing. I have a "passive" heal called Earth Shield thats always up on MT.
Whenever i see BigWigs' "DOUBLE STRIKE", i think... Boooyaaaaaa... And throw a HoT+healing wave that way.
I suspect Amber does a shield on Tanks whenever this happens. I also know that Twisted and Hal uses their self heals.
I dont think we were doing anything wrong. I just think we all had Nefarian in our heads.
Ill be the first to admit that I was very excited, looked forward to breeze through the first 5 bosses.
After a couple of wipes on Magmaw(!) I understood that I was not the only one.
And Atramedes.. me running wrong way, Sheeper standing in the discs, Jesung being a gnome...
Heads, it was all in our heads yesterday. We are WAY more skilled than what we showed yesterday.
I thought we had a taunt rotation for Double Attack? OT taunts for double strike, then MT re-taunts & resumes; then continue taunting off when Break stacks dictate? Or is old age causing me to forget previous discussions?
If we're trying to single tank through Double Attack then it's pretty much RNG as to when we'll lose a tank, not if.
The Caustic deaths are to my mind an awareness issue. We need to ensure that Caustic & Massacre timers are followed carefully so that we do not allow those with Caustic to stay at 1HP before the next massacre hits, or those hit by massacre to be under 10k when a caustic hits. Awareness leads ot pre-heals, for example:
Situation 1:
Massacre knocks down to 1 HP.
Caustic tick then kills.
Situation 2:
Healer pre-casts AOE heal
Massacre knocks down to 1 HP
Heal pushes to over 10k
Caustic tick knocks down to 1 HP, we all live.
We should be doing situation 2, it's that simple, but I'm not convinced that every knows the relationship and why it is important to top off specific targets immediately.
Likewise, we are ALL meant to be monitoring the timers and using a healthstone or a pot to ensure we are not <10k HP when a massacre or caustic is due. I'll hold my hand up here and say I failed to use either on the try when I died. We should all handle this element better, but it is not something that will save the raid throughout the fight - last night we had no HS and you'd only get the 1 pot per try, so all the others have to be handled by healers.
Quote from: Tirkad;323324To fill up a whole tank hp pool (usual situation in a switch after a massacre) i need 2 secs and more than 7k mana for each 20k healed. In the while the tank gets hit. If you want me to fill the bar faster, i'll need 50% more mana.
The first time I downed Chim I was carrying maybe about 170k HP raid buffed.
These days I'm just shy of 200k HP raid buffed.
So due to my new phat purplz you're doing at least one extra big heal on me because you're filling up my bar. Would it help to just heal a certain amount to save mana? Do we know what the magic HP number for tanks is here?
Quote from: TeaLeaf;323350I thought we had a taunt rotation for Double Attack? OT taunts for double strike, then MT re-taunts & resumes; then continue taunting off when Break stacks dictate? Or is old age causing me to forget previous discussions?
We taunt after the 3rd break in which AFAIK there is one double attack which we soak. There is no OT as such, just tank swaps.
Last night Hal changed slightly and delayed his taunt until after the Massacre which was due a few seconds after I stacked 3 breaks. I don't know enough of the mechanics of the fight to know if this is a good or bad thing and if I should be doing it myself.
On top of other things, i've tried to set bw to announce the double strike with a countdown, but nothing happened. I guess the boss will only let us know about his double strike after the previous one, so it gives about 1-2 secs to prepare for it.
Interesting read ... A slightly different way of tanking and healz
Quotehealing on Chimaeron. (http://leafhead.tumblr.com/post/3527269651/druid-healing-on-chimaeron)
Somebody on my Twitter stream was asking about druids in the Chimaeron fight. The first time I was there I wondered what the heck Blizzard expected us to do on that fight, since the only heal fast enough to save a caustic slime victim (Regrowth) was too expensive to spam for the duration of the fight. It’s still true, so druids should be doing something else. But what?
The fight
The bare-bones outline of the Chimaeron (http://www.wowhead.com/npc=43296) fight:
- The Bile-o-tron gives you a buff that makes any damage that would kill you take you to 1HP instead, so long as you’re over 10KHP to start.
- Chimaeron debuffs the tank with Break (http://www.wowhead.com/spell=82881).
- Periodically he will do a Double Attack (http://www.wowhead.com/spell=88826) that hits his target with two very large hits in quick succession. You need to have a tactic to handle this or you’ll be losing tanks.
- Periodically he’ll throw Caustic Slime (http://www.wowhead.com/spell=88916) at 2 raid members. This would one-shot them save for the buff. It can splash to nearby players.
- Periodically he will cast Massacre (http://www.wowhead.com/spell=82848), which is TURD, aka Totally Unavoidable Raid Damage.
- A random subset of these massacres knock the Bile-o-tron offline and cause Feud (http://www.wowhead.com/spell=88872), through which he continues to throw slimes, only you do not have the life-saving buff.
- At 20% you enter phase 2. This is a straight burn phase because nobody can be healed. If you have mana left, you’ll be doing DPS.
The tactics
The generally-used tactics are these:
The main tank holds the boss and piles up break debuffs. The second tank is a double attack soak tank: he or she taunts the boss just before double attack. The main tank takes it back afterward.
The raid spreads out to avoid splitting damage from Caustic Slime. Because it won’t kill you (1HP!) there’s no sense in splitting the giant damage. That would just give you extra targets to have to heal up, which is a waste of mana. Somebody must be assigned to healing these victims asap. If your raid has good positioning discipline, there will be only 2 to heal. (This is another one of those encounters where melee is a liability.)
For Massacre, the raid stacks up to maximize the benefit of aoe and group healing spells. It stays stacked during Feud because slime damage must be split while the life-saving buff is missing. This is when raids cycle damage reduction cooldowns and big heals.
During phase 2, pop Heroism/TimeWarp/Whatever and burn like mad. There’s no point to healing. Evasion tank, dump aggro, use all your survival tricks when he’s on you. Also, maximize his travel time to his next target. We love our bear tanks in this phase because a nice avoidance string can keep them alive for a long time while everybody happily does damage.
The healing
What do druids do in this fight? My usual raid make up has 1 holy paladin, 1 discipline priest, and 1 resto druid. The healing usually goes this way: I keep the main tank fully hotted and keep an eye on the off tank, who usually needs the big bomb heals. The off tank is the one raid member whose health has to be kept high. The holy paladin beacons the off tank and heals the raid after slime hits. I use Wild Growth on cooldown to ease the raid healing burden. If OOC procs I hit low health people with Regrowth; if not I throw Rejuv on them as a death-delaying buffer to give the holy pally time. (If not straight tank healing, that’s my role in most of these fights: a buffer. I give the other healers time to wind up.) The disc priest smites the boss and pays attention to the off tank. Everybody uses aoe healing on the massacres: Efflorescence plus WG plus Regrowth as you get procs. We cycle big cooldowns on Feuds. Because my raid usually has 3 druids (bear MT, moonkin, me), we also have a Tranquility rotation for Feuds.
I save tree form for phase 2, for the fast Wrath casts. Tree is 4 a spam moonfare LOL. I almost always have 0 mana left entering phase 2, however, if I’ve paced myself properly.
I have one other tip for this fight. Make sure your raid frames show people below 10K health differently from other people. Those are the urgent healing targets. The Low Health (http://www.wowhead.com/spell=89084) debuff is present on them, so you can use that as a handy trigger for display.
Chimaeron is a one-shot for us (unless something silly happens) and we have the Sound and Fury (http://www.wowhead.com/achievement=5309) achievement for most of the guild now. So this approach works. I’m sure others do as well. This fight is mostly a quick-reflexes fight for healers, followed by periods of massive multitarget throughput. Holy priests probably rule on Massacres.
Another thing I didn't know. After much tweeking of my UI and boss mods to get them to show people below 10k health I find that it's a spell that can be shown as a debuf (DOH!) http://www.wowhead.com/spell=89084 Low Health
Bump for monday
Just a note which i hope will help those who have not seen this fight. It is not a dps race, it is entirely about not taking damage. If you can maintain that single thought whilst doing your healing/dps then you'll kill this boss very quickly.