Blackwing Descent: Chimaeron - Defeated Feb 20th 2011

[Whitey]

wowwiki:Chimaeron

[video=youtube;eLa57ES3py8]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLa57ES3py8&feature=player_embedded[/video]

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.

[Arcticfire]

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

[Tirkad]

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.

[Arcticfire]

I dont think ure supposed to top off the tank on ure own, if everyone is above 10k the other healers should help.

[JonnyAppleSeed]

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

[Whitey]

I 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.

[TeaLeaf]

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.

[Arcticfire]

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.

[Slush]

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.

[TeaLeaf]

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.

[Twyst]

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.

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?

[Twyst]

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?

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.

[Tirkad]

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.

[JonnyAppleSeed]

Interesting read ... A slightly different way of tanking and healz

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 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.
  
• Periodically he will do a Double Attack  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 at 2 raid members. This would one-shot them save for the buff. It can splash to nearby players.
  
• Periodically he will cast Massacre, which is TURD, aka Totally Unavoidable Raid Damage.
  
• A random subset of these massacres knock the Bile-o-tron offline and cause Feud, 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 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  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

[Arcticfire]

Bump for monday