HEROIC: Bastion of Twilight: Halfus Wyrmbreaker - Defeated 22/05/11

[TeaLeaf]

Hello and welcome to the Bastion of Twilight Raid Guide! My name is Aliena and in this video I'll show you all you have to know about the heroic Halfus Wyrmbreaker encounter. We completed this fight with 3 tanks, 9 healers - 3 of which were discipline priests - and 13 DPS. I will assume that you're familiar with how to defeat the normal encounter and will only explain the differences in the heroic version.

As soon as you enter Halfus' room, you'll notice that all the dragons and whelps are interactive and that Halfus and his dragon have all possible buffs and abilities. Yes, it's probably dawning on you, this fight is a cluster****. The enrage timer, if you were wondering, is 6 minutes.

Obviously, you have to negate all the abilities that will cause you to wipe quickly straight away. That means, the Storm Rider, Time Warden, Whelps and Nether Scion should be released straight away. You're going to need at least three strong tanks to handle the incoming tank damage. We used a warrior, a paladin and a blood death knight tank.

We start out the fight by having our paladin pull Halfus and simultaneously activating the Storm Rider. Meanwhile our warrior picks up the Time Warden and our Death Knight grabs the Nether Scion. We have a rogue break out the whelps which are then picked up by our warrior.

Everything is immediately pulled to the middle of the room and the whole raid should stay within a 15-yard radius of Halfus. This means you'll be pressed for space, but the fire balls raining down are very slow, so you still should not have any trouble moving out of them. It also ensures that your disc priests can handle all the necessary raid healing by Atonement-smiting, which frees up your remaining healers to tank heal. Make sure your priests only smite Halfus, since he's the only one taking increased damage. Also, we found it's an HPS loss to use Archangel. Each tank should have about two healers assigned to him.

Once situated in the middle of the room, ranged AoE classes work on taking down the whelps as soon as possible, while melee and single target DPS concentrate on the Time Warden. You also want to leave at least one interrupter on Halfus, to interrupt every single Shadow Nova that he casts. As soon as the whelps are dead, the AoE DPS switches over to help out with the Warden.

Since Halfus has a Mortal Strike debuff that he puts on whoever tanks him, he needs to be bouncing around your tanks. We had our tanks taunt off of each other at 5 or more stacks of the MS debuff. Keep in mind that whoever is tanking Halfus and a dragon will need extra healing, so be vocal about tank switches on ventrilo.

On the subject of tank damage, your tanks will want to use cooldowns pretty liberally throughout the whole encounter whenever they're tanking Halfus at the same time as a Drake. Try to have some kind of cooldown up for the majority of the time that you're tanking Halfus. Be vocal about this on vent, and don't be shy about asking for a healer cooldown.

Once the Time Warden dies, your now freed-up tank should release the Slate Dragon, which will occasionally stun Halfus. To make it easier on your tanks, you can also have a hunter free him and then misdirect him to the freed-up tank.


This is really useful sub-50%, since it puts huge delays on Furious Roar, and sometimes even cuts off some of its ticks. However, even though you have three drakes released, all your DPS should switch over to Halfus straight away after the Time Warden dies while the tanks just hold them. Any kind of bloodlust should also be used as soon as all DPS is on Halfus, since you won't get the full effect of it when you're continuously stunned by Furious Roar.

As soon as you push Halfus past 50%, you need to pay close attention to Halfus' Furious Roar timer. You should have a power word: barrier order assigned to your disc priests, and have them put one up on the raid each time Halfus is casting Furious Roar. Also, make sure all your tanks are at full health before a Roar. Whoever is tanking Halfus at the time needs to use a strong cooldown, such as Shield Wall, Ardent Defender, etc, or have a priest cast a Pain Suppression.

Tank deaths occur very easily below 50%. Soulstones should be placed on tanks and battle resses should be reserved for such emergencies as well. Your raid needs to be healed up completely between Roars, and you still want to assign an interrupter to blink out of the last Roar pulse, to interrupt the Shadow Nova that follows it.

To recap, by role: At the start of the fight, tanks pick up their assigned targets. Bounce Halfus around the three tanks by having one taunt when another hits 5 or more stacks of the MS debuff. Use a cooldown when tanking multiple targets. Once the Time Warden dies, the freed-up tank releases the Slate Dragon. Do not stand in fire if you can avoid it.

Healers should be within 15 yards of Halfus. Disc priests should concentrate on smiting Halfus the entire fight, which triggers raid healing through Atonement. Other healers should be assigned to the tanks, ideally two healers to each tank. Power Word Barriers should be up for most Furious Roars. Be ready to use cooldowns on tanks when they ask for it. Do not stand in fire.

DPS should be within 15 yards of Halfus. AoE DPS focuses down the whelp pack, single target DPS concentrates on the Time Warden. Once the whelps are dead, everyone should kill the Time Warden. Keep one or more interrupters on Halfus, so no Shadow Novas go off. Once the Time Warden dies, concentrate on Halfus. Use Bloodlust. Sub-50%, have a mage or another class assigned to interrupting Shadow Nova after a Roar. Do not stand in the fire.

That about concludes the changes you'll encounter in the heroic version of Halfus Wyrmbreaker. Good luck, and have fun! I've attached the full encounter with the relevant vent conversation so you can see how we handled tank cooldowns. This is footage of our first Halfus kill, so tanks have slightly different assignments than I've mentioned in this video and the last few percent are a bit... sloppy.

[TeaLeaf]

This post is only half done, but as I need to go out now I'll post this incomplete info and edit it later.
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As this thread has been such a hive of activity, I'm not sure I need to post anything.  But I guess I will, someone has to.

6 minute enrage timer
Halfus 51.5 million HP

Recap:
Frenzied Assult - Nether Scion - Increase caster's attack speed by 120%
Malevolent Strikes - Slate - Halfus applies MS debuff
Shadow Nova - Storm Rider - 0.25 sec cast of Dark Magic AOE + knockback
Proto Behemoth - Fireball, Fireball Barrage, Scorching Breath

When a drake is released they give these buffs before being MC'd by Halfus:
Storm - Cyclone Winds - slows Shadow Nova to 1.5 sec
Time - Time Dialation - slows Halfus attack speed
Slate Dragon - Stone Touch - stuns Halfus periodically for 12 seconds
Nether - Nether Blindness - reduces Halfus chance to hit, attack speed and damage done by 25%
Whelps - Atropic Poison - reduces damage done

When a drake dies, we gain Dragon's Vengeance (increases damage by 100%, stacking)


First up - the smite strategy is old hat, since 4.0.6 you do not need to run the smite strategy.

Second up.  Tanks beware.  Threat WILL be an issue as we'll be unloading big time on the targets, so you will be needing to push a steep threat curve at the outset.

Third: After 4.0.6 Halfus doesn't get damage debuffs till after drakes are down. Each drake or whelppack that goes down means 100% more damage on Halfus. Focussing dps on Halfus before at least 3 Drakes/Whelps are down is basically a dps loss overall.

This is a 2 tank fight.  Yes it can be 3 tanked, but I think we're not there yet with dps, so we'll need to 2 tank it.

High DPS will be crucial.  
HPS requirements early in the fight will be seriously hard, we'll use heroism.

Initial plan?
2 drakes (Time + Storm) + boss + whelps + Nether
When first drake down then add whelps
Other drake down add Nether
Kill whelps
Kill Nether.
Then boss.
Slate we'll probably end up leaving.
We might need to pull whelps earlier and kill before 2nd drake
If we add a third it could be fun on healing (Nether).

AOE will be a factor here to help us beat enrage timer.

Raid Help:
Check you have ALL your maelstrom enchants.   The price is so low now there is no excuse.  Bracers/Gloves/Weapons/Chest, makes sure you are sorted please.

Tank Help:
Priest can Leap of Faith MT after pull on boss to bring him as fas away from Halfus as possible, so that we delay the application of debuff stacks.
Have your BOP/Cancel BOP macros ready
Have /target macros or /focus macros ready for the relevant drakes/boss you are handling, it will be tricky to click on things in the midst of the fight.

Healer Help
Spirit link totem passes through mortal strike effects. For example, pop spirit link totem next to the 10 stacked tank whilst raid is healed up (rain/tranq/AOE heals) - that healing is constantly distributed to the tank with no penalty.  Not helpful regularly, but if we needed a temporary boost to finish an add or keep a tank alive then it works if we have people within 10 yards for 6 seconds.
(note this also works on Chimaeron P2)

Optional order?
Whelps > Nether > Time > Storm
Whelps > Nether > Storm > Time (currently my preferred order)
Whelps > Storm > Nether > Time

Double pot

Shadow Nova interrupts in P2 - must have a mage to blink>CS, or PVP trink or racial to remove stun.  Set order.

Free-action potions?

[Tirkad]

As suggested by TL, i went to maintankadin forums and check the heroic halfus 10 men fight. The second post is really interesting, and i'll bold out the most interesting part (in my pov):

If you release that many drakes at once, you won't last longer than 10 seconds.

The strat that we've been using is to release Storm Rider (slows shadow nova casts), Nether Scion (25% less attack speed, damage, and chance to hit) and whelps (less damage from the proto drake) right off the bat. We AOE down the whelps and release Time Warden (makes the fireball barrage avoidable).

If we're alive long enough to make it this point, our healers are running low on mana. The goal at this point is to finish off whatever drakes are active and then switch to the boss. Of course, we've never lived long enough to manage that.

And, yes, we use 3 tanks. We have a bear on Halfus, since his avoidance is high enough to give us better RNG on the Malevolent Strikes debuff. He has a /cancelaura hand of protection macro set up to drop his stacks, the idea being that our paladin will then take over once the druid's stacks get too high again.


Simply put, there is very little reason to actively work on 10-man heroic content at the moment. Whereas 25-man raiders get, what, 6-7 pieces of heroic loot and 1-2 heroic tokens on heroic mode, 10-man raiders only get 2 pieces of loot and no tokens. Heroic fights require massive amounts of raid stacking that most 10-man guilds cannot handle. Hell, many of the 25-man raids require stacking that literally cannot translate to 10-man (the 25-man Halfus strategy, for instance, cannot be translated to 10-man), possibly making the fights currently impossible. It's stupid and it will either be fixed or people will wait until tier 12.

So, mainly the healers problems are related to malevolent strikes absorbing tons of mana and sucking out A LOT of the heals, up to requiring 2 healers full time on Whitey.
BUT! we have 3 paladins, and one of them is Whitey, so we can actually reset the stacks once every minute(the forbearence debuff lasts one minute), given the fact that when all the [ITEM=http://www.wowhead.com/spell=1022]Hands of protection[/ITEM] are on cooldown, Hal and Whitey can switch their tanking targets and hal can reset them again.
Now there's a point to develop: if you'd like to use this tactic, one or more pallies can talent the improved hand of protection (2 talents for 2 mins less cooldown on it), becouse since the fight is 6 mins, with at least 2 people (correct me if i'm wrong) using a talented Hand of Protection, we'll be able to reset the stacks forever. Please tell us in advance if you want us to respec.
I think this tactic will be preferable to the spirit totem glitch, mainly becouse if the healers will be sitting in a tight place, they will have to move more often to avoid the barrage, ending up having less time to effectively heal.
I hope it helps.
P.S.: I didn't suggest the use of hand of protection to drop the stacks becouse i thought you already experimented it, like the Divine Shield suggestion on Nefarian that would have failed miserably.

[Whitey]

So, mainly the healers problems are related to malevolent strikes absorbing tons of mana and sucking out A LOT of the heals, up to requiring 2 healers full time on Whitey.
BUT! we have 3 paladins, and one of them is Whitey, so we can actually reset the stacks once every minute(the forbearence debuff lasts one minute), given the fact that when all the [ITEM=http://www.wowhead.com/spell=1022]Hands of protection[/ITEM] are on cooldown, Hal and Whitey can switch their tanking targets and hal can reset them again.
Now there's a point to develop: if you'd like to use this tactic, one or more pallies can talent the improved hand of protection (2 talents for 2 mins less cooldown on it), becouse since the fight is 6 mins, with at least 2 people (correct me if i'm wrong) using a talented Hand of Protection, we'll be able to reset the stacks forever. Please tell us in advance if you want us to respec.
I think this tactic will be preferable to the spirit totem glitch, mainly becouse if the healers will be sitting in a tight place, they will have to move more often to avoid the barrage, ending up having less time to effectively heal.
I hope it helps.
P.S.: I didn't suggest the use of hand of protection to drop the stacks becouse i thought you already experimented it, like the Divine Shield suggestion on Nefarian that would have failed miserably.

The problem with this is that 1 minute is waaaay too long.  I bubble when I get to 8-10 stacks to reset and I then have at most about 30 seconds before I would need another one (or as we did last night, a taunt off).  Once the first drake is down then the tanks are in a taunt rotation every 30 seconds (as the debuff wears off).  It might help the healing a bit if the stacks get higher than expected within the 30 second window but you would need to refrain from using lay on hands to ensure you had the HoP available to use.

[Tirkad]

Of course the forbearence debuff will make lay on hands not usable on tanks, but the only way to get more time for your rotation is to free the last dragon too, and hope in a well timed stun on the boss.
You know i always praised mitigation above avoidance, but here we really could use some seconds relying on some avoidance. Do you think it makes sense to develop a tactic over the use of dodging cooldown trinkets to survive until the forbearence expires on the other tank?
On the other hand, i think we should plan a cooldown rotation. I guess you're saving the dmg reduction cooldowns for when the stacks get high, not to mention that both me and the off tank can still use the hand of sacrifice if needed.

[Twyst]

How were you guys doing the initial pull?

I ask as it's about 5 seconds from drake release -> debuff on boss. So if the tank wades into halfus, the opening few seconds he will be hit very hard.
Maybe have dps taunt + kite halfus while drakes go up. This allows the debuffs from drakes to happen and the tank can pickup halfus and in get a slower application of stacks as Nether debuff should now be up.

[Twyst]

You know i always praised mitigation above avoidance, but here we really could use some seconds relying on some avoidance. Do you think it makes sense to develop a tactic over the use of dodging cooldown trinkets to survive until the forbearence expires on the other tank?

Avoidance trinkets share the same CD, which is often 2 minutes.

[Grimnar]

How were you guys doing the initial pull?

I ask as it's about 5 seconds from drake release -> debuff on boss. So if the tank wades into halfus, the opening few seconds he will be hit very hard.
Maybe have dps taunt + kite halfus while drakes go up. This allows the debuffs from drakes to happen and the tank can pickup halfus and in get a slower application of stacks as Nether debuff should now be up.

Tank taunts the boss and runs away, then a priest uses leap of faith (or how it is called) to get a few secs more before halfus is smashing down the tank.

[Whitey]

You know i always praised mitigation above avoidance, but here we really could use some seconds relying on some avoidance. Do you think it makes sense to develop a tactic over the use of dodging cooldown trinkets to survive until the forbearence expires on the other tank?

I swapped out my mastery trinket for my dodge one at the start of the night.  Other than that, I need another set of gear as Mastery is way better than dodge (on a pally tank) for every other fight and any dodge/parry is reforged to mastery where appropriate.

[Slush]

There are alot of similarities to the Cho'gall fight here.
Remember we tried a 2 healer setup on that for a few nights? And we did get Choggy to 14% while learning and adapting. We switched back to 3 healers and got the kill.

I think we should do some changes here aswell. But not 2 healers. Lets go 4 healers instead? And see if we can manage smoothly through p1. Learning and adapting.
If(when) we are satisfied with positioning, love, damage taken and healing done it will be a kill. Or we can go back to 3 healers. Switching and tweaking now, faceroll it in a month.

We have an enrage timer, so it would pherhaps be smart to leave Slate up, while burning Halfus.


Source: Post 6 in http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/852553-Halfus-Wyrmbreaker-10-man-heroic-%28patch-4.0.6%29

[Tirkad]

I didn't mean to have you change the whole gear, just the trinkets.
Anyway, since we're not going to have 3 tanks, a question hits me: if we're using every cooldown in the most efficient way, how much time do we have before both tanks got 8 stacks?

[Whitey]

I didn't mean to have you change the whole gear, just the trinkets.
Anyway, since we're not going to have 3 tanks, a question hits me: if we're using every cooldown in the most efficient way, how much time do we have before both tanks got 8 stacks?

On one of the tries last night, Hal had 7 stacks within 30 seconds as he died before my stacks fell off.  So that was less than 30 seconds including kite time.

[TeaLeaf]

We seemed to lose Whitey quite a lot last night, either due to timing or taunting or sheer healing required v damage and the MS debuff.    Spirit totem was discussed last night as a way of bypassing the debuff, but I've been thinking about going down the AA/Atonement route with the same effect.  Early fights *had* to use disc priest in AA/Atonement spec for this reason and the initial stage of the fight is *all* about letting the Halfus tank survive.  Whilst we'd lose a lot of dps if I switch to disc spec for this fight, perhaps it would assist survivability greatly for the Halfus tank with the debuff bypass, Inspiration, PS and a PW:Barrier.  All we need is to get through that initial seriously mad phase and then the fight irons out.  Initial number crunching seems to indicate this would work.

[Tirkad]

well, i'm sure you'll end up with something for sunday. I can see that there is too much RNG involved to base a tactic around a tank's avoidance.
@TL: in your post you clearly stated that at the moment we cannot afford to bring less dps, so i think you should consider to switch one of the healer who were in last night (me jas or slush) with amber in disc spec.

[Slush]

If we want to kill everything -> Halfus, we have to bring as much dps as poss.
If we can kill something -> Halfus, while leaving other stuff up, we can bring less dps to balance it out.

With me, jas and tirk pumping out 13-17k each in the first part of the fight, I think TL is right on thinking Disc. This means less stress on healers, less dps...but also a possibility on leaving a drake up =we need to do 4.1 million damage less = halfus only has a 300%(instead of 400%) damage taken debuff.. Argh...