HEROIC: Blackwing Descent: Chimaeron - Defeated 29/5-2011

[TeaLeaf]

Hello, and welcome to Tankspot's Heroic Cataclysm Raid Guide. My name is Papapaint, and in this video, I will be discussing the strategy for Hard Mode Chimaeron in the Blackwing descent raid instance. This guide will assume you are familiar with normal mode, and deal exclusively with the changes present in the hard mode encounter.

From a healing perspective, the fight is relatively unchanged. You still only need to heal people to over 10k, but tank healing and fued-phase healing are slightly more intense. This fight boils down to Tank coordination and DPS control.


The first item of note is the unchanged enrage timer; it is still 7 minutes, but chimaeron's health has been increased to 126 million. This, combined with what is essentially a three-tank requirement, means you need to maximize your damage where you can. We ran with 7 healers to cover the intense fued phase healing, and used two tanks. Because of the mechanic preventing any player from being one-shot as long as they are over 10k, we opted to have a DPS DK tank as long as Finkle's mixture was up. The other tanks tanked him during fued phase and soaked double attacks during Finkle's Mixture. This increased our DPS output with no change in healing requirements.


The next change from normal mode concerns "Fued" phase. After Chimaeron casts fued, Papa Nefarian will tell his little hydra child's heads to quit bickering. Chimaeron will Fued for only two seconds, then revert back to meleeing his primary aggro target and continue to stack break. To handle this, you'll want a tank with no stacks of break to pick him up. Your raid will still go without Finkle's mixture until the next Massacre, so you need to have your raid stack up to soak the poison vomit just like on normal mode. Your tank should stand away from the raid to prevent the vomit from hitting him as well. Chimaeron will double attack once during this phase, and a tank with a single stack of break can rotate cooldowns to survive it.


Please note that your tank needs to be topped up in the two second window following the massacre that knocks bile-o-tron offline. We rotated Guardian Spirit and Lay on Hands to ensure he wouldn't be gibbed by a quick melee.


The reason for having three tanks--even if one of them is actually just a melee DPS--is on the likely chance that Chimaeron will knock Bile-o-Tron offline two massacres in a row. If this happens, the last Fued tank will still have stacks of break, and will definitely die upon application of the third stack OR from double attack--chimaeron hits hard to begin with, and him hitting 50-75% harder will ruin your day. With three tanks, you can rotate between two tanks on Fued phases to ensure that you're always using a tank with zero break stacks.


The final change occurs in phase 3. Nefarian will cast a shadow DoT spell on your whole raid called "Mocking Shadow," which deals one to two thousand damage per second to your entire raid. While you are still unable to heal players, you can mitigate the DoT with Power Word: Barrier, Raid Wall, Aura Mastery, and other personal cooldowns. Because of this, it's best to enter the final phase with your whole raid topped off. Chimaeron will not apply the healing debuff until riiiiight around 22%, so we chose to bring him down to 24%, waited for massacre, stacked up, topped the raid off, and pushed him into the final phase. As in normal mode, hike up your britches, pop cooldowns, and go to town.


Thanks for watching this guide. As usual, feel free to leave comments either on youtube or the official strategy thread on tankspot.com. You can also subscribe to this channel for access future raid guides. I have included the last half of this fight with some commentary to demonstrate how we handled the encounter.

[Slush]

Your tank should stand away from the raid to prevent the vomit from hitting him as well. Chimaeron will double attack once during this phase, and a tank with a single stack of break can rotate cooldowns to survive it.

Guess this is what TL mentioned before the last try. Cant belive I didnt notice this myself :-)

Healing PoV:
Chimster hits harder than usual, so what I tried to do... Keep Healing rain up all the time on mah group + Riptide-HealingWave-HealingWave on whatever tank is tanking. With proper rotation on Mana tides+Mana Hymn my mana will be on a decent level throught the fight.. atleast until the first massacre..

[TeaLeaf]

Yep, that was it Slush!   Let's get some research done and get prepared for this properly!

[JonnyAppleSeed]

Quite a good breakdown of the 10 man heroic ... http://www.icy-veins.com/chimaeron-detailed-strategy

Worth a read some nice tips for all classes

[Slush]

Quite a good breakdown of the 10 man heroic ... http://www.icy-veins.com/chimaeron-detailed-strategy
Worth a read some nice tips for all classes

Im gonna post the difference (according to your site, Jas).

Differences from Normal Mode

There are 3 changes between the normal and heroic versions of the Chimaeron encounter:

    1 Chimaeron has more health, up to 36,246,424 from 25,939,384 in 10-man difficulty and up to 126,776,592 from 90,616,064 in 25-man difficulty;
    2 during the Stack Phase, Nefarian removes Feud from Chimaeron, enabling him to resume his Melee/Break/Double Attack while the Bile-O-Tron 800 is offline;
    3 during the Nuke Phase, Nefarian afflicts every raid member with Mocking Shadows, which eventually wipes the raid.

All the other abilities hit for exactly the same amount as they did in normal mode. In 25-man, Chimaeron's melee swing deals an extreme amount of damage to the main tank compared to the other versions of the fight. Fortunately, this is of no concern thanks to Finkle's Mixture.

1.. ok, no problem. Makes the fight longer.
2.. this caused problems yesterday, and I can hear tirk commenting this mechanic already :-D <3 this is where we need to step up.
3.. this will cause problems when we get that far, but: As teaell said; Make sure we have massacre and all to full health before we kick him into last phase.

[TeaLeaf]

2.. this caused problems yesterday, and I can hear tirk commenting this mechanic already :-D <3 this is where we need to step up.

ROFL - I saw the pre-edit!

3 will not be a problem.  It's a timing issue, sort of like getting Nef as low as possible without a crackle whilst still killing Ony before she goes BOOM!

I'm figuring we do Chim rapidly, then Atra, then Maloriak.  How's that for a night's work?

[TeaLeaf]

From the website Jas linked:
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5. Heroic Mode

The only change that tanks need to worry about is that during the Stack Phase, Nefarian removes Feud from Chimaeron, enabling him to resume his Melee/Break/Double Attack cycle while the Bile-O-Tron 800 is offline.

5.1. Strategy Change

To deal with that change, the fight now requires two tanks (the double-attack tank and the stack-phase tank), and one DPS with the ability to taunt the boss and keep aggro. The latter tank will be referred to as the main tank. Below, we detail the various tanking assignments.

The main tank will be tanking Chimaeron during the Spread Phase and will be afflicted with stacks of the Break debuff. Because of Finkle's Mixture, the healers only need to keep that tank above 10k. That is the reason why you do not need an actual tank here, as there is no need for defensive cooldowns or damage reduction abilities. The damage increase you get by having a DPS as a main tank is crucial for beating the enrage timer.

The double-attack tank has the hardest task because they need to taunt the boss before each Double Attack and survive it, even during the Stack Phase, when the Bile-O-Tron 800 is offline. There will only be one such attack per Stack Phase so tanking and healing cooldowns should be used.

The stack-phase tank is required during the Stack Phase because the stacks of Break on the main tank prevent them from surviving the melee attacks from Chimaeron when the Bile-O-Tron 800 is offline. In that phase, the stack-phase tank will take Chimaeron and will use their abilities to survive. As the phase goes on, it will be increasingly harder to survive, due to stacks of Break building up. Fortunately, the stacks will drop during the Spread Phase.

5.2. Tips and Tricks

In order to alleviate the damage on the main tank, your raid can make use of several DPS players (they need to be able to taunt and keep aggro) as main tanks and have them rotate so that they spread their stacks of Break.

Players afflicted by stacks of Break will not be targeted by Caustic Slime. During the Stack Phase, your raid leader can decide to keep the stack-phase tank out of the stacking position to make healing them easier. If your raid is using a single main tank, then it is also advised to have them stay out of the stacking position because 4 stacks of Break are going to make them take increased damage that will be difficult to heal.

TL:DR
So we could have a ret pala with RF or a cat/bear etc as the MT for the fight.

[TeaLeaf]

We still saw some 60 second stacks, so we think we need to go to a third 'dps' tank.  Unfortunately last night coincided with us having two of three main tanks offline and we had to run Grim as a second tank (thank you) but run a two tank strategy not a three tank.  The bad news is that the two tank strat needs a lot of cooldons and we were running out and getting tank gibs.  If we want to do this reliably then I think we run 3 tanks with the third in dps spec as a main tank - say a death knight in blood presence.  We then have two tanks to handle break and the stack double strikes and should be able to rotate to avoid having a break+double strike.

1 taunting dps main tanking
1 tank double strike taunting
1 tank for tanking during feud with double strike taunting from tank 2 to avoid break + double strike issues

9% was our best try.  It will drop next week with 3 tanks I reckon.

In 2 tank mode we saw some wierd melee gibs on Grim even though Whitey had taunted as a stack phase started. Anyone found anything as to why the taunt at the start of the stack phase seemed so unreliable?  The taunts for double strike were working fine, but the stack phase taunt often had Grim getting gibbed some 4 seconds after the tank switch for some reason.

[TeaLeaf]

We had 23 tries last night:

MT â€" the 10k tank
OT â€" the double strike/feud tank

Try #
1: MT lost to melee during feud
2: OT lost to double strike during feud (not quite high enough health for 1st strike)
3: MT lost to melee during feud (MT mis-taunt)
4: MT lost to double strike during spread
5: OT lost â€" no healing on OT in 2 second window transition into feud
6: MT lost to double strike during spread
7: MT lost â€" not certain, but looks like early re-taunt at end of feud and killed without Finkle’s buff
8: MT lost to melee during feud
9: MT lost to melee during feud
10: MT lost to double strike during spread
11: MT lost to melee during feud
12: OT lost to melee during feud (not quite high enough health for 1st strike)
13: OT lost to Break+Double Strike during feud
14: OT lost to melee during feud (not quite high enough health for 1st strike)
15: OT lost to Break+Double Strike during feud
16: OT lost to Double Strike during feud
17: MT lost to melee during feud
18: MT lost to melee during feud
19: G2 healer down
20: MT lost to melee during feud
21: OT lost to melee during feud
22: OT lost to melee during feud (not quite high enough health for 1st strike)
23: OT lost to Double Strike during feud

We also lost people on three tries when they forgot to group up, but that should be easily handled in future.
As you can see, there are a few common issues:

40% (10 of 25) â€" OT lost (40% OT lost to melee during feud, 30% OT lost to Double Strike during feud, 20% OT lost to Break+Double Strike during feud, 10% healer error)
32% (8 of 25) - MT lost to melee during feud
20% (5 of 25) - Healing Errors
8% (2 of 25) - Taunt Errors

28% of our tries we can fix easily as they are down to us to make sure they don’t happen.  I've also been kind and not assigned all the OT losses to healer error as I know we will sort this!  :wink:

However I’m worried by MT losses during feud as these should not happen.  Tanks & melee, please can I ask you to focus on researching why this is happening?  MT is tanking, feud happens, OT taunts Chim and then some 3-5 seconds later Chim goes back to hit MT when MT has not taunted.  Why?  I know we can say RNG, but I’m one of those people who cringe when we say RNG as I don’t believe in it, it’s usually a case of us not fully understanding a mechanic.  So let’s find out what it is that we do not yet understand, go post in the tank forums, let’s find out!

As an aside, we definitely saw 60 second gaps between feuds, not the 'all 90 second gaps', so we have to plan to handle that 60 second feud and this is another reason why a third tank might be a good idea as we can split breaks between the two OTs.

OT losses are slightly easier to fix.  Either we apply some cooldowns (but that’s highly dependent on raid composition and was not possible last night), or we add a third tank to split the damage as I mentioned in the previous post  That should remove at least 50% of the OT gibs and probably more as I suspect some of the 40% were not helped by break stacks which I did not notice in the logs.

Any other thoughts?

[Slush]

Well... I cant say for sure, but I do have a sneaky thought in the back of my head.
Ive been tanking BH (Argaloth) alot on my druid, and well... I there tend to get aggro back after the other tank has taunted if I do a Mangle-Maul or a Swipe or Lacerate... or just about do anything.
So what I started doing .. is pressing Esc. Twice. I dont want to target anything or do anything. I just dont want aggro back. This helps :-D
You say 3-5 seconds TL, thats about how long it takes for the Taunt(taunt is a debuff on the mob target) to wear off, yeh? And if not additional aggro is established, the mob will go back to other tank. And taunt only brings the taunters threat to the equal amount as the current tank has.
In short: Grim shouldnt do any dmg before he taunts again.

And as healing goes: This is a super-duper-thight fight and a major step up in focus on timers and abilities and CDs... learning phase yesterday, yeh.

The healing setup yesterday was made for a fight like this. We dont need to target anything but tanks, its perfect.
If someone other than Tank went down, it was because of not standing in Healing Rain. And most of the time when a tank went down, it was some taunt/rotation thing that was wrong.
I say we try 3 tanks. Grim might be one of them, but... Yeh. Good times.

[Grimnar]

Well first off, it was my first time tanking in cata and then right away a heroic fight. So i started of in the raid with a mixed feeling, a sort of scared feeling
Halfway the fight i became abit more relaxed and at that point i started to see some more things as at first i was way to focused on my timers (and didn't see half of my screen...)
 
The double attacks where fine at the start of the fight, but halfway i got lost several times, as whitey was dodging a few of them. So i sometimes taunted to early.
And once to late.... (soz) But with this also came a few deaths at my end, As with the stackup phase i had just taunted the boss and then that phase started. And thanks to that taunt he came back to me, first one was solved with me using all my cd's. Second a bubble (with 1 weird death and 1 forgotten bubble for 2 tries). And nr 3 was more like having luck.
 
Also with a few tries i had agro problems, whitey wasn't taunting the boss but somehow i couldn't keep the boss on me and when i needed the one taunt i have it was still halfway on cooldown. What caused us a wipe...
 
For my own feeling it went k, considering i was sort of thrown into a lions pit and with great help from whitey ofcourse.

[TeaLeaf]

Just a thought:

We had several instances when I was trying to call your taunt at the end of the double strike period where we then went into a Feud.  Is there a possibility that this happened:

OT tanking
TL calls taunt at end of Double Strike period
Feud starts
Whitey taunts quickly for Feud period
TS delay (half a second maybe) MT hears call for taunt and taunts
Bubble applied
OT still tanking
Bubble removed, Chim returns to MT during Feud and kills MT

Bit of a long shot, but do you see what I mean?  I think Slush's explanation is better, but I thought I'd throw it in as an option!

[Slush]

Well, yeh... Delay and ts is abit of a risky combination, and even someone else calling the taunt. Sure, long shot... but it could still have happened a couple of times yesterday.
How is DBM on this encounter? Im using BigWigs myself.. and Im.. not quite happy with it. Feel like something is missing.

Btw, you did an awsome job yesterday Mr. Hawk. From the rest of us: Thx, very much appreciated. :-)

[TeaLeaf]

DXE has a bar that pops up to show that a double strike is due and the bar disappears when double strike has been applied.  It is cued I am sure by the previous Break being applied.  DXE might be a good mod to have installed for this fight for that bar alone if you are the MT.

Another thought was that if the double strike period ends the next melee swing for the MT might not be for another =<5 seconds, so we could probably delay the taunt until we see if a Feud happens.  If no Feud then MT taunts back (well within the 5 sec swing timer), if there is a Feud then we leave Chim on OT who already has solid aggro.  That way we would avoid some of the above problems.



And yes, you did good Ice!

[Grimnar]

Just a thought:
 
We had several instances when I was trying to call your taunt at the end of the double strike period where we then went into a Feud. Is there a possibility that this happened:
 
OT tanking
TL calls taunt at end of Double Strike period
Feud starts
Whitey taunts quickly for Feud period
TS delay (half a second maybe) MT hears call for taunt and taunts
Bubble applied
OT still tanking
Bubble removed, Chim returns to MT during Feud and kills MT
 
Bit of a long shot, but do you see what I mean? I think Slush's explanation is better, but I thought I'd throw it in as an option!

No for the bubble part this couldn't have happend, the taunt was 2/3 seconds before the change, at that point whitey taunts and 2 seconds after that i get the bubble, i removed the 10 second (correct here?) bubble when it had 4 seconds left, a second later i died somehow. For my own counting my taunt couldn't still be active at that time. But what i thought when we all where wondering what happend was that maybe (a big maybe) that i had a huge agro difference compared with whitey and that his taunt(s) somehow wern't accounted for and then when i removed the bubble that my threat was back at where it was infront of whitey.
But that wipe will stay a mystery i think...
 
After that i let the bubble go fullout before i started smashing the boss again and that went fine.
 
 
and i am using bigwigs aswell. and only had a chat warning for doublestrike and then at some poin i waited for the boss to do his animation and taunt at that point as whitey couldn't be trusted with his dodging attacks