HEROIC: Blackwing Descent: Magmaw

TeaLeaf · April 22, 2011, 09:29:57 AM

QuoteHello, and welcome to Tankspot's Heroic Cataclysm Raid Guide. My name is Papapaint, and in this video, I'll be discussing the strategy for defeating Hard Mode Magmaw in the Blackwing Descent raid instance.

Magmaw has become significantly more complicated in his hard mode form. As with the other Hard Mode guides, I will assume you are familiar with the normal mode encounter and deal primarily with the changes present in Heroic. That dastardly Nefarian has come to observe this fight, as he does the other hard mode encounters in Blackwing Descent. He floats around behind Magmaw and throws stuff at your raid to make the fight more difficult.

For the first 70% of the encounter, Nefarian will hurl meteors at your raid at roughly 35 second intervals. When the meteors hit, they will knock back any players within the impact radius--roughly 5 yards--and create a twisting line of fire that will slowly move back and forth. As of a recent patch, this mechanic will prefer players at range, so you shouldn't frequently see melee range meteors as in this video. The fires they make hurt pretty badly, so it's quite easy for a raider to die immediately after being hit by a meteor and lying in fire for the duration of the knockback.

More importantly, the meteor impacts will spawn Blazing Bone Constructs, giant skeletons which must be DPS'd down when possible, and require the addition of a tank in 25 man difficulty. He sends these out every 30 seconds, and it's fairly tough for a tank to handle more than two of them without generous use of cooldowns; as such, your best bet is to focus your DPS on skeletons until Magmaw's head is exposed.

Whenever the skeletons reach 20% HP, they begin channeling an 8-second spell called "Armageddon". They must be killed before the spell finishes casting, or else they explode and hit your raid for a significant amount of damage. For this reason, I would advise against trying to cleave down the skeletons, and instead focus your dps onto them anytime the head is not exposed.

When Magmaw reaches 30%, Nefarian gives up on his meteor strategy and instead chain-casts AoE shadowbolts. These hit for around 25 thousand damage, and can splash to other players; simply spready out, pop heroism slash bloodlust, and go to town on magmaw. He will still fall over during this phase, so it's actually a little easier than the rest of the fight; just a hard burn against your healers' mana.

Thanks for watching this guide. I've included some footage of our kill, along with some commentary to identify a few specific ways in which we handled certain mechanics. If you're interested in seeing future raid guides from Tankspot, please subscribe to the Zam official channel on youtube. Good luck!

TeaLeaf · June 02, 2011, 03:00:18 PM

Bump for RGT to be prepped for this fight.

TeaLeaf · June 08, 2011, 02:20:26 PM

Bump for this week for RGT.

Whitey · June 09, 2011, 09:37:50 AM

For the DPS (taken from Maintankadin):
[ATTACH=CONFIG]734[/ATTACH]

Slush · June 09, 2011, 09:48:15 AM

Haha, thats a beautiful one Whitey. I love it when its that simple!

Whitey · June 09, 2011, 12:21:26 PM

Quote from: Slush;326670Haha, thats a beautiful one Whitey. I love it when its that simple!

Other than the lava kiter (Hunter or Mage), the dps have this one easy (don't they always ;-P ).

It looks like having me tank Magmaw and Twisted on Constructs will be the best option for this fight. We can then use HoP/bubble during mangles to free up some heals for raid (I need respec and reglyph before raid to reduce cooldowns).
It might be worth Twisted taunting Magmaw before Mangle for me to taunt back to ensure that if anyone gets hit after my threat reset (head down phase), it's Twisted. The healing in phase 3 looks fun!!

hubbah · June 09, 2011, 12:25:34 PM

my vote goes to mage.. ( goooo sheep gooo!

haha )

Slush · June 09, 2011, 03:50:56 PM

Hmm... been looking over this and... It looks quite doable. But... Why is this bumped for this week? We need to kill this guy normal to get to Atramedes Heroic.

Whitey · June 09, 2011, 04:06:07 PM

Quote from: Slush;326691Hmm... been looking over this and... It looks quite doable. But... Why is this bumped for this week? We need to kill this guy normal to get to Atramedes Heroic.

No...we need to kill this guy heroic to get to Atramedes heroic :narnar:

The reason we want to have a go at it is to do with tank availability on Sunday and how quickly we think you lot will get Atramedes and Maloriak down.

TeaLeaf · June 10, 2011, 07:54:47 AM

Logs for this are now up. Let's sift through them and find out who got hit by what and let's discuss how to approach this fight next reset. In the mean time the focus moves to HC Chim and HC Maloriak for this week, so don't forget to prep for those too!

hubbah · June 10, 2011, 08:13:35 AM

Damage taken from
Actor    Amount
Magmaw    4790830    84.7 %
Blazing Bone Construct    403793    7.1 %
None    336335    5.9 %
Lava Parasite    51459    0.9 %
Pillar of Flame    47621    0.8 %
Lava Parasite    23570    0.4 %

As you can see this is from all try's we had on magmaw.. so there were some fights i took no dmg at all cause we wiped really early.
Only the dmg from magmaw can not be avoided all others can.

To make slush his job abit eazier ill need to work abit on not getting hit by the pillar's parasites but i cant really do anything bout the bone construct.
It is gonna happen that i hit it with my aoe, cant really do anything about that one.

TeaLeaf · June 10, 2011, 08:17:51 AM

Yep, the construct hits just need some quick taunting by the OT. I think we had a better position on the last tries where OT was able to be more mid for the pick up, then moving out of the way again.

hubbah · June 10, 2011, 08:24:10 AM

Maybe i can help by MDing the construct when it spawns.. ill have about a second or 2 before the parasites spawn. Its worth giving a shot

If i dont mess up i should have the adds down before next spawn anyway.

Slush · June 10, 2011, 08:53:37 AM

Hubbah, you should really keep your focus on the parasites, where you are doing a great job.
When it comes to your damage taken, it has to be in 3rd (After tanks), cause you will take more damage from Spew+Parasites being all alone and unable to be AoE healed. This is not the issue :-)
The issue in this fight is..

Where do we place ourselves?
We have many options, and we need to make sure that the incoming damage is minimized, healing is maximized and dps is comfy with the spots. When we have figured this out, its a kill.
The reason I called it a Hubbah issue yesterday was; you take loads of damage whilst running in and out of range. We need to, like we did on last tires, make sure that Hunter heals lands, the hunter being in range .-)

Twyst · June 10, 2011, 11:21:44 AM

I'm was more comfortable hanging out near the spike for sure. Easier to see where the meteor lands for construct pickup as my camera view isn't obscured with a lava spewing monstrosity. It also means that when the head is down, it gets my cleaves as well.

I am having an issue with having to taunt magmaw and handle add pickup at the same time. The issue is this - Whitey is calling for a taunt roughly when the 1st construct is in the 20% threshold to trigger a wipe and the 2nd construct will appear almost right after. My prio was use my DPS on the 1st construct then tag the 2nd then maybe taunt magmaw then back to the new construct. Do the DPS feel that when the 20% marker is reached, my attention threat and DPS can go elsewhere so I can pickup and agro the other construct asap, tickle maggy and get back to the new construct?