Lord Rhyolith - Deafeated 18/07/11

[TeaLeaf]

http://ptr.wowhead.com/npc=53258

[TeaLeaf]

Today on PTR we got some time with the newly renamed Lord Rhyolith. He's a well-tuned encounter and one we preferred to yesterday's boss, Beth'tilac. Some of his mechanics were refreshing, particularly in the way you actually controlled him, and we managed to test both phases of the fight thoroughly. If you've done Supremus or Kologarn, you'll find some elements from those bosses borrowed and rehashed with Lord Rhyolith.

Phase one starts out different from most fights as there is no need to tank him. He ambles around slowly and does not attack directly; instead, the real threat is where he intends to walk. Consequently, you'll need to steer him where you want him to path by attacking his left and right legs--applying DPS to the leg in which direction you want him to turn. We found it best to only have two or three melee on him at most communicating on ventrilo where they wanted him to turn and calling out switches. There is also a bar on the screen the indicates how much in the respective direction Rhyolith will be turning to help you out.

Your immediate goal in steering him is to make sure that he stays on the island itself; if he gets to close to the edges, he'll begin to drink the surrounding lava which results in potentially deadly raid damage from Drink Magma.

Your secondary goal is to make sure that he is being led in the path of active volcanoes that crop up over time. Each time he walks over one, he will stomp on it, which removes stacks of Obsidian Armor and gives him Molten Armor instead. He starts the fight with 80 stacks of Obsidan Armor and the goal is to remove them all so you can DPS him down to trigger phase two. Don't worry much about Molten Armor he gains in exchange as he loses a stack whenever he casts a spell or summons an add.

As he is being steered around successfully in phase one, the ranged DPS, healers, and the tank handle the adds he summons. Lord Rhyolith spawns two types of adds: Fragments of Rhyolith and Sparks. He spawns these in an alternating pattern so you will never have two types of adds up at the same time, making this a single tank fight. Fragments begin with a debuff called Meltdown. When it expires, it does their remaining HP as AoE damage to the entire raid. As such, it's best to just AoE them down with ranged.

The other adds hit harder; a single Spark spawned each time with an Immolation aura, ticking for a base 10,000 fire damage to those within its range. The tank would pull it off to the corners of the island to tank it away from the ranged. It was important to have the ranged focus down the Spark as it contributed to too much raid damage and also took up space where the melee couldn't steer the boss because of their ground AoE.

As mentioned earlier, throughout the fight active volcanoes spawn periodically. They put a stacking debuff on the raid that increases fire damage taken called Eruption. This debuff won't stop stacking until the volcanoes are dealt with and they make the damage the raid takes be quite severe as they buff all of it. You can easily wipe if it stacks to high. In addition, he casts Concussive Stomp time to time which hurts even more with the debuff. Volcanoes also shoot lines of magma across the zone which then flare up and become walls of lava. They hit hard and knock you up in the air, but are easy to avoid.

When Lord Rhyolith transitions into phase two after dipping to a low enough percentage, his model changes and the tank must pick him up. He also gains an Immolation aura similar to the one the Spark adds had. This ticks for a default 8,500 and affects the whole raid. However, if he has Molten Armor stacks, he will hit for more. If you recall, he gained these stacks in exchange for losing Obsidan Armor ones and they are removed whenever he casts things. Ideally, you don't want it to be on him when you phase transistion if possible so try to time it when you push him into phase two (i.e. wait for him to summon a spark or cast Flame Stomp before you do the final percentage). This is the entire rest of the phase--dealing with the damage from his AoE and burning him down before it overwhelms your healers.

Overall, it was a fun fight and more dynamic than usual. Steering him took a few wipes to learn and it was still easy to make a mistake on. The fight wouldn't be hard to PUG, either, if the melee who were assigned to steering him knew what to do. As such, he seemed significantly easier than the fight from yesterday and way less of a gear check. We also have some more gorgeous screenshots up to show you Firelands below.

[TeaLeaf]

Lord Rhyolith has two main phases. The first is interesting in the fact that the tank will never really target the boss, as they will be dealing with adds and their management.

In phase one, Fragments and Sparks of Rhyolith needs to burned down quickly. Fragments of Rhyolith have low health, but must be burned down within 30 seconds of spawning to prevent them from dealing their current damage to a random player(like a Grenade of Rhyolith). Sparks of Rhyolith must be gathered and tanked away from the raid as they deal nearly 9000 damage to players within 12 yards.

During phase one, the remaining raid needs to literally 'steer' the boss over dormant volcanoes to debuff the boss and help healers dealing with Volcano Summons and Craters he leaves behind after running over active volcanoes. To remove his armor, you must run him over Active Volcanoes, which will spawn other nasties or deal AOE damage at times (he will take 20% more damage everytime he is ran over an Active Volcanoe).

The group must also keep the boss away from the sides of the platform as he will Drink Magma; dealing 35000 fire dmg to all players every second for 4 seconds.

Phase two is reached at 25% health. Lord Rhyolith then loses his obsidium armor and becomes Liquid Form. This is a tank and spank and burn phase; as Lord Rhyolith gains Immolation, buring the raid with AOE damage (7k - 9k per second).

It's a fun and easy fight as long as the group remembers the steering mechanics, and the boss's positioning.

[TeaLeaf]

He has 8 stacks of his armor, and every time you run him over a volcano, he loses only one (not two) stacks of this buff, increasing the damage the raid deals on him (or his feet) by 10%.

[TeaLeaf]

Short fight tactics, will be updated once live versions appear...

Phase 1

-Steer him by attacking his legs. Attacking right leg turns him right, attacking left turns him left (IIRC). Dont let him reach edges, make him step on volcanoes to lower his armor stacks.
-Kill adds whenever they appear. Keep Sparks away from raid.
-Do NOT let fragments explode by timing out!
-8th volcano removes armor completely
-Dont stand in the fiiiireeee.....

Phase 2

-Burn burn, heal and burn.
-Dodge fire. Pewpew.

[TeaLeaf]

http://25man.com/firelands/rhyolith

[TeaLeaf]

[TeaLeaf]

Stacks getting too high was leading to some wipes during AOE.
You stop stacks getting too high by steering Rhyolith over the active volcanoes as a priority.
We weren't able to steer well enough and even a lot of DPS was not triggering the turn, let alone a hard turn.

Seeing lots of issues with leg driving on other forums.  
Steering meter resets after stomp.
Two melee DPS on their own seem to be able to do it for the guilds who have got the fight (we had 3-4 dps on them and still had trouble)
Logs do not show massive cross-damage/cleave/AOE/bleed but this would also affect it if the legs are in range of the adds being AOE'd down.
We're struggling on add dps as we're having to put so much into leg dps.

Forums saying that you can steer really sharp turns to allow accurate turning to prioritise active volcanos.  We were lucky to maintain a rough circle and hit them in the order we reached them during our clockwise tracking.

The fight itself is not difficult, but I think we need to figure out what we're doing wrong on the legs as if we get that right the stacks get lower, the damage taken gets less, the healing requirement drops and the dps is freed up to handle adds more efficiently.

Initial thoughts are to move me to adds and a non-DOT to legs and then to make sure that absolutely NO aoe/cleave/bleed damage is used on the legs.

Anyone found out which addon is hiding the driving meter?

[JonnyAppleSeed]

Some addons display it as a percentage bar. The value indicated/displayed by the bar shows where Rhyolith is currently steering:  

• the closer to the left (or 0%), the more Rhyolith is steering left;
• the median value (or 50%) represents Rhyolith moving in a straight line;
• The closer to the right (or 100%), the more Rhyolith is steering right.

I saw the % figure also working on the atramades addon we use ....

[Whitey]

I don't see the default one either.  I could tell easily from the Advanced Powerbar used in Pitbull as the bar starts in the middle for straight ahead and then moves left or right depending on the dps on each leg.

[Noréia]

Leg driving seems to be an overall issue. Loads of posts about this. Some say dots and aoe by the leg drivers would be no good. Others say, they killed the boss by exactly using that. During our attempts I used aoe and the druid did as well. Let us know, of we should really stop that.
I particularly found the "designated leg driver method" very logic. One person, best not one of the melee dps but a ranged with a better overview, keeps an eye on the walking path and the volcano locations, and in order to turn the "container ship" he directs all raid dps for a short period of time on the particular leg. Only to give it an intial boost, then the designated leg dps melee is doing the rest. Sounds sound to me. People reporting this, pretend they did it with 2 melee leg dps only.

[Grimnar]

Well as i seemed to be the main turner with the calls etc. Here is what i noticed.
 
The boss is really a freaking huge rock to turn:narnar: But it is insane to get him turning him fast.
Main leg that we attacked was the right leg, with so far me knowing that i was the one that swapped to left sometimes to get him going straight for a while..
But it was not doable without loads of other dps to let the boss do a hard turn right.
 
I don't know if someone was attacking left leg at those times as that is something i just can't see during the fight but sometimes it felt like someone was doing that.
 
But one bigger concern on my end is the sort of dps on the legs. To do the hard turns we need long bursts of dps on one of the legs. I for sure don't have that dps power. I had a few saves with a turn with using "beserk" but that has a 3min cd. for the rest my burst dps is 3 attacks within 3secs and then i am out of dps, that is way to short to let the boss do a hard turn.
 
 
In the first bit of the fight hard turns arn't much needed but the longer we are in the fight we will need to do loads of those turns to hit the volcanos. But what also should happen and for my own feeling it didn't happen is that the boss should turn more easy when we dropped off a few stacks as the way it should we should do more dps at that time.
 
Last try was best try we had for the movement etc. Boss armor was at 30%.
 
 
 
I have one more thing that is for those people that somehow can't see what they are doing or just don't see things comming his/her way.
 
Zoom out as far as possible so you can see most of the stuff going on. Also turn on the spell detail so you can see the fires comming towards you. Some had loads of trouble with that and it should be easy to avoid it, i did it so that means you can do aswell.
 
 
For the rest pretty fun fight and it should go down sunday.
 
Grim

[TeaLeaf]

This is the damage taken by the feet during the night.  On most tries we were almost exclusively on the right foot, mainly because the bugger simply refused to turn.  I felt like Clint Eastwood last night spending 95% of my time doing the 'right turn Clyde' thing.

Actor   Amount
Grimnar   7972015   28.2 %
Teaell           7827092   27.7 %
Noréia   5070488   17.9 %
Mythmaster   3848851   13.6 %
Jesung   1052332   3.7 %
Khuukun   588790   2.1 %
ShAppition   452896   1.6 %
Halbarad   387829   1.4 %
Whytee   330885   1.2 %
SearingTot   321581   1.1 %
Spirit Wolf   150517   0.5 %
Shadwfiend   143076   0.5 %
MagmaTot   67063   0.2 %
Tirkad   30695   0.1 %
Ebon Imp   14243   0.1 %
Gr FireEle   9612   0.0 %
Jas   7129   0.0 %

Actor   Amount
Grimnar   608199   29.7 %
Teaell          534791   26.1 %
Mythmaster   270516   13.2 %
Noréia   197740   9.7 %
Jesung   146853   7.2 %
Halbarad   83353   4.1 %
Whytee   79114   3.9 %
MagmaTot   45856   2.2 %
ShadwApp   39530   1.9 %
Khuukun   22337   1.1 %
Tirkad   9536   0.5 %
Gr Fire Ele   4552   0.2 %
Spirit Wolf   3505   0.2 %

Left foot damage is interesting as there is stuff in there that we can avoid, but what is confusing me is that given the 10:1 ratio of damage from right to left foot, what little damage the left foot received assuming a 1:1 offset, still left 8 portions of dps on the right foot and *still* the bugger would not turn the way we wanted.

I am reading that some guilds are turning him left, then right, then around etc to get the active volcanos, which is what we wanted to do, but we were struggling just to keep the bugger on the island with a simple right turn only technique.  No way could we do a right then a left as it would have quickly become a slightly right, then straight into the lava for a drink and a wipe.

We need to figure out the feet, that's what is leading to everything else on this fight not being manageable.  Solve the driving problem and the rest of the problems go away.

[Jesung]

I don't see the default one either.  I could tell easily from the Advanced Powerbar used in Pitbull as the bar starts in the middle for straight ahead and then moves left or right depending on the dps on each leg.

Yeh I couldn't see the default one, It Is a problem with Pitbull.

[hubbah]

guess ill have to do some reading up before next raid!

did you get other bosses down so far?