Yogg Musings: P2, P3

EDIT: I have a comic-version of the basic strat here, and a in-depth discussion of the Yogg+1 hardmode here which has a lot of tips that are useful in the normal mode as well.

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Followup from First Yogg Attempts/Strat guide.

Another raid weekend slips by with Yogg-Saron still alive, but not without giving him some heavy wounds. The rest of the instance is going smoothly for us, aside that we trained other tanks and some new ranged dps on the Vezax fight and had a bit of a learning curve with that, but it did snap together. When we jumped on Yogg this week we were going straight into P2 on the first pulls.

Here is something interesting: we switched to having only 2 healers. One holy priest, one resto druid. We had two mages in the party that helped with decursing, and I won't pretend it was easy, but we could steadily get through P1 and P2 with only two healers, and we were the only ones who could cleanse magic, poison, and diseases.

Raid makeup was such: 1 prot warrior, 2 healers (resto druid, holy priest), 2 mages, rogue, DK, feral druid, warlock, hunter.

Pros:

• Extra dps made the phases go a whole lot faster, and is likely a major key to getting the quick-kill achievement.
• P2 is mostly just a cleansing battle anyway, aside heals to the "crusher-tank," those caught in constrictors, and the dps who took damage in the mind.

Cons:

• If the holy priest gets MC'd in P1, you're out of luck until it wears off. CC them and stay away from their psychic scream range. Otherwise, bring along a pally or another priest to help cleanse, whatever their spec.
• Fewer healers to help deal with the heavy damage of the adds that spawn in P3.

Phase 1: ribbit.

Our wipes to this phase were usually from having our priest MCed, or some streak of bad luck with the cloud rotations forcing healers to fall out of range of people with painful dots (usually the DoT combined with Sara's Favor). Rarely did we get overrun with extra adds from people touching clouds, and I'm proud of the guild for that; even when someone did touch a cloud, they admitted to it quickly, so that the tank knew to find it and grab it when it spawned.


Phase 2: Mmm brains...

The amazing cleanse-fest. As discussed in my first Yogg Musings post, we followed the tank outside to the crushers, where he served as the "melee attacks" needed to calm the things down while the ranged killed the tentacles.

Squeeze: this debuff can be added to your raid frames to mark those constricted; preferably it should be in a different spot than your regular debuffs because of all the curses, poisons, diseases, and magic debuffs being thrown about. I stuck it in a corner using GridIndicatorCornerIcons, leaving the "cleansable" debuffs to the center icon, and it served me well for noticing who'd been grabbed and needed heals/help.

The vast majority of our wipes in this phase were from melee being grabbed by constrictors when they were across the room from the healers, usually right as they were being punted out of the Mind and were low health for various reasons. While we were usually able to cleanse them before they entered the portals, their exit was often too far away from the raid to be in range of help. My best guess on how to handle this is to have the ranged group reposition themselves to meet up with the melee, which will require a lot more coordination. Tips on this would be appreciated!


Phase 3: You catch the license plate...?

While we reached P3 several times, we didn't get far into it: we're still working out what strategy will work best for us. Since we had 4 players in tow that were just learning Yogg fresh, it was all a bit overwhelming for them to remember everything for P1 and P2, let alone be able to get a smooth transition to P3. Our P3 transitions were anything BUT smooth, usually with the melee all running for sanity-wells while the ranged tried to clean up the remaining tentacles, and the adds would pop and kill off healers before they were picked up.

Since an unhurt add will one-shot most players (their damage weakens as they loose health), we noted that on the transition, healers should move well away from the boss, acting as the heal-threat bait to pull the adds to the tank. Healers would move towards the door, with the tank and ranged players in front of Yogg's maw to pick up the adds. Adds seem to spawn in Yogg's belly, so this layout of placing the healers FAR AWAY seems like a great idea, to me!

Rough outline:




Drawing not to scale... healers would need to be in range to heal the dps, of course :)

Two unhurt adds would quickly overwhelm the tank, however; dps will need to be quick about whittling them down. It seems a tricky line to walk between getting the aggro to the tank and getting them dpsed down fast enough that they don't decimate him.


That's as far as we got before we went and kicked Emalon over (I got a pvp belt... yay?), and called it a week. Those who have killed Yogg10: what are your suggestions? How many healers did you bring?

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Doodle to share:



Was messing around with photoshop filters. They're so much quicker than "painting" with the brushes, but I gotta admit that the brush/smudge tool paintings look a lot nicer.