Monday, October 12, 2009

U10: Firefighter


You know that big red button in the back of Mim's room? That one your guild may or may not have been able to resist pressing, already? The button that makes Mim really mad and sets the whole room in fire, the flames feeding off your raid like all too much kindling?



This is how you survive pushing that button.

This guide assumes you know how to kill Mim normally. For a guide on Mim's 10-man normal mode, check here.


Makeup:
  • 1x Melee Tank (we typically use a pally)
  • 2-3x healers (we've two-healed it with a holy priest and resto druid, but it is more forgiving with a 3rd)
  • 1x ranged tank (hunter or lock do well)
  • 1x ranged robot-killer (assigned to kill off any fire-extinguisher alarm bots that come too close to the raid)
  • 1x Bomb-Eater (grabs the bomb-bots and eats the explosion, bears and DKs are good for this)
  • Remaining: mix of ranged and melee dps
Among your raiders, I suggest having at least two who can throw up a shield on the MT, if not 3 who can; this is important for getting through the Plasma Blast in P1. I also recommend having a pally with FR aura, though frequent re-dropping of totems can also be managed to provide the resist buff.

Throughout the whole fight, you must follow the oldest raiding rule of all:

Don't Stand in the Fire.



Phase 1: The Feet
Honestly speaking, this is probably the hardest phase (imo). P4 may be more chaotic, but P1 is where plasma blasts make life difficult, and where spreading out from each other for napalm is limited by healing range and fire patches.

To begin, I suggest clustering your raid by the doorway closest to the big red button. Stand in a loose clump together, and have ONE person stand over by the button: inevitably, if you cluster on the button, someone will accidentally press the button and start the fight before you're ready. Shortly after the button is pressed (and the button-pusher has flung themselves across the room to rejoin the raid), 3 fires will be thrown at 3 random members of your raid, and then everyone will scatter to their respective P1 places: the initial fires will be grouped up where your raid stood at the start, and thus much easier to control and kite.



Kiting Fire:
The fire on the ground will always move towards the raider closest to it. As such, you can kite the fire around. You will want to assign a ranged dps (hunters work well) to weave about near the fire patches, pulling the 3 fire spawns into one clump together, and dragging them around back and forth in a small area so that they don't take up too much space.



The rest of the raid will assemble themselves just as they do for normal mode: we like to tank in the middle until about the first Shock Blast, with ranged DPS spread out around, healers interspersed. All raiders need to be very aware of their positioning relative to others and stand apart from each other, as the Napalm hitting more than one person will often result in a raid wipe/death, especially if Plasma Blast is coinciding so that the healers have too many people needing heals.

The following actions (aside from eating Shock Blast) will get you killed:
  • Sharing a splash of napalm from standing near others,
  • Standing in fire,
  • Treading over mines hidden in flames,
  • Hiding in a far corner out of range of the healers.
...particularly while plasma blast is eating the tank alive and your healers are busy on the tank.


First Shock Blast:
This is where we deviate from our normal strat: by the time this goes off, there is usually another spawn of fire patches on the ground, which are a danger to the tank and the melee. When shock blast goes off (or sooner, if necessary), the tank will run to the wall behind her, and pull the boss over to the wall, and then slowly kite the boss counter-clockwise around the room (or whichever direction leading away from the spot where the raid began, which will be full of fire patches as well). The ranged and healers will need to reposition themselves carefully, ahead and to the sides of the boss, staying in range of healers while trying to not splash napalm on each other.



Continue to kite the boss around the outer edge of the room as new fires are spawned. At some point, he should extinguish all of the fires and start anew, so most of the fires will be out by the time you take him down and he transitions to P2.



Phase 2: the Torso
When he transitions, the whole raid should cluster together on the wall near where the tank was last located so that you can keep the incoming fire spawns localized in one area. Fires should be kited in on themselves, woven back and forth to keep them from spreading too far across the room, as you will need as much free running space as possible for getting out of the rapid-burst and the laser barrage.



As the boss pops up in the center (and spawns new fires where you were clumped), the ranged dps need to SPREAD OUT across ~half of the room (or more) while the melee cluster in around the boss: just make sure you stay in range of at least one healer, preferably 2. This phase is very similar to normal mode, except that a cluster of ranged getting hit by the Rapid Burst gun attack can easily kill people from overall damage taken (particularly as new fires spawn around the room), which can overwhelm healers' own aoe HPS when they themselves are trying to move. Try to keep everyone topped off as much as possible, move out of the gun-attack, and keep very sharp eyes out for rocket-strikes on yourselves. Having the raid leader call out "rocket strike up" can help in awareness, as everyone can then check whether or not they've been targeted.

Resto Druids:
I found that hanging out a bit behind the melee was a good place to stand: far enough away that I wasn't bringing rocket strikes onto them or sharing theirs, but close enough that I was central to most of the room and any WG I cast on them would splash myself as well. Keeping rejuvs on everyone in range and splashing Wild Growth on anyone who were clustered together at the time were my most-used methods of healing in this phase; NS+HT and Swiftmend are great to rescue someone, and nourish was used when those were on cooldown.

Periodically he will spawn a giant blue orb; this orb will explode and extinguish all of the fire around it in about 1/4 of the room. Avoid being anywhere near this orb, or it will hurt you and send you flying across the room when it explodes. This can be a particular problem during Laser Barrages, so try to steer clear of them as much as possible, and don't put yourself on their right-hand side if the boss is going to be spinning up soon for a barrage.



Phase 3: the Head
As with the previous transition, cluster your raid up together along a wall, whatever section of the wall is most convenient to the raid. Your raid will need to follow your MT as they move around the room picking up the little adds, kiting the helicopter-head around behind. A ranged tank will hold aggro on the head. All of the ranged players should try to keep along the outer wall of the room, well away from possible bomb bots.

For bombs, I highly suggest having a high-health player to soak the damage from these, likely a melee (we prefer to use our cat-specced/geared druid in bear form), so that your ranged dps can focus on the helicopter. Having bombs explode on your healers isn't a good idea. This same player can spend time between bombs kiting the fires and taunting off any stray adds that get on the healers, since this player will usually stand more towards the center circle while the main group is towards the outside along the wall.

Another ranged dps should be assigned to killing any fire-extinguisher adds that come too close to the raid, because the adds, though they are helpfully removing fire patches from the floor, will injure your raiders and send them flying across the room.

Keep your raid together, and keep moving with the tank as the tank moves around the room to escape fire and pick up the spawned adds. The melee should be killing adds (mind aggro, of course), picking up the cores, and using them to pull the helicopter down for dps: preferably in a non-firey patch!

Resto Shaman:
It is suggested that you keep your Earth Shield on the ranged tank through this phase as well as P4. While it will help to mitigate incoming damage, it also will prevent any spell pushback they suffer, in the case of caster tanks like warlocks.

Ret Pallies:
You should switch to Seal of Command for phases 3 and 4. Vengeance/Corruption are better in P1 and P2.




Phase 4: by your powers combined...
Again, cluster your raid together during the transition, kiting fires together and getting a short breather for mana regen. As with normal mode, split your dpsers up between the 3 sections (bottom, torso, head). One healer should focus on each of the two tanks (MT and the ranged-tank), though the healers will all need to cross-heal and keep the raid up at the same time, as there will be more shuffling and moving around of the raid than in normal mode, and times where a healer needs to be running away from something and can't heal their target as easily while moving. Be prepared for chaos.

As a combination of all three of the previous phases, spread out your raid and be extra-aware to watch for rocket strikes, as they can be hard to notice amidst the red glow of all the fire. There will still be fire-extinguisher bots; steer clear of them and let them do their job of taking out the fire patches. There should still be someone assigned to pick off these bots to keep from having too many running around, or they will overwhelm the raid.

Depending on how well fire patches are placed, you may or may not need to move him out of the center. If you have to move him to a wall (as with P1), make sure you leave enough room between the boss and the wall that people can slip through it to escape laser barrage around land mines, rocket strikes, and fire patches. All raiders need to stay aware of the boss' relative positioning, so that they can quickly react to a laser barrage. If the boss is across the room from you, move quickly to get closer, or you're going to be out of luck with a laser barrage catching up to you! The farther away you are, the longer your path to move out of his barrage.



All DPS should be paying attention to their targets' health relative to the other sections, and swap to another section (or stop dps) if their part is in danger of dieing before the other 2 can go down. You don't want to prolong the fight in this phase by having parts repair themselves because they died too early while another part was still high health! Get them all down together, and Mim's toy will crumble :)

Have fun, good luck, and don't roast too many marshmellows on your resto druid's limbs... they get sticky.

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