Nefarian down

Bloody finally. At one point someone went through worldoflogs and counted around 160 wipes. No doubt we were closer to 200 now.

In the end, two things radically changed the fight :

(1) Adding an additional crackle at the end of P1.
(2) The 4.1 nerf, which made a P2 crackle possible at long last.

Both of these, however, were not without their challenges.

The P1 crackle has to be timed PERFECTLY. As the 3rd P1 crackle results in Ony exploding and wiping the raid (which never happened to us, for the record), you need to essentially dps Nef to just over 70%, Ony to about 2-3%, then quickly push Nef under 70%, then kill Ony. Crackle has a 5s cast time, so you have that much time to get your 5 dps + your Ony tank to do enough dps to kill her.

Any earlier, Ony goes boom. Any later, and you don't have enough time to heal up before P2 starts. We had a few attempts where we pushed Nef over as he was running to the middle, but it was too chaotic trying to get to our pillars and trying to heal everyone up before the magma and shadowflame barrage damage started rolling in.

When done right, you push Nef over, kill Ony within the 5s window, and have time to heal everyone to around 90% before the magma starts to rise.

Then comes the P2 crackle. The 15% nerf to shadowflame barrage in 10 man really helped here. The reason we haven't done one in P2 before is simple. All the tacts say "when the whole raid is stable". Well, we never had such a point. Specifially one of our platforms was always all over the place. I realised recently why. It's shadowflame damage, which acts on the lowest of your shadow/fire resistences. We had a shadow resist up from our priest, but that platform was missing a fire resist (the paladin and shaman healers had their platforms covered).

In order to get around this, we switched the raid so that platform had the priest healer, and our 2 tanks, who both popped cooldowns for the crackle. throw in a bear tank tranquility, and it felt much easier than expected. As long as the priest was topped up, and both tanks were at least on 50%, the crackle didn't kill anyone. Heal up after, and it's done.

The next challenge was the timer on P2. P2 ends when all 3 adds die, but there is also a timer. If you hit the timer, P3 starts, but whatever adds are still up, don't go anywhere. So we had to balance Nef DPS with killing the adds, essentially pushing Nef as low as possible before killing the adds right around the time the timer ran out. You start P2 at just under 70% (thanks to the 3rd P1 crackle), and have to get him to just over 50% before the phase ends. On our kill I think he was around 53%.

Finally, the reason why this is necessary. P3 has a soft enrage in the form of fire that spawns faster and faster on your offtank, who is running around the room like a mad thing. The less health you have to burn through in P3, the better. Shaving 20% off what we needed to do turned our 13-17% wipes into a kill. Plain and simple.

After just over a month of wiping, it took a nerf (I call it a fix, since 10 man is overtuned at the moment) and a change of tact, and we did it in two nights. I guess that goes to show just how tenacious my raiders are. Yes we got some pretty severe burnout, people were snapping at each other etc, but in the end we held together and got it done, and I'm one damn proud raid leader this morning :)