Friday, June 19, 2009

XT-002 Heroic: Heartbreaker

Ok So I managed to completely lose my previous strat here, so I will be rewriting this from scratch (which probably needed doing anyway)

Shopping list:
1MT
1DPS/OT
6 healers
Some serious DPS.

Set up the same way as explained in the Normal mode strat. To jog your memory, tank XT in the middle, Turn him away from the raid, melee on the left arse cheek, ranged and healers stacked a small ways behind them. Light is right and go hard to get XT to 75% as soon as possible!

Heartbreaker!
To activate this hardmode, all you have to do it kill the heart before the timer runs out. Pfft easy, right? WRONG! This means popping anything and you have at your disposal to increase DPS. Get rogues using expose armour as it is faster to apply than sunders. Get your healers DPSing as well (there is no raid damage at this time). Go ballistic, get out the whips and smash/smoosh that thing into the ground.

A useful thing to know if you are very close to activating hardmode: Dots keep ticking on the heart even when it has gone back up! So load it up. Hardmode can activate several seconds AFTER the heart has gone back up into the body. So, don't give up on hardmode until you get a second heart phase!

Ok, so we smashed the heart, now what?
Lucky for you the adds will stop spawning. But things will get harder. XT resets to 160% health (ouch) and you have about 2 min less on the enrage timer! Time to pull out the best DPS you can muster. Keep moving left and right, but now there is extra added bonus things that the gravity and light do!

/tar life /DPS!
Your first light on some one is going to do something funky, and the reason you are running to the right leg will now become apparent. Make sure you are in line of sight of the tank. When the light thingy drops off, a new annoying thing called a Life Spark will start hitting you like a mack truck if you don't move quick back to your group. The MT needs to quickly taunt this life spark away from anyone else and tank it. Healers need to be on their game and aware of the extra damage, and all ranged DPS need to smash that life spark down as quickly as possible and get back onto DPSing XT as soon as they can. If a ranged gets aggro on the spark to early, they may need to kite it around until dead. Obviously, this is not ideal, but it happens sometimes if the person is accidentally too far away from the tank to taunt.

Black goo?
So, you are
running left with gravity bomb, you stay out there until it drops off and suddenly, there is a big pool of black goo surrounding you! RUN OUT!! RUN OUT! So, now with gravity bombs you have to move to a position to drop your goo away from everyone else! Which makes it a fair bit harder to manage.

The shopping list mentions a DPS/OT?
Yes it does! Make sure there is a plate wearer who can grab the big trash (if any happen to spawn) and just hang onto them until the MT is ready to taunt them himself.

Tympanic Tantrum
Tympanic tantrum is a lot more deadly in hardmode, it actually almost does enough damage to kill someone. If they happen to be not topped up, or have a light/grav thingy on them, they may well die if you are not on top of heals. Ret/Prot paladins with Divine Sacrifice can help out here if you are struggling, and so can priests with their 8s "HEAL EVERYONE" ability. Organise a rotation ahead of time to help out.

Is that really all?
Yeah pretty much! The tanks need to be very fast on picking up the sparks, DPS have to be uber-elite and smash those life sparks as soon as they can. The main trick here is to not make a mistake. Like all the hardmodes in ulduar, this is about perfection! Make it perfect, and XT will die with a broken heart. Aw.

9 comments:

Macbook said...

Just wanted to say that you have some pretty nice strats. We tried this out last night, but our closest attempt was about 40%, we kept having random things mess us up.

Great blog and strats, keep it up :)

Macbook

Brangwen said...

Thanks :) I try to keep this as easy to read as possible! There are so many strat sites out there that simply gloss over the important stuff, like, how NOT to stand in the fire, they just say don't do it. Thanks helpy strat site... *sigh*

Brangwen said...

Oh and grats on 40%!! You will get there, you just have to have one attempt where no one stuffs up - it's got to beeeeeee ... perfect!

Macbook said...

Just thought I'd update ya -- we downed him last night. The best attempt before we downed him was that 40%, then we had one attempt where the stars aligned, everyone worked in unison, and bam. :D

Onwards to Freya +1 and Yogg -1!

Brangwen said...

Oh grats! :D

Oh freya +1, not so easy... we tried it the other night and it was the funniest mess I had seen in a while.

I'd recommend Thorim or hodir first if you haven't already.

Macbook said...

Meh. My ranged DPS'ers are weak, we are nowhere near Hodir hardmode in terms of DPS.

Thorim, maybe. But we usually suck on Thorim regular mode.

Sigh, sometimes I'm surprised we've managed to kill anything z.z

Brangwen said...

LOL! Don't worry, everyone has that issue, we did too. And one week we started actively encouraging our DPS to improve and theory craft, and a week or so later they were smashing it. Get a thread going on your forums encouraging some friendly competition or start looking at peoples gear and rotations in WWS... hey, there is probably a whole post here *hmmmmm* :)

Tyrahell said...

We managed to down XTHM last night thanks to your strat ! 1MT 1OT 6Healer and 3 dedicated DPS on the spark, 40 sec left on the enrage timer !!

Thanks a lot for your work , next step, Thorim Hard Mode !!

Best Regards, Tyrahell

NonElitistRaider said...

Grats! Thorim is definitely the next one to do.

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