Yogg-Saron with 4 watchers (ie not a hard mode)

So, My guild defeated Yogg last night, not in part due to practising on 10 man.


Yogg was recently nerfed (you can look up the changes on the blizzard website) and I dont actually think it will make much of a difference to anyone still working on downing him with 4 watchers. It WILL make a huge difference to the hard modes (not losing as much sanity being the major one). No MCs in Phase 1 doesn't really make a huge difference to the phase, it just removes the RNG from it and causing needless wipes. So, I actually agree with that one. Nerfing the spawn rate I think was unnecessary.


Shopping list:
3 tanks
5 healers
8-9 melee
9-8 ranged



Tips for the fight with 4 watchers. At all times your raid should maintain their own sainty. The green beams give you back 20% per tick.

Phase 1
This was fairly straight forward. We stand near the door to avoid the gas clouds. Tanks ferry the adds to sara. We DPS the adds to about 30% before switching to the next one. We also have about 3 ranged DPS who are capable of dodging clouds nearer the centre to finish off adds that need a hand. We do not spawn an extra add, we dont need to to just kill yogg. Once Sara is dead, split the additional mobs up and smash them down. Healers watch and heal up the explosions.


Key things:
Make sure every add hits Sara. Do not spawn any extra adds. Keep this phase under control and clean up all adds before phase 2.



Phase 2
You must have cleared out all the phase 1 adds before the tentacles appear! Very important.


Melee team
There are 10 portals, East, North and West. Allocate 9 melee and one healer to enter these portals. Allocate groups of 3 to the 3 sides to make it easier. Once someone enters a portal THAT PORTAL VANISHES, so the allocation really does help. If you are having issues, allocate individuals portals, but I hope that would not be necessary.


If a melee gets put in a constrictor on the way to their portal, the other 2 melee must get them out. If by chance that melee is the last one through the portal, and they are nowhere near the ranged team, sorry... wait for a b-rez - that is literally bad luck. The melee need to look after their own.


If a melee gets brainlinked, who ever is brainlinked with the melee MUST go with them to the portals, then return to their own job once the link severs as the melee go in the portal.


This is all about tentacle control. The faster the tentacles are killed in the portals, the less spawn in the main room. Melee are on the clock, do not skip a sinlge tentacle, and smash them as fast as possible. Blow all cooldowns on the first portal phase - and get the yogg brain to about 75%. Dont forget to turn your back to the skulls. This is not as easy as you might think. But with a bit of practise you will learn where the skulls could be (they are randomly placed in the room) and where to stand to minimise their impact. I cant really describe them here, just practise will help. But generally, if you have your back to the room and are facing the tentacles, you will be ok most of the time.

Once the tentacles are all dead, you head into the brain room. Yoggs hitbox is huge so eyeball the exit portal and head toward it as you DPS. There are dangly tentacles which move around and CAN get in the way of you clicking the exit portal and get you insane. Be aware of this and don't nub it up.


When melee get spat back out, they need to clean up all the corruptor tentacles they can possibly find.


When the portal phase comes up again, melee head back in (cleaning up corruptors and constrictors on the way) and this time blow heroism. Again, get to Yogg as soon as possible without missing a tentacle (remember killing tentacles in the portals means less outside) and smash him to about 50%. Pop out, kill corruptors and constrictors.


Third portal, blow any CDs that have come up and get Yogg to 30%. It is imperative that this happen on the third portal phase. Any more and you will run over the timer and probably be overrun with tentacles in phase 3.


Ranged Team
You guys get to stay outside. Mark up the main assist (your best ranged player) with an icon. Ensure that person has the ability to put their own marker back on themselves as DBM will probably remove it if something happens to them like brain link. If possible have a couple of people spamming a macro to mark up the assist. I also recommend reminding people on vent/ts to keep stacking on star (our symbol).


All ranged must stack on star and assist star at all times.


Now, what star has to do is this; smash crushers (moving off the crusher when the tank calls for it, more on that in the tanks section), get people out of contrictors whenever possible, and when there are no crushers or constrictors up, kill corruptors. They will move to wherever the next crusher is and clear out the area around that.


When the portal team kills all the tentacles and are on the yogg brain, the tentacles become stunned, making them much easier to kill and no new ones spawn.


Rinse repeat. If you find at any time that you are becoming overrun with tentacles call a heroism (requires a second shammy in the main room team) to help clear them out during a stunned phase if the melee were a bit slow that time (this might happen on the third portal). At the end of each stun phase there should be very few corruptors up. By few I mean less than 5.


Tanks
Your job is to reset crushers - the big huge tentacles. This is done the following way; Watch for the cast, call for DPS to change targets, wait a second until the stacks drop off, run in and hit the crusher, call for DPS again. Rinse, repeat as necessary.

Healers
There really isn't a lot of healing going on. Stay with the ranged team and heal as required. What IS necessary is decursing, and there will be a lot of it.

Phase 3
OK, so you made it to P3 with perhaps a crusher up and a couple of tentacles. Most of the raid is alive and no one is insane.

Adds:
Tanks pick up the adds as soon as possible, they hit like mack trucks to begin with, but get the pro melee team onto them and they soon shrink down into kittens. Get your taunts off as soon as you can, and stay with your back to yogg the entire time. This should be not too bad to achieve.

Melee:
DPS adds. You should be able to do this with your back mostly to yogg for maintained DPS time.

Healers:
Stand with your back to yogg and heal and decurse. Watch the boss timers for add spawns and time a nice big heal for that first hit from the add - it's a doozy.

Ranged:
Melt brain. Go hard, everyone is counting on you.

Troubleshooting:
Ok so you make it to phase 3 consistently, but you are still wiping. What's going on? Ask youself these questions:

Was P1 perfect?
Were all the adds from P1 dead before tentacles from P2 spawned?
Did melee kill all the tentacles in the portals?
Were brain link and the green death beams managed?
Were constrictors killed in a timely manner?
Were crushers dead by the end of the stun?
Did melee keep corruptors under control after a portal phase?
Did ranged stack on star and assist correctly?
Did you get to P3 in 3 portal phases?
Were there 1 or less crusher and 5 or less corruptors up at the start of P3?
Were there 23 or more alive, un MCed raid members ready to go into P3?
Did everyone stay calm in P3 and do their jobs?

If you answer no to any of these questions you need to figure out why you answered no and fix it. And just remember, the fix for a problem in P3 might be in the execution of P1!

This boss has the best wipe enrage mechanic I have seen! I wont tell you what it is, I just hope you get to experience it because that it part of the learning curve to kill yogg!

Good luck