Last night Forgotten Heroes downed Northrend Beasts in Trial of the Grand Crusader 25. We welcomed a lot of new members over the weekend as another guild joined with ours and it made all the difference.
Now with some progress wiping going on, we have to learn to wipe again. The nature of Wrath raiding is that pretty much everyone has to live. So heres some tips for what to do when a wipe is called.
General Tips
- Stop healing!
- Stop tanking – you WANT the boss to rampage insanely around the room now.
- Actually die. Using Divine Intervention, Feign Death, etc. does two bad things. It means the person who did not die still has a Heroism debuff. And it means that the wipe is slower as the boss takes longer to reset (or it sure feels that way to the people standing outside the door). Only use these abilties when someone uses a StupidNinjaPuller Wand on members of your raid. They dropped off the Headless Horseman, you know.
Northrend Beasts
Phase 1 – Stand in the fire!
Phase 2 – Stand in the slime!
Phase 3 – This one is trickier. You basically need to stop healing and wait for him to kill you all. Stand close to the boss to get damage from his knockback and clump up so more people are targetted by his icy breath.
Demon Lord Jaraxxus
Stand in the fire!
Faction Champions
Stop dispelling. Stop healing. Stand in the Hellfire/Whirlwind/Consecration/etc. All group up together so that mobs will come close to you.
Twin Valkyr
This is an easy one. Run around the room like a nut taking every opposite coloured orb you can find! This one is possibly more fun than the boss…
Anub’arak
Phase 1 – Again you need to wait for him or his adds to kill you all.
Phase 2 – All gather up in the middle to get spiked.
Phase 3 – Just stopping the healing should be enough.
Updated 21 November 2009
Caer Morrighan 
Ha, I hate that one “Ok guys it’s a wipe, stop the healing” *lolshaman carries on healing and the mages desperate to get top of the meters while the opdk is dead*
A quick update to this. In the next patch we’ll be able to DI again! DI will remove Exhaustion.
I’m going to watch my repair bill plummet. Mwhahahaha
ever since I learned that DI saved me a repair bill, I use it every time it is up, lol.
I usually aim for a healer because they are affected the least by a bloodlust, or, if I know we haven’t used it yet, I’ll DI a DPS if all the healers are dead.
I’m gonna be laughing all the way to the anvil 🙂
This is seemingly a humorous post, but seriously it calls attention to the fact that people don’t know how to wipe. When I was leading our ToC raid last night, and we were attempting Faction Champions, when I called a wipe it seemed as though it should be quick to kill yourself, but no the wipe took way too long. I didn’t release but watched my grid showing incoming healz, and I had to say stop healing three times until I just said, look I can see you healing on grid so STOP it, let’s wipe it up so we can try again. Ah frustrations of wiping lol.
You forgot the most amusing way to wipe as a ret pally… DI the MT and watch the boss run from DPS to DPS oneshotting them. Then hear the yowls of confusion from the MT as they can’t figure out what happened. Then the curses as they realise what you did.
“But all you needed to do was click it off…?”
MUAHAHAAAA!
I’ve taken to DI’ing someone on my paladin tank just as the boss is about to die when I’m tanking heroics. The “wtf?!” I always get from the healer as I go from 100% to dead in a second is always amusing.
Most healers are too obsessed with meters to let a wipe happen quickly. Wipes are the perfect time to pad your effective healing – everyone’s taking damage so there’s plenty of it for you to heal! Make sure you link the healing meter once the raid is finally dead so everyone knows what a top notch healer you are.
These people are often also the ones who call out disc priests for being low on the meters and tell them to heal more.
For me it has nothing to do with the meters. When I’m raid healing it’s an instant health-drop-gotta-heal thing. When I’m “in the zone” with healing I don’t really see chat and if I’m on vent I’m listening for very specific fight cues. “Healer tunnel vision” isn’t just about the eyes.
Any healer who links their healing meter in /raid as proof they are a great healer is in fact a bad healer. Jov over at World of Snarkcraft says it best: http://snarkcraft.wordpress.com/2009/11/17/jov-sez-meters-arent-about-the-size-of-your-e-peen/ Healing, like most raiding, is a cooperative thing, not a competitive one. Its amazing how many people fail to understand that.
One of my old raid leaders used to say this.
“Healing is a results oriented business. Meters are fine to help you find out where you can improve, but who is on top of them is irrelevant.”
I’m a big fan of casting water walking on the guild leader when we are falling to Anub’arak. Of course when I do this I get demoted down to slaptard, and the GM sends me his repair bill for the entire nights raiding.
We had one brain-genius decide Path of Frost was THE THING to cast as you fell to Anub’arak. He then proceeded to spam it so that everyone who died who tried to zone back in would have it reapplied just before they hit the water. I bubble every time I fall now. Also, can we PLEASE get a groupwide slowfall to counteract Path of Frost spam?
As a priest I always pop Levitate just before I hit the water. It takes too long to lev the whole way down, but when I get there I consider swimming something for the people that aren’t cool enough to walk on water. Plus it counteracts the Dork Knight in my guild that does this and then claims that it wasn’t him even when he is the only DK in the raid.
We have people in our guild who throw water walking and path of frost. The trick is to angle your screen down and hold both of your mouse buttons. You will swim under the water when you hit.
Kick your dk, that crap isn’t funny.
Seriously, kick the Dk…no slofall is needed
Nice article, but now you need to do one for raid leaders on “When NOT to call a wipe”.
We were doing a pug ToC25 and the OT hit the deck in P2 of beasts. As soon as that happened the rl called a wipe. A few people stood in the slime and died, while I used rebirth on the OT, we rebuffed him and got him back in the fight. We wound up finishing the fight with about 30% of the raid outside the instance waiting as ghosts.
You RL called a wipe and you cast re-birth? re-read the article.
If you are not the RL you are not right to keep the wipe from happening, they had a reason to call it, and you kept close to half of your team from getting loot.
You are bad.
No, the RL is bad for calling a wipe prematurely. The druid is good for using his class skills to save the group from wiping.
A -good- RL would have said “Crap, OT died, quick druid rez him!” Not immediately said “Crap, wipe it.” Seriously? Unless that one guy who just died is the MT it’s not automatically a wipe (and even in some rare fights, you can still save it if the MT dies at the right time or the boss is tauntable and the OT picks it up fast enough.)
Summary: RL was bad. Druid was good.
When the RL calls it a wipe, I usually run to the side, Lifetap away and try to use Hellfire to kill myself and avoid the repair bill.
But 90% of the time I don’t succeed because the healers just keep me healing till the boss kills me. Yup, those healers own me a lot of repair money 🙂
Nice post, but Anub doesn’t cleave.
“Phase 1 – Again you need to wait for him or his adds to kill you all. He has a cleave so group together to get hit by it.”
Um no, he doesn’t cleave… we don’t turn him away so I stand in front of him in demon form with immolate aura up for Great Justice.
If you want to fail in phase one, don’t interrupt the shadowstrikes for Jolly Japes…. and don’t shoot down the frost balls
You’re right – he doesn’t cleave. The tanks in my guild keep yelling ‘don’t stand there – he cleaves’. Thats a whole new way to torment them I have there 🙂 Or I could just tell them …
I agree that wipes should be quick, but there are many cases in which heroism would not have been used, and as a hunter, I will always take the opportunity to try to survive a wipe with feign death, just as a paladin should always use the opportunity to use devine intervention. These abilities do not increase the length of a reset. A person under the effect of DI is no longer considered a target, and thus the last person to die causes the reset. This would be the same circumstance with or without the DI, and the same is true of a feign death. The reset in fact becomes faster as the boss and or adds are not forced to seek out an additional one or more targets to finish the encounter.
Come on! How many times have people been headbashed by Icehowl? As long as you have a cooprative hunter, his enrage will happily go smashing though everyone.
God i love that fight
Well i dont, i love messing people
DIs aren’t a bad thing. Exhaustion is tediously easy to clear: just exit the instance, get naked, mount up, fly high in the air, fall to your death, and rez. Takes all of ten seconds, and you’ve saved your gbank at least 20g (or two of your raiders, if your guild doesn’t pay for repairs).
I enjoy using DI on the MT when a wipe is called saved me a bill and him as well and its also funny watching the healers trying to heal the MT
warlocks get all these abilities to suicide effectively, it’s a part of the class itself. but, it takes a real effort to wipe the raid with them.
for instance, i’ve hellfire’d during kel’thuzad in naxx25,
fear’d razuvious, with hilarious results.
death coil’d hodir and soulshatter’d, to no avail.
not that it makes any difference when you get one-shot in cloth, but it’s the thought that counts, and warlocks really try their best at it.