WotLK - Vault of Archavon (VoA) - Toravon the ice watcher

[jimbobobb]

So this guy is a total joke. I HIGHLY recommend grabbing another boxer or 5 randoms, and doing this every week.


Did him the other day before reset with another 4 boxer and one single (the 4 boxer's wife).

Me:
Pally (5.1k gs)
Arcane Mage X 2 (4.9k gs)
Druid healer (5.3k gs)
elemental shaman (4.7k gs)

Him:
Pally (5k gs)
Arcane Mage (4.9k gs)
Boomkin (4.5k gs)
Lock (4.8k gs)

holy Priest (5k gs)


We put /tar [nodead] frozen orb in our dps macros and the fight was a complete joke.

All dps on the stairs in two groups on each side.

Stacked all my guys together, and all his and the priest together. His wife healed his tank and my druid healed mine. We were able to single heal each tank relatively easily. My druid cast wg on every cooldown, and his priest used holy nova on every cooldown. This negated the aoe damage fairly easily from whiteout and the incidental from the frozen orbs.

We each kept an eye on our dps/heal groups and only payed attention to the tanks to switch aggro every 4 stacks of the frostbite debuff. The fact that this is more or less a tank and spank with a simple tank/dps switch (that boxers are great at) makes this ideal. We strafed away from the orbs when we had to, but it wasn't too bad.

One shot it, only one death because one of my mages got messed up somehow and ran right into a frozen orb.

We then went on to smash koralon and the rest as well. With basically just badge geared groups, I highly recommend taking another boxer friend or 5 people you know and doing this every week. Papa needs some free tier 10 legs and hands!

[puppychow]

Has anyone tried 5 boxing him with geared chars? I 5 box the naxx weekly quests no problem, be kinda cool if you could 5 box Toravon. Right now I just individually take my chars through, which is not a real problem in 10 man since you are usually the only class for drops.

[SideWays]

Sounds promising.. Never thought about boxing him but Im gonna try it in a few mins :D

Ok killed him.. definitely worth a try :)

Oh yea group composition wasnt the best imo:

Tankadin/Holypriest/Eleshaman/Eleshaman/Warlock (all around 5100-4900 GS) + 4 Palas/DK (4900 max)

Took us 3 tries since both of us never saw the encounter before but I think thats quite good actually. With only one healer its quite hard in some situations and destroying the orbs with 3 DPS'ers only sux too but we made it ;)

Edit: oh loot sucked btw :S

[Lyonheart]

i tried to 10 box him the first day he was out. I got him to 50% using my paly and bear tank. The only reason i left was the guild my main shamy is in told me not to save him to the instance. I know this guy can be 10 boxed.. just spread your guys out and have your healers macros to heal both tanks. And i tried it before he was nerfed. I'm sure ill get him next reset.

I'm sick of losing T10 to scrubs anyway lol. I have one of every class.. so I'm sure ill get upgrades if I can 10 box it.

[jimbobobb]

Has anyone tried 5 boxing him with geared chars? I 5 box the naxx weekly quests no problem, be kinda cool if you could 5 box Toravon. Right now I just individually take my chars through, which is not a real problem in 10 man since you are usually the only class for drops.

He stacks a debuff on the tank that increases frost damage taken. So you need to tank switch to let it drop off. He also casts whiteout which puts another stacking frost damage debuff on the raid, so I'm fairly sure that you could not beat the soft enrage with just 5 characters, 2 of which would have to be tanks.

[SideWays]

I dont think only 5boxing this is possible.. It needs too much healing..

[jimbobobb]

Did this again the other day and figured out something that we should have figured out the first time. Apologies if this is completely obvious but we didn't figure it out until my /tar [nodead] frozen orb stuff got messed up and we had to manually target.


The frozen orbs are tauntable.

So basically just whichever tank is not tanking atm, taunts the orbs, burn burn burn, back to boss, tank switch, other tank taunts the orb, burn burn burn, back to boss, repeat, free loot.

[Altsoba]

Did this again the other day and figured out something that we should have figured out the first time. Apologies if this is completely obvious but we didn't figure it out until my /tar [nodead] frozen orb stuff got messed up and we had to manually target.


The frozen orbs are tauntable.

So basically just whichever tank is not tanking atm, taunts the orbs, burn burn burn, back to boss, tank switch, other tank taunts the orb, burn burn burn, back to boss, repeat, free loot.

The way we did, me and Sideways was that his team (3 dpsers) took care of the orbs while mine was just nuking the boss. So basically it means that one team is enough to handle without "tanking it".
This is strongly reccomended to any 2*5 boxers, we did it with just one healer, two tanks and 7 dpsers.

[Lyonheart]

Did this again the other day and figured out something that we should have figured out the first time. Apologies if this is completely obvious but we didn't figure it out until my /tar [nodead] frozen orb stuff got messed up and we had to manually target.


The frozen orbs are tauntable.

So basically just whichever tank is not tanking atm, taunts the orbs, burn burn burn, back to boss, tank switch, other tank taunts the orb, burn burn burn, back to boss, repeat, free loot.

are you saying the /tar [nodead] was not working right?

I got him down to 23% 10 boxing today. I'm having issues switching to adds and switching tanks/heals. a few more trys and i think ill work it out. time ran out or i would still be trying. The idea of getting every drop is too tempting..i MUST kill him!

[jimbobobb]

Basically, after we killed the first frozen orb, my guys all got stuck targeting it, even though there was a [nodead] modifier. Dunno why this happened.

So we just manually assisted. And here is what we decided on next time, since we know you can taunt the orbs now.

Basically I play my five guys, and he plays his five guys. We have 2 healers, and each just focuses their respective tanks, and does their aoe heals on cooldowns to negate incidental damage/whiteouts.

We will switch tanks at 4 stacks of frostbite. Whichever tank is NOT tanking currently, will target the frozen orb, and taunt it - not tank it, just taunt it so it starts running toward the tank. He will target it, and his team will kill it. They only have 130k hps so they usually die before they even reach the tank. Basically I would suggest doing it this way.

And if you were ten boxing, to simply pay attention to your two tanks, and have half of your guys assist one tank, and half the other. One healer per tank, and also does aoe heals to keep everyone topped off. One tank is always tanking, and the other when an orb pops taunts it towards him, and the three dps assisting him target it and kill it.

[SideWays]

I got the same /tar problem.. Its just stuck after the first kill.. I began to manually target them after this and it worked fine.. Oh and btw I dont see why theres a problem with those orbs.. Even if I forgot about them I was able to easily heal the group and the tanks with one healer (happened once during the fight^^).

[jimbobobb]

Once you get multiple stacks of whiteout on your group, if an orb just sits in your group, it'll start doing quite a bit of damage to all your toons. It becomes unhealable at a certain point of whiteout stacks. That's why you can probably sit in the second or third one and not care, but towards the end of the fight, they can actually kill you if they sit on you for more than a few seconds.

[Lyonheart]

i need to get my 2nd healer a bit more geared i think.. also its two shaman healers.. but my DPS is high.. about 4.5=7 K, so around 5.5k across the team. I got him to 17% before giving up.

Ill try your tips, Jimbo, next time, that sounds like it should work.

[puppychow]

There is a "trick" to this fight which lets you 1 tank it -- a DK, if they pop AntiMagicShell (AMS) while he is casting Whiteout, will not get affected by Whiteout. So you pop it during the 2nd cast of Whiteout, and you drop back to 1 stack. Same thing again on the 4th stack, etc to enrage.

So in theory you could take a mostly DK team in and keep going till enrage, you could even make them all (except tank) unholy and put pets on the orbs along with diseases.

Anyways I doubt anyone has 6-7 DKs and it would be kinda dumb from a loot point, but just fyi. If you are trying to 10 box it you can go with a single tank if that tank is a geared DK. You have to time AMS perfectly though, cast it during his cast of Whiteout but not too early since you need it on when it hits.

[jimbobobb]

So does antimagic shell remove stacks of frostbite? Because that is also what tanks have to worry about

Frost Bite inflicts 975 to 1025 Frost damage every 2 sec and reduces move speed by 5% for 10 sec. 1950 to 2050 on 25-player. Stacks to 100

So by 4 stacks (when you normally switch) it:s already doing 4k every 2 seconds. He casts it pretty frequently......

[Coltimar]

/tar thread
/cast Redemption

Nighthawke and I are boxing VoA 10 with 2x5. We are seriously stuck on Toravon. We haven't gotten him past 2.4 million hp after 12+ wipes. We would love some advice. We are using the strat jimbobob posted. We have a system to target the frozen orbs that works pretty well.

Here are the toons:
Nighthawke - pally tank 5053GS about 1740 boss dps
Lorelei - disc priest 5113 GS tank healing only
Aeirelle - arcane mage 5093 GS 4100+ boss dps
Kiriana - ele shaman 4880 GS 3100+ boss dps
Shadiel - BM hunter 4864 GS 2700+ boss dps
Coltimar - prot pally 4793 GS 1300 boss dps
Marlun - resto shaman 4903 GS raid chain heal spammer
Coventar - shadow priest 4644 GS 2700 boss dps
Jermayne - ele shaman 4700 GS 3500+ boss dps
Necrutia - destro warlock 4756 GS 3200+ boss dps

A lot of info, some of it useless (like the GS), but it gives you an idea of our team.

We are getting too many whiteout debuffs and getting smoked by Frost Nova, I think. Does anyone who does this boss a lot have any pro tips?

We are taunting at 4 stacks and try to taunt the Frozen Orbs out of the raid. We are blowing our trinkets, elementals and CD's but still can't get him much below half.

[jimbobobb]

Our setup was always two individual 4 man groups on the top of the steps. (that way a single orb would never be on everyone) One healer, 3 dps each - healer spam healed their respective tank while using aoes to keep their group up as well. the dps only assist their respective tank.

Then Toravon at basically max range, somewhere between the middle of his room and the bottom of the steps.

Basically whatever tank is not tanking has to taunt that orb the moment it spawns. If you're lucky it'll spawn on the tanks - if not you have to taunt immediately to get it off the range and moving towards the tank. That tank's group should then be killing the orb.

I see that you are using a disc priest and a shaman - if the shaman is simply casting cheal over and over, I'm guessing you have all your guys grouped up in one spot. Try splitting them up perhaps. Does the disc priest have any trouble keeping the tanks up at all?

Is the problem the fight is just going too long? So a single frost nova wipes out everyone? Are you having trouble keeping everyone topped off? Or do you randomly lose half the team to a bad frozen orb?

Looking at your dps vs. your gear-score, it looks a tad on the low side. Maybe double check that? I think my guys were all around there or lower gear-score wise when we were killing this guy, but I'm pretty sure they were all doing at least 4000dps - with almost 5k gs on all your toons, there may be some things you can do to tweak some macros and get to that.


(just double checking section!)
frost aura!
healing stream totems!
guys are assisting and not getting stuck on some [nodead] macro!

[Coltimar]

Positioning is ok. We do try to get the orb as soon as it pops. We have had some issue of our taunt being on CD because of the switch, or just not targeting it easily.

The disc priest does good at keeping the tanks up. With my shaman I chain heal when need and I Riptide a tank every time I can. I also spam LB with him between orbs and whiteout, on occasion.

Everything goes well until about 50-55% (I think that's after 3 whiteouts, maybe 2) but a Frost Nova hits or an orb gets too close and we lose my group (the lesser GS team). We may need to tweak our tank healing as getting more than 4 stacks (in the rare case of a missed taunt) almost always dooms a tank.

We both use macros from this site. Mine may need to be tweaked to account for haste on new gear, etc.

Frost Aura, check! We also tried dropping Frost Resistance totem, since we have 3 shaman total.
Healing Stream, I KNOW we have one, and I think two. I am reminded that I may need to do a better job of re-dropping the totems. Mana Tide eats my water one and Fire Eles eat the fire totems. I'll watch for that.
We've tried both. It seems to work best when we add \targetexact Frost Orb or some variation. We both use ISBoxer so it assists the tank even if the \target fails. It seems like the dps pick up the orb faster with the target in the macro.

We may try the suggestion I have read a few times now; the tank not on the boss pick up the orb and only his group dps it down. It will take longer for it to die but we may be more sure about picking it up.

[Maxion]

When I have tanked it on my pally I think the taunting was at 3 stacks as soon as the tanks old stacks wore off.
But it sounds like you have some serious issues with suboptimal dps.
If I were you I'd go over the dps macros and make sure they are as good as they can be.
All my dps characters were doing more dps than that before hitting 4k gearscore.

[Coltimar]

I am going through all 10 of my toons today, not just my raiding toons. After going through my best dps and tweaking a bit, I made him worse, lol. He is Jermayne my elemental shaman. On the 80 boss dummy I can do around 3700 dps using all of my mana. I use Fur's macro from the Wiki. Maxion, I tried your shaman macro but only got around 3300 dps.

[Maxion]

I am going through all 10 of my toons today, not just my raiding toons. After going through my best dps and tweaking a bit, I made him worse, lol. He is Jermayne my elemental shaman. On the 80 boss dummy I can do around 3700 dps using all of my mana. I use Fur's macro from the Wiki. Maxion, I tried your shaman macro but only got around 3300 dps.

Oh yes, my macro, heh, I guess I should go back to that post and check if it's the same macro that I use now.
But I was more concerned about some of your other dps.
Though, as for the shaman, make sure you have the right glyphs too.
And make sure all your dps are hit capped (taking into account any buffs and debuffs they may usually be applying).

[zenga]

What kind of dps are you doing in heroics? Because I did this boss 2 weeks ago with another 5 boxing buddy who just dinged 80 and has a mixture of blue's and quest greens, and had no problems whatsoever. But his 3 shamans were doing 2.5-3k dps in that crap gear.

That being said, my team is very well geared as is my tank (i can easy go above 10 stacks). Using frost resist aura and equipping a couple of the 213 ilvl frost resist gear on your tank might help alot though.

[Coltimar]

Both of our dps is teh suck! I was gonna post some recount data but I dumped it by accident. In heroics my ele shaman does 3700 or so my resto shaman does 850 or so just spamming LB (I don't have to heal a lot) my destruction warlock usually comes in around 3200 and my arcane mage is around 2900.

On Toravon today my pally was about 1300 ele shaman 3500 and my mage was at 2700 (no lock today, we brought Kate instead (:).

On the target dummy, heroic boss, my mage ranged between 4200-5600 dps. On an early try I got 3 17k crits in a row, lol. I basically just go through my whole mana pool.

[Multibocks]

Actually for raiding Elemental Shaman should only be using Flame Shock, LB and Lava Burst. Don't include Chain Lightning for single target.

Heroics obviously are a different story. You want all that splash damage for multiple pulls.

[Coltimar]

Ok, but my elemental shaman is doing the best dps, lol. I'm more worried about the other toons.

[kate]

For the people who are doing this successfully, what's the total DPS you need to do to bring him down? I've seen people say that having 3 healers + 2 tanks (totaling 4k dps) and then another group putting out 25k dps total (5k/each) is the key.

Am I crazy? Are these people overstating it? What kind of gear is needed to reliably put out 5k dps, anyway?

[Maxion]

For the people who are doing this successfully, what's the total DPS you need to do to bring him down? I've seen people say that having 3 healers + 2 tanks (totaling 4k dps) and then another group putting out 25k dps total (5k/each) is the key.

Am I crazy? Are these people overstating it? What kind of gear is needed to reliably put out 5k dps, anyway?

5k or so gearscore should be enough with the right rotation setup for most classes.

[Coltimar]

That's what we are saying, Maxion, Our GS doesn't mean anything because our dps is low.

[jimbobobb]

For the people who are doing this successfully, what's the total DPS you need to do to bring him down? I've seen people say that having 3 healers + 2 tanks (totaling 4k dps) and then another group putting out 25k dps total (5k/each) is the key.

Am I crazy? Are these people overstating it? What kind of gear is needed to reliably put out 5k dps, anyway?

Did this guy the first week he came out, in heroic (at the time) level gear - which means no tier 10. No raid gear whatsoever except on my resto druid.

I'm fairly convinced from the posts, that most people having trouble here just need to work on their rotations. Once you get your damage to the level it should be by tweaking a few things, you'll absolutely smash this guy, and wonder why you ever had problems in the first place.

[Iceorbz]

Actually for raiding Elemental Shaman should only be using Flame Shock, LB and Lava Burst. Don't include Chain Lightning for single target.

Heroics obviously are a different story. You want all that splash damage for multiple pulls.


Where did you get this from? This is not true, you would want to use CL -- as long as your not lusted / heroed. Our rotation isn't perfect, so CL is used to close those gaps.

[Multibocks]

A majority of this fight is BL/Heroism, my statement upon reflection isn't correctly worded. However for this fight it is as you will do most of your damage through BL/heroism and then if you have terrible dps you die from the cold AoE. He needs to maximize his dps and I was trying to help.



If used on single-target fights in every rotation, CL should not be used during EM or Heroism/Bloodlust as you end up with much more "GCD waste."