We went back in on Monday night – and it was ugly. In some ways it was almost worst than our first venture in, maybe we were just lacking mojo that night, I don’t know! We made more progress on phase 2 (33% with one of our DPS DC’d early into the phase) but we are still lacking consistency in getting into phase 2 in a fashion that will ensure success. And that was frustrating.

We plan to go in on Saturday for what will (hopefully) be a kill – but Al’Akir may have a different plan, so we shall see!

As for alts in the main raid – Brade has a DK tank that could fill in, and I could likely handle the healing on my paladin. Our mage has a priest I’d trust him to heal with, our hunter a mookin he’s skilled with. But I think that’s the extent of who would have an alt they could bring in. I think the biggest issue would be our tank – I don’t know if we’d have someone to fill in his role, as we are down a tank at the moment and recruiting. But it IS an idea that has some promise if we decide to keep at it on 10s and can navigate it

The first phase of the fight is just brutal on heroic. Two squall lines running, frost that is a massive slow and insane damage, and the wind bursts.

I think what we’ve decided is that once it’s down in 10s, we will leave it to the guild to decide how they’d like to handle it – then we can see where to go from there!

On normal, its possible for the tank to jigger the timing of wind burst just a touch, but at the price of a tick or two of electrocute. I don’t know, never having tried heroic, if that’s an option in heroic…

The way that we worked around it for our first kill (which was on 10HM), was to free ourselves to move around a bit if need be. Instead of sticking to the strict “group” positioning that we used on 25s (eg: thou shalt not move from your designated spade), we spread out around the platform so that no one person was on top of another. This meant that the distance anyone had to travel to get out of a lightning burst and stop chaining it to another player was very limited (and that our healers wouldn’t be frantically trying to heal two people chaining to one another for very long).

Two healers were on the front with one healer (me, on my druid) in the back. This was similar to how you have it now, although from the looks of your layout, we were rotated one position clockwise. For phase 1 we operated in pure survival mode–move where you need to move to get out of the way of squall and lightning. IIRC, I did jump off the platform once to avoid a perfect storm, and survived the subsequent lightning only due to being topped before I jumped. Sometimes, we would wind up with 2 people in the same narrow sliver between lightnings and it was all we could do to live through it. But once we got the hang of it, and our disc priest switched into his pvp set to mitigate the effects of the sleet, we were able to consistently push into phase 2. And a kill wasn’t far off after that (the second time we saw phase 3, we killed him).

As to how we handled the lockout for 10 versus 25, one week we ignored Throne entirely in 25s and the subsequent week all of us who did the 10 HM came into the 25HM Conclave kill on alts. The loss of loot was marginal, especially when most of the time we end up sharding the stuff.

Best of luck to you and your team. It can be a maddening fight, but that Essence is definitely worth it. ^_^

This is on normal 25, so I’m not sure how different the heroic 10 version is, but if you can get your MT to delay that first (and maybe subsequent?) Wind Burst, you should be fine. The group just left of the MT group all had huge issues once the MT group (me, the MT and a ranged DPS) had finally stopped dying to Wind Burst/Squall Line combos.

Not sure it’ll be any help, but we finally stopped killing our resto shaman and two ranged DPS to our left by delaying the Wind Burst ’till the Squall Line had passed them and us.

As to the 10 vs 25 thing… We haven’t deliberately dropped down to 10m for any progression. We originally let some keeners go to Throne to do Conclave on off nights while we killed stuff in BoT and BWD on 25 on raid nights. As a result, our guild first kill of Conclave was on 10-man. We’ll still let them go in on an off-night some resets, since we do NOT clear Throne every week.

Having said that, I can’t imagine we would ever drop to 10s for progression’s sake. I say that now as we’re beating on heroic Chimaeron and heroic Maloriak, so maybe we’ll change our minds later on, but I would vote sticking to all 25-man.

Apart from anything else, it takes FOREVER for guildox to put you back as “25-man” from “10+25″ in their rankings if you get a progression kill on 10.