Tips for the Conclave of the Wind
We went after the first encounter in the Throne of the 4 Winds on Friday after we dropped Magmaw and again on Saturday and got them down. Videos on this fight helped but I noticed there were several tidbits of information that we did not get from videos. These small ideas were key to getting them down so I figured I should post about it. Go watch a video and then read this. It will make more sense that way.
This fight has 3 bosses that all need to die within 1 minute of each other. You need 2 ranged, 2 tanks, 3 heals and 3 of any other sort of DPS.
When setting this fight up I like to put raid makes on the floor of the entrance platform and have everyone stand on them and move back and forth to practice the phases of the fight. The left boss is green because he does plants and healing, the center/top boss is blue for his ice and the right boss is any color (what color is wind?). We will call the right platform yellow
Setup
Right/Yellow
One heal (preferably one that can reduce fall damage), Two ranged DPS.
Center/Blue
One healer, one tank
Left/Green
One healer, one tank, 3 DPS melee or anything.
This is the configuration at the start of the fight. The fight has two alternating phase. The bosses all have an energy bar. This bar fills from 0 to 90. Ninety is full, not 100%. Don’t mix up ‘percent’ and the energy number or your timing will be wrong. At 70+ energy people need to shift to be near the bridge they are going to use. At 80 energy people move. At 90 energy the wind bridges vanish and you have to already be moved.
Movement
At 80, all the DPS on the right/yellow platform move to center/blue. Everyone on the green platform goes to blue and everyone on blue (tank and healer) goes to green. It is important to note as you are moving there might be a boss there taking a swing at someone. Also on the blue platform there might be an ice patch you land on. Get off it fast. The healer on the right/yellow platform does not move. That person stays there until that boss dies.
Special attack phase.
At 90 the bosses do a big attack. Lasts only a short time. During that time the DPS should be burning the blue boss. As soon as the boss energy bars drop down everyone needs to be moving back. EXCEPT, the tank and the heals on the blue and green platforms. They only move once per cycle. The ice boss applies a debuff so you can’t go back there right away. There will be plenty of aoe damage on the ice platform and everyone also needs to stay off the fickin ice patches and out of the spray of ice.
Now for the real tips…
Right platform, wind, yellow
This platform does not need a tank because the boss just stands there and shoots stuff at you. The big risk here is getting blown off. If the whole squad gets blown off the boss silences the raid and everyone dies. It is possible to recover from a blow off, if you did not die. So try to get back on the platform fast. There will be tornados. Don’t let them hit you. The big thing is that periodically the boss will start channeling a knockback and slowly turn clockwise, sweeping the blast of wind around the platform.
-When he is doing the sweeping move he holds one hand out in the direction he is doing it
-If you are far back it is easier to see the boss’s move but takes more running to get away from it
-keep your camera at max zoomed way out to see better.
-If you get blow off toward the inside of the ring of platforms, you live and get carried back to the platform. If you get blow off AWAY from the ring you die.
-Don’t stack with everyone else. If one of you gets blown off it is not a wipe. If you all get blown off it is probably a wipe.
Center platform, ice, blue
-Don’t stand on the ice
-Don’t point the boss at your healer or anyone else on the platform
-Always be ready for you or the healer to get ice under them. Have your next movement after that planned out.
-Don’t move to the bridge too early or it will get blocked up with ice.
-Don’t move to the bridge too late or it will be too late. If you don’t jump in time the debuff will drop you.
-If you are jumping to the other platform and you left an ice patch near the bridge, tell people in vent so they will be ready to move fast.
Right platform, life, green
The boss drops healing rings and you have to move him out of them fast.
-The INSTANT you see him casting ‘soothing winds’ turn and run away. He will move as soon as he is done and he will not heal up. You HAVE to keep him out of these rings.
CRITICAL: The area of healing is larger than what it looks like. WATCH the bosses health bar. If it is taking ‘up’ ticks move him farther away.
-Don’t stand in the green yourself.
-When he casts ‘nurture’ adds will spawn from the flowers.
-Don’t let adds stand in the green.
CRITICAL: When 3 or more adds stand together they do bursts of AOE. Tell every DPS to spread out, find some adds and tank/kill them themselves.
-Do NOT gather the adds up.
-The tank should kill the adds too, just don’t turn your back on the boss.
-The adds MUST be down before the end of the cycle.
- NO DPS should be back on the boss until ALL adds are down. Communicate and let people know if there is still one up.
-The healer should stand near someone that can get adds off them. Don’t run away from your people or they can’t get that thing off you.
-DPS needs to spot any packs that are larger than 2 (3 or more) and pick one, hit it hard, and move it away.
-Single target DPS the adds. Don’t AOE them. AOE is garbage now and you can’t afford to have too many up in a pack. IF there is a pack of 3, single targeting one down fast will REALLY help the healing situation out.
-keep all adds and the boss well away from the center of the platform while killing adds. This is critical. He will drop another circle of green either on himself or an add. Be ready to move him off it. If this circle is any where even remotely near the center of the platform then the boss will take big heals during the end of cycle phase. If he is standing on a circle he will heal to full in that phase. See the picture for the areas where the boss should NOT be at the end of the cycle.
-It is ok to leave him standing in green when you jump on the bridge at 80 energy. He will teleport to the center of the pad a moment later. In fact it is GOOD to have him drop that last green patch there because you know he will not heal in the ‘big move’ phase.
-Killing adds fast is a critical key to this fight.
CRITICAL: Keeping that last green circle from dropping in the center is also key to winning. Don’t take it lightly. When we messed it up a little we lost. When we did it right we creamed the fight. Make sure the boss is well clear of the center when energy is 50 and higher.
-At the start of the next round the green boss will be enraged. This makes him bigger so he is actually closer to any healing circle. This also makes him CREAM the next tank.
CRITICAL: The next tank needs to attack him during the ‘big move’ phase and apply all tanking debuffs that he has available before the boss comes out of the big move. Tanking cooldowns should be saved for this time. If the enraged hits are too hard you should apply the debuffs and then run away before he comes out of the move. This will buy you a few seconds of not getting hit. The enrage wears off fast so those few seconds are precious.
Here are my super professional pictures of the tanking on the green platform. Here the boss is green and we are about to pull. The blue arrow is the bridge to the blue platform.
Next the boss is casting his healing circle and the tank is turning to run.
Here is the new boss location well clear of the circle. Remember, the healing area is a lot bigger than the graphic of the circle.
As you are fighting the adds each time here is the area that you want to avoid.
But! If you run to the bridge at the end the boss might drop a circle as it is chasing you. So you can’t drag him across that area. Also you don’t want to be too far from the bridge. So THIS is the real area to avoid.
Do recap, let him drop the first circle in the center and then keep him in the upper left area for the later circles. There may be two, so leave yourself room to drop two in that white area. Boss positioning is very key on the fight but it is not totally obvious how key it is. Move fast and position the boss well.
And also… no that is pretty much it…
Oh wait… if you get on a wind bridge at the very edge of it you can get blow to kingdom come and never land on the other side. Get on bridges ONLY in the center area. Try this out before the fight. It does not kill you. See how sensitive they are so you don’t screw it up in the real fight.
For the wind platform (yellow)- you can’t depend on seeing his outstretched hand to know he’s doing the wind blast. His normal casts also have his hand semi-outstretched so it can be hard to tell the difference (especially if you’re on the blue platform and trying to determine if you should jump back or not). Speaking of which, when determining whether you should jump back from the blue platform, we used the following:
- if the windblast cooldown was under 10sec, we stayed on the ice platform and dps’d ice boss until windblast had been cast and finished, then jumped over.
-if the windblast cooldown was over 10 sec, right away jump back and prepare for the windblast cast.
This helped us out a lot and we avoided being blown off by wind blast as we were landing from returning from the blue platform.
Ah, thanks for these details! I noticed sometimes you ladies didn’t jump back right away but I wasn’t sure why – figured there must have been a good reason.
I have to thank Ado for supplying us with that information. I was having a lot of problems until I finally asked him what he does in his raid as he’s always assigned to the wind platform. Once Karius and I got those details, we were golden!!!
On the ice boss, we had a pally tank it and a frost mage as the dps. If our pally healer is on, he’s on the ice platform too. Pallies can bubble out of the stacks, mages can iceblock out of them. Frost mages can iceblock out twice.
If the pally healer isn’t on, we have the healer on blue swap with the healer on yellow. If we go through more than 2 ultimates we have the pally tank swap with the tank on green. The spare dps all go to blue for the ultimate.
I agree wholeheartedly on banning AoE on the life adds. It took a while to drill this into people’s heads, but I think we’ve got it down. The only exception is a mage’s frost ring, which can help pin the adds in place and make them easier to keep out of the green circle.
We also have learned we sometimes need to back off on dps if an ultimate is about to occur when a boss is close to dying. The bridges close during ultimates, so if you down one you’re going to lose precious seconds getting the raid restabilized and waiting for the bridges to reopen.
It is important that people do not stay on their boss in the ultimate phase, even if it is low. Can’t wait too long and lose the bridge. Have to jump on schedule regardless of boss health. No hesitation, stick to the plan. That almost happened on one attempted but the something else killed us.
We only had DPS on the frost during the ultimate phase. The rest of the time it was just a tank. So there was never any danger of him dropping early. They stay pretty balanced doing that as long as everyone gives him a few hard whacks each time. He is soft enough that as long as he is below 30% when the others die there is plenty of time to pop hero and zerg him down.
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