Project Lore

My guild took down Mimiron last week, knocking off the last of the Keepers of Ulduar. It was an exciting kill that took a fair amount of coordination and strategy adjustment. Touted as one of the most challenging bosses in the instance, Mimiron is a complicated encounter, but it shouldn't roadblock a well-prepared guild. When bosses have multiple distinct phases, like Mimiron, they tend to develop a reputation for being extremely difficult. Images of Kael'thas or Illidan begin to cross players' minds. Sometimes players can build these bosses up and place them on pedestals to the point that it actually makes them harder. Is this a tough fight? Yes, I would agree that Mimiron is probably more complex than almost anything we've seen in WotLK up until this point. (I haven't had the pleasure to attempt Yogg-Saron, yet.) However, my "medium-core" guild bested the clockwork gnome and his inventions on the third night of attempts and claimed his incredibly yummy trinket, Pandora's Plea. As a raid leader, I have found the best way to combat encounters like this is to treat each phase as a separate mini-boss. Explain the first phase of the fight to the raid, give out assignments and then go. It's better to get an attempt under your belt before you lose your audience to napping and afk runs for Pop Tarts. While running back after a wipe, go over what you observed and tweak your strategy. The more familiar your raid is with the fight, the better you will do, so make sure you are spending more time fighting the boss, than talking about it. When you make it to phase 2, or know you are close, then go over the basic strategy for the next phase. Rinse and repeat. Make sure your raid members have all read the boss strategies and watched movies of the boss in advance of the attempts. Do not underestimate the importance of having a well-prepared raid. Sure you're going to go over the fight, but it's better to have 25 people with ideas, than relying on one raid leader. On the other hand, written strategies and movies are only going to get you so far. On complex encounters it's the adjustments you make to the basic strategy that will determine your success. Every raid is different and will have different strengths and weaknesses that you must cater to in order to succeed. Here are some of the adjustments and tweaks my guild had to make in order to get this boss down. As I mentioned, every raid is different and some suggestions may have value to you and some may not. These are some of the things that worked for us and perhaps they can help you too. If you don't know the basic strategy for this fight, please click here first, as these tips assume you already know the basic strategy. Phase 1: Leviathan MKII

• When the melee and tank run away from the boss to avoid shock blast, don't run too far. There are three stripes on the ground with circles in them, which divide the room. If the boss is positioned in the center of the room, you only need to run to the second circle on the ground. If the tank is running too far, the boss will get out of position and possibly lay a set of proximity mines too close to the casters and healers.
• The plasma blasts deal an insane amount of damage. Even with a proper cooldown rotation established, all of the healers need to be focused on keeping the tank alive. Every healer that is assigned to use cooldowns on the tank, such as pain suppression, guardian spirit or hand of sacrifice should have another healer near them in case they get hit with a napalm shell at an inopportune moment.
• Your raid members should know their jobs and what to do, however, having someone diligently calling out things over ventrilo can help your raid stay alive. Giving your group a few second warning on shock blast and plasma blast, can make a difference when you're learning the fight.

Phase 2: VX-001 Anti-personnel Assault Cannon

• We tried having the melee constantly rotating around the boss to avoid rapid bursts, but it didn't work well for us. So we assigned everyone a specific place to stand. The room has three stripes on the floor, which divide the rest of the room into wedges. The positioning we ended up with was dividing the ranged and healers into three groups and assigning each a wedge to stand in. The melee was also divided into three groups and each group was assigned a stripe to stand on. The rapid bursts would then have six distinct targets to choose from and each time the damage would only be hitting 3-4 raid members at a time.
• Have someone watch the back of the VX-001 and call out when they see the rockets launching, so the ranged classes can avoid them. They do five million damage to those that get hit! Fortunately, as of patch 3.1.3, the rockets don't seem to target the melee anymore. Someone should also call out when they see the boss casting spinning up, which will lead to laser barrage. Everyone needs to run around clockwise to avoid getting hit by this.

Phase 3: Aerial Command Unit (ACU)

• Everyone should group up on one side and be as close to the outer walls as possible. The ranged DPS tank for the Aerial Command Unit needs to make sure it is positioned well away from the raid, but it also cannot be directly in the center of the room. We found that the magnetic cores had trouble rooting the ACU when he was positioned in the center. If the ACU gets too close to the raid, it will drop bomb bots directly on top of them.
• The bomb bots can be dealt with by having one death knight using the following macro:

/target bomb bot /cast chains of ice

• When a bomb bot spawns, call for ranged DPS to kill it and the death knight can keep it place by hitting the macro. If a bomb ever gets to close to the raid, the death knight can Death Grip it away from them.
• The raids in our guild usually have a lot of melee DPS in them. We found that saving two magnetic cores and using them in immediate succession allowed for more DPS on the ACU and less running back and forth. You have to be cautious with this strategy, however. After you loot a magnetic core, it only lasts in your inventory for one minute. So I recommend leaving the cores on the assault bots' corpses until you are ready to root the ACU.

Phase 4: V-07-TR-0N

• Phase 4 can be a chaotic mess and all three parts of the gnomish Voltron need to be killed within 10 seconds of each other, otherwise they respawn. We had everyone go back to their assigned positions from phase 2. We asked all of our ranged DPS to focus on the ACU (head) and the melee DPS to focus on the Leviathan MKII (feet). We had them DPS those parts down to around 12% health and then focus on the VX-001 (middle). Once all three sections were around 12% health, we had folks assigned to DPS all three pieces and we coordinated their death over vent.
• The shock blast in phase 4 can be interrupted by the Laser Barrage spin. The shock blast graphic will flicker for a moment and then stop while the laser barrage spin is cast. Be careful! If this happens, as soon as the laser barrage is over, the shock blast will cast and blow up anyone in melee range. If you see this, call it out on vent and have your melee and tanks stay away until after the shock blast goes off.

I hope some of this information proves useful to you and your guilds, as you attempt this unique encounter. Feel free to post your own suggestions for this encounter or ask any questions you may have as well. If these suggestions help you make progress, please come back and let us know!

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Blizzard is 100% serious about making us think before we chose to replace our items. While I still have not replaced much of my S2/T4 gear, I am finally at the level which this should start happening. At the moment I have only easily replaced four items, both of my craptacular trinkets from The Burning Crusade days and the rings to boot. The odd thing is, I have replaced my old pair of trinkets nearly three times over. That is right, I have a total of five trinkets that are an obvious improvement.

Of course, this is where the difficult choices Ghostcrawler discussed come in to play:

• First Mate's Pocketwatch
• Fury of the Crimson Drake
• Talon of Hatred
• Fury of the Encroaching Storm
• Death Knight's Anguish

Unfortunately, the WoWHead item comparison isn't of much help because of the trinkets possessing “Use” or “Chance on hit” buffs. Initially, I went back to min-maxing, a practice that I became to loathe so much from vanilla days. Rather than performing the calculations of average gains over time and all that crap, I just guestimated what was best, taking into account the vendor potential. And no, I didn't even bother checking shared cooldowns for swapping potential. I did check for this post though, the Pocketwatch is the only “Use” trinket not shared with the others' cooldown.

My thought process went something like this. Fury of the Crimson Drake is easily vendored once I look at that Pocketwatch, which beats it in every category. Due to my fast weapons, Death Knight's Anguish pops to its full extent (+150 crit) nearly every fight, adding a solid amount of +crit. To top it off it gives you two separate buffs, making me look more beefcake to the opposing faction and generally badass.

The second trinket seems like it will be a more difficult decision, Fury, Talon or Pocketwatch? Fury and Talon offer the same benefits, static +Haste with AP on use. Naturally the numbers are ever so slightly different, Talon with more haste but less AP. However, Fury is only on a one minute cooldown, meaning I can pop it twice as often. Seems like a good enough reason to beat out the Pocketwatch as well.

Pop in a simple macro and finito:

/use Fury of the Encroaching Storm

/cast Slice and Dice

Now that you are out of my head, you can see that I have finally recovered from obsessing over a small increase in DPS. The case can be made for using the later two “Use” trinkets, Fury and Pocketwatch, since they are on separate timers. The added haste over crit would probably increase DPS due to energy generation off of Focused Attacks, though, and again proving Ghostcrawler's point, I would be losing a chunk of +crit to get the haste. I am just gonna stop now...It'll all get replaced soon.

How do you guys go about these hard decisions? I have a few friends who just go for “whatever is cool,” rather than racking their or someone else's brain over the numbers. This goes for everything, armor, tabards, weapons, trinkets. If the gear is comparable the only stat they analyze is coolness. How I envy them.

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