i'm cold

smolderon prog, very fun boss too bad my guild sucked ass

[@MyPetCactus]

I have no idea whats happening

[@bionicbubble23]

i’ll explain

[@bionicbubble23]

It's important to understand that this is a heavy HPS (healing per second) and DPS (damage per second) check fight, with simple yet unforgiving mechanics. All healer cooldowns have to be perfectly assigned, and you will need a very optimised DPS composition to meet the damage check. This fight essentially repeats after the first 1 minute and 40 seconds. So finishing the 1st intermission with everyone alive for the first time, essentially means that you know the fight, you just have to do this 2 more times. The hard part comes from the fact that players simply need to survive all the way until the end. Mythic Smolderon does ramp up in damage, but that is covered with healer cooldowns and personals. Soaking Living Flame orbs during the intermission is also an important factor in the fight, that will lead to way too many wipes. Players simply need to be very focused on soaking those orbs. The fight is doable with 2-3 orbs reaching the boss, but more than this will make it a lot harder than it should be. First, the tank pulls the boss close to the entrance to conserve as much space as possible for later on in the fight. There are about 4 mechanics during phase 1 of the fight- Overheated, Flame Waves, Brand of Damnation, and Seeking Inferno. Each time that Smolderon casts ‘Overheated’, half the raid gets a circle around them dealing damage over time to those within 5 yards. This damage isn’t super lethal unless like 5 people stack, but after 10 seconds when the debuff expires 5 Flame Tornados are expelled from the players position in random directions that must be dodged. Getting hit by more than one is almost certainly death. This is a pretty easy mechanic to deal with that our guild sucked at however in this particular video I did not do a good job at dodging the tornados because we were testing a new positioning strat so I didn’t put enough focus into this mechanic. Now remember only half the raid has this debuff. t the exact same time, those without the debuff are tasked with dealing with ‘Brand of Damnation’. This ability is cast onto whichever tank does not have Overheat. It does a shit ton of damage to the tank along with 5 mil damage split to everyone inside the circle often known by World of Warcraft players as a “soak”. Typically 10 people should be soaking this ability leaving dealing around 500k to each which is anywhere from 50% to 70% of their health pool. All players hit by Brand of Damnation are inflicted with Cauterizing Wound debuff. Cauterizing Wound is a healing absorb which means all the damage you take during the absorb cannot be healed until the absorb threshold is reached. For instance, if the healing absorb is 500k, you must be healed for that much before your character actually receives any healing. Once the healing absorb is cleared, the player drops a fire swirly under their feet that detonates in about 2 seconds causing an explosion on the ground. It is important for people in the healing absorb to stand still for as long as possible and stutter step away from the ground explosions to minimize the amount of space these explosions take up on the floor. They must do this while also dodging fire tornados, doing as much damage or healing as possible, and moving towards the bait for the next ability ‘Lava Geysers’. Before we talk about this ability, I will note the tank targeted with Brand of Damnation will be given a debuff called ‘Searing Aftermath’ that will explode for massive damage to the entire raid after 6 seconds, reduced by distance. The tank needs to get as far away as possible before the explosion goes off. There was some random ass item that tanks could take into the raid to teleport back to their last location every 5 minutes, but I, a DPS player, don’t know much about the tank role. Lava Geysers appear twice per phase when Smolderon stomps the ground and spawns lava geysers below random players. These deal damage and knock back players who are hit so avoid them. More importantly they leave behind permanent pools of fire which deal damage over time to people who touch them. They don’t do a ton of damage if you walk through it, but if you have to stand in it for long periods of time or while taking damage from another mechanic they can prove to be lethal. It is absolutely vital and was in my opinion the ultimate downfall of our guild to understand this mechanic and position correctly to conserve as much space as possible for later in the fight. They should be baited together and preferably behind the raid that is moving in a counter-clockwise direction. Each person will do the Overheated mechanic and Brand of Damnation mechanic once in each phase therefore both will go off twice a phase. Seeking Inferno also goes off twice each phase after these primary abilities. Seeking Inferno causes 3 orbs to spawn and each fixate on one player moving slowly towards them. After 30 seconds, or when the orb reaches its players, it explodes, dealing large raid-wide damage and increasing the damage taken by them by 500% for 3 seconds. That means that the orbs must be soaked after 3 seconds of the previous orb or it will cause an instant wipe. Players fixated have to kite their orb and only soak it when the vulnerability from the previous hit has expired. This particular mechanic caused a lot of strife within race to world first teams as well as more casual guilds pursuing the “Cutting Edge” achievement (Cutting Edge is earned by clearing the entire raid on mythic difficulty before the next raid tier is released - typically around a 6 month cycle). To understand the dislike of this ability you have to understand how add-ons and weak auras are used throughout World of Warcraft. World of Warcraft or WOW for short allows player-created modifications enhancing UI capabilities. They are nearly essential for every player including the best in the world. Most raid tiers have player-created weak aura packages that display key ability cooldowns on your screen making coordination with your 20 person group much simpler. Most abilities are able to communicate with these modifications however ‘Seeking Inferno’ could not. Unfortunately, my understanding is limited on this matter, but I remember seeing a reddit comment explaining it. I’ve already spent about 30 minutes writing this and I would estimate I am about half way done so I am not going to search the internet to find this explanation and instead will make something up that I think might be correct. Seeking Inferno was uniquely server-side as opposed to client-side, that means that no add on could pick it up. Typically you could make an add on that easily deciphers which 3 players have an orb seeking them and then decides an order for them to soak it in, but this didn’t work. Instead you had to make a macro which did even crazier shit although it had to have a button pressed to activate it. So basically if you were being heat-seeked, you would press the button and whichever order you pressed you would be assigned a soak order. Now you may be thinking - “Why don’t you just call out if you have an orb or not and coordinate over voice communications. Well this mechanic was eventually nerfed from 4 orbs to 3 orbs, but not until after everyone was used to the crutch of using the macro. With 4 orbs it was nearly impossible to do this mechanic without an add-on or macro. Also, many wow players have incredibly shitty microphones, play in their living rooms while their 6 year old children watch TV in the background, or are incels to the point of being unable to confidently speak in an online voice chat room with 19 other typically friendly individuals. I thought this mechanic was kinda fun, especially when it overlapped with another movement mechanic forcing the player to think quick and alternate their route timing to keep the raid alive. What I didn’t like about this mechanic is that my guild sucked at using their eyes and would constantly double soak it and wipe the raid. Also if you were unlucky and got a Seeking Inferno right before phase 2, it would almost certainly result in a personal DPS loss in the upcoming damage phase. This was all just phase 1 you ask? Yes indeed! Fortunately, phase 2 is much more straightforward and those who died during it could not hide the shame of dying during such easy mechanics.

[@bionicbubble23]

When Smolderon drops to 0 energy (which takes about 1 minute and 40 seconds), he goes to the middle of the room and knocks the raid back. This “intermission” or “phase 2” lasts 30 seconds and is often a great time to pop larger cooldowns since during this 30 seconds Smolderon recharges his energy and does nothing, then phase 1 starts again. Blistering Heat is active during this intermission which passively does raid-wide damage, but it’s really nothing to be too concerned about as it can be easily healed through. Right after the small knock back, players who soaked Brand of Domination in phase 1 will spawn 5 small orbs that only they can see and must soak. Soaking an orb gives you a 20% damage & 10% healing buff for 20s. This buff stacks but does not increase in duration, so it is important to collect all orbs as quickly as possibly and as closely to one another as possible. This is why this is known as a damage phase and a good time to pop larger cooldowns that may increase your damage. As for myself (a retribution paladin), I would use my macro casting both Execution Sentence and Avenging Wrath at the same time as well as popping my 5 minute Elemental Potion of Ultimate Power during the first intermission. These abilities greatly increase boss damage and most paladins will use it in this phase and even delay the usage of it in later phases so it aligns during this phase. My guild didn’t do this because they are noobs, but all other paladin players from good guilds I looked at would use their cooldowns here.

[@bionicbubble23]

The Devouring Essence ability shows the importance for everyone to soak Brand of Domination during phase 1 or else there will be a large damage decrease due to the lack of orbs spawning for those who didn’t soak. Another reason it is vital to soak these orbs is because for every orb that is not soaked and reaches the boss, Smolderon’s damage is permanently increased by 5% for the remainder of the fight. Somehow our guild also sucked at this so we would always be taking more damage than necessary. If we were to ever kill this boss we would have needed to minimize orb losses to 1-2 max. This means all 20 players have to soak their 5 orbs on all 3 intermissions - that’s 300 orbs that have to get correctly soaked. One thing that can make this challenging is if Seeking Inferno balls aren’t soaked quickly, it can make movement for someone doing the small orb soaks at the same time much more difficult which can take their focus off doing damage. One thing you will notice about the room is that it is separated into 5 rings. During this intermission, Smolderon continuously, but predictably sets different rings on fire. Players hit by a ring take massive damage and a 10 second dot. This is a very fun dance to manage while also trying to do as much damage as possible, but being hit will almost certainly kill you immediately or the dot afterwards will. There was a great weak aura to deal with this mechanic and you can see it on my screen doing this phase. There is a line of numbers in the center of my screen which shows which rings are safe. This is the same every time so once you get to this phase a couple times the cadence of your movement is easy to remember and a fun game. My particular strategy during this intermission would be to stay in melee range while the boss transitions to his stagnant position in the middle of the room, dodge any lava pools on the way to the center, resist the small knock back by counter-strafing against it, soaking all 5 of my mini orbs as quickly as possible, popping my damage cds, then following the ring dance. The first one is very easy with the pattern being 2-1-1-3-1-1-3. The hardest part of that pattern is going from ring 1 to ring 3 before the explosion while keeping uptime on my abilities. You have to turn around to run back to ring 3 which means you cannot melee attack the boss or cast abilities behind you since it’s out of your line of sight. To get around this I would jump and then strafe midair in order to face the boss again, cast an ability, then strafe back towards the outside before hitting the ground so I continue running in the same direction. That is pretty much the entire fight! Each intermission has different ring patterns, notably in the second intermission the pattern is 1-2-1-3-1-5!-2. As you can see by my chess notation on 5, we must go from ring 1 to 5 in a very short amount of time! Far too short to get there without any movement enhancements and even difficult with most movement abilities. Therefore we much utilize the niche Warlock ability demonic gateway! What a fun experience it is to take a gateway during a hyperactive moment in a fight. For those unfamiliar, Demonic Gateway creates a portable between two locations within 10-40 yard range. Activating the gateway transports the user to the other gateway. Each player can use a Demonic Gateway only once per 90 seconds. This is how we get from ring 1 to 5 in such a short amount of time! There is a fun little macro you can create that allows you to press a keyboard button to activate any gateway within range of you. This makes it much easier to use in a chaotic fight instead of clicking on it which is what most players are typically familiar with. After taking the portal, I use my Divine Steed movement ability to get back into melee range as quickly as possible to maximize my damage.

[@bionicbubble23]

If you are able to do the first 2:10 of the fight while doing around 25% of Smolderon’s health (I think this % is right, but I can’t find my logs or remember which guild I raided with because they kicked me from discord for some reason), you just rinse and repeat! The only thing that gets more complex is the continuous decrease in space caused by lava geysers. This is why it is vital to bait these pools as far from our rotation point as possible. By the end of the fight, the room will be almost completely full of lava with hopefully a straight line of space for people to efficiently run through during the dance intermission. You will hopefully have enough damage at that point to kill the boss while possibly even tanking an entire cast of World of Fire at the end since the whole room will be on fire (make sure to use a defensive). A good pull includes each individual being capable enough to dodge fire tornados, bait lava geysers, kite seeking infernos, soaking personal orbs, and managing the intermission dance. Unfortunately, in a guild such as mine, with individuals with inadequacies in both dealing damage, movement, problem solving, and communication, there are typically 2-3 people dead from each mechanic. There were probably less than 5 pulls where each person made it to the intermission and even less where each person survived through intermission. Shocking yes, but that is one of the biggest difficulties of World of Warcraft. Finding a guild with good players, but how can you prove to that guild that you are good? Unfortunately without nepotism you must join these shitty guilds, perform well, and hopefully the better guilds will see your high damage output in the fight logs or you are well-spoken enough to make a good argument on why you should be on their raid team. What a fun fight this was despite enduring around 200 wipes and not seeing a kill or even the final phase. That is a part of raid prog but as always you hope to always have better teammates when typically the easiest way to cause change is within yourself. One of my favorite bosses from the expansion to be sure.

[@MikeCobo876]

darn that sucky guild!! what the heck are they doin

[@Quiqblade]

i'M cOlD 🥶