Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Ulduar 10 for Dummies: Flame Leviathan

So I read raid tactics, strategy guides, and watch videos before I go into a fight. Often I find them giving a lot of excess information, and me having to pick out the important parts. I thought about it for a while, and figured that there must be an easier way to lay down strategies for a fight, and here we are. The first in a series of 'Ulduar 10 for Dummies.'

I will approach this as if I'm giving quick drive through lessons to someone who has heard of the fight, has a pretty ok sense of how the game works, but has never done the fight before.

I will not include hard mode information or achievements. After all would you want to go into hard mode with people who have never done the fight before? Yah, I didn't think so.

Imagine yourself to be the raid member filling in for a regular, needing super quick simplified fight explanation, and let me know if what I wrote actually makes sense to you.


Flame Leviathan

Download ratingbuster (or a similar mod)
Find your highest item level gear and make sure to wear it. The higher the average item level on your gear, the higher the health of the machine you'll be driving

Choice of Machines
For 10 man you want 2 demolishers, 2 siege engines, 2 choppers. Who drives which machine doesn't matter, as long as you make sure that the passengers of the demolishers can do pretty ok dps.

Activation.
Speak to Brann to start the event.

Towers
On normal mode you can just ignore all the towers, and go straight through the middle. Kill the pillars to stop adds from streaming out of them. Have some fun while doing this, and get to know the abilities of the machine you're in.

Flame Leviathan
When you kill the last two big dudes you hear Brann babble and Leviathan comes driving in.
  • He will drive to the middle and announce his first follow target.
  • Follow targets can be siege engines or demolishers.
  • The only job for the target being followed is to kite him around, stay away from him as far as possible, and not get hit.
Target = Demolisher
  • Choppers put tar in front of him to slow him down
  • Siege engines make sure the flame vents get interrupted
  • The other demolisher makes sure the tar that the choppers put down is ignited
  • Do damage after you have made sure that the respective jobs per machine have been done
Target = Siege Engine
  • Both demolisher passengers load themselves into the gun, and the driver shoots them on top of the boss, where the passengers will kill the turrets
  • The main job of the Siege Engine who is not followed, is to interrupt flame vents
  • Choppers still put tar down
Turrets are down
  • Leviathan is stunned and the demolisher passengers are thrown off
  • The choppers need to pick up these passengers, heal them up to full and drop them off next to their respective demolishers
  • While being stunned Leviathan takes more damage so do as much damage as you can
Rinse and Repeat

6 comments:

  1. Hi !

    I read your blog for a while but never commented.

    I just read this article and saw the part : "On normal mode you can just ignore all the towers, and go straight through the middle."
    In our ten-mans, we allway destroy all the towers, or it will become hard mode (and we're not ready for hard-modes...).
    Or is it impossible to do hard-modes by keeping towers in 10-mans ?

    But anyway, great blog, I love reading it. :)
    Nef

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  2. And I forgot something...

    Pyrite is all in this fight.

    Have people in the siege engine shoot the flying pyrite down and demolisher passengers must assure their machine is loaded with pyrite. And the demolisher can stack pyrite on the boss up to 10 stacks and refresh it every 7 or so seconds.

    And the siege engines can interrupt the boss and ignite the tar, not the demolishers.

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  3. Heyas Nefernet, glad you enjoy what I write :)

    As for normal or hard mode.

    The only way to enter hard mode is to speak with the lorekeeper (yaknow the big gray dude at the front when you come in) first and then to Brann. The lorekeeper has some dialog that lets you tell him to activate secundary defense systems, and Brann then starts the event.

    I can imagine you were confused though since my group went there and figured we would try it with a tower up. So we started the whole thing, dropped all the towers but one, and killed him. No achievement...made us a bit sad, but it was very nice to know that you can make the event go a lot faster by just ignoring the towers.

    So if you just want to do normal mode the fast way, ignore the lorekeeper, tell Brann to start it, and race through the middle.

    I did indeed forget the pyrite I will update the post to reflect your comment, thanks!

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  4. I didn't know about lorekeeper and Brann... It's always the raid leader who starts the event and I'm not RL. :)

    But I will make sure *they* know about it, in case one day we would want to activate hard mode. :D It would be too bad to bring the A team and have an easy kill and no new loot...

    And about the pyrite, I know about it because I always do this fight with a demolisher, either as the pilote or the human canonball... But hunters are not that good to kill the turrets as they are dreadful in melee range.

    I play with my boyfriend who plays a mage and it's so easy to drive the machine together... We begin the fight with me firing all the pyrite on the boss and my BF reloading pyrite the tanks passengers shooted. When the demolisher is full pyrite again, I throw him on the boss and he burns down the turrets all by himself (the other one don't need to go there and keeps loading pyrite for his own demolisher). And I can often get him back aboard without the help of the bikes.
    I try to keep my stacks of pyrite up but it's quite difficult, but the other demolisher do it, and the boss is just burned down in a few minutes.

    Thanks for the tip about hard mode ! :)
    Nef

    Recent blog post: Scary…

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  5. Oh hey, you're French (yes, I followed your blog linkie, gratz on the druid ding!) trop cool 8-)

    But yeah, I decided to leave the post as is, you're doing a pretty good job explaining how it works in your comment, can't really think of a way to do it better ^_^

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