Luskan's WotLK Raid Guide: Ulduar: Yogg-Saron

[Luskan]

For any of you that do like too read, there is a video at the bottom.





Phase 1
We chose to go with the strategy of tanking Guardians near the door and having two tanks ferrying them to Sara when they were below 30%. Normally, I tanked all of the adds myself and stay just outside the outer clouds so the other two tanks can Taunt off of me. I move the final Guardian to the middle for DPS to finish it off and one of the other tanks picks up any additional adds during phase transition.

Standing on clouds spawns additional Guardians. We found that purposely spawning two additional Guardians worked well for our three-tank setup. The first would be DPS'ed and tanked down by our first ferry tank, the second by our second ferry tank, and the third by me. By the time the first had been killed in the middle by our ranged group assigned to it, he was ready to taunt mine off me as soon as it was ready. Doing this, I had to handle two adds at the beginning at one time, but had a very healthy threat lead by the time DPS got to mine so I could switch off.

The reason for this is because we wanted to reduce the time we spent in phase 1 as much as possible. Since adds come slower at the beginning, spawning two additional adds was possible with our DPS. Spending less time gave us a smaller window of time in which we needed to worry about tank mind controls and helped the overall encounter timer a small bit.

Tightly controlling the use of Taunt abilities made Phase 1 go a lot smoother for us. As much as possible, we use our Hunters to alternate misdirects to bring adds to me, and a Holy Paladin in the door group running Righteous Fury to attract uuncontrolled adds right through me so I can pick them up easily. We found that doing this eliminated the issue of ferry tanks randomly dropping aggro or losing aggro after a mind control.

Ferry tank mind controls have been a pretty big but unavoidable hassle in many of our pulls. Guardians completely drop aggro when a tank is mind controlled and even with a quick dispel it can be difficult to get them back in a pinch.

Mind controls on myself were also frustrating but somewhat easier to deal with. Because we wanted to control our taunts, I simply wouldn't taunt adds back onto me immediately after a mind control, instead letting them hit on whichever DPS had them at the time. Guardians are easy to heal through so long as the healers are aware that aggro has changed, and adds in the DPS group are often being DPSed very quickly anyway and will be brought out by a ferry tank quickly.


Phase 2
There are five important things to know about Phase 2 that will make learning this encounter a lot easier for your group.

First: There are 10 portals for the portal phase in 25-man. There are three on the left, three on the right, three in the back, and one in the front. We stacked these with 9 DPS'ers, primarily Melee DPS & Hunters, and one healer (a Druid who could also debuff the Brain to help DPSers). We assigned exact portal locations and set up and practiced them in General Vezax' room.

Second: Though counterintuitive, your portal team is far more important to what goes on outside of Yogg-Saron than the group that's actually killing adds outside of Yogg-Saron. The big breakthrough for us was realizing that killing all tentacles inside the portals within 20 seconds prevented some Crushers and Corruptors from spawning. We wasted a lot of time moving DPS outside of Yogg to handle tentacle spawns before realizing that simply killing the tentacles in the portals faster would make all the difference.

Third: Constrictors can be broken with Ice Block from Mages and, more importantly, Blessing of Protection from Paladins. Paladins should be able to cover players all around Yogg-Saron when they are position for portals to prevent a loss of DPS that could prevent killing portal tentacles within 20 seconds.

Fourth: Crushers are a lot more important than you might think, and a lot better targets to kill than their health suggests. Unlike prioritizing Corruptors, Crushers are stationary and benefit from allowing DOTs to fully tick as well as as more raid debuffs during the time they are up. In other words, DPS is far more efficient on these than constantly running to Corruptors. When we tried to ignore Crushers we found ourselves with 3-4 Crushers going into Phase 3 and handicapped while one of our tanks was occupied trying to break channeling of Diminished Power on all of them. That's not to say Corruptors should be ignored -- we switch off to hit Corruptors if they're nearby and have already taken some damage before heading to a Crusher on the other side of Yogg-Saron.

Fifth: Curse of Doom and especially Apathy should be interrupted! As a Warrior tank, I normally handle second Crusher spawns if one comes up when another is being finished off, but only until the Feral Druid gets to the new Crusher -- then I immediately go and find a Corruptor that's still up to interrupt and stun. Shaman are amazing for this duty as well due to the quick availability of interrupts. Have a few players to handle these until Melee and Ranged can burn them down.


Phase 3
I won't speak too much in depth here because we haven't finished Phase 3 of Yogg-Saron as of this post (I'll edit this later). I'll just note that there are two unique strategies to dealing with Phase 3 that we've observed and both have brought successful clears by premiere world guilds.

The first is keeping Immortal Guardians directly in front of Yogg-Saron and having Melee DPS burn them down as they come in. Attacks such as Whirlwind will continue to hit Yogg-Saron by doing this.

The second is keeping Immortal Guardians away from Yogg-Saron and having ranged and healers always facing away from Yogg-Saron (and towards the adds) while burning them down. This leaves melee DPS always on Yogg-Saron. This is a bit safer if there are DPS shortages since the add will be out of range of healing Yogg-Saron if he successfully finishes a cast.

Phase 3 is about finding a perfect balance of who is on Yogg and who is on Immortal Guardians. They must be killed quickly, but there is a very real enrage timer to watch out for as well.











Good luck!