This weeks maintenance came on Tuesday and with in a new Trial of the Crusader raid boss. This new boss is called Faction Champions. The first thing I am going to comment about is finally a decent degree of difficulty from a boss in the new instance. Faction Champions is a PvP arena style fight against your opposite faction. Each week your raid will be drawing a different mix of Races, Classes and Specs. Our raid drew this combination: Warrior, DK, Enhancement Shaman, Pally(heals), Druid(heals), Priest(heals), Priest(Shadow), Warlock, Rouge, Hunter.
The fight starts out as an all out zerg fest where your raid group must work together to get the Champions under control by using your raid groups CC abilities. For the 25 man version there are 3 healers that use every trick in their bag to keep themselves or fellow Champions health topped off and dispelled. There are 2 melee classes that really started to be a problem for us. The Warrior and the DK were able to destroy and cloth member of our raid in seconds so they became the focus for our raid. While our Prot Warriors worked on taunting and trying to contain them we focus fired down the healers, at the same time anyone with CC rotated on keeping the rest of the Champions under control.
The real trick to this fight is having members of your raid group work together in small groups to manage their Champion they are responsible for. It took some getting used to and our guild was finally able to figure out we needed to move the Warrior and DK as far as possible from the rest of the raid to minimize their chance to annihilate our clothies. Unfortunately we ran out of time on Tuesday night and Wednesday we continued working our way through Ulduar 25 hard modes so we won't be finishing ToCrusader until Sunday night. I will attempt to shoot a video of our killing encounter and post it here for our readers to see. If anyone has any good tips on this raid boss please share your comments below.
Elemental Shaman's roll for Faction Champions
The main roll of an Elemental Shaman in Faction Champions is to keep sustained dps on the raid's target. The secondary roll is to provide a combination of spot heals and CC. I used my Hex spell on the Hunter's pet to keep it off our healers/casters. Remember that your CC spells will suffer from diminishing returns during this encounter so it really help if you switch Hex from the pet to any Champion that is freely damaging your raid. I keep the shadow priest or hunter under Hex as much as possible. Another this to remember it that Wind Shear is off the shock cool down now and must be used to interrupt a healer or caster whenever possible. Keep an eye on the 2 melee dps that your tanks will be trying to control and help them with earthbind totem and frost shocks to keep them off of their target. Also a spot chain heal will help your healers if they are kiting or being interrupted. As you take each Champion down the fight will become easier and easier so pop Bloodlust/Heroism right away to get the fight under control.
The best tip I can provide is make /target marcos for the different Champions so you can easily switch to help with CC and interrupts. This fight is very chaotic at the beginning and trying to click on your target is just not efficient so create some marcos to help you out.
on August 21, 2009 at 8:52 AM
We downed Faction Champions last night. Took a few tries but we got them down while being short 2 people in raid and 1 with connections issues during. We got the same mix as you listed. We had a boomie and a lock rotate cc on the tree (banish, fear, cyclone, repeat. Our rogue respecced to allow for his fan of knives to be an interrupt (worked wonders) and his main focus was the paladin healer while spreading their healing debuff poison to everything in range. The warrior and dk were being kited around and taunted by our tank(s). The rogue was the big issue for us, he kept nuking clothies. Our mages sheeped him as much as possible. He nuked down the priest healer first. Popped hero/BL from the start and with 2 enh shams for interrupts and purges he went down pretty quick. Im trying to remember our kill order; Holy Priest, Rogue, Tree, Warrior, Holy Paladin, Shadow Priest, Warlock, DK, Hunter, Enh Shaman, then pets last. We also had 3 hunters for frost traps and a shaman in each group for tremor and cleanse totems. The best thing that helped us was a set plan before pull. Communication is key and with 4 different people in vent talking at a time aboout their interrupt or cc rotation it gets pretty overwhelming. We assigned a hunter for totem stomping; windfury and healing stream being the main 2 to get down. Anyone who can purge or dispell, should. Best of luck!!!
on August 21, 2009 at 11:29 PM
Last night we down the 10 man version and took the same approach since the rogue really seemed to be a issue. We used Bloodlust at the start to kill the priest and then killed the rogue.
The fight from a shaman point of view really comes down to purging the hots of the Champion your raid is working on dropping.
I have to say this is probably my favorite boss fight in game right now with Yogg following FC>
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