The Oculus

We decided to try The Oculus on Heroic mode last night, in spite of the fact that most of us hadn't ever even see it on non-heroic. Beros, Hawksy, Inkx, Primux and Stupidrenren wiped our way through the instance and nearly got through, but stalled too long on the final boss and had to call it due to the late hour.

We started by wiping on the first set of trash pulls. But we got the hang of it. Later, when we had to reclear them, we cruised through in just a few minutes. By then we had worked out the CC and AoE issues. We didn't have a lot of either in our group. The mobs reliably broke Inkx's traps quickly. It was nice the rooting worked, but rooting didn't add much for the all spellcaster pulls. Even gathering up the mobs was tricky since the little whelplings are casters. As I ran around picking them up, Hawksy's healing would exceed the consecrate threat and they'd start leaving me. I think the easy time through, Renren went bear, Primux grabbed some and Hawksy just did Circle healing.

We wiped on the first boss, read over our combat logs and got him the second time with just that much practice on avoiding the bombs.

Then we got our dragons, discussed what colors we should use and figured out where the next set of mobs (constructs) were. And wiped on the constructs. I think we wiped 3-4 times on the next 4 pulls of 3-4 spellcasters + 1 construct. We were really feeling the lack of CC. Renren could root the construct, but the casters were giving us trouble. The next couple of pulls of 3 constructs + 1 caster were no problem. I think we had Mocha tank the caster and maybe that would have been better on the previous pulls too.

The we pulled the second boss and wiped again. We pre-read on wiki and it warned of the Energizing cores first and summoning Drake Captains second. However, it seemed like it was the Captains that were causing the trouble so we took a few minutes and tried completely clearing all the nearby drakes to see if that kept them from coming. I don't think it helped, but we were able to dodge the various attacks enough to get through the boss anyway.

The trash mechanic on the 3rd boss took us by surprise -- you aggro and he summons a bunch of adds and ports away. There's no time to set up CC there, so it's a bit tricky to gather them up and also figure out which is the dangerous ones to kill first.

I think we wiped a few more times on the 3rd boss getting the hang of kite-tanking away from the frost bombs and dodging his arcane explosions. It's hard to get clear of the explosion if you have the slowing debuff, so I had to plan the kiting to keep us close to the hiding spots.

The fourth boss was rumored to be the easy one, but we did not find it easy. Maybe because it was late, or we were experimenting with too many different strats, it took awhile to key in on the issue that he's summoning a lot of adds in Heroic mode (4-5 instead of 2-3 on non-heroic). By the end, we settled on a 1 red, 1 green and 3 amber drake strategy so that we could spam time stop and have everybody focus on killing the adds. But we were tired so we started running into execution issues. Plus only Hawksy and I had working mics so it was hard for the amber drake riders to coordinate the time stop. As we were hearthing out, we realized that I should just have been calling all the time stops -- whenever I was low on hp, at the enrage, whenever there were a lot of whelps.

I'd like to go back and try it again tonight if possible. I'm sure it'll be a lot easier the next time through and I'd like to wrap up the daily heroic quest from yesterday as well. I should also make some time to make sure I'm fully prepped for Naxx tomorrow.