Heya guys!! We kicked Hodir tonight!! Yeah, that’s right!! I stuck my foot right up his arse!! :D I got into PTR this evening with my guild, but it was an utter snaffu!! Quite misreable really. Non stop critical errors crashing the game, constant dc’s due to lag and overloading the servers, and awful load times overall. It took me nearly 20-30 minutes just to get out of Dalaran. Blizzard support consisted of one…ONE…developer trying to help people and failing misreably. His fault? No way!! How the hell is one guy supposed to help EVERYONE?!?! Not happening… /sigh
Anyways, after much trial and tribulation we managed to get 10 people all together inside the instance. Not only did we get 10 people there, but we even had 2 tanks, 3 healers, and 5 dps. 
Let the good times roll!! So, without further ado lets talk about the boss fight itself in Ulduar 10man.
Ulduar 10 Man
Now as you come in to the room, you’ll notice that there are some ice block’ed dudes in the room, the MAN himself, and then some weird frosty lookin’ anvil chest things. Forget the chests, they’re probably where the loot goes. Wait, don’t forget the loot!!! I mean, damn!! Remember the loot, REMEMBER THE LOOT!!! Just remember it…later… Right, moving on…
Now these lil guys in these ice blocks are buggy. Shocker right? Pick two of them and agro on to those ice blocks. Don’t hit the boss first. Have your tank running in and grabbing threat like he is supposed to on the pull, but have dps and tanks first hit the two lil guys you want to free to help you fight. Some of them will despawn, and if you do not target the guys you want off the bat, they will sometimes despawn as well. It’s not 100% fixed yet.
There are basically four lil guys who “can” come out and help you. But you only get 2 at a time in 10 man. So depending on what you want you pick two lil buggers to help out. But we’ll come back to these 4 lil guys in a minute. First, lets talk about what the boss does during the encounter.
Now in this picture you can see 2 of the effects done throughout the fight. Biting Cold is a debuff on everyone in the entire raid. It starts off as a stack of 1 doing minimal raid damage, and by simply jumping or moving you can keep the stacks down to 1 or 2 at all times. The nasty part here is that if it builds up to 3+ stacks, jumping once will not reduce it instantly down to 1 stack. You have to keep moving to get it back down to 1. There is no way to stop Biting Cold through player actions. Remember this. So it is imperative that you move and/or jump consistently throughout the entire raid.
The other effect that you can see here is Flash Freeze, which is sometimes a death sentence and must be avoided at all costs. This is not something that you can wait for it to wear off as it has a 5 minute duration. And since you cannot move while under the effect, Biting Cold will continue stacking until it eventually kills you. Now the upside here is that it, the Flash Freeze, is targetable. So suffering through one is not an instant wipe or loss of a character. But you cannot afford to have your dps constantly breaking people out of these Ice Blocks because the Flash Freeze’s do come fairly frequently.
The boss has a 10 minute enrage timer which pretty much means a wipe. So it is imperative that your dps is killing the boss and not contantly breaking people free of Flash Freeze. Now periodically during the fight small snowstorms will start falling from the ceiling, and after a few seconds large falling ice will drop to the ground doing massive damage (10k+) and knockback. Think similar to Gruul. Now these little snowstorms are especially important because at Flash Freeze, there are 2 special ones.
Directly to Hodir’s left and directly on top of him you can see 2 snowstorms falling. Now I did not get a decent pick of any normal snowstorms, but this should still be sufficient. The regular snowstorms that just drop the frosty doom on you are much easier to see through. They will not be as cloudy, frosty, or difficult to see through as these are. Every Flash Freeze however there will be 2 special snowstorms that look just like this. It is important to note that these 2 storms can appear right on top of each other. So it may look like there is only one at times.
When these appear you need to run up NEXT to them, but NOT ON TOP OF THEM!!! They are about to drop massive blocks of ice “of frosty doom” ™ which will knock you away from them, which is very very very bad. Once they drop, 2 mounds of snow appear.
Once they have dropped, you then immediately run and get on top of these fluffy mounds of safety goodness!! <3 They will make you immune to the Flash Freeze. Now sometimes if you are too far on the edge you will get the Flash Freeze anyways, but it’s not a big deal because the snow you’re standing on will get rid of it immediately. There is also another little trick possible too. If you are too far away, for whatever reason, if you leap as Flash Freeze is casting you will continue forward even while frozen. So long as you land on top of the snow, the effect will be removed from you. I know, it happened to me!! Got too close waiting for the icicles to drop and ate a knockback… >.< Heh.
Lastly the boss has two other tricks up his sleeve. He will periodically cast frost novas (dispellable) around the raid and will also buff himself with an uber damage buff. His hands will get all glowy (you cannot miss it) and he stops doing physical damage and does all frost damage. They can still be avoided (dodge/parry), but armor no longer does jack. How to live through it? Have a Prot Warrior turn on his reflection thingy and turn his back to the boss. The Prot War will do like 20k+ damage per Reflection easy. The reason he turns his back is for a dps boost. He will avoid a lot of the damage if he is facing him through avoidance. But since he will not take any damage with reflection up, you don’t want to dodge or parry these attacks. You want them all reflected. By turning your back to the boss, every hit will land, or in this case, be reflected back at the boss. Turn back around once Reflection is off though.
Now, let’s get back to those lil guys who wanna help for a second.
If you look closely you can see a gnome mage off to my right. And then you can see me standing directly to the left of a small camp fire that the mage creates periodically. Now if you look to the far right of the screen where my buffs are, there is no debuff up there. The mage drops these nice lil fires that allow casters to stand on top of them without gaining the Biting Cold debuff. So long as an icicle of doom doesn’t appear above you, this allows the casters/ranged a lot more breathing room for standing still and doing their jobs.
Now if you look here you cannot see the Elemental Shaman off the screen, but you can see his Chain Lightning hitting me and FM. It grants a buff for about 15 seconds that ups your damage. I cannot remember if it upped the crit % or the bonus damage from crits, but all in all…you do more damage.
Now sadly I did not manage to get pics of the priest and boomkin effects, but I can at least tell you about them. The priest was dispelling the frost novas periodically cast by the boss and doing some healing. And then the boomkin was applying some buff that was doing haste or something like that for people.
Allies:
- Mage: Brings dps to the table and also creates campfire zones where casters can stand still without gaining Biting Cold stacks.
- Boomkin: Brings dps to the table and also buffs your dps to do more damage.
- Priest: Heals for you (or maybe he smites and does dps… *shrug*) and also dispells the AoE frost novas the boss periodically casts.
- Elemental Shaman: Brings dps to the table and also buffs your dps to do more damage.
Once you have things down the Mage combined with either the Boomkin/Shaman (depending on which buff is better) will allow for the fastest kill possible. The mage is too valuable since he can actually allow your ranged dps to do their job and just dps. Every Flash Freeze will hit these guys unless they get lucky and end up on a snow mound somehow. You need to break them free every time, and your healers can heal them. They do not appear to take Biting Cold damage, but do take all other damage.
Boss Abilities:
- Flash Freeze – It can be avoided by getting on one of two snow mounds that appear right before it is cast. Remember to avoid the falling ice before they are formed or you may be knocked too far away. If it is not avoided then dps must break people free from their prisons.
- Biting Cold – It can be avoided entirely by standing next to a fire created by the Mage NPC if it is out, but otherwise you must rely on moving and/or jumping to keep this debuff down to 1 stack.
- AoE Frost Nova – It is periodically cast and cannot be avoided except by spreading out well. It can be dispelled.
- Frozen Blows - The boss will do *massive* damage versus the tank. His physical hits become “Frost” damage bybassing armor, hitting significantly harder. It is best to use a Prot War so they can reflect the damage back at the boss. But other options like a DK tank with AMA and IBF could work.
- Falling Ice – Similar to Gruul, a small swirl of ice and snow will begin to fall to the ground. You must get out of this area (similar to a void zone) or a massive block of ice will fall upon you knocking you back and doing massive damage to you as well (10k+).
Pets:
This fight is NOT friendly to pets. You need to have a pet macro set up to pull your pet out of the fire…er ice…so to speak. When Flash Freeze starts, make your pet follow you and get the hell out of there. Every pet frozen is that much less dps getting done, and wasted time spent on getting them free.
Kill Shot?!?!
Sadly no we did not kill Hodir. Had we not been hung up all night with dc’s, loading issues, people stuck in Dalaran, waiting to even be able to zone in to Ulduar, etc… We would have. Once we figured out where the snow mounds were we brought Hodir down to 40% before we hit the enrage timer at 10 minutes and he killed us. Then shortly after Blizz called the testing as finished, and the next thing we know our MT is teleported out of the zone and a wipe ensues. /sigh Ah well…
You do not need an OT, and if you’re healers are really good you can honestly roll with just 2 if you wanted to. Preferably with one of them as a Druid if you went with 2. It’s a REALLY FUN fight, and it is a total blast!! You guys are seriously going to enjoy it!!
Disclaimer:
This is not meant to be an UBER BOSS GUIDE!!! This is not a boss guide site. But, this is still something you may find useful on your raids!!
I had more fun tonight in WoW than I have had in a very long time guys. Ulduar appears to have been done very well, and I look forward to telling you guys more and more about it!!
-Suffer Well Brothers and Sisters
Tags: PTR Boss Testing
The little bugger has not understood why I’ve been in bed so much, and has promptly and quickly let me know her irritation about being cooped up with no play time by attacking my feet and legs while I sleep. Worst part is, even if I open the door for her to leave and explore the house she stays in my room attacking me. *rolls eyes*
