How we killed Mythic Archimonde in 3:19 (Mage PoV)

[Rinoa]

As some of you know, I am a member of a guild that enjoys doing speedkills. We have had numerous kills around and below 3:30, and I'd like to explain what makes that possible.

First of all, here is the video. It's from the PoV of Azortharion, one of our Hunters.



You'll notice that the health of the majority of the raid is dropping right before the boss is being pulled. This is because both the Mages and Rogues are using alternate gear sets to snapshot some of their class mechanics. For Mages, we use 4-piece Tier 12 in order to snapshot Arcane Power while wearing it. 4-piece Tier 12 further reduces the mana cost of spells while under the effect of Arcane Power by 20%, down to a total of 70% of normal value. This means openers grow quite a bit in size as we get much more value out of our mastery stat. Efficient use of this is accomplished through a macro that goes as such:

/cast Arcane Power
/use Draenic Intellect Potion
/equipset <name of your regular Arcane set>

Use this about 1.5s before the pull and start your regular opener as you would do at other times.

We chose not to glyph Arcane Power as the cooldown timings lined up so that we could use our first Arcane Power+Crystal+Nithramus in the opener, then use Arcane Power and Crystal without Nithramus on cooldown, then all three together again once Arcane Power and Crystal was off cooldown 3 minutes into the fight. This comes at the cost of some of the other classes' DPS, but with a raid this mage heavy it proved to be worth it through several trials.

When going for speedkills like this it's very important to do as much efficient damage as possible, this means you should never switch off the boss unless it is completely necessary. This is the reason why you see so many players in Archimonde's hitbox. That is the way we deal with the small adds in phase 2 - through cleaving them down with Mark of Doom procs on Archimonde. It can be messy, but the damage is incredibly efficient and allows for much more boss DPS than usual. Sometimes we had to swap to the Hellfire Deathcaller though, as that one is quite a bit bulkier.

As we were only using one tank and one healer for the fight we could not safely sacrifice any Hellfire Deathcallers. It is rough on the tank to take both Archimonde and a Deathcaller, but because of very high DPS we only got one throughout the entire fight. Killing it with this speed also requires Archimonde to have entered phase 3 before the second Arcane Power + Prismatic Crystal, which he did.

We sacrifice the Source of Chaos we get, but as we only have one tank it means we have our only healer, a Mistweaver, taunt the boss alongside recieving Misdirect and Tricks of the Trade. He takes it, dies, and uses his Soulstone. This essentially means nobody else can die during the fight.

Mark of the Legion is easily dealt with. Mages just use Alter-Time to negate the damage of them, which means we have Greater Invisibility and Ice Block available for other dangerous situations, such as Infernals landing and doing high raid-wide damage.

In phase 3 we do the Void Stars and Infernals as usual, DPSing them down as they come. The second set of Infernals happens around the time the third cooldown rotation comes up alongside the second ring usage, so we ignore them and just focus the boss. The boss dies in that explosion.

[Curnivore]

hehe that "done, done" has funny for some reason.

[Windfury]

Good post.
Unlucky try in DPS terms for you.

[Rinoa]

Indeed, but I don't care much about my personal DPS so long as I play well, so it really isn't a worry.

[Curnivore]

Unlucky try in DPS

This parse is another expression of the reality that the spec has pain that other classes don't understand. It's a double-faceted pain. One, you need luck to do the most impressive logs compared to people of similar gear and similar raid setups and not necessarily too similar skill, but, not only that, the spec also drops in impressiveness on any kind of fight that lasts for at least 3 rings because the conservation phases last for a large part of the fight, and, your luck can only go so far so with several burns the logs will usually be more average.

[Searix]

Have you tried the drop crystal at -3 strat i mentioned in the PoF thread? Will always proc PoF on crystal, just requires main tank to slightly move the boss

[Rinoa]

Yeah, it just doesn't seem worth it for us on Archimonde. Particularly not since that would mean we can't place the Doomfire inside the boss reliably.