It's Hammer Time!
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With three raid instances in T11 content, TDC had a choice to make - which of the nasty end-bosses would be our first target? Upon a little reflection, we decided to give Cho'gall that honor, and he didn't disappoint.
TDC found the Cho'gall encounter to be primarily about balance; this fight has a number of actions required by the entire raid team, and doesn't fit into a standard characterization. In P1, we had to balance tank switches on Cho'gall (which taxed both tank and healers) as well as ensuring prompt interrupts of the Conversion process, which mind controlled random players to buff Cho'gall. While this is going on, Corrupting Adherents spawn periodically in the room, which the tank not currently engaged with Cho'gall must pick up and drag to a specific point in the room while dps is burning it down, which must be completed within 40 seconds or the Adherent enrages and wipes the raid. Once the add dies, it drops a corrupted blood pool which spawns Blood of the Old God slimes that DPS must kill in advance of them getting to the raid. With each additional Adherent spawn and kill, more slimes are spawned, which become more and more difficult for the DPS to eliminate in a timely manner. All the while Cho'gall is still casting Conversion, which ensures everyone has to be on their toes the whole fight, as well as managing the Corruption debuff, which if allowed to get too high will kill raiders.
In order to best manage this chaos, TDC decided that we needed to transition to P2 before the 4th Adherent spawned slimes; this required that we have Cho'gall at no more than 36% of his health when the 4th Adherent spawned, which with all the movement and target switching was a real test of our DPS. Once we did this we transitioned to P2.
P2 is an all out burn of Cho'gall, who periodically spawns tentacle adds (yay Old Gods!) that have to be killed quickly. We positioned Cho'gall next to a wall, which limited his ability to position spawned adds. At this point it was a race to the finish, and on our Very Last Attempt of the Night (perhaps we should make our Very Last Attempt of the Night our first attempt?) we killed the two headed monster, giving TDC our first clean raid instance in Cataclysm.
Cho'gall is an exciting encounter, and I'm going to miss his dialogue (seriously, It's Hammer Time? Best Boss Line Evah!). On to BWD and Nefarian!