[Edit sep 28, 2009: there is an updated strategy here]
The Faction Champions encounter is the third in the trial of the crusader. Unfortunately, at this time, there are no general wowhead (or whatever) guides I can refer you to for further reading, however since we two shot made short work of this last night, I’m going to write up a list of advice I have to pass on, and go and edit it for accuracy as it’s completed more often.
First and foremost, this fight is like a large arena match. At least, that’s what Blizzard was going for. There are 10 bosses you fight simultaneously, and while they have agro tables, they periodically wipe them and try to burst someone down (usually a healer). Unfortunately, resilience does not seem to help in this fight, and many other mainstays of arena have been selectively disabled. Your raid can’t AOE, spellsteal or mind control, for example.
Luckily, most forms of crowd control still work, even though they’re affected by diminishing returns.
When you start the encounter, the group jumps down out of the stands. They won’t engage you until you pull them, so you can take your time and formulate a strategy, mark targets, etc.
- Kill order, unsurprisingly, must start with a healer. We chose the priest because he is squishy, however the tree druid has been reported to do more healing unless his HoTs can be purged.
- As a hunter, you need to focus your DPS with the rest of the raid while still contributing your traps, wyvern stings or silencing shot, and scare beast every time they come off cooldown without untargeting your first target. I wrote several macros that turned these abilities into mouseovers, and they all looked like this
/cast [target=mouseover] insertspellnamehere
- Use this for scare beast (for the cat) and wyvern sting if you’re survival, and keybind silencing shot if you’re marks.
- If you have aimed shot in your build, you’ll want to include it in your rotation on your primary target, to minimize the heals it receives.
- Consider using a marks build for this fight- while is may be less DPS in an optimal patch type fight for some levels of gear, you will find some nice synergy here with scorpid stinging the melee and chimera shotting to disarm them when they are hammering on a healer, as well as viper stinging casters.
- Your raid leader will probably not assign you to “locking down” one of the other healers, because to be honest, we’re not as good at that as other classes are, and we are extremely good at providing the raw face-meltage required to quickly finish off the first healer.
- Use shamans to purge HoTs from the first target.
- Set up a rotation to keep the other healers as stunned and silenced as possible.
- While you can not use a macro to target these, zoom out and manually shoot down all the totems you can while the shaman is alive. His healing stream totem in particular could outweigh the DPS of several players.
- The first kill is the hardest- you need to get it down before their DPS kills your healers. Once it’s down, you will definitely want to take down a second healer, and after that most people would probably just focus on the hardest hitting DPS and keep the last healer stunlocked.
- As a hunter, we typically don’t worry overmuch about raid damage other than to get out of the occasional void zone. Well, that’s not enough on this fight. Your healers are going to be stretched to their limit until you take down some of the opposing DPS, and to top things off, it’s not raid damage they’re healing, it’s coordinated debuffs and attacks from all the enemy DPS simultaneously. If this happens to a healer (which is their usual choice), get their attention. Throw a freezing arrow under a ranged DPS, distracting shot the warrior, wyvern sting a caster, anything. This will save your healers mana, and allow your raid the time needed.
- Create a special raid bar for healers so you can monitor their health and debuffs- if one of them started to crash and get bubbled, find them, run over, and do what you can.
- If you’re the target of one of these bursts: deterrence, disengage, kite, and if you’ve managed to kite them somewhere far from a healer, feign death.
- If you can get two or three of these guys down without serious raid losses, you will probably win.
That’s my list of tips for the Faction Champions encounter- hug your healers when it’s over, they’ll need it.
Posted in Hunter, Marksmanship, Survival, World of Warcraft Tagged: 3.2, aimed shot, aoe, chimera shot, coliseum, crowd control, diminishing returns, distracting shot, dps, faction champions, freezing arrow, heal over time, list, lock down, macro, Marksmanship, melt face, mind control, pve, raiding, scare beast, scorpid sting, silencing shot, spell steal, Survival, tips, trial of the crusader, tricks, viper sting, wyvern sting
