Ready Check: Cataclysm raiding guide for Baradin Hold
by Michael Gray 
Dec 31st 2010 at 7:00PM
Ladies and gentleman, welcome back to raiding. It's now been three weeks since Cataclysm has been released, and we're staring down the barrel of an exciting time not standing in fire, killing adds, and watching the tanks swap aggro with unmitigated skill.
There are habits for us to rebuild, of course. Healers have been struggling with mana issues, tanks are finding themselves working to produce good threat, and damage dealers are laying down crowd control for the first time since Burning Crusade. It is a new environment for raiding and everyone's getting a chance to learn the ropes again.
The first tier of raiding content in Cataclysm takes place in four different instances. These four raids are Baradin Hold, Blackwing Descent, Throne of the Four Winds, and the Bastion of Twilight. Raiding progression doesn't really go from one instance to another; instead, most raids will do the first boss of each fairly easily, struggle with the second, and then really work if there are any further bosses in the group.
Most players will start raiding with Baradin Hold. This raid instance is available to a server's faction only after winning Tol Barad, which makes the raid analogous to the Vault of Archavon. Just like the Vault at the beginning of Wrath, Baradin Hold only has one boss in it right now. That boss is named Argaloth and he can drop a huge variety of epic gear. The nice thing about Argaloth is that he's a fairly easy fight without much in the way of dance steps; the only real tough thing about Argaloth is that he has a 5-minute enrage timer.
Since Baradin Hold is a fairly straightforward and fast raid (assuming your team has enough DPS), most of your raiders will be picking up some practice in that instance. However, most people are busily working their way into heroic instances using the random dungeon finder, and grinding those bosses to get enough gear to step into raiding.
Gauging readiness
There aren't great benchmarks for "raid ready" in Cataclysm, but there are few standards based off Baradin Hold. You should expect your tank to have at least 150,000 or 160,000 hit points and your damage dealers should be putting out an average of at least 10,000 damage per second. Healers are tougher to rate this way because of the huge differences in healing in Cataclysm. It's tempting to ask your raiders to be in an average of item level 340 gear, or something like that. However, that's perilously close to the ongoing gear score argument. Let's just say that if your team can handle heroics without much trouble, and you can down Argaloth, then it's time to start looking at the other raids.
The instances
Blackwing Descent is a common entry raid past heroics. This is probably in part due to its familiar Blackwing and Blackrock aesthetic. Also, Blackwing Descent offers six different bosses, which is the most any of the contemporary raiding content has to offer. Magmaw is a fairly straightforward fight, assuming your raid is decent at not standing in fire and switching to adds.
The Bastion of Twilight is the second largest Cataclysm raid which includes Cho'gall as the big name fight. The Throne of the Four Winds is the third smallest raid, with only one-boss Baradin Hold being shorter. However, since the Throne opens with a council fight, it seems like most raids are waiting until they pack a little extra gear.
Ultimately, right this second, it's time to make sure that your guild is packing up the heroic gear. With the random dungeon finder and prodigious use of justice points, heroics are a great way to get raid ready quickly. Once you're in a place that you're ready to tackle the longer instances, Baradin Hold is a great gear check for your team.
Guide to Argaloth
Argaloth is the current and only fight in Baradin Hold. The Argaloth fight is pretty simple. There are two phases to the fight. The first phase is a spank-and-tank with the raid divided into two groups. The second phase is a "don't stand in fire" dynamic, with the entire raid running around to avoid standing in fire.In the first phase, split your raid into two groups. One group is in front, one group is in back. This is because Argaloth hits with an ability called Meteor Strike, which does an immense amount of damage. That damage is spread evenly among anyone stacked on top of the target. So each group stacks on top of its tank, helping to mitigate Meteor Strike's immense damage by taking a small portion.
At the same time, Meteor Strike leaves a debuff behind that means your tank will take even more damage -- that's why you have two groups. Each time the strike happens, have the other tank taunt the boss. That will give the afflicted tank time to have the debuff drop, so they can take the boss back.
Consuming Darkness is a DoT that will absolutely kill its target. There's no help for it but to cleanse it.
Argaloth will enter his other phase when he reaches 66% and 33% of his life. This phases involves Fel Firestorm, an aura Argaloth applies to himself for 15 seconds. During this time, Fel Firestorm will spawn fire under the ground of raid members, forcing them to move nearly nonstop. It's important to note that DPS with instants should "Keep attacking, raiders!" during Fel Firestorm. After the ability is over, Argaloth returns to his normal phase.
Argaloth has a 5 minute enrage timer. In 5 minutes, if he's not dead, Argaloth gets super angry and one-shots each tank, then every one else in the raid one at a time. On average, your raid should be putting out at least 10,000 damage per second for each raid damage dealer. Most groups do the fight with two tanks and two healers in 10-man, with twice the healing in 25-man.
Check back soon for the raid guides to the rest of the Cataclysm bosses.
Ready Check shares all the strategies and inside information you need to take your raiding to the next level. For more healer-centric advice, visit Raid Rx, and be sure to look up our strategy guides to Icecrown Citadel and Halion/the Ruby Sanctum.Filed under: Ready Check (Raiding)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
elstor Dec 31st 2010 7:07PM
The exact same model and an incredibly similar fight mechanic to Brutallus- I really think Blizzard is being lazy on this one.
SaintStryfe Dec 31st 2010 7:48PM
well to be fair, this is the weekly bonus mini-raid. It's not MEANT to be a challenging encounter. It's the raid you can do a few weeks into heroics.
awall Dec 31st 2010 8:17PM
Not buying it. They are recycling part of the Brutallus encounter from Sunwell because relatively few raiders got far enough at the end of BC to run it, not to mention that abilities are intentionally kept similar with particular boss types. (Dragons have breath attacks and tail swipes, Pit lords use Meteor Strike) Even taking that into account, this is one encounter amongst a dozen or more.
Rakah Dec 31st 2010 9:21PM
oh come on this can be one shot by a pug that doesn't know what their doing beyond the "stack here"
devilsei Jan 1st 2011 7:55PM
How is that shocking? World of Warcraft, to me at least, is just 50% lazy design, and 50% new stuff.
For instance, Args drop table. It is the same, exact thing as Archavons system, which was flawed to hell and back. These bosses shouldn't be dropping individual pieces of armor like they do, and instead should simply drop tokens of some sort that can be redeemed.
Throughout the entire time I raided in WoTLK, I did Archavons whole dungeon nearly every week.
And all I got to show for it was the mammoth, nothing else ever dropped that I could use. Not even a piece of gear for my spec that was tiers behind what I was at.
Zalvi24 Dec 31st 2010 7:08PM
i did this boss for the first time and , he enraged on us so we all got killed but he went down 2 seconds after us lol, dots are deadly and got pvp cloak for my warrior
Mugutu Dec 31st 2010 7:14PM
I like that it's at least slightly harder than Archavon for the phr33 ep1x raid boss of Cataclysm, but don't expect to PUG Baradin Hold very often. Dispelling and taunting is still far beyond the capabilities of far too many players at this point, as far as my anecdotes can tell. Guilds with decent players should have no problem with the place, however.
Cassie Dec 31st 2010 11:32PM
As much as I would normally agree, somehow I one-shotted it my first time in (with a PuG) and proceeded to have a wipefest the following week with my guild (took us an hour and a half to down him).
This worries me.
QQinsider Jan 1st 2011 8:30AM
Did you ever actually do Archavon? That fight required taunting too, in case you didn't notice, and most PUGs managed it fine. This will be no different.
Sharkey Jan 1st 2011 1:49PM
RE: Most pugs could handle taunts. Not really. Most of my pugs, my mage would end up dying to Archavon, as I was typically just under the tank in threat. Tank got picked up, Archavon runs over and 1-shots me before the other tank either taunts or bothers to get threat, if I didn't hit ice block or invis in time. I've already sat at top aggro through an ice block and *still* had aggro on Arch by the time it faded. So yeah. Never underestimate the potential fail of PUG tanks. Emalon was where the most fail occured though.
But the pugs weren't all bad, you do get good ones as well as the bad ones. Bad ones are just easier to remember.
Herman Dec 31st 2010 7:17PM
actually, its a dot that does 120k over 15 seconds, so you can live through it, with most dps having around 125k hp a couple heals would let you survive it, even ignoring self heals. however for most groups, it is more efficient to dispel it, but make sure to not put all the burden of dispels on one healer.
Neirin Dec 31st 2010 7:47PM
It may not do 100% of the damage on its own, but that dot wil still generally kill you. If you've taken damage from fire or a meteor slash or if you will take damage from either of those in the near future, your healers would have to heal you quite frantically to keep you alive. If your healers care enough about you to keep you at high enough health to survive the dot, they probably care enough about you to dispel the dot.
wow Dec 31st 2010 8:53PM
Assuming your at maximum health, then you may just survive the dot.
How often are people at full health in raids these days?
The simple truth is that it costs less mana to dispel the dot rather than to heal the person up. As such you should dispel asap.
Jessica Dec 31st 2010 9:25PM
Healing the people affected uses more mana and gcds than dispelling it. Mana is a precious, precious thing. It makes more sense to have everyone with the ability to dispel, dispel it. Show your healers some love. Don't make them heal through a dispellable effect.
Neirin Dec 31st 2010 7:44PM
This is one of the simplest raid encounters I've ever, well, encountered. The first time I did it, though, was a gear check - we wiped to the enrage our first attempt. Still, if your group is having trouble with Argaloth's enrage, you're going to come up very short on Maloriak and even Halfus's enrage would probably stretch you.
Because of the very simplistic mechanics, Argaloth is also a great Patchwerk-style dps dummy. Melee dps will have lower dps values than they would if they could stay behind their target the whole time, but an intelligent raid leader can easily compensate for that in their analysis. It's also a decent way of looking at healers because as long as you 2 heal it (10 man) both healers will be required to handle raid damage, tank damage, dispelling, and personal survival. Also, since the raid is easily accessible (i.e. PUGable), anyone should be able to gather data from it. For guilds that want to gauge their own progress, test their recruits, or want to see logs of applicants, this fight is excellent.
wow Dec 31st 2010 8:57PM
If your group is very good, this raid doesn't require much more gear than is required to get into heroics. (I was hitting and passing the dps mark in 335~ gear, enchanted but not gemmed)
Granted the majority of wow are either not that good, or wearing the wrong gear (Hell yes I'm going to use a melee trinket as a mage!)
Bernie Roscoe Dec 31st 2010 9:53PM
But it has mastery and hit! And if I run out of mana, I can hit it with my staff amirite?
Moucalgeon Dec 31st 2010 9:11PM
Managed to do this tanking it by myself (DK) AMS'd the stacks off after 2 stacks and rolling CD's rotating the boss between the groups. With 2 healers and 7 DPS he dropped real fast.
Pyromelter Dec 31st 2010 9:44PM
Pyro's strategy for Argaloth:
Step 1:
Find 10 people who have a pulse, and a wow account.
Step 2:
Form raid with those 10 people. Enter Baradin Hold.
Step 3:
Make sure no one is passed out drooling on their keyboard.
Step 4:
Collect loot.
Optional step before step 4: Punch Argaloth in the face.
remy Dec 31st 2010 9:59PM
I can't wait till my guild gets up in gear enough to try this ot. Never raiding BC means this encounter is still fresh for me. :)