Things to Remember

1. Requires two tanks to get to him, but only one to tank him.
2. Mangle automatically kills the tank if not broken within 30 seconds.
3. It is exceptionally easy for a hunter to accidentally begin auto-shots on Magmaw simply by moving and turning in the room with right-mouse-button. This happens because as of 4.0.3, the entire floor of the room for ~20 yards in front of Magmaw is considered targeting his lower body.
4. So long as there is at least 1 player within melee range of Magmaw, he won’t become buffed with Molten Tantrum.
5. Magma Spit – Every 5 seconds or so, balls of lava arc out from the boss and hit random raid members, dealing a hefty amount of damage. This ability targets 3 people per cast in the 10 player raid. This ability cannot be avoided; healers must simply counter the damage.
6. Lava Spew – This ability will be used every 25 seconds to hit everyone in the raid with a very large amount of fire damage. It will tick each second for 3 seconds, with each tick doing ~30k fire damage.
7. Pillar of Flame – Prefers ranged over melee targets. As soon as Magmaw chooses a target, a pulsing animation that looks like a ring of lava will appear at the spot, warning players to move away. Approximately 2 seconds later, a fountain of lava will shoot up out of the ground in the center of the ring, knocking all players within ~6 yards into the air while hitting them for a significant amount of fire damage. The fountain will persist for around 5 seconds as it releases a pack of Lava Parasites.
8. 8 Lava Parasites – ~120K hit points each, total of 960K total health.
9. If a player gets Parasitic Infection, they must get away from other players before Infectious Vomit occurs, as it will deal 40,000 damage to allies within 8 yards, as well as spawn more Parasites.

Priorities

Phase 1

1. Ranged DPS prioritize Lava Parasites over Magmaw
2. Melee DPS prioritize Lava Parasites in the group over Magmaw
3. All adds must be down prior to Mangle

Transition 1 -> 2

1. Magmaw covers half the room in fire (Ignition). Don’t stand in it. The fiery area is also where he will slump down shortly, stunning and damaging people straggling behind.
2. Cool downs can be used while Mangled. and Blessing of Protection does Negate the damage. Heal the tank being mangled.
3. When “Magmaw slumps forward, exposing his pincers!”, two melee players pin the head down (using chains) quickly. To do this, right-click Magmaw as if entering a vehicle. One action will be available, which causes a targeting circle to appear on the ground below the cursor. Target the spike in the middle of the floor to attach the chain to the spike and pull Magmaw down onto it. You have 30 seconds, or the tank dies.

Phase 2

1. DPS Magmaw‘s Head
2. Healers regain mana

Transition 2 -> 1

1. Agro resets completely! Stop all DPS and Heals.
2. Get in position, once tank establishes new agro, go to phase 1.

Common Mistakes Made

• Designated Constricting Chain operators get anxious and stand too close to Magmaw‘s head for the slump, resulting in one or both of them getting stunned.
• Adds do not get prioritized, DPS think it is more important to be hitting Magmaw. 90% of the damage done to Magmaw is done when his head is down, don’t screw that up.
• Raid does not bring enough ranged DPS to handle the Lava Parasites. You need 3 ranged DPS capable of repeatedly sustaining a cumulative 31K DPS on the Parasites. 3 Dudes that can do 10Kdps will only get you 30K DPS, it simply is not enough – the raid will fail.
• Have the hunter spawn the Lava Parasites as far from the raid, every time, as possible. More space == more time.

More DPS

When Magmaw‘s head is exposed it will be attack-able for slightly less than 30 seconds (26-28 seconds). You really want to set up all your DoTs immediately, then refresh all of the DoTs just before he raises his head again. Why? Because the DoT’s have the Double Damage modifier set when they are applied to the head, so even after he raises up, all of your DoT’s will continue ticking for double damage until they fall off or are refreshed.

This also means that the timing of Heroism/Timewarp is pretty critical as well. Heroism lasts 40 seconds, you can only DPS the head for less than 30 seconds. In a perfect world, heroism goes off 5 seconds before the head becomes attack-able, and then as soon as the head is attack-able everyone immediately (re)applies their DoT’s, then launch into their direct damage rotations, then just before (5-1 seconds) the he lifts his head, everyone re-applies their DoT’s. This nets additional uber increased damage after he has raised his head and is no longer attack-able.

It also means you need to make sure you are not in Melee range before the tank taunts/gets control. 🙂

Miscellaneous

One the questions I am most often asked is this, “Why don’t we have Magmaw on Farm Status yet? Shouldn’t we be able to go in and kill him anytime we want by now?”

The short answer is that we simply don’t have the raiders to put Magmaw on farm status as a guild. We could choose 10 people, and those ten could farm Magmaw every week – but as a guild, we don’t have enough geared healers and geared ranged DPS to farm Magmaw.
Keep in mind that there is a significant amount of damage in this raid. Every 25 seconds, everyone in the raid takes ~30K damage every second for three seconds. Effectively, the entire raid takes ~90K damage per person, or 900K for the whole raid, every 25 seconds. At the same time, your healers are keeping up a kiter who is keeping the Lava Parasites busy as well as healing a tank who is taking a beating. Raid healing is a hard thing in Cataclysm, and most of Wrath of the Lich King healers turned in their healing kit in frustration. We don’t have a lot of healers around. Of the healers around, only a handful are “raid ready”, and of the ones that are “raid ready” a smaller portion are so ready that they could be involved in “farming” Magmaw.

We also tend to have a lot of melee DPS raiders. The short story is that this causes us problems, particularly when the mechanics of the encounter are expressly Ranged DPS only. Most raid leaders shoot for a balanced 3 melee / 3 ranged / 3 heals / 1 tank raid composition, and one of the 3 melee can double as off-tank when/as needed. Over the past month, I have consistently seen 3 ranged DPS fail to put out enough to kill the Lava Parasites – to the point that it seems worthless to even go into Magmaw if you do not have 4 ranged DPS, one of which I would want to be a Hunter and another a Frost Mage.

Once we get to the point that that we have more healers that can heal the entire fight AND we have enough ranged DPS such that it only takes two ranged DPS to dispose of the Lava Parasites, then we will have Magmaw on Farm Status. Until then, Magmaw will remain on “We worked our butts off and eventually killed him status.”