Spore Loser (25 player)

After 5.4, if you have the legendary cape, Make sure you unequip your legendary cape [item=102246]. The proc will kill the spores and you won't get the achievement.

Since this achievement is now considered progress on www.wowprogress.com, many guilds will now be interested in gaining this achievement. Rather than wipe repeatedly to discover things easily researched, I gathered all the info I could on the encounter and wrote this guide to post on my guild's strategy forum.

Overview:

Spores:
- Have about 3150 HP.
- Usually spawn about 40 yards away from Loatheb in any direction, not only by the grates.
- Despawn after 1 min and 30 seconds, but do not count as dying as of patch 3.0.8.
- Tauntable.
- Immune to CC.
- Melee for very insignificant damage (rumored to be 20-200).

Loatheb:
- Loatheb has 20,220,250 HP.
- Soft "enrage" is 5 minutes. There is no real hard enrage/berserk. During the soft enrage, the cooldown on his Inevitable Doom ability is halved.
- At least 67,400 raid DPS is needed to defeat him before his soft enrage.
- Loatheb ability: Deathbloom (Instant Cast) - Inflicts 400 Nature damage on everyone within 100 yards every 1 sec. for 5 sec, followed by an additional 1500 Nature damage. Cast every 30 seconds.
- Loatheb ability: Inevitable Doom (Instant Cast) - Inflicts 5000 Shadow damage to everyone within 100 yards after 10 sec. First cast is after 2 minutes of combat and is cast every 30 seconds until the soft enrage and then every 15 seconds.
- Loatheb ability: Necrotic Aura (Instant Cast) - A wave of necrotic energy fills the room, completely preventing all healing effects for 17 sec. Cast every 20 seconds.
- Absorption effects: Up for debate, but while the the necrotic aura is active, absorption effects such as PW:Shield, Divine Aegis, and Sacred Shield do not absorb any damage. It's rumored that absorption effects may absorb the final tick of Death Bloom.

Goal:

Do not kill any spores and kill Loatheb quickly. Without the spores, it will feel like a DPS race just like getting the Make Quick Werk of Him achievement, considering the level of DPS needed to kill him before too long after the enrage timer. To accomplish this goal, you should plan to prevent spores from going anywhere near Loatheb nor should you severely limit the DPS.

Tactics:

- Limit AoE effects. AoEs that are normally used for single targets such as Whirlwind, Divine Storm, Thunderclap, Shockwave, Heartstrike, Chain Lightning, Avenger's Shield, Howling Blast and other instant AoEs must be used with extreme caution (look before you use them). AoEs with a duration that are hard to control such as Consecration, Unholy Blight, or Bladestorm should not be used. Uncontrollable pets such as non-Unholy DK pets, Treants, Gargolyes, or Mirror images should not be used. Retribution Aura, Lightning Shield, and Thorns should not be used. Fire/Earth Ele totems and Hunter traps should not be used. Prot Warriors with the Damage Shield talent must be careful not to gain aggro on spores. Personally, as a Fury Warrior, I only used WW 4 times and still managed 3800 DPS with the Jawbone and Colossal Skull Axe as weapons.

- Tank the spores. Holy Paladins with Righteous Fury can use their taunts and heal aggro them. People who can throw up a group buff (like PW:Shield or Battle Shout aggro except that we don't want these aggro'd on Warriors). People who can regain "power" such as mana/rage/hp/energy (like Bloodrage aggro - again, we don't want Warriors to tank them). Shamans may strategically place Stoneclaw totems. People who are not designated as a suitable tank (can have many suitable tanks) should avoid using any abilities that would build aggro on the spores.

- Positioning. Have all the people who do not want to aggro the spores to group up close to Loatheb at his back. Since healers, buffers, etc. are aggroing the spores, you should accommodate them. So if they end up fighting for aggro for spores, they do not want a spore cross through Loatheb if the spore tanks are standing on opposite sides. This is up for debate. My suggestion is to have with healers in the center, with the DPS by the outer walls or corners, MT is a bit away from the center, and with Loatheb close to the wall between all the DPS and the MT. DPS will cease to use any AoE abilities around the time the spore is due to spawn (DBM tracks it very well) and the MT will move Loatheb to a corner if a spore pops near Loatheb. If it pops anywhere away from Loatheb, the raid proceeds as usual.

- DPS. If attempted as a 20 man for a double achievement with 13 DPS doing an average of 3500 DPS each, it'd take 7:30 to kill him if everyone stays alive. 2:30 worth of the entire raid taking a lot of raid damage with only 3 seconds to try and heal it all. If you do min/maxing with a 25m raid (1 tank, 1 holy paladin, 5 priest, 18 DPS), 3700 DPS each is needed without spores before hitting Enrage.

- Enrage. After a sustained amount of time beyond Enrage, it would not be unusual to see half the raid die except for the MT, the healers, and a number of DPS similar to the amount of healers alive in your early attempts before your healers get used to the damage of inevitable doom being more than they can heal in 3 seconds. Raid leaders and assistants should be prepared to modify groups to make best use of AoE heals such as Prayer of Healing as raid members die. Since hitting enrage will be common for most raids, you may have to look into bringing more healers and to effectively plan and coordinate the healing to keep up more DPS through this stage of the fight. Priests are by far the best, since they can regen enough mana between healing windows and can do a Prayer of Healing and Circle of healing to top off the raid in theory.

Enraged healing requirement scenario:

Deathbloom is 3500 total damage, but is cast every 30 seconds, calculating to an average of 2333 every 20 seconds.
Doom is 5000 every 15 seconds after enrage, calculating to an average of 6667 damage every 20 seconds.

It's hard to give a healer an idea of how bad it can get, since they'd worry about 2 dooms fitting in the one 20 second period if you just go by the average. To give them a scenario, barring partial resists and talents/abilities that increase/decrease damage taken, it would look like this:

5:00 Assume everyone's topped off from the 4:57 healing window with a Deathbloom and Doom freshly cast.
5:06 Down 3500 HP.
5:10 Down another 5000 HP, 8500 total.
5:15 Doom.
5:17 Healers heal up the 8500 damage.
5:25 Down 5000 HP.
5:30 Doom and Deathbloom.
5:36 Down another 3500 HP, 8500 total.
5:37 Healers heal the 8500 damage.
5:40 Down 5000 HP.
5:45 Doom.
5:55 Down another 5000 HP, 10000 total
5:57 Healers heal the 10000 damage.
<repeats>

This is in addition to Loatheb melee attacks. Other things to consider that makes the healing amount needed change: Seal of Blood/Martyr, Lifetap, Berserker Stance for Fury Warriors take additional damage and abilities like Cloak of Shadows every minute, Ice Block/Divine Shield, Shield Wall, Ice Bound Fortitude, Anti-Magic Shell, etc. reduce damage.

Additional Info:

This fight can technically be done with only a tank and healer, as seen in this video. Fight to the very last man and do not kill any spores and you should have this achievement.

My guild personally got this while doing the 20 man achievement this week due to low numbers (Super Bowl), if that's any indication of the difficulty. It took us just under 6 minutes to kill him. http://www.wowmeteronline.com/combat/1881361

This is the hardest achievement my guild has gone after. No matter how many times we tell everyone to take any/all AoE effects off their bars, someone still manages to screw it all up. We got him down to 5% once without killing a spore, then a retadin hit BS, or whatever it is, and all our work was wasted.

To put it simply, don't take stupid people with you when going after this achievement.