StratFu
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Overview
The bulk of the fight is making sure you manage the raid buffs well. While he's killable on normal mode by ignoring the NPC's, you will need to use them and use them well to kill him in under three minutes.
Completing this hard mode awards the achievement I Could Say That This Cache Was Rare.
Raid Composition
| Tanks: | 1 |
| Healers: | 3-6 |
| Melee: | any |
| Ranged: | any |
The raid buffs are haste and more damage when critting: so classes that benefit from high levels of haste and already have high levels of crit do well in the fight.
Melee do well, just not as strong performance as casters since Singed doesn't benefit 100% of their damage, they don't always have as much flexibility to move to a Starlight for haste, and haste only benefits their autoattacks, not their specials and cooldowns.
Melee classes who have part of their dps from magic will see that be a higher percentage than normal due to Singed.
Strategy
Who should kill Freezes
Some guilds have only melee do it -- remember while melee aren't your top DPS, they still do strong DPS, and having them run around a lot may not be the best.
I don't personally favor this approach, as it makes freezes die too slowly, and reducing melee dps by that much isn't a wise idea.
Some guilds exclude the top ranged DPS, usually mages and warlocks, from flash freeze and have them stay on the boss. This is what we do.
Some guilds have everyone doing it -- also a fine solution.
You can use WWS to see who is killing freezes:
Pull up an attempt, or the entire night, and click on "Raids and Mobs". At the bottom of the page will be a list of mobs. There will be two sets of Freezes listed. One with 8, which is the initial 8, and the other is the ones that occur during the fight.
Storm Power Management
Storm Power is the part of the fight that makes people feel like Hodir is very random, or RNG-prone, but it isn't actually.
Someone in the raid gets buffed with Storm Cloud, and bigwigs puts a mark on their head. They can then buff up to 6 people with Storm Power by standing next to them for about a second.
You can treat this as RNG by just ignoring it -- and some of your attempts will do well because DPS get it, and some will do poorly because it's all on healers or arms warriors.
Or you can take charge: tell people who get Storm Cloud that they need to spread it to DPS who have the highest innate crit rates and encourage your raiders to notice the skull and run over to grab a charge.
It can be controversial in some guilds, but ranged *do* benefit more from Storm Power than do melee. This is because:
* Storm power is at its most powerful when combined with other encounter buffs
* Starlight (haste) affects all of a casters' damage rather than just auto attacks like melee
* Casters are more free to move to new Starlights when one gets icicles
* Singed benefits casters far more
* A melee with a high Storm Power uptime can hit 10-11k, but an equivalently geared and skilled mage or other crit-caster can hit 14-15k
But ultimately the decision is one for your guild: do you tell melee to run Storm Power out to the ranged or do you keep it in melee?
Stacking 'Singed'
A great way to stack singed is to have a Survival Hunter or two standing next to Toasty Fires and using Explosive Shot.
If you don't want to do that, casters need to try to stay near a fire to keep up the debuff on Hodir -- although their priority still needs to be standing in Starlights because the haste is *so* strong for a caster.
General Tips
You may need to dramatically cut down on the number of healers you take, so your guild needs to be excellent at avoiding damage.
Biting Cold
Make sure everyone focuses on moving to keep it to at most two stacks.
Icicles
Make sure 'Projected Textures' is turned on so you can see the circles on the ground that they make before they are going to land.
Flash Freeze
No one should ever get caught out in one -- it's time the DPS doesn't need to spend to break you out.
Also, make sure you don't hop on a snowdrift too quickly when Flash Freeze is casting. A good rule of thumb is to hover outside of one until there are three seconds remaining on the cast and then go in.
Frozen Blows
Frozen Blows deals high raid damage as well, and that can be very hard to handle with so few healers.
It's especially important to not let your Biting Cold stack to two.
Having your paladins, including the holy ones, spec into Divine Guardian can help as well, hitting that when Frozen Blows goes off.
Ranged Tips
Standing in a moonbeam is generally the best thing you can do for your DPS. While it's nice to not have to move for Biting Cold, and fires have their appeal: you end up needing to move pretty often to avoid Icicles anyways, so Fires don't really do as much for you as it seems.