Best advice I can give is to go in there with at least one person that can lead / go over mechanics. The 2nd boss on vet destroys groups with low dps but other than that the dungeon is very doable even for average players. Hard mode is a different beast and makes the rest of the dungeon feel like a joke. Seriously, the difficulty spike of hard mode in the DB dungeons is a bit extreme.

If you are on PC NA you can run with my group we’ve been farming motifs but occasionally we get a PUG member who is new and we teach them through their first run. If your group can beat the 2nd boss you will have no trouble clearing the dungeon in my opinion.

Left4Daud wrote: »

Best advice I can give is to go in there with at least one person that can lead / go over mechanics. The 2nd boss on vet destroys groups with low dps but other than that the dungeon is very doable even for average players. Hard mode is a different beast and makes the rest of the dungeon feel like a joke. Seriously, the difficulty spike of hard mode in the DB dungeons is a bit extreme.

If you are on PC NA you can run with my group we’ve been farming motifs but occasionally we get a PUG member who is new and we teach them through their first run. If your group can beat the 2nd boss you will have no trouble clearing the dungeon in my opinion.

Thank you but I'm EU, thank you for the advice though.

Apologies for a mild hijacking, but I've been having a lot of trouble getting this clear. vFang Lair is the only vet dungeon I've not completed yet, and it is all that cursed menagerie boss.
First off, I play Stamden, and I know about the bugs with Warden pets in Fang Lair, so obviously I drop all pets for the boss fights.
How should this fight be set up, assuming above average DPS, an excellent tank and heals? We've tried across the room from the wolves, on top of the wolf spawn, keeping the mini bosses separated till they are down, stacking everything up and kiting the wolves. You name it, we gave it a shot, but we just cannot seem to get it sorted out.

Any advice would be deeply appreciated. Or if anyone is willing to have me along, so I can see how it should go, that would be awesome. I am on PC NA, @faeryn-shea

The way we've dealt with the Menagerie is to have the tanks aggro the wolves near the spawn spot. He'll bait them into exploding and they never bother us.

One of us will taunt the bear and hold it near the guar and tiger. The bear hits like a wet noodle. I am usually the one tanking it, and my magblade self-heals (plus an occasional shield or two) is all I need to survive the bear--it's a bit of a waste to have the tank dealing with this non-threat. The real threats are the wolves and the tiger pounces--having the tank keep the wolves out of our hair means we can ignore them and just parse the bear like a target dummy. And with enough DPS (which is much easier to achieve if the DDs can just focus on DPS and not worry about exploding wolves), the tiger pounce mechanic can be skipped.

The important thing is the timing. Pounces happen every 30s. We focus the bear, keep the tiger in cleave, and then as we approach the 30s mark, if the tiger isn't dead yet, we'll switch focus to the tiger and kill it before the 30s mark. Done right, it means that the tiger doesn't get to do its first pounce. Once disabled, the tiger will remain dormant for exactly 60s, after which it will awaken and immediately pounce.

So we'll kill the tiger before 30s--usually at 24-28s (don't want to kill too early, but also don't want to risk killing it too late). And then we'll have 60s to finish off the bear. If the group DPS is high enough, the bear will die before the tiger ever wakes up, and we'll never see the tiger pounce. In our experience, if the total group damage is over 80K (so in a traditional healer+2xDD configuration, each DD will do 40K multi-target DPS), we can kill the bear before the tiger reawakens. It's important, though, not to kill the tiger too early. For example, if you kill the tiger at 15s, you'll have 75s total (15s + 60s dormancy) to kill the bear before a pounce, but if you killed the tiger at 25s, you'll have 85s total to kill the bear. So if the tiger looks like it's about to die early, just switch focus to doing damage on the bear, and then finish the tiger off as that 30s mark approaches.

If we fall behind on DPS, and the tiger does its pounce after it awakens, it will pounce the tank (since the tank will be the farthest from the group, as they play with the wolves). If we are keeping track of the time, we can know when the tiger is about to wake up, and the tank can just hit a defensive ult (Magma Shell is nice) right before the tiger reawakens. We'll interrupt the tiger, and then have 30s to finish killing the bear before another pounce.

With a healerless 3xDD configuration, this becomes much easier--with 3x DDs, usually the tiger will die at around 20s, and the bear will die about 30s-40s after that, giving us a very generous 20s-30s margin of error.