Mythic Hellfire Assault...

We have had 2 nights of progress (spread over 3 or 4 weeks) on this "boss"... it is causing us a few problems for something that is, for most Mythic guilds, just glorified trash.

But we wipe more to trash than the bosses anyway so it shouldn't be too much of a surprise.

Our first night was very painful... I don't think the right preparation had been done by anyone really, almost as if they expected to walk all over it like the Heroic version.
This might not be the most difficult of Mythic fights but it is huge step up from the AoE-fest of Heroic on farm.

So many attempts have ended with one of our tanks dying, closely followed by the rest of the team on that side of the fight... but the underlying causes were quite varied.

The most disappointing ones were people dying to bombs.  It's failing these basics that always frustrates me, and the lack of responsibility as people blame the tanks for not moving the boss away from them.
Yes, the tank should move the boss/adds away from the bombs.
No, you can't blame the tank if you don't move.

Stupid 'stood in the fire' deaths aside and the fight is really interesting for our team.
We obviously don't have the skill level to just blast through it like 'real' Mythic raid teams so we have to be creative.

The whole fight rests on balancing single target damage on the priority target with AoE or cleave to bring down the other targets. 
Easy in principle but the difficulty comes in with the Felcallers.

If we push one of them below 50% while the Berserker is still alive, the combination of damage is easily enough to kill the tank.  Or we focus the Felcaller down and the tank takes too many stacks and dies from the Berserker anyway.

So we have a window between Berserkers to push the Felcallers below 50% and kill them, but we also need to kill the Siege Engine in this window.

I'm sure better guilds than us can do just that... Kill the Berserker, kill the siege engine, kill the felcallers... before the next Berserker spawns but we just can't bring that much dps.

So we have to cleave.

And this is the challenge (and the fun) of the fight.

Single target enough so that the Berserker dies before it kills the tank.
Cleave enough so that we can kill off the Felcallers and Siege Engine in the window between Berserkers
Don't cleave so much that Felcallers are pushed outside of the window.
AoE enough to take care of the other adds.

I know we have the overall dps to kill the boss, after all, I've killed it before
and our dps is better than those early days, even with the difference in skill level.
So it is just about getting that dps in the right places at the right times.

I think much of the responsibility for this lies with the tanks.

Some classes, mainly the DoT classes, can dps all things equally regardless of where they are stood.  The rest of us rely on proximity for our cleave.

Earthquake may be one of the best Cleave/AoE spells in the game but, if the mobs are not stood in it, it does nothing at all.  The same applies to almost all melee classes, Blade Flurry being a prime example.

I can choose to place my EQ so that it only covers some mobs, the rogue can position himself so that only some mobs are hit by the Blade Flurry, but the mobs have to be close for us to make that decision.

So I think the tanks are the only ones who can have true control over the cleave. 
Their movement and positioning is what will determine whether cleaving is an option, then it's up to us dps to decide when it's the right option and how much of it to do. 

And I think this was a major drawback for us in our attempts, we weren't always given the option to cleave and ended up trying to complete a series of single target burn phases back to back.
We weren't capable of doing that so we either got overwhelmed by smaller adds or a priority target lived too long and killed people, usually a Berserker killing a tank.

To be fair to our tanks, I don't think they trusted our dps to hold back on cleave at the right times and they probably have a point. 
I think it would have been easier to sort that issue out over the night though, rather than continue to pursue an approach that was beyond our ability and hope for miraculously different outcomes.

We did make some progress but it was painfully slow and we rarely made it to the halfway point, when the big adds and the transporter come in, in good shape.

One side is much more difficult than the other side, with an extra pair of Felcallers to deal with, and that side struggled every time.

The easier side was running very smoothly by the end of the night and the last attempt was as close to perfect as you can get, killing the final siege engine just before the transporter arrived.

The hard side though, never really came to terms with that balancing act (which is far more important with the extra Felcallers) so we never got close to the kill.

I think we will do better next time but, with the current roster issues, I have no idea when that next time will be.

If anyone has any tips for this fight, or 5 spare Mythic raiders lying around, please feel free to comment.