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Speed Pulling Black Temple
Last month I had the unique opportunity to lead my guild's raids while the bulk of the officers were out on vacation, buying houses, and just generally being unavailable. I hadn't led a raid for over a year, so it was a pretty steep learning curve trying to apply all the knowledge I'd been accumulating about group composition, healing and tanking assignments, and yelling into my microphone.
What really bugged me, though, is that I came to realize just how much unnecessary crowd control we ended up doing - and always do, apparently - simply out of habit. Given the immense amount of work I had on my plate I was leery of rocking the boat, but at the very least it got me thinking: just how much can we abuse the fact that I can generate non-diminishing AE threat? Once the officers got back, I convinced them to turn the guild into lab rats so that I might distill the data we accumulate into a blag entry.
Here we go.
I. Paladin Strategy
The ideal suit for your AE Paladin is going to be pretty heavy on all of the following stats:
I would strongly recommend using exclusively threat-boosting consumables, since there isn't much available for increasing your survivability against large groups of light hitters. My threat consumable kit is:
Because of the speed at which you are moving, you are going to want to bring a healthy quantity of [Super Mana Potion]s to help keep the raid going. [Mana Potion Injector]s are a godsend if you're short on inventory space, but they're generally overpriced on the auction house; if you have an engineer in-house with the pattern you'll save big.
Wiggling yourself into a Shadow Priest group will alleviate a lot of the potion use and increase your speed even further. I highly recommend it.
II. General Trash Strategy
1. Communicate with your raid that things are going to get a little livelier. This was the first mistake we made, and really shouldn't have. And while pulling Shade of Akama's room all at once without warning is hilarious, there's a possibility you might all die horridly. Make sure the guild is prepared to be focusing heals on your Paladin tank, AE'ing, and generally being very alert to the fact that this is more intense than Polymorphing four things per pull. As a tank, make sure you're well in range of healers at all times, too; unlike normal pulls, you will almost assuredly get smoked if you're out of range for only a few seconds.
2. Pot up. Everybody. Even if it's just cheapskate potions like [Adept's Elixir], some food, and a shot of wizard oil, that little bit extra will help. The goal here is to finish faster so that you can spend your time doing more profitable things (like farming money!). You gross 92.5 gold per Black Temple clear anyways, so I'm sure you can suck it up.
3. There will still be crowd control on some pulls. Some pulls are just infeasible to AE, be it because of excessive damage, or because of frustrating targets. Don't feel bad if you still have to CC, just make sure you're quick to break it. Banishes should be for no more than a single cast; if a second is required you are too slow.
4. You will still have offtanks. There will still be offtanks picking up marked targets, which are usually hard hitters, ones that are difficult to control, or ones that do dickish things to Paladins.
5. You will still have an assist train. This isn't WotLK yet, so not everybody has an AE. Players who have no (or poor) AE will still be following the assist train and will generally be killing targets that the offtanks are picking up unless otherwise noted.
6. Misdirect to the offtanks, not to the Paladin. If offtanks are being used in a pull, Misdirecting them is generally more useful since they're tanking targets that are being immediately focus fired, while the Paladin is building multi-target threat anyhow.
7. Avenger's Shield on the pull saves lives. Use this on every pull, since it will slightly stagger your initial incoming damage instead of it coming in a sudden spike. This will give your healers time to stack HoT's and generally mentally prepare themselves to heal their Paladin.
III. Specific Trash Strategies
1. Naj'entus and Supremus Trash
All of the trash leading up to Naj'entus has fairly limited opportunities for abusing Paladin tanking. The first nine pulls are a mix of double and triple pulls, with the Aqueous Lords hitting hard enough and being spaced out far enough to make double pulling those packs prohibitive. Pull ten has six mobs, but with the Aqueous Surgers and Generals being sufficiently dangerous enough to also make AE a poor idea.
The twelve Aqueous Spawn pull after Naj'entus - assuming your Paladin has Nature Resistance gear - is ideal for AE to let loose. You'll want your Shaman to also drop their Earth Elemental Totem, making the pull fairly trivial. The next two pulls of Bonechewer Workers are also built for AE, and you could probably pull both groups simultaneously if you are feeling exceptionally saucy. No offtanks should be necessary.
Aside from those three pulls, and the single pack of workers later in the clear, it's again mostly single and double pulls all the way to Supremus. AE would be pretty senseless.
This is an ideal time to fire up the barbecue and put on some steaks if you're the Paladin tank. I recommend keeping it simple: freshly ground pepper, sea salt, and maybe a little bit of crushed garlic if you have the time. Assuming you start the barbecue while you're buffing up to pull Naj'entus, the grill should be up to ~400-450°F after the first two Worker packs. Put the steaks on then, making sure you keep the lid down on your barbecue and only touch the meat two additional times: once to flip, once to put on your plate. Flip them after the first four packs of Wyrmcallers/Windreavers, and take them off after the trash is all dead. If your steak cooks past medium you need to pick up the pace.
You'll need to let the meat stand for 2-3 minutes to finish cooking, which is incidentally about the time it takes to rebuff and deal with Supremus' first tank phase. Eat during the volcano phases.
2. Shade of Akama Trash
From here onward is where we really start cooking with gas (steaks excluded); all trash from now on comes in mostly pulls of four to six, with only small smatterings of pulls that come in smaller groups.
Of course, the initial pulls of six demons are bastards to AE tank. While it's certainly feasible, the Boneslicers are fond of Gouging the tank, which causes everything you're AE'ing to turn around and punch somebody's jaw straight off. If you offtank those, there's still the silencing Centurions to deal with. Save yourself the trouble and just Banish two or three of the satyrs while you assist train the pull.
The Illidari Dreadlord pulls should be handled with a single tank and Banishes, like normal. And probably not the Paladin. This will give him time to drink and save on a few mana potions.
The large packs of Ashtongue Broken are very AE-able. You will want to mark the pulls such that offtanks are picking up the Ashtongue Battlelords - since they can use Concussion Blow on the tank, which is bad when you're tanking six things - and the Ashtongue Mystics will need to die first because of how dangerous their totems and heals potentially are. Make sure your Paladin throws his shield at the Mystic on the pull so the assist train doesn't kill themselves, and AE away.
The Shade's room can be done effectively in three pulls: the first pull picks up the two packs on either side of the door, the second picks up the roaming Primalists, and the third picks up the remainder of the room. Abuse the pillars when doing the final pull, since there are a fair number of casters present.
3. Teron Gorefiend Trash
The first pull is pretty straightforward: Pull, AE, loot. It doesn't do anything special that it didn't do when you weren't AE'ing.
The second pull - and any pull with houndmasters - are also fairly easy to handle with AE. You'll need to make sure that a Priest or a different Paladin is targeting your Paladin tank, and rapidly hammering their Dispel Magic or Cleanse button to free him from the Freezing Trap immediately. You could also get fancy and set up a Blessing of Freedom rotation: the Paladin gets himself initially, his buddy hits him when the buff expires, and they rebuff as soon as the cooldown is over. If the freezing trap isn't broken you'll find that the Houndmasters run off and start shooting your tank, which is not very conducive to AE.
The third pull - and any pull that contains Blood Mages - will need to be tanked facing away from the raid. If they Blood Siphon the raid then all your AE will be for naught. For this pull only you can have your offtanks take care of the Blood Mages, but incoming damage on your Paladin will be minimal; it isn't necessary.
The fourth pull will have your offtanks picking up the Shadowmoon Deathshapers to assist train as quickly as possible, before they summon more Flayers. The Paladin will face the Blood Mages and the Flayer away from the raid, and will Judge/Exorcism the Flayer so he doesn't run off and gib people with Cleaves when he uses Ignored.
The Weapon Master and Soldier pull is simple AE. Nothing to see here.
All subsequent pulls are copies of the previous four until you reach Gorefiend's room. The Hands of Gorefiend don't AE very well, and hit hard enough that you don't want to pull all four of them, so just handle them like you normally would: one tank on each.
4. Gurtogg and Reliquary Trash
The very first pull (and the other two like it) is a little different than usual. The Blade Furies are pretty dangerous to try and AE, so the offtanks will pick them up and everybody will focus fire them down before starting in on the main group. While the Blade Furies are zipping around is also going to be the first time that your Paladin tank is exposed to stuns (from the Shield Disciples) that he can't escape. There are two ways of handling them:
The Behemoth pulls are unchanged from a non-AE strategy, since you can't AE them, and they're sufficiently dangerous that you don't want more than one at a time.
The Brawler and Combatant pulls will probably also be unchanged from normal if you have a Paladin tank. Offtanks on the big guys, Paladin on the small guys. Cakewalk.
5. Mother Shahraz Trash
This section is pretty unnecessary, since the trash is so trivial with a Paladin. Somehow we manage to wipe on this every week though, since our tanks are pretty fond of playing games with how much of it we can pull at once. Here's a bullet point summary, though:
6. Illidari Council
Your Paladin will not be tanking One-Shot the Robot, so have one of the other tanks pick him up.
The blood elf packs are slightly more interesting - at least in terms of strategy - than any other trash in the zone. Seeing as they can do fairly ridiculous single target damage on occasion, you'll put your offtanks on the Battle-mages. Your kill order, however, is going to vary depending on whether or not the Archon is Holy. If he is, he needs to die first, since he can heal for 50k health a pop. If he is Shadowform, he can die after the Battle-mages. Since it's impossible to tell before the pull, you won't be able to mark them properly, so your assist will need to be aware of this little nuance and your raid better be sure to follow him. The specific kill priority, by the way, is:
By the way, did you know that you can skip the last two robots? Pretty cool.
IV. Conclusion
This section is largely extraneous, but I'm pretty sure this is the longest EJ blag entry so far. Prove me wrong.
What really bugged me, though, is that I came to realize just how much unnecessary crowd control we ended up doing - and always do, apparently - simply out of habit. Given the immense amount of work I had on my plate I was leery of rocking the boat, but at the very least it got me thinking: just how much can we abuse the fact that I can generate non-diminishing AE threat? Once the officers got back, I convinced them to turn the guild into lab rats so that I might distill the data we accumulate into a blag entry.
Here we go.
I. Paladin Strategy
The ideal suit for your AE Paladin is going to be pretty heavy on all of the following stats:
- Health
- Armor
- Spell Damage
- Block Value
- [Band of the Eternal Defender]
- [Signet of the Last Defender]
- [Item not found!]
- [Darkmoon Card: Crusade]
- A helmet with an [Eternal Earthstorm Diamond] in it.
I would strongly recommend using exclusively threat-boosting consumables, since there isn't much available for increasing your survivability against large groups of light hitters. My threat consumable kit is:
- [Flask of Blinding Light]
- [Poached Bluefish] (or equivalent)
- [Superior Wizard Oil]
Because of the speed at which you are moving, you are going to want to bring a healthy quantity of [Super Mana Potion]s to help keep the raid going. [Mana Potion Injector]s are a godsend if you're short on inventory space, but they're generally overpriced on the auction house; if you have an engineer in-house with the pattern you'll save big.
Wiggling yourself into a Shadow Priest group will alleviate a lot of the potion use and increase your speed even further. I highly recommend it.
II. General Trash Strategy
1. Communicate with your raid that things are going to get a little livelier. This was the first mistake we made, and really shouldn't have. And while pulling Shade of Akama's room all at once without warning is hilarious, there's a possibility you might all die horridly. Make sure the guild is prepared to be focusing heals on your Paladin tank, AE'ing, and generally being very alert to the fact that this is more intense than Polymorphing four things per pull. As a tank, make sure you're well in range of healers at all times, too; unlike normal pulls, you will almost assuredly get smoked if you're out of range for only a few seconds.
2. Pot up. Everybody. Even if it's just cheapskate potions like [Adept's Elixir], some food, and a shot of wizard oil, that little bit extra will help. The goal here is to finish faster so that you can spend your time doing more profitable things (like farming money!). You gross 92.5 gold per Black Temple clear anyways, so I'm sure you can suck it up.
3. There will still be crowd control on some pulls. Some pulls are just infeasible to AE, be it because of excessive damage, or because of frustrating targets. Don't feel bad if you still have to CC, just make sure you're quick to break it. Banishes should be for no more than a single cast; if a second is required you are too slow.
4. You will still have offtanks. There will still be offtanks picking up marked targets, which are usually hard hitters, ones that are difficult to control, or ones that do dickish things to Paladins.
5. You will still have an assist train. This isn't WotLK yet, so not everybody has an AE. Players who have no (or poor) AE will still be following the assist train and will generally be killing targets that the offtanks are picking up unless otherwise noted.
6. Misdirect to the offtanks, not to the Paladin. If offtanks are being used in a pull, Misdirecting them is generally more useful since they're tanking targets that are being immediately focus fired, while the Paladin is building multi-target threat anyhow.
7. Avenger's Shield on the pull saves lives. Use this on every pull, since it will slightly stagger your initial incoming damage instead of it coming in a sudden spike. This will give your healers time to stack HoT's and generally mentally prepare themselves to heal their Paladin.
III. Specific Trash Strategies
1. Naj'entus and Supremus Trash
All of the trash leading up to Naj'entus has fairly limited opportunities for abusing Paladin tanking. The first nine pulls are a mix of double and triple pulls, with the Aqueous Lords hitting hard enough and being spaced out far enough to make double pulling those packs prohibitive. Pull ten has six mobs, but with the Aqueous Surgers and Generals being sufficiently dangerous enough to also make AE a poor idea.
The twelve Aqueous Spawn pull after Naj'entus - assuming your Paladin has Nature Resistance gear - is ideal for AE to let loose. You'll want your Shaman to also drop their Earth Elemental Totem, making the pull fairly trivial. The next two pulls of Bonechewer Workers are also built for AE, and you could probably pull both groups simultaneously if you are feeling exceptionally saucy. No offtanks should be necessary.
Aside from those three pulls, and the single pack of workers later in the clear, it's again mostly single and double pulls all the way to Supremus. AE would be pretty senseless.
This is an ideal time to fire up the barbecue and put on some steaks if you're the Paladin tank. I recommend keeping it simple: freshly ground pepper, sea salt, and maybe a little bit of crushed garlic if you have the time. Assuming you start the barbecue while you're buffing up to pull Naj'entus, the grill should be up to ~400-450°F after the first two Worker packs. Put the steaks on then, making sure you keep the lid down on your barbecue and only touch the meat two additional times: once to flip, once to put on your plate. Flip them after the first four packs of Wyrmcallers/Windreavers, and take them off after the trash is all dead. If your steak cooks past medium you need to pick up the pace.
You'll need to let the meat stand for 2-3 minutes to finish cooking, which is incidentally about the time it takes to rebuff and deal with Supremus' first tank phase. Eat during the volcano phases.
2. Shade of Akama Trash
From here onward is where we really start cooking with gas (steaks excluded); all trash from now on comes in mostly pulls of four to six, with only small smatterings of pulls that come in smaller groups.
Of course, the initial pulls of six demons are bastards to AE tank. While it's certainly feasible, the Boneslicers are fond of Gouging the tank, which causes everything you're AE'ing to turn around and punch somebody's jaw straight off. If you offtank those, there's still the silencing Centurions to deal with. Save yourself the trouble and just Banish two or three of the satyrs while you assist train the pull.
The Illidari Dreadlord pulls should be handled with a single tank and Banishes, like normal. And probably not the Paladin. This will give him time to drink and save on a few mana potions.
The large packs of Ashtongue Broken are very AE-able. You will want to mark the pulls such that offtanks are picking up the Ashtongue Battlelords - since they can use Concussion Blow on the tank, which is bad when you're tanking six things - and the Ashtongue Mystics will need to die first because of how dangerous their totems and heals potentially are. Make sure your Paladin throws his shield at the Mystic on the pull so the assist train doesn't kill themselves, and AE away.
The Shade's room can be done effectively in three pulls: the first pull picks up the two packs on either side of the door, the second picks up the roaming Primalists, and the third picks up the remainder of the room. Abuse the pillars when doing the final pull, since there are a fair number of casters present.
3. Teron Gorefiend Trash
The first pull is pretty straightforward: Pull, AE, loot. It doesn't do anything special that it didn't do when you weren't AE'ing.
The second pull - and any pull with houndmasters - are also fairly easy to handle with AE. You'll need to make sure that a Priest or a different Paladin is targeting your Paladin tank, and rapidly hammering their Dispel Magic or Cleanse button to free him from the Freezing Trap immediately. You could also get fancy and set up a Blessing of Freedom rotation: the Paladin gets himself initially, his buddy hits him when the buff expires, and they rebuff as soon as the cooldown is over. If the freezing trap isn't broken you'll find that the Houndmasters run off and start shooting your tank, which is not very conducive to AE.
The third pull - and any pull that contains Blood Mages - will need to be tanked facing away from the raid. If they Blood Siphon the raid then all your AE will be for naught. For this pull only you can have your offtanks take care of the Blood Mages, but incoming damage on your Paladin will be minimal; it isn't necessary.
The fourth pull will have your offtanks picking up the Shadowmoon Deathshapers to assist train as quickly as possible, before they summon more Flayers. The Paladin will face the Blood Mages and the Flayer away from the raid, and will Judge/Exorcism the Flayer so he doesn't run off and gib people with Cleaves when he uses Ignored.
The Weapon Master and Soldier pull is simple AE. Nothing to see here.
All subsequent pulls are copies of the previous four until you reach Gorefiend's room. The Hands of Gorefiend don't AE very well, and hit hard enough that you don't want to pull all four of them, so just handle them like you normally would: one tank on each.
4. Gurtogg and Reliquary Trash
The very first pull (and the other two like it) is a little different than usual. The Blade Furies are pretty dangerous to try and AE, so the offtanks will pick them up and everybody will focus fire them down before starting in on the main group. While the Blade Furies are zipping around is also going to be the first time that your Paladin tank is exposed to stuns (from the Shield Disciples) that he can't escape. There are two ways of handling them:
- Suck it up and power heal through them.
- Chug a [Free Action Potion] at the start of the pull. Then when it fades, see 1.
The Behemoth pulls are unchanged from a non-AE strategy, since you can't AE them, and they're sufficiently dangerous that you don't want more than one at a time.
The Brawler and Combatant pulls will probably also be unchanged from normal if you have a Paladin tank. Offtanks on the big guys, Paladin on the small guys. Cakewalk.
5. Mother Shahraz Trash
This section is pretty unnecessary, since the trash is so trivial with a Paladin. Somehow we manage to wipe on this every week though, since our tanks are pretty fond of playing games with how much of it we can pull at once. Here's a bullet point summary, though:
- Paladin picks up prostitute packs. (Awesome alliteration!) He's going to get frequently stunned by them, and won't have [Free Action Potion]s on cooldown often enough to be useful. Healers need to be alert.
- Offtanks pick up everything else.
- When there's no prostitutes to tank, your Paladin drinks.
- Don't stop moving.
6. Illidari Council
Your Paladin will not be tanking One-Shot the Robot, so have one of the other tanks pick him up.
The blood elf packs are slightly more interesting - at least in terms of strategy - than any other trash in the zone. Seeing as they can do fairly ridiculous single target damage on occasion, you'll put your offtanks on the Battle-mages. Your kill order, however, is going to vary depending on whether or not the Archon is Holy. If he is, he needs to die first, since he can heal for 50k health a pop. If he is Shadowform, he can die after the Battle-mages. Since it's impossible to tell before the pull, you won't be able to mark them properly, so your assist will need to be aware of this little nuance and your raid better be sure to follow him. The specific kill priority, by the way, is:
- Illidari Archon (Holy)
- Illidari Battle-mage(s)
- Illidari Archon (Shadow)
- Illidari Assassin
- Illidari Blood Lord(s)
By the way, did you know that you can skip the last two robots? Pretty cool.
IV. Conclusion
This section is largely extraneous, but I'm pretty sure this is the longest EJ blag entry so far. Prove me wrong.
Total Comments 4
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Rhyd has written some long blogs on dressing, that is the only competitor for longest EJ blog.
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Really good post, thanks. Love the bit about grilling during Supremus.
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Couple things to add
-Something I learned in my new guild, after Supremus neck out and port into the NPCs and get to Akama that way -Primalists (I think, these are the hunter mobs right?) are great to be tanked by ferals....they can powershift out of the sweeping wing clip -Tank the Blade Furies so that you are between the raid and the Fury. This makes the Blade Fury run past you, which means you can have a slightly slower reaction time to taunt/keep up/etc. -On the Illidari Council, get your feral freed up as quickly as possible, Maim will interrupt the Blizzards just like it interrupted the spinny Kael trash dudes arcane flurry |
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Haven't used Avenger's Shield in a couple of months as I saw Worldie's (paladin from the Main Tankadin forums) SA spec and liked it quite a bit; plus I found myself rarely using AS in raids. I'm also curious as to what your stats are when you do this, mainly the ones you listed above but also dodge, parry, and block percents.
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Recent Blog Entries by Theras
- 'Sheathbot' is this week's Worst Word of the Week (08/06/08)
- Speed Pulling Black Temple (07/27/08)
- D-I-N. Was that so hard? (07/26/08)
- WotLK Tanking Seals: Preliminary Analysis (07/22/08)
- WotLK Protection Bloat: Causes and Solutions (07/21/08)
