I'm not sure if the those damage meters are last night's kill or the night before. Last night though, our mages were really high and one (Amarok) actually managed to pull hate. The other's started calming down after that once one of our Warrior's started bitching. As for our Warlocks, I have explanation.

With regards to saw blades obeying LOS, I don't really know what to say to that. We've tried several methods and they still seem to fire them through the wall. When we get the room to do it, we pull them 100 yards apart and that seems to be the only thing that works.

He wouldn't have been standing out of range if he couldn't use specials. He's all about the dps, He's the one who calls at 15% "I'm reckless executing, I'm going to pull agro, let me die". I'm not sure if it was luck, had something to do with the Tauren hitbox (we have noticed interesting things like this before with Taurens), or just a mistake. I'll try and get confirmation when we do him again next week.

No need for confirmation, Trouble. Here's what he was doing last night on our kill.

http://netigen.com/kuya/wws-20070417.../hardcore.html

In short, a lot of white damage but specials are included. If you browse those stats, you'll notice that our second DPS warrior (also a tauren, but one who didn't find the sweet spot) took considerably more damage (a little over 4 times as much to be exact).

That would explain it. I tank the mech's so I just heard mages going "wtf I'm out of line of sight and I just got hit with a saw blade" during our first pulls. Either way, I actually kind of like the mechanics trash, it's a hell of a lot more interesting than the blood elf sheep and kill pulls.

Circle of Healing, not prayer of mending.

looks like your guild doesn't show love for rogues

My guild reached void reaver for the first time today (we cleared thrash to him once before but got tired of it before reaching void reaver himself) and we had some decent tries on him. Im actually ashamed we didnt kill him (14% best try) but well, im pretty confident he goes down next time.

The question I was wondering about is - does anyone really knows how his aggro works?
Because from what I understood from the overall info flowing around, he has deaggro knockback which he uses every X seconds. After this knockback tank looses some threat and void reaver should start beating some other tank and hopefully allow the knockbacked one to regain some aggro again.
I was one of the tanks today and intentionally picked tank gear with tiny bit more dps orientation and full dps consumables (including AP flask). I ended with around 2500 ap buffed and 37% crit. On the first few tries, I actually lost aggro on the boss just once after knockback. Every other time I got aggro back on me in second or two after being knockbacked, even with dps going intentionally full out to find where the aggro limit is. On our best try I was able to keep aggro from 100% to about 35% before loosing the aggro after knockback for the first time.

Is the knockback % or flat amount of aggro? Anyone actually tried this fight with just 2 druid tanks or something similar? Thanks in advance

It's just like Broodlord.

Use 4 tanks and ignore threat entirely, just burn.

Venomia, while you can tank it for a long time I haven't seen it to be that repeatable, we've had a warrior hold it to 50% solo before simply because he only got hit with 2 of the knockbacks. Other attempts they land very often, and we've had the first tank swap at like 96%, I wouldn't suggest building a strategy around minimizing tanks.

I'd mostly agree with the above statement except for enhancement shammies, dps warriors, and shadow priests, which will still likely have to hold back a bit.

This is one fight where lots of hunters for misdirects is really nice, we've had agro locked down solid with 2 tanks for the whole fight before.

EDIT: At a minimum I'd plan on 3 tanks, 4 is probably a more ideal setup for most cases.

Hmm, im actually pretty sure I did +- the same 2-3 tries in a row and I got hit by 3-4 knockbacks atleast (that was pretty much what confused me, getting knocked three times in a row and not loosing aggro is just weird). It seems we are going there tomorrrow again to finish what we started, so ill try to get someone to fraps it if it works like today. Thanks for the insight tho.

3-4 isn't always going to change targets either, I've had 2 or 3 at the start without losing aggro if I've been landing a lot and the OT's haven't been landing as much, but I still don't see it as repeatable with less than 3 tanks. I'm sure it's possible, but I wouldn't recommend it.

I could make an entire thread with 5 graphs to illustrate this, but theres no point, just do this.

I argued with one of our tanks for ages about how he does more threat than another of the tanks, but its so meaningless with the KB... number of tanks > all. Stack them till he never runs - and that number, is 4. It can be more or less with luck, but generally that's the magic number.

Edit: Ugh i'm falling into my own trap by even adding this (cause I know I'm gonna keep ranting about how the dynamics of this fight play out), but as time goes on the KB's knock more and more threat off and mean that switches become far more common. I've taken half a dozen of the first few KB's... but later on, one KB can be unrecoverable (generally around the 7th minute).

The knockback deaggro percent is 0.25. Change KTM to that, and you're basically 100% accurate. I'd still try to do the math and understand what's going on though. Make sure your warriors know how to maximize threat to rage (i'd say 90% of warriors have no clue at all whether to devastate or shield bash given 15 or so rage).

It's just common sense.
If a tank gets KBed at the start he loses 25,000 threat and can rebuild it rather quickly. If he gets KBed at 50% he loses 100,000 and won't rebuild for even longer. Eventually it becomes insurmountable.

And yes, Taurens can outrange pound with room to spare while still meleeing VR.

Also, I'm 95% sure that this knockback is much more forgiving in the threat department than old Broodlords was, unless it's just BOS talking.

This is one of the biggest myth in all of WoW raiding.
When people start pulling agro on mobs with knockbacks or wing buffets, it means your DPS needs to DPS harder and faster, not slower. Soulstone or Combat Res, but holding back is just a waste and will make every kill a sloppy one.

If not holding back means you out threat tanks 2-4 and will therefore have aggro when 1 is KBd then you need to hold back. Trying to wand Broodlord to death was a surefire route to mess, an enhance shaman going all out from the start on Void Reaver is just as daft as he will die very quickly.

There is a more sensible spot in between, in which the very aggro risky class holds back enough that the tanks are ahead of them, but still does respectable damage.

Edgewalker is spot on - man knows his stuff. BTW edge, its a 25% kb - broodlord's afaik is 50%. So its twice as bad (or actually much less than twice as bad right?).

Yeah, it's been an issue since the broodlord days of course. People tend to think "uhoh, a deaggro! We'd better watch the dps!" when they should be thinking "uhoh, a precentage deaggro that builds over time! We'd better get this thing dead!".

Interesting that the mechanic is back though, I wouldn't have thought we'd see many non-flat aggro reducers. It's not that it's really a horrid mechanic if done right, it's just that old pre-nerf BL might still leave a sour taste for some people. Then again, we all have BoS now I suppose!

Don't you think it's a bit weird to put an enrage timer on a broodlord like fight ? Enrage and %deaggro on main tank serve the same purpose : put a hard time limit be it through a "ding 10 mins, time to OS everyone" or "aggro plateau reached, mode no tank enabled".

As we are up to the tanking point, anyone else noticing ferals do better as tanks in this fight, as they can quite well dodge the knockback? I've seen one of our ferals dodge it 3 or 4 times in a row.

Yeah druids are very good for this fight, he doesn't hit that hard, they can avoid many knock backs and I think they can build more aggro than a warrior in an offtank position. I'm sure you could easily do the fight with only 2 tanks if those 2 tanks are well geared feral druids.

Melee is not a problem imo, if your tauren (like me) then you cannot stand at max range, or atleast we have found it to be problematic, when myself and another tauren warrior stood at cow range we occasionally got an arcane orb on us and the other melee.

our way to completely avoid it was to take a deviate and stand at max range then take 1 step back and your out of rnage of the pound and then move back in.

no running back and forth into other peoples arcane orbs.

ofc if you have the available shaman then you can always chain heal the melee, this fight is definetly not melee unfriendly like most guides claim, same as leotharis isnt either.