If the warrior isn't in tank gear, he most likely will die from a higher level growth intervene.
As a side note, does intervene work like misdirection, in that a new intervene will overwrite the previous one if it's not used up?
I'll happily accept a dps warrior death if it means the MT is still alive. That's what we tell the other warriors and they're perfectly fine with it. Warriors that arn't the MT are reverb meat shields first, dps second.
I'll happily accept a dps warrior death if it means the MT is still alive. That's what we tell the other warriors and they're perfectly fine with it. Warriors that arn't the MT are reverb meat shields first, dps second.
I didn't mean to say never throw the DPS warrior in there, it was more saying it's nice to have a warrior in tank gear for this purpose as you will lose your DPS warriors.
"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge." - Bertrand Russell
Not every guild does the fight the same way. We killed Gruul at 16 growths on our first time. 16 on the second also. The third was 18 and was a one shot.
The MT has some mysteriously missing gear. There are two boots and two gloves that drop in Karazhan, he has blues. There are shoulders from Karazhan and shoulders from Maulgar.
You can drop all the strength/stamina gems from this guy's gear. Get this man some decent gems.
Have him bring one of your leather workers to a heroic to get a nether for his leg's armor kit (another 10 stamina).
I'd suggest working out who will cast improved lay on hands toward the end of the fight. After growth 12 or so, things get really scary if you don't have this. Also, it would be nice if your priests/shamans could try to keep their armor buff up as much as possible.
For siliences, I do multiple ranks of healthstones and lucky pocket watch.
Yep... our guild typically does Gruul and mag on the same night, so We normally have both healthstones available to the whole raid. It's important that people are on their toes about cave-ins, and shatters.. We use a clock/group assignement. group 1 = midnight, group 2=1:30, etc. It's more of a guideline than a rule as you can't predict where you are going to land.. But it works for the most part.
Now that we have consistently killed on the same growth number, we assign certain growths to certain abilities.. Like growth 9 is shield wall (I don't know the names/numbers, I'm just a lowly priest :p)
We typically have 2 paladins, 2 druids, and 3-4 priests. We have the druids just spot hot healing, and put 1 paladin and 2 priests on the MT, and 1 paladin and 1-2 priests on the OT. If we only have 7 Healers, we have the druids make sure the OT is continuously hotted/move a druid over to straight MT healing.
When a big strike happens (they are pretty easy to anticipate), we make sure that EVERYONE (even the OT healers) stabilizes the MT first, then the OT, then the raid.
Overall, we play this fight as a you need to be responsible for your own life.. (Should be the rul, all the time, but w/e). That means you may get lucky and get a hot, or a direct heal, but you should be using stones, bandages, pots, w/e to keep your critically injured ass from dying. A hot will top you off sure, but you need to save yourself first.
Intervene is hot and I suspect highly underused as a mitigation method on the MT. Any warrior you have in the raid that isn't full out DPS spec should macro his shield and intervene constantly between shatters to help absorb some of the damage. Its amazing how easy much damage it will slough off the MT by doing this.
That is an incredibly useful idea -- I'll have to propose that to our Gruul raid lead if we get that far this week (lol drama).
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@OP:
I believe the way we were organized for our kill this past week was as follows:
MT: Saberoy
OT: Feorthas (Armory has my DPS stuff on; I'd link my CTProfile but they're taking those down, so :-/)
Healers:
-Tons of pallies, couple of priests (No resto druid?), one resto shammy
-2-3 dedicated to MT (at least 1 priest, rest pallies)
-1-2 dedicated to OT (pally + whoever wasn't busy)
-Resto Shammy + free healers on raid (resto concentrating on melee for CH goodness)
I believe both Saber and I had an Imp as well as Commanding shout, putting our HP in the 18k range (each. Yes, I know my HP is low ><). He was flasked with Fortification, I with an Unstable "of the Beast" variety and all Misdirects were on the MT for the duration of the fight, not counting one onto me to give me a brief headstart over the DPS after the MD on Saber--which is needed because I can't do much more than autoattack without pulling gruul off of the MT below 10k Threat (happens way too often for me to like; that's just how bears work though).
On our last night of attempts / kill night, this past Wed, we had the no-deaths-to-shatter thing down pat and I was getting so much UI lag that I would often shatter in the air, well away from anywhere else (which was cool, but the lag caused by Tankpoints/Healpoints recalculating my points after every buff/hot/debuff I got was unbearable, so I disabled them). The sticking points we had were as follows:
-Saberoy would get crushed somewhere between 10 and 12 growths at below full HP and literally go *splat*.
-Some mishap with healing would net no HoTs during a silence during the middle of the fight, so we'd have either a critically low MT or critically low OT after the debuff dropped. With only one NS, one would die unless someone got a lucky parry/dodge/miss.
I think the real issue is making sure that the warrior tanking Gruul is crush immune 24/7; threat generation is immaterial after 550 TPS or so because it can be boosted by constant MD rotations. Also, keeping some sort of HoT up on the tank(s) when the silence timer is up is a huge help; just two renews on each of us meant that we'd be in great shape come the end of the silence. With regard to more minor, but still annoying, problems such as shatter, telling your rogues to CloS out of each shatter slow effect can also decrease the damage (as they can run away from people) just as having your pallies bubble in order to keep moving can. The very final sticking point we had, and still have to some degree, is keeping up a nice stream of heals on the MT/OT. All too often, late in the fight, would one get hit hard, necessitating lots of 'oh shit' heals and stealing some of the other's healers temporarily, followed shortly by the other getting hit hard. This would stabilize after Saber parried/dodged a couple of times, or if I dodged once, but it's still going to be the main problem we have (our guys also err on the side of efficiency; HPM is more important than HPS... unless the tank would've died at the level of HPS that your efficient heals would be putting out).
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Sorry about the long-ish post, just trying to be as helpful as possible.
I am not your personal Frost Deathknight knowledge base. If you have a simple question, ask in the simple questions thread; if you have a more esoteric, specific, or complicated question, ask in the spec-appropriate thread.
My PM, WoWmail, and, especially, chat boxes are NOT the appropriate places for these questions.
Your main tank does not have Improved Demo Shout. Is there a different warrior with it and is it being kept up at all times? Also imp tlcap and imp shield block that should be considered required, even in Kara.
Lots of good points, I'll try and give what advice I can, coming from a healer perspective.
1) Silence will ruin your day if given the chance. Soon as the silence timer hits 15 seconds, its called out and from that point on, all healers have hots on the tank non stop. This, plus well timed pot or HS will carry you through a bad silence.
2) Pre Growth 10, healling efficency is best. Post Growth 10, overheal is ok. By about Growth 10, Gruul is now hitting painfully hard on the tank and the OT. At that point, we basically have our healers going all out, overhealing doesnt matter due to just how hard he will be hitting and how easily a tank can go down if not topped up. The OT especially needs to be careful, as the Hurtful Strikes will be getting close to the <50% hp range. Often, as a pally, I tell the other OT healers to shift to the MT and I pop Divine Illumination and just go to town with Holy Light spam, as its the only feasible way to get the tanks hp up before the next Hurtful, but the OT knows that at some point, he will likely be one shot if Gruul gets past Growth 15 or so.
3) Generally, our tank has Gruul roughly in the center of the room and stands on the 'east' side of him, facing into the room. All our healers are on the east side of the room, in order to always be in range for heals. Many times, as we were learning the fight and positioning, we would have healers be knocked too far away and have an unlucky melee round which ate the tank. Work on minimizing that happening and you will be much better off.
4) I do have Imp LoH and it is great to drop on the MT post Growth 10, as a safety buffer, so he can save Shield Wall if we end up in the Growth 15 range or higher.
Our first 2 or 3 kills were always sloppy, as we were hitting 16-17 Growths and the damage on the tanks was just too high and we were very conservative on having the melee in DPSing due to Shatter. But as we have learned and done the fight mroe, it has dropped down to around the 12 Growth range or so. Which is fairly comfortable, but can certainly be improved. It is not an easy fight, and an unlucky Shatter can ruin any guilds day.
Even for guilds with Gruul on farm status, if people don't pay attention or have set plans for handling Reverb and Shatter, the MT can still die. It's unfortunate that you don't have a Shaman for Earth Shield as Shamans on the MT (for many if not all encounters) are incredible.
3 Paladins
2 Priests
2 Druids
First thing I would suggest is splitting your Paladins 2:1. Put two on your MT and one on your OT. That way there are classes that are fully capable of chain casting for a fairly long duration. Then split your two Priests 1:1. The Priests can essentially keep HOTs on both the MT and the OT, but they still keep their "priority" on their assigned tank for cast/canceling. 2 Druids on the raid, while keeping HOTs on the MT.
The thing with keeping 4 HOTs ticking on the MT is that you have some serious damage mitigation going on while people are casting. Keeping the HOTs up will also give the Tank the ability to withstand a nasty Reverb.
We run two Priests together and it's been worked out that P1 will Shield then Flash Heal and P2 will Flash Heal then POM after every Reverb and Shatter. More times than not it's overkill, but it staggers healing and provides some instant damage mitigation to allow other healers time to cast. One of the biggset problems with MT healing is coordination of "emergency healing" of spike damage. There are many healers out there that freak out when they see a 15k hit and queue up their biggest heal. Coordinating which healers are using which heals during an emergency might help prevent everyone queuing up 2.0 - 2.5 sec heals and the MT not getting any help for nearly 3 seconds.
Fast, mana inefficient heals won't get you anywhere if casted for the duration of a fight, but having your healers comfortable using them when necessary is important.
Small Aside: When we were learning Gruul...I set Gruul as my Focus and would POM/Renew the MT as soon as I saw Gruul casting Ground Slam. It would help a little while people tried to get back in range...now I do it if/when I remember, but I found it gave me a little more room when we were learning to get back into position.
For learning Gruul your 2 paladins should be on the main tank primarily, the whole time. You don't want to really be healing anyone else unless the tank is 100% and your timers indicated shatter and silence are way off.
The healing style for this fight is "keep the tank at 100% the whole time" you can't really afford to let the tank take some damage then cast a big heal like you can in many of the encounters in kara. You need to top him up asap because a shatter or silence can and will take you of of action every now and then.
For paladins this means quite a bit of chain casting Flash of Light, Rank 7 Holy Light or whatever works out good mana/hp for how much +heal/crit and regen they have.
The universe is run by the complex interweaving of three elements. Energy, matter, and enlightened self-interest.
Intervene is hot and I suspect highly underused as a mitigation method on the MT. Any warrior you have in the raid that isn't full out DPS spec should macro his shield and intervene constantly between shatters to help absorb some of the damage. Its amazing how easy much damage it will slough off the MT by doing this.
Just don't have a fury DPS warrior hit the wrong macro when doing Magtheridon... the MT's comment over vent at the time was just priceless.
But on Gruul yes it can be a life saver, especially during a reverberation. I was doing this on earlier kills, but lately I've been used as the HS OT which actually makes the fight more engaging, trying to keep ahead of the DPS classes.
Fast, mana inefficient heals won't get you anywhere if casted for the duration of a fight, but having your healers comfortable using them when necessary is important.
Good advice for a priest, but I'd offer the completely opposite advice to any paladin in a guild still learning Gruul.
Let the priest or Healing Touch Druids deal with the big damage spikes, Paladins work best keeping the incoming HPS consistant throughout the fight. But after the Shatter, You need to be able to switch to spammed Holy Lights to really pump up the HPS until the raid is stabalized and full health once again.
I hate to sound like a troll, but the slacker druids and priests are going to let their hots fade on the MT after every shatter, so you need to be able to pick up the slack switching from Flash to Holy Light.
Our server's instance servers went shit-tastic so we had to cancel our raid, which is immensely frustrating.
As a token MS warrior, can I just pick pieces of gear carefully, carry stoneshield potions later in the fight and expect to survive an intervene on the MT? I would like to do this without dying, for obvious reasons, and a lot of my decent DPS gear is gladiator's anyway.
You have the right to remain silent. THAT MEANS SHUT UP.
Our server's instance servers went shit-tastic so we had to cancel our raid, which is immensely frustrating.
As a token MS warrior, can I just pick pieces of gear carefully, carry stoneshield potions later in the fight and expect to survive an intervene on the MT? I would like to do this without dying, for obvious reasons, and a lot of my decent DPS gear is gladiator's anyway.
I've got to imagine that Gladiator's is pure awesome for a DPS warrior, or Reverb Meatshield, on Gruul; you have a lot of hitpoints, good damage, and good non-tank level mitigation. Unfortunately, if you manage to get crushed past 10 growths, you're probably dead anyway.
Make no mistake, Gruul hits HARD. We only killed him because I was getting overhealed like mad after Saberoy went down; hatefuls were hitting for over 12k on 25-26k armor and crushes were nasty as well. The best insurance policy that you can have is a good group of rogues; if the rogues can stay right under the offtank in threat, or at least between the OT and the warriors, they can evasion tank at least one hateful, possibly two (maybe three with a lucky dodge/parry) each. This keeps the MT stable and allows the raid to continue DPSing and Healing at a sane level for just a LITTLE bit longer. Unfortunately, we had to convince our rogues to not vanish when the MT/OT die and, instead, evasion tank a few hurtfuls for the good of the raid; the good ones picked the potential benefits up really quickly and try to vanish right after evasion drops so they can keep doing damage after their 'tanking' utility has gone away but I'm more worried about having a backup HS soak than additional damage at that point.
I am not your personal Frost Deathknight knowledge base. If you have a simple question, ask in the simple questions thread; if you have a more esoteric, specific, or complicated question, ask in the spec-appropriate thread.
My PM, WoWmail, and, especially, chat boxes are NOT the appropriate places for these questions.
I've got to imagine that Gladiator's is pure awesome for a DPS warrior, or Reverb Meatshield, on Gruul; you have a lot of hitpoints, good damage, and good non-tank level mitigation. Unfortunately, if you manage to get crushed past 10 growths, you're probably dead anyway.
A /cast Shieldblock /stopcasting /cast Intervene should take care of that I assume.
(correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm fairly certain any warrior with SB on is atleast crush immune for that period of time)
I challenge the idea of Holy Paladins exclusively for MT, and resto shamans + priests on the Raid.
One of the staples for this type of fight is the +25% armor buff provided by Inspiration and Ancestral Fortitude. If you are denying yourself this buff, you will make the fight significantly more random and challenging.
I know the advantages of a paladin single target healing, but you have to weigh it at a loss of 4,500 armor for your MT, and 7,000 armor for your OT. These buffs will smooth out the damage, and decrease the likeihood of a 2/3 shot.
You have to figure out *why* the tank is dying first. You need a combat log, period, whether you WWS it or not.
Our last Gruul I thought we had healing problems as well, but after reviewing the logs, I discovered that melee were cheating up inside Gruul to escape cave ins and getting counted as being in front, getting parried, and once Gruul got enough grows on, the resulting fast attack spam resulting from multiple parries was instagibbing me. Preventing parries from the melee DPS is paramount on Gruul, because his autoattack becomes so severe due to the grows.
I don't believe any one person has said put all Shaman and all Priests on Raid Healing. I believe it's either been a strong case for Put Shaman, or Put Priests...but never both together. I could be mistaken though.
Anyway, regarding your comment about the 25% AC buff, I personally dropped Inspiration and Holy Specialization. This is of course based around my guild's healing assignments for me, but as a mostly raid healer or on occasion OT healer (which ours are Druids), I asked if there was indeed an armor cap and received the following explanation:
I agree with a poster earlier that lamented the frequency with which healers get blamed. In my experience as MT, I would say that 20-30% of my deaths are in fact due to my play (slow to refresh SB, letting debuffs expire) or bad luck (consecutive hits eating charges leading to a crush). I am pretty anal about these things, and still find myself with responsibility a quarter of the time. I would venture to guess that yours and probably a lot of other tanks out there are at least as responsible and don't realize/admit it.
That said, I have read quite a few good ideas in this thread and want to emphasis a few of them that you may pass over.
1. Mele DPS getting parried: This is very often overlooked in the absence of a cleave, but can greatly impact the amount of damage taken by the tank. Drill it into the mele dpsers brains that they need to make every effort to avoid being parried. A mob that parries an attack will have his next attack increased in speed by up to 40%.
2. Imp Thunderclap/Imp Demo Shout - Not having these up religiously will kill your tank. Each one of these debuffs dramatically lowers incoming dps. As raid leader, you should download "Debuff Filter" from curse and filter out most of the debuffs so you can be positive these are always up. Encourage the warriors to do this as well and eventually pass the responsibility to them.
3. Tanking - Shield block always on cooldown after 5th growths or so. I prefer not to use it prior in order to convert the excess rage into agro, but that is a judgment call. Proactively use cooldowns. Sheild Wall/Last Stand/healthstone/seeds/pocket watch should be saved for late silences. Try not to use them as a reaction to low health because you won't have them later when you KNOW there aren't incoming heals. Iron Sheild Pots are a must after 9 growths for your first few kills. Imp LoH is nice.
4. Healing - WWS healing page has a stat called "Healing Focus". The closer to 0 this is for a player, the fewer players he/she is focused on. Your paladins should have far lower numbers for this stat than the other healers. You definitely don't want them to be raid healing. Leave that for a druid and a resto shaman if you can get one. HoTs need to be constantly refreshed on the MT/OT. Any healer w/ hots that isn't using a timer needs to get one. Hopefully your healers can conserve enough mana to spam max rank heals w/o canceling from 10 growths --> Death. If they can, overhealing is fine and should not be looked upon negatively. Inspiration is a huge armor buff, and any healers that have it should be healing the MT/OT after 9-10 growths.
Our server's instance servers went shit-tastic so we had to cancel our raid, which is immensely frustrating.
As a token MS warrior, can I just pick pieces of gear carefully, carry stoneshield potions later in the fight and expect to survive an intervene on the MT? I would like to do this without dying, for obvious reasons, and a lot of my decent DPS gear is gladiator's anyway.
My guild's DPS warrior does it every Gruul kill, look up Persis on Sargeras. He goes in with all his DPS gear on, just macro's a shield and intervene together. I imagine he hits shield block although I haven't asked. I can check our WWS parse to see if it appears on the Misc Gain for you.
We had a lot of tank deaths from just normal attacks by Gruul when we were first killing him. Here's what would happen: the tank would get a lucky avoidance streak, would stay topped off taking 0 damage for 5+ seconds, and too many healers would just stop casting. When he'd take damage again they'd resume casting, Gruul would land 4-5 hits in a row and the tank would die. This isn't something you resolve through theorycrafting, it's just LAZY HEALING. I've been guilty of it too, but it's really something that needs to be avoided. Like somebody else said in an L2heal thread, the ABCs of healing:
Always
Be
Casting
From an assignement standpoint, here's how I set up healing (assume 7 healers, that's about average for Gruul). At the start, it's a free-for-all. You heal whomever takes damage, keep your group topped off, all that. In the MT/OT group I drop Windfury Totem for better threat/rage generation. At 8 Growths, I swap Windfury for Grace of Air and 4 healers stick to the MT, 3 healers on the OT. Those healers are assigned before the pull.
It could be the fault of the warrior in part too. I know I try to spend as much rage as I can, so if I hit a massive avoidance streak, I may not have enough rage for shield block. This means the first hit after the streak can be a crush. I try to save bloodrage for this sort of situation. I doubt I'm the only warrior who could use some improvement in this area.
The comment above about parry is definately something you should look into.
On a related note, does anyone know a way to identify when a parry occurs? I tried configuring sw stat's uni-log-thingy to look for parry, but the only thing I could find was raid member's attack was parry/dodge/missed by Gruul the Dragonslayer (I couldn't look at parry alone).
A /cast Shieldblock /stopcasting /cast Intervene should take care of that I assume.
(correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm fairly certain any warrior with SB on is atleast crush immune for that period of time)
Depends on if they can get of the gear swap and still have a GCD worth of time to intervene prior to heals coming back up.
Completely feasible but not something one couldn't do without a little practice.
I am not your personal Frost Deathknight knowledge base. If you have a simple question, ask in the simple questions thread; if you have a more esoteric, specific, or complicated question, ask in the spec-appropriate thread.
My PM, WoWmail, and, especially, chat boxes are NOT the appropriate places for these questions.
Hah, pallies and druids are the last people I put on the tank on a heavy physical damage fight like this (well druids are somewhat good because of hots during reverb actually). 25% extra armor is what's going to prevent your tank from getting two-shot from ridiculous combos. Sure you may argue that it's not up all the time and it's luck based, but with a few priests/shamans on the MT, that means a significant % of the time your tank is much safer from getting destroyed. And let's not forget the sweet added threat ES gives your tank allowing him to spend more time concentrating on having SB and demo/tclap up. And I don't know where this myth about shamans being great at all raid healing is coming from, shamans are amazing at raid healing when you can use chain heal, which usually only applies to melee in most fights. If you can't use chain heal then you're stuck with Healing wave and without a full healing way stack that is far less efficient then similiar druid/priest/pally spells.
Apart from that for specific assignments I always do 2 ppl on raid healing (usually a druid/pally or 2 druids if we have 2 resto ones), 2 people on the OT, and the other 4 on the MT. Pre-healing is absolutly critical to tank survival at high growths. If your tank dies in the normal course of events (i.e. not right after/during reverb or shatter) and you're not at some obscene growth, point at your healers and tell them to preheal.
06/04/07, 12:12 PM
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