I thought that it would be worth making a post about this fight as I feel there is quite a lot to discuss about it. We just killed it tonight after around 7 hours of attempts on it in total but I felt that it was more down to luck rather then mastering the encounter.

In its current form it favours a very healer heavy raid (we used 9 tonight to kill it compared to the initial 7 we tried when we first engaged it) and even then people can, and will die with unlucky dice rolls. Here are some of the tough things to cope with in the encounter so far:

• Increased damage on bloodboil, prepatch it would do 600 damage every 3 seconds for 18 seconds on five targets. Now this has raised to 600 damage every second for 24 seconds.
  
• Two aggro switching abilities that can be mitigated causing issues with reliable tank switching.
  
• Debuff applied to MT every two seconds which can also be mitigated, with bad luck this stacks fast and with too many on the MT/OTs it makes healing them much harder.
  
• Sick damage done to people during Fel Rage, bad luck with crushing blows and arcing smash/acid breath is so much damage and not always possible to outheal. (http://files.filefront.com/fel_ragew.../fileinfo.html) - Also the breath lasting after Fel Rage fades causing instant death.

Has anyone else been working on this encounter post-patch? There are so many factors which allow for easier kills (eg. Rogues getting Fel Rage and popping evasion with sick damage output) thereby leading to unrepeatable kills. I would also be interested to hear what was changed in the patch exactly, was it just bloodboil or did the tank debuff change also? I know that quite a small percentage of guilds have seen this fight but after a rather tedious period of raiding on him I felt motivated to start a discussion here about the fight after talking inguild about it.

We just spent 3 hours on Gutogg. We knew nothing really going in and worked out a rough strategy in few attempts. Spent the rest of the time working out the kinks and making a few revelations to the mechanics. One problem we did have was the tanks not being able to properly transition and handle the debuffs. The tanks changed something around (I myself am not entirely sure what they changed) and it worked quite well.

Keep people with fel rage alive. Losing one with a significant amount of time left before the transition back to p1 is a wipe.

I don't want to spoil the fight, but while there is definitely a luck-element in the fight, most other fights have it too. Teron Gorefiend can potentially Shadow of Death four healers in a row or take away your dispellers. Thaladred can gaze the same person three times in a row, cornering him if he doesn't suspect it. The luck-factor was present in TBC with Sapphiron, Heigan and dates all the way back to Vaelastrasz, so it's nothing new. However, I don't think the luck factor draws the line between possible/impossible. The worst class possible to get Fel Rage is Mage. We've healed through it just fine a couple of times. We've failed miserably a few times too, but it's definitely possible. Warlock can get nasty too, but all other classes aren't bad at all. With good execution, I'm guessing that the elements that you've mentioned above (bad classes, crush + arcing + acid, etc...) will cause a wipe in estimated (pulled from my ass) 1 out of every 4 or 5 decent attempts, which is probably comparable to the bullshit that Hydross V1.0 used to pull when he was capable of one-shotting max-resist tanks at 100% debuff.

I guess it's easy for me to say because our first kill's FR order was: Paladin, Hunter, Shaman, Hunter, Druid(Feral), Druid(Resto). We were fortunate (no Mage, no Warlock), but we have healed through a Mage and Warlock's before. I couldn't ask for a much better FR order but it is hardly unrepeatable. We beat him in a little over three hours worth of attempts. I'm certain that we will run into some bad luck with him in the future, but with good execution, bad luck can only last so long. (or we can just sub out all of our Mages =D)

Is it too much to ask to make Fel Rage give 30k armor?

I think the fight is very strategy based and easily 1 shottable every week with the proper raid setup. The slight luck factor present in the fight as mentioned before has been in many many encounters before, but the chances of it breaking a clean kill is next to nonexistant.

I personally really like the fight, as it's pretty much one of the biggest individual skill checks I've seen in the game so far (much more than essence as well imo) and I think the bloodboil change made it a much better fight overall and turned it into a real challenge that you'd expect from a BT encounter unlike the 4 earlier bosses.

It's clearly balanced for 9-10 healers and bringing any less would of course make it much harder than it should be. If people don't fuck up bloodboils and the breath, and tanks do their job right the raid heals on residual effects from the normal phase during fel rage periods are very manageable and it's not hard to dedicate 90% of the heals to straight up allout spamming the tank, which from my experience is almost always not a problem in the vast majority of cases regardless of class. Of course, crazy shit like MS 15k crush crush crush on a mage happens, but that's what SW/brez are for right? ;p

As for tank swapping being broken... how do you figure? The eject itself is a pretty minor deaggro in comparison to most other fights with similar mechanics, the fight seems to me to be designed to have all tank switches completely reliant on the tanks themselves and not on the abilities. The goal is basically to have 2 warriors who are able to switch every 1-1.5min and any competent pair of warriors can pretty much flawlessly do it as many times as necessary. The fight is really alot more like Huhuran from a tank pov than something like voidreaver or broodlord, so it should be handled like that.

To help keeping Mages alive, tell them to cast Frost Armor, to slow Gurtoggs melee attacks by 25%.

Well the armour change would help it quite a lot, but also reducing the damage of the fel-acid breath. It has a 2 second cast and ticks every 5 seconds during the "normal" phase but during FR it is instant and ticks every second for over 5k damage.

I figured my opinion stems from trying him for a good 4 hours with only 7 healers. It was definately more manageable with 9 and I'm sure it would probably be even better with 10.

I think my problems with the tank switching is based on several attempts where eject/debilitating blow were mitigated and some attempts where they all landed. I'm not a tank though and did not really try to get too much involved with the switching, perhaps they need to do a little work on it if it is truly as controllable as you say.

We had only 7 healers attuned this week. It was somewhat excruciating.

Hah that sucks, I'm sure it's possible but I'd skip even trying with 7 healers, must be insanely intense on healers. ><

Regarding tanks though... I considered the benefits of 2 tanks vs 3-4 and I don't think there's really any benefit to using more than 2, all you're doing is in the end with that is making the switches less controllable and lowering the max threat ceiling for the dps in exchange for slightly easier healing. We found that healing a tank with 10-15 debuffs is np at all and that's about exactly the time it takes for the other tank's debuffs to wear off completely and for him to pick up aggro... worked really well and reliably for the many hours of progress and kill.

Yes and our kill actually came about when our 3rd tank died at about 70%.

I think a greater being is trying to tell us something..... Two tanks in future perhaps? :p