Gurtogg Bloodboil - Luck or Strategy?

RikkiP · 06/10/07, 8:41 PM

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.

Melador · 06/10/07, 11:29 PM

Haven't downed him yet, but I can absolutely agree that (with 7 healers) the difference in keeping up a rogue/druid/warrior through Fel Rage was night and day different from (failing in) keeping up a mage.

Croto · 06/11/07, 2:15 AM

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.

Bokchoy · 06/11/07, 3:17 AM

Originally Posted by RikkiP

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.

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)

Dartan · 06/11/07, 3:38 AM

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

Schneeb · 06/11/07, 4:15 AM

I was present for quite a few of our tries, as with death wish we probably could have killed it earlier but for a few mistakes (you can feign death of of fel rage! / really early fel rage deaths). It seems like the wanted fel rage tobe abit like burning adrendalin at vael where a dps class can do 1/2% of the boss themselves.

The tank swapping is kind of broken, there seems tobe two abilities that can force a tank swap but without a tank stopping making any threat sometimes this could never happen, leaving the timing of certain debuffs completely fubar.

This was an extremely steep learning curve and I wish we had had the chance to probe his abilities when bloodboil ticked every 3 sec, any other instance and it would have got boring but being able to repair directly on the 1 minute corpserun really is a testament to how well BT is designed.

Originally Posted by Dartan

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

Its not really the persons armor, the -50% healing debuff makes things go pearshaped

mko · 06/11/07, 7:46 AM

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.

Katherine · 06/11/07, 7:48 AM

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

RikkiP · 06/11/07, 7:49 AM

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.

Schneeb · 06/11/07, 8:16 AM

mko we basically learnt the fight with 3 tanks as the disorient is a guaranteed agro swap and the second tank could in theory (dual wielding boss) take 5/6 debuffs with an unlucky avoidance string leaving you with one tank on 5/6 debuffs and another on 8+ during felrage, you dont really want either to pick it up again for an entire phase so its gets really complicated.

I guess our weakness is the tanking as the rest of the fight we can perform np

RikkiP · 06/11/07, 8:16 AM

Originally Posted by mko

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.

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.

Demi9OD · 06/11/07, 8:18 AM

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

mko · 06/11/07, 8:29 AM

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.

Schneeb · 06/11/07, 8:38 AM

Come to think of it, our 3 tank strat basically evolved from when we were trying it with 7 healers, all was fine really apart from healing the felrage guy which was obviously very very short of working

RikkiP · 06/11/07, 8:55 AM

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

Seth · 06/11/07, 9:06 AM

Originally Posted by mko

It's clearly balanced for 9-10 healers and bringing any less would of course make it much harder than it should be.

I havent been at any given boss fight after Bloodboil but any of them must be made to be doable with 9-10 healers in raid. That is only true if you think the instance must have good overall design. If you need 6-7 healers for whole instance and 9-10 for one boss than you have a problem.
Yes i know we are talking here for top guilds only atm, but what will happend when average raid guild come to this point? Not everyone have the luxury of 10 people waiting in front of the BT.

Schneeb · 06/11/07, 9:16 AM

Originally Posted by Seth

I havent been at any given boss fight after Bloodboil but any of them must be made to be doable with 9-10 healers in raid. That is only true if you think the instance must have good overall design. If you need 6-7 healers for whole instance and 9-10 for one boss than you have a problem.
Yes i know we are talking here for top guilds only atm, but what will happend when average raid guild come to this point? Not everyone have the luxury of 10 people waiting in front of the BT.

Its no different than the fight requiring two tanks and the attunement (kael/hyjal) requiring 4/5, as for healers i'd imagine most guilds would have 10 or more active healers...

Seth · 06/11/07, 9:27 AM

Originally Posted by Schneeb

Its no different than the fight requiring two tanks and the attunement (kael/hyjal) requiring 4/5, as for healers i'd imagine most guilds would have 10 or more active healers...

The point is that you can do whole ssc/tk with the same raid and i dont think this is the case with BT at the moment.

♦ Praetorian · 06/11/07, 9:30 AM

Well doesn't it arguably only "require" 9 healers because you're still gearing up? Wouldn't increased healer longevity, increased HPS via +heal and especially +haste for the burst healing, allow for a reduction of that number?

When we first killed Patchwerk, we brought 17 or 18 healers, which was more than we'd bring for any other fight and more than we'd bring for any DPS check in the zone, but that's because we were undergeared for the fight. Later on we could do Patchwerk with 14 healers no problem. Isn't that how it should be?

• Quigon · 06/11/07, 9:37 AM

Originally Posted by Praetorian

Well doesn't it arguably only "require" 9 healers because you're still gearing up? Wouldn't increased healer longevity, increase HPS via +heal and especially +haste for the burst healing, allow for a reduction of that number?

When we first killed Patchwerk, we brought 17 or 18 healers, which was more than we'd bring for any other fight and more than we'd bring for any DPS check in the zone, but that's because we were undergeared for the fight. Later on we could do Patchwerk with 14 healers no problem. Isn't that how it should be?

So gear replaces skill and execution? Healers are readily replaced by epics? I don't think thats a very good design personally. We beat patchwerk the same way week 1 as we did week 30 or whatever it was, same class makeup, same theorycrafting quotas - maybe he died a bit sooner. The whole idea that you have to outgear an instance to stand a shot at it is well - not good imo. Its a massive step back to the everquest days, and should have been moved past. So we use 18 healers to get us epics, and now we bench them down the road once they've served their purpose.

Gear should serve a purpose to make things easier - to some degree. The best guilds should be able to drop illidan with execution, while gear over time allows others to catch up - as it was before BC really.

Once you beat an encounter - over time execution and strategy and gear makes it slightly easier - but that isn't the encounter 4 months later. The time that matters most is when you first beat it, and what strategies are in play to do that. Every major end-game guild stacks their raid to no end really, if that meant 15 healers, or 15 tanks to get a world first - you can bet it would happen.

You could argue that 4H required 8 tanks. But then we could also say it was doable with 7, or 6, or now adays maybe 3-4 tanks. But realistically, it required 8 for every first kill. Some guilds brought 10, some brought 7, but it really was basically "8."

Stigmata · 06/11/07, 9:38 AM

I would suggest that with our relatively small raiding group (we only have 10 healers in the guild i think) we are more likely to have better gear than most doing the encounter.

So I can relate to the patchwerk comment given I was healer back then, but as far as healers go now, the gear difference is not that great. (haste items excluded)

♦ Praetorian · 06/11/07, 9:47 AM

Originally Posted by Quigon

So gear replaces skill and execution? Healers are readily replaced by epics? I don't think thats a very good design personally. We beat patchwerk the same way week 1 as we did week 30 or whatever it was, same class makeup, same theorycrafting quotas - maybe he died a bit sooner. The whole idea that you have to outgear an instance to stand a shot at it is ridiculous - its a massive step back to the everquest days, and should have been moved past. So we use 18 healers to get us epics, and now we bench them down the road once they've served their purpose.

Gear should serve a purpose to make things easier - to some degree. The best guilds should be able to drop illidan with execution, while gear over time allows others to catch up - as it was before BC really.

Once you beat an encounter - over time execution and strategy and gear makes it slightly easier - but that isn't the encounter 4 months later. The only time that matters is when you first beat it, and what strategies are in play to do that. Every major end-game guild stacks their raid to no end really, if that meant 15 healers, or 15 tanks to get a world first - you can bet it would happen.

Well, I'm not sure that 9 healers really counts as "stacking." If the fight required 12, I'd be bitching. You have 4 classes that can heal. So let's say you have 3 paladins, 2 holy priests, 2 resto druids, and 2 resto shamans on a raid. Is that a "stacked" raid? Back in 40-man days, 15-16 healers was typical. 16/40 = 40%. 40% of 25 is 10. And back then only 3 of 8 classes could heal, now we have 4 of 9 that can.

I'd agree that an encounter that required serious stacking of one class until you were overgeared for it would be bad, but I differ regarding the definition of serious stacking. We typically run with 6 healers, and have done every fight through SSC/TK and the first parts of BT/Hyjal with 6 healers (Naj'entus with 6 healers sucked fyi). Obviously we'll need to bring more for this. But 6 is very healer-light. I'd say you have a spectrum ranging from 6-10 in terms of a "normal" number of healers. Below 6 and you're insanely DPS-heavy. Above 10 and you're stacking healers.

If the complaint is that a healing intensive fight is much easier with a healing-heavy raid, I'm not sure I see the problem with that. This isn't raid-stacking, Naxx style, where 4H means 8 warriors from now until eternity, or where any hunter or warlock you bring to Loatheb is always going to be a complete liability. Bringing an extra rogue or warlock for a DPS burn fight, or an extra priest or two for a heal-heavy fight, doesn't really strike me as unreasonable. They may not be "necessary," but of course they're going to help.

And, of course, DPS gear progression is even clearer than healer progression, so the fights that people think might not be doable with 8-9 healers right now will be doable as people continue to improve their DPS gear.

Seth · 06/11/07, 9:47 AM

Yes i am aware about gearing but if you want to do the fight with 7 instead of 9 healers than every healer need to have 30% more hps (i realy dont think mana can be issue with shadow priests). With full t6 gear maybe i will have that hps but this will require a lot of time and untill then we are stuck with people for one fight only.
Patchwerk is good example but cant cover the "mage" problem of Bloodboil. At Patchwerk we had healers with better gear but we had tanks with better gear too. Here we have "tanks" with same gear as on out first kill. Do you think you would kill Patchwerk with 14 healers after few months farm of Naxx if your tanks had only pre Patchwerk gear?

• Quigon · 06/11/07, 9:59 AM

Originally Posted by Praetorian

And, of course, DPS gear progression is even clearer than healer progression, so the fights that people think might not be doable with 8-9 healers right now will be doable as people continue to improve their DPS gear.

I agree that gear is supposed to help people beat encounters, I am just saying that basically what is "required" is really what you see your first time there, everything after that is just farming. If this requires 9-10 healers, thats what it is for today really... that was my point, cause even on patchwerk, one should be able to use the same strat on day 1 as they do months later without it feeling like you're gimping yourself.

People will do anything necessary for a kill - even if that means, for instance, stacking. Yeah, this isn't really a bad example of stacking - and I personally don't have a huge issue with stacking within reason.

Essentially encounters shouldn't require 6 months in SSC and TK25 to beat in BT - and likewise, gear shouldn't be able to cut your healers by 25% - both of those seem like bad designs. I know the reality of the situation doesn't match the healer point. But its like you said with Hyjal and doing it with 20 or so people instead of 25. On vashj and kael for instance there are enough moving parts that people won't be readily replaced by some purples later on.

Egel · 06/11/07, 10:10 AM

We killed Bloodboil this week by having all of our healers online and making our shamans and druids respec to healing (and have a dps warrior respec prot to replace our feral tank). For next week we have recruited a new healer. The encounter isn't that difficult per se --- if you do have enough healing the fight is fun --- but requiring 50% more healers than the norm is unreasonable IMO. Keeping the dot damage like it was before the buff, or increasing it just a bit maybe, and tuning the enrage timer instead would be a better way to buff Bloodboil.

Better gear won't help all that much since the actual number of healers matters. You won't be able to drink more mana pots with better gear for example.