Daxe

Sometimes you have to learn encounters in a hard way, when you might not get the 'optimal' raid or even close to that. With 8 healers and 1 shadow priest, its definately doable. We have done it with 7 healers and 1 shadow priest and wasnt even that close. Wasn't an easy task to do tho... warlocks were drain lifing in order to save healers mana and so on. So my suggestion would be.. keep on trying, because with that setup it will go down.

To improve healing... i would say:
- Take all the wlocks you can because they can overheal bloodboil dots. Also.. as u might know, 1-2 mages max.
- Assing a resto shaman to cast earth shield on fel rage target as soon as possible.
- Nice spread right before p2 is about to start. Wont kill low hp ppl and once again saves healer's mana which is very important when doing it with 1 spriest and 8 healers.

About your main change.. the difference aint that great. It really isnt that bad for healers to be in the bb cycle. Besides.. it would be a huge loss of dps to put melee running back and forward. What u might want to do.. is to put maybe one or 2 melees to replace important healers, such as MT healer paladins in bb rotation. We usually have mt group warlock or extra feral druids to do that job. Rest of the melee who wont be in that cycle can be used to replace dead bbgroup members if they happen to die.

 

Daxe

Mm.. this has happened to us couple of times now:

Fel rage phase begins and gurtogg charges towards a hunter and starts spanking him. Everything goes fine.. he wont die. Then, when p1 is about to start all over again gurtogg still stays on hunter. He didnt feign or anything and he surely wasnt even close to gain aggro at the end of p1. At this point we told him to feign, so he did and gurtogg switches back to the tanks. Hunter stops to feign dead and gurtogg once again runs towards him, one shots and comes back to regular tanks.

I would like to point out that hunter wasnt even close to get aggro and he wasnt next to the wall. Same has happened with other classes (druid). Have any of u experienced the same?

 

Vazu

We found it enormously useful for our Warlocks, Priests (shadow) and Mages to wear partial PVP gear for this. This may have been posted already. I haven't gone through and read everything in this thread, but unless you lose massive amounts of Spell Hit, surviving is just too important here. The added stamina plus Resilience without nerfing your stats too much is very preferable. I'm normally in the 1000-1500 range for combined DPS with my pet. On this fight I can barely manage 700-800, but I haven't died from a Fel Rage yet. Not in 14,000 health and 225 Resilience. It's worth noting that Resilience affects Bloodboil DOTs as well.

Edit: Also, the moment we moved our shadow Priests into a healing group with resto Shaman (running Tranquil Air + Salvation), it solved all of their aggro problems right away. Plus it gives 4 healers in that group incredible regen.

 

Touf

The stamina is good, but the resilience doesn't do anything.

 

Hate Monkey

This is a problem with the encounter. Possibility #1, even though Fel Rage is over, he sticks to his target for a while, sometimes 2-3 seconds after the phase is over, and he's supposed to be on the tanks. Possibility #2, he also could of resisted the Insignificance debuff and built up threat that way during the phase, also Druids are notorious for resisting Insignificance.

 

Vazu

I'd love to get some confirmation on this. Doesn't Resilience, even on cloth wearing classes, mitigate crushing blows?

 

• Chicken

Resilience is for critical hits and for DoT damage reduction only. The only thing a person can do about Crushing Blows is either getting their armor higher, or having over 87% miss/dodge/parry/block.

 

Vazu

Ok, is a Crushing Blow considered a critical hit for the purpose of calculating damage reduction from Resilience then? If not, what's the game mechanic difference between a regular hit and a crushing blow then?

 

amethyst

Crushing blows and critical hits are 100% totally separate entities.

The hit table from a lvl 73 boss will have 15% of his attacks being crushing blows. Typically they have about 5% chance to critical as well.

Crushing blows do 150% normal damage and criticals do 200% normal damage.

I never felt the need to wear resilience gear in a raid, so can't give you any practical info on that.

As someone above said however, the only way to eliminate crushing blows is to push them off the hit table. Typically, only warriors and paladins can do this, by using shield blocks.

 

Zindel

Gurtogg can't crit anyway, the only benefit from resilience that I can see is mitigating the dot damage from bloodboil.

 

Aslin

I wouldn't be so sure about that unless you mean only during Fel Rage..

We experienced a few wipes last night because Gurtogg seemed to go over to the MT right after fel rage and take him from 20k hp to dead in 4 seconds flat -- crit, dot tick, crush, crush, crush, dot tick, crush, dead.

I think our MT said he was something like .13% under crit immune because of a recent gear change.

 

Cardynal

I wear 2-3 stam pieces for this fight. It gives me just enough to break 10k hp. This isn't really for the tanking part should I become his target in phase 2, but more to survive the nature attack he does right before the transition.

If your healers are doing their job, of which you should have 3-4 only healing the person tanking in phase 2...and another 3-4 healing the people taking dot ticks, you should not have a problem with people staying up. The only time we really see people die is when they take poison ticks as the phase transitions from 2 to 1.

 

Touf

3-4 healers? How does that work when Mortal Strike goes up?

 

SecSolidus

We have 2 people Buffer healing during Fel Rages, and the remaining healers ( Depending on how many in raid ) go on the Fel Rage person. Those 2 Buffer/Raid healers can take care of Warrior DoT Ticks and remaining Bloodboils without a problem, ( try CoH Priest and Resto Druid ) 3-4 people on the Fel Raged person will lead to some nasty deaths if not countered via a lucky dodge/class ability.

Solidus Guildmaster of < Security >

This valorous visitation of a bygone vexation, stands vivified and has vowed to vanquish these venal and virulent vermin vanguarding vice and vouchsafing the violently vicious and voracious violation of volition.

 

amethyst

Anyone tried pain suppression on his random target when he gains fel enrage?

We killed him last night, but none of our priests were spec'd for it. Strikes me it could trivialise the fel enrage part of this fight.

 

Beren

We have always used two bears to tank Gurtog, mostly because he couldnt crush, but he also seemed to not crit much at all either.

However, last night he was critting our bears often. It was not a huge deal, as they just replaced some agi gear with more true bearish gear, but it was wierd.

 

◊ vorpalblade

He can absolutely crush. In addition, it is in your best interests never ever to have anyone tank any boss who doesn't have 5.6% crit mitigation, ever. Avoidance gear is wonderful on this fight for slowing the application of the debuff on the tanks, but avoidance is never ever a substitute for being crit capped against a level 73 boss.

 

Akron

Yesterday we had a Pain Suppression priest, used it when Fel Rage was on weaker classes like Priests and Mages, worked well. One-shotted him with ease. Gurtogg's ability to destroy classes without avoidance abilities / high armor no matter how much healing they receive is very annoying - one PS priest surely makes it easier.

 

ionlylooklazy

hey, we had our first attempts on bloodboil last night, best attempt was about 60something percent.

we had 8 healers, 2 spriests. we'll take another healer next time (one pally had ISP issues)

last night we had 3 priests (2 CoH, 1 IDS), 4 shamans, 1 pally (we only have one resto druid and 2 active pallies in guild, qq)

we had some dificulty in keeping fel rage target alive, and with aggro control. (using 2 prot wars and feral bear)

i think improving our healer allocation can solve the former

we had each priest take a bloodboil group, while the shamans and pally healed the tanks

each bloodboil ticks for 600/sec for 24sec. so thats 3k DPS per bloodboil, easily enough for a CoH priest to keep up with.
with a possibility of 3 bloodboils up at a time (only for 6sec).


i was curious, why doesn't anyone only use one group to take all the bloodboils?

i was thinking a group with 4 locks and a shadowpriest for taking all the bloodboils. they will have up to 3 bloodboils at a time, ticking for 1800/sec. taking into account VE, and fel armor, that should be enough for two priests to heal through easily.

post patch my raid-buffed CoH averages ~ 1000/person for 3333 HPS max. with 4/5 targets having fel armor, that average HPS to about 4000 max. so for two CoH priests thats about 8k HPS on the group, and with the additional HPS from VE, that should enough to cover three bloodboils on the group, let alone when only two are ticking.

this would free up the third healer for other purposes.

am i missing something? or do i just suck and people still only use 2 healers for bloodboil?

hmm. i guess there would be range limitation on the shadowpriest

 

nataku

Given the choice between pain suppression spec'd priest or a Circle of Healing priest, I'd take CoH anyday. Being able to heal two BB groups solo with CoH given a constant flow of mana from spriest/innervates trivializes the fight more than using PS to deal with 1-2 fel enrages.

The only class we've ever had issues with keeping up are mages (which we only take one to on Bloodboil raids to lower the chance of a mage being chosen, and for amp magic) as long as your healers understand they need to swap from mana efficiency to bigger heals.

 

Tempestra

For what it's worth, over the past month, Gurtogg has gone from needing 9, 8, 6, 3, to finally 2 attempts last night, so there's definitely an element of strategy/skill needed to complement that healthy dose of luck =)

 

• Latito

Now THAT is a lot of aggro. 4k HPS is 2k TPS before Salv. Even with Tranq Air added in, you're looking at a lot of threat for the tanks to keep ahead of, especially on a knockback type fight. Not to mention that shadow priest will be generating a good chunk of threat too if he's expected to keep up VE for the entire duration of P1 while doing enough dps to contribute to the required healing for the phase.

Generally my guild finds it better to assign 3 healers each to 1 bloodboil group. This adds in the "complexity" of people switching locations a lot and making sure groups stand near each other for CoH / Chain Heal, keeping Bloodboil on the proper people, especially on spread-out for the start of P2. That said, our 3 BB healers are still quite high on threat generally.. switching to just 2 would make it really tough.

If you can, give it a try - just make sure you have those 2 CoH priests in a group with a 2nd shadow priest and a resto shaman dropping TA. Lots of mana, lots of threat reduction.

 

Sariaa

The down side to trying to have 4 warlocks and a shadowpriest trying to take all the bloodboils is that it refreshes the timer when you get another dot on you. So you will have 1, then 2, then 3, then 4, then 5. Because it will be getting refreshed. Where as if you had 3 separate groups it would be fading on group 1 when it is their turn to take BB again. If you had some crazy healing it might be doable, but I don't think it would be worth it, as overall they will be taking way more damage than if 3 groups were 3 single bloodboils. As 600 per seconds is easier to heal than 3000 per second.

 

Whitemane

Not to mention that you will incur 300k extra healing each round just because of bloodboil being refreshed. It's just not feasible to stack bloodboils.

 

ionlylooklazy

oh, I guess I just assumed it would wear off after 24 seconds . oh well