We run with four healing priests, so we had our DS priest spec PS in 2.3. PS really did make keeping up the squishier fel rage targets easier, even at a small portion of the duration of fel rage.

We use eight or nine healers preferably. An optimal setup would include two shadowpriests (one for the healergroup, one for the castergroup) and two restoshamans, who really prove their worth topping the healingmeters on this encounter, at least for us. For chainheal to work effectively, we have all ranged group up during the normal phase (except for the group that needs to take the debuff) and spread out right before the enrage phase, to avoid that AoE damage.

I don't think we have had much problems keeping people up since the encounter was nerfed. For most classes, it obviously isn't a problem (rogues can go evasion when MS hits, druids can goear). Mages/Priests are the hardest to keep up, on our first tries we had them using stamina gear, taking ironshield pots and mages using ice armor.

I'm not sure how much of a difference that makes, but even if one or two clothies die, you can still succeed in the encounter as long as you have people filling in with running out for the debuff. We have three groups rotating for the debuff, the melee and MT groups excluded. So non-tanks in the MT group can fill in when someone dies.

I find myself dpsing on a lot of fights as an OT, so I was thinking about going 0/46/15. When looking over fights, the only concern is Gurtogg threat generation. Do you think I have any chance of generating good aggro with this spec in max avoidance gear? Has anyone tried it? I'm thinking I could go to the back and start DWing when I'm third on the list, but I don't want to cause a wipe trying it.

The trick to making the healing on this fight very manageable is making excellent use of what each of your healing classes are best at, they all bring something which excels at a part of this encounter:

Lifebloom > Acid Debuffs
Chain Heal / Circle of Healing > Bloodboil
Holy Light and Flash of Light > Bloodboils melee hits (in both phases)
Vampiric Embrace > Healers going OOM early

With those points in mind, assign your healers by class to specific roles with each boss ability in mind. Suddenly the fight becomes much more manageable.

We have a bunch of flask of petrifications from pre-TBC. Does anyone have any ideas on what would happen if we had a clothie pop one during fel rage?

Just a side question, how many debuffs do peoples tanks usually take on both a 2tank and 3tank rotation, im still insistant ours take way too many.

I usually stop attacking when i have 10 debuffs, and lose aggro to the second tank when i have 14-15. We run a 3 tank setup, but most of the time we end up killing it with only 2 tanks ever having aggro. Look at the third tank as a safety measure for disorient-instant knockback situations

I'm guessing he turns and rips through your tanks and the rest of the raid.

Lifebloom is great for bloodboil as well.

Ya indeed they are, unfortunately we usually run with 1 druid (2 if we're lucky) and they are too-good at solo-stabilising all three tanks Acid Stacks to warrant taking them off that job =)

I joked in our guild healer channel that it'd be very fun to try 6 Druids + 3 Pallys for Bloodboil. Druids would lifebloom everything and pallys would Flash the rest . Lifebloom was made for this fight

Quick note: Resilience mitigates bloodboil ticks. So if a paladin has the libram that gives +resilience to the target it heals, the bloodboil will tick less. Arcane mages who are spell hit capped already due to talents + 5% spell hit in gear, could also be very helpful in surviving fel enrage as the talent for reaching spell hit cap for arcane spell school means you can use some pvp gear in absence of +spell hit in the gear. That being said, we rarely use 2 mages. 1 at most due to how crappy this encounter is should the mage get targetted for fel enrage. Not sure if this has been posted or not.

He can't crit during felrage (he can crush though, but molten armor does nothing against that).

Ill just paste some interesting snippets from our WWS when we learnt Bloodboil:

Maladictia (priest)

12:52'38 Gurtogg Bloodboil's Arcing Smash hits Maladictia for 21940

Asirian (rogue)

12:11'17 Gurtogg Bloodboil's Melee hits Asirian for 10051
12:11'18 Gurtogg Bloodboil's Melee hits Asirian for 15149 (crushing)

Chn (shaman)

12:11'00 Gurtogg Bloodboil's Melee hits Chn for 5957
Gurtogg Bloodboil's Melee hits Chn for 3269

12:11'01 Gurtogg Bloodboil's Melee hits Chn for 9506 (crushing)
Gurtogg Bloodboil's Arcing Smash hits Chn for 6732

12:11'02 Gurtogg Bloodboil's Melee hits Chn for 3043
Gurtogg Bloodboil's Eject hits Chn for 1758
Gurtogg Bloodboil's Melee hits Chn for 5560

Across these three different armor classes he was perfectly capable of doing 25-30k dam in 2-3 seconds.

25-30k? Try 45k.

20:10'08.070 Gurtogg Bloodboil's Melee hits Plussa for 5018
226 Gurtogg Bloodboil's Melee hits Plussa for 18002 (crushing)
20:10'09.007 Plussa's Drain Life dots Gurtogg Bloodboil for 2020 Shadow damage
804 Gurtogg Bloodboil's Melee hits Plussa for 5534
851 Gurtogg Bloodboil's Melee hits Plussa for 17939 (crushing)

This was on a lock, if it matters.

04:49'08.812 Gurtogg Bloodboil's Arcing Smash hits Copernicus for 15885
812 Gurtogg Bloodboil's Bloodboil dots Copernicus for 600 Physical damage
04:49'09.015 Gurtogg Bloodboil's Melee hits Copernicus for 18999 (crushing)

After that night, we only ever brought one mage to the encounter.

Damn.

Is it too much to ask to alter Fel Rage to give at least 25k armor?

I had a question regarding Heals on the 3 Tanks' Acidic Wounds. I originally planned on using our two Restoration Druids to keep constant HoTs on all 3 tanks, but after reading here, I've seen a lot of guilds only use 1 Resto Druid for it. My question is, what happens if that Resto Druid gets Fel Raged, do you just have another Healer pick up the last heals on those MTs until they wear off. Do you guys use a last "spot healer" who's helping out all over the place?

My plan for going into the fight:

Current MT + Fel Rage: 3 Pallies + Imp. DS Priest
Acid Debuff - Resto Druid
Bloodboils: 1 CoH Priest 2 Resto Shamans standing with their groups.
Possibly a spot healer as aforementioned, most likely a second Resto Druid, if not a Ret Pally or Feral in healing gear,

This would be about 8-9 Healers.

Heres how I do it. We have 2 restro druids on ot healing but theres a small catch. We call one of them primary-ot healer and the other is secondary-ot healer.

The primary druid is fulltime on lifeblooms and the secondary one only helps when the other one says (on vent) that he needs it, which is obviously when the debuffs stack too high. Until then, the secondary druid helps with melee healing/bloodboil healing/mt healing - whereever you feel the raid will benefit really.

If the primary druid healer gets fel rage, the secondary one takes over his role immediately. So usually our 9 healer setup looks like:

- 4 mt healers (3 pally+priest)
- 3 bloodboil healers (2 shaman+coh priest)
- 1 primary ot healer (druid)
- 1 secondary ot healer (druid again, but any other class could do it if you dont have two in a raid)

Basically, with a little communication between your two ot-healers (I just say druid because its all I ever put on this role, its made for them) the acic-wound debuffs should be handled with ease.

That helps a ton, thanks much!

Another question. We typically run pretty Mage heavy, 3-4 a raid usually. While we'll have to rotate some out for Healers obviously, its likely there will be times when we have to run 2-3 due to sheer numbers. What other ways can we go about keeping them alive. Stack full HP/Armor Gear? Have the Destro Lock use Imp instead of Succy sac? Or are we boned no matter what?

Bloodboil really is a fight where you just want 1 mage in the raid. Even then, the 1 mage is only really there in case theres loot that drops (to avoid sharding drops) and provide AI - sub the rest out (assuming you have other dps/healers available).

If you have no choice but to have excess (aka three) mages in the raid you have to accept that if you get unlucky with Fel rages and they get targetted - there is a high chance they will die (even with the tricks others have mentioned) and this may result in a wipe depending how early they die into phase 2. Your raid will not be happy when this happens, if you have mail/plate wearing classes outside yet chose to keep excess mages in the raid.

With some luck, if your fel rage person dies quite late (eg 25 sec) the Tank might be able to live for a few sec until phase 1 re-starts. If they die early, you better hope your warrior has shield wall available =)

I tell all warlocks to use imps for this fight, well the two in bloodboil groups at least. I usually wear my full sta set and forget about dps for the most part (like archimonde), In our usually less-than-perfect bloodboil, we might kill him ~8 minutes, easily before the enrage. Its not worth me personally wearing normal dps gear if it means I have a very high chance to die during fel rage. However, other mages might choose to do the fight differently in other guilds. Long story short = you shouldnt be relying on mage dps to kill Bloodboil comfortable within his timer, so I think its better you tell your mages to focus on staying alive - and part of that is wearing smart sta gear options.

There are various 'tricks' to keep people alive I guess - like stoneshield pots, LOH on cloth targets who get fel rage, using healthstones/healthpots when in danger - but really it comes back to this obvious conclusion: Spam a shit-load of healing on the fel rage target and hope for the best. It doesnt matter what tricks you try if you dont have excellent fel-rage healing to begin with. During a fel rage the healing setup might look like this

- 6 fel rage healers
- 1 Acid Wound OT healer (might need to keep 2 on, depends how high your tanks debuffs are at the time)
- 2 Bloodboil healers (We usually have 3 on bloodboil, but one of them will switch to fel rage healing if the other 2 are managing fine when phase 2 begins)

The best thing you can do to improve the survivability of your fel rage target (especially mages) is to watch those 6 healers carefully and make sure they are spamming max-rank heals non-stop immediately as the phase begins. Are your healers running oom and having to stop casting? Are they using lower ranks because they are worried about going oom? Those things you need to find out and adjust your setup as necessary to prevent it happening (aka , group them with a shadow priest). When we learnt bloodboil, I pasted wws death replays of all fel rage targets to ascertain whether the death was just 'bad luck' or whether the healers were just not putting enough healing on the tank (aka no heals for 2-3+ seconds) or whether the player themself used a healthstone/healthpot - its a great tool.

Have amplify magic up on the whole raid before pulling also helps a lot, as very few damages are magical (and in those particular cases the difference will be barely noticeable).

1) Eases bloodboils and MT healing.
2) Eases fel rage healing. A mage should always apply amp magic on the fel rage, but it's just easier to buff everyone, and it saves a GCD to nuke.

Is it even possible for him to Fel-Rage a non tanking Warrior? Out of our 48 combined attempts and kills, I have never been hit with it. I also recently recieved a tell from another Warrior asking me what I did during Fel-Rage simply because he's never been hit with it either yet.

So if someone has 1 or more rage already when he goes to target someone, it will randomly target everyone but them?