He doesn't target warriors, as far as I can tell. I've seen him go on a druid in bear form. Really easy phase.

I've never seen Gurtogg pick anyone with a rage bar for Fel Rage; never seen him use it on a warrior, and I've only seen him go for druids if they were not in bear form at the time (The druids do usually switch to bear form if they do get it, since it boost their survivability significantly).

An amusing side-effect of those kind of mechanics is that if you are using a Prot Paladin as tank on Gurtogg he is a potential target for Fel Rage.

Be careful if you do though, do not let the paladin have his back right to the waterfall, as if you're tanking right up against the waterfall, Fel Rage will fail on you (because you can't grow), though it wont fail on Gurtogg.

I believe Nature Damage counts as magic damage. If so, I would not put amplify magic on the entire raid. Have melee click it off. In our pulls, our rogues usually take nearly 100% nature damage. Same goes for warriors, enhancement shaman, etc. However, those at range and taking the Bloodboil usually take 100% physical damage. I would also say it's worth throwing Amplify Magic on whoever gets Fel Rage, even if they are melee.

Our tank said that something was overriding his Demo Shout. He thought it might have been Curse of Weakness. Anyone else have this problem? Do they not stack?

Also, our tank doesn't want to blow Shield Wall if the person with Fel Rage dies and Gurtogg goes to him. He wants to save it for the end of the fight. He believes the healers should be able to keep him alive. Is it possible to keep someone up without the extra 30,000 hit points for any length of time?

I also suggested using Intervene near the end of Fel Rage when Gurtogg starts hitting harder and faster. Our tank said he did not want to risk intervening because he still has the debuff from Phase 1 ticking and he could take enough damage to get himself killed. I'd appreciate some feedback since I have seen several posts recommending the use of Shield Wall and Intervene. Would anyone advise against it?

If he doesn't shield wall when a fel raged person dies, it very well might _become_ the end of the fight...

What is so special about the end of the fight that is different than any other typically controlled part of the fight? He doesn't have a 10% enrage or anything...

Edit: No, it's not reasonable to expect healers to be able to heal the tank during fel rage when he does not have the fel rage buff. If it were, the fight would be easy, as it wouldn't matter if a fel rage target died, if you could reasonably just heal the MT. It is _possible_ to do it, say you screw up twice and SW is already down, or whatever. But you can't blame the healers for not being able to keep up the tank vs a fel raged gurtogg.

Weakness and Demo shout don't stack, but they also don't remove each other, I believe. Possibly it was another warrior overwriting it?

If fel rage target dies, and your tank has shield wall available, he should use it, period. Sure, It is definitely possible to keep up an un-shield-walled tank through a fel raged phase, but your healers have to be FAST, and your tank probably has to get lucky with a few avoided attacks. Losing a fel-raged target is the easiest way to lose a tank... a tank that's unwilling to use cooldowns to survive that scenario shouldn't be tanking this fight. From my experience, the only time I've EVER had to use shield wall on this fight is if a fel rage target dies. It is far more reasonable to expect your healers to keep you up with 20 fel-acid debuffs ticking during a normal phase than it is to expect them to heal through Gurtogg doing double damage to you plus however many debuffs you have simultaneously ticking. There is no rational reason to "save" your shield wall for the end of the fight.

Intervene on a Fel Rage target at first sounded like it would be helpful, but back during our learning attempts when I was still trying that, all it ever did was get me killed, since I'd always have debuffs ticking anyway, and all the healers are watching the fel rage target. Your tank's armor is already reduced from Fel Acid, it's usually too much to risk having him intervene. It's much more advisable to simply have your healers be on the ball and do all they can to keep the target alive. Lose a fel rage target and you can recover, lose a tank and you're probably going to wipe.

Fel Rage lasts 30 seconds - this includes the time it takes to grow, switch targets and charge off to the new target. In reality, if Gurtogg 2-shots whoever gets Fel Rage, the "most" your tank will need to tank a fel-raged Gurtogg for is ~25 seconds. If Shield Wall is up, use it. If you have a bear tanking.. hope he's got some clicky-trinkets.

Yesterday our first target of Fel Rage was a holy priest. She (yes, it's a she!) died after about 15 seconds. Luckily, Gurtogg went back to the tank that was second on aggro list (KTM was cheating I suppose), which was a feral druid. The healers kept him up and we proceeded to kill Gurtogg.

Also, for want of a dps class online, we went there with 11 (!) healers, even though our usual setup is 9-10. We killed him 35 seconds before enrage.

To be quite honest im stunned that with 11 healers (assuming 2-4 bloodboil, rest for tanks) you couldn't keep someone up.
Did she get PS and your healers slacked off after? or was there simply an insta-gib situation, and if so do you have the numbers?

With 6+ healers on one person fully healing them as much as they can, and that person still getting killed is seriously just obvious proof of how retardedly overhard that phase is, considering the buff is ment to make it somewhat even regardless of who gets Fel Rage.

Well, it's obvious that everyone should use any survival timer available, and in the case of this priest, maybe she forgot inner fire, dying with 11 healers is indeed surprising.

Had our MT bear get Fel Rage last week, which was the first time I've ever seen anyone with a Rage bar get Fel Raged. He ran in as a Bear and im fairly positive he never shifted out to Combat Rez which might possibly flag him as having a mana bar and a suitable target for Fel Rage.

So i've come to the conclusion based on what I've seen that only Warriors can't be targetted with Fel Rage. Given that we've killed him 10+ times and we run consistently with 4 Warriors, the odds of him never picking a Warrior are pretty low. Not revolutionary knowledge I know!

Anyways we've had our Fel Raged target die quite a few times (everyone has im sure) and its almost never a wipe. We tend to wipe more if theres severe downs with 'dancing' blood boils and those same people getting hit by the acid splash during the transition. Shield Wall will typically save them even if they have tank a near full Fel Rage. If its just a few seconds then we simply heal through it. A tank death (although bad) doesn't typically spell wipe and I think thats contributed to using three tanks (some guilds use two, we use three for safety).

Seen some pretty wicked dodge streaks from our Feral Druid who had to tank the whole duration of a Fel Rage when our sole Dagger rogue lost the debuff because he failed to grow (was standing too close to the wall). It was impressive to watch the Druid tank the entire phase only taking ticks from the debuff (from previous stage) and equally amazing at how high backstab can crit. I thought that if you failed to grow that you lost Fel Rage altogether but this appeared to not be the case. Although the Rogue wasn't typical Fel Rage size he still managed to have all of the good aspects of Fel Rage present.

Depending on your normal phase 1 raid setup, you might not need to consciously spread out. We first tried bloodboil in the slopey hallway and found it was too difficult to spread out, so instead I made a pic for this setup. This lets you make use of the long length of the room well rather than feel restricted if you are only using the narrow width of the room. Of course any setup can work, but this has been good for us:

I'm a little late to this party, but it's not anywhere near impossible to keep a tank up on fel rage even without the player buff or shield wall. When you think about it, tanks negate crushing blows and have avoidance. It's just the fact that having half as much HP means spike death from 2 consecutive high end hits becomes a problem. (And usually if/when the original target for Fel Rage dies, it means that Gurtogg's speed increase buff has stacked to stupid values)

From a healing throughput point of view though, Gurtogg puts out much less damage per second on a tank than a cloth, even with the armor bonus from Fel Rage factored in. Make sure your healers realize this - it's usually the first few seconds which is crucial when only 1-2 healers react to the target change... not to mention that quite a lot of the time tanks aren't at full HP to begin with due to ticking acid stacks during the Rage phases.

And on that note, a tank tanking him from early on in the Rage phase is much more likely to survive than a hand-me-down at 10 seconds left... More hits avoided = less chances for his attack speed debuff to stack up, which means even less hits, which means less chances for his attack speed debuff to stack up, etc.

Acid Breath ticks for ~5k every second during Fel Rage before talents are taken into consideration (WWS from most recent kill that I had Fel Rage). Then again, he was also hitting me for 6-10k and I had 25k armor at the time. So take that for what you will, it's still a lot to keep a non-raged tank up without that tank popping a good number of cooldowns. There's also the possibility of Arcing Smash landing on said tank, which would be a bad thing to say the least when he has the potential to insta-gib someone with 20k health if things go badly.

Yeah whenever I end up dying on Fel rage it's always that I didn't have Clos ready or see the acid debuff get on me. Gurtogg dmg + Fel acid can be really tough to keep people healed up on, especially if the acid ticks over the enrage period.

Well, I'm sure 55k, including Arcing Smash, in 2 seconds, is about "mathematics and class sensitivity". Got to be my own record. No matter what you claim about healing, sometimes Gurtogg simply rips clothie apart and there's nothing you can do about it - to heal said damage, you'd need to heal over 30k in less than 2 seconds(healing debuff, 15k dmg to heal), with no visual indication that said spike is going to happen at that exact moment, so you can't precast or anything.

No offense, by I highly doubt you have some secret strategy for healers that is 100% effective. Fel Rage can range from trivial to unhealable, depending purely on luck. 40k+ combos are rare, but when they happen someone will die.

We killed him yesterday on our second Night of tries.

On the first day we never got him below 50% and always struggled the moment a Cloth-wearer got Fel-Rage, mainly caused due most healers were still "focus-fire" on the dmg they had to heal in the Bloodboil Groups, Tanks etc.

This leaded me to the question how to develope a Healing Strategy which allows us to have as many healers "without a job" when the Fel Rage starts. How we got this done finally, is based on a Tip from Sneek (Sinister Ministry), who came up with the idea of HOT-Healing the Bloodboil Groups. I didn't saw this kind of healing strategy mentioned here yet, so I thought it might worth to contribute.

This is done by having 4 HOT-Classes (we had 4 Priests) assigned in 2 Hotgroups. As soon Bloodboil G1 takes the Dot , Hotgroup1 hots them up. When the hots are running out G2 is applying a new set of hots. This is done aswell for Bloodboil Group2 and 3. While Fel-Rage phase tanks were kept alive majorly by a priest's hots + a ToL druid.

In this way we "freed" almost every healer in the raid and focussing heal on the Fel-Rage'd Person seemed to be working fine (some Mages usually died 1-2 seconds before Fel-Rage ends)

Why would you put 4 priests on hot'ing duty? Three priest can accomplish the same with prayer-spam. Fortunatly we had 3 holy priests with us on our first night of attempts, so we had one priest for each bloodboil group. We never had trouble again with bad geysers (fresh bloodboil + geyser) after we switched from hot'ing to prayer-spam. The only problem was target-switching for our rage-healers unfortunatly. (We also had only 8 healer with us, which might not be such a good idea for a first kill)

Not necessarily 4 priests; just four hotters - and that can be two priests and two druids, even one of them being feral with a good healing kit.

The principle behind using the HoT's is that you just spend five global cooldowns, eight seconds, doing your thing.
It's fire-and-forget and this gives the healers keeping the bloodboil groups up mobility rather then locking them in place or forcing them to look at healthbars.

My math indicated that you should be able to use just three hotters, be it druid or priest, once you have acquired enough gear upgrades from BT/MH.

2 Priests with CoH is enough, they will need shadow priest and innervate/mana tide though.

We usually go with 1 CoH priest and 1 resto shaman and 1 tree druid as the "bloodboil group" healers. If one of said healers is not availiable we run with 2 CoH priest and a resto shaman. Never ever have issues with that healing aspect as long as we dont have ADD that night and someone decides to take 4-5 bloodboil stacks.

After a couple months of kills him feraging a clothie can still cause the occasional instajib. I've seen several mages and priest take well over 40k damage in less than 2 seconds with the 50% healing debuff up, shit happens tho.

This fight is easier with 9-10 healers but entirely doable with 8 or if you have some really really pro people even 7 I suppose. This is one fight where healers with top notch reaction times can make a world of difference. (for example having heals landing on his fel rage target before he even reaches the player, may as well kiss that player goodbye if hes not getting heals before he gets hit the first time and takes a 20k arching smash to the face)

I actually like the fight even tho it can be extremely stressful for healers. I do however wish they would fix the bugs like the rare time fel rage falls off a split second before he takes his final swing. I personally have been hit for 13k after the felrage buff had faded. Other than the odd bug like that very intense and fun fight.