We actually had our first 1-shot of Bloodboil last night. It's no great achievement but I'd note a couple things from previous weeks where it has been 3-5 attempts. First of all, I stopped tolerating the "Oh my god, it's Bloodboil, this fight sucks" crap. I told people, believe he's going to die, and he's going to die. Believe we'll fail, and our chances of success are awfully low. Second of all, we actually stack an extra healer on this because we have a huge dps margin. That healer is my priest. He's tier 5 geared, but spec-ed pain suppression usually. I'm usually gheal spamming on tanks and topping overheal meters by a wide margin. I throw a PoM everytime it's up into the BB group and I decide whether the fel raged person needs the pain suppression or not. The healing margin it gives us, I supect, makes the fight just that much more trivial Our healers do a great job without my marginal contribution. But that marginal contribution is a safety net that cuts out a lot of risk. Your guild may be different, of course, but since there is no useful rogue loot on BB anyway, I'm happy to make the swap and get the fight done more quickly.
We downed BloodBoil this week. We spent a night + about 3 attempts the previous night on him. The thing that made the fight for us was when we figured out that mages can cast slow on him when he fel rages people. This made it cake to heal people through it.
The thing that made the fight for us was when we figured out that mages can cast slow on him when he fel rages people.
Have you confirmed that it works? Sometimes the "Slow" debuff will up on the mob/boss but doesn't have any effects on him.
BTW, Slow doesn't affect his melee attack speed and Fel Acid is instant cast so I don't think it "made the fight" for you, maybe just your healers are more familiar with the damage?
As we have never tried using Slow on Gurtogg, I'm not sure if what I'm going to say is correct, but this is the description of Slow:
Reduces target's movement speed by 50%, increases the time between ranged attacks by 50% and increases casting time by 50%. Lasts 15 sec. Slow can only affect one target at a time.
Gurtogg indeed does melee, not ranged attack; and his fel acid is instant cast, therefore even IF slow affects him the only thing it will do is reduce his movement speed by 50% (well, maybe give your healers 1 more second to prepare?), which as I said - I don't think it will change the fight much, not worth respeccing in my opinion.
The thing that made the fight for us was when we figured out that mages can cast slow on him when he fel rages people. This made it cake to heal people through it.
Slow does absolutely nothing for Fel Rage. What made it cake is your healers waking up.
Again, not be a broken record, but the Solarian macro that every guild should surely have used months ago is all you need to heal the person with fel rage. There are two people on bloodboil healing, 1-2 people who >>might<< be fixing up a tank, and 5-7 healers who are spamming their Solarian macro. Maybe the druids can get cute with nature's swiftness (or whatever it's called). It's seriously insanely simple to heal. Spam heals save lives. You don't have to think if it's macroed, you just press the button.
Just downed him tonight thanks to some wws parsing and some good suggestions from this thread. We had done some 30 attempts on him and tonight we got him on our second serious try (we actually had two people autorun pull, and one pull was when we were practicing bloodboil positioning).
What seemed to do it for us was having clear healing assignments, and making sure the 6 healers in charge of healing the fel rage target had the /tar gurtogg /assist /cast (heal) macro.
We had 9 healers and 2 Spriests, with four pallies on MT healing, and 1 resto druid in charge of keeping full hots on tanks for acidic wounds + fel acid on the melee. 2 resto shaman and 1 CoH priest kept up the bloodboil groups, and one extra resto druid was basically a free agent. His job was to help out the acid wound healer if he called for it, and in the meantime help with healing the bloodboil groups and the geyser damage on transition to phase 2. It was this same resto druid that was also assigned to be the backup bboil soak in case anyone in those groups died.
My feeling is that what got us from 14 attempts a night to getting him on the second attempt today, aside from people learning the rhythm of the fight, was the elimination of crosshealing. When healers don't have to worry about watching the whole raid they can do their job a lot better.
Well, either your protadin hasn't explained how we work well enough to you, or he just sucks. Unlike VR, I've _never_ had issues with mana here that weren't solved by popping a mana pot. If you're not terrible at threat, you'll get the boss sometime before the end of the third cycle, at which point you'll be set for mana for the entire fight. Add in that you get to use Avenger's Shield, and you won't notice the lack of Holy Shield. I'm not sure what you mean by not benefiting from the acid rage generator, but a paladin can generate mana by stepping in the acid rage, taking some damage, and getting healed back up if they really need it. Again, he really shouldn't need to do that.
Second, if you're low on mana, you just judge/seal the Fel-Rage BB with wisdom and regen plenty in that time period. This plus pots plus nice debuff ticks mean that I'm at near full mana for the duration of the fight including throwing Holy Lights on Fel-Rage targets (normally only if a clothie gets targeted).
As for the lack of TPS control, again that's _your_ protadin's problem, and not a prot pally problem in general. Holy Shield will generate aggro, this is true, but if that's actually the reason why your other tanks aren't catching up in threat then it's either because a) your other tanks suck at threat or b) your paladin isn't stopping attacking soon enough. I find that if I stop attack with 5-6 debuffs I lose BB in the same range as a warrior that stops at 8 debuffs. So it's not a lack of TPS control, as much as being aware of your class.
Finally, a 2-warrior setup is clearly inferior to including a paladin on this fight. Warriors can't start out full-dps, and generate rage pretty slow when they aren't getting hit. If we run with 2 warriors, the OT warrior always needs to go stand in the first bloodboil group just to generate rage to even have a chance at keeping up. On our last BB, with three closely geared tanks (2 warriors and myself), the warrior MT and I split all but 2 times (of about 10 seconds each) of tanking. That's with none of the tanks getting to a stack above 14 either (a pretty clean kill in my book).
Add in Divine Shield for if the stacks get out of hand, and claiming that a paladin tank is any worse on this fight is your guild's problem, not a class problem.
The holy shield qualm is a valid problem, at least one that I've experienced. As I mentioned a few posts ago, I just put holy shield rank 1 on my bar for this fight. When I get 5 stacks or so, I stop auto-attacking and just make sure that I'm facing the boss and have holy shield up. My OT's (Always druid and warrior) always end up catching up to me.
Mana problems are also a legitimate concern but keeping wisdom judged and being intelligent about your Mana pot CD's means that you should NEVER have any problems with mana. Much like Denogran mentioned, I even usually have enough mana to throw out full rank holy lights during fel rage if a clothie gets targeted.
Finally killed this guy last night for the first time, with 7 healers even, after about 2 and a half hours of total attempts. As has been stated, the hardest part is the phase 1-2 transition where healers are still trying to top the raid off and the fel rage person is already taking retarded damage. I'm a resto shaman who had 13k armor with Devotion (was in the tank group) and thus 28k during fel rage, and I still took 44k damage in 2 seconds according to the combat log:
Obviously, I only had 3 healers on me at that point (including myself) and I'm not sure why the paladin was using flash of light. I'm sure we would have brought more healers if we had them. I can certainly see how guilds often have 9+ for their first kill, as we were nowhere near the enrage timer when we downed him.
We routinely bring 9-10 healers. If we're short healers, some of the tanks respec healing! (Our tanks are all 100% attendance almost... 2 x Feral, 1 x Paladin, 3 x Warrior)
Awesome accomplishment getting the first kill with 7 healers. In the future, make it easier on yourself and just stack healers
We've always run healer light and DPS heavy, though not really by choice. We pretty much invite every healer online to every raid. Last week we ended up clearing 4/5 hyjal with 5 healers, and a ret paladin wearing healing gear (so like 5.5). We subbed out a dps who had to log for a holy paladin who came online halfway through the raid and killed Naj'entus with 6.5, then called it a night. We're in sort of a unique position that you'd think we'd be a 'stepping stone' guild that people would try to use to get into Illidan farming/sunwell guilds, but we don't aggressively recruit, and have pretty much no turnover, either.
We just sort of try to make do with what we have. Our first Kael kill had 6 healers, and I think Vashj was the same.
I'm a resto shaman who had 13k armor with Devotion (was in the tank group) and thus 28k during fel rage, and I still took 44k damage in 2 seconds according to the combat log:
<Combat log SS goes here>
Gratz on the kill. BTW I think you should tell your pallies who heal Fel Raged target to stop using these FoL, may save you from a lot of wipe =)
What seemed to do it for us was having clear healing assignments, and making sure the 6 healers in charge of healing the fel rage target had the /tar gurtogg /assist /cast (heal) macro.
Yep, the "Solarian macro."
My feeling is that what got us from 14 attempts a night to getting him on the second attempt today, aside from people learning the rhythm of the fight, was the elimination of crosshealing. When healers don't have to worry about watching the whole raid they can do their job a lot better.
My feeling from reading your post is that your guild figured it out but maybe a LOT of people are overengineering the hell out of this fight and that's why they're struggling? You have bloodboil healers, tank healers and raid healers. On fel rage essentially everyone switches immediately except the bloodboil healers who are finishing their work and >>maybe<< a tank healer with a job to do. If other people are not about to be dead -- and really why are they? -- then you have no healing issue.
People should go back to the strategy guides, get their positioning dialed in, bring the extra healer, and stop treating this like some epic battle. It's a bit sloppy, to be sure, but hardly of the annoyance level of council or the length of Illidan.
As for the lack of TPS control, again that's _your_ protadin's problem, and not a prot pally problem in general. Holy Shield will generate aggro, this is true, but if that's actually the reason why your other tanks aren't catching up in threat then it's either because a) your other tanks suck at threat or b) your paladin isn't stopping attacking soon enough. I find that if I stop attack with 5-6 debuffs I lose BB in the same range as a warrior that stops at 8 debuffs. So it's not a lack of TPS control, as much as being aware of your class.
Finally, a 2-warrior setup is clearly inferior to including a paladin on this fight. Warriors can't start out full-dps, and generate rage pretty slow when they aren't getting hit. If we run with 2 warriors, the OT warrior always needs to go stand in the first bloodboil group just to generate rage to even have a chance at keeping up. On our last BB, with three closely geared tanks (2 warriors and myself), the warrior MT and I split all but 2 times (of about 10 seconds each) of tanking. That's with none of the tanks getting to a stack above 14 either (a pretty clean kill in my book).
I really don't agree the whole of these statements.
First, a warrior may choose to maintain his threat to 0 (I don't take into account any PoM, ES or LB) while maintaining a good crushing blows mitigation. A Paly will have to trade of resistance vs threat, knowing he also gains mana, i.e threat while being healed. Actually, it makes a small difference, far from being a strategy breaker. But the maths are here : comparing 0 to more than 0.
In fact, a warrior control over low TPS > a pally's.
Second, a 2 warrior setup may be inferior for the other part (sustaining high TPS), but we're talking about the core tanking strategy for this encounter.
We've initially killed BB with a 2 tanks (warriors) setup, being myself one of these to with my MT raiding character.
Our early conclusion were : we lack a "oh shit" plan for the disorient + Kb combo. So it was a risk we took into account by allowing a bear to be #3 on the threat list, in order to strenghten our overall tanking strategy.
Since then, we've been running a 3 tanks strategy. We've just experienced a protadin as I stated earlier in the topic. And actually, things are less reliable at the moment. We do have the reasons, and the low TPS control is part of.
When you say : protadin > warrior, I can just disagree. This encounter is 25% threat management, 25% motion and 50% healing efficiency. We do run with a 7 healers + 2 SP most of the time. So we built our strategy with a early aggro holder switch. Going for 12+ acidic stacks is just a pure burden on a healer who could be tossing some heals to the felraged instead of spamming the OT in the felrage phase. We just ask our DPS to be very carefull in the normal phase.
A protadin will hardly be able to hold off his TPS in order to get a 7-8 stack switch. We experienced it.
On the other hand, if you go for a 9 healers + 3 SP setup, ok, it's trivial. You may just wait for the odds to get bumped/replaced as the aggro holder, and then divine shield is strong advantage. But in my opinion, it's not the smartest way to understand and execute this encouter.
the OT warrior always needs to go stand in the first bloodboil group just to generate rage to even have a chance at keeping up.
We've always run 2 warriors on Gurtogg, and have never had to stand in the bloodboil group for rage. If you need rage, you can stand in the cleave, only moving out of the cleave if you are anxious about the debuff getting refreshed.
If you use two high avoidance tanks (I generally run 35% dodge, 25% parry) then the debuff will stack very slowly, and we trade over at 8 every time (because they stack slowly you have longer for the OT to take over). The OT can generally hover just under the MTs threat, and at 8 stacks the MT stops attacking, a hunter MDs and the swap happens before 9 debuffs. You can also force a swap after any P2 by standing near or far away.
The only times things go differently is when the MT gets Disorient, which generally means the OT just takes over then. It is very rare to get Disorient then a KB on the new tank, but if this does happen DPS will have to slow a bit.
I can see the logic in using a third tank, it gives more redundancy if there are mistakes but I prefer to have extra dps (our feral stays in cat).
Having said all this, a paladin may well be superior to a warrior due to higher threat, I haven't tried it that way, all I know is that 2 warriors works very well.
I really don't agree the whole of these statements.
First, a warrior may choose to maintain his threat to 0 (I don't take into account any PoM, ES or LB) while maintaining a good crushing blows mitigation. A Paly will have to trade of resistance vs threat, knowing he also gains mana, i.e threat while being healed. Actually, it makes a small difference, far from being a strategy breaker. But the maths are here : comparing 0 to more than 0.
In fact, a warrior control over low TPS > a pally's.
Second, a 2 warrior setup may be inferior for the other part (sustaining high TPS), but we're talking about the core tanking strategy for this encounter.
We've initially killed BB with a 2 tanks (warriors) setup, being myself one of these to with my MT raiding character.
Our early conclusion were : we lack a "oh shit" plan for the disorient + Kb combo. So it was a risk we took into account by allowing a bear to be #3 on the threat list, in order to strenghten our overall tanking strategy.
Since then, we've been running a 3 tanks strategy. We've just experienced a protadin as I stated earlier in the topic. And actually, things are less reliable at the moment. We do have the reasons, and the low TPS control is part of.
When you say : protadin > warrior, I can just disagree. This encounter is 25% threat management, 25% motion and 50% healing efficiency. We do run with a 7 healers + 2 SP most of the time. So we built our strategy with a early aggro holder switch. Going for 12+ acidic stacks is just a pure burden on a healer who could be tossing some heals to the felraged instead of spamming the OT in the felrage phase. We just ask our DPS to be very carefull in the normal phase.
A protadin will hardly be able to hold off his TPS in order to get a 7-8 stack switch. We experienced it.
On the other hand, if you go for a 9 healers + 3 SP setup, ok, it's trivial. You may just wait for the odds to get bumped/replaced as the aggro holder, and then divine shield is strong advantage. But in my opinion, it's not the smartest way to understand and execute this encouter.
First, please quote my name when you're quoting me. Makes it much clearer that I'm counter-responding.
Second, you're correct about not being able to cut off threat like a switch. Paladins can't do that. But, and this is the important part, that's entirely not necessary for this fight. IF your paladin knows how to play his class, AND plays his role correctly, you'll realize that the threat control is really no harder for a paladin than a warrior. Holy shield doesn't do sooooo much damage that you can't control approximately when you'll switch threat. If _your_ pally can't figure out how to stop attacking a little sooner (Warriors/druids stop at 8 for us, I stop around 5), then that's a personal problem and not a class problem.
As for healing efficiency, ever seen a warrior toss spot heals on himself during felrage when he has debuff ticks? Thought not.
Also, I don't think you get the point of Divine Shield. My strategy in this fight isn't to get up to 25 ticks, bubble off and then go for another 25 ticks. It's for when he decides not to kick me off the threat list for longer than normal, kicks me down to second place, blinds the new tank, and again decides not to kick off threat for longer than normal. An o-shit! situation, if you like. This will happen - it's not the most common thing ever, but it will happen. We had a druid get up to 32 stacks once - even trying to do no threat after 8 (and healed him through it, but it's not something that we were thrilled about).
Again, I'm not trying to say that paladins are going to make this fight much easier than a warrior or druid. I'll reiterate what I posted in one of my earlier posts in this thread, and say that any combination of the 3 tanks will work fine for this boss. We're all pretty even. But anyone who claims that a paladin is worse on this boss is dead wrong. YOUR paladin might not be your best option, but that would be something you need to work out within your guild.
Again, I'm not trying to say that paladins are going to make this fight much easier than a warrior or druid. I'll reiterate what I posted in one of my earlier posts in this thread, and say that any combination of the 3 tanks will work fine for this boss. We're all pretty even. But anyone who claims that a paladin is worse on this boss is dead wrong. YOUR paladin might not be your best option, but that would be something you need to work out within your guild.
I guess you may have thought I'm an "anti-protadin". You may now realize it's not true.
I wouldn't even call using a prot paladin more challenging, it's just slightly different. The three tanking classes are different, that's the nature of them. As Denogran said, his warriors and feral stop attacking at 8 stacks compared to the prot pally who stops at 5. It's funny but my guild does it the SAME exact way.
Also, a bit of a topic change... I still stack healers like crazy on this fight. I was taking a look at some WWS Parses at the fastest Naj'entus kill and saw that the guild wiped 3 times on BB before they killed him. Given the speed of their Najentus kill, I'm guessing they're in full T6 yet they still wipe. We typically bring 9-10 healers and still sometimes have fel-rage targets die. I've even gone so far as to enforce a "One-mage and 2 locks in raid" rule and we still have Fel-rage targets die. I will literally check all of our healers healing fel-rage (usually 6-7 healers at any given time) and they are all spamming their strongest heals. Do well-equipped guilds (A la guilds in Full T6) still have problems on this fight?
We've done the fight recently with as few as 6 healers and had zero problems. We've also done the fight with 8-9 healers and wiped. We're pretty much full T6 and as much as I like to blame it on the fight mechanics, I think that almost every wipe is a result of lazyness. Even if a fel-rage dies people should react fast enough to be able to maintain the situation until it wears off.
I wouldn't even call using a prot paladin more challenging, it's just slightly different. The three tanking classes are different, that's the nature of them. As Denogran said, his warriors and feral stop attacking at 8 stacks compared to the prot pally who stops at 5. It's funny but my guild does it the SAME exact way.
Also, a bit of a topic change... I still stack healers like crazy on this fight. I was taking a look at some WWS Parses at the fastest Naj'entus kill and saw that the guild wiped 3 times on BB before they killed him. Given the speed of their Najentus kill, I'm guessing they're in full T6 yet they still wipe. We typically bring 9-10 healers and still sometimes have fel-rage targets die. I've even gone so far as to enforce a "One-mage and 2 locks in raid" rule and we still have Fel-rage targets die. I will literally check all of our healers healing fel-rage (usually 6-7 healers at any given time) and they are all spamming their strongest heals. Do well-equipped guilds (A la guilds in Full T6) still have problems on this fight?
Sometimes Gurtogg *will* kill Fel Rage people. When a mage takes 45k damage in 1.3 seconds, there's not much you can do but shrug your shoulders and pray it snaps back to a warrior with cooldowns available. Plan around losing people to Fel Rage occasionally (i.e. make your tanks swap at <10 debuffs so their cooldowns are up if they have to tank half of a Fel Rage, rather than having to use them to stay alive with 20 stacks, etc.), realise that sometimes sh*t happens, and get on with life.
Wiping to BB, however, indicates something is going wrong somewhere. Are your tanks failing at threat/debuff management? Are your healers failing on every Fel Rage? Are your DPS being nubs and pulling aggro? Are your CoH priests trying to play with 5000ms latency and having bad throughput as a result? Losing a few squishies to Fel Rage should not mean you wipe as long as the rest of the time you play intelligently.
DeeNogger: "No dot timer? Get your belt off, its spanking time."
I guess you may have thought I'm an "anti-protadin". You may now realize it's not true.
It's not that I think you're anti-protadin, it's that some people (like the poster that started this side-discussion), come to this forum with no idea how paladin tanks work. Were they to come and read "It's just a bit more challenging" with regards to paladins tanking, they very well might not employ a paladin tank at all. Lots of guilds starting on Bloodboil find him quite challenging enough without adding extra complexities. I know if my guild leader had come to this forum, read your statement, and had enough tanks on - I'd be sat in a heartbeat.
My point was only to state quite clearly that having a paladin as one of the tanks on this fight is no more challenging or difficult than using the other two classes.
And your point is valid. In fact, it may well make it easier to have a paladin as one of the tanks. This needs reiterating on page 27: This fight is strategy and execution. It isn't luck and it isn't over hard. We now are at around 6-8 Bloodboil kills. The last 2 are 1 shots. People are very very rarely dying to Fel Rage. Tanks are very very rarely dying due to communication.
"Do well-equipped guilds (A la guilds in Full T6) still have problems on this fight?"
Why would they? I mean seriously, what is hard here? You need your tanks to talk. You need a small group of main tank healers. You need 15 people to exercise movement coordination that is 1/10th as complicated as that required at Archimonde. So not complicated that you put a lucky charm on 3 of those 15 you trust and tell the other 12, follow those 3. You put the rest of the healers not healing the boil with a freaking target of target macro and they spam it like robots. This is just not hard. I can't even imagine an Illidan farm guild having trouble at Bloodboil. Oh, we have 1 Illidan kill.
Why would they? I mean seriously, what is hard here? You need your tanks to talk.
...
This is just not hard. I can't even imagine an Illidan farm guild having trouble at Bloodboil.
Nothing is hard here, but I think it's up to you to define "problems". If "having problem" = wipe then yes, I do think even well equipped guilds may have problem here (I only saw it sometimes ago and I didn't save any SS, but there are enough proof in this topic to show BB can deal >40k dmg in 1.5s which is very possible to kill the fel raged target, then BB moves to the tanks, kill them if they don't have trinket/SW/oh-sh!@-things up, and cause a wipe)
Nothing in WoW is overly hard. Doesn't mean it's not quite easy to wipe, and my guild manages to wipe on Gurtogg semi-frequently. It's more often due to people being incompetent about bloodboils than it is about fel rage targets dying though (as a couple people have said the loss of a fel rage target should not be a wipe unless it happens several times such that the tank's cooldowns aren't up).
04/26/08, 6:16 AM
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