khel

I don't understand why everyone is bop'ing the mage on the pull. Does he click off the blessing of protection before High Nethermancer Zerevor casts his second nuke? Blessing of protection drops you to the bottom of the threat list, even against magic damage dealing mobs, so pom or bloodrage or any type of buff aggro will put other players ahead of your bop's mage tank on threat and they will get nuked, and probably 1-shot.

We send in a bubbled paladin with 2 misdirects, feral druid grabbing Veras Darkshadow (sometimes a 3rd misdirect here) and our mage grabbing Nethermancer Zerevor themselves.


So are you guys clicking off bop? Timing it so that it will fade naturally before Zerevor casts his second nuke? Or just battle-rezzing the person he one-shots?

 

dakalro

BoP does not do anything against magic damage, absolutelly 0, as tested by myself in reverse when I tanked Capernian in a Kael pug with Nether Protection, luckilly she doesn't hit that bad with melee

 

Blutelf

BoP does not change aggro in any way. Mobs will ignore targets that are immune to their attacks for the duration of the immunity effect only.

Caster mobs will happily continue casting on a target with BoP while melees will run off and target someone else.

 

khel

I am talking about threat, not damage here. I am going to test this out when I get home today, as from memory playing a paladin pre-BC a bit I remember BoP effectively wiping your aggro temporarily even against casters. Maybe my memory is bad though, or these mobs were forced into melee mode somehow and that is why they switched targets.

 

springwheat

What hes saying is that since BoP does not make you immune to spell damage caster mobs will continue to attack you instead of switching to another target.

The reason we BoP the mage is to give hunters, warriors and druids time to misdirect or pick up their mob without having to worry about the mage tank getting creamed.

 

Denogran

Neither of the paladin's bubbles affect the amount of threat the bubbled person has in any way. If the mob you're trying to attack decides you're non-attackable with the bubble up, they'll go find someone else till it's dismissed or runs out. But on the council, Zerevor will still find the mage a perfectly happy target to attack even with BoP up. Luckily for your mage, the other three members of the council won't, and will find new targets to play with (hopefully your tanks by that point).

 

• Chicken

Malande doesn't particularly mind using her Empowered Smite on someone with Blessing of Protection either, but the damage it does is fairly pitiful if you've just stolen Zerevor's Dampen Magic.

buff /bʌf/ Pronunciation[buhf]
–verb (used with object)
- to reduce or deaden the force of

 

Tyrian

It only does that against mobs that use physical attacks. Casters will continue to attack you, whether you have BOP or not - nothing changes.

 

Frogmite

Anyone know what was the cause of these two occurances? Both were on the Veras Darkshadow tank, a Druid. It was really frustrating for us as we just could not explain it maybe you guys can help. In the end we had more trouble on trivial things than I expected, priest tank/mage healer dieing to an arcane bolt in the pull, the same healer insisting on not moving from the AoE again and again but in retrospect I enjoyed the fight. Maybe once we're doing it for the tenth time it will be boring but as far as I could see there was enough AoE that while it kept you on your toes it wasn't frustrating and didn't have you running around like a headless chicken. Maybe it was a bit too easy due to how well we did so fast but then again it just feels so controllable. In my mind one of the much better tuned fights and definately more enjoyable than the randomness of some earlier bosses. The randomness on the Rogue tank is the only thing that bothers me at the moment but hopefully it's something that we were doing wrong and so can change. I never thought dodging AoE's for 10 minutes could be so much fun.

 

• Daboran

Darkshadow is DW and therefore you dodge a lot of his attacks, but he crushes a LOT in compensation - it's just one of those things the person healing his tank has to look out for. Having said this, that sort of crushing streak shouldnt kill a Feral who wears the right gear as long as the healer is actually lining up heals.

I equip my dodge trinkets and as much armor as possible (Badge of Tenacity is win for this fight). I can "double-trinket" for massive dodge about once every two times Veras disappears which eases the load on my Pali healer a lot. Don't forget also that he is stunnable, so I Bash him every time cooldown is up and get the Paladins to use ranged stun (especially if he resists taunt when re-appearing).

When you Druid tank gets used to him he can also help out with spot-healing and Innervates/Rez when Veras goes stealth. All in all a nice interesting fight for a Druid tank, but the healer will need to be on his toes - we assign our best Holy Pali for this job..

 

Pyros

The damage on the rogue tank is pretty damn random, we usually end up with a paladin tanking him(so no demo shout), and I sometimes have a really hard time keeping him up if I lag behind on hots stacking when the rogue is popping back(which is most of the time since I'm healing other people during the vanish). Actually the only thing that prevented a few wipes was his ardent defender thingie, because while the damage can be quite spiky, it's not huge hits at once but usually smaller hits, so it'll proc just fine. It really sucks when swiftmend is down, the tank has all hots up, and his health is still not going up ^^. Combine this to bad flamestrike/blizzard chance, and healing on this tank can be quite hard. Overall however it works ok with just me on him, most of the transitions just 3lifeblooms will keep him up.

With good healing it shouldn't be much of an issue though, we have way more problems with dps standing in the damn consecration even though they're called in advance and mages blinking up the stairs to avoid AEs and going out of los from healers ^^.

 

• Latito

While you end up at the right conclusion later on, this information is sort of off-base. Veras is Dual-Wield, yes. All that means is that his base miss rate is lower - you won't dodge him any more often. Dodge is based on the person being attacked, it really has nothing to do with Veras or DW. You will dodge just as many of Veras' attacks as any 2-Hander boss. That said, Veras will MISS more often than a 2-Hander boss. As for crushings.. he will still crush at a rate of 15% of his attacks. Due to having a higher base miss chance, a larger portion of his LANDED attacks will crush, but its still 15% of his overall "melee swings".

The point is - dmg is still spiky. Any dual wield mob will generally do more damage in a single attack combination of both MH and OH (1 MH, 1 OH swing at the same time) compared to a single attack from a 2-Hander boss. Each attack on its own is less, but combined they are greater. It balances out due to missing more often, but can produce large spikes.

 

• Chicken

Dual Wielders do tend to spike damage more heavily. It's a combination of high attack speed and higher amount of attacks dodged. It basically means that a larger amount of the attacks that do hit are crushes, and it also means that the damage potential he has can be deceptive. Most of the time you'll take pretty low damage off him, but if he gets in a streak of hits you'll suddenly take a lot of damage.

Of course, the fact that he can be stunned and is only up for relatively short times means that any class with a stun and some avoidance trinkets can abuse this to lessen the chance of this happening. Typically if I'm tanking him less than 25% of the time he spends attacking me is when he isn't stunned and I'm at my normal avoidance rates.

buff /bʌf/ Pronunciation[buhf]
–verb (used with object)
- to reduce or deaden the force of

 

Denogran

And even then, as a pally, holy shield charges tend to eat up a lot of would-be crushes. I generally have only found myself crushed because of my own stupidity for not throwing up Holy Shield fast enough. It certainly is a bursty position though, a nasty streak between you and your healer right when he's popping can easily eat up a healthstone + healing pot. One attempt I actually had to bubble just so I could get him off me for a couple of seconds. A druid will get crushed a lot more, but then again, he doesn't hit _that_ hard, and a properly healed druid should do as well as either other class of tank.

We did find it helps if the mage healer and the rogue healer (both off to the leftish side for us) help each other out. We found it a lot rarer that all 4 people assigned to those two mobs would be needing significant heals at the same time. Also, pallies are built to heal the rogue tank - short periods of sustained damage followed by long periods of basically nothing. A 7k heal every 2.5 seconds is going to make that damage intake seem a lot more reasonable.

 

Jayde

We use a Paladin tank and Paladin healer on Veras and a Druid healer on Zerevor on the same side. The Druid can easily help out with HoTs on the Paladin tank in addition to Zerevor's damage being pretty regular (and thus good for HoTs), which makes it pretty stable on that side.

 

Anthara

Does Grounding Totem absorb Zerevor's Arcane Bolt?

I've both succeeded and failed at the classic mage bop -> steal pull. We then switched to the safer pally bubble -> mage steal pull. In efforts to make it even more reliable, we tried to have a grounding totem in my party soak the first bolt on me as I charge in to steal. Unfortunately, results were inconclusive from our logs so far.

 

Junpei

Vera is stunnable so if you feel you are taking too much damage smack that Bash key (if your a druid) or have a paladin HoJ him, you can effectively knock off around half of his dps time by staggering stuns

 

Chirality

Can you disarm Veras Darkshadow?

edit: Nevermind I tested it myself. He's immune to disarm.

 

Pyros

Didn't know you could stun him though, never seen any of our tank do it. Guess I'll tell our paladin next time, it's sometimes really crazy how shitty luck he has, like getting hit by holy wrath and blizzard at the same time while tanking. He has yet to die, but he's been so close so many times, thank god for ardent defender I guess.

 

Papajan

We just downed council on Monday, thanks for all the excellent tips.

I was the mage tank and pulled with BoP. I was sweating bullets for a while cause I couldn't do my old Maulgar pull of casting a spell, cause max range Frostbolt would body aggro (we had everyone hide behind the door while I experimented for a few pulls to find out). In the end, simply stealing the buff generated enough threat to keep Zerevor on me until I happened to get a Frostbolt off (sometimes 4-5s later due to GCD and spell pushback). That surprised me very much, especially as I had Arcane Subtlety (-40% threat on arcane), but I think I recall noticing something like that on Krosh/Maulgar. Also, I didn't see any of the LoS problems for gnomes that have been mentioned, I never had a LoS problem with Zerevor. It could be that other mages are pulling from the sides instead of the front, I really don't know. The final pull tip I can remember is that one time Veras took a while to get into place or something, and 1-shot me cause the BoP pally swapped to BoK as soon as I had aggro. After that wipe, we just let BoP wear off it's normal duration and then the BoP pally would give me a new blessing afterwards.

Also, we didn't try the grounding totem, but I know we tried it on Krosh/Maulgar back in the day and it didn't work.

I also didn't realize how bursty the mage tank damage is. I'm not implying that it's a huge amount of damage, but sometimes Zerevor will just sit around, maybe with a hidden cast/channel bar or something, and I'd sit at full for a while.

 

Tyrian

Im interested as well to know how much numerical threat stealing Dampen Magic gives the tanking mage.

 

Toabo

The gnome LoS issue exists in a certain area of the stairs when Zerevor is in his pre-pull position. I've never marked it out (what with focusing on getting the Spell Steal off), but somewhere between the bottom of the stairs and a few steps down from the top, you'll get LoS issues. However, you'll be within Spell Steal range of Zerevor before you actually step foot on the stairs. Simplest means of avoiding LoS problems: Stop moving as soon as you're in range of Spell Steal, cast Spell Steal, and then run up the stairs to wherever you plan to tank Zerevor from.


Generally Zerevor will pound the mage tank with several Arcane Bolts in a row, then he'll switch his attention to AoEing the raid. You'll see the Flamestrike cast bar, but for some reason Blizzard doesn't show up. Anywise, if you time it right (and get lucky that he doesn't decide to AoE you), you can fit a full Evocation into that window.

 

Anthara

Thank you for the excellent observations! This pull's been a gamble for my human mage, too, because I'd keep moving further up the stairs in order to eventually overcome los issues. The problems were motion and being on the stairs. Tonight we applied your observations. Lined up front and center with Zerevor. Bubble-boy led the charge with me a step behind. Stood still as soon as Spellsteal got in range near the bottom of the stairs to cast it. Zerevor swaps to me, I nuke and re-position him easily. Worked perfectly and helped us get our first genuine 1-shot on Council

 

Duravi

The easiest way by far I've found for the pull is just to stand at max range and use fireball (pulling like this makes it basically impossible for someone to grab aggro over you at the start) then have the pally bop you and run in. You should get to spellsteal range before the fireball even lands and have enough time to spellsteal twice before the first arcane bolt even finishes casting, so even with an unlucky resist you'll be ok. If your frost just use the water elemental pull that was mentioned earlier in the thread, as frost as soon as I steal the dampen I usually fireblast right away as well since you don't want to be waiting around for a frostbolt cast initially, it's infrequent but an overzealous healer could pass your spellsteal threat before you finish casting. I really didn't think the damage was "bursty" since he can't crit you and its basically a 3-3.5k chunk of life per cast. It really should not be an issue for you to stay alive, if you are dying it's due to poor healer(s), the damage you take is so predictable that it's pretty damn simple to heal you. Aside from that just set your focus target to Malande and CS whenever she casts CoH AND has melee immunity. Tanking is absolutely no excuse to not be on the ball for CS duty that's really your most important job since once you get the pull off tanking is pretty damn easy and boring.

 

Yenadar

A few inter-linked comments here about the observations/questions above:

- We chose to BoP the mage running in, and after the first attempt, I became the one to BoP him. The BoP keeps Zerevor on our mage, but the buff aggro from the BoP pulls Veras and the paladin (name escapes me) to me. I Hammer of Justice right off the bat in case the paladin doesn't get MDed before he tags me a time or 2. Works great.

- Our mage healer off-heals the raid, and agrees that it is boring healing target.

- I tank Veras, rather than one of our bears, since I can keep off crushes, and don't need to shift to be able to heal while he is vanished.

- My healer is a holy pally, so if needed, she can stun Veras if she knows she isn't likely get a heal off in time. Between us and the holy pally on the mage, (who is usually nearby) we can keep him stunned for quite a while if needed.

- I get put with a shadow priest, which combined with mana kickback from heals, I can maintain a non-stop FoL spam during the vanishes without running OOM, relieving some of the healing pressure on the rest of the raid from the poisons.

As another note:
- Our affliction warlocks also DoT up everything in sight, and attempt to maintain full DoTs on as many of the council as possible, including Veras when he leaves vanish, which really helps to maximize the total damage dealt to the shared health pool. (And since my threat is mostly spell based, if I can't build threat on Veras, they can't DoT anyway, unlike Druid-tank on Veras)