Yenadar

This high does seem odd. I believe proximity to an undetermined point(/or other council member) has an influencing factor on who it randomly picks next, since I never get poisoned if I pull Veras to whole way to the left, but start getting poisoned 1-3 times a fight if I fight him closer to the middle. The highest I have gotten was 5 poisons, and I was a bit to the right of the door, in the middle of the rest of the raid. (A bit unnessessary, harder to pick up, I generally wouldn't recommend it)

We could end up in an OMG DOOMFIRE! discussion here regarding it, and it is most likely just another mechanic that Blizzard has introduced that isn't purely random, but a random rule-set instead, which drives the community nuts in trying to figure it out. (My opinion about doomfires, incidently)

 

Shadorn

We killed the council last night Australian time (yay first kill), deadly was spread out over the majority of the raid, WWS showing Veras hit 18 people aside from his tank. Standard positioning used, nothing too fancy. Prot pally was tanking Veras. Seems you just got lucky

 

Greymist1

One rogue can do both. Just have him equip PVP gloves and a throwing weapon, and use deadly throw as an interrupt. There is no cooldown on deadly throw so the only limitation is how much time it takes to move in, shiv to get a CP, and move back out.

I still use kick -- I usually kick heals since Malande's heal cast is so long I can move in and kick it with plenty of margin for error.

Your rogue interrupter won't do much damage this way, but it's not like rogues assigned to Malande get enough DPS time to matter anyways. Even before I started using DT I found that the reflective damage shield was up so much that it was hard to even beat our MT in total damage done. So I gave up on damage and started using a pure survival gearset for Council, focusing on high stam. That gearset happened to include my PVP gloves and throwing weapon, and I took advantage of that and started using DT to let me interrupt at range when Malande was standing on an AoE patch... then I realized I could use it to interrupt nearly every divine wrath too.

 

◊ Wenge

On our previous run on IC, I had the dampen magic buff appear and then disappear off Zerevor before I could steal it. There were no felpuppies anywhere near him, and nobody will fes up to any form of purging.

As to the pull, I've found I have to stop running up or I will be out of line of sight. I stand right at max pyroblast range, count it down on vent, then as soon as its left my fingers I move up to where spellsteal lights up and spam that button. I've used the Orb to turn into a Blood Elf and it doesn't make much of a difference.

You can easily set up a focus-based counterspell macro that will let you stop the circle of healing from going out, although it can be tricky to know when to use it. The raid will say on vent when the priest is BoPped so I know if I see a CoH to hit the macro.

 

Mideci

That's great info, and I want to second some of the things here. We also had a first-kill yesterday. It was our 4th pull on our 2nd day, so not too terrible. I was the rogue kicker on divine wrath until our heal pummeler died at which point I switched to heal stopping in the last 15% because, well, we wanted to win.

I pulled something on the order of 300dps for the fight. Maybe not quite that high. Between the various AoE effects, the BoP and the reflective shields, you are not going to do much damage. This was clear to me after the first wipe of the day (I had missed the previous day's attempts), so I loaded up on stam / PVP gear and was around 13k buffed. Not dying is clearly for the win and the fact I missed the deadly throw trick has me feeling a bit silly right now It would have occurred to me instantly in an arena match, and yet somehow escaped me there.

For what it's worth, you'll quickly find you can't miss heals much if at all, but you can miss a divine wrath or two or three. Plan your interrupt strategy accordingly.

Oh, and we pulled Illidan for giggles. We were not prepared...

 

Adlai

I'm surprised there hasn't been any further discussion on this topic. From a strategy point of view I believe this warrants a little research. Most "boss kill guides" state that though all three of the other members of the Council can receive Gathios' Blessings, Malande will be the target of them "90%" of the time. It's been mentioned earlier Veras has little to no AC, so when my guild was attempting him I would frequently put my Pet on him after MDing to the tank post-Vanish.

Here's the targets and frequency of Gathios' Blessing of Protection from our first kill: Wow Web Stats

Malande was the target of BoP 70% of the time, Veras 30%, and Zerevor 0%.


As for Blessing of Spell Warding: Wow Web Stats

Malande 47%, Veras 42%, and Zerevor 11%.

I wish I had a larger sample size, however our guild has only killed IC twice (once without WWS running). Zerevor never gains BoP, which might be expected since he's rarely if ever physically hit. Malande does infact appear to receive both Blessings at a higher rate then the others, but not nearly as high as is popularly cited. Are these results unique or is BoP simply randomly cast with a preference for Malande?

 

Papajan

In looking over our most recent 3 kills:
Malande: 20 BoPs (37.7%)
Zerevor: 27 BoPs (50.9%)
Veras: 6 BoPs (11.3%)

In each of the three kills, our one difference from most people is that we put a hunter on Zerevor when he doesn't have BoP. I realize it isn't conclusive evidence of my idea that BoP/BoSW is based off of damage taken in the previous BoP/BoSW duration, but since someone will probably ask, over the three attempts, Malande took 758k (36.3%) physical damage, Zerevor took 957k (45.8%) physical damage, and Veras took 374k (17.5%) physical. The percentages are out of the three targets.

 

Shadewalk

Wondering if anyone else has seen anything like this, Sadly I don't keep any logs to show cleanly, but at least screenshotted and glued together most of what showed in the log as healing/damage in at kill time.



So just this moment we killed Council, quite a normal kill except for the behavoir on envenom. Essentially the rogue seemed fixed on my hunter from about half way through the fight onwards, through FD, and even after dieing and ressing, went to my hunter on about 5 seperate vanishes to do ~3x envenom and he even did a 5x envenom one time.

The more worrying this is this is not the only time I've experianced this, having taken a good chain of them before now, but was a one off that entier fight, so shrugged it off at the time as a nasty fluke.

Basically I would like to know if anyone has any idea what I could have done to attract the rogues undivided attention during vanish, even though death. The possible suspects I can come up with is TotH, but if this takes aggro why would not any other heal? Otherwise something to do with where I tend to end up standing, though I was moved quite a lot after dieing and ressed to where the druid was, so its not like I was in a constantly stationary point. Further more I actually sat in FD for a while after getting an envenmom to have this vicious cycle continue anyway (mind, could have resisted, didn't exactly check to see at the time particularly).

 

Anobix

Last night was my guild's first attempts at IC and man did it go horribly... I think out of 6 pulls (trying different things) I died 5 of them (on the pull). We tried pulling with a warlock's imp, me running in, counting down a pyroblast, etc.

It was just so random that either they would run to me (and I could spellsteal) or I had to run forward. While running he seemed to be in the middle of casting so I would get 1 shotted anyway. I had about 11k buffed hp going in.

For some reason no one listened to me about BoPing me before I run in so instead it was just a pw:s... oh well, next week...

 

◊ Wenge

I've been the mage tank for Zerevor a number of times. Our pull usually has me move to 41 yards, directly in front of him, pyroblast (for the longer count on vent) and at 0 I run forward until Spellsteal and then steal it as fast as I can.

Today, after 2.4.2, Zerevor went on a run to the back of the platform for three attempts; I had to blink up to the platform to get him in time.

Anyone else see this change?

 

Pheroz

Yup. He started running away from me on the pull as well. It wiped on us our first attempt, I was able to get the spellsteal off on our other two attempts of the evening. We pull with misdirects up, I get BoPed, and I run in and spellsteal immediately then the hunters tag their targets to the other tanks.

The change is behavior is unnecessarily annoying, but if your prepared for it not too problematic. And it does a nice job of seperating Zerevor and Malande for you on the pull.

 

Gunn

Tanking

We had our first peak at the council yesterday evening. I've been reading this forum and looking over other strats.

My question is.
If you have equally geared Feral tank druid and Protection Paladin, it seems to me that the Paladin would be best suited for tanking Veras and the Feral druid on Malande. Is that true?

Paladin on Veras means 3 things in particular over Druid
1. 30yd shield range after vanishes
2. In my case, 3 pts in Pursuit of Justice (I run faster)
3. Can bubble out of any debuffs

Malande just seems like a normal tank and move out of stuff

 

Schniepel

Actually a feral druid isn't a very good choice to tank Malande. No spell interrupt, no spell damage mitigation and high armor doesn't help at all too. So I would really go for a Warrior here.
Regarding Veras, both feral druid and protection paladin work, however the paladin gets in serious trouble if Veras gets the magic protection blessing, because neither avenger's shield nor righteous defense works in that case. A feral druid on the other hand has lots of physical and magical means to catch Veras' attention and Warrior/Druid taunts work with either blessing active.

 

Intoxify

Yeah. Was both mine and our other mage's first night tanking for them (our third mage, who is usually the tank, wasn't on), and that's possibly the main reason the pulls went bad, when we died. LoS issues from the stairs when he ran backwards. :/

 

• RoboStac

One trick I found that worked quite well was to cast pyro then move backwards towards the door - means he has to move towards you to start casting, and immediatly seperates him from malande who isn't as easy to move. You end up with the mage tanked at the bottom of the stairs, so theres never any danger of LoS issues. It's possibly not the ideal position for him, but it's never caused us any problems.

 

Denogran

Paladin's taunt works as well, it's on melee hit, not spell hit. Also, pick up a [The Decapitator] off of Prince if you haven't yet. The thing never misses and is great for initial aggro. Also, since the rogue generally isn't being dps'd down, you don't need a ton of spell damage to get him.

The other thing I would suggest would be to have a paladin heal whomever is tanking the rogue. That way, that paladin can stun the rogue once every other appearance, for 6 seconds of no damage. If it's a paladin tanking, have the paladin ranged-pull with Avenger's Shield, stun when he gets to you, then run away from him so that when the stun wears off he has to run back. 10+ seconds with no incoming damage is great. If you have a paladin tanking as well, then you can stun every appearance (alternating between tank and healer).

 

Papajan

yeah, the 2.4.2 change to pulling Zerevor is annoying (was unable to spellsteal on the first attempt cause aggro range is less than SS range). The thing we did to fix it was I went Invis, ran to the top of the steps, got BoP, clicked off Invis and stole the buff. Kinda scary to do, but it worked.

 

Harwin

Thanks to all the help in this thread, we were able to get them down in about 4 "real" attempts (after 4 wipes basically on the pull as we tried different things)

We tried using non-imp pets, using DS and BoP, and ultimately it was the imp fireball that made the difference.

Mage gets BOP-ped just as fireball flies, hunters have MDs up, tank runs in for Darkshadow and hunters MD malande/gathios.

The other big thing that helped was putting the hunters on Zerevor. Extra physical damage on him means more BoPs on him, which means fewer BoPs on Malande, so heals were a lot easier to interrupt.

It cost us some DPS (Hunter's Mark won't reliably stay on any target but Gathios due to BoSW and we had to keep stopping due to BoP) but it made heals really easy to block.

 

Fadaar

I'd be careful doing that. Better off doing BoP while they're casting and not after it goes off. Resist on the mage + minimal BoP agro = dead paladin if they don't bubble immediately.

 

Harwin

While the imp fireball goes off, not the mage. Even if the fireball is resisted, it should send the first cast to the imp. We had problems before where BoP would wear off too soon because the imp takes his sweet time getting into position.

 

Tanoh

Hmm.. I don't see what the problem with the pull is, and I think you're all doing it way too overcomplicated pulls. I'm usually the mage tank in my guild.

1) Set /focus to the priest, and a "/cast [target=focus] Counterspell" macro to interrupt healing when melee immune.
2) Stand infront of everyone and target the mage.
3) Get blessing of protection, preferebly by the paladin assigned to salvation.
4) Any other buffs, like priest shield, pain surpression etc can be used also if available, but they're not needed really. All I care about is the BoP.
5) Run forward.
6) As soon as you are in range spellsteal, pray it's not resisted as that's most likely a wipe.
7) Fire Blast the mage on your next GCD.
8) Start scorching and fireballing. From this point you'll never lose aggro.

Because you are immune to physical attacks from the BoP the melee mobs will ignore you and run towards the raid, the tanks need to poke them or get MD:ed depending on how many hunters you have. If they run a bit behind you they should get proximity aggro. The tank for the priest should charge/feral charge in as soon as you've stolen the spell of the mage and start to move her.

The only slightly tricky thing is moving the priest. She is a bit hard to move but it's perfectly doable. You and the other ranged spell breakers make sure she isn't allowed to cast anything the first 30 seconds. Interrupt everything and she'll move with the tank, we tank her at almost the door. I've never seen her heal after just a few seconds of the fight, and even if she does hopefully at least one will have their breaking up. And well, even if all goes against you and no one can break it, healing from 99,5% to 100% is not the end of the world.

I never move the mage, he stands on top of the stairs and I stand below the stair a bit away from it making sure I'm in LoS of him, you're only really out of LoS if you stand at the first step at the bottom of the stair. I'm also making sure I'm in range of the priest to Counterspell. Sometimes it's a bit tricky to find a spot if there's blizzard and flame strike going on right where I want to stand, but it's usually not a problem.

From reading the latest replies I think you're all overcomplicating the pull. Yes, it can fail and expect to fail in the start until you've figured out the exact place to spellsteal and not be out of los. But once you've done it and isn't unlucky with resists, not much can go wrong.

If I remember I can take some screenshots tomorrow (assuming we don't suck today and don't clear the start of BT :>)

 

Harwin

We went to the "complicated" pull after reading tons of posts about spellsteal and lag, such that the spellsteal would go off apparently in time and the mage would still die to the bolt. Since our mage doesn't have the HP to survive an un-dampened bolt we have to 100% make sure he doesn't eat one.

 

Gunn

Lets say you have 3 tanks

Warrior
Paladin
Druid

Which tank on which of the council? Lets assume they're all equally geared.

 

Vidofnir

The Warrior on Gathios, so he can Spell Reflect the Judgements. Causing a lot of damage, threat and preventing some big spikes.

The Druid on Veras, so he can charge Veras as soon as he pops out of Stealth again for quicker picking up. Can also Moonfire spam him in case he has BoP.

The Paladin on Malande, although a Warrior would be better for more interrupts on her. You'll probably have a Mage+Rogue interrupting the CoHs already, but if you have a Warrior tank and a Shaman healer healing the tank, those two can interrupt nearly all Divine Wraths, preventing loads of raid damage.

 

Denogran

Again, I'll just point out that the Druid or Paladin on Veras is fine - I'd put the lesser geared of the two on him. We tank him way away from everyone else, so a pally in that case can throw spot heals while the druids would just be twiddling his thumbs. If you tanked the rogue somewhere closer to the group then the druid could help with dps while not tanking. Same with Malande, either will work fine, although like Vid pointed out, a warrior is superior for her.

In our raids I'd put warrior on Gathios, Pally on Veras, and druid on Malande. But if your raid is setup differently, or your pally far out-gears your druid, then switching the two might be better.