Roywyn

At 6.512 you gained the Dampen Magic buff.
At 7.510, the Arcane Bolt hit you for full damage.

The Bolt has a travel time, and probably some delay until the damage registers. So, if the Bolt hit at 7.510, the cast of it completed perhaps at 6.500, which may be right before you gained the dampen magic buff.

You need to have the buff when he completed his cast, before the bolt appears and travels to you.


We used a Water Elemental pull last night, works like a charm. He gets the first Bolt and Smite, and you have all the time you ever need. If you're not frost (you should consider it for Illidan though), find some other pet to send in, hunter pets or shadowfiends.
Or you can have a prot warrior that tanks Malande pop Last Stand and pull, he can surive the first onslaught and shouldn't need his cooldowns tanking anyway.


Question for gnome tanks on Zerevor:
Do you all use shapeshift food against line of sight issues, or is there a better way to deal with the pull?

 

NinJOu

Sorry to bump the thread but i wanted to know when the Paladin Tank should get his Spell Reflect up ?

I mean Gathios self buff with his seal and then immediatly judge the MT ? Or is the time between seal & judgement random ?

Thx !

 

Kalince

Fairly certain his judgement has a cast time. At least I believe that is what it says when he actually has a cast bar.

 

Zindel

Yes it has a cast time. The cast is called "Judgment" and is easy to reflect since it's his only cast. Although it's the same name, he alternates two casts. Either Judgment of Blood "non reflectable dot" or Judgment of Command "reflectable nuke". He does one judgment cast ever 15-20 seconds so it's safe to spell reflect all casts even if half of them are non reflect able dot.

I "think" he alternates between the two, using blood first then command then blood then command ...etc. But with all the other stuff going on, and all the rage you're getting, it's not worth trying to pay attention to which judgment you got hit with and only reflect the nukes. I'd just reflect all to be safe.

 

• Valoran

He does alternate between the two, but if you're using any form of spellwatch addon (witchhunt from wowace in my case) you can see him gain the seal just before casting judgement and reflect as appropriate. This eliminates any guesswork from tanking gathios.

That said, it's rare that I don't have the rage to spell reflect, nor is threat ever really an issue - so I normally just spell reflect everything and just leave it down to the "twitch" whenever I see a cast bar, rather than risk making a mistake.

 

Krazen

Hmm, if Zerevor can be put out of range, would/could there be any potential benefit in casters nuking him down instead of the pally?

 

◊ Klasto

I'm sure this has been said before but the judgement you reflect gives you a lot of aggro as well.Maximizing your threat via reflects and minimizing your damage taken via armor pots/trinkets is a good idea.And don't worry, Judgement isn't the fastest cast around and is pretty easy to reflect.

And as a side note, I've never seen him crush, but still like to maximize my armor in this fight rather than taking spike damage, everyone takes enough spike damage already throughout the fight.

 

NinJOu

Thanks for the answer.

We downed them last Tuesday. Indeed, judgement is a 1sec cast. I asked the warrior tank to Shield Reflect every time Gathios casted it.

Our MT had some really high spikes at 7K damage. Maybe next time, i'll ask him to put his armor stuff.

 

Buiden

Full evasion gear for this fight as spell reflect holds agro for you. It is a fight where I still chug Ironshields to help on healer mana as well. He cannot crush so focus on keeping him debuffed and moving properly (don't turn your back to him :P) rather than threat.

 

Aereus

Assuming you have a Rogue on interruption duty of the Priest, I like to wear my PvP gloves to interrupt in case I can't get into Kick range due to blizzard or flamestrike.

 

caxt

My guild had our first attempts at Council last night. We never made it past 85% but we learned a couple things. Since we have a frost mage tanking, sometimes zerevor would just start casting instead of running to the top of the stairs, therefore out of LOS for spellsteal. So, had to have a marks hunter MD it to him. The real question I have is about raid healing. Every attempt we got past the initial 15 seconds, we would always start losing people immediately due to deadly poison/envenom, or divine wrath from malande.

My understanding from this thread was that you should interrupt divine wrath and circle of healing, but unfortunately we only have one mage on interrupt duty. I put another melee interrupt on her to see if that would help but they were still getting off. Just wondered if I should expect that to be interrupted or if we just need to bring more than 9 healers. Had 1 on rogue tank, one on malande tank, two on garithos and one on zerevor tank. I kept rolling lifeblooms on garithos/zerevor/malande, and the other 3 raid healed.

 

Vihermaali

Both circle of healing and divine wrath should be interrupted if possible. It not end of the world if one or two gets past. Not interrupting divine wrath adds a lot of stress for healers so while it may be possible to heal trough it I don't suggest it.

9 healers should be enough. Your healing assigments look like ok too.

1)Does everyone in your raid have around 10k hp buffed?
2)Are you sure your healers are fast enough? As a healer I can't stress this enough: when healing raid you have only 2 second window to heal someone who has taken dmg. That is, you have to heal him in less than 2 seconds from the moment he takes damage or he may die. 2 seconds because thats the avarage time for dots to tick.

 

caxt

Everyone was at 10k buffed minimum. It was probably just because it was a new fight, with more than one thing to look out for it probably made some people nervous or whatever. After the first 15 seconds, several people would be near dead and the raid healers just could never catch up.

The raid healers were two shaman/1 priest, later switched to 2 shaman/1 paladin. I suppose it may be a better idea to throw the shaman on the MT and put the paladins on the raid since our paladins are probably our strongest healers after our druids.

 

Vihermaali

Well, people dying from envenom just doesn't sound right. Make sure they are not casting slow heals (healing touch, chain heal, greater heal etc). Other than that, can't really tell whats wrong without actually being there.

 

Roywyn

The best pull for us is to summon a water elemental and have it charge in (and die).

Your mage has LoS issues on the pull - 1g says it's a gnome and doesn't use [Savory Deviate Delight]. It's kind of mandatory for a guaranteed clean pull for a gnome tank, character size causes LoS issues with the stairs.

 

Gofa

On the one hand Illidari Council is really hard for your healers. There is a LOT of damage going around. It's takes some time for your healers to get used to this fight - just like RoS p3 for example. They have to spam fast heals to targets, which aren't topped off, otherwise one bad flamestrike / blizzard could kill them.

On the other hand it is kind of a retard check for your whole raid like Lurkers spout or Al'ars flame patches. People have to pay attention für 12+ minutes. There is no reason anyone should take more than 1 tick of flamestrike/blizzard/consecration if they start running out of it immediately.


That said, our raid had some troubles with them at first too. It just takes some trys to figure out what is going on. Once you can bring them to 70% without any death, you are able to kill them. Keep focused for the whole fight and make sure you survive, similar to Archimonde. Bandage yourself if you aren't topped off to help your healers.


For interrupting duty we have two rogues (or warriors) and the mage tank + one backup mage. As far as i know 1 rogue kicks all the heals, the other makes sure no divine wrath get through. The mage counters her heals, if she has her melee shield up. The backup mage only counters her, if the tank mage has still cooldown and there is a melee shield up again and she starts to heal again.



As far as the pull causes problems, just use BoP on your tanking mage to save one MD. That's the way we deal with the pull. I gain BoP, run in, spam spellsteal on the mage and use a fire blast, as soon as I'm in range. Never ever had a problem this way.

 

caxt

the mage in question is a human, but he's frost. The problem was he'd run in spamming spellsteal, but zerevor would start casting missiles immediately without moving into LOS on the top of the stairs, mage gets instagibbed, wipe it up.

 

Wibble

Healing for Council has 2 components:

1) Your raid needs to manage the amount of damage that it receives. That means moving quickly as soon as Blizzard starts (you can totally avoid getting hit at all this way), staying spread out so that Flamestrike catches as few people as possible, and so on. It makes triage much easier, it lessens the chance of one-two punches (i.e. Blizzard into a Flamestrike) because people can be topped off efficiently, and constantly adapting to the AOE is just part of the fight. Moving out of AOE, allowing for space around you even if you have to stop casting/whatever for a little bit, and then shifting again to recover empty areas when AOE subsides becomes a smooth, natural rhythm.

2) Your healers need the self-awareness to do the above while they're mentally evaluating the raid's incoming damage and using the spell that fits the purpose. People need to be topped off quickly. People with poison require care depending on their current HP (normally I shield immediately when the poison hits and queue up a gheal rank to top it; there's play time with poison). Anytime someone takes Holy Wrath--which generally means a failure somewhere else--you need to be ready to instantly tend to that, especially if they were low to being with. As an aside, Grid/healing mods that show which targets have aggro/target of target is good for this, as you'll have lead time during the cast to make sure the person is covered.

Do that, manage your mana, and maybe pitch in on the tanks with an occasional hot or heal, and it's all good.

I actually enjoy raid healing on this fight because it's fairly dynamic, even though it can be long as hell. It's usually interesting and especially so when things go wrong.

 

Oafijev

I'd like to echo this. There is a lot of damage flying around, and every raid member needs to be willing to pot/healthstone if the need arises. You're almost certainly dead if you take 3 ticks of flamestrike or blizzard, and if you take 2, another flamestrike/blizzard/wrath will kill you. Ideally, everyone should only take a maximum of one tick of these. As Wibble points out, spreading out can minimize the number of people hit by any particular aoe but even so, people need to cancel that cast and get out of there if they're the one hit.

This is all good advice.

I'm a raid-healing priest on this fight also except we don't interrupt any Divine Wraths, only the heals (so it can still be done fairly "easily" even if you let all the Divine Wraths through). I put the Malande tank as a PlayerTarget on ora2 so when Malande switches focus, I immediately switch to her focus and start a max rank GH. The GH will land momentarily after the Wrath.

If you're using Grid or PerfectRaid, make sure you register Divine Wrath and Deadly Poison as debuffs to display so you can react to them quickly. (Note that casters may have a Divine Wrath buff too - one of our shadow priests has a trinket buff called Divine Wrath on 2 minute cooldown :P ). The other thing that I found helped a lot was PoM on poisoned targets. The instant nature of PoM negates a tick and heals a bit to boot, buying a lot of buffer time for other healers (or your own following flash heal) to top off the target. You should usually be able to use either PoM or PW:S on every deadly poison.

 

Vulkaire

If he is frost, have him pull with Water Elemental and a BoP on him. The WE will eat the first arcane bolt so you have less risk of eating a full one due to resist or whatever.

 

Lastembrace

I think its worth noting regarding the healing that deadly poison does not show up as a poison, as such it won't make your raid frames show as a different colour or anything like that. We have the healer assigned to the rogue tank throw some heals on the people that get the poison while he's vanished, and tell them to use the warnings from bigwigs/DBM to know who has the poison for this reason.

Regarding the interrupting, we have the warrior tanking Malande interrupt the heals as they don't come so often and have a long cast time, and a rogue kicking the wrath's as well as two mages alternating interrupts when she's melee immune. Also, make sure not to interrupt smite as this will cause her to use her other more harmful spells (heal and wrath) more often. At least I think so, correct me if I'm wrong.

 

Astelin

One thing to add as far as interrupting the divine wrath is your shamans can also do this with rank 1 earth shock.

 

◊ Penguin

I believe it was mentioned earlier in the thread about the rogue doing melee attacks on players before he came out of vanish. The other night when I was tanking him I was waiting for him to reappear, and with more than 5 seconds on the boss timer (which had been and continued to be accurate for the whole fight), I saw Dodge Miss on my SCT. Looking at the log next time he vanished, he attempted to melee me well before he reappeared.

 

Juniormage

Hi, can i check with the mages, what gears do you wear to tank Illidari Council. About how much HP and spell hit rating. Sorry if I missed out a thread on it or something

Thanks.

 

Gofa

<< just logged out with my tanking gear.

Nothing too special, today i got raidbuffed with just some stamina food + imp + commanding shout to 16,2k hp, but that's almost too much I guess.