Is the rend flesh a bleed effect?

Would stoneform remove it?

Lac and Rend are bleed yes, Stoneform should remove it, make sure the other tank taunts at the end of the bear duration or you will see a nasty suprise

I have transfered over, now I just need to find time to raid.
Has anyone done any testing with executioner yet? I respeced to test a couple things in blasted lands but couldnt find anyone willing to do the enchant. I figured since I speced out of flurry it would be a good time to test for PPM or hidden cooldown.

I think people are getting the wrong end of the stick with this zone. Complaining that it's too hard whilst also clearing it in one day doesn't make much sense - yes, the numbers might be big, but Prince Malchezar can still do 16K damage in under 2 seconds on a Karazhan tank, and no-one has any issues with him. It's suppossed to be hard, and it's suppossed to take the guilds that it is tuned for several weeks to complete it.

I alos think people are underestimating how much easier it will become with practice. When we first started Karazhan, we killed the Curator in 3 evocates. Two weeks later, and with minimal upgrades, we were trying to do him in one. The fact that the zone has been brute forced by Illidan guilds probably means it *is* tuned at the appropriate difficulty.

Wow Web Stats

Here's a parse, appropriately disclaimered as having Wizz in near full T6. Even so, the logs tell us a lot:

In P1 - Brutal Swipe isn't dangerous in the least if properly contained (<5k damage)

In P2 - Highest hit on Wizz was 2273. (430 blocked)... lets assume a ballpark figure of ~3k max hit on a T4 tank. (Also, Nalorakk dual wields in bear form (wtb), unless I'm horribly, horribly mistaken). Rend Flesh was ticking for a shade over 2k.

If we take P1 management as a non-issue, the only problem we'd have is Rend Flesh damage output and/or Silence catching healers unaware. Timers on Silence would help out a lot in that regard.

It's doable with T4 gear, at my best guesstimate; I was reluctant to convince the raid to try out the T4 thing, as it was the first full guild run into Z'A.

On a very related note, looking on the logs themselves, is there a way to tell if Rend Flesh is avoidable? I'm still convinced from both this run and the previous that Rend Flesh cannot miss.



Edit: Looking at Nalorakk - WWS it's pretty significant if the two bleeds cannot miss.

We can calculate how much damage a T6 tank took in P2 by looking at Wizz's incoming damage minus Brutal Swipe, or 213.5k - 12.5k (Guesstimate, 25k/2) = 201k

Now, to get the amount of melee damage Wizz took, it's 201k minus the two bleeds; so 201 - (90 + 84.5), or about 25.5k melee damage. Now if the two bleeds are unavoidable and thus do the same amount of damage irregardless of gear, it'd make the VAST majority of damage in P2 come from damage that is not affected by gear scaling... or is my maths badly flawed?

I'd probably agree with this. By the time we got to him we had 3 Shaman in raid (2 heal heal, 1 [me] pewpew) and 1 Priest. We also had 2 Hunters, a Mage, a Warlock, and a Feral Druid. Never saw what the Warlock did, but the frequent Shaman phases were nasty with that setup. I could kill the totems pretty consistently with Shocks, but if I did we didn't have reliable interrupts ready for his low-cooldown heals/Chain lightning, though the Mage got a few. If I focused on interrupting his spells, it seemed I still couldn't get them all by myself and there was no one able to kill the totem in time.

If we'd decided to stay we could probably have done something like have the Feral Druid stay casterform and be in charge of Moonfiring totems and set up some kind of system so the Mage knew when to Counterspell... Our composition made this guy harder than he would otherwise be but I was still surprised.


By comparison, when we got the Warrior soul drain, the phase was laughably easy by comparison.


Along the same lines, I didn't find the Dragonhawk boss to be that nasty. Hard to figure out? Sure. But once you do, probably one of the easier bosses in there in terms of raw numbers, just a little bit of a complicated execution.

Oh pray tell, since we horde don't have stoneform we can not find out ourselves

This is the feeling I am getting as well. I talked about this in guild chat but from the progression standpoint you have to realize players will be going into ZA with heavy badge loots. Say your in a guild who only has 10-15 members, you have been doing Karazhan for about 3 months and do not have anything you want from it. That means you have gotten approximately 264 badges (I am assuming you get 22 a run but I do not know how much badges are distributed there and this is based off Kara alone. You could have been doing heroics on your offtime and this results in many more badges. This means your gear is already getting to the point of Tier 5 and thus makes Zul'Aman actually doable from a gear standpoint. Players should have Zul'Aman badge gear before getting Z'A and this should be enough to cope with whatever is available there especially once strats and boss mods are available. I have not matched the damage from different raids yet so that might be a variable in the issue though.

we did use blessing of protection to force a tank change after a resisted growl (and this fight makes me want to dig nat pagles broken reel out of the bank..) Didnt remove mangle.

I cannot speak to any of the tuning in Z'A, and it may be perfectly manageable for a guild that has never entered a 25-man zone, but this statement is absurd. Consider the situation of a guild who has been doing Karazhan from May to the present but has not progressed into the 25-man content or has limited exposure. The guild has zero badges from Karazhan. They probably have some badges from heroics, but it is unlikely that anyone in the group has a massive stockpile. It would be more reasonable to assert that they cut back on heroics or switched to playing alts or PvPing once they acquired all the items they wanted from heroics.

When Zul'Aman comes out, it would not be unreasonable to assert that the guild would be in 70-80% KZ/crafted/PvP epics and 20-30% heroic blues, as limited by the absence of available epic gear in certain slots. Perhaps each member will have enough badges stashed away to pick up one new item. Should that guild continue to farm Karazhan and heroics for a month, sharding the drops that they acquired months prior, just to get the badges to be able to overcome the opening gear hurdles of Z'A? If that is how the bear boss is tuned, then there is a definite problem.

At the moment, Illidan killing guilds have been expressing a concern about the long wait until the Sunwell. 10-mans guilds have had a similar wait for Zul'Aman. If we need to continue to clear old content after Z'A is released before our tanks can manage the first boss, then that represents a fundamental design problem. If they want to tune the content in that manner, then they ought to hotfix badges onto Karazhan bosses now instead of waiting until the patch comes out.

As I said previously, at least the bear boss and eagle boss are doable right out of Karazhan. Maybe mana pots on bear boss, and the occasional "oh-shit" nature pot on eagle boss, but the numbers are well within range for a Karazhan-geared raid (with decent and above players, obviously) to topple with knowledge and practice.

Can't agree more. My PUG was basically karazhan geared (sure, with some SSC/TK gear thrown in as well, but for the most part kara) and we downed the bear boss EASILY. I actually think the bear boss might need to be tuned to be harder. Even the dragonhawk, which most people herald as one of the hardest bosses, was not that bad. We only did two attempts on him. The first time we didn't really have a strategy and got mobbed by dragonhawks at the end. The second time our mage DCed and a healer left. We still managed to get him down to 30%. I know we could have three-shot that boss with no previous strategy and 8 players. What does that say about a guild who has the full strategy and a full raid?

I think instead of looking at actual numbers, people need to just look at how hard it is people people to win the fight. Clearing an instance in one day with no strats seems overly easy to me. Sure, the bear boss can deal 16k in two seconds,(or whatever), but isn't that why we have NS macros and swiftmend? Z'A seems too easy to me.

The bear boss is a gear check for the tanks. The issue here is whether a kara geared tank can survive the burst damage + silence. Well geared tanks make it a non issue

I realize that Karazhan will be dropping badges of justice when the patch comes out, which will provide a transition from Karazhan to Z'A for guilds that are working their way through Karazhan now. However, if a tank today has all upgrades they can get from Karazhan and heroics, is appropriatedly enchanted and gemmed, and has an appropriate group makeup, that tank should be sufficient for handling the bear boss on the day Z'A comes out. As a gear check, the tank should not be required to have the majority of the new badge items with the expectation that he would have acrued enough badges from his time in Karazhan.

The boss can be tuned to require all the best tanking gear from Karazhan and, perhaps, one of the new badge items, but it should not require *most* of the new badge items. I'm certainly not saying that that is the case in the current tuning. I haven't experienced it myself. I'm just saying that it would be poor design if a tank got everything he needed from Karazhan months ago but would be inadequately geared for the next boss in the progression line until he had farmed up a boat-load of badges from content he had already farmed to completion.

Group that I did it in was me tanking Troll form, T4 geared warrior tanking the bear as ironically we saw the Troll form as the hardest due to the fact I was taking the Brutal Strikes for 9k etc along with the regular damage. The T4 geared tank had no major problems tanking the bear and other than his shoulders the rest of his gear was purely from Karazhan so its easily doable in its current state.

Brutal strikes does les damage the more targets it hits, so have the other tank stand in front next to you and they're trivial.

I'd say optimal makeup is probably something like:

Tank
Tank/DPS
Resto Druid
Resto Shaman
Holy Paladin
Shadow Priest
Mage
Warlock
2x other dps

But this isn't what my group had and I'm sure you can do it with a lot of things. Doing it without a Mage would be irritating. Not substantially harder per se but certainly more irritating. You need some form of offensive dispel and some form of reliable interrupt so I guess Ele Shaman or Rogue would be ideal for one of those last dps spots.

For your setup, with what you have already, I'd do my best to get a Resto Druid for one of the other two healing spots, and try to get a Mage.

Stoneform removes both bleeds and is basically a lifesaver on this fight, especially if your other tank is slow for some reason and you get Mangled.

The nature of his bear form actually favors paladin tanks in a unique way for once; since most of his damage is DoTs ticking while healers are silenced, Ardent Defender will be active quite often. Combined with the ability of a warrior to intervene any melee hits during the silence, I think T4 guilds will do just fine with his damage output.

The brutal swipe thing is a pretty good example of brute force vs. understanding the mechanics. In T6 you just tank through it and don't even care that it has an odd mechanic. Presumably some of the other fights are the same way, things can be avoided/mitigated rather than healed through.

It has been mentioned, but it bears re-iterating: T6-level guilds may outgear the place by so much that it appears harder to them, because they do it the hard way, which is supposed to be the impossible way for Kara guilds. In the three days this instance has been out there hasn't been a heck of a lot of work into finding out the exact limitations and counters to various abilities. Numbers like 10k just don't make "UR DOIN IT RONG" flash through your head the way they should, whereas when cthun's eye laser hit someone for eighty million it was obvious that was a strategy issue, not a gear issue. You're trying it the hard (obvious, brute force) way first, and beating it. If you had wiped more you would have had an incentive to be more inventive.

Case in point: according to the 2.3 mega-thread, the fifth boss's massively massive 10k spell-pushback DoT has a maximum range of 30 yards. While T5-6 guilds have been stacking shadow resist or healing through it, and wondering how Kara guilds can manage, it turns out that it's supposed to be avoided instead.
Bear Boss's melee attacks may need some minor tuning. The other stuff, you really should start looking at things like range, target cap, avoidability, dispelling, interrupts, and LoS, before thinking about elemental prot pots.

Eh, again, about the concern of T6 tanks trivializing the Bear gearcheck, I posted a WWS, some maths and numbers about how the Bear phase dishes out damage which is -very very largely- unaffected by tank gear level. Until someone disproves my maths or otherwise points out a flaw in my assumptions (i.e. posting a WWS of Rend Flesh actually being missed/dodged/parried) it's going to stand that the difference between T6 and T4 geared tanks on the Bear phase is extremely minimal as it is unaffected by armor mitigation and avoidance. (Except maybe the difference of a single extra tick of Rend Flesh in terms of max HP?)

This is the last I'll repeat myself on the matter... Sorry, I'll shut up now.

Edit: Also significant, just noticed while double checking the maths/WWS - Bear boss doesn't crush. Hooray.

Ah; then avoidance doesn't matter at all, only stamina does.

I wonder if he can even crit? Then the tank requirement is even lower than kara, only execution and healers are tested.