Darkstar614

Indeed stomp does suck for healing.But I think we've had just as many tank deaths while NOT stomped, as we've had while stomped. So I don't really see it necessary for a 3rd tank for trying to avoid healing through stomp.

On the "shadowpriest for healers" subject, its not as necessary as I originally though when our guild first started this encounter. In my opinion it isn't HPS thats the issue, its the way everyone times their heals. And trying to coordinate something like that is near impossible with latency. Heals that are faster or as fast as his swing timer(1.5) such as flash of light and lifebloom have amazing effects on this encounter. Both of which do not require a shadowpriest to use to the full capacity.

 

◊ Praetorian

Taunting off stomp as a healer makes me a bit uncomfortable, actually. I like to be pre-casting a heal on the taunting tank when he taunts, but I can't really do that when the previous tank is about to eat a Stomp because accepting a possible 18k-20k Stomp spike and trusting a Taunt to land within that <1sec window to save the tank is a dicey proposition (especially since resists are possible, albeit unlikely), and even without Stomp, Brutallus can still do around 7k-8k DPS, which can be ugly if you get no avoidance at all and the healers are just starting fresh heals.

Also, with the new Slash changes, using three tanks somewhat complicates Burn positioning, I'd think, and also increases the number of people you need to have soaking.

Really, what it boils down to is just what works for us. Our strat feels completely stable and repeatable and healing through Stomp doesn't scare me as a healer, so I don't see the need to avoid it.

Either can obviously work, however.

 

david0925

Issue with havnig a 3rd tank taunting off stomp is that it lowers your DPS output by bringing an extra tank that's going to be a waste of slot a lot of the time. Also the fact that you can't really precast on a "stomp tank", which makes him vulnerable to getting killed even without the stomp since Brutallus hits hard enough without stomp.

Neverthless, if it works for you, obviously stick to it. I don't see that as being optimized, though.

Maniq is my hero

 

◊ Praetorian

Well the idea is that you drop a healer when adding a tank, so your DPS is more or less unchanged (in theory a few hundred higher due to the tank's DPS). I definitely agree about pre-healing, though, as I stated above.

 

Zaran

It's not bad at all. We have currently been using 2 holy paladins as burn healing. Actually its more like 1, and 1 on backup burn healing incase there are 2-3 up at once. I am fairly confident a paladin and druid could do the job very effectivly. Druid / Shaman can work, but unless you run with 3+ shaman healers I think they would be better spent healing the MT and or soak groups (IE chain heal onto the MT)

To clarify a bit, 1 holy paladin can easially keep up 1 burn person. However without at least help from hots it is not possible for 1 paladin to keep up 1 person through the last 10 seconds while keeping an eye on someone else thats part way through burn.

I would like to try having 1 holy paladin do it and just have the druid toss hot's on the burn victim when they have 15 seconds or so left while keeping his full attention to the MT. Maybe we'll get to try that next week

 

Setia

On the DPS side of things - how many people use [Eye of the Night] and [Chain of the Twilight Owl]l ? In an all-caster group, they're pretty effective, the Eye actually having the equivalent of 170 spell damage, 16 hit and 26 crit, while the Chain has 21 spell damage and about 177 crit rating (assuming only 4 people benefit from crit because there's a SP in the group). We gave one to every group member and have a rotation to pop them in-group (one hour cooldown, and you have to keep the necklace on).

We don't use it, but [Braided Eternium Chain] is a weak equivalent for melee, with 21 hit, 5 weapon damage and 140 crit rating.

 

orcsgotbooty

In regards to the on use necklaces, does anyone know if they stack? Either 2 people in a group using the same necklace, or if 2 people use 2 different necklaces in the same group.

 

Setia

Different necklaces stack, the same does not.

 

Derketo

Thats the whole thing. When you don't heal through stomps, you can have healers prehealing the next tank, which is exactly what we do. Every pass we've ever done on brut on live, we've had exactly 1 taunt resist, so thats also not an issue.

Burn positioning actually isn't even remotely an issue, because we never outranged it in the first place.

I personally feel that either strategy works, but I also think that 3 tanks is the easiest to repeat. There never comes a time when a tank takes a 20k damage spike where he will die if the proper response doesn't happen. The worst thing that can happen with 3 tanks is that you have a late taunt, wherein the previous tank dies, which makes it just a matter of rezzing or having a ss on said tank, instead of a wipe.

I'll be alright when we get to pass out time.

 

Shha

Or use 2 ferals like us and stack them with armor buffs/inspiration :P Stomp is really barely noticable with hits "spiking" to 7k.

 

• Falk

A few people still need to make sure the old tank is topped up so that MH/OH + stomp (in that order) doesn't gib. I don't know, maybe it was latency in general but tanks kept gibbing on a 3-tank 3-group strat which we used on the first dozen or so pulls. It actually became loads more stable after we swapped to a 2-tank setup. As always, YMMV.

 

Trouble

I think three tanks is superior in terms of keeping tanks alive, but we switched to two tanks due to the change to meteor slash. I know you can still do it with three but it easier for us to switch to do. That said, I wouldn't be interested in using warriors in a two tank strategy at all.

 

poexel

i don't know our guild tryed brutallus today many many times and and we casters (wlocks, mages)reached every time the threat cap. our tanks have ~1400TPS, but it's obviously not enough
i've waited sometimes 12seconds before i begin to cast scorch and 30seconds before i burned all out (iv+comb+cap+destro+trinket+drums) and @80% i gain aggro.

i've no idea...sublety enchanted...and invis @80%? no way...do you have any idea to increase the threat generation of our tanks or decrease tps of me?

 

Illundai

We had that problem too. We made our Feral Druid start off with tanking (seemed to be better) and gave all our casters tranquil air until ~90%.

 

Halle

We also use Traquil Air for a short period at the start too.

As melee I find just one totem let to run it's duration followed by all the usual good stuff gives us enough space to go full out.

We have used pala/warr (insane threat from the pala, just cant catch him) on first kill and warr/druid on our second kill.

I used to be a hardcore raider, now i'm a hardcore father.

 

Hand

Are guilds really having threat problems on this boss? This is probably the easiest boss to tank. Normally you're faced with decisions while tanking in order to maximize your threat, which skills to use, when to use them, rage management, etc. This fight is just insane, its impossible to run out of rage. I'm pretty sure nobody is even above 70% of the tank threat when we do this fight(we have warlocks at 2400 dps, mages at 2200 dps, fury warriors at 2500), I think you should talk to your tanks. For the record we use a druid and a warrior.

 

Illundai

Actually, it depends on how your casters position themselves. Before I caught on to it, our mages were standing in melee range. Brutallus would not even move to kill off a Mage that pulled aggro, which lead me to believe they were in melee range of him thus could only do 110% threat. Its really not an issue anymore now that they make sure they're out of melee range now. I forgot to mention all of this in my previous post, do check if they are out of melee range. His hitbox is quite large.
And no, it really isn't our tanks fault, they were doing plenty of TPS.

 

• Aldriana

The other thing that might be noted about threat is that the boss gets taunted at least every 35 seconds or so; hence, to pull aggro, you need to generate enough aggro between two taunts to pull from the tank, which, after the first minute or two, is actually quite hard. To pull, say, 3 minutes in, you need to not only generate 10 (or 30) percent more aggro than the tank does in a given period of time, you also need to generate that precent of the *total* threat the tank has so far as well. Thus, pulling after 75% or so should be pretty hard to do, so one can optimize one's threat reduction cooldowns as though the fight were only 2 minutes in length - vanishing/soul shattering/whatever after the first taunt (~30 seconds in) is a totally reasonable option.

 

Flamingcloud

We have had threat problems in the first minute or so, especially when we were at one hunter.. One attempt I got PI'd at 99% for some reason and did 3700 dps with 73% crit rate before he lol'd me... Ya.. I got scrolling combat text after that one.. Mages have used icy/combustion/trinket at the start to try and fit them in 3 times and pulled early. Some adjusting to 130% range and using trinkets/drums 1minute in instead of trying to fit another in at 6minutes into the fight solved those problems.


Taunt gives you the aggro of the person who has aggro, not the highest person.. If you are at 125% and a tank taunts, you sitll only need 5% to pull.

 

Metrosexuelf

We killed him tonight using only seven healers: two resto druids were on burn targets, two shaman were on raid healing, and two holy priests and a paladin were on tank healing (two protection warriors).

Unfortunately no one was running a WWS but we managed to kill him with a good 15-25 seconds left on the enrage timer with a 30.9k raid DPS (DBM said the kill was 5 minutes 43 seconds). Here is a link to a screenshot someone took. Prior to that we were wiping at enrage with 3-5% left so it just came down to putting more pressure on healers by adding another DPS.

As far as the healing mechanics worked with only seven healers, the two priests said they basically did nothing but spam max rank greater heal on the current tank. The holy priests were given a shadowpriest to keep up the spam and another was given to the mages.

 

Narishma

You actually run such a healing intensive fight with a priest with points in Power Infusion?

 

Animosityftw

Yea going from 8 healers to 7 healers made the difference for us. We took a Paladin off our 5 healer tank team, and added a second shadow priest. The shadow priest ended up doing so much healing our Slash healer could help out with the tanks so we really didn't lose much healing at all. Putting the SP in with mages also boosted their dps too, as the original SP was with the healers.

 

SecSolidus

Free up one resto druid on full Tank hot duty. There is no need for 2 druids to heal the same burn target ever. I always do it without any help.

Solidus Guildmaster of < Security >

This valorous visitation of a bygone vexation, stands vivified and has vowed to vanquish these venal and virulent vermin vanguarding vice and vouchsafing the violently vicious and voracious violation of volition.

 

Metrosexuelf

In all likelihood they were probably tossing HoTs all around and keeping an eye on the tank, too. It's just that the 'first eye' was fixed on burn targets.

 

• Daboran

I know it's pretty dependent on classes, but how close do you think you should be getting unbuffed before you go full-out at him?

We had our first proper raid at him yesterday, with somewhat less than our absolutely best-geared players and after working out mechanics/positioning we finally managed 30% at Enrage with only flasks/food running (no Bloodlust, Drums, Elixirs/Pots etc) and no CoR.

I'm thinking we need to improve that to about 15-20% - we run 3 Shaman and with 3 Mages and a DPS Warrior the last 20% tends to fly.