Galred

For last night's kill, the hunter group was:

BM Hunter
BM Hunter
SV Hunter
Resto Shaman (dropping Mana Tide/GoA)
Affliction Warlock (the Destruction warlock was in a shadowpriest group)

The raid featured a Ret paladin refreshing Judgement of Wisdom, so between JoW, BoW, Mana Tide, and mana oil the hunters didn't have mana problems. This isn't the best group for the warlock, but with 2x Ferocious Inspiration it isn't completely awful and we are buffing the SV hunter's Expose Weakness (via GoA) along with his personal DPS (via FI).

 

Suvega

Alright after a few -long- nights of tries, and several re-reads of this entire thread, I think I need some help from the great gods o EJ

Our sole problem (currently), is tank instagibs. I can't figure out a way to coordinate heals and tanking such that the tank doesn't get instagibbed during a stomp/mh/oh combo.

To give some background, our current setup is something like this:

Tank Healers:
3 paladins, switching between down rank and max rank heals in rotation to avoid oom.
They have a 'focus' chain to get heals timed in such a way that you don't have huge spike of healing folowed by a lack for 2sec.
1 Holy priest - Switching from GHr2 for spamming, to max rank during stomps.

Soak Healers:
2 Shaman. Shaman is healing their group for when taking slashes, and chain healing off other tank when their group isn't taking slashes.

Burn Healers
1 priest
1 druid

Dmg buffs/debuffs on boss, are CoR, imp Demo Shout (5/5), and Scorpid Sting.
1 War tank, 1 Druid Tank. Both in (arguably) the best gear available to them atm.

As like another poster in this thread, our problem is that the gank get's instagibbed. -A lot-. Aside from luck, we can't find a reliable way to _ensure_ that a stomp doesn't pwn the tank. Specifically the warrior.

With 100% uptime of inspiration and/or Ancestral Fortitude, the warrior tank is taking in updwards of 12k main hand hits during a stomp. From watching videos, this seems really excessive. Every WWS I've seen with tanks have them taking no more then 10.5k melee hits. This seems like the most likely culprit for instagibs imo.

What could be causing this? He's chaining ironshields, blocking everything. CoR + 5/5 Demo should negate themselves, and from the WWS I've seen none of the tanks have Devo Aura.

We've tried gearing the tank for mitigation (using 2 trinkets, popping one for each stomp combined with last stands), as well as stam (a bit over 24k as a human). Either result in gibbing

Shadow embrace seem's like the only solution atm, unless someone can find something.

Thoughts? Thanks for your time.

 

Elerion

On a different forum the question came up about parry gibs on Brutallus. Someone mentioned Brutallus doesn't reset his swing timer when he parries, that this functionality had been removed for all sunwell bosses. Is there any truth to this?

 

Dyalad

It should be a mix of coordination between your healers and your tanks.
At some point in the fight, you'll end up with a tank transition right at the moment a stomp is about to happen. Usually you try (if possible) to do the transition right after the stomp is cast to alleviate the healing on the MT. It occurs around 65-50% in the fight.

Your MT healers should start kicking in their max heals a 2 seconds or so before a stomp is coming, and keep going until the stomp is over. That's where there is the highest chances of being gibbed. Healer wise, think of it a little bit like bloodboil - stomp is like the felrage target. You need to throw in your big heals because they're going to die otherwise.

As much as damage is more "predictable" with 2 druids, we've found that 2 warriors don't get gibbed as much during a stomp that our druid.

edit: I can only guess it's bad luck. While you feel your warrior gets gibbed, we felt the same but with our druid tank. Could it be the gear or poor transitioning? We had a hard time timing our heals properly until we had some taste of the fight with stomp / transition timing.

 

Danoobiel

Nothing new on the Expose armor topic but I found out you can increase DPS with [Flame Cap] and [Commander's Badge].

 

Zaran

[Commander's Badge] seems like a terrible waste of a trinket slot. Any reasoning behind suggesting this or just some random thought with no math to back it up?

 

• Chicken

I think he means you use it once before the fight starts and then switch to a different trinket. It's a small bit of extra DPS if you time it well, since the Netherwing Ally summoned by the badge stays up for quite some time.

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

 

Northerner

It seems to be 40 seconds in duration unless he gets killed of course. He isn't exactly stunning dps but hey, when you are squeezing out what you can you might as well use it. I would feel like quite the fool if I didn't get it swapped back out in time though.

 

Galred

Suvega, do you have a hunter with an owl for the Screech debuff? It takes off 210 AP and stacks with Imp Demo Shout.

 

Zaran

Ah yes, never thought of that. Suppose it couldn't hurt if DPS was coming right down to the wire.

 

CD

Ask your raid healing shamans to do more tank healing, fill the gap in raid healing by utilizing VE and large soaking groups.
MS is usually 40-45% of the total damage in the fight and you can literally half the amount of healing you need to devote to it with 2 shadow priests.

 

delling

We killed Brutallus tonight.

We didn't put a lot of pulls in, but rather tried to learn a lot and make significant changes over 2 1/2 nights.

He is afterall a very simple boss with an almost non-existant learning curve. So after we figured out how to position the 2 soak groups, and the burn spots, we just changed DPS groups and healer strategy until he died. It took about 25 pulls in total!

Things worth noting:

• As other people have mentioned, find out who your top DPSers are. Pimp out your best players. Group synergy is really important here. The 3 hunter-shaman-druidtank group is great.
• Using 1 druid tank is fantastic. No threat issues, pretty damn easy to heal on the stomp, and negligible difference at other times. Having a single prot warrior gives you shield wall for the last few percent, or horrible taunt-on-stomp moments.
• Shadow priests are REALLY good here. A shadow priest with improved VE can solo heal his meteor slash group... Also, healers don't really need these spriests. At least your priests probably don't - give the spriests to the destro locks and paladins.

This guy was surprisingly easy; although I guess that's the reward for farming Illidan for a few months. Now I just hope we can recreate the kill next week without a few respecs!

And Felmyst looks really tricky...

 

• Intermission

We usually have a hunter group, subject to the encounter and attendance. The group is ideally SV/BM/BM/Feral/Shaman, but often just SV/BM/BM/BM plus a shaman or a feral. Obviously this would vary heaps from guild to guild, but the setup below worked well for us. We killed Brutallus the first time the tanks lived for 6 minutes using this setup:

melee:
arms warrior / ret paladin / enhancement shaman / rogue / rogue

hunter:
feral druid / enhancement shaman / survival hunter / bm hunter / bm hunter
(feral would swap into the MT group with imp and commanding when tanking, probably wont bother in the future)

caster:
shadow priest / resto shaman / fire lock / fire lock / fire mage

healer:
shadow priest / holy priest / holy paladin / holy paladin / resto druid

tank:
prot warrior / resto druid / holy paladin / affliction warlock / fire mage

 

◊ shorto85

We got our first kill tonight coming off a night of sub 1% 10.4mil wipes. A couple things we changed in our setup was having one hunter spec for improved hunters mark to boost melee dps a little more. We had our affliction warlock that was sitting in the tank group respec destro which he normally raids as. Having a ret paladin would have been quite nice for us but we haven't been able to recruit a good one yet so we had a holy paladin keeping wisdom up. Also, 0 glaive sets in the raid as well, both rogues only have MH glaives.

WWS parse from tonights kill:
Wow Web Stats

 

Inaiwae

Is your druid properly equipped? If he is, he should be definitely easier to keep up than the warrior.

 

acote

2/5 Imp DS (-48 AP) brings a mobs AP to 0 w/o CoR. CoR raises a mobs AP by 135. Therefore, wouldn't screech + unimproved DS bring a mobs AP down to 0? Can anyone verify I have not made a mistake here?

 

Warbo

I would like to request some form of information about what kind of gear do protection warriors use when tanking brutallus while eating the stomps. We finally killed Brut after three days of attempts using a war/feral druid comp, but one of the major reasons for us taking so long to down brutallus was because the warrior would get insta-gibbed so many times. Basically, there's often times, mostly during stomps, where he basically fall from full to zero in a second.

I'm the feral druid and avoidance seems to work well. I changed my gear entirely or used my extra tier 6 pieces to just stack avoidance. I ended up the fight with 55% overall avoidance, at the expense of only ~21k hp raid buffed, and it works really well.

However, no matter what we do, our prot warrior keeps getting burst down. We have all the non-burn healers ( so 5 of them) que up heals right as stomp goes of. Their heal goes off, in time, but brut basically kills said warrior so fast that nothing can be done. He tries to use a CD ( moroes' trinket, nightmare seed, last stand, shield wall, etc) every time he's going to eat a stomp, but there's just times where he goes down to zero with what amounts to basically nothing we can do.

His gear is your standard t6 geared tank gear, max stamina, with the moroes and the heroic MgT trinket.

 

Mearis

I was thinking about switching to purely bears, since bears have much better mitigation and seem to die a lot less, but that means that you need to completely gut a DPS warrior's damage by asking him to be debuff bitch. Did you bring two DPS warriors or just accepted that one of the DPS warriors would be doing completely crappy DPS?

 

Stolidus

To my understanding an arms warrior doesn't actually lose loads of dps by being in battle stance for the occasional TC, and he's already partially a "debuff bitch" for BF so a personal dps loss there shouldn't be the most worrisome thing (Here's our kill Wow Web Stats , as you can see the pathetic arms warrior dps didn't really hurt us that much).

Also, as others have mentioned, I didn't notice a very large difference between the survivability of our feral and our warrior.
The key differences in keeping them alive were armor buffs from CH spam and the use of some sort of CD for every stomp. This is actually a fight where your druid can use ironshields by quaffing them before he taunts, and an activatable trinket and nightmare seed/last stand for every stomp are very noticeable.

 

Yessia

2H warriors aren't completely terrible dps, we had one with less then optimal gear respec arms so we could have 2 druids tank and he did ~1100 dps on our kill tonight(no wf), when you add in what his blood frenzy was doing for all of the other melee it brings his dps very close to an accetable hybrid dps level. We also had a combat swords rogue with imp EA using that over sunder, the warrior was only responsible for tc/demo.

 

Zaran

The World of Warcraft Armory

Was our warrior on both kills, for the first he obviously didn't have the pants, belt or boots but he did have tier 6 pants, shade of akama boots and the bloodboil belt.

Pretty standard warrior gear (he does have some pretty crazy avoidance tho) and we've never noticed any issues in keeping him up or him getting insta jibbed.

 

• Intermission

A couple pages ago people discussed this. I believe having a rogue swap to an imp Expose rotation led to better raid dps than the arms warrior sundering every ~25 seconds (including the dps lost/gained from rogue/warrior, and raid dps gained from more armor reduction).

 

Mearis

I am not talking about sunder, I am talking about keeping up commanding shout/demo shout/thunderclap. Sunder is important too - but you need a second warrior to keep up battleshout for melees if you want commanding shout on the tanks.

 

Ish

question here for the Melee..

We have 2 brut kills under our belt but on both of them our melee doesent seem to be outputting the damage. Its normally fine on Terron and other BT fights but this fight has got me scratching my head wondering what on earth is going on.

The debuffs we run for melee are as follows, CoR, Surv hunter, FF, 5 stack SA. The melee group consists of either 3x rogue, 1 x enhance 1 x arms or swap out 1 rogue for 1 retri.

Positioning is behind brut so parries are not a problem, they dont need to move for burns so they are stationary.

We run with a warrior tank and a feral tank, would it be viable to have one rogue keep imp EA up or would that screw over the warriors TPS too much?

And before anyone asks, yes they are going all out on consumables i.e demonslaying.

I realise he has a high armor value but seeing WWS charts from other guilds downing him I see rogues at 2.5k, warriors at 2k.

Last kill the top rogues where around 1800 to put it in perspective.

Anyone have any form of ideas of how I as RL can arrange the fight more in favor of the melee?

 

khel

The group placement sounds pretty ideal for the encounter. I would compare WWS's between your own kills and some other guilds and see what's going on. Drum rotations, haste potions, dps cycles, and gear choices all play big roles.