Brutallus Strategy Discussion - Page 14

Hylo · 04/08/08, 5:20 AM

Originally Posted by delling

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.

Is priest mana regeneration really THAT good now? Shadow priest is a must for every holy paladin in this fight if you want them to perform acceptably. Healing Brutallus is not exactly FoL-spam and HL eats your mana super fast. Our first kill I was in tank group giving Devotion for tanks but our 2nd kill we left tanks without the aura and I got a shadow priest. My HPS went up by 1k (240k -> 420k effective healing done).

Zaroua · 04/08/08, 5:33 AM

Originally Posted by 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.

Get avoidance if you can. Titans instead of Deftness, Silkk's instead of Pepe's, T6 gloves or Silvermoon instead of Enforcement and Sundered Soul + other ring of choice (I use Exalted Karazhan ring since I literally have nothing else, the new Badge vendor will provide a very nice ring for this fight). Moroes and Commendation are the 2 obvious trinkets.

Moroes > Last Stand > Moroes > Shield Wall (or Nightmare Seed if SW is on cooldown) > Moroes will last you the entire fight. Since I've been using my cooldowns for Stomps, the only times I've died during a Stomp was when multiple healers were already dead. With that being said, we usually run Resto Druid heavy so I always have a ton of HoTs up on me which provides a really nice buffer in case I get unlucky with avoidance. I seriously wouldn't want to try tanking Brutallus with a Warrior without decent amount of HoTs.

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Tojara · 04/08/08, 5:47 AM

Originally Posted by Hylo

Is priest mana regeneration really THAT good now? Shadow priest is a must for every holy paladin in this fight if you want them to perform acceptably. Healing Brutallus is not exactly FoL-spam and HL eats your mana super fast. Our first kill I was in tank group giving Devotion for tanks but our 2nd kill we left tanks without the aura and I got a shadow priest. My HPS went up by 1k (240k -> 420k effective healing done).

Of course giving the Paladins a Shadow Priest will allow them far more freedom in what rank of spells they can cast, but is it really necessary? Our Paladins were obviously running on fumes at the end of the encounter, but they never really felt that having a Shadow Priest would be entirely necessary. Soaking meteor slash damage and having mana returned through SA (along with traditional consumables) seemed to be all they needed to perform effectively.

Obviously there are many different ways you can approach the encounter depending on your raid group though. While you may have been able to afford taking a Shadow Priest away from your DPS, I don't think we would've gotten a kill if we had done that.

The more I think about the encounter, the more I realize how tightly tuned it is. They obviously had SA in mind for allowing paladins to go the distance, and the spirit changes to allow priests far more freedom. But yeah, Priest mana regeneration is certainly improved since the spirit change.

Smooglab · 04/08/08, 6:19 AM

We've had some discussion about how many people should be in the soaker-groups. At first we went with 10 people in each group (basicly everyone, except the melee DPS). This obviously made the Meteor Slash a lot less noticeable since the damage it does to each person is 5k on the last hit.

And then we basicly went with the following positioning.

Now people wanted to go with less soakers (some talked about 5, others about 7) so you'd had people stand behind the melee DPS (I guess?). But how is this realisable healing wise, and what is the benefit other than, I guess, no spell pushbacks? We run with 2 prot warriors and 2 druids, 1 priest, 2 shamans & 2 paladins. But if we for example leave our shadowpriests out the soaker-group, together with a healer and 3 other dps.

Any thoughts on what the most efficient size of the soaker group would be?

Hylo · 04/08/08, 6:36 AM

Originally Posted by Zaroua

With that being said, we usually run Resto Druid heavy so I always have a ton of HoTs up on me which provides a really nice buffer in case I get unlucky with avoidance. I seriously wouldn't want to try tanking Brutallus with a Warrior without decent amount of HoTs.

I understand the value of HoTs on MT but what about when your tank can take up to 24k or even more damage in two seconds? If you have 2 paladins, 2 shamans and a holy priest literally spamming the tank the value of multiple sets of HoTs seems questionable.

Originally Posted by Tojara

Of course giving the Paladins a Shadow Priest will allow them far more freedom in what rank of spells they can cast, but is it really necessary? Our Paladins were obviously running on fumes at the end of the encounter, but they never really felt that having a Shadow Priest would be entirely necessary.

It's not *freedom* in that sense that paladins could spam HL11 even with a shadow priest (-2100mp5 is just too much) but yes, I went from R7+R11 to R9+R11 and that boosted my output alot. In our strategy soakers took only moderate damage and I gained 6,4k mana from SA.

In my opinion healing bosses like Brutallus you just don't have so many options to control your mana consumption than you have on, say, Council ("hey the tank is topped, I'll switch to FoL").

Graul · 04/08/08, 7:55 AM

Is 0/40/21 for Mages actually good for this fight, or is the standard 2/48/11 going to be just as useful? It seems like some are grabbing Cold Snap for an extra IV, yet in a fight around six minutes they only seem to be using it twice. Is Mage mana such an issue on this fight that they can't ever use IV except during the last 20% with Bloodlust? That's the only reason I can think of not using it more than twice during the fight if you have the ability to.

Dryssa · 04/08/08, 8:03 AM

Originally Posted by Graul

Is 0/40/21 for Mages actually good for this fight, or is the standard 2/48/11 going to be just as useful? It seems like some are grabbing Cold Snap for an extra IV, yet in a fight around six minutes they only seem to be using it twice. Is Mage mana such an issue on this fight that they can't ever use IV except during the last 20% with Bloodlust? That's the only reason I can think of not using it more than twice during the fight if you have the ability to.

This has been posted in the Mage theorycrafting thread, but basically the DPS you lose by giving up some fire talents is more than what you gain from Cold Snap. The only reason you'd want Cold Snap for this fight is to Ice Block out of multiple Burns, which has a low chance of occurring and is much less important than maximizing DPS.

delling · 04/08/08, 8:10 AM

Originally Posted by Hylo

Is priest mana regeneration really THAT good now? Shadow priest is a must for every holy paladin in this fight if you want them to perform acceptably. Healing Brutallus is not exactly FoL-spam and HL eats your mana super fast. Our first kill I was in tank group giving Devotion for tanks but our 2nd kill we left tanks without the aura and I got a shadow priest. My HPS went up by 1k (240k -> 420k effective healing done).

Yeah, our regen is really quite insane now. Something like 400mp5 while casting... As someone else said in the thread, if clearcasting procs, and you strap inner focus on the end of that (or the Gruul trinket proc, which is still awesome), you are looking at over 1000mp5 outside of casting.

The priests actually had an spriest on our kill, but I was #2 on healing, and didn't really go below 70% mana for the entire fight. I used 1 potion, 1 shadowfiend...

So I am just making an educated guess (and from the 'oom' calls on voice coms from the shaman/paladins) that the priests probably shouldn't get an spriest.

Although, having said that, we only had spriest for 2 mages + 1 destro lock, and still hit the DPS requirement by some margin, so it might be better safe than sorry to keep the spriest with more healers.

Andrast · 04/08/08, 8:43 AM

Originally Posted by delling

Yeah, our regen is really quite insane now. Something like 400mp5 while casting... As someone else said in the thread, if clearcasting procs, and you strap inner focus on the end of that (or the Gruul trinket proc, which is still awesome), you are looking at over 1000mp5 outside of casting.

The priests actually had an spriest on our kill, but I was #2 on healing, and didn't really go below 70% mana for the entire fight. I used 1 potion, 1 shadowfiend...

So I am just making an educated guess (and from the 'oom' calls on voice coms from the shaman/paladins) that the priests probably shouldn't get an spriest.

Although, having said that, we only had spriest for 2 mages + 1 destro lock, and still hit the DPS requirement by some margin, so it might be better safe than sorry to keep the spriest with more healers.

Currently I avoid giving priests a sp on any fight unless we happen to have 3 in the raid which doesn't seem viable for Brutallus.

At least the paladins in a ranged dps group provide concentration aura which provides 50% resistance to pushback (talented). With some extra regen trinkets, appropriate libram use (the lurker one is ideal) and using fel mana pots instead of super mana and finally a shadowpriest a well geared paladin (which they should be) shouldn't have any particular issue spamming very high ranks of holy light for the entire fight. Without a shadowpriest though I know I start to run on fumes after around 4-5 minutes.

Currently I'd be expecting a group makeup for 2 of our paladins to be like:

Paladin
Shadowpriest
Elemental Shaman
Warlock
Warlock

Paladin
Shadowpriest
Elemental Shaman
Mage
Mage

Or slight variations thereof....

Our 3rd paladin unfortunately has to suck it up and sit in the tank group with devo aura.

Jitka · 04/08/08, 9:11 AM

Originally Posted by Hylo

Is priest mana regeneration really THAT good now? Shadow priest is a must for every holy paladin in this fight if you want them to perform acceptably. Healing Brutallus is not exactly FoL-spam and HL eats your mana super fast. Our first kill I was in tank group giving Devotion for tanks but our 2nd kill we left tanks without the aura and I got a shadow priest. My HPS went up by 1k (240k -> 420k effective healing done).

With the priest regen changes I rarely consider putting one of ours in a shadow priest group unless they are spamming CoH. And I disagree with your Holy Paladin assessment. Both myself and my counterpart sustain 2000+ HPS on this fight with or without a shadow priest. Any main tank healer willing to chain chug mana pots really shouldn't need a one, as intelligent cooldown managemenet (potions, trinkets, talents) should easily get you through the full six minutes. The only thing a shadow priest buys me is that I don't have to use mana pots, which are cheap enough these days anyway. As tight as DPS can be on this fight I'd rather give the extra mana to the warlocks or mages.

I find this fight to be very much like patchwerk was as a MT healer. Find a rank heal you can chain cast for 6 minutes straight with max buffs and consumable usage (for me alone it's HL 7 or 8, with a shadow priest it's 9) and then spam that on the tank until the boss dies.

Midnight · 04/08/08, 9:25 AM

I´ve got a question regarding pets and parries. I´ve not read the whole thread yet (I´ve searched it for the keyword parry though) so pardon me if the question has already been asked.

Sometime during our tries yesterday someone remarked on my pet staying in front of Brutallus and obviously getting parried a few times raising the risk for an tank instagib. Even though I was under the impression that the pet is supposed to get behind the mob on its own which should prevent any parries, this was kind of obvious visible so I tried to position it behind him at where the melees stand manually. Looking at our WWS today I had come to realize that it´s still getting parried roughtly 2-3% of its attacks.
So now I wonder why it still gets parried - it certainly looked as if it was attack from behind from my point of view. Also how do other hunters handle this?

sp00n · 04/08/08, 9:30 AM

Originally Posted by Midnight

So now I wonder why it still gets parried - it certainly looked as if it was attack from behind from my point of view. Also how do other hunters handle this?

You're getting parried when Brutallus turns around to cast Burn on a melee. Although he shouldn't be able to parry while performing a cast, it seems there are some split seconds when he finished or hasn't begun to cast yet, that he is able to parry.
Should be less than 2-3% though.

Also take a closer look where your pet stands. On one try I was on the side of the mob, but was actually still being parried (I think that was a bit behind his forepaw).

• Falk · 04/08/08, 9:56 AM

I am 100% certain he doesn't parry-gib anymore. I'd have a lot more inexplicable explosions if he parry gibbed since I run close to zero expertise in my gear setup from this. And an additional 8k damage from a parry is noticable.

Illundai · 04/08/08, 9:59 AM

Yeah, I did a couple of attempts with me just standing in front of him, parrying him like mad. He didn't get any haste from it whatsoever. I didn't WWS those logs unfortunatly since those were just practice tries =/.

Hylo · 04/08/08, 10:46 AM

Originally Posted by Jitka

And I disagree with your Holy Paladin assessment. Both myself and my counterpart sustain 2000+ HPS on this fight with or without a shadow priest. Any main tank healer willing to chain chug mana pots really shouldn't need a one, as intelligent cooldown managemenet (potions, trinkets, talents) should easily get you through the full six minutes. The only thing a shadow priest buys me is that I don't have to use mana pots, which are cheap enough these days anyway. As tight as DPS can be on this fight I'd rather give the extra mana to the warlocks or mages.

I had shadow priest, used 3 fel mana pots and had Lurker libram equipped: 2600 HPS / 420k healing done.
Can't even dream about these numbers without a shadow priest.

Originally Posted by Jitka

Find a rank heal you can chain cast for 6 minutes straight with max buffs and consumable usage (for me alone it's HL 7 or 8, with a shadow priest it's 9) and then spam that on the tank until the boss dies.

Found ranks 7 and 9 to be good for me too. The "problem" is that HL7 is significantly less healing than HL9.

cheebamonkey · 04/08/08, 12:30 PM

I would lile to see some WWS logs to back up these healing claims.

Dyalad · 04/08/08, 1:08 PM

It's possible to reach as much as that, however you got to spend most of the fight casting holy light non stop, have a good amount of crit and possibly some spell haste.

Jitka · 04/08/08, 1:50 PM

Originally Posted by cheebamonkey

I would lile to see some WWS logs to back up these healing claims.

Jitka - WWS

Here I had a SP but the previous night attempts I was without it and I sustained the same overall HPS. The only difference was the number of potions I was forced to use. My total regen was 57384 mana for the 6 minutes with a SP.

Hocken - WWS

My counterpart was in the MT group (for devo aura) and without a SP and actually beat me in effective healing. His total regen was 49610 mana with a resto shaman in his group.

Obviously it helps to be in a soak group for a paladin, we were both getting a decent amount of mana back from spiritual attunement.

@ Hylo, I looked up your WWS (Hylo - WWS) because 600 more HPS than I average is a lot. Do you use 3 or 4 MT healers? We use 4 and were all within 1% of each other as far as healing goes (13%, 13%, 12%, 12%) which is exactly where I'd expect it to be if everyone is doing their job. Just looking at a quick glimpse of your WWS report, your tanks also took a lot more damage (1.26m vs 1.57m) than ours did.

• Latito · 04/08/08, 2:27 PM

Originally Posted by cheebamonkey

I would lile to see some WWS logs to back up these healing claims.

Eirmad - WWS (2400 HPS, nearly 500k Eff. Healing)

Holy Paladins with a shadow priest can go quite nuts on healing. Compare this to one of our longer attempts the previous day without a shadow priest:
Eirmad - WWS (1650 HPS, extrapolated to 370k Eff. Healing over 6 min)

Anedris · 04/08/08, 2:49 PM

Do keep in mind however that a shadow priest cannot keep up with a pure DPSer in damage done, and will probably fall short by 800 or so DPS. This gap is usually made up by the increased damage done by the other DPSers in the priest's group. If the priest is in a healer group, that difference must be made up either by your other DPSers performing exceptionally or by dropping a healer.

Zaroua · 04/08/08, 2:54 PM

Originally Posted by Hylo

I understand the value of HoTs on MT but what about when your tank can take up to 24k or even more damage in two seconds? If you have 2 paladins, 2 shamans and a holy priest literally spamming the tank the value of multiple sets of HoTs seems questionable.

In 2 seconds, with 2 sets of Lifeblooms only (let's ignore Regrowth, Rejuv and Renew for argument's sake) you will heal nearly 4.5k HP with those 2 Lifeblooms. That's without any other heal incoming. That's the difference between sitting at less than 2k HP and having your healers have a heart attack or just dying.
Then you factor in the 3 second HoTs and you'll see how much of a buffer the HoTs are. The other advantage of HoTs is that they can be pre-cast for tank switches while still generating HPS on the current tank.

Edit: The advantage of Lifeblooms on tanks should be obvious in any fight though. I almost feel like Captain Obvious for saying that Lifeblooms are very helpful to keep tanks up...