A bit off-topic, but to reply to the 2 posts above.

We have the same situation with mages. If we only have one shadow priest and they don't get it, they are literally wanding by the end of the fight. Our mages try REALLY hard to show us that no matter what they do, by using potions + gems + evocation, they go oom on a 6 minute fight.
Me, never playing a mage, not to mention in a high-end raid have no argument against it...
If it were the case that mage evocationg is less DPS loss for the raid than warlocks life-tapping and we see no oom situation from mages then I could easily justify giving the SP to warlocks... However in the mean time I have no way of doing so...

On topic about Brutallus. We went in with 7 healers, and my fear was that we might have to get an 8th as I wasn't sure about our performance. However after setting the healing and after the tanks got the hang of the fight, we literally have no problem with healing the tanks.

We use prot warrior + feral druid. The warrior uses something every stomp, be it Moroes trinket or seed/SMI/LS or any other combination. The feral pops barkskin few secs before taunt, which makes warrior>feral transition a non issue.

The healers we used were 2 paladins, 3 shamans, 1 priest, 1 druid. 1 shaman and the druid were on burn victims and I'm not sure how much time they had to spare for the raid. 2 palas + priest (was CoH spec, but he just spammed GH) were on the MT. 2 shamans were assigned to soak groups, each of them being focused when his group getting damage while spamming CH on the tank when the other soakers were getting hit.

We opted for 5+1 soakers, for the reason that it's easier to heal less people, even if the damage/person is a but higher. Of course if a soaker got the burn and couldn't IB or bubble out of it, he would get replaced.
As a shaman healing the soakers, I can say that healing was trivial. Having SP in each soaker group (but not actually taking the damage) meant that the first meteor was completely healed by the VE. I was popping 2-3 CH after second meteor. The thing is that after 3rd meteor, there was no rush to top the raid, as it was followed by a taunt before next meteor. So basically I only had to cast 3-4 heals on my group for the entire duration, meaning I was also free to assist the tank.
So in practice we had 5 healers on the tank and 2 on the burn.

We had more wipes from people dieing to burn than tank gibs (after we got the tactic down and people got used to the healing intensity on their assignments).

Forgive me if I misunderstood, but if the shadow priest himself isn't getting meteor slash, then aren't you wasting 20% of the healing value of VE?

For mages, they can just about sustain themselves for a 6 minutes IF they are in mostly BT/Hyjal gear, with mage armour, evocation, pots, gems.
If they get unlucky on mana pots (3*1800), or if they have drummers in their group, they'll end up out of mana.
A shadow priest adds around 130 DPS if they don't run OOM.

In full Sunwell gear, they will always run out of mana without a shadow priest.
A shadow priest makes around 350 DPS difference in that case, even more if you have Leatherworkers in your group.

A shadow priest adds around 100-130 DPS to a warlock.


The conclusion would be:
Mages and Warlocks gain similar benefits in this 6 minute spam nuke fight.
Mages without a shadow priest will play the RNG for their mana coverage.
They will always run out of mana when they get more Sunwell gear.


Shadow Priests have no interruption protection.

Warlocks do get benefits from a shadow priest however.....They just like mages can switch from destruction to mana pots so honestly why people make comparisons and assume a warlock isn't using a mana pot while a mage is obviously flawed. Beyond that mages will lose flame caps, molten-mage, evocation, oom. For shorter fights when a mage is using a mana pot/gem you may be able to make a case for warlocks getting a sp although they have relatively low life tap time for a short fight assuming they're using mana pots for longer fights you start to run into some pretty decent dps loses for the mana they return. You also have to look at raid composition too if you have a mage with no shaman no sp and no jotw.

Thanks Roywyn, that's seriously different from what my gut told me. Can you give me a source for that information?

Mages: Rawr - Release: Rawr b13.1
Warlocks: http://www.leulier.com/files/warlock_dps_v24.xls

Those seem to be generally accepted standard sheets. Takes a moment to setup the data (fights/gear/buffs).


Curious, how is it different from your gut feelings?

We've been working on Brutallus for a couple weeks now and we've always brought 8 healers. Once/If we kill him I have a feeling we won't change this. Have any other guilds gone in with this many healers on successive kills and killed him cleanly?

Indeed they do not.

So as I understand your reasoning: SP must stand outside slash to do (rough guess) 5% more dps and thus 5% more VE, but in order to do more dps he loses 20% of the effect. And the people who he was healing now get more damage because it's not spread to him. That seems counterproductive. Especially since the meteor slash is fairly predictable, so it is possible with practice or luck to coincide it with an instant cast. Or at least not be channeling when it's due.

By a clean kill I understand pretty much one shotting the boss.
One would assume that on Brutallus, seeing that only random factors are burn targets and tank avoidance, bringing more healers would make it even more stable. The trick is of course to be able to beat the timer with 1 less DPS. The only thing that could wipe you is DPSers not performing the same as the last kill.
I am sure we'll keep bringing 7 healers as people are always more comfortable to do things the same way every week. I bet that if we decided to try with 8, every wipe would be blamed on the setup, because no one will take the blame if they can put it on something else.

The number of soakers is the same. So we have 4 people from the SP' group and 1 more. The SP himself is a backup, so if some of the soakers need to run out because of the burn, the SP is one of the ranged DPS that moves in to sub.
As stated previously, meteor damage is not an issue, and overhealing from chain heal is high anyway.
I don't see 20% of the VE healing being wasted much of an issue.

This guy managed, but he got an innervate.

Ultimaknight - WWS

We have the shadowpriests not soak too. For me there are some reasons to do so:

1. For the shadowpriest himself, the biggest difference is beeing mostly unable to SW:Death without additional healing when taking meteor slash. This is actually the moment, where the healing and therefor the damage is needed most. I would guess the lost SW:Death would be something about ~500 less healing given for each groupmember within each meteor hit (SW:Death cd ist same as meteor slash), which ist more than the bigger hits of meteor slash on the fewer targets make up.

2. The more important reason is, that a shadowpriest having to run from burn will produce only ~40% the healing on his group while running. If this happens somewhere after slash 1-2, the shadowpriest group will probably require healing from a real healer. So why not avoid those problems altogether and have perfectly reliable meteor healing on his group?

I assure you that Brutallus does not have any particular resistance. In any case, a mage should barely have less dps than a normal Teron fight, assuming proper play. Something in the order of ~50-100 less dps, which is a side effect from mana consumption/cooldown stacking not working as well on 6 min than it does vs 2:40.

In any case, either your mages are arcane or deep frost (which suffers from 'low' WE uptime due to fight duration), or they lack a shadow priest. I don't think any other possible case could explain such a dps loss, assuming proper play.

Just for information, and I don't remember it being mentioned here already, parry range for Brutallus begins before meteor slash range. So an additional melee soaker is not possible (well, not without him being parried, reducing the DPS).

I am looking for the post on this thread where someone shared the sequence of consumables that they use (being the tank) to stay alive during the stomps.

We had some great progress last night going from 2-3 min attempts to 5+ minute attempts. DPS doesn’t appear to be the problem (however we will be very close), but tank deaths are wiping us 90% of the time. We ran with 8 healers last night and 2 tanks. Tank 1 is our warrior MT and he has the absolute best gear available. The second is a nicely geared feral druid, however still has room for more gear upgrades. Strangely the tanks deaths are in favor of the completely geared warrior. There where a few attempts where our warrior got hit 4 times in a row totaling 25-27k in 1.25 sec. Not sure if that is pretty typical during stomps? Many have stated on these boards that healing through the stomps is possible and we can’t afford to bring another tank at the cost of a dps (guess it could be a healer). Any other advice you guys might have would be great.

Inspiration and Ancestral Fortitude. Learn to love them.

use [Moroes' Lucky Pocket Watch]

Your tank can use that trinket on every second stomp (2min cd, compared to most trinkets which use a 3min cd). It's by far the best on use trink a tank can use on this fight. Use whatever else on the others (last stand, nightmare seed, second trink, etc)

A tank eats a maximum of six stomps, with the off-tank tanking five stomps.

It goes Trinket, Nightmare Seed, Last Stand, Trinket, Nightmare Seed, Shield Wall (with a three minute trinket). The last Stomp happens just before the enrage.

Question about CoR and the -210 owl screech and demo shout.
With full imp demo shout and cor the boss is left with 60 ap I believe.
5/5 Imp demo increases the effect of demo by 120 ap.
Without imp demo and cor the boss is at 180 ap.
Owl screech does -210 so the boss is at 0 ap.
Can anyone confirm this?? This should be right I think but i've heard some conflicting comments of they might not stack (owl and demo)

The cooldown rotations can be completely fluid and have been stated 100 times in this thread and others. My comment speaks to the heart of the issue, which I know because my guild was in a similar situation for the first couple Brut kills: plenty of DPS, generally plenty of healing, but it was a complete crapshoot if our tanks would live during Stomp. Hence, Inspiration and Ancestral Fortitude. Thanks for being snippy though.

Thank you, this was the link I was missing. The VE is not wasted since it will heal SW:D.

Thank you for the info guys, we shall try that this week.