1200 is exceptionallly low, we didn't have a wws (but will this week), and I've seen other alliance logs of their ret paladin doing at least 1500 dps, probably upper 1600s with a better group.

And your line of thinking is roughly accurate enough to draw that conclusion, which is why I think most people think it's a no-brainer to bring one. Not all 15~ of your DPS'ers actually pull 2000+ dps on Brutallus, anyway.

<woops, thats what I get for not pressing F5, delete please>

We have 2 enhancement shamans, so I've usually got a fair bit of flexibility in arranging the melee dps groups. The ret pally would probably end up in the tank group, because we frequently use a prot paladin for tanking stuff and he'd get some good threat synergy.

Regarding (de)buffs falling off, we haven't had issues with it on the boss (no aff locks), but wtf is the problem with prot pallies and buffs getting knocked off? We had at least 2-3 wipes because our pally tank had his flask bumped. I suspect it's due to our abuse of druid healing, but it's pretty lame. Eventually we just had him click off amp, wis, int and we didn't have a problem with it from then on, but frustrating for sure.

I've never heard of buffs being knocked off until now, ever since the buff limit raise a few months ago. (Ok, like, over a year ago?). Do you have a WWS?

Finally killed him tonight, with 2 warrior tanks/7 healers, COR + using a ret pally. To me, 1200 dps is very very low for a ret pally, ours was at 1605 with no enhance shaman (resto shaman-me, in the melee group) which is decent, considering the buffs he brings.

Biggest difference for us was swapping from 8 healers to 7 healers, and managing to get a 3rd shaman(2 restos and 1 ele), went from a few 4-5% enrage wipes to a kill a few seconds before he enraged.

Totally agree with offspec use, I think they really shine in a fight like this. We used 1 ele shammy, moonkin, ret pally, 1 survival hunter and they are really worth their weight in gold in adding raid dps to the 9-10 'main dpsers'.

The main question for me is definately how are we going to manage farming this boss week after week, Im assuming gear will help alot, along with experience...but expecting a perfect raid comp every week for us is quite harsh, especially since it means we have to recruit more shamans just for this fight.

I do, and I can't think of a good way of searching for the event happening. The same thing happened to us on our first Illidan kill - and it only happens on our paladin tank. I'm assuming the combination of seals, threat buff and the fact we were using 4 resto druids was enough to exceed the limit (40 buffs iirc?).

If you can think of a good way to search for dropped buffs I'll go search the log for it.

Right, and not even all the damage being dealt can crit. I think the point was though that you can very-roughly get an idea of what type of DPS contribution a ret paladin will bring (your math shows this well enough when done properly), and add it to the paladin's normal DPS, compared to the alternative options and deem it worthy. I don't think anyone actually really believes 3% crit = 3% more dps.

Yeah, the value of the 3% crit judgement is often exaggerated. Judgement of Wisdom and Light are much more powerful reasons to bring a ret paladin frankly. If you already have a prot paladin keeping up Judgement of Wisdom I don't think a ret paladin would be worth it for Brutallus.

It depends on whether you're Horde and the kind of gear/group your ret paladin has. If your ret paladin can do 1800 DPS on Brutallus, then the "utility threshold" for justifying the slot goes way, way down.

In the "When to use CoR, Amplify/Magic'" thread, I attempted a more qualitative estimation of the damage difference between CoR+Imp Demo and just Imp Demo ( http://elitistjerks.com/659848-post97.html ). However, using a bit more in-depth linear regression (after better correcting for the prescence of Shadow Embrace in the Curse of Weakness thread's data), I came up with the following formula for the Lurker Below. Other evidence posted in the Curse of Weakness thread indicates that mobs have similar AP and Damage(AP) function behavior. Thus, I assume that the following formula applies to all bosses:
A boss with 320 attack power and afflicted by Curse of Recklessness and Improved Demoralizing Shout is left with 35 attack power. A boss with 320 attack power and afflicted by only untalented Demoralizing Shout is left with 20 attack power. The difference in damage per hit is:
Assuming an average tank has 18k armor ( through armor, and 10% mitigation through defensive stance, this leads to
This of course assumes a boss does not have a "increases damage done by X" buff (like Gruul). In my view, 71 more damage per hit, after mitigation, is a fairly insignificant amount of damage--orders of magnitude less than the damage range of the boss, for example.

Improved Sanctity Aura should be worth another 150-200 dps. Not huge, but worth mentioning.

As a sole Resto Druid on this encounter I'm uncertain of Insect Swarm, is providing less tank focus on HoTs worth maintaining this? (ie LB always and RJ during stomp, with them both pre-cast on the transition tank) im near limited on GCD as it is so this would require a drop off somewhere.

Im tending to play very protective of tanks, perhaps its just a lack of trust in other healers and a bad habbit, regardless we have not currently lasted to the enrage without a tank death (Feral/Warrior 2/8 Healer setup).

We killed him on our second night of attempts with zero deaths, actually with about ~200k hp left after his enrage, thanks to Shield Wall. We too used 2 tanks (warrior/druid) and 7 healers, one of them a Discipline specced priest - sure, his healing wasn't that great, but Pain Suppression is really nice if you get Burns on several "not-so-great" classes in a row, plus you get Power Infusion and Improved Divine Spirit (ok, the latter one can also be provided by a holy/disc priest).

Due to a lot of tank gibs in our earlier attempts we went the "safe" way, using an Affliction Warlock for Shadow Embrace, and me as the only Hunter keeping Scorpid Sting up 100% of the time, which kinda sucks for DPS and costs a lot of mana - but thanks to JoW I could even get away with using 50% haste pots. We only recently began raiding with a ret paladin (who rerolled and doesn't have the greatest gear yet), and in my opinion he proved himself invaluable on Brutallus.

I guess there's still much room for improvements for our DPS, we only got 3 main hand glaives from farming Illidan for almost half a year, and only two of those were in the raid, additionally none of our elemental shamans were available so one of our restos respecced (who again doesn't have the greatest ele gear).

I'll chime in on the consensus that he's very nicely tuned, the DPS requirement is pretty steep, but certainly not impossible (even without several complete warglaive sets and perma-drums in the dps groups).

I don't think the purpose of this thread is for everyone to post stories about their kills. To be blunt I sincerely doubt anyone cares.

Yes, please.

Your healers should spam the tank with biggest heals they got. Brutallus can take a bt geared tank down in less than 2 seconds (especially if he is inflicted with a stomp). The important thing is that a huge heal hits the tank before Brutallus finishes his killer combo, that tank unluckily didn't avoid. If they don't have mana problems, spamming max rank heals is not a problem, right? I'm sorry if I'm stating the obvious, especially since healers who have come this far are likely to know what they are doing.

I don't know if it's a good idea to throw a renew on tank if you are a priest assigned to heal a tank. I dread what could happen in that 4 second window (1,5sec global cooldown + 2,5secs GHeal cast time, haste shortens ofc) when I'm not healing him.

You said it's not the transition that kills your tank, but it's a good idea anyway to make sure your healers know the exact moment when transition happens. If it's a surprise there is a small window when tank gets zero heals and he's likely to die. We heal trough all stomps, so that should not be a problem.

You would only be able to use Pain Supression twice, as well as two Power Infusions... I definitely do not think it is worth the healing loss.

Anybody else has seen a change to his meteor slash tonight ? Seems like it's a Frontal attack with unlimited range.

Can anybody else confirm this ?

Same, I can confirm this is happening.

You're right. Plus direct heals can proc inspiration which is helpful.

I'm going to toss out the obligatory "your holy paladins can keep up SoCr" easily even with only 2 tanks. Just apply it during non-stomp periods. A 42/11/8 spec will you get imp socr and you can be the imp might paladin at the same time. So realistically as alliance you are weighing 2% group damage and wisdom along versus using a better DPSer. As horde, I think it is a no-brainer. As alliance, I really isn't worth doing without a good, fully geared ret paladin. If you have one and it fits into your groups, super. If not, just have a holy paladin do it.

We are fighting him now. Seems that mini patch changed his meteor slash as others are mentioning. Looks to be the frontal cone but with unlimited forward range? need to adjust burn zone