We're working on Brut as well, and we saw a rather big jump in our raid DPS when switching to full consumables ("dry" attempts we ran flasked with oils/poisons, full attempts are flasks/demonslaying, foods, destro/haste pots on CD, BL, etc.)

On our first dry attempt to hit enrage I think we hit about 21% at the 6 minute mark. On our last attempt of the night we decided to go balls out to get a look at our potential. We wiped because of a tank death, but we hit the 30% mark with about 1:45 left, which is roughly on time for a post enrage kill. For us, though, going full consumables is a huge gain because we always run a full melee group (145 more AP from demonslaying, haste pots on CD) and a full hunter group (3-4 hunters gaining haste pots on CD, 145 AP from demonslaying). These groups also have 2-3 drummers each, and we don't use drums at all on dry attempts.

As far as CoR, it really depends on where your strength lies. Our physical DPS is generally taking up at least 4 of the top 5 spots, so CoR is a no brainer. Even if you run light physical DPS (melee group + 1-2 hunters) you'll generally see a better benefit than CoElements, unless you run with 3-4 mages who are all rock stars.

Anybody got any insight in the glancing blow mechanic on this specific boss?
We keep seeing a vast discrepancy every single try, though our positioning never changes. For instance, on our kill last week I had about 22% gbs. Both other rogues, paired with me in front of the feral tank (and yes, I know it's not the best position, but our rangeds kept killing half the camp when they got burned and this way at least he goes down eventually), saw around 25-26%. As of yesterday, it was exactly the other way round - same players involved, no gear changes apart from one of us wearing his new belt (thought strangely enough HIS gb stayed the same) mine went up to 26% while my mates dropped down to 23.
Same goes for our ms warri who still got the priviledge to stay in brut's back last week had around 19% and saw a rough 25% yesterday. Numbers are logged with wws, so I guess they should be rather reliable.

So I guess what I'd really like to know is, is it just sheer luck, depending on the sample size, or is it possible to influence how many gbs you get to see on this specific boss? Maybe depending on how close you stand to him or any other hitbox-related stuff?

It is exactly that, sample size.

While the fight has a much larger sample size then say Teron it is still subject to RNG (even for rogues who typically get quite a few swings). If you took multiple Brutallus kills and clumped them together you would see a glancing rate that is more or less the same between all of your physical DPS (with 10 000 swings it would probably be within 1% at most).

Consumables is naturally important but I'll tell you a story. Maybe it applies to you, maybe not.

My guild killed Illidan only the night before 2.4 and so we had only a handful of people with 4T6, certainly no glaives, no shield, no skull, only 1 tempest, etc etc. On first tries we were just trying to find the right positioning, we had something like 20k rdps. That was best lock on 1800 and best mages and rogues on 1600 dps. People started massively farming consumables but it didn't really help, maybe got us to ~24k rdps.

It was at that point we realised that the raid make-up we'd been using since Gruul was just plain wrong.

We never needed any enhancement shaman and besides, dropping any of the rogues from the raid would be instant drama. The four mages and three locks often got shadowpriests but that seemed to be for most of them about saving on mana pots rather than facilitate destro pots. Hunters never got a buffed group - not to mention no one had thought about speccing or gearing for expose weakness. No retri pally either, and our prot pally quit the game after Kael. Warriors both dual wield furies - both passed on the archi sword to save dkp for something else. No affliction lock... The last few weeks we've been learning a lot about raid buffs and what adds what. People have respecced, people have been recruited. Extra rogues and mages are on the bench. Best try is now a 1% wipe. So another week or two of luck with drops in MH/BT and we're there.

So I'll warn you now - if most of your raiders are not in full iLevel 146 gear, then don't expect consumables to cover any shortfall. Those consumables should just be standard on every attempt. The trick of beating this with lower gear is very much in the use of group and raid buffs.

Sorry for the late reply, hope this is still relevant.

The delay of the autoshot isn't that bad as you say. The additional problems with having having hunters in soak groups however are:

a) they then need to move when burned - depending on where they're standing this can waste a fair few seconds of dps time - if the hunters are as you say your highest dps, more movement from them costs your raid more raid DPS than the same amount of movement from a lower DPS person

b) if the hunter in question is using a /cast/cast macro to DPS (and I'd hazard that these days the majority of BM hunters are), unless he watches for the slash being cast and stops spamming the macro, the pushback does very bad things to his rotation for the next several seconds, since the macro depends on some steadyshots completing before their GCD completes, which permits an autoshot to fire between steady shots - getting a push back on one of those shots not only delays that steady, it causes another steady to start immediately after it, often ending up with chains of 3 steadies between a pair of autoshots.

Point (b) you can somewhat deal with by paying attention and finding something else to do when you see slash being cast - refresh HM/scorpid, misdirect, feign, multishot. Point (a) there isn't much you can do about, it's just lost damage.

We've now been trying Brutallus for just over 3 weeks now and are having some really frustrating problems, our DPS is fine, peaking at 29k at some points but our healing is terrible, we run with 8 healers and in over 100 pulls have one ever seen enrage once. Sometimes the tanks just take too much damage which is fine - it happens but other times they die to something that seems perfectly healable not getting a heal for 2 - 4 seconds. We have each healer with a stopcasting macro with the other healer focused so they can interupt heals reliably could that be the issue? I feel like it shouldn't be an issue having extensive experience pre-2.3 (I think?) of stopcast timing and it should be that hard, it's only the 4 MT healers that are using it and they dont have any other healing assignments so surely they can watch their cast bar, their co-healers cast bar and the MT's health? It seems like they can't and I'm really stumped what to do - it's frustrating I promoted this as the DPS boss and with our DPS sorted without needing to hit enrage a few times we're burning through consumables going full out - hoping for things to click to get us the kill.
Can anyone shed some light on whats going wrong? Any suggestions how we can make it easier on our healers - help them perform better?

We have one Priest/Paladin on MT1 - Paladin/Paladin on MT2, One Druid dedicated to burn, one backup Druid for burn whose otherwise rolling HoT's on the current tank. We have a CoH priest healing on the MT2's Meteor Slash group and a Shaman chaining healers pre-dominantly through the MT1 and otherwise healing MT1's Meteor Slash. Both tanks seem to die equally often but through Grim Reaper it always seems to be due to badly timed heals (what inteval between big heals landing is acceptable? I've been pushing for no more than 1.2 seconds although 90% of our wipes it's at least 1.8 seconds sometimes as much as 4 seconds without a big heal.

Their feedback has generally been unhelpful, sometimes it's because they both interupt their heal at the same time which is silly due to the fact that they're supposed to be ~1 second slower than their partner and regardless in those deaths where it takes 4 seconds even if the first is interupted a second should land.

I've seen earlier in the thread a suggestion that just spamming a lower rank when stop isn't imminent is preffered by some which to me seems a bit touch and go personally but is this really more desireable? Thanks for anyone that can shed some light on this. Also to note; tanks are spamming ironshield potions, trinket/NMS/LS in stomp and have wards of shielding.

Link your WWS frogmite, we had a our warrior tank dieing over and over while learning, then once we looked at WWS we noticed he wasn't chugging AC pots, wasen't wearing commendation of kael (best tank trinket for this fight imo) and wasen't using cooldowns for stomps, as soon as we fixed that we killed him easily.

Afflction lock, scorpid sting, insect swarm, thunder clap and demo shout are all massive to ensure your tank survives.

Have to agree with Anedris, the flow of heals to the current tank should never stop. If there is a danger of running oom, make sure that they are using full mana pots, even Dark Runes if needed, and intelligently downranking. We have a priest that switches when the OT calls "taunting in 5 seconds", and a paladin that switches after the taunt to top-off the previous MT. With correct positioning 2 shamans with chains can keep the slash groups topped off as well.

The gaps in heals are definitely due to cast-cancel errors, and with how fast and hard he hits, even 1.2 seconds without a heal can be fatal. It's entirely possible to get Stomp, and then MH+OH in the same 1 second window.

With Super Mana Pot every cooldown, regen food, Flask of Mighty Restoration OR Distilled Wisdom and Elixir of Major MageBlood, the daily quest weapon oil and lastly a spriest your 3-4 tank healers should be able to heal constantly the entire 5-6min, cancel casting is not wise when learning it.

As holy on this fight on my paladin I typically use Holy Light 7 or 9 outside of stomp at a cast speed of 1.8 (haste and lights grace) and Holy Light 11 during stomp or at a tank change over.

Heal staggering helps but you don't do it by cancel casting you do it by delaying the start of your next heal by ~0.5sec if other heals have only just started.

All your healers should consider wearing some haste gear.

After 2-3 quite abysmal raids on brutallus (always rather short, raid attendence is rather low thanks to good weather, euro 2008 etc ) we finally managed to really improve last night.

We got to enrage a couple of times and overall our raid improved by quite a lot. When he enraged he was at 4-6% and since we went with 8 healers we decided next time we'll go with only 7.

Since we are still seeing the occasional tank death (outside of those ridiculous times where he just kills a tank without any chance of saving him) this leaves me kinda worried about our healing.

last time we had a druid+paladin on burn duty (and they failed sometimes ) and the rest (3 resto shamans, 2 priests, 1 paladin) on the tanks the whole time. we're using dorjeshealingbars so most of the time the heals are spread out rather well, mostly.

Our WWS is here:
Wow Web Stats

I'd like some suggestions concerning our Setup and which Healer we should drop.
Note: A few people had rather low dps or hps due to being rather new in the guild. The shadowpriest was invited like 3 days before that raid and didn't raid for months before that. The offtank was blood frenzy/ms/slam/whatever for the first time and in half fury gear.

Really, any help is appreciated

Improved hunter's mark is one we missed and noticed the difference when it was spec'd.

Fauxpas

With 2 shadow priests you should only need a single shaman healer healing the raid through the main tank, so you can probably drop one of them, or ideally have one respec elemental if they have enough gear. With 7 healers bringing some terribly low dps people is still quite doable. While learning it we put our druid tanking first (heroism at start for no threat problems ever), that way he will enrage just as the druid is suppost to get it back, he will kill the warrior, then chase a travel forming druid around for about 15 seconds of extra dps.

Would it be possible for the Healing be handled by:

2 Paladins on Main Tanks
2 Priests on Main Tanks
2 Druids fully HoTing the Main Tank and healing Burn targets
1 Shaman Raid Healin
And finally 2 Shadow Priests with VE in each soaking group.

From your experience would this healing composition be effective?

Thank you all for any tips.

That is almost exactly what we use, usually we have 3 holy paladins instead of a 2nd priest, but either should work fine, lifebloom stacks on the tank from burn healers is very handy, we give the 3x paladins shadow priest so they can max rank for the entire time.

If you're going to drop down to 7 healers (which it looks like you may need to for a kill) the option I see is dropping one of your priests or shamans. This is something you'll have to figure out for your raid, but personally I would drop a priest. You can't really put less people on burn healing, you can't go without 3 pally blessings, and you'll probably want that extra set of totems/bloodlust.

Your situation is almost the exact opposite of ours, and your current healer setup is what we ended up using on our first kill last night.

Some things that we used for healing (some based on suggestions in strats, some based on our wipe experience) were:

-Burn healing is a druid who is outside of a soak group, and a paladin who is inside a soak group, but on the closest corner/edge to the burn safe zone. The burn druid has a lot on his shoulders, because he won't always need the paladins help. He can easily do the first 30 seconds of multiple burn victims solo, but he needs to be smart about knowing who has burn, what slash stacks they have (if any), and when he'll need help. Communication is absolutely key, and it goes both ways. If a burn victim has slash when he gets burned, he calls out how many immediately so the druid knows the exact healing load that needs to be taken care of.

You probably know this, but burn healing needs to basically be flawless. We had multiple 1-3% wipes last night before our kill, and on each attempt we lost a DPS to burn at some point in the fight, who was then battle rez'd and came back with low mana and not fully buffed. That's what you call heartbreaking.

-MT healers are doing intelligent downranking and non stop spamming tanks. Our tank transition used a "3...2...1...Taunt" countdown to give healers a decent warning. If the tank was taunting off a stomp (current tank taking stomp, then the next tank taunts) they would call it out, and start their countdown with 1-2 seconds left on stomp timer. Whenever the countdown started, we had one priest designated to switch and have an incoming heal on the tank, and the other priest stayed on the tank that was being taunted off of until he was back to full, then switched over. All of the other healers switched over on the taunt (3 shamans using CH, 1 paladin with HL).

EDIT: Make sure whichever paladin you have designated to holy light spam the tank is in an spriest group. With the amount of casters you have, he'll also be an asset to DPS by running conc aura. The burn healing paladin should be running devo aura in the tank group.

One of the priests (preferred that it's the one switching early to the next tank) stands in the burn safe zone with the druid to avoid movement.

Other than that, if you're still experiencing tank gibs outside of the crazy RNG, 7 healers may not be the right answer. We started learning the fight with 7 healers from the viewpoint that, if we do it the hard way, and it turns out our DPS is up to the task, we can move up to 8 for more stability. I'm pretty sure out of 35ish attempts with 7 healers, we only hit the enrage about 3 times. Moving up to that 8th healer really, really helped our stability, however we felt very comfortable with putting that extra pressure on our DPS. I guess it comes down to this: Do you feel more comfortable putting extra pressure on your healing when you still have tank gibs now?

We use 1 druid on burn healing only, and she does usually an ok job. However this assumes some "missed" burns - be it cloak, bubble, iceblocks, resists etc. She can handle 2 consecutive burns fine, but a streak of 3-4 usually results in someone dying. However we decided that dropping a healer for an extra dps, and just risking maybe one death (usually not) , is simply worth it. Even if you end up losing someone, just SS them and keep going - the gain from one more dpsers 100% of the time outweights the loss from putting a SS/rebuffing someone. With around 2 mages 3 paladins 3 rogues , 2-3 hunters(if they are fast), its really rare to have those consecutive burns stack a lot.

As for tanks after experimenting with finding "balance" for gear, we switched to 100% avoidance setup (2x druid tanks). They even wear dps pieces , basically increasing their dodge as much as they can. With idol up/scrolls/food/totems etc they have well over 75% dodge 15% miss (scorpid+is) before radiance. After radiance it STILL accounts to 65% avoidance. Then they use moroes/badge of tenacity on stomps, getting them to over 80% avoidance during stomps. We havent had one tank death since switching to that strat - and we definitely did had problems before. with 80% avoidance you are looking at onyl 0.2^4 = 0.16% chance of a "4 rounder" - aka 4 non avoided hits in a row (basically only way tanks die - 4 unavoided hits+ lack of heals between). That means every stomp there is maybe 1% chance of getting a big spike - something our healers can handle. Avoidance gear also helps survivability by actually increasing tanks "effecitve health". I know it sounds like a blasphemy but consider:

- Brutallus attacks TWICE during 1.2 sec.
- With low avoidance setup you are looking at constant damage intake every second.
- Your tanks are usually not topped off with a low avoidance gear. Im not saying huge deficits - but usual "death scenario" looks like this:

2-3 unavoided MH in a row -> health deficit (tank at 50%) -> Average avoidance , but healers having some problems actually pushing health up (they can cope with incoming damage, but it takes good few seconds to actually get t3ank back to full)-> Big unavoided spike -> death.

As you can see the major flaw with "effective health approach", is that your tank will probably not be completely topped off when the big spike comes.

Avoidance helps at every stage of this. It reduces chance of health deficit appearing - by a LOT. It makes topping tanks AFTER spikes, very easy. It reduces chance of a big spike as well.

I did already. Our druids have ~56-58% dodge unbuffed completely. with procs/totems/consumables its up to ~75-80% constantly (thanks to druid amazing scaling with agility - imp agi totem alone with kings gives almost 8% dodge. Idol gives 4%, Kings gives another 7% or so). With trinket use they get over 100% dodge assuming good proc stacking or not much less without. So yea its not 80% avoidance ALL the time - there is also 13% miss. Take away sunwell Radiance and they sit at 55-60% dodge and 8% miss so 63-68% avoidance. WITH clickable trinket it gets up to ~80% avoidance during stomps with sunwell radiance accounted for.

wow thats not even close to the avoidance numbers i have seen from WWS. I think your numbers might be flawed there and not just by alittle bit.

edit * yeah after you got me curious i went back and checked to make sure it was not a huge discrepancy in gearing between the druids in my guild and others. Though i could not find your WWS for Bruta what i did find out is that the druids I looked at all ranged between the mid to low 30s and mid 40s for dodge (all very small samples of course) with none having a significant amount of pure miss. so 35-45% dodge on Burta seems average for druids.

Thats what our druids were running initially - 45% dodge means 65% before radiance which is a decent dodge for a druid gemming for stam etc. We actually didnt switch until recently to pure avoidance, a change that was more a result of M'uru fight - where avoidance shines even more. Pure miss depends on your hunters mostly - Druids hardly have any defense (most use some resilience to reach uncrittable too - so maybe 1% extra miss) - meaning that they run at 6% miss or so - 1% after radiance. Misses on our druids come from scorpid sting+insect swarm (yea we run a boomkin), so that changes the base 1% to 8%.

Im actually checking some reports right now. I must say im even more impressed by SK kill now - 6 healers with tanks only dodging 30% attacks seem like a real feat - they didnt use scorpid/insect swarm either - so yep no real significant misses.

The thing that made the difference for us was spacing out heals so one lands every half a second on the MT. We had constant tank deaths, rarely reaching enrage for 2-3 raids and when we started spacing out heals we could reach enrage much more consistently. We originally ran with 8 healers but switched to 7 on the kill. The healing load felt the same with seven.

I've made a tanking guide for Brutallus on the Feral forum if anyone is interested: http://elitistjerks.com/783865-post4143.html

Although slanted towards Ferals, a lot of it is probably applicable to Warrior tanks also.

I just finished flipping through the last few pages of this thread, and seems like we are having the same issues as Frogmite.

History. Killed Illidan mid-Feb, Kalegoes was second week after sunwell opened, and since then we've had brutal attendance issues and have basically had to replace half the guild. 2 out of 3 new locks, 2 outa 5 new mages, new rogue, new main warrior tank, 2 new priests, 3 new pallies, new elemental shaman....etc etc. So gear is all over the place, ranging from T4/badge geared healers to 6/8 T6 with dual glaive rogue.

Basically any time we are able to get Kal down early in the week we try to get attempts in on Brut, and we must have done well over 150 attempts by now. Not ONCE have we made it to enrage. Brut is always fully warrior debuffed, scorpid sting, etc. Several nights we've run 9 healers in an attempt to keep the tanks up, with no luck.

Last night was our best night on him ever, getting him to about 11% with ~40 seconds left, when we lost both tanks.

Wow Web Stats

That's the WWS if you guys are interested. IMO dps is close enough that we can get brut if we can live to the 6 minute mark, but that isn't happening at all, and im not qualified to judge healing.