Disc priest looses perhaps 500 +heal and 10% healing so a 6k heal with holy will be a 5k heal with disc, if i did the math correct.
When you assume that healing is no problem without stomp and PS negates stomp nearly completly, it should work shouldnt it? There are allways more than 2 Healers healing the tank so 1k heal more or less from 1/2 Healers doesn`t do the difference, important is only that enough heals land in a specific timeframe.

The threat could be a problem, but if its really only 5% less threat done in the 10 second window i don`t bother its a great problem.

I can confirm that the new area of effect for Meteor Slash is not a full 180°. Hearing about the changes, we set up our first attempt last night with all of the "soakers" lined up in a horizontal single file straight out to the off-side of each tank. The several people closest to the tank were hit by each Slash, while the furthest three or four were not. Our experience seems to confirm Cadfael's diagram of a large aspect cone originating from the center of the boss. I plan to run some quick tests before tonight's kill to more precisely determine the pattern.

No Clearcasting, 5% spirit, 25% spirit->heal, 20% more +healing on Greater Heals. What you gain from PI, you lose from healing, possibly even requiring additional healer to cover for you.

Just a question here: 20000 divided by 6 is 3.3k each. Divided by 5 its 4k. A priest can heal a 5man group for 3.5k in 3 seconds by a single PoH+CoH combo. So theoretically a group composed of 1 priest, + any combo of mages, warlocks and elemental shamans, can stand close to the tank, with as many sta buffs as they can get and 2 priests can pretty much take care of every slash. If the slash has some animation that gives the priest advanced warning he can prechannel the PoH, so that the damage is healed even faster. Alternatively you can put the priest in the tank group, so the tank also benefits from the AoE heal and use 5 mana per slash leaving 4k damage to be healed, this would require an additional CoH extending the time to 4.5 sec.

Do you think this is a viable tactic?

You're in a guild working on SSC and TK, have no understanding of the fight, and little prospect of ever seeing it. It becomes evident within a few pulls that the meteor slash is a minute portion of the healing requirement of the fight and requires only the most basic of positioning to overcome and, thanks to shamans, no dedicated healing. There is a reason no one is discussing the meteor slash at all and, surprisingly, it is not because we were waiting for your brilliant insight. I have to wonder what exactly you were hoping to accomplish by posting anything at all in this thread.

Yes. No. Maybe.

It really depends if you can afford to divert healing power to the soak groups. Please note that there is a stacking debuff, increasing the Meteor Slash damage by 75% each time it hits if it does not run out. Going with 2 soak groups, you may want to stack it up to three applications, which is far more for one single priest to heal away quickly (the difficult one is between second and third application, because afterwards there is the switch to the other group so you have enough time).

The priest can time it though as Meteor Slash comes every 12 seconds.

So you will divert a healer quite long to heal this up. If you can keep your tank up during this time, it is viable. Otherwise not so much. A shadow priest with VE in this position healing a full party of 5 soakers is quite useful as it costs him one GCD once a minute to apply the VE and otherwise he isn't doing anything he wouldn't do anyway. You can easily do 6 soakers by having tank (who gets healed anyway) plus a full group soaking. Depending on the SP's healing output, minimal "external" healing is required. Having a Shaman with Healing Stream in the same group probably is absolutely enough and thus you can have full time healers ensuring the tank stays up.

EDIT: On second thought, what Clandestine says. It doesn't look like you were there and saw how this fight works. Theorizing without any first hand experience can be fun but isn't really conductive to this forum's community.

The diagram was a quick 2 minute job to clarify what I wanted to express. I think the angle could be anywhere between 90 and 120 degrees. It's just damn hard to guess where the cone begins since he's so big and you can't really see the circle well.

If you want to test it, it's simple. Form a perfect line. Put the tank in the middle. He makes one step forward. Misdirect Brutallus on him and let all healers do their job. DDs further out on the edges don't do anything else than just wait for Meteor and depending wheter they get it or not, walk forward until they are convinced they find the spot where by walking one step back they'll get it and staying (or going one step forward) they wont. Then try to screenshot that and guess the angle from it.

Since Rupture is only 2-4% of your personal DPS for you, keeping Improved Expose Armor up you will lose that 2-4% personal DPS but gain 450 ArP over using Sunder.

Depending on your physical DPS setup, if you don't use any warrior tanks there should be a breakpoint at which 475 ArP more for the raid outweighs the loss of personal DPS.

I raided as disc for a while, and used it fairly often on the aoe'ers who just pulled. PS would cause them lose aggro the moment I used more often than not. After all, what's the point in generating 5% less aggro for 8 seconds?

The spec, however, isn't as bad as quoted above. You lose clearcasting but gain more mana to start with, lose spirit of redemption but gain enlightenment. You do lose some healing, but if PS can cover all the pyroes(or stomp here?), it does work.

Thank you for the reply. That is what I needed.

Thats what i figured. But I don't think 1SND 5EA is good cycle (thought maybe for the start of the fight). Rupture last 16 seconds but expose armour 30 seconds so it would be refreshed way too erlay. And i havent been useing 1SND since I droped two pieces T4. Im going to try out 3SND 5EA 3SND 5R, 3SND 5EA 3SND 4R and 3SND 5EA 3SND 3R after we clear BT this week and I'm going to stay combat swords, just swapping 2 points from vile poisons to imp expose armour (I don't have the gear for multilate anyway).

edit: Don't know if it has been mentiont here but I heard Elixir of Demonslaying would rock against Brut.

First of all no rogue should be using a 1s/5x cycle, that's a cycle if you are wearing two piece T4 which I would hope your rogues are not wearing going into brutallus. Rupture also is about 4-5% of your total damage. Also, changing your spec to drop vile poisons for imp EA for one fight seems like a bit much.

Unless you're using two ferals to tank, I don't see a reason why sunder shouldn't be up anyways.

Why would it be so bad for a dps warrior to be sunder bot? Yeah, he has to sacrifice a lot of rage in the start to get it built up but once he has 5 sunders up he only needs to refresh it every 30 seconds. You can even do it from zerker stance. Is it that much threat?

I somehow doubt an arms warrior has to worry about threat on Brutallus. A fury perhaps, but if you're running a fury warrior and not an arms warrior, you're doing something wrong in the min/max game.

Generally, it's less threat for a DPS warrior to sunder than use anything else in their cycle actually.

Just a note on the imp EA stuff and rogue cycles:
-A rogue using Imp. EA should pretty much just be doing 5s/5ea. 5 point SnD's and EA are both (almost) 30 seconds. Its a really easy cycle to keep up with a very low risk of dropping either finisher - which is important, because even a few seconds of lapse in EA is a large dps loss to the raid. Don't bother trying to rupture, even if you were able to weave in an extra 3-point Rupture every 90 or 120 seconds (which is about all you are capable of).. it would increase your risk of dropping EA and/or SnD, thereby completely negating the dmg gain from the rupture and then some.

-The rogue using Imp EA only loses ~20 dps. The extra 475 armor pen (not 450, btw) nearly makes up for the entirety of the loss caused by not rupturing. Every other physical dps'er gains 3-4%. The dps warrior who doesn't have to sunder will gain substantially more.

-If you have no warriors tanking (any combination of Ferals and Paladins), you should use Imp. EA. If you have a warrior tanking they need Devestate/Sunder.

As an aside: All the Warglaive whine regarding Brutallus, here and in other threads, needs to stop. Dual Warglaives make for about 300 more dps than alternatives on the fight. Sure, it helps, but when you need 29k raid DPS, 300dps is a drop in the bucket.

300 dps over 6 minutes is 1% of the boss's health. Considering how tightly tuned the fight is and how many people kill him seconds after the enrage, I'd venture to suggest that it very much *is* significant.

However I agree that whining is unproductive.

Whining is definitely unproductive. Obviously this is a tightly-tuned fight, and people are likely to have 1% wipes where they can't help but think "man if our rogue had glaives he'd have done an extra 100k damage and that would be a kill" but you can also find a dozen other areas in which to improve your raid DPS.

Do you seriously believe a 1% RDPS increase is not worthwhile of mention ?
I bought the mats to go JC just so that I can gain +2 spell dmg. Were talking 1500g-ish for 2 spell dmg. If I could get anything remotely close to that kind of dps gain, I would call the buff borderline insane (considering the efforts I have to go through for such minor boosts).

We've never given this much thought but I see some guilds taking spell pushback into account for determining soak groups. So what classes lose the most from being in a soak group in terms of spell pushback? I realize shadow priests hurt quite a bit but what about locks, mages and hunters? We have our shadow priests in for the sake of VE but I would easily do 100-200 dps or more higher if I didn't have to soak.

Its worthwile to mention I guess, but theres nearly no discusstion to be had about it. You cant force warglaves to drop, and you got to assume every sunwell guild is still farming BT for glaves and the other few "mising peices". The fight is beatable without hitting the enrage even with no warglave sets. I would think that people coming in to this thread looking for little things to help them beat what is admittidly a tough encounter, diserve to see something besides "get some warglaves!"