Darlal

In terms of imp Expose Armor, one could consider bringing a mutilate rogue if you have a well-geared one. In general the current numbers seem to put mutilate 2% behind combat swords, but a mutilate rogue can keep up imp EA forever with almost no loss of dps (a further 1% drop most likely). The DPS gained by switching to 4+s /4+ r/ 4+ EA from 4+s/4+r/4+e may actually result in a net DPS gain.

 

• Aldriana

One caveat about that is that a 4-pt Imp Expose is vastly inferior to a 5-pt; thus the Mutilate rogue would really want to be doing 4+s/4+r/5a, which, regretably, is somewhat of an inefficient cycle (if it's even sustainable) for a Mutilate rogue. It is definitely the case that if you're not using warrior tanks, Imp EA is a nice damage boost for the raid; but it's not at all clear to me that a Mutilate rogue is better at it than a combat rogue.

 

• Whiteknight

We put our 2 spriests in the soak group, but not actually taking slashes. So they got no pushback and they were healing soakers the entire fight. It worked pretty well for us.

Our soak groups were one group of healers and one group of mages. In particular our paladin healers got to be soakers because the mana return from them getting healed up allows them to uprank more. Resto druids soak well too, particularly if they're mainly doing instant HoT spells. With concentration aura running in a heal group, a lot of the pushback is limited. Pallies get 100% pushback prevention. We kept our resto shamans out of the soak groups as much as possible.

 

cheebamonkey

If you are running a typical healing group with at least a pally in it then no healer will have pushback, along with druids since they are only casting instant spells meaning you should have 7 healers and 2 tanks soaking. We use 16 total soakers since it means we never have to have anyone sub in for anyone else. So thats still a lot of spots to fill for our strat. I've heard people saying you can do it with 10 soakers total including the tanks but does anyone have any numbers or approximations on how dps suffers from having two people moving when a soak group member gets burn as opossed to only having 1 person?

Also mages should probably be included in soak groups because of the their ability to ice block off the burn.

 

• Whiteknight

We used 5 soaks in each group. The tradeoff is simply this: The more people you have soaking, the harder it is to heal burn. When slash and burn is up simultaneously players take a lot of damage. Obviously you want to drop slash ASAP if you take a burn, but you'll definitely be taking some higher damage.
If you have fewer soakers, it's more likely a non-soaker will get burn. As you pointed out, low soak count means you have to move dps in to replace folk that get burn.

 

◊ vorpalblade

The Bolded one is accurate. Don't pain suppress your tanks unless your raid is fully prepared for that tank to instantly lose 5% of his accumulated threat. It gets pretty easy to threat cap on Brutallus, so you may well just be harming your DPS potential for a damage reducer that shouldn't be required anyway, with the proper healing assignments.

If you're going to use it at all, use it on your threat capped DPS.

 

Sinndir

Pending on the amount of resto shamans, and if it is not needed on the tanks. You could put the earth shields on your casters in the soak groups to maximize their DPS.

Just a thought /shrug.

 

◊ Praetorian

Yeah, PS really isn't for tanks and that's exactly why it has a threat reduction component. On Brutallus I'd use it on someone in the last 10sec of their Burn, if anything, if I had a deep Disc priest along.

 

Gokey

Anyone know if they fixed [Elixir of Demonslaying] to work for ranged attacks this patch?

I see a lot of hunters on WWS using it, but as far as I know it's never worked for ranged attacks.

 

◊ Zerchi

Based solely on what we can see in regards to spell data (Elixir of Demonslaying), it still doesn't appear to affect ranged attack power. Blizzard could have changed how those mods work though I suppose. But usually if it affects both, there's an explicit mod for ranged attack power along with "normal" attack power. Compare to other items with demon slaying effects for confirmation.

 

Morsexy

If your arms warrior is expertise\spec dodge capped, he has a great point in his slam cycle to use sunder anyways assuming 2 feral tanks.

 

Jarlyn

Tested it with a hunter in my guild last week after our first night on Brutallus. It does not work for hunters.

 

Fleebenworth

Errrr, except that barkskin, like most other damage reduction auras of which I am aware(defensive stance comes to mind). stacks multiplicatively, and not additively, meaning that you get in practice far less than the advertised 20% damage reduction.

Also, from my understanding, I think most people are probably getting gibbed on stomps that come along with several rounds of melee, rather than just after taunt, which is relatively easy to heal.

 

Carmak

I'd say that you would get more than advertised if it stacked additively, not that that you'd get far less with multiplicative. A druid with barkskin should take 20% less damage with it on regardless of other effects. A hit for 10,000 should turn into a hit for 8,000 which might not be as much as you'd want but it's still quite useful.

 

• Latito

If you are using 2 feral druid tanks already, you'll still want a warrior to be T-Clap and Demo'ing the boss.. a decent bit of GCD usage already, especially considering resists on those abilities. Adding in Sunder only further detracts from the warriors dps. GCD issues aside, why would you intentionally use an inferior ability (Sunder vs Imp EA)? It costs a rogue all of ~20 dps to go from using Rupture as a secondary finisher while a warrior Sunders to using Imp EA. The dps warrior should easily gain more than 20 dps from not having to sunder, which makes the 475 Armor Pen for the entire rest of the raid pure benefit. I simply don't understand why a guild would insist on using Sunder unless they have a warrior tanking.. that really is the only reason to *ever* use it on a boss fight.

 

• Snowy

It's still 20% less damage. It's like Salv -- I don't go from 50% threat to 20% threat, but 35% threat is still 30% less threat generated than 50% threat was.

Benefactors' Bar, where you get free English lessons:

 

Zaroua

Druids won't have any other kinda of percentage based damage reduction (like defensive stance), making the 20% a flat decrease in damage taken. At least that's how I understand how Barkskin works.


And as a Warrior tank with close to 70% avoidance on Brutallus (under 21k HP, above 22k armor), Stomp deaths are very rare due to good use of cooldowns.

The only problems we ever had with Stomps causing deaths on me were when I had a Burn ticking on me and in the last 20 seconds and then I get a Stomp + double hit. That or when my Shield Wall was down from the previous attempt on our 1-2% wipes.

If a Druid specs Moonkin in Darnassus, do the trainers still laugh at him?

 

• Aldriana

Well, there's one reason, that being that Imp EA takes a bit longer to stack up. On a sustained fight like Brutallus, this is not an issue; one can simply pop AR to get EA up starting 10 seconds into the fight. But on a fight with more interruptions - Leotharas would be the ultimate example of this, but there are others - waiting 15-20 seconds every time for a rogue to get 5 EA up will significantly hurt DPS; good CP management by the rogue will mitigate this to some extent but cost him more damage. Fundamentally: without AR it takes a good 30 seconds for a rogue to get both SnD and EA up, so when doing damage in 1 minute chunks waiting for this overhead is not always advisable relative to sunders.

 

◊ Vaccine

Just downed him tonight using 2 tanks/soak groups. We adopted our strat to the Meteor change by having the tanks stand further apart and having a rather large safe zone in between the two groups. We also had a Resto druid stood their so he never took slashes as he was the primary burn healer. He was stood there so he could easily keep himself up if he got burn.

We actually "killled" him twice on Tuesday night but massive disconnects at 5% due to Omen screwed us over.

Theres a couple of Stomps that come closley after 3rd slashes that you can let the tank with 3 slash hold and take before taunting, that helped us a lot on healing.

Also for Druid tanking I was alternating between using Nightmare Seed and BoT Use: for each Stomp which also was good. For my Idol I decided to go with the flight Idol after its recent buff as I had 3 hunters in my group.

WWS here if it helps anyone:
Wow Web Stats

 

Fleebenworth

Yeah, for a second I was just thinking that the person I was quoting was saying that your total mitigation would go up 20%, which is false. Of course the real damage you're taking goes down 20%. but your overall mitigation only goes up 5% or so.

 

Illundai

We killed Brutallus for the 2nd time tonight and maybe a little onorthodox but we use the whole ranged groups to soak, including Shadowpriests. I'm thinking of taking the Shadowpriests out next kill, though.

While it's true that Burn gets harder to heal with Meteor Slashes, soaking with more people makes it easier to heal the Slash damage, so that the raidhealers can focus more on the tanks.
We used the positioning as posted earlier in the thread by Cadfael, seemed to work quite well. Basicly 3 shotted him (first 2 our Retri paladin wasnt available >.<)
Actually looking over the parse, I think that we may have gotten a tad lucky with Burns.

Parse here for the interested:

Wow Web Stats

 

◊ Vectivus

In case you missed it earlier, walking us through your group composition and what you did/didn't have doesn't really help anyone.