Cyn

Almost as good as our Paladin that shows up as ret from the week before, specs prot for kalec, ret for brut, prot for felmyst, ret for twins, prot for muru, ret for kil jaeden, all in one night.

 

KamPa

While this is very "interesting" discussion, I'd like to quote myself from way back, in some slim hope of getting answer on the actual fight rather than "tuned or not".

 

Kaidman

We've also been having some issues with our Void Sentinel tank getting killed. There hasn't been much discussion if any on Sentinel tank death issues which makes me think we're doing something extremely wrong. Our warrior MT (Kenyi) has been with us since beginning of BC and geared very well so I don't think it's a gear issue. One of our top healers is healing him, holy priest. We use 6 heals - 3sham, pal, priest, druid. Our druid is stacking LB on sent tank, spawn tank, and both BE tanks. We assign 2 healers to heal the prot paladin on BEs because he takes a lot of heat, 1 heal on our feral, leaving one healer free to help on BE tanks and sentinel tank. The extra healer mainly concentrates on BE tanks, should we put 2 healers on Sent tank full-time? Do others sent tanks have the time to TC/Demo each Sent without worrying about having aggro issues, especially when you have to slam the sent and run clear across the room? We CoTongues the Sent and Void Blast is reflected the majority of the time. Our warrior says the shadowbolt volley has been gibbing him sometimes. Do some Sent tanks wear a few SR pieces like the spawn tank?


We are currently using a strat similar to Drow because double melee groups was just not working for us, seen P2 within a night of attempts after switching strats. I despise this fight as GM/Raid leader. It has not been fun at any point and we've been making attempts on/off since the gate was opened. There isn't a feel of strat adjustments here and there like the earlier fights in the zone. In particular pre-EZMode Twins was great, tweak tweak tweak and eventually find what worked best for us (before reverse kill, which makes the fight the most trivial in the zone). It's about pure amount of attempts put in it seems.

 

Yeria

We are running a similar Healing setup, we usually also have 1 Holy Priest on the Sentinel Tank(me), and 1 Druid HoT'ing Sentinel/Spawn Tanks and at least one of the Humanoid Tanks.
There have been a few Tank Death issues, but it usually only happens if someone did a mistake. I don't really recall that I died when everything was going fine but the damage was "unhealable" or something like that.
You should make sure the Priest sticks to his assignment though. I recall dying because my Priest was healing someone else and I died because the Heal came 1 sec too late.

However, what kind of gear is your Sentinel Tank using? I've been going fine with a lot of Avoidance and Armor, so most of the damage I take is from Shadow Pulse which is a steady damage income. If it happens that I gets multiple Melee hits in a row, a Swiftmend, NS or Last Stand should be ready.
As for TC/Demo shout - After a Sentinel Spawned I'm usually doing Shield Slam, Thunderclap, Demo Shout, Revenge, (while spamming HS along the way) and then continue the normal rotation. Also using Ironshields, and I'd find it too risky to tank Sentinels without TC/DS/IS up at all times. Threat has not really been an issue, if I have to move the Sentinel across the room before a Darkness hits, the DPS will generally notice and not go all out if I have to move it fast.

As for Void Blast, it should be reflected 100% of the time. -35% Attackspeed and a Huge amount of threat from it really helps. If your tank has Rage issues (which I can hardly imagine, as Shadow Pulse and the occasional Melee hit provide a lot of Rage) he should try to manage it better, if he has troubles reflecting Void Blast in time without CoT, he should probably try to bind Spell Reflection to an easily reachable key (Personally I really like Spell Reflection on Mouse5)

 

KamPa

Actually, we didn't have much problem with Sentinel tank with 4, but with 3, there's no reflect/thunderclap, meaning those huge hits come fairly often. Demo shout is solved by locks using CoW, grounding totem takes care of damage part - but there's no -aspd, neither from TC or VB. Which is why I'm curious if anyone considered Deathfrost here and what else I might be missing to make healing it easier.

 

Ramayana

I think having to use 2 healers on the Prot Pally Door Tank is kinda harsh. I'm not exactly sure about healing assignments that we use on this particular fight, but I know we only have 1 healer dedicated to each door tank, both of ours being Ferals. We use shamans spamming CH on the door tanks so that it runs through the melee as well, and then 2 healers on the Void Tank. That probably won't help you much though if you are using a Drow-like strat. And I'm not sure what to tell you about your Void Tank being gibbed by shadowbolts, as that has never been a problem for us. I have had to tank voids on a few occasions when a tank doesn't show up that night, and only 2 things have resulted in a gib, that is not having enough rage for a spell reflect. The other was the night that I had no priest/shaman healing me, just 2 druids, so I had no Inspiration/Ancestral Healing, and if Demo Shout got resisted, I would take near 10k hits and 2 of those back to back would spell death.

It would definitely be worth a try, as agro is typically never an issue with a Paladin tank.

 

Xtoforas

I would like to ask those shadowpriests who have killed M'uru how they deal with the transition and dps in p2. We had our first good night of attempts, (6 out of 11 attempts going to ~30% of p2) and we're finding that overall we're lacking on dps.

As a shadowpriest in p2 I'm finding it really difficult to focus on dpsing Entropius and making sure I get Dark Fiends dispelled.

I barely have enough time to get vt, swp, and mb off before either a gravity ball hits me or a dark fiend pops up that i have to run to dispell.

We haven't had that much experience in p2 yet so we could all improve in avoiding the gravity balls and spreading out to get the dark fiends but the 3 shadowpriests combined for just over 2k average dps on Entropius which is pretty low considering on M'uru we're close to 4.5k.

Is it just that we have to get used to avoiding the gravity balls that is hurting our dps?

 

Darkkazul

We used to try to have our Spriests dispell the Skulls but ending up having each shaman on the corners of the room dispelling skulls which sometimes hurts our healing but allows spriests to concentrate on getting more mana back for those healers that are healing.

 

ionlylooklazy

The key for me healing sentinel tanks was to be aware of the sentinels swing timer. I think, undebuffed its swing timer is 2.0 seconds, with IMP TC it becomes 2*1.2 = 2.4 seconds. For this fight I wear 193 spell haste which brings my greater heal to a 2.23 cast time. This means that when impTC is up, I am always able to land a heal between meelee swings.

We tank our sentinel on top of the void spawn, so he takes extra damage during this time. I try to time my greater heal to go off ASAP after a meelee swing, so that if he takes a burst of shadowbolt damage, I can land a second gheal before his next meelee swing.

Heres a little diagram how I time my heals. M is meelee (hit or miss) and H is heal, and '-' is some measurement of time.

M-H----------------M-H---------------------M-H

This makes cast-cancelling impossible, but since my cast time is ~.2 seconds faster than the sentinels swing timer it gives me time to land a second heal if the tank takes a nasty spike form shadow bolt damage.

M-H-----SSSSS---M-H---------SSSS----H--M----------H-------M------H--------------M--H--------------M

When the sentinel tank is not near the void spawn, I'll time my heal to land a little later so I have the opportunity to save mana by having enough time to cancel and start re-casting my heal if he avoids.

M----------H-----M----------------H--------M



We also have a resto druid healing our prot prolly, so he keeps lifebloom and rejuv on the sentinel tank, which makes swiftmends available for use. I'll also use pre-hot both tanks between sentinels and use prayer of mending whenever void blast goes up.

 

• Snowy

Use a macro for skull dispelling. (see earlier in the thread for one I use) If you're clever you can even make special macros for that fight that'll attempt to dispel skulls before you cast your actual spell. If you are getting VT/SWP/MB off, then that's really fine enough. An enhancement shaman can purge close skulls too, but resto shamans simply don't have the time available to do this. (same for holy priests)

 

• Praanz

One of many problems on Sentinel-tanks dying are the added SB's from Void Spawns. We kill two Sentinels then AoE's the Spawns (I'm actually thinking if 3 is doable at the moment). At first it was quite the problem keeping the Sent-tank alive, when there was two packs of Spawns beeing AoE'd, while he brought in the third Sentinel for killing. It was quite often this lead to a tank death even while giving him extra heals during this period.

The Sentinels dish out quite the amount of physical damage so I for one am not a believer in SR on the Sentine-tank. We solved it with switching sides. This means that every third Sentinel gets tanked on the opposite side of M'uru. Once the paladin-tank is free from Void Spawns he just moves over to the other side, HoJ's a Berserker on the Entrance side, and arrives just in time to see the new Sentinel go down.

It really had a huge impact on our Sentinel-tank allowing him to go full out physical-gear and never taking spikes from 2xVoid-groups.

 

Ramayana

Our most recent M'uru kill took us exactly 80 seconds to kill Entropius in P2, and these are our 2 Shadow Priests.

-----------Dmg----Hits----Avg----Max
Dvoryn---81,810---80---1022---4525
Jayvo----78,490---78---1006---3885

So between 2 of them they are just shy of 2k DPS combined, and neither of them took a aingle tick from Singularity.

The main thing with doing good DPS in phase 2, is avoiding Singularity. Our most recent kill, we killed him with 1 person dead, and only a grand total of 7 Singularity ticks on the raid, on 2 people total. Avoiding being thrown around = good DPS = dead M'uru.

Here's the WWS if you're interested.
Entropius - WWS

 

Warbo

We're having extreme problems dodging balls, on top of generally lack of DPS on entrophius come phase two it seems.

this is a parse of our best m'uru attempt - Entropius - WWS ~35% into phase 2. we lasted 66 seconds into phase 2, which is only 11% lower than your M'uru kill, ramayana. we only had healers getting hit by singularity too for that attempt, and DPS surprisingly didn't start dying until around ~55 seconds in

the majority of the problem seems to come from balls and the general kite path that our tank have. it seems that people are losing huge amounts of dps time solely from dodging the ball, both as melee, and apparently, for ranged. is this supposed to happen? we told everyone to save cooldowns for phase 2 in order to burn entrophius hard, but it seems that we keep getting stuck around ~40-50%, with everyone dying around that time, discounting wipes where a skull blows the raid up.

we used 3 resto shamans, 1 holy priest, 1 holy pally, and 1 resto druid, and i don't know what's exactly killing people constantly. we almost always wipe around 35-40 seconds in. is it people not dodging balls correctly and efficiently?

are we also losing dps time due to a poor entrophius kite path?

the part that frustrates me is how I'm out-dpsing a large portion of our DPS classes. On the parse that I linked, I was #5 on damage done to entrophius...beating well over half of the DPS classes in the raid. the numbers are pretty much consistent throughout the whole night; i would always be top 10 dps, and i always out-dpsed our enhancement shaman, along with the majority of the casters. i don't understand how a feral druid in tank gear is able to do this, especially when I'm in a rush to swap groups, assign bloodlust assignments, etc, during phase two, which severely cuts into my DPS.

 

ionlylooklazy

How is your raid positioning in P2?

 

◊ Praetorian

I've said this a million times but I don't think a "kite path" like Exodus used is productive in P2 at all, unless you have a massive amount of melee DPS that constantly needs to keep moving.

Stick your melee in the middle. Split your ranged into three clumps in a triangle formation around the edges. Move as needed, then return to positions once the Black Hole is gone. This way if one portion of the raid is getting fucked by a Black Hole, by definition the other 75% of the raid can DPS unhindered.

 

Ramayana

I agree with Gurgthock in that a Kite Path is just a bad idea in general. We run very melee heavy as you can see from that WWS, but we do not use any kite path. We use on of the ferals, Pudgeball, to MT Entrop, and our normal MT, Sendaii, his entire job for phase 2, is calling out Singularity spawns. As soon as one spawns he calls it out and directs Pudge which way to move Entropius, and then continues to let us know what direction it is traveling in, as well as letting us know when it despawns. When it despawns we do not continute to move, assuming no void zones underneath people, we take advantage of the short amount of free non-movement time to go balls out DPS. Something you might assume based on the DPS is that melee didn't have many spawns near them, but in actuality of the 4? Singularity spawns 3 of them were within 5 yards of the melee. Good communication goes a long way when avoiding them, as they can somtimes be pretty difficult to see. One thing we don't do that alot of people do, is swap shamans for heroisms. We normally run with 4 shaman, but have only had 3 as of late, but even when we had 4 we did not give groups double hero. We wait until between 50-60% just as healing is going to start to fall behind, then pop a hero for both melee groups and the healer group (caster group gets 4th if we have it). Thats when we use all consumables, all cooldowns, everything possible. If I had to give a rough estimate, I'd say that the first 50% takes us about 50 seconds, and the second 50% takes about 30.

@Warbo

I looked at a few of the other attempts you guys had on him that were 10+ million damage dealt, and saw the same thing in every one. You're just taking too much damage from Singularity, the one you posted as your lowest was decent, with only 35 Ticks on the raid from the Orb, but some of the other logs were 50+, one I recall was even over 100. So yea, I'd say figuring out a way to deal with Singularity is a big part of solidifying your strategy.

Another thing I noticed, you have 2 rogues, 2 DPS warriors, 2 hunters, and 2 enhancement shamans in your raid, and not a single one of them popped a Demonslaying Elixir going into phase 2. Thats +145 AP on 8 people that you should have. You guys are getting close, it's time to get away from flasks and start chugging elixirs. And another thing, you are probably better off having one of your Fury Warriors as Arms, Blood Frenzy is a pretty huge DPS boost.

 

rieko

For sentinel tanks: wearing any SR to mitigate some of the volleys you recieve or is it pure tanking gear all the way?

Edit: This is a great idea and solution to basically what I asked. Still, people that continue to tank all sentinels on 1 side; SR yay or nay?

 

Ramayana

No SR on Sentinel Tanks. You sacrifice too much to use it.

 

Trouble

We tank all the spawns in one spot and don't use any SR. Sentinel tank deaths are rarely a problem and it's usually due to a mistake on the part of the primary healer on the tank.

 

◊ Praetorian

We tank everything in one spot, keep 12 Spawns up at once, and our tank does wear a couple of pieces of SR. It's never been a big deal. I found that we do want to get partial resists on most/all Volleys or you can experience some brutal spikes from a Sentinel + 12 Spawns.

 

Rensy

I like the idea of moving Entropius in a loose adaptive circle, because with heavy amounts of melee I feel that keeping 100% DPS time on the boss is a bit easier. If you move as one unit it feels much easier to dodge the spinny tossy orbs of death, at least in my experience.

That said I don't think its at all necessary or optimal for everyone. Especially people who don't run heavy melee.


Additionally, to someone a page back. The best way to meet the dps check for Entropius after strong raid comp is simply strong individual play. With void zones on the ground and people being tossed around and a boss possibly moving out of range the biggest loss in DPS will be dead people and people who don't get full DPS time in. I don't think that drums of all things are going to keep your players alive and dpsing on Entropius (UNLESS ITS THE SPEED DRUMS FOR PRO-NESS).

 

• Riot

Couple of things here to add to Gurg:

I wear the BT neck, Night's End, and Shadesteel Bracers. This is not a huge loss. You can tank Sentinels just fine in this setup, with Shadow Protection and Flask of Chromatic Resistance.

Secondly, it was mentioned somewhere that people CoT the Void Sentinel - this is nice but not necessary, and the extra GCD that's being spent on using this, is probably better used DPSing something else. Your Warrior should be able to handle it, barring latnecy problems.

Tanking Sentinels on top of Spawns is fine with 200ish SR. I once swapped out a piece of SR gear for more Avoidance, and I remember getting gibbed by a set of unresisted Shadow Bolt Volleys that killed me while a heal was in progress.

FWIW, not wearing a little bit of SR gear if you're tanking Sentinels seems like a bad idea. Sentinel damage is spiky, period.

"Give me but one firm spot to stand on, and I will move the Earth" - Archimedes.