i read this on R&D.
Is that true? And if so, why can our last tank get BA and kill others after vael dies?

I don't think that's true at all and I suspect that someone said that just to laugh at the whipes it causes.

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Well I'm pretty sure we've never tested this hypothesis. We should have a BA'ed tank go stand by a worthless raid member, such as Graham, to try it out.

It is AoE but if you die before BA kills you then the explosion doesn't happen. Usually the tank will get so low on HPs that Vael will 1 shot them before BA kills them. I think our tanks usually move round early but we do have the occasional accident doing this when Vael doesn't manage to kill the MT in time.

I can confirm that there is no AE unless BA kills you. I normally live until about 900 max hp or so and usually get 1 shotted by the breath. Bringing your next tank in early will save more wipes than it will cause. Just be ready to heal him as he will start getting hit with cleaves/breath.

That's interesting -- I'd never picked up on that little detail. I guess you could intentionally stop healing the old MT at 0:05 remaining on their BA and they'll certainly die that way.

Also as I recall Vael is a fat ass and doesn't like to move with a funky hit box. Tank 1 with BA can run back far enough that he can still hit Vael while Tank 2 could stand in front of the dragon and not be in range of the BA AoE.

I wouldn't recommend doing this. A hunter with BA pulled agro off of the first tank and when she turned to swat him down, she hit the tank with a tail swipe. He flew back to the chairs and Vael ran all the way forward. I either had to stand in the breath/cleave zone or have Vael face the entire raid for the tank switch and possibly breath on our entire front line.

We didn't win that attempt.

The point of that story is: Don't risk getting Vael stuck in the chair area. He will smite you with extreme prejudice for sitting on his bench.

If you turned him around you woudn't risk getting stuck in the chair.

That has nothing to do with positioning. If someone pulls aggro (how the fuck does a hunter pull aggro?) on Vael you are playing with fire (lol!).

Aimed shot 1 second into the fight.

I wonder how we'd know that. Hmm.....

Yeah it was a bit of a rhetorical question. I recognize how it happens: You do damage sufficient to generate more aggro than the current tank. :V:

It really depends on how the lag is. Our 1st tank lags pretty hard on Vael for some reason (only once he is agro'd. He can't even move once the fight begins - thus he is the 1st tank.) The hunter got the first BA and figured he didn't need to FD since he had barely started DPS before the BA. I know that sounds pathetic but it was one of our first attempts. I've pulled agro as the 2nd tank way more times than that hunter ever has.

Of course there was the time when a hunter got the bright idea to start an aimed shot the second the "countdown" ended. He fat fingered arcane shot before the tank even walked up to Vael and wiped the raid at an impressive 28%. Me and 2 of the other warriors didn't even die that attempt. We ran upstairs and hid by the gate without ever hitting him.

fixed

Risk seems to outweight the benefit. Besides shield wall+gem+last stand usually allows our tanks to stay alive and max execute DPS for the full duration of the BA.

Edit: I can definitely see it as being very helpful for guilds who are just learning the encounter.

Edit2: fixed quote, this board is hard to use.

I thought BA had some sort of threat reducing component on account of our warlocks getting it early and throwing off 3k shadow bolts once every 1.5 seconds. :-/

The non-MT BA's put the target permanently on the bottom of the aggro list. The MT BA's don't change anything.

I'm fairly sure that BA is a -75% passive threat reduction when you have it on but it's not applied retroactively:

http://thottbot.com/?sp=24701

So a 2000pt bolt will generate 500 damage worth of aggro while you have BA. But if you had done a lot before getting BA, it's early in the fight, and you're chaincasting, it's still possible to pull aggro with that.

Ah, very good.

No gems (you need to kill Broodlord for it, and if you can do that you probably don't need Vael advice any more), we only have 2 tanks specced for last stand (one of which is the 1st tank so he never gets to execute), and shield wall has a 30 minute cooldown. Burn it once and you have 3-4 attempts before you can use it again.

We try to keep the warriors up as long as possible. We never let a tank die on purpose. But when my max hp gets down to 900 and I'm getting the AE + breath + melee + cleave, I think I've survived the duration of BA once. Even with multiple Shield Wall + Last stand attempts.

But then again, we are still learning the encounter. We killed Vael on our 2nd day of attempts on him and then couldn't make it click the following reset (1 day of attempts.) I figured I'd just throw in my advice since I am also just getting familiar with the encounter.

We also just stand the new MT on top of the old one just as the BA hits. Never had an old tank not die before sploding (usually with about 900-1500 HP left).

Our issue in the fight has always been the tank transitions, not getting Vael dead. Nail the transisitons and getting Vael dead just follows.

(And are we the only ones who ditch FR on everyone but the tanks?)