dreadnor

I was tanking Onyxia the other day and found myself always running low on rage and losing aggro in stage 3. These days I purposely lower my FR for Onyxia so that I dont resist the firebreath (need the rage). I tank her in 8/8 might and am 30arms/20fury spec.

My question is, in a limited rage situation, besides revenge/bash what abilities give you the most hate for each point of rage (on a fully sundered mob)? Basically what is better to spam, HS or sunder armour?

The way I understand it, they both generate a similar amount of hate and sunder (no talents) is about 25% cheaper than HS (no talents). However I have seen an EJ post reccommending that wars use HS whenever they can and now I am completely confused.

 

XI-

Because in an unlimited rage situation, eg most boss fights you can simultaneously spam HS along with your other aggro generating abilities.

In any case if you're not getting enough rage just get out your 2h and spam MS or something along with sunder. Her melee only crit/crushing blows for like 2k on my 2600 armor rogue, so you should be fine.

 

inveratulo

HS & Revenge

crappy troll knocked out the DSL now it takes 2 minutes to get to tits

 

Shin

It's like being Arms/Fury, and pulling aggro.

 

◊ Praetorian

Sunder Armor generates a larger amount of "bonus" hate than does HS, and they both cost 15 rage.

However, HS also adds 138 (157 after AQ20, woo) damage to your swing, which more than makes up the difference. An HS can also crit, further multiplying that extra hate (the damage-based hate, not the bonus hate). Now, this portion of HS is mitigated by armor, but just have another warrior sundering.

So, if you have 15 rage to burn and revenge and shield bash are cooling down, HS.

Optimal aggro tanking means that Revenge and Bash (and Slam if you are prot) are used every single time they are cooled down, and every one of your melee attacks is a heroic strike.

In the earlier days of BWL, ultrafast weapons were popular choices among many tanks (Alcor's Sunrazor, Eskhandar's Right Claw, even Julie's Dagger) simply because in high-rage boss fights that were also aggro sensitive (Vael and Firemaw being two key ones) they allowed the MT to pump out 50% more heroic strikes than using Quel or a similar weapon, and the added HS threat made up for the lower DPS of the weapon.

 

Shin

Man those were the days B)

 

XI-

Except I have 1/2 the physical mitigation and 2/3's of the hp pool to fill up. But hey just keep piling the heals on me its fine.

Reminds me of after our second nef kill. I'd only been playing on SH for like 2 months, had like 3 purples and the rest blues. Anyway I decided I wanted to tank lucifron. So the tank moves him into position and I blow my cooldowns and get aggro at 98%, at which point he promptly hits me to 400 life. Managed to blow my evasion to throw my dodge over 100% until the heals caught up and away we went.

Anyone else have this on broodlord. Occasionally even one of our full wrath tanks will go down, but god forbid a warlock or mages gets aggroed, they're staying up FOREVER, people just spamming on them until, BOOM HEADSHOT, they catch that nice crit MS.

 

dreadnor

Thanks for the reply but I believe it to be incorrect in the following ways:

HS does not cost the same as sunder armour, in fact, it generally costs over 33% more than sunder armour.

Although they both require 15 rage, with HS you lose the rage you would otherwise gain from your next swing. That rage is anywhere between 4 and 7 on a normal hit and even more on a crit or sword spec proc.

You also state that HS can crit further generating hate, however this is also true for your next swing that you lose by using HS. And despite what blizzard says I have never seen a Sword spec crit off of HS whereas this is possible for the next swing without HS.

 

◊ Praetorian

Hey, that segues into an interesting design-related point I'd been pondering recently:

Healer mana is almost a nonfactor at the high end. I can't remember the last time we wiped because our healers all ran out of mana. Every wipe in BWL was due to either aggro loss, or a huge spike killing the tank.

I think the endgame raiding numbers are all screwed up when it comes to tank mitigation, hp pool, and healer mana regeneration and healing capacity. As much maligning as it received, I miss Golemagg in March 2004. The fight was conceptually easy, but having blue-geared healers keeping up three blue-geared tanks while your blue-geared DPS, ranged only, slowly whittled down Golemagg's HP, was a different sort of challenge from anything we've seen since. Efficient healing rotations and mana management strategies were born out of that fight and others like it, back in the early MC days. MC bosses didn't have shit for spike damage, unless you were tanking Geddon with no FR and minimal defense, so raid mana was everything.

Today, as a shaman, I have 7000 mana unbuffed and 50 mana/5sec, and I have the worst longevity in my raid. We have priests and druids with meditation talents and 15% in-combat regen from set bonuses. We have greater dreamless sleep, night dragon, mageblood, nightfin, etc.

I'm not sure Blizzard really CAN give a boss enough sustained DPS to run a raid out of mana without killing the tank in the process, the way the numbers work out now. I've wondered what it'd be like to have a boss that hit moderately hard but very, very quickly, or otherwise put some nasty sustained DoT (say 750/sec unresistable) on the MT but didn't melee very hard beyond that.

BWL's burst emphasis was a twist, and it forced all of us to become more attentive healers, which is a good thing. But it's time for something else -- I really hope "challenge" doesn't come to equate with "might two-shot your tank if you blink" going forward, but I wonder whether Blizzard hasn't painted themselves into a corner with their itemization.

 

◊ Praetorian

True, I do tend to forget about the lost rage from on-next-attack abilities. I guess it depends on the situation:

If you are rage-starved, HS spam is not going to be fruitful or even possible. Ultimately, your job as a tank when trying to maximize aggro is to make sure you don't waste rage. If you are ever sitting there with a full rage bar (and it's not Vaelastrasz), then you fucked up. HS spam will pretty much always burn through rage faster than it's coming in, but it's also the most time-efficient form of rage generation along with Revenge/Shield Bash/Shield Slam. If you start running low on rage, then stop HSing and switch to Sunder, but if you ever have more than half a bar, resume the HS spam. Rage does you no good sitting there unspent.

 

dreadnor

Cool, thanks a bunch for the info. Just wondering do your warriors use FR gear or full defense gear for Onyxia? I'm worried about losing too much rage from resisting Fire breaths but I dont want to overwork my lazy healers.

 

XI-

Same stuff they usually run around with BUT our healers couldn't care less. We'll pretty much heal any idiots any time. Things like this are just a relationship between you, your dps, and your healers. Personally we're at the abuse stage.

Here's our typical onyxia.

"MT, you ready to go?"
"no"
Sprint, hit dragon, evasion, 99% BF+AR.
SS/evis spam through stage 2.
As soon as she hits the ground 5 point evis, with fear ward from a mischevious dwarf. etc.

Gurg. On your topic I've been contemplating that for a while. I think this is part of their desire to make raiding easier and back away from min-maxing. This was a big reason we forced EVERY shaman to have tide, because we needed it. We were blowing innervates, and stacking tide groups, everything we possibly could to outlast that stupid giant.

 

Ghostz

I like teh 5pt evisc on landing idea. :ph34r:

On Gurg's topic though, I was discussing this with some guildies a few nights ago after an extremely long lethon fight. Most guilds that have been farming BWL for a while now have healers that can keep healing indefinitely with even a small regen rotation set up. So we couldn't see much possible progression in terms of healing strategies. One of the most probable ideas that came up is forcing the healers to be aware of their surroundings. Ie, not to just sit in one spot and keep an eye out for the x people they were assigned to or watch emergency meters. Thigns like the sleep cloud; possibly having to avoid land mines or mid battle traps of some sorts, things like reign of fire that have to be avoided, slow moving heat seeking bombs (think mario), running in and out of range (think firemaw without LoS coverage). Basically, things that have to keep them aware of whats going on around them, not just the big hunk of health bars they have open on their screen.

I've personally always been looking for a dynamic environment, which seemed promising after seeing Onyxia phase 3. However, Blizzard hasn't really added anything of the sort since then. Maybe C'Thun? They did say that he's like nothing anyone has seen in an MMO before.

 

malthrin

Remember when the 5-second rule kicked in at the start of spell-cast instead of at the conclusion? I don't think I've seen a raid run out of mana since then. Combined with heal-canceling mods, there is a ton of regen going on that wasn't available back in the beginning of MC.

I'm fairly curious how few healers you could get away with having these days. Most groups still seem to tend towards 14-16, giving you a safety blanket in case half of them go play in the Shadowflame, but even in cases where something's gone wrong mana's still not a huge concern. How low could we go? Under 10 healers in a 40man raid?

I suppose it's a golden opportunity to try to switch to a DPS main :p

Travian - Resto Druid
Malthrin - Priest

 

XI-

Depends, keep in mind your healers are also your buffers. So even if it may only take 8 people to heal, its going to suck waiting around if they have to drink all the time, and twice as long if they have to buff.

 

• moz

I've settled on a mix of gear that is around 250ish FR in order to get enough rage to be confortable with threat. This depends on who is in the raid, but as a general rule I never max out FR and swap a couple of DPS pieces over those with heavy mitigation. I pop in an off-hand when I'm tanking her to build up rage if I am low, it's pretty situational really -- just as long as you have a comfortable amount of rage to work with based on how dps-heavy (or suicidal) your raid group is. It's really an adaptive thing, I've done it so many times that I've kind of settled on gear and what to do in order to keep her reasonably under control -- one general rule is that if you have all the best FR pieces as well as a mix of great mitigation equipment you probably don't want to max out against Onyxia, all things being equal. Of course, this is based on the fact that we are usually pretty heavy DPS-wise -- YMMV.

 

diospadre

The last few times I've tanked her I've done so in full DPS gear and 2h.

 

◊ Lord BEEF

The boss of AQ20 should be to your liking.

Without giving too much away, the entire raid is constantly in motion and there are roving tornados which you have to move out of the way of or you will die.

It's refreshing to actually use travel form as an effective tool against a raid boss.

Check out my friend's bitchin' Lord of the Rings Art

 

Chupa

Dammit don't give away our secrets!!!
:angry: :angry: :angry:

 

newladin

Where's beef?

all your base, are belong to us!

 

hamlet

Do you see them coming out with a mana burning boss that has an ability like geddon's mana burn but perhaps non dispellable? I haven't looked into the AQ bosses but I dont see why they couldnt add something like this to mitigate the mana regen/pools of the healers.

http://i16.photobucket.com/albums/b3...mai_hime37.gif

 

Ghostz

Thats actually a pretty good idea, I think that something along the line of INT reduced by 50% for the duration of the fight would be a better endurance provoking debuff. Having a negative or zero regen will ultimately set a timer on the fight (which is not a bad thing, just different) but it will be inevitable that priests run out of mana if the boss isn't dead before X minutes.

There are definitely abilities they can add to bosses to work around this kinda stuff but it seems like it's out of the way and feel like touchups to flawed progression in itemization.

Nevertheless, I'm sure I'll enjoy AQ20 and 40. I loved BWL at its early stages even through all the bugs, and ZG was awesome before it was full farm status. I haven't lost my faith in Blizz. :D

 

◊ Praetorian

Idiots, if you want to chat with someone in your own guild use your own guild forums. (Bunch of stuff deleted.)

Anyway, the mana drain thing is certainly a valid concept for a boss/mob, and a whole family of mobs in AQ operate that way on a fairly simplistic level. The problem is that that isn't really a mechanic you can make widespread use of. It's a new concept, but very limited in practice: A race to burn down the mob before it drains your healers' mana (and/or uses that mana to do something that will kill you).

I'd still like to see a boss that does very flat, non-spiky damage, in massive volume, such that unless your healers are all braindead, the tank won't die while they have mana, but such that so much healing is required that mana inevitably becomes an issue.

 

hamlet

I am sure you will see some of that but I dont think blizzard will ever fully move away from the spiky damage. Spiky damage lends more to a difficult fight no matter how well geared you are. If it is flat and sustained once you have beaten him he should always be beaten. I just think blizzard really likes the random unpredictable fight(vael's BA, broodlords MS, Chrom's abilities, nef's shouts and the drakonids in phase 1), perhaps they will move away from some of that in AQ but I doubt it.

http://i16.photobucket.com/albums/b3...mai_hime37.gif

 

XI-

The problem with this gurg is how many healers do you balance it around, 10, 14, 18. How do you balance wisdom, tide, innervate, 3 piece trans, meditation, etc.