In my opinion, the problem is not really where you place your raid, we all agree that the room is large enough to place everybody with minimal damage from shatters. The real problem is how you place them since you don't know where you will land after the kb. You can't really move more than 10 yards after the kb with the snare.

Onyxia's hit box is so large that if she isn't quite centred, I can have minimum range issues without being anywhere "near" her. Murmur in SL also seems to let me hit him from a bit further away than I'd expect. I wouldn't be surprised if a hunter on the circumference of the 100 yard circle could hit Gruul. However that kill only shows one hunter, and he did little damage :S

I take it that standing with your back to the wall doesn't prevent the knockback moving you, but instead punts you forward like Murmur's?

Yah sorry I've been a healer for the entire game up to this point, so I'm still getting the mechanics down of the melee world.

Quick question: it was stated early on in the thread that he's got some sort of stacking self-buff that is integral to the encounter and essentially puts him on a timer. Since I haven't been there just yet (hell, nobody on our server has), would you mind filling me in on what the self-buff is, what it does, and how frequently it is applied?

+15% damage every 30 seconds

We did Gruul a few times, but exactly like Praetorian, we're not going to bother until we really have to drop the guy. I just don't find the thought of grinding this out or putting our head to the wall on this guy as "fun" in any sense of the word.

My question was, how often was the shatter? We have combat logs somewhere, but not here at work obviously. I think what likely guilds do to win is limited invuln, pray for good luck, limited invuln, kill before the fourth. Just a wild guess. At least, I would certainly cater any current strategy as much as possible around limited invulns as they're relatively simple to gather, and basically nullify the entire shatter; probably cutting your need to survive down to 1. Perhaps thats all nihilum was waiting for on their kill, a lucky shatter. I get the feeling their DPS was probably adequate otherwise. But who knows! Pure speculation. We were able to generally improve our shatter survivability, but there are definitely times where you are going to take massive hits, even with the best initial positioning. It seems buggy to me - but w/e, thats sometimes part of the deal (sup invisible void zones: when those got fixed 4h became trivial, beforehand? not so much).

Its a gear check, plain and simple, and we all know that consumables compensate nicely there. It just isn't a very fun gearcheck (ogre council was fun for instance).

Shatter is for the most part very manageable tbh and much more of a l2p issue with most people than any random luck. Invuln pots are definitely nice for the oh shit moments, but it's stupid how a lvl 40 pot makes several of the few 70 raid encounters much easier than they should be and I hope it'll be changed. After lots of attempts, the last 3~ before the final kill were all pretty much perfect outside of not being potted out so I believe its definitely one-shottable consistently and the people dying and yelling about how impossible it is to not die just need a little more practice than the average person. ;p
We had lots of theories on the timer on shatter but from all the attempts I'm gona say I don't believe it's just something he uses in x-y time range.

Also, when Gruul was in the center, casting while hugging any wall as a lock (36yd range) was impossible.

I guess that's one way of not being stuck with "gimp with the imp".

Silly question, but is the shatter outrangeable a la Ouro's sandblast?

No, it doesn't work that way. Discussions like this really should be limited to people who have actually tried the fight.

But I want to discuss how to deal with Gruul's Hateful Strike!

(cookie if you figure out what I am talking about)

But isn't wild speculation tons of fun?

Our first information gathering attempts last week showed us most of what's being said here - Shatter is proximity based damage and does in fact blow up pets (which was very surprising, given how so many similar mechanics in Naxx were pet-friendly). My first thought was that it was just based on how many people you're near, which resulted in the "find a shatter buddy" test - with hilarious results.

Our second attempt - with only a leftover flask on our MT from High King, and little to no knowledge of the fight's mechanics - had him at 70%, so I wasn't at all surprised to see him go down last week. Like others, I'm not feeling terribly driven to get him down, except for the fact that he drops the set leg token, which at 1 drop per instance stands to take over SIX MONTHS to gear up only the core group in one set, assuming perfect distribution - so I want to get started on that horrific timeline as soon as possible.

Of all the people to make this post.

*mutters something about fire and Morbent fel*

(sorry)

Unless I've been supremely unlucky on my Knockback lands, I don't understand how it's feasible to spread out as much as is ideal after the knockback. I always seem to land relatively close to him. Not Aran close, but within the carpet borders for sure.

Note that any kill until the next patch should be taken with a grain of salt. On our first attempt, he was bugged and never used shatter. That first attempt got us to 50%, knowing pretty much zilch about the fight, before he repeatedly 9k'd our tank to death. If that was a potted try with full knowledge, he would probably have died, thanks to a bug. We were unable to reproduce it in the next 3 tries before we called it a night.

Once again, it annoys me that melees take such a performance hit relative to casters in another TBC fight. Rain of Fire (sorry, Rocks) is not something you want in the middle of 5 melees, and time spent running back to the boss after shatter hurts their dps.

Exactly.
From the few early tries we had, I could not draw a conclusion how the KB before shatter works. (Could have been unlucky though or too tired).
I expect that figuring that mechanism out is one key to the encounter ... as repositioning of a completely random postioned raid in the 5 sec timeframe is out of the question (due to the slow stacking).

There really is no gimmick or trick at all, just a l2p issue, communication and clever use of immune pots/buffs for the very rare inescapable situations.

It's not. The graphs and such people have made are pointless, unless of course you had a 5 second grace period without any movement impairing effects and were punted nice and thoroughly.

It really didn't seem like 20 yards to me when I did the fight. People seemed to be a hell of a lot closer than 20 yards on all sides for me personally, while we all took 0 damage. The shatter didn't really seem to be that big of a problem on our attempts, we basically just said to spread out as much as possible before hand, and don't run into people when you get knocked, and we generally had no more than 2-3 deaths per shatter, often times no deaths at all. The shatter didnt seem to be as big of a problem as the insane amount of dps needed to drop this guy before he gibs your tank. On that note, what will happen first due to the stacking enrage buff, will he kill your MT first or one shot your hateful strike tank? We never actually got too far into the fight to find out because our MT would always die but this was mainly due to healers not paying attention and not healing, not actually due to the boss doing a large amount of damage from the stacking buff.

Had to say it before the rest of the community!

But on the topic of Shatter, you cant make a graph for it, you cant say "well, this is what you are gonna or need to do." Simply run in there, and fight and get a feel for it. The ground slam throws you in a random direction, so you and your raid have to be aware of whats around them and move. Like mko said, its all l2p. Practice enough, and then its just like Loatheb. You wont always be perfect, you will hit someone. But you only hit 1 person for 2k-3k max, and everyone should be entering the fight with around 9k+ life (raid buffed).

Oh, and fuck windfury. Killed me at 90% :/

Yeah, it's a great little ability.

Well, if it's just an inevitability that SOME people are going to take SOME damage from shatter eventually, wouldn't this require a change in thought on how to heal, along with at least initial positioning and optimal end placement for Shatters?

I mean, previous to this encounter, most encounters had raid damage as either incidental and idiot checks that the people being hurt could take care of on thier own through pots and bandages, wholly aviodable, or of relatively little consequence (the only fight I can think of being the exception is Huhuran, and even that was far more about resists).

Or has this already been addressed?

Well, the earlier diagrams and such were really just pure theorycraft, wondering whether it was possible to have a 0-damage-taken-raidwide shatter. It is. Obviously it's not likely, and in practice who cares if a dozen people each take 1000 damage or something. That's nothing. It's all about the execution, but I was just wondering what the theoretical limits were.

And re: javelin's post: Shatter should only be incidental damage. Gruul is very much a DPS fight, and it's not an encounter that's going to demand a lot of healing regardless, so a few HoTs tossed on people who took more damage than they should have will repair most of it.