Having a lot of stamina on a boss that does high damage aoes is fairly logical and not something the guilds at the top are going to 'miss' as a means to completing an encounter. Whilst i agree with other posters' thoughts that the removal of the necessity of items like Limited Invulnerability Potions in order to complete a given boss is a good thing, clearly the tuning is slightly out of key here, but not to the extent of the C'thun cockblock many of us knew and loved. I'm yet to read about D+T or Nihilium now finding Gruul 'impossible' to kill, so I doubt it is a case of a skill block. More likely, as mentioned above, it's a question of gear.

Slightly out of topic, but why care about gruul at this point anyway? If its not the last step before vashj that is. It sounds to me like a boss you get your key and never come back again. Gruul, and even magtheridon too; complete trial of naaru and dont come back to mag again, go for kael instead. It's not like the old times where the only options were molten core & onyxia.

Killed today (11-02-2007 at 20.00 CET).

Still easy ;)

Day-Month-Year? Whats up with that?

You have two posts on this board and this second one is what amounts to a brag. Put your money where your mouth is and tell us how.

Sorry, wasnt my intension to offend anyone..

We went at him today and killed him on our second try.

The absence of invul pots helped alot on DPS (shadowpriests/mages chugging mana pots now), and he went down without any real problems.

Day-Month-Year is the european standard :(

NmE
<Nihilum>

Your strategy is your own - but I am quite curious about your raid composition.

Are you kidding? Do you live under a rock?

And no, no one should feel any pressure to disclose any strategies or the like.

Apparently! I never thought there was a different standard for the date. Which is odd because I am well aware of Celsius temperature, meters, kilograms, etc.

Aren't you quite the scholar.

This thread has gone retarded.
Has anyone tried it with everyone over 10k to test the theory above? Doomwalker rings a bell on this theory.

I really like this idea. I've kinda missed the idea of true 'gateway' mobs for raid zones. With a lot of the previous zones there usually wasnt a particular encounter which acted like a gatekeeper to the rest of the zone. The feeling when a guild finally downed Rallos Zek in EQ and suddently had access to a load of new content was really rewarding.

I guess Magmadar and Vael were semi-gateway mobs, but different in that you had to keep beating them every week.

Not to beat a dead horse, but the problem is that while almost all raids are currently somewhat "undergeared" for the zone, this fight doesn't seem like one that you can really "outgear" in the remotely foreseeable future. If you had a raid of 25 people who all had every single drop from Karazhan, Maulgar, world bosses, and even Gruul himself, that they might want, you're still looking at a massive consumable sink with nothing that really justifies the expenditure and risk aside from one-time attunement. There's definitely still gearing up to do, but nothing that can come close to curbing the consumable use currently standard here.

Also, the other problem with Gruul is that, as Quigon said, something about the fight just doesn't seem "fun" by the standards of WoW's current raid game. Maulgar isn't "hard," but it's a complex and fun fight that introduces you to the 25-man raid game by emphasizing the individual responsibility that every member of the raid is going to have to shoulder in order to keep five nasty raid mobs controlled simultaneously with 25 people, using class-specific abilities to their fullest, etc. Karazhan is obviously full of innovative fights like that. Gruul just seems like he's missing something by comparison.

I don't know where the hell you guys see all thoses massive upgrades. I mean, 12k hp with a priest ? With karazhan gear ? Seriously..
Even if I could get all the loot I want from karazhan right now, I would gain maybe 5 or 10% healing power, something like 1k hp and that's all. Same deal for dps classes (because heh, everyone's talking about hp pool but gruul is a dps race before everything else, even with perfect shatters you still have to provide an insane raid dps to win).
I have no problems with the fact that I must gear up before doing magtheridon or whoever but the problem is... where to gear up exactly ? It's not like karazhan epics or even kazzak/doomwalker/maulgar epics are such massive upgrades from lvl 70 dungeons or even t3.

Are you more referring to the dps requirement for the fight than the shatter issues?

If so, it seems like it's the same issue that raid designers had with Loatheb. Do they tune it around no consumables and have it be a complete joke to any raid that decides to pot up? Or do they tune it around pots and hear complaints from people about having to pot? That big thread about consumables affecting raiding on these forums (few months back I believe) applies pretty well to this fight along with a lot of others that are to act like a gear check. I personally don't think people having to use elixirs and healing/mana pots is that big of a deal. With the new alchemy specs, they're pumped out at 1.5 times the rate on average and they're not what I'd consider a pain to farm. If a fully flasked raid was required, I'd change my opinion of the fight, but from what I've seen at this point, with a little more gear and regular pots it "should" be feasible (with some raid stacking, which is another issue we've seen in the past :P).

Edit: Dawme, getting a 10% healing/damage upgrade and 1k health raidwide is pretty significant if you ask me. There's a lot you can do to improve your gear through gems and enchants right now that I don't think a lot of people have got to yet.

Edit2: NmE, just out of curiosity, what consumables did you guys use aside from standard elixirs? Any flasks on anyone other than the MTs?

Well, the kills I've seen and heard of have definitely involved heavy flasking by more than just tanks, which is part of the concern, yeah. If someone out there is just popping 2-3 pots per person, no flasks except for the MT/OT, and going in and killing Gruul at this point, then I stand corrected. But my understanding of the more typical Gruul experience is a long string of brutal wipes with full flasks and consumables (raidwide use of the relevant elixirs is no big deal -- raidwide use of the relevant elixirs on a dozen consecutive wipes is just a bit more painful), followed by a close kill, and the expectation that they'll need the same consumables to do it the following week, albeit hopefully with fewer wipes due to the practice they've had.

Thus my personal inclination to leave him alone until we have 25+ people needing him for Serpentshrine attunement, since every passing day means a better-geared raid that will have an easier time of him when we reach that point. And by "easier time," I mean hopefully fewer needed consumables. Maybe it's a guild culture thing, but at least on our end, our final experience with Sapphiron/Kel at the end of the pre-TBC push really soured everyone on massive potting for encounters.

Something, or everything? I have never done the fight, but just reading about it, it seems to suffer from another problem -- luck. This is the same problem that afflicts a few Heroic mode fights -- a couple bad random generator rolls and people die with little to nothing they can do about it. Too many uncontrollables don't make a fight "fun" or "dynamic" -- they make it bad.

Well, I'm not prepared to play the "luck" card without knowing everything about the fight and putting more time into it than I have. That's a dangerous trap. Remember when people said that 4H was a bullshit fight because it was all based on luck? No, 4H was a great fight, slight raid-stacking issues aside. People just weren't good at it yet.

Similarly, I've seen people cite, for example, Nethermancer in Heroic Mechanar as an example of a purely luck-based fight. It isn't. You can control the "luck" factor that people criticize.

Gruul may well be one-shottable every time -- the fact that Nihilum say they two-shotted him after the recent changes is worth noting. That doesn't mean he doesn't have problems currently.

I really don't think shatter is what's causing all of the headaches, although from reading these threads it would probably seem like it is. There's some interesting mechanics behind it, and it doesn't seem to be fully random. I've never really seen most of the raid jammed in the same corner, or even in the same general area, it always seems to be at least a decent spread. The problem with this fight is the insane amount of dps required and as a result the consumables people have to farm/use.

Basically. That, plus the fact that the fight is really just tank-and-spank, with not much to get excited about on each attempt. It's the antithesis of the direction in which Blizzard's raid design has been going -- Gruul doesn't really offer individualized responsibilities or make use of varied class abilities. Two people are getting beat on by Gruul, a few people are healing those two people (more healing as time goes on), and everyone else is burning Gruul as hard as they can. The only difference between a hunter and a mage and a warlock on this fight is the name of the skills they're using to do damage, which is also the only difference between a fury warrior and a rogue. The only "interesting" roles are those of hybrids like feral druids and enhancement shamans who might DPS early and heal late.

This was probably their thought process behind the whole fight. With all the new offspec options for different classes and gear to support them, they probably wanted to cater to all of the "I picked a druid for versatility, not to be a full-time healer" people. I have to admit though, elemental shamen and feral druids look really good for this fight. As for enjoyability, although the fight is pretty simple, I don't mind it too much so far. He looks cool (big plus IMO :P) and the whole shatter phase is skill based to an extent.

I'm amused by how for a while it seemed PvE gear was going to lead to people being glass cannons, and arena gear would be the stamina heavy lower damage sets - and now people are acting like the main upgrade to our pve gear is getting pve gear with oodles of stamina on it, so we can pve better. Hopefully there's more to Gruul than getting higher average HP.

Blizzard on the other hand certainly seems to want to differentiate gear, I've yet to find a nice set of gear that has both great DPS and stamina, but that's a different thread.