How well can a druid specced feral in feral gear actually heal? How well can a druid specced feral in resto gear dps? How well can a resto druid in resto gear dps? I'm assuming the answer to all those questions is not very well. It's an interesting concept, to have to heal for half the fight and be able to dps the other, but is that really feasible? As the fight progresses, especially as Gruul stacks up 10+ debuffs healers are very stressed between healing the main tank and healing up cave in damage. For the latter part of the fight all of your healers need to be in healing gear and healing for their full potential.
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.
The difference between the PvP sets and Tier 4 in terms of damage really is quite significant.
From what I've read of this thread, it seems like the more damage you have, the less hp you need (up to a certain point, which I doubt is 12k for priests) for Gruul.
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.
The difference between the PvP sets and Tier 4 in terms of damage really is quite significant.
From what I've read of this thread, it seems like the more damage you have, the less hp you need (up to a certain point, which I doubt is 12k for priests) for Gruul.
Damage and HP aren't really that related. There's a minimum HP threshold that you need to meet (probably enough to survive at least a 10k hit) assuming there is no way to predict and avoid Shatter and from there on you have to maximize your damage while keeping that. Having more damage doesn't really reduce the need for HP.
I was thinking the more damage you have, the quicker you can kill Gruul and the faster you can avoid the time where less healers can watch you and need to heal the tanks, rather than having enough hp to survive a certain number of shatters without less and less heals. It's moot, but what I mean, just like you said, is there's an HP threshold, and once met you should gear for damage rather than more hp.
How well can a druid specced feral in feral gear actually heal? How well can a druid specced feral in resto gear dps? How well can a resto druid in resto gear dps? I'm assuming the answer to all those questions is not very well. It's an interesting concept, to have to heal for half the fight and be able to dps the other, but is that really feasible? As the fight progresses, especially as Gruul stacks up 10+ debuffs healers are very stressed between healing the main tank and healing up cave in damage. For the latter part of the fight all of your healers need to be in healing gear and healing for their full potential.
A Resto druid in healing gear wont do much dps. But it wont be 0 dps either. If 3 healers can do the job, why have 4? Why not utilize the 'wasted' healer and have him dps for a bit? The flexibility a druid (and other off spec healers) can give for fights like this can be amazing. In AQ40 we had a shadow priest in full healing gear dps Fankriss for the first few minutes until the cubbies started getting full and needed healing help. Did he do a lot of damage? Hell no. But he didnt do 0 damage either.
Alchemy specializations offer nowhere near a 50% yield increase.
I wouldn't consider a stacked raid with everyone near 10k hp and pairing up during a shatter to help, at all. Now movement after a shatter doesn't just force the player to ask himself "Where do I need to go?", it also forces him to ask himself "Who do I pair up with?" I would venture to say making that decision in such a small time frame is much more difficult than simply trying to spread out. While performing successfully may cause the raid to be more spread out when shatter hits, a single misplaced person is going to kill two people, and himself die, almost guaranteed.
And keep dreaming about that predictable non-random toss...
The biggest issue I see with the encounter is, first and foremost, the randomness. There is nothing wrong with random elements in an encounter, sure the toss is random but that may not mean players' skill can not pull through for them on a bad toss. I enjoy encounters where I get to do a bit more than just stand there and watch health bars. Getting Gruul to 75% before the first toss and having 2 perfect tosses is a ridiculous easy encounter compared to 92% before the first toss and having a couple, I will assume, unavoidable deaths on the first two shatters. Maybe the bad luck can be overcome in this encounter and most guilds simply aren't to that point yet, but the fact certainly remains that the encounter is much easier with a bit of luck than it probably should be.
Another issue as I see it is the high toss. Players tossed so high that they're at 3 stacks of the debuff before they even land seems like a bit too much. I would also assume the ability for the shatter to crit is also unintended, yet in true Blizzard-esque they are more than willing to fix unintended mechanics that make the fight too easy, but not the ones that might make it too hard.
I did a search on Hurtful Strike and got nothing back... can anyone direct me to where I could find information on the mechanics of Hurtful Strike? I always seem to die from this, even if I don't touch Gruul. We have other tanks in on Gruul to take the hits for the tank, but I still take an occasional 1shot from it. (I'm a rogue, btw)
"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge." - Bertrand Russell
I did a search on Hurtful Strike and got nothing back... can anyone direct me to where I could find information on the mechanics of Hurtful Strike? I always seem to die from this, even if I don't touch Gruul. We have other tanks in on Gruul to take the hits for the tank, but I still take an occasional 1shot from it. (I'm a rogue, btw)
Hateful strike just hits the second melee in aggro list, nothing more. Get an offtank.
And yeah, no crits on shatter (this is so stupid, I can only hope it is unintended) and 5 real seconds when kb is over, maybe even without snare, would make the fight much less random and more enjoyable.
I did a search on Hurtful Strike and got nothing back... can anyone direct me to where I could find information on the mechanics of Hurtful Strike? I always seem to die from this, even if I don't touch Gruul. We have other tanks in on Gruul to take the hits for the tank, but I still take an occasional 1shot from it. (I'm a rogue, btw)
Think hateful strike, very similar mechanics.
Originally Posted by Dawme
Hateful strike just hits the second melee in aggro list, nothing more. Get an offtank.
And yeah, no crits on shatter (this is so stupid, I can only hope it is unintended) and 5 real seconds when kb is over, maybe even without snare, would make the fight much less random and more enjoyable.
Hateful Strike is HP based, correct? Is it who has the most HP, or is it who has second aggro?
"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge." - Bertrand Russell
Hateful is aggro/hp based, and has an added threat component when it lands. Hurtful is just aggro based. It will hit whoever is #2 on aggro in melee range.
edit: Just killed him without a full flasked raid, so he's doable. :-P
From the perspective of a guild that had not killed Gruul pre hotfix, the change wasn't as drastic as I anticipated. We still had a few people die really early, but beyond that it's nearly the same fight. Yeah there were a few attempts we had to restart due to one guy getting flung right into the middle of the MT and OT and killing one or the other but overall it didn't set us back more than maybe a day. I am not looking forward to repeating this week after week, however.
Hateful is aggro/hp based, and has an added threat component when it lands. Hurtful is just aggro based. It will hit whoever is #2 on aggro in melee range.
edit: Just killed him without a full flasked raid, so he's doable. :-P
Would you mind saying your basic class setup for the raid? and how many of the healers were actually full healing spec'd too if you would be so kind ;o
Hateful is aggro/hp based, and has an added threat component when it lands. Hurtful is just aggro based. It will hit whoever is #2 on aggro in melee range.
edit: Just killed him without a full flasked raid, so he's doable. :-P
Would you mind saying your basic class setup for the raid? and how many of the healers were actually full healing spec'd too if you would be so kind ;o
2 Warriors, 2 Rogues, 3 Paladins, 4 Hunters, 4 Warlocks, 2 Mages, 2 Druids, 5 Priests, 1 Shaman who just hit 70 the day before wearing greens lol
2 Priests were shadow, 1 Druid was Feral - every other healer was full healing spec.
We used fairly typical pots and had DPS flasks on about half our casters and melee/ranged. No titans on anyone but the MT/hurtful sponge (who was the feral druid).
Is the shatter deaths really that unavoidable? We were there for an evening and i was never close to dying. I suppose that the real problem lies in that you cannot afford to lose anyone due to the dps requirements fot the fight. Hopefully when you up the overall raid damage with epics from heroics and karazhan you will actually afford to lose a few people to really unlucky situations.
For the love of god don't make Gruul even more consumable heavy. I thanked the benevolent Lord when I had to farm one less pot.
I havent done gruul with invulrability potions, but without it seems so much to chance; im guessing they just even out the encounter and are used for those "oh shi-" moments where you get launched to the same spots as 3 others.
They're not that difficult to farm anyway to be honest.
Gruul has been reverted to the way he was before. Hooray!
Pretty certain that was due to the hotfix change being left out of the 2.07 patch. I'd bank on invuln effects not working again soon.
It doesn't make sense to me that the Gruul hotfix would be somehow left out in the 2.07 patch, the patch shouldn't have touched anything regarding the hotfix and it should have remained in place. On the other hand GM's seem to be quite unsure what is intended, one GM was entirely sure that the change was unintended to begin with, while another said the former was an idiot and the hotfix was definitely intended.
Gruul has been reverted to the way he was before. Hooray!
Pretty certain that was due to the hotfix change being left out of the 2.07 patch. I'd bank on invuln effects not working again soon.
It doesn't make sense to me that the Gruul hotfix would be somehow left out in the 2.07 patch, the patch shouldn't have touched anything retarding the hotfix and it should have remained in place. On the other hand GM's seem to be quite unsure what is intended, one GM was entirely sure that the change was unintended to begin with, while another said the former was an idiot and the hotfix was definitely intended.
Never expect anything substantive from a GM regarding cutting-edge raid content. You have at best a 1 in 10 chance of finding someone who actually really knows what you're talking about. They field a million petitions about Socrethar or Goc or the Tomb of Lights event being bugged and can help you with that, but unless they play a raiding character in their personal time, most raid-specific queries are just going to be outside of their personal experience.
for anyone who's interested in a parse of the combatlog data from a gruul kill - here's the combat stats from our kill last night. don't think this reveals anything that isn't already known, except maybe that you can win even if three idiots die to the first shatter :)
edit: this data is from the combat logs of a mage (Ellysa) who died at something like 5% and a rogue (Tyrranna) who died at 10%, so it's not exactly accurate, but it's fairly representative at least.
Impressively evenly-spread DPS at the top of the charts. I think for our first kill the highest damage had like 550k and the next 2 or 3 had around 500k and then it went low pretty quickly. Which classes dominate your damage charts are completely different from ours as well, suggesting that dps is much less related to class than I have been griping about :p
It might be worth mentioning that a third GM stated the change was intended, however Limited Invulnerability Potions were still not working as intended on the encounter.
I did notice that once a player becomes immune on the encounter, they prematurely turn to stone and are prevented from further movement. We also had a few players indicate that they still took some damage while immune. I would guess then that Gruul is currently working as intended, that players are stunned as soon as they become immune (I would assume only during Ground Stomp), and that Limited Invulnerability Potions either only prevent a certain amount of damage, or only prevent damage from a certain number of targets. While I am fairly certain of the stun while immune, I'm basing the limited amounts of damage being prevented off of a very few small comments, so if someone had any additional information on this I would find it useful.
02/12/07, 12:39 PM
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