Tank Hard!

Sorry for my unannounced hiatus, but the last few weeks have been a bit hectic and I’ve been in and out of town quite a bit due to good ole ‘real life’ involvement!  At any rate, I’m back and time to get rolling on the blog again!

First a little post about me and my guild’s current progression.  It’s been a while since I made a progression post, but back in January I posted we had downed Hydross. Since that post, we have moved on to off Morogrimm, Karathress and Leotheras, and have had several attempts on Vashj, but haven’t managed to down her yet.  We’ve gotten her into phase 3 a couple of times, but haven’t closed the deal yet.

It seems the hardest part for us in the Vashj encounter are the random elements.  The spawning of the Elite Naga and the Striders have been problematic.  We can’t seem to be consistent in picking them up before they manage to walk over and one shot a healer.

We are working on remedying this though by having more than one designated strider kiter and having a paladin healer near a tank drawing heal aggro for the Naga to pull them into a predefined location.

Our goal is to down Vashj before 2.4 goes live, but I don’t know if that will happen or not.  2.4 is right around the corner, possibly as soon as this Tuesday so who knows if we will manage it or not.

If your guild has no trouble with Vashj, care to give any pointers on how you manage the spawns to make sure they don’t go whack someone?

I quit my job two weeks ago. Tomorrow is my last day. I am moving back home and then joining the Air Force (or maybe the Army, I haven’t decided yet). I will probably be playing a lot less once I get home (or maybe a lot more if I am particularly bored) and then not at all while I do basic training and then officer candidate school. My tanking career is definately on hold for a while and may be over for good. I was unceremoniously dumped down to Legacy status in my guild which basically means that I got put into the raiding retirement home.

I was starting to get pretty bored with raiding anyway so its not a bad thing. I never really raided for the loot (although it is pretty nice), I did it to see new content and be challenged. But we have been farming T6 content since Decemeber and it has become pretty monotonous. I can’t imagine what it might be like for the really elite guilds who have been doing the exact same content since last summer.

I found lately that I really hate everything in WoW except arena and raiding. Doing daily quests is physically painful for me. I go crazy flying around looking for mining nodes. I am terribly overgeared to do heroics or regular 5 mans and I am accustomed to a high level of play from those around me so pugs make blood shoot out of my eyeballs. Alliance in my battlegroup just turns off their brain when they enter a battleground and sometimes it seems like they are actively working against their team. I have run Karazhan approximately 122394512341 times. I never liked ZA. I kinda like leveling characters so I might get a few of my mid level characters up to 70 over the next few weeks.

I just noticed that there is no as to who is making which posts. Maybe it is because I am logged in as an admin or something. Regardless, this is Rochelle

Well, it’s about a week late in posting, but another personal note on another first kill for our guild.  Last Sunday, we dropped Hydross on our 2nd night of attempts.

In all honesty, we would have downed this guy on our first night had I not missed one important piece of information.  During the transition from one phase to the next, I was under the assumption that it was a total and complete aggro wipe.  This is not the case, it is only a partial aggro wipe.  I am not sure of the exact mechanics, but know that it is not a 100% complete aggro wipe.

I was tanking Nature, so our Frost tank would initiate aggro.  Since I was going to pick it up after the transition, I mainly focused on conserving rage and making sure debuffs were applied.  I did not concern myself with building threat (again, I assumed complete aggro wipe).  When we transitioned to poison, every time, Hydross would be line it for someone, often going back across into Frost, spawning more adds, and ensuring a wipe.

I kept chalking it up to too many dots, or overaggro.  I did not realize that it was my fault in not having built up any threat before the transition.

After the 6th attempt of the night, I finally realized that the transition was not a complete wipe.  On the next attempt, I concentrated more on building threat with the frost tank during the first phase.  Upon the transition, Hydross stuck to me like glue, as expected.  That was the first strong attempt we had and we got him down to 40%.  Unfortunately it was late and we had to call it a night.

The next time we saw him, we were better prepared and we took Hydross down with zero deaths.  Ahhh, I love it when a plan comes together!

We used a hybrid resist prot paly to tank 2 - 3 of the adds and AoE’d them down during each transition.  An additional frost resist tank grabbed 2 frost adds during frost phase and 1 nature add during the poison phase.  This worked very well for us.

Some tips for our readers!

Tip #1 :  I learned this one the hard way.  The transition from phase to phase is NOT a complete aggro wipe, so make sure you are always building threat.

Tip #2 : Some of the strangest things can aggro him after the transition, ie, for us it was a Searing Totem.  Tell your shammies to keep ‘em in their pants because it could cause a silly wipe.

Tip #3 : Use a weapon swap macro to swap to dual wield when you are not the focus tank in order to generate more rage.  Just make sure you swap back to your sword and board before you take over tanking!

Tip #4 : Get your guild to start working on resist gear early!  This stuff is pricey and takes a while to accumulate.

Tip #5 : You can back Hydross across the transition line, but if you find you need to move quickly, strafe run instead of turning your back to Hydross.  Strafe running is very important as you can move full speed yet still block and parry.

Do you have any tips to add to taking down Hydross?

Illidan is cool and so is Reliquary of Souls. Kael’thas is maybe the most epic feeling fight in the game. But in my opinion, the most intense and most fun fight for a tank has got to be Gurtogg Bloodboil.

The boss has an ability called Bloodboil that will put a DoT on the 5 people farthest away from him which does 600 damage every second for 24 seconds and he does it every 10 seconds and it will stack if the same people get it every time. So for all of phase 1 there are 3 groups of 5 people rotating so that there are new people getting Bloodboil every time and nobody gets more than 1 stack.

And in the front of the raid the boss tries to apply a debuff to the tank every 2 seconds. The debuff reduces your armor by 500 and has a DoT component that does 300-350 damage. That doesn’t sound too bad but of course it stacks up to 99 times. So the idea is to make sure it doesn’t stack too many times on the tank. Since there is no way to remove it and it lasts for 60 seconds, the only way to get rid of it is to let it wear off and that means you need two tanks trading aggro. But of course the boss is immune to taunt so you have to do it the old fashioned way. He also Ejects the current tank which is a knockback and a small threat reduction and he can disorient the tank for 8 seconds and go attack #2 on threat.

Every 60 seconds it goes to phase 2 when he casts an ability called Fel Rage on himself and on one person in the raid who isn’t a warrior and a debuff called Insignificance on everyone else. The Insignificance debuff makes it so that nothing you do will generate any threat.

Fel Rage increases your armor by 15,000 and your health by 30,000 and it increase healing done by 100% and damage done by 300%. Gurtogg will only attack the person with Fel Rage until that person is dead or the debuff wears off after 30 seconds. Remember Gurtogg casts that buff on himself too (except he doesn’t get the armor bonus) so he is going to be beating the crap out of the Fel Rage target. So healers need to heal that person like maniacs while healing the people with the Bloodboil debuff and healing the tanks with the Acidic Wound debuff.

After Fel Rage it goes back to phase 1 for another 60 seconds of aggro trading fun.

It is obviously a dps race because if you can’t kill him fast enough the healers will run out of mana because of the massive raid wide damage. There is an enrage timer at 7 minutes but I can’t imagine how you would run into it before the healers were all OOM.

As a tank you have to generate enough threat that the dps can kill him before the healers are OOM but you can’t generate too much threat or the other tank won’t be able to keep up. And you have to stack the crap out of avoidance stats so that you don’t take too many stacks of the Acidic Wound debuff. I think that when we were first learning the fight I had a ludicrous amount of avoidance - 36% dodge, 22% parry and 7.5% miss on top of the base 4.4% chance to be missed. Of course that kind of avoidance doesn’t help much with threat generation.

The key to this fight is finding a balance in everything. Finding a balance in the gear to keep you alive and generate threat, balance between enough threat to get the kill and not outpace the other tank, a balance between bringing enough healers and enough dps, a balance between squishies to stand in the back but who can easily die to Fel Rage or melee who can’t soak a bloodboil but tear the boss apart during Fel Rage. There are two different fights going on in the front and in the back and then it all crashes together in phase 2. There is just so much going on and I love it. I look forward to this fight every week.

As one of our hunters aptly put it, phase 1 of the A’lar fight is for the prima-donna tanks who want all the spotlight.  Trying to be all fancy up on their pedestal and all.  At any rate, just a quick personal note that on our first real night of attempts on A’lar, my guild, Calzowned, dropped the Phoenix on our 8th attempt.  It all really comes down to proper execution of avoiding the Flame Patches as well as getting away from A’lar when the meteor hits.

Here’s a few tanking tips for A’lar just to keep this post relevant.

Tip #1 :  When A’lar enters Phase 2, he will spawn right in the middle of the room, but be sure you’re not right on top of the center.  Anytime A’lar spawns, either the first time for Phase 2, or anytime after a meteor, stand back a bit as A’lar will do a huge knock back when he spawns.

Tip #2 : Typical Intervene does not appear to work on A’lar.  Normally you can Intervene on a mob who is targeting someone else and you will Intervene to that person.  It doesn’t appear to work that way on A’lar so you cannot rely on Intervene to get into position.  Feel free to use Intercept however and jump back to Defensive after you have gotten into range.

Tip #3 : If your Taunt is resisted when the opposing tank gets Molten Armor, don’t forget that you can switch to Battle Stance and use Mocking Blow to pull A’lar onto you.

Tip #4 : During Phase 1, save Berserker Rage for when you have to drop down during Flame Quill, switch to Berserker Stance and then use Berserker Rage so you make sure you have plenty of rage to Intercept up to A’lar immediately after the Flame Quill.