Tank Hard!

Grobbulus has always been a bit of a pushover and has always been regarded as one of the easiest fights in the zone.  But there are a few important mechanics that the raid needs to be aware of.

 Every 15 seconds he drops a poison cloud where he is standing that deals a bunch of nature damage and persists for 75 seconds.  The tank needs to walk the boss around the room so that the melee can dps without standing in a poison cloud.  But the tank has to minimize movement or else the long duration of the poison cloud will mean that there is no safe place to stand in the room.

 Grobbulus has a frontal cone attack called Slime Spray that deals a lot of nature damage.  Anyone hit by the spray summon an add called Fallout Slime which does aoe damage and should be picked up by an offtank.  If all the ranged/healers are in the center of the room and the tank is walking the boss around the outside of the room and melee is all behind the boss, then the MT is the only person who will get hit with Slime Spray which means there shouldn’t be too many Fallout Slimes to worry about.  A few ranged can kill the Fallout Slimes relatively quickly when they spawn.

 The boss has another ability called Mutating Injection.  Every 20 seconds or so he will cast this on a random person in the raid and it adds a debuff (and possibly a DoT?) that lasts for 10 seconds.  At the end of those 10 seconds the person explodes and does a whole bunch of damage to everyone around them and they drop a poison cloud where they are standing.  The debuff is cleansable and that is where groups might run into trouble.  When the debuff is cleansed, the person doesn’t explode, but they will drop a poison cloud on the spot they are standing.  Likewise if a mage tried to Iceblock off the debuff or a pally tries to bubble it off.  There needs to be 1 person responsible for cleansing and nobody else should even think about cleansing.  When someone gets the debuff, they need to run to an area where there is already a poison cloud on the ground and only then will they get cleansed.  By doing that, the poison cloud that drops when the person gets cleansed is in a spot where there is already poison on the ground so you don’t lose any free space.

 The fight is really about managing space.  If the tank is moving the boss too far between poison clouds and you have a few cleanses in bad places, the whole room will be full of poison clouds and the raid wide damage will go through the roof and you will probably wipe.

Patchwerk is a very simple yet very challenging fight (or at least he was back in the day).  He hit the tanks very hard so he was a check on both the healers and the tank and there was a tight enrage timer which made for a tough dps check.  If everything goes well, the tanks are the only people who ever take any damage in the fight.

 There is only one mechanic in the fight and it is called Hateful Strike.  It is a melee attack that does a ton of damage and it targets the person in melee range with the most health and the boss uses it roughly every 1.6 seconds.  You need to have at least two tanks for the fight, one boss and one Hateful Strike tank.  The healers basically just spam max rank heals non-stop on the tanks, no real complexity to it.

 The most important thing in the fight is for the Hateful Strike tank (or tanks) to be topped off ASAP after getting hit.  With Hateful Strikes coming as often as they do, if the Hateful tank doesn’t get topped off immediately, it is very possible for someone else in melee range to have more HP and therefore be a target for the Hateful Strike.  If someone that isn’t a tank gets hit with a Hateful, it’s a one-shot.

One thing you can do to protect melee is to have them step into the green slime.  The slime will reduce their HP by 50% and since there is no raid wide damage, the healers can ignore them.  If the melee are getting heals from Improved Leader of the Pack or Vampiric Embrace, they can jump back into the slime occasionally to keep their health low.

While using the slime like that is a nice little trick, if it is really necessary, then you have other problems that you need to deal with – i.e. your Hateful Strike tank is not being topped off fast enough.

 It’s basically a tank and spank fight.  Assuming you have the gear for it, once your healers get into a rhythm, it should be free loot.

For the last day and a half I have been hanging out in the battlegrounds quite a bit and I’ve gotta say, its been awesome.  If you haven’t tried it yet, I strongly recommend it.  The build I have been playing with is http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=LZhxZVfzrgbdibIzsGo.

Admittedly, I have a pretty big advantage because I can wear 4 pieces of T6 and 4 pieces of gladiator gear, but even without the T6, prot can be very potent.  I am wearing 50/50 pvp and pve gear so my resilience is only at 260, but it gives me 25.5% crit and 1839 AP unbuffed and 15.3k hp.  But with talents my devastate, shield slam and heroic strike all gain another 15% crit for 40% crit on my big damage abilities.

With those kind of offensive stats I have as much burst as an arms warrior and with shockwave, imp revenge, concussion blow and imp disarm, I get a ton of control that you don’t get with arms.  Add in warbringer to break snares and I am also much harder to control than an arms warrior.

Before the 3.0 changes a prot warrior could usually kill any other melee class but it would take a while.  Now its a joke.  A prot warrior just destroys other melee.  And since a prot warrior can break snares, you can kill most casters as well.  The only thing that gives me trouble is well played hunters and healing priests and shaman.

I am having so much fun with it I just had to post about it.  If you haven’t tried it yet, you really should.

I’m just going to touch on this a little as I don’t really have hard numbers to back this up. I am going to do my best to gather some hard facts on this but it is not easy to stop in the middle of a boss fight to take note of differing threat numbers.

The simple fact is this. Threat is not dead. At least not when you have upper level dps’ers who have the gear, capacity, and skill to play at the top of their game.

Since Patch 3.0 hit, we have seen tank threat skyrocket. It’s great fun to see 2500 TPS, and one would think that would mean we would have zero threat problems, and many tanks and raids are saying this is true. But I’m here to tell you, there are still DPS raid members who can, and will be right on your ass on threat, possibly even threat capped and having to hold back.

Strong mages, DPS warriors, ret paladins, enhancement shaman. These are the ones I see riding my ass in threat since Patch 3.0. I keep an eye on those who are right behind me in threat and will even use a GCD to move my Vigilance to someone who is right behind me on threat.

So basically, the point of the story is this. Do not neglect your threat. Perfect your rotations and your reactions to Revenge, Shield Slam, Devastate and Sword and Board. Use Heroic Strike whenever you have the surplus rage to do so, or reactively use it after a Revenge if you have the Glyph of Revenge.

The lovely Ms Faerlina is the second boss in the spider wing and is another pretty simple fight.  She does a poison bolt volley that hits for some initial damage and leaves a cleansable dot and the casts a rain of fire randomly around the room.  Have your shaman and paladins cleansing and the poison bolt volley won’t be a problem and don’t stand in fire and the rain of fire won’t be a problem.

The MT will pick up the boss and an OT will pick up the other 6 adds.  The Naxxramas Followers don’t do anything special and you can kill them straightaway.  Every 60 seconds the boss will enrage which greatly increases her damage and attack speed.  The way to stop the enrage is by killing the Naxxramas Worshipper (in the 40 man version a priest would mind control them and there was a Sacrifice ability on the pet bar but since you can’t count on having a priest in 10/25 man raids, you can just kill the worshipper).

There are two different strategies for dealing with the enrage.  In both cases the raid will burn the Worshippers down to around 10% HP so that they can be easily dispatched when the time comes.  The most common method of dealing with the enrage is to try and time the killing of the worshipper so that it dies immediately after the boss enrages.  The tank will probably want to pop a cooldown because he may take a few hits from the boss before the worshipper dies.  By killing the worshipper after the enrage happens, you remove the enrage and reset the boss’ 60 second cooldown on the ability.  The other strategy is to kill the worshipper before the enrage.  When you kill the worshipper before the enrage, another 30 seconds is tacked onto the boss’ cooldown.

There are only four worshippers so you can only remove/delay the enrage four times.  After the fourth worshipper dies the tank is just going to have to stay alive as long as possible through the enrage.  The benefit of killing the worshippers after the boss enrages is that it allows the enrage CD to fully reset so you have more time to kill the boss.  But the drawback of that strategy is that your tank is going to take a few swings from the enraged boss and depending on the tank’s gear, the healers’ awareness, or RNG, that can be enough to kill the tank.  If, on the other hand you decide to kill the worshippers before the enrage happens, the tank is never really in danger.  But, since the enrage CD doesn’t get reset to 60 seconds - only delayed by 30, you are going to run out of worshippers to kill earlier so your DPS on the boss needs to be very high.

Both strategies worked at 60 and if the beta forums are anything to go by, it looks like both work at 80.  If you know your DPS is hot, then you will probably want to kill the worshippers before the enrage so you never endanger the tank.  If you aren’t totally confident in your DPS then you can kill the worshippers after the enrage and just have the tank be ready to use a CD.