Ulduar Iron Council (Hard Mode)

We do this in 10 man in such a way as to explode Steelbreaker once we are on him. We kill the little guy first, once he is down we have our highest DPS (in our case a rogue) start attacking Steelbreaker to build some agro along with the tank. Once Runemaster dies, everyone on Steelbreaker and the fun begins. I’m a paladin tank so I dispel myself through all of the fusion punches, just a side note. You get 1 minute from the time you get the de-buff until you blow up. At about 5-10 seconds I back Steelbreaker away from the group and let him kill me (or the de-buff kills me, doesn’t matter). Since that rogue was building agro that whole time, he gets initial agro upon my death (therefore getting the de-buff making him do ridiculous damage). Then our 2nd tank taunts off of the rogue and they go at it. Steelbreaker usually dies within about 35-45 seconds after the 2nd tank has agro with 2 people doing 200% increased damage. Since both the tank and DPS have the de-buff, having the tank hold the boss isn’t a problem because he is doing the increased threat needed.

It has got to the point where my guilds 10 man 1 shot this every week. If you can pull off the precision of taunting at the right time so 2 people have that de-buff, Steel just explodes and you don’t have to worry about the tank dying before the boss. Once that DPS has the de-buff, he does around 12k+ DPS consistently.

Bada boom, bada bing, Bettie Boop.

excellent work, great video. thanks again TS !

Would it be viable to have a hunter distracting shot, take buff, feign death at the start of phase3? When the buff is about to go off on the hunter and first tank, the hunter could aim shot the boss to reduce the healing affects. Personally we have no issues with our current way of doing it in 10 man even with no shaman bloodlust (leave runemaster up until he drops a blue circle), but this could be helpful to people who are just learning the boss.

Steelbreaker doesn't put the debuff on the tank until about 13-15 seconds into phase 3, so having the hunter Distracting Shot right off the bat probably won't help. What you can do, though, is have a single ranged dps just dps on Steelbreaker for all of phase 2 so he's 2nd on threat. You don't want him dying too early, so 5 seconds before the first tank dies, the 2nd tank taunts and gets the debuff. When the 2nd tank is about to die, no one taunts and Steel will aggro/buff that ranged DPS who was 2nd on threat. The 3rd tank will need to immediately taunt.

The tricky part about this is that when the 2nd tank is going to die, he can't run way off because Steelbreaker will continue to follow him and if the raid's grouped up they'll all get owned by Static Disruption. The tank blowing up is only a 15 yard radius, so everyone can actually get to Steel's back hit box and let the tank blow up in front of Steel.

First - people please refrain from commenting from 10 man experience. It's by far different fight. In 10 man it's a breeze walktrough while in 25 it's serious check for all 3 aspects of the raid.

My raid is atm wiping on 3rd tank death. And we are slowly improving... thanks for the video, gave us some nice hints.

Simple question: Otherwise then counting I'm not seeing Auracle part for Overwhelming power. I found out how much important is proper timing of tank switches. Our raid is doing 100Kdps on Steelbreaker which means that each second lost is 1% of his hp more or less. We started first with 10sec switch then we went down to 7 that leaves some room for error also, 5 is prolly best with clean tank switches, also we tried several times intervening totems for gaining 3 sec more dps, however I would love to see what's of all these best experience in switching.

We do the tank switch at 5 seconds. The blow-up radius is only 15 yards, so the tank does not have to run very far to get clear from the raid. What I've found is:

Phase 3 starts
15 seconds he puts up the first overwhelming power
25 seconds later the tank needs to taunt
25 seconds later the next tank taunts
25 seconds later the final tank (if needed) taunts

That adds up to having to kill steelbreaker in 95 seconds if you can get it done with 3 tanks phases. If you go to the 4th tank phase you have 120 seconds to kill him. He's got 10M health and heals 1M every time a tank dies. So doing it in 3 tanks means 12M damage over 95 seconds (126k raid dps). Doing it in 4 tanks means 13M damage in 120 seconds (108k raid dps).

Taunting at 7 seconds (compared to 5) means the entire raid needs to do 5% more damage which is pretty big. We did it with 2 tanks (each got SS or brezed) and planned on 4 tank phases with each tank going twice. With good raid positioning and a good healer mix, you can easily 6-heal it. Having the entire raid except for 3 soakers stacked up on Steelbreaker makes AoE healing very efficient.

Since no one other than the tanks can die, there's not much point in blowing heroism right away. It's best to use it when Steelbreaker's under 40% to maximize dps during execute range. Also, healing is the most difficult late in the fight, so heroism will greatly help healing if used later. For your first kill, you'll probably need 4 tank phases. We popped it during the 3rd tank phase, just after the dead tank resses. That gives both tanks heroism, and they will do a great deal of damage with the overwhelming power debuff.

Note that this event has been nerfed as for patch 3.2:

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The overwhelming debuff has been increased to 35s from 30s in patch 3.2. This effectively gives you anywhere between 15 and 20 seconds more in Phase 3 with 2 or 3 tank-switches.

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For our guild this means a certain kill every week now, where we before where cutting it 5-7 seconds short sometimes depending on DPS.

As for tank-rotations this is very important to maximize your dps output. We use "time remaining on overwhelming power" to manage this

- 5s MT1 stops to generate threat
- 4s MT2 taunts Steelbreaker
- 3s MT1 runs off, explodes outside of raid

This maximizes everything very well. 3 seconds is enough to run away safely. It's also important to STOP generating threat before the 2:nd tank takes over since you're doing insane TPS in this fight and a lucky crit will bring the boss back to you.

I have a question for Cider, what action bar addon are you using? And what is that black bar at the bottom of your screen?

You'll have to pardon my ignorance on a certain part to the strategy re: Divine Sacrifice/Taunt/Salv for ret paladins. Would you please explain the exact process and exactly when to do it? I'm not sure if the intent is that you do the Divine Shield/Divine Sacrifice Combo, or just use Div. Sac. before you taunt. I'd like to try this strategy out being the Primary Ret Paladin in our guild but I don't want to mess it up. :) Thanks very much.

I have a question regarding the this encounter. Is it possible just to dps each of the bosses down to 10% before starting to kill them off one by one, or do they heal back to full health once one of them is dead. I have never seen if anyone has tried to kill them this way. Either way I will find out in few hours when I have a raid but I would like some heads up in case that they do heal to full if one of them is dead.

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Originally Posted by Kyo Nanashi

I have a question regarding the this encounter. Is it possible just to dps each of the bosses down to 10% before starting to kill them off one by one, or do they heal back to full health once one of them is dead. I have never seen if anyone has tried to kill them this way. Either way I will find out in few hours when I have a raid but I would like some heads up in case that they do heal to full if one of them is dead.

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This has been covered numerous times in a few threads. It's also stated in most strats across the web. When one dies, the other two heal to full.

Will steelbreaker aply the meltdown aura right away or do the off get a sec or somthing without the debuff,???

and what is the dps cap for the 10man version of this???

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Originally Posted by Keleher

Will steelbreaker aply the meltdown aura right away or do the off get a sec or somthing without the debuff,???

and what is the dps cap for the 10man version of this???

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Not sure about the meltdown debuff, didn't ask our tanks about it although from what I've seen there seems to be a slight delay for him applying it.
As for dps, there is no cap, the more you can bring, the faster he goes down, you'll need around 3.7k dps average from your dps assuming you bring 5, with our first kill we flasked up and managed around 4k+ from everyone. Assuming you don't overgear it your dps will need to push themselves, and your healers may find phase 2 a strain.

Steelbreaker waits about 13-15 seconds before he applies the meltdown debuff.

First off, awesome video! My guild has been hesitant to approach 25-man hard modes for a long time and have needed some considerable encouragement to try it. Having such clear video guides available was a huge plus in getting momentum and we're now 2 hard modes down in one week.

Just a small thing I found regarding this one; I was raid leading our Steelbreaker kill last night and I opted to use the raid positioning shown in this video for after Runemaster Molgeim died.

I was tanking Brundir himself to start with (we took 3 tanks) and me and our Death Knight tank who had Steelbreaker aimed to get them next to each other in the general middle of the room whilst the raid was working on Molgeim. The DK had no problem with Steelbreaker, but Brundir outright refused to stay still and I've never seen that before on our normal kills.

In every one of our six attempts including the kill, Brundir kept going for a wander without warning. This was both during me setting the positioning up and when the raid was killing Brundir. I know I hadn't lost aggro because he'd come straight back to me if someone silenced him, but it was just bizarre watching him run off about 10 yards in a random direction for no apparent reason, bearing in mind I hadn't actually moved so I wasn't inside his hitbox nor had I made the server think I was going somewhere.

Is this a feature of the hard mode or was it some random bug?

Hey, im new to tanking in Ulduar.. So i was wondering if there was a movie to kill Iron Council tehe normal way? Thanks

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Originally Posted by Lowarrk

Hey, im new to tanking in Ulduar.. So i was wondering if there was a movie to the way to kill Iron Council? Thanks

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This is the Hard Mode Thread as you can tell, the normal mode thread is here: http://www.tankspot.com/forums/f206/...n-council.html

How often does Steelbreaker cast Fusion Punch? Can a DK tank AMS through every single Fusion Punch on 10man hard mode?

No. He casts fusion punch often enough that even chaining cooldowns, there will be moments where you will eat a full fusion punch.

Even when steelbreaker is being tanked in p3, since its so easy now, is it possible to have 2-3 pally heals with 3 raid healers? I watched the video and i was wondering if its been downsized now since the patches and the new raids?