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Ran the 10 man tonight - got through Marrowgar and some attempts on Lady Deathwhisper. On marrowgar 80% of the damage I took was from his cleave, a physical attack which I was able to both dodge and parry. Also, the giant adds as you head in also hit pretty hard.
Not that Marrowgar was particularly difficult, but avoidance would be much better than EH for that fight. I am looking forward to mixing and matching multiple gear sets again. Oh and Bonebreaker Scepter dropped :D
how would being more avoidance heavy help you? You're basically eating those hits almost guaranteed, so you dodge a few, th eheals were coming anyways, if a healer doesn't heal you, and you eat 2-3 of those your dead anyways.
To be fair, that's what I kept claiming since they came up with Icecrown Radiance: Neutered avoidance can be made useful.Saurfang specifically seems to favor a big avoidance set. He doesn't seem to hit for much and on the tank side all relevant abilities can be avoided.
Lord Marrogar doesn't really seem like an avoidance boss but like Synapse said the BP from Surfang could really favor avoidance along with the captain on the other ship in the Gunship Battle because of his debuff system.
But, really there is no need to use an avoidance and you can just stick to EH the safe choice. Maybe in heroic it will change and in an EH set you will die enough on avoidance favored bosses that it will be worth using an avoidance set.
Kaz, I can currently survive two concurrent hits. The issue we had in the fight (10 man) was when a healer got impaled and the second healer had to heal the entire raid for a short bit. My thought was that taking fewer big hits would ease these periods and make the entire fight easier for the healers. Is my logic off? I am here to learn and share ideas :)
Sure, that's a novel idea, to think that you could control when "oh shit, my healer got impaled, i better dodge this next attack", the problem is you got lucky. Avoidance is about RNG, you can increase your odds with the RNG, but the simple fact is, in that scenario, your healer gets spiked, the other healer has to try to cover, and you tanks get saberlashed. You dodge, you live, you don't dodge, you take a big hit, healer tries to catch up, another saberlash, you're now in dangerzone, healer isn't catching you up, and the other healer is out and trying to catch up now too. another saberlash, you die.
It's not just about being able to take 3 consecutive hits without healing, it's creating a buffer so that in events like you described, even some small healing, will have let you lived a 3rd hit because you had more than required to survive 2 hits by a good margin.
Explain to me how "avoidance" would have reliably saved you there where more hp wouldn't have? Avoidance is useful, it's always useful, it smooths out damage intake, it always has, with lower levels because of chill, any avoidance gains now, seem like big ones but aside from picking up upgrades in a natural order, i don't foresee anyone stacking dodge gems for Marrowgar.
I agree with Kaz RE: marrowgar, however I believe for the gunship battle and DBS it may prove to be... useful if not more powerful.
For example on the gunship encounter. We used 10 stacks as the "Get the flux outta dodge" number. From my understanding you can avoid the application of the buff. So if your in heavy avoidance gear, you could possibly extend the boarding party's time on the opposite ship.
Same with DBS, if you can dodge the debuff application.
everyone says this and I still say it makes no sense. Why?Quote:
Originally Posted by Synapse
on DBS:
no matter what, you're gonna have a second tank up on the platform to swap when the application goes off. avoiding it once, or twice, or even 3 times in a row doesn't really HELP the encounter. all it does is extend how long before the other tank taunts. How does this "favor" an avoidance set?
on the gunship encounter, i thought he just got the buff because he was getting engaged...
I agree with you completely on your other post, HOWEVER.Quote:
Originally Posted by Kazeyonoma
Once DBS gets 100 BP he casts a debuff on someone, and every time you get hit, it does damage to that person also and increases his BP counter. So once you get to his soft enrage (he attacks harder and faster, but it matters before this point too) and you've got a bunch of people with that, every time you get hit he gains more and more BP. It is a situation that is very unqiue, and while in normal mode it doesn't really matter that much, in heroic decreasing your damage taken over the course of a fight to where you dodge 1 or 2 times more could actually mean the difference between a wipe and a kill because BP gets out of control. Oh and btw if someone with that debuff dies he heals for 5%, so lets say you get 6 people with the debuff, you get hit 4 times in a row, they all take 20k damage, healers can't keep up, they die, he gets healed for 30%.
And on normal again, gunship won't matter much probably, but on heroic I can see that buff getting really fierce. I wonder if it applies if you fully block an attack...
While what you say is true I think the simplest solution lies within not letting him get off 5-6 marks rather than having your tanks socketting 20 def in every socket.Quote:
Originally Posted by Aggathon
You can stack avoidance from gear.. like by wearing the tier 9.5 bp vs. towering monstrosity and by swapping out normal satrina's for ony etc., without re-socketing everything. Even 5-8% extra avoidance could be enough... I agree that the best solution is to not let him get his BP high in the first place. Atm we have no idea how the encounter will work in heroic, it may be much more difficult to manage BP... leading to an advantage here. For normal 10m it's not required, but it's fun to speculate about heroic.Quote:
Originally Posted by Tzobee
I'm pretty sure the opposing ships captain gets the buff when he connects a hit.. from Spiritus' guide.
Battle Fury
Melee, Instant, 20sec duration.
Increases all damage done by 7% [5%-10man]
This is a "debuff" placed on the tank. Every time the Enemy Captain connects with the recipient of Battle Fury, he will increase his damage done by 7%. .....
....Tank swapping is not an option because it is a buff that the Captain himself receives from a debuff placed on his target. A high avoidance tank is recommended for this task.
Which is why I believe an avoidance heavy set-up could help for tanking the opposing captain. In normal the rocketeers and mages are easy to handle, thus the boarding party has to spend relatively little time on the opposing boat... in heroic tho; it may be a viable strategy.
I don't think avoidance gear will be "required" for normal content, but for heroic I see two mechanics that could be managed with avoidance.
True, that was just an exaggeration, but he is going to get some off, and it will be beneficial to dodge rather than eat it for the debuff reason, not necessarily for "best way to tank" however I'm assuming that the healers won't really have to move, so in general it seems like once you've reached the min EHP mark for the soft enrage, gearing avoidance is simply the way to go on this fight.Quote:
Originally Posted by Tzobee
Also I probably wouldn't gem defense because block wouldn't really help and it becomes better to gem parry/dodge than defense. If you have the spare pieces to do it, why not?
Okay now that the Stam Czar has just advocated avoidance for a fight, I'm going to go throw up now. =P
At least on normal mode, you don't need any specific avoidance gear for either Gunship battle or Saurfang. Your boarding party stays on just long enough to kill channeling mage and then retreats back to reset Battle Fury, no need to gimp your dps by having two tanks there. For Saurfang, your tanks just need to be awake and switch quickly to prevent healing, fast reactions help far more than avoidance set.
It's a matter of min/maxing in preparation for heroic mode.Quote:
Originally Posted by Crommi
True in normal mode your boarding party needs little time on the other boat.
True in normal mode BP doesn't stack quickly.
It's not a matter of IF WE NEED IT. It's a matter of WHICH IS BETTER.
I don't NEED an armor stacking set for Gormok, but does it massively reduce the inc. damage on me and greatly reduce my chance of getting gibbed. I CAN use my Stam set, but my armor set is BETTER.
While I may not aggree with this hyperbole... the marks on heroic heal for 20% instead of 5%. And since I expect him to start hitting like a truck on heroic, you definitely need to lock down his mark applications first.Quote:
Originally Posted by Tzobee
Honestly, there are a handful of places you can easily switch avoidance in without having to re-gem or re-enchant anything. The obvious one, and I know this may be somewhat scary, is trinkets. Just swapping my dual stam trinkets to double avoidance trinkets (Purified and the heroic 10 toc trinket) significantly slowed the overall accumulation of the debuff on gunship boss tanking. When 25 man rolled around the next day, I swapped in my 25Toc boots for my 10HToc boots, my block/avoidance gemmed/enchanted shoulders, and my offset lettings to break my set bonus because of all the extra avoidance... it was an ENORMOUS difference.
I don't think anyone is advocating giving up on your EH set. There are some times where nothing but EH will do. But having kept an avoidance set in the bank is helping me out tremendously on certain fight mechanics. We can call them gimmick fights all we want, but the more common they get the more you want it.
I think you guys are missing the point that avoidance slows his mark applications AS WELL as reducing the damage. The mark "ticks" when the tank takes a hit. As a matter of simple fact, it's currently and expected to continue to be impossible to kill him, especially on heroic, without taking a single mark. Once there is even one mark up in the raid each extra attack you avoid is less BP, which means less additional marks. Considering the avoidance both slows down the application of extra marks AND the duration that you have higher counts up, the function is inherently exponential. Avoidance is an enormously valuable way to lock down his mark applications.Quote:
Originally Posted by Muffin Man
Yes you are right, I didn't think about mechanic behind the ability there, ofcourse you want dodge/parry. My bad hehe.Quote:
Originally Posted by Aggathon
And yea ofcourse on heroic it might be a very valid tactic, will be very interesting to see! And once we are actually there hopefully one will have quite a collection of 264 items to play around with :D
Maybe I don't understand how other fight works well enough, but I thought he only gained BP from hitting a tank with rune of blood? (and all his lovely instant spells and blood beast melee-ing of course).
In which case, the tanks just taunt of each other and there you go, no BP from tank smashing.