Mogu'shan Vaults - Gara'jal the Spiritbinder

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Originally Posted by Solarflair

Hello and welcome to Tankspot's Mogu'shan Vaults raid guide. My name is Solarflair and today I will be walking you through the 10-man normal Gara'jal the Spiritbinder encounter.

Gara'jal is a two phase fight that requires good coordination and synergy between all of your raid members, it is also worth noting that this fight can be two or three healed depending on how competent your DPS are.

To start, you'll notice that Gara'jal summons Spirit Totems throughout the fight. These are key to controlling the encounter to always ensure you have the upper hand. We recommend sending one healer and two DPS into the spirit world each time.

Once the Spirit Totem is killed, three players within six yards of the totem will Cross Over into the Spirit Realm, and in the process be taken down to 30% health.

In the Spirit Realm, you'll notice Shadowy Minions spawning around the platform. These guys do damage to your raid both outside and in the Spirit Realm and it is important to kill as many as you can to control the damage on this encounter.

While you're in the Spirit Realm, your healer should be bombing heals onto the other two members inside to get them to full health, in the process of doing so, two things will be going on.

One, you will be gaining stacks of Spiritual Innervation. These stacks vary depending on class and spec, but they all have one thing in common. They increase certain stats such as Haste and Critical Strike as well as buffing your damage done. The more your healer heals you, the more stacks you will gain. It's best to shoot for 20-25 stacks upon leaving. Note, it's not the amount healed but the number of heals recieved, and HoT's will only stack it once. It's advised to spam your fastest heals, as when you leave the Spirit Realm, you gain a powerful Spirit buff that will restore a substantial amount of mana back.

Also, upon reaching full health, you'll notice another button pop up on your screen, this is Return Soul, and is used to retun yourself back into the living realm. Upon being in the spirit realm for 30 seconds, you will die, so you need to make the most of your time underground. Spam heals and kill as many Minions as possible, and when your Spirit Realm debuff is about to expire, hit your button to head back out.

Voodoo Dolls is a debuff Gara'jal will periodically cast throughout the encounter. Gara'jal will fixate on your tank, and will force them to copy 70% of incoming damage onto the two other afflicted players. Also, it is important to note that if you do have Voodoo Doll, you cannot enter the Spirit Realm, thus causing you to cycle in new healers and DPS as the case may be. During this time, your tank should be rolling light cooldowns in order to help alleviate some of the incoming damage. Discipline Priests and Holy Paladin Mastery are very useful when it comes to dealing with this mechanic as they both deal in absorbs and can almost completely negate Voodoo Doll damage if played successfully.

Voodoo Doll targets will change every time Gara'jal casts this new ability called Banishment.
Gara'jal will banish the current tank and send them into the Spirit Realm, while inside, the tank will have 30 seconds to kill a Severer of Souls, if the tank fails to accomplish this in time, they will die, however if they are successful, they will be transported back into the raid to continue the fight as normal.

Due to the fact that this fight has such a tight enrage timer, and that the Spirit World really chunks up your uptime on the boss, it is important to stagger cooldowns in a way that will be most beneficial, this is ideally just after you get out of the Spirit Realm.

At 20%, Gara'jal will go into a Frenzy, this is a Berserk, and should be handled as such. Spirit Totems will stop spawning and the Minions will increase in number. It is ideal to pop Bloodlust or Heroism at this point and cycle raid cooldowns as necessary, however because this is also the execute phase, it should go by fairly quickly.

Overall, Gara'jal is a very fun and engaging encounter for all roles and requires good communication between your raiders. Thanks for watching this guide, remember, you can always find more information on this or any other encounter on our forums at tankspot.com, if you're watching this on YouTube you can click the link in the details below. My name is Solarflair, and good luck.

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Please welcome Solarflair to the team! As a cohost of the Convert to Raid podcast (http://www.converttoraid.com) he's no stranger to the WoW community, and I'm very excited that he's joining up with us to put out encounter guides :)

Three cheers for being the new guy!
Don't throw rotten vegetables at me... yet, anyways.

/me readies a left-over pumpkin

Welcome to the Green Club!

Give me all your babies NOW Solarflair

Did I miss the video for Feng ?

Question: What happens if someone clicks a totem and goes into the spirit realm, lets say 5 seconds before he hits the 20% Enrage burn phase? Does the person or persons get kicked out immediately, or do they have their full time down below to kill more adds and rack up healing stacks?

Feng should be up... soon. I'm working on Spirit Kings right now but Lore may have myself or another author, maybe even him(?) do Feng.

Karoht, it will still work as normal, they have thirty second to get out, even if Gara'jal does pass the 20% threshold, all his berserk marks is the cease of spawning totems.

Great guide. BETTER THEN LORE!!! jk lore i still love you. but seriously. very well done.

The spiritual innervation buff increases damage done, haste, crit and mastery many of the tooltips around were incorrect(wowhead just recently updated from the beta versions of the buff). Also keep in mind it doesn't stack persay the buff changes reflecting the amount of the stack. You said to aim for 20-25 stacks, have you seen it stack past 22, I dont know if maybe we arent getting enough actual heals out, but to us it has seemed like it maxes out at 22 for the dps throughout our 50+ wipes we have had on heroic.

Good video, though I did find the large periods of silence somewhat distracting (perhaps you're trying to strike a balance between the clip-notes format that was used for the DS videos and still showing the full encounter?). I also liked the way the DS videos first sent over all of the abilities and then covered the strategy afterwards, it just seemed easier to follow the strategy when the ability explanations aren't stuck in the middle of it.

Just my 2 cents worth of feedback.

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Originally Posted by The_Pancake

Good video, though I did find the large periods of silence somewhat distracting (perhaps you're trying to strike a balance between the clip-notes format that was used for the DS videos and still showing the full encounter?). I also liked the way the DS videos first sent over all of the abilities and then covered the strategy afterwards, it just seemed easier to follow the strategy when the ability explanations aren't stuck in the middle of it.

Just my 2 cents worth of feedback.

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i do not agree, with the dragonsoul setup i felt really overwhelming with all the mechanics trying to remember them all. i very much prefer this way, even though i felt kinda weird at first. it makes it very visible when stuff happens and how it looks.

When I explain an encounter to my raid, I start with the basics of what to do in each phase (often stopping at phase 1), and then drill down into the mechanics after one or two pulls. A video can't do precisely that, but it can start with a simple framework. Starting with an ability rundown is really common, but to me it feels like "I don't really know how to start this, so I'm just going to read you the dungeon journal."

My favorite videos have been from Vox, like their heroic Hagara video. They're dense, but there's a lot of attention to presenting the information in an understandable order.

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Originally Posted by Karoht

Question: What happens if someone clicks a totem and goes into the spirit realm, lets say 5 seconds before he hits the 20% Enrage burn phase? Does the person or persons get kicked out immediately, or do they have their full time down below to kill more adds and rack up healing stacks?

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They will be able to stay down there for the full 30 seconds however it is not ideal because the boss is frenzied and hitting very hard so it is really a DPS race. At 20% you want everyone in the real world so they can get the benefit of Bloodlust/Heroism and nuke the boss. The healers just have to heal through the add damage and rotate raid cooldowns as the boss gets lower in health.

Welcome aboard, Solar, and thanks for the video. :)

A couple of points, though:

1) There's a lot of dead time in the video, so you could probably cut out the pauses and use that to further explain the mechanics as they pop up.

2) I think increasing the size of the ability boxes would make them a bit easier to read, as well as maybe keeping them on the screen for a bit longer.

3) On your next video, I beg you to take out the raid warning noise - I hate it on DBM, and I hate it on this video. x_X

All told though, a good first attempt and I got a lot of good information out of it. I'm looking forward to your next one. o/

Maybe I am remembering incorrectly, but when I tanked this on Sunday it seems to me the tank targets looked like giant Tiki Masks, not giant void walkers.

Good guide, I liked the pauses, but perhaps they could be a bit shorter than they were.

Yep, that's correct. They do indeed look like tiki masks

Grats on your first tankspot guide Solarflair.

I like the new format because it gives you time to digest each mechanic and see how it plays out in the battle, but I agree with others that you really need a different sound effect to announce the mechanics. The DBM warning is really obnoxious. It haunts my nightmares.

Also, I don't mind the downtime between explanations, but you really need some livelier background music. I was falling asleep listening to that stuff.

But overall a very nice, concise and thorough guide.

Just wanted to post what hopefully will be some good tips for those struggling here.

We just got this down last night after banging our heads for a full night, basically from not quite getting the best way to do this fight, after researching a bunch and really picking the ideas that seemed the most sound we came in last night with a pretty different strategy and got him on our 4th attempt.

We used 2 tanks, 2 heals, 6 dps.

Things changed for us with just a few tweaks.

1 - Tanks should be using all their mitigation for when they have Voodoo Dolls, as it will minimize the damage to the other players and help healers. Important, but easy to overlook.

2 - DPS in the spirit realm - We noticed that our SP could take care of basically all the adds in the realm alone until the 3rd totem. We then sent in our Healer/SP/Mage to the realm and had the mage almost immediately leave once he could... just to get the buff. We worked it out to "leave 3 seconds after the button appeared". The healer ONLY healed the mage until he left then would heal the SP and himself. Starting with the 3rd totem we had both dps stay in each phase to help adds.

Healers - Use your Big/Fast heal that is not mana efficient. Using a priest as an example: Binding heal/BH/fast GH etc. Remember for throughout the fight (spirit realm or not) this fight is about big heals and you will get full mana back quickly. Make sure healers are rotating who goes into the spirit realm too. The healers goal is to get out of the spirit realm as fast as possible - with maximizing buffs on dps. 2 extra heals after the DPS is topped off should do the trick.

2 things to add to that: 1) Starting at the 3rd totem we noticed it was more about getting healers our asap than maximizing dps and we would just have him top dps off so they had button and peace out to help heal in normal realm (not doing an extra 2 casts on each)

2) Before the healer leaves try to cast a HoT on anyone staying in the spirit realm, each tick will refresh their damage buff.

We went from wiping at about 25% to enrage to getting the kill with 35 seconds left on enrage.

Hope that helps some groups get over the top!

It sounds obvious, but shedding a healer (and going with two) makes this encounter laughably easy because it utterly removes the enrage as a concern.