Dances With Big Bugs - Need Advice On Tanking Garalon

"Shoulda brought a bigger can of Raid." -one of my guildies

18% on our first night playing with Garalon isn't bad at all. But one of the things I noticed is that my OT and I are struggling with being able to hit the boss while dancing in front of him while one of us has the pheremones.

* I understand the principle is 'tanks should be hitting the legs when they're up, preferably with an AoE attack to splash the damage over', but if you're in the leg zone, you're not in front of the boss to get hit by the cleave cone. So the goal is looking like 'watch the DBM timer for that attack ('tis on a 5 second countdown, which is huge) and then dip back in to stand in the attack, then dance back out to munch on the leg some more.'

* However, whenever one of the tanks has the Pheremones, either we wind up running into each other or one of us has to stand outside of melee range of Garalon's body. And one of the tanks needed to start with the pheremones because our DPS don't get down the legs fast enough at the start of the fight to prevent the boss from trapping a ranged kiter in the corner and subsequently munching them. Plus we only had three ranged folks to kite with.

What this means is that if we have no legs up and the tank has the pheremones, the other tank winds up standing around looking cute because they have to stand in the cone zone and unable to hit the boss at all. Which meant that both tanks were sporting kinda painful DPS numbers.

Any advice from tank-shaped folks on how to tank Garalon a little better?

Thanks in advance...
-Tielyn

Get better DPS.

When our tanks are kiting they are actually kiting; They aren't in melee range. Tank damage on Garalon will always be low, primarily because of his low attack speed and relatively low damage vengeance doesn't stack up. That's primarily the reason why tanks should kite. Having them out of melee range is not as big a DPS loss as having a Proper DPS out of the blue circles.

There is a spot where the Front legs blue circles overlap the frontal cone area. iI you imagine a direct line between the center of the blue circles at the front, where hat line crosses the blue circles is where a tank should be when he's not kiting in order to deeps the legs. if he is kiting fuck deepsing the legs just stay at max rang inside the cones and try not to drop the shit all over the place.

YOu do not need 5 people to kite (unless your healing really sucks ass) 4 people, 20 stacks each will do. We go tank>ranged>tank Ranged. that should leave you with 4 deeps with 100% boss uptime. some peeps have 3 kiters swapping off at 27 stacks.

If you stand on the edge of the circle you get hit by the frontal cone attack. As tank you can use a strength flask, dps trinkets on this fight as he doesn't hit hard to boost dps a little. If you need to kite as tank you'll loose a bit of dps but same goes for most ranged dps.

Sounds like your dps needs to step it up and that it might be a good idea to 2 heal this fight. With 2 healers you have 1 dps more that should be 16-18% more dps. Have 1 healer focus the tanks+kiters and the other healer focus the raid, keeping the pheromone stacks low can help if your healers struggle 15 stacks instead of the regular 20 stacks.

I'd only take 3 healers if the healers where kiting.

We had exactly that setup (2 heals, 1 on the kiters, 1 on the raid, with the raid healer being groupheals spec'd) but since we'd never seen the fight before on Normal, there was a lot of thrashing/churn to be had as people got used to the new mechanics. Some people got a clue; others, not so much. But one of the people who didn't 'get it' was my OT, who would run me over while trying to dance, get the pheremones, panic, and then they'd give it back. Double crush ungood. :P

The big issue in knowing where to stand with the legs/circles is that when both legs are moving madly about, if you try and follow the leg, sometimes you get out of the cone zone. The best thing to do seems to be 'dance out to follow the leg right after the cone, dance back in when he's about to cone.' Less effective but safer is 'always stand between the circles and just hit the body'

It's probably just practice, but y'all confirmed that the tank DPS is secondary to the fight when the tank is the one kiting. Can do. I'm honestly just happy we're on Garalon finally after a month plus on Bladelord/Elegon...

-Tielyn

I'm not sure what causes it. but if he suddenly goes all spinny and ignores pheromones for a breif moment don't try to follow the leg,as i beleive its just an animation glitch.

He always seems to want to take on the lead part of the Ballet in the right-hand corner by the stairs

I'm fairly certain that the graphic of where the leg is doesn't move with the hit box of the leg too btw. If you stand just inside the blue circles and face the middle you shouldn't ever have targeting issues.

I couldn't attack the leg with Shred (requires standing behind the target) when the boss was pirouetting.