Tanking Gruul

[Alamir]

I am a tank on Hydraxis (fairly new server) and am part of Prevail. We downed Gruul last night for the first time (third alliance side guild to do so on this server) and I wanted to share how I tanked him...in case anybody else needs ideas, or if anybody has any ideas about how I could do a better job.

First, my raid buffed stats
just over 19k health (14.5k unbuffed).
just over 19k armor (about 16k unbuffed).
19.2% dodge
19.5% parry
19.0% block

Tankpoints had me at just a hair under 70k.

We had a feral druid tanking hateful strike and the raid leader called out hunter misdirects to him or me as needed.

I kept up thunderclap (improved) and demo shout (2 points improved) and five sunders the whole time. I also kept up commanding shout the entire time.

Spam cycle consisted of revenge, shield slam, devastate and heroic strike. I also spammed improved shield block...somehow he still managed to get in a 13k crushing blow, though.

The most important thing for me was staying alive during the silences. I had three warlock healthstones, which I used mainly between grow 6-10 during silences.

At about grow 10, I used Moroes' pocket watch during one of the silences. At about grow 11 or 12, I used last stand, which brought my health up to about 22.5k

At grow 13, I used improved shield wall during the silence. I died during the final silence (he was at 7% health). The hateful strike tank took over and we downed him at grow 14.

Every two minutes, I popped an ironshield potion to keep my armor up and before the fight, I ate +30 stam buff food and used a flask of fortification.

We had a holy priest and a resto druid healing me...hots were key during the silences.

[Horacio]

Yeah, that's pretty textbook "How to tank Gruul" Your tank stats are good for that content but 14 grows is a little much assuming the rest of your raid is similarly geared. (last 2 weeks were my raids first 2 kills and were 14 and 17 grows respectively....WTB DPS)

You can probably hold off on Iron shields until about grow 5 or 6...its a feel thing....I felt awful silly burning them from the beginning when it was just a bad attempt and I saw 4-5 people die on the first shatter.

Anyhow, good job and gratz!

[Abbi]

By the time we get to grow 13 or so, all the raid healers are focused on the two tanks. Only two for you sounds a bit low for me if that was really everyone directly assigned to you towards the end.

You didn't mention Cave-ins, but I assume you're moving out of them when they target you. Those aren't a big deal early; they are a big deal late.

Otherwise, yep, you're doing it perfectly.

[Horacio]

Yeah, I thought that was just referring to HoTs....everyone should be on the MT and OT. I let one priest help DPS out until grow 10 and have all of them toss a SW:P up to chip in a little DPS.

[Alamir]

yeah, there were definitely more healers on me toward the end...I just mentioned the two because the druid and priest hots were very helpful during the silences.

I did my best to stay out of the cave-ins...it seemed that the best strat was to run straight through gruul when the cave-ins were on me. That way Gruul didn't move.

[TheZ]

You should be able to pop your moroes trinket about once every three silences, usualy silences arn't a problem untill you get to roughly 8 growths. Overall your kill was pretty textbook as stated above. Once sugestion that i think could help you guys some is use 6 healers if you didn't before to up dps as much as you can. Once you guys are confterable on dps move back to 7 so that your almost guarnteed to down him every time. One thing that i used to do along with the offtank was that when he did ground slam switch to zerker stance and intercept midair back to him, your also usualy able to get a shield slam off right before you turn to stone or so doing this.. Also sticking in the middle of the floor helps to bring him back. Other than that he's an easy kill. I haven't done him in a while since my guild stopped with the t4 instances unless it's pugged on the off raid days and we're basicly just plowing thru ssc and the eye now. Hopefully the dps will be able to pick up some and we'll down Vashj this week

[Horacio]

Yeah, keeping Gruuul relatively stationary is good. Running through him works. I like to spin him around personally but its the same concept, he doesn't move and melee DPS only has to adjust, not chase him around.

And the stance/intercept thing is huge because it puts you right where you need to be and removes some randomness from the equation. I haven't got the points in TM to have enough rage for a SS unless my BR is up but you can put up an SB (it mitigates shatter damage) or I will put up a rend (lol) or something.

Also, I do not believe Moroes has a watch of any kind, you must be mistaken. I think he took it to Stormwind Pawn or something because I have never seen it. /grumble

[veneretio]

Yeah, that's pretty textbook "How to tank Gruul" Your tank stats are good for that content but 14 grows is a little much assuming the rest of your raid is similarly geared. (last 2 weeks were my raids first 2 kills and were 14 and 17 grows respectively....WTB DPS)

You can probably hold off on Iron shields until about grow 5 or 6...its a feel thing....I felt awful silly burning them from the beginning when it was just a bad attempt and I saw 4-5 people die on the first shatter.

Anyhow, good job and gratz!

We killed Gruul on Growth 18 this week O.o

At 17 Growths, he hits me for 8k - 550 blocked lawl = 7.5k
At 18 Growths, he hits me for 10k - 550 blocked lawl = 9.5k

I popped Last Stand around Growth 13 to live.
I popped Shield Wall around Growth 15-16 to live.

I still have no idea how the healers kept me up through Growth 17 and about 5 seconds into 18.

In the past, we've killed him at 13-14. Suffice to say the DPS wasn't what it usually is this time. Nonetheless, it was great to see what the healers were capable of. (not to mention I'm sure I lucked out with dodges at key times during the latter stages too) By the end of the kill it really was like a poster child for Effective Health with me dipping to around 1k health countless times only for my healers to somehow get me back to 100% health.

[frim]

I did my best to stay out of the cave-ins...it seemed that the best strat was to run straight through gruul when the cave-ins were on me. That way Gruul didn't move.

RE: flipping gruul around during cave-ins... Be careful about announcing this to your melee DPS, especially when you start reaching high growths, so they can start to move or stop their auto attacks. Last thing you need is a few poorly timed parries at 12 growths

[Horacio]

In many ways its a double edged sword. Its always been that the higher your DPS, the faster the mob goes down and the easier the encouter is but Blizzard has found ways to really stress that and put the onus on the DPS classes. The days of controlling the fight and taking it nice and steady are pretty much gone. In truth, they probably have been since Naxx was introduced.

On Gruul, its pretty glaring. We had alot of subs last Thursday and in desperation, I took an extra tree druid in place of a DPS class. We got him down on grow 17 but we had tanks up @ grow 18-19 on some failed attempts. When you get the "Grow #9" warning and see his health at 56%, its a pretty sick feeling....you can hang on for a while but its not going to matter because mages and locks are going to run short of mana, people are going to die to shatter, etc.

I got squashed inbetween 16 and 17. I burned my SW to get through a silence around #14 and Last Stand way early after a bad shatter. And a Nightmare Seed in there somewhere. He was DoTted up pretty good but the last 2 rogues standing blew evasion and soaked a couple of hurtfuls. A feral druid switched over to bear and in DPS gear ate a hurtful with 1K hp to spare. Our OT took a beating but he's got good gear and held steady #2 threat throughout.

Our biggest problem with DPS is the huge gaps. I'd put the top 2 rogues up there with any similarly geared rogues out there. The third is not far behind but three players should not comprise such a huge chunk of the DPS. Too many people hovering around my damage output.

But this fight is the poster child for effective health gearing. Which is basically the "hit me you SOB" approach. He is going to hit you, at that point, for 80-90% of your health bar. When it comes down to it, those few Star of Elune or high stam trinkets, or even the 120 armor to cloak is the difference between life and death. High avoidance can net you 2 seconds until his next attack then its another roll of the dice. If you have healers with mana, he can hit you or not but you will stand up to it and not have to rely on chance.

[veneretio]

Our biggest problem with DPS is the huge gaps. I'd put the top 2 rogues up there with any similarly geared rogues out there. The third is not far behind but three players should not comprise such a huge chunk of the DPS. Too many people hovering around my damage output.

Ya Rogues really shouldn't be outdpsing Mages, Warlocks and especially Hunters on this fight. (assuming you give the Hunters a shadow priest )

[Berginyon]

Our first kill and all our sloppy kills are on growth 14, the sweet spot is always 12 or less. I've never heard of a growth 18 kill :-) hit, hit, parry and you're dead, and I don't know how you'd survive a silence. Your healers must be pretty sweet, pally must of had the lay-on-hands armor buff on you.

[Aelvain]

Ya Rogues really shouldn't be outdpsing Mages, Warlocks and especially Hunters on this fight. (assuming you give the Hunters a shadow priest )

My current guild has been farming this for a few months and are currently on Kael; as such the dps is quite geared. Even so, rogues are still generally on top, pushing over 1,000 dps, followed closely by a hunter, then a lock, warrior, and mage. With such high dps, we typically kill him around 7-8 growths, so I can afford to wear mostly block value/+hit gear, and drop my buffed hp from ~20k to around 18k. I also will usually do what I can to stand in cave-ins (at the right times), pop rage pots on CD, and pop Auto-Blocker on CD. Since the dps is high I can afford to gear for higher tps, meaning the dps can be higher, etc. etc. you can see how smart/geared dps/tps really affects the difficulty of the encounter more than most. I'm not going to pretend to know about when the rogues vanish/feint, but obviously they're doing something right to live the entirety of the encounter while maintaining such high dps.

[Alamir]

Our two BM hunters topped the dps charts at about 800 in our first successfull encounter with gruul.

[Paumedie]

I've never heard of a growth 18 kill :-) hit, hit, parry and you're dead, and I don't know how you'd survive a silence. Your healers must be pretty sweet, pally must of had the lay-on-hands armor buff on you.

My guild's first kill (Gruul 2.0) came at 21 growths. I hit shield wall as growth 21 went in. As soon as it wore off, I was dead. Fortunately, he was < 1% at that point.

[Arrowson]

God damn that sounds fun, I can't wait til we get outta kara and into there