[25] Vezax Hardmode - How to do it with a warrior?

[Agrocasey]

Ok, this is my predicament. I have read up on how General Vezax Hardmode on 25 man can be done with tanking the surges using a DK tank, and I understand the advantages to keeping him in one spot. Unfortunately, several people in the guild are against using this strat, including our main healing officer, as it wastes healers mana unnecessarily, and also that it risks getting the tank killed during surges if healers aren't spamming the tank, which they can't really do for this fight.

Unfortunately we don't currently have a main-spec T8.5 geared DK tank in our guild, as our DK that was tanking for us through T7.5 went DPS when ulduar came out, so in order for us to kill this hardmode in a reasonable amount of time would be to get either myself or Lexxaa, our other warrior tank to MT this.

The CD strategy I plan on using for this fight is as follows:

Surge 1 - Shield Wall (40% damage reduction) + Shield Block + Monarch Crab
Surge 2 - Last Stand + Pain Suppression (Disc Priest 1) + Shield Block + Monarch Crab + Heart of Iron
Surge 3 - Shield Wall + Shield Block + Monarch Crab
Surge 4 - Last Stand + Pain Suppression (Disc Priest 2) + Shield Block + Monarch Crab + Heart of Iron

It requires me to glyph for Last Stand and Shield Wall, which I currently have in my full mitigation spec.

Now, one of the opponents against this strategy in my guild has done some maths on this CD strategy, which basically resulted in him saying that healers will need to spam heals on me though the surge if they want to guarentee I live. I haven't asked permission to present his mathematical proof here, I'll see if I can get that later tonight.

I have asked the supporters of the kite strategy to come up with concrete proof that it works, such as a kill video or even a WWS.

Unfortunately they are being stubborn and saying that the burden of proof is on me to show that the tanking strat works with a warrior, along with specific details on what CD's are used for each surge, and provide supporting maths as to why they will reliably prevent tank deaths taking into account probablities of unavoided strings, as they believe they shown that I will die with my current CD strategy.

If I can do that, then they will go and find a video of the kite strat working, which I currently have not seen any evidence of succeeding.

Now, I'm not the best theorycrafter in the world, especially when it comes to healing, so I was hoping some of you more experienced guys, like Satrina or Xav could help me out.

[Mookey]

Have in mind that PS last 8sec while Surge is 10s. That's not only bad part of it. PS also reduce your threat, have that in mind and tell it to your casters.

I have usually 3 paladins with me for Vezax so I'm alternating sacrifice/buble with shield wall. My healers are going for green cloud when Vezax is at 30-40%, still don't have hard maths if it will work in hard mode.

[michah]

The thing with the whole kiting part is, you only have about a 120 second window to kill the animus or your whole raid is going to die horribly to the shadow debuff stacking too high for the raid healers to keep up. He spawns at the 4th surge, 5th surge is at 60s, 6th surge is at 120s - so essentially you would be kiting through 3 surges while trying to kill a moving target. That is far, far, far less realistic than cycling cooldowns on you for surges.

[Hamburglar]

The way the kite works is to have the raid and healers able to DPS Vezax and heal you regardless where you are on the kite path. Your melee and healers in melee range must also keep up during the kite and interrupt. If they're slow to keep up and Vezax pulls away he can and will shadow crash/mark them and that is terrible. The strategy is pretty much the same on 10 man, just you have to take into account his harder hits and more people able to be marked as he moves. If you have a cooldown up for every second he surges, the damage is no different than normal so I don't see what your healer friend is on to.

As for cooldowns, the paladin cooldown for every 2nd surge is the best way to do it. If you have enough pallies/disc priests, just have the pally throw up a hand on you and the priest throw up their pain suppression halfway through.

I will say this though. A blood DK, even in 7.5ish gear, will do a far better job tanking this than you will as a warrior. You wouldn't believe how many kills I've read came down to "our DPS DK respecced". I'd just let the DK tank this for hard mode even more so. Not your fault at all, it's Blizzard's for making Vezax in the first place.

[bludwork]

you don't need external cooldowns if you glyph for last stand and shield wall. The surge only lasts for 10 secs, the maximum # of attacks he gets during a surge is 2, with trinkets it is normally 1. His slow attack speed means that even during the last stand phases if he manages to hit you healers have about 2 secs to top you back to full. For added HP use laststand+double trinket+nightmare seed.

As for the mana debate I tend to lean on the side that says it makes no difference. General V hits for 21k ish per hit, due to the way healing works healers are almost always healing you constantly. If you kite they won't have to heal for maybe 5 secs but any mana saved is lost because kiting = increased fight time.

That said try it both ways and work on the one that gives better results.

[brain]

I'm not sure how you are being healed, but I recommend browsing WWS hard mode kills and comparing what those healers do to what yours do.

[Cookie]

All anyone has to do is look at the first 10 kills/guilds to see that warriors can tank bosses fine. Are DKs overpowered currently? Yes. But does that mean that other tanks are so bad to a point that they're incapable of tanking bosses? No. Some guilds just happen to be so bad that they can't complete encounters unless they do it the easiest way possible and that means having to resort to DK alts or even voidwalkers.


We use a warrior tank for Vezax25 hard mode, external cooldowns come from a disc priest, holy priest and 2 paladins. But no, you don't need all of them, they just happened to be in the raid.

If you're doing hard mode, I really recommend you to not kite regardless of what tank class you use. Positioning of the boss and shadow crashes is really important to maximise dps, so having the boss moving (and melee dps + healers chasing after you) is a really really bad idea, especially if the Animus has spawned. Also like mentioned before, the mana you save from kiting really isn't much.

If you really want to be efficient, then doing things like having healers gear for crit and geming for int, mages spec frost, shadow priests spec imp VE, etc., is much more important than kiting.


Though I have to say that Vezax hard mode has got to be the worst designed fight in Ulduar. It's heavily reliant on RNG. A string of unmitigated big hits? Tank pretty much dies no matter what class. No shadow crashes for over 2 minutes because it's not on a fixed timer? Have to call for a wipe because dps is too low. Even though it's meant to test healer "skill", well- I was almost falling asleep. The adrenaline was during the last 5% when the healers started announcing that they were oom one after the other >>

As for the mana debate I tend to lean on the side that says it makes no difference. General V hits for 21k ish per hit, due to the way healing works healers are almost always healing you constantly. If you kite they won't have to heal for maybe 5 secs but any mana saved is lost because kiting = increased fight time.

If your healers are constantly healing the tank, then you'll never get a hard mode kill.

[Darxide]

It happened that for our first Vezax 25 kill our 7.5K DPS DK decided to take measures into his own hands after we had wiped for 1.5 hours. Unknown to us he respecced himself blood and put on his tanking gear, most of which was Naxx 10/25 stuff. He kept himself second on threat while our regular Paladin tank did his thing alternating his own shield wall with two pain suppressions all staggered for maximum coverage. He went down on a surge of darkness as he usually did and our DK yelled over vent "I have him keep me healed" and it just so happens we downed him right then and there with no more problems.

Moral of the story: Get a DK to respec and tank him.

[Cookie]

It happened that for our first Vezax 25 kill our 7.5K DPS DK decided to take measures into his own hands after we had wiped for 1.5 hours. Unknown to us he respecced himself blood and put on his tanking gear, most of which was Naxx 10/25 stuff. He kept himself second on threat while our regular Paladin tank did his thing alternating his own shield wall with two pain suppressions all staggered for maximum coverage. He went down on a surge of darkness as he usually did and our DK yelled over vent "I have him keep me healed" and it just so happens we downed him right then and there with no more problems.

Moral of the story: Get a DK to respec and tank him.

Once, I was doing a Naxx pug. I've forgotten the class of the MT, but basically, at about 40% on Sapphiron, he died. The ret paladin in ret gear, who happened to be a better player, decided to take matters into his own hands, taunted the boss, and tanked him the rest of the fight. Despite being a dps class and needing heavy spamming, the fight actually went pretty smooth.

Going by your logic- Moral of my story, don't bother with tank anymore, use a ret paladin -.-

I'm taking the piss a bit and I know DKs are OP right now, but really, skill is a factor as well.

[Lyco]

Don't forget Enraged Generation. If you Glyph it will heal you for alot of extra HP