He has an ability called Mark of the Fallen Champion, when this ability up no matter if the tank has Rune Blood or not every time the tanks is made contact with the member/s with Mark of the Fallen Champion get hit for 5-6k damage.
This could be dangerous for his soft enrage especially if he kills one he gets healed for 5% of his health while continuing the soft enrage. It isn't going to make a whole lot of difference on normal but on heroic it could be very important to have high avoidance.
Whenever the marked person takes damage from the mark splash damage(which is only done when a tank takes melee damage), the boss gains a BP.
What we did to prevent this...let the marked people die. Boom, soft-enrage reset. Took us 3 tries post-that.
Avoidance is very helpful on this if you are going to one-tank the encounter, which is also a very viable strategy.
I see, wasn't aware of that extra BP generation source.
Almost a chicken and the egg problem then isn't it?
You don't really need to go avoidance heavy until marks are up. Ordinarily I would be skeptical of it being impossible to get DS down before he marks someone but the achievements doesn't say no-marks, it says no more than 1 (we got it last night with 1 mark to my surprise). So maybe it really isn't possible.
However, we didn't get that mark until very late in the fight and he ended with I think 40 BP or so?
This is 10 man, so beast kiting is much easier. But I imagine the same could be done on 25 man.
Of course, if you need to be avoidance heavy at the end of the fight but not the start, there's no reason not to. I just don't think it's so easy to squeeze out 5% more avoidance when we're at 50% avoidance DRs already, unless I'm wrong and Chill of the Throne also pushes you back down the DR curve on dodge (which I'm fairly confident it doesn't).
Muffin I believe the Mark mark(punnnn) limit is <5 for the achieve. At least for 25man.
I'm using the http://www.wowhead.com/?item=50352(I and the http://www.wowhead.com/?item=47735 and I'm sitting at 8% avoidance in my DBS tank gear which is basically my balanced set.
Last edited by Wars; 12-11-2009 at 07:32 PM.
Well on 25man the fight can become quite chaotic once he enrages and starts slapping 30% faster, that is generally when people with marks starts dying and if one of those guys happens to be a healer then its pretty much game over since it becomes a chain reaction (much like anub'arak heroic).
The fight is alot more complex on 25man (done both) but it is very funny!
What another poster said was that in heroic if someone with mark of the fallen champion dies, then he heals for 20%, this makes the "let them die" (and btw when I say that in my head I think of Kirk talking about the Klingons in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country) strategy not viable imo.Originally Posted by Wars
[Today 09:38 AM] Reev: The older I get, the more I think those Greek philosophers were just annoying hipsters.
After I saw this I went back and looked at the 10 man achievement which is actually less than 3, so even more generous than I thought.
Makes the encounter even more interesting to me. You would think that for the achievement they would demand perfect play so to speak, but allowing you to get marked makes me think that they don't think it's possible to keep them off the raid.
But then again it's pretty tough to manage having lots of people marked, short of letting them die, so it just seems like Blizz expects this to be a messy fight all around.
Also, I think you're missing a digit in front of your avoidance number =p.
I'm sitting around 34% avoidance (guestimating how much miss I actually have).
Anyways, back to why I think this is so interesting is I wonder what exactly Blizzards expectations here are. Usually you can look at the achievements and see what's going to make the fight harder. Like ToC you could tell that snobolds and Jaraxxus adds were going to make things difficult for your raid and you wanted them dead. This one is the converse though and encourages you to do the encounter better, like killing the twins in under 3 minutes. But presumably you can complete the encounter without getting the achievement, but from our experience it doesn't seem possible to keep that many marked people alive anyways, but I suppose they could die and you go on your merry way and slowly kill DBS. We just wiped though when we started losing marked people since on 10 man unless it was melee dps, it was a kiter (important) or a healer (also important). So surviving multiple marks and losing marked people feels rangy, but maybe that's how Blizzard expected initial kills to happen. It still seems odd though, kind of like how Razorscales enrage timer was initially so short that you had to get A Quick Shave just to beat the encounter.
Last edited by Muffin Man; 12-13-2009 at 04:19 AM.
Mark of the Fallen Champion is the whole point of the fight and the only reason it is difficult. It's something we simply have to deal with. Granted, we were at ~15 percent when our first Mark went out in ten man, but we are overgeared for 10 man ICC. And Saurfang gains BP much less quickly in ten man.
The bottom line is this: there are several sources of BP available to Saurfang. The only ones that can be controlled by proper play are the Blood Beasts meleeing raiders, and tanks taunting at the appropriate time.
Blood Nova and Blood Boil are granting him unavoidable BP for the fight's duration. Apparently, you can use a Disc Priest to negate any BP gain, but I imagine this will be nerfed/fixed.
Mark of the Fallen Champion related BP can be minimized (but not completely negated) through avoidance stacking.
Getting 5 or more BPs makes the end of the fight more difficult, but it doesn't mean you have to wipe it. A number of guilds didn't get the I've Gone and Made a Mess achievement for 25 man and still clocked earlier kills.
Clearly from looking at the icecrown loot lists, which I know are data mined and I'll not link, you all know where to look, there is EH gear (+armor pieces) which is many of the badge pieces, and avoidance gear (lots of def / dodge / parry) which for warriors is more like the t10 set and other offset pieces.
Obviously the ideal is to collect both sets. With the problem being that you are often sharing loot with another plate tank, making such a collection very time consuming.
So really the question is, which set do you focus on first, especially with your badges. For me, its gonna be the EH / armor set. Now that is partially because I know the paladin tank I play alongside favors avoidance more than I do in his gemming, so he can tank avoidance bosses, while I stack EH like a maniac for bosses of that style.
Assuming it even matters, so far no boss has stressed tank survivability. We stretched Muradin Bronzebeard up to 40 stacks of his debuff fairly easily on our first gunship kill, with judicious use of chain cooldowns. Then again heroic mode will probably bring back the heavy tank damage we've grown accustomed too.
So far, barring a gimmick which favors avoidance, every raid instance has focused on EH first, go with what avoidance comes with your gear.
Regarding Saurfang, I think that gearing for a worst case situation is a mistake. If he has 5 or 6 marks up in heroic mode, you are probably going to wipe anyways to the mistakes which resulted in such an occurrence. Better to focus on EH as always, to create a buffer for situations when healers are stressed or moving. Get the raid to execute properly and keep blood power gains at a minimum that way. Depending on the health of the adds, and his health, I expect the issue with heroic saurfang will be the dps check and proper positioning.
If the healers are having to move on saurfang then the dps are doing something wrong. A mark is going to go up eventually, and once it does every hit increases the time to the next one and the stacks can add up quickly. Now it's not much of an issue on normal, but I have a feeling it might be a necessity, but we'll see when it actually comes out.
[Today 09:38 AM] Reev: The older I get, the more I think those Greek philosophers were just annoying hipsters.
I'm not too sure what to expect. Deathwhisper is about tanking the adds really, she's not hard to handle herself if you are solid with interrupts. Airships isn't that bad either since you should always have a cooldown available on *one* of the tanks when you have to jump over.
It looks like there's going to be at least one other fight where all you handle are adds (the green dragon) and I'm not too familiar with the rest of the locked fights.
That said though, I fully expect Marrowgar to destroy tanks on heroic like Northrend Beasts did/does. Arthas I also fully expect to hit like a convoy of trucks on normal (I'll be a little disappointed if he doesn't actually). So EH will be the way I plan as well.
Marrowgar could get ugly on heroic, depending on how high they tune the saberlash damage. Given that not much else goes on, fires are easily avoided, spikes are easily dpsed, tuning marrow to massive tank damage makes sense. Can't have the healers getting bored, amirite?
If I don't die in the first 5 seconds of tanking Arthas heroic I will be disappointed. If we are taking hits from frostmourne, it better hurt! That's exactly what happened the first time I pulled Algalon, dead near instantly.
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