ICC heroic tank damage - tuned too high?

[Fayre]

After raiding ICC last night (mostly heroic modes), it's fairly apparent that the removal of significant portions of our armor has had a significant impact on incoming damage. To the extent that some of those fights are almost "untankable".

Festergut heroic was a case in point. I was basically two-shot by him when he was at two stacks in just over a second.

[23:12:12.484] Festergut hits Fayre Dodge
[23:12:12.562] Totally Earth Shield Fayre +*385* (O: 6896)
[23:12:12.781] Mobé Riptide Fayre +0 (O: 1838)
[23:12:13.062] Toby Renew Fayre +*0* (O: 4295)
[23:12:13.281] Totally Riptide Fayre +0 (O: 1607)
[23:12:13.328] Festergut hits Fayre 30343 (O: -1, B: 13004)
[23:12:13.546] Festergut Gastric Bloat Fayre 13698 (O: -1)
[23:12:13.546] Fayre hits Festergut 3418 (O: -1)
[23:12:13.718] Mobé Earthliving Fayre +1124
[23:12:14.093] Fayre Retribution Aura Festergut 308 (O: -1)
[23:12:14.484] Fayre Heroic Strike Festergut 19141 (O: -1)
[23:12:14.484] Festergut Gaseous Blight Fayre 1518 (O: -1, R: 250)
[23:12:14.500] Festergut hits Fayre 35187 (O: 8039)
[23:12:14.625] Fayre Revenge Festergut 15849 (O: -1)
[23:12:15.187] Fayre dies

That's 101,789 incoming damage after damage reduction but before block. I have about 30,000 armor and around 75k HP buffed (slightly more with procs up). I have 4pc T10 277 and am gemming for stamina. Admittedly I reforged some items with dodge/parry towards expertise, but I should still have had pretty respectable avoidance given diminishing returns are hitting quite hard.

I have to admit to being at somewhat of a loss as to how I could gear differently or the healers could have saved me. An Indestructible and a Flask would have helped, but I doubt that'd have been enough to avoid my death. Yes, I could reforge towards Mastery and gem avoidance, but I don't think even that would take unblocked hits off the table... so the chance would remain of two back-to-back hits of that kind of magnitude. Consider that Festergut was at 2 stacks of his self-buff, not 3. I'm not sure whether we'd have had enough cooldowns to chain them for the full duration of both 2 and 3 stacks.

I'm now rather dreading facing Sindragosa tomorrow.

Has anyone else noticed this, and how are you dealing with it?

[Tinytankz]

We are 3 healing 10 man hard fester where we used to two heal it and two of our healers are only healing 1 guy at the time (whoever the hell has fester attentions) You must also be rolling CD's internally and externally for the majority of the fight and where you used to 2 tank it there is a possibility it may need as many as 4 tanks to complete now as anyone without CD's is going to be majorly messed up. if you can have one tank with only 2-3 stacks of the bloat on him make it through blight you should be DPSing him down before his second 3 inhale stack. Also you can try 3 tank healing it (and i mean 3 guys who are doing nothing but bomibng heals on tanks) that may sound extreme but don't know it till you try it.

[Dragaan]

First thought - are you sure Demo shout was up? If demo shout and inspiration/AF are both down, ur gonna take some big hits. Seems ordinary to me.

[Fayre]

I checked the log. Demo shout was up when I died. AF was also up.

I've seen a GC post suggesting they've made a few fixes to ICC this week. Hopefully his damage was one of them.

[Blacksen]

We had no problems this week. Our warrior and paladin tanks both fully reforged mastery and are sitting at 102.4% passively, which throws up a -30% damage taken aura. Just reforge any +hit rating or +expertise things to mastery. For items that don't have hit or expertise, reforge whatever your highest rating is (so if you have lots of dodge, reforge dodge. If you have lots of parry, reforge parry.)

[Mr.Winkle]

From a healing perspective tanks certainly felt squishier, which i'm assuming is due to the armour reduction, but it would appear Blacksen has the answer.

I've read a blue post saying that they were watching the post 4.01 ICC raids to see if there was any drop in say the number of LK HC kills and i don't think there were any dramatic changes so it would appear we still have the tools available to cope with the fights.

[Fayre]

Thanks. Having seen some of the maths around the mastery ratings, I've reforged considerable rating stats towards mastery and we'll see if that helps in this reset.

[uglybbtoo]

I've read a blue post saying that they were watching the post 4.01 ICC raids to see if there was any drop in say the number of LK HC kills and i don't think there were any dramatic changes so it would appear we still have the tools available to cope with the fights.

LOL there will be a drop off anyhow because alot of guilds are sitting it out atm with the Brez issue the rez issue and countless bugs so far.

How many peeps got rez'ed only to find themself with 1HP at the GY on a pvp server .. :-)

[Duvon]

just to make certain people who don't read official sources or mmo-champion also gets this, the armor mechanic for Cataclysm has been implemented, which means that mobs over lvl 80 (all bosses) hit much harder.

Oh and as said, some fixes were made, so damage should be more as usual now.

[Bigbad]

I tanked ICC25 hc without any problems yesterday. I was trying to achieve some high dps on rotface and i had the problem that he didn't hit hard enough. Average vengeance was at 4400 ap with max 7100, while i had 82k hp so 8200 max ap from vengeance. Guess my gear is too good atm and rotface hits like a pussy, was running with 23% dodge 23% parry and about 46% block raidbuffed. Will switch in some dps gear next time and see if i can beat the 8k dps from this week.

Fester will of course hit harder then rotface as some other bosses will as well but i didnt have any problems surviving the first 11 bosses on hc.

[Dragaan]

We had no problems this week. Our warrior and paladin tanks both fully reforged mastery and are sitting at 102.4% passively, which throws up a -30% damage taken aura. Just reforge any +hit rating or +expertise things to mastery. For items that don't have hit or expertise, reforge whatever your highest rating is (so if you have lots of dodge, reforge dodge. If you have lots of parry, reforge parry.)

While the mastery helps a lot on most bosses, this post was made before they announced that they were making some changes to the damage output of some bosses. I actually think they did lower the damage a bit after the first week of 4.0 on some fights.

For those of you considering reforging mastery on everything - Before you run out and do that, remember the biggest reason to go for mastery is to get unhittable. I don't think it's even possible to reach unhittable as a warrior w/o most of the best gear in the game. If you can't reach unhittable, it might be best to stick with EH and leave ur avoidance the way it is.

[Fayre]

Well, reporting back, they've definitely done something to Festergut. Thankfully.

Last night, he was doing about 3.5k incoming damage per second over the course of the fight, with spikes up to around 12,000. Last week, it was more like 5-6k incoming DPS, with spikes up to 25k!

So, the issue is rather resolved in his case.

[Goros]

Just keep in mind you have less armor and less armor mitigation now, but more avoidance (so going for an unhittable set is again an option for icc).

I noticed some hits were coming in harder than usual, but that's just the armor component. As for the larger hits on fights like fester, tanks might have to consider using cooldowns again!