Need tank advice for Gara'jal the Spiritbinder 10 normal

[naarua]

I was wondering if anyone could give me some tips and suggestions on cooldown roataion for Gara'jal the Spiritbinder 10 normal mode I just seem to take alot of damage when im tanking him. I am keeping shuffle and guard up 24/7 maybe im gemmed wrong or what not but some advice would be great thanks. I am also using my other cooldowns when they are up so im not sure whats wrong. I don't have any logs but im asking our RL to run WOL tonight so i can see whats going on.

my armory http://us.battle.net/wow/en/character/gilneas/Naarua/simple

[Tengenstein]

Guard is ok, its not really very good as the shadowy attacks bypass absorbs. It's quite possibly down to how you use purifying brew, I tend to favour using it right after I take a shadowy attack to to the face. I believe monks tend to prefer Haste/hit/exp as secondary stats and tend to either those stats or agility, stamina or a combination of all of the above. Crit/dodge/parry tend to be bad; monks have poor scaling with parry rating, and whilst crit and dodge are nice 1agility is worth 0.9crit rating and 0.9 dodge rating and 2AP, so if you;re ever in the place to choose crit or dodge or agility, you go for agility as it really gets you more raw stats, even with the gems having twice as much secondary stat.

[naarua]

so would have the xuen trinket have been better for tanking ? since it has agility on it

[Tengenstein]

Monks and Druids are in lucky place that they can use both the agi and stam DMC trinkets. The choice beween agi and stam is is a personal one depending on what encounter your doing, how you tank, and how your healing team is setup. There is no answer that will always be right you'll need to make the judgmenet call on a figh by fight basis, do you want to take less damage or be able to survive bigger spikes?

For Garajal i would have gone with Agility. as the less damage you take, the less damage the linked guys with voodoo dolls take too.

[Kemen]

Try reading the guide on mmo-champion forums for general stat and play questions if you need them. I think ej have just started a brewmaster guide too.

The only thing with gara'jal is the shadowy attacks. As they bypass absorbs, you should be dodging/parrying all you can. Shuffle should already have a high uptime, make sure elusive brew is up during shadowy attack as much as possible.

Also note that as the fight goes on, if there are too many adds alive in spirit realm, you and the rest of the raid will take lots of damage from them. Which is the dps's problem for the most part.

As your stagger damage is also done to voodoo targets, purify earlier than usual.
Probably save big cooldowns for the last 20%.

[Tielyn]

One of the things that I advise my tanks is to watch who their healer is at any given moment; we have one great healer, one good healer, and one weak healer, of which we get two out of the three plus a boomkin on an average night. The healers have to contend with damage hitting three different characters simultaneously -- usually one of them being themselves. I'm a druid, and I'm balanced around rage generation, so I'm keeping Savage Defense up most of the time. I save my heavy damage cooldowns for the weak healer healing for when he falls behind, and I use my self-heals for when he's really behind.

Shadowy attacks are a lesser concern: over half his damage is from Melee, so anything you can do to avoid his melee hits is what you want to do as your top priority.

I tried to post the damage taken logs from my last week's run, but it drops the column headers, which isn't terribly useful. Suffice to say that he throws few shadow attacks for more damage per, but it's the constant rain of melee blows that does the most damage.


-Tielyn

[SonnyJr]

this is so easy to tank....i barely do anything just hold aggro which is all a tank is suppose to do none of this taunt and switch crap..tank and spank and a few other things for teh dps to do....Stoneguards is one of the worst fights to tank they require too much from tanks, elegon to and this dancing stuff on Will...not until i actually tried to dodge the swipes on Will did ppl start dying..better off just standing there and healing through it then we downed him....Lei Shi was the worst experience..i think ppl just make these harder then they need to be...Like Sha of Fear ppl treat it like its so hard...its incredibly easy to tank and so is Empress but as always ppl find something to whine or complain about....

[Tengenstein]

I pity your healers if you're eating every single devastating Combo it throughout the entire fight.

[Fetzie]

this dancing stuff on Will...not until i actually tried to dodge the swipes on Will did ppl start dying..better off just standing there and healing through it then we downed him

So, how much damage do the bosses do if you have zero Armor?

Not to mention the fact that you can do anything between 5 and 10 million additional damage to the boss by not failing the dance. I don't see how people suddenly started dying because of something that you do that affects absolutely nobody. Unless they were being complete idiots and that just happened to coincide with your dancing, so you made the (false) assumption that your dancing caused the wipe (it didn't) so that you could just stand there and do nothing.

[Aggathon]

I think he has to be talking about LFR

[Fetzie]

I think he has to be talking about LFR

There is still zero correlation between the tank dancing properly and the raid dying.

[Aggathon]

There is still zero correlation between the tank dancing properly and the raid dying.

Oh I agree, I just feel like the only way the tank can just not move and still survive is if it's in LFR.

[jere]

Does devastating combo also do damage (I've only done it on LFR and never paid much attention to the attack's damage if any plus I usually dodge them all)? If so, between that and the stacking debuff, I could see a tank moving the boss all over the place (incorrectly) causing problems for melee (again, not sure if melee stay in on Normal like they tend to on LFR).

[Tengenstein]

oh yes it does. but given that the order of the strikes is random it doesn't really matter wheter the tank moves or not as the melee are going to have to dance if they want to melee.

[Fetzie]

It does 500k damage (or 520k if armor pen debuff is present) on all difficulties except of heroic, where it does 1M damage because you have to dodge 10 swings instead of 5.

The boss turns independently of the tank movement during the strikes. The only thing that changes if the tank moves is that he takes a lot less damage, and does a lot more damage.

[Aggathon]

And really, the tank can just reset after the devastating combo and just face him in the same direction again, and it's REALLY hard to actually move the boss since if you try they just pull you back to them. Not dancing makes zero sense.

[Gregasaurous]

this is so easy to tank....i barely do anything just hold aggro which is all a tank is suppose to do none of this taunt and switch crap..tank and spank and a few other things for teh dps to do....

Are we in a dungeon? Cause something reeks of troll.

[Fetzie]

Are we in a dungeon? Cause something reeks of troll.

To be fair, Gara'jal does fixate the tank, so in theory it doesn't matter what you do there so long as you are first on the threat meter after the tank is sent down.

[Gregasaurous]

I was more referring to his idea of "a tanks job" in general.