Gara'jal discussion - elemental

[Recom]

Since Gara'jal is one, if not the most dps demanding boss in the vaults I figured it would be nice to have a proper discussion on how to maximize our DPS.

I would like to discuss 3 topics :
1) Echo of the Elements vs. Elemental Mastery
2) Elemental Blast vs. Primal Elementalist
3) Glyph of Unleashed Lightning ?

A few things before starting :
- I'm in a 10 men guild, there shouldn't be much difference between the 2 setups but still
- I don't use Chain Lightning glyph
- we're 2 healing it atm

About CD usage : since the fight lasts 6 minutes you'll only have 2 FET, 2 Stormlash, 2 ascendance and 3 Elemental Mastery if you spec it.

1) Echo of the Elements vs. Elemental Mastery

Echo is supposed to be better by a fairly small margin except if you need to burst the boss for a short time and this is exactly why I'm considering taking Elemental Mastery. Poping EM right after going out of the spirit realm could be a nice increase in boss DPS at the expense of a small dps loss in the spirit realm.

We BL on pull and I'm on the first spirit group (unless I get the doll) which means that I won't be able to pop EM for 60 or 70 seconds. The fight lasts at most 6 minutes so I wouldn't be able to pop more than 3 EM anyway so delaying the first by 1 min isn't necessarily a bad thing.
In addition, we can only pop Ascendance 2 times so we could very well wait until EM lines up (after 5 min), in fact it would line up with FET too.

Spiritual Innervation increases haste so the 30% bonus haste from EM would put us well over 50% but I think it would still be a nice dps increase, what do you guys think ?

2) Elemental Blast vs. Primal Elementalist

I think EB is better for 2 reasons :
- it's more usefull in the spirit realm than PE
- it benefits from the mastery part of Spiritual Innervation while PE doesn't

3) Glyph of Unleashed Lightning ?

Ths fight involves very little movement, you only have to move to get close to the totem and to get back to the boss, it shouldn't take more than 1 or 2 GCDs each time.

What do you think ?

[Deleted]

I don't use Unleashed Lightning, as like you say there is so little movement. Chain Lightning glyph also isn't needed. I go with EB and Echo because EB helps me burst down the big ghosts in the spirit realm, plus it benefits from the Mastery buff, and Echo benefits far more from Spiritual Innervation than EM does too. I use the first FET, Ascendance and Stormlash on the pull, use the second FET and Stormlash ASAP and I use the second Ascendance when I come out of the spirit realm with 20+ stacks and pop my second Pot there. As you won't get a third Ascendance you can delay the second one for as long as you like

[enq]

Pretty much everything Undefetter said =)

Furthermore, my glyphs here are FS, SWG and TC (yeah that's Telluric Currents). CL would in most cases be a DPS loss, FET is dumb to glyph for a 6 minute fight, UL would surely be a DPS loss with how little movement there is. It's not like SWG pays off much but just for the off chance that you need to dodge a totem or so... and TC also extremely unlikely to matter but if you die or you have to heal (accidents happen with spirit realm) it can actually help.

Yes, it seems we have to dig extremely deep to find meaningful glyphs when CL, UL and FET are out of the question to use.

[zenga]

Do you guys do any special reforging for this boss? I was considering a heavy mastery build since the haste buff, but have no data yet about the uptime of the haste buff.

This is the build I'm running with as well. We are still on the early pulls, trying to figure out what our best raid comp is. Our intend is to go with the 2 healer + 1 disc who dps's. With that in mind I did some experimenting with conductivity as elemental with unleashed fury, where ele could turn into a healing hybrid with healing rain down all the time and spot heals when needed during clearcasting. The dps was surprisingly good, as was the HPS. We are keeping it in mind as an alternative for now if our first plan won't work out. Our resto seems to be hesitant to give it a go trying to push me to take on that role, but so far the dps I'd lose outweighs the extra dps he could do vs our disc.

[Recom]

I did a few sims with the buff kind of simulated (by just adding extra haste, mastery and crit to my stats, there is probably a better way to do this though) and the result is that haste=mastery>crit so I decided not to reforge my gear.

Thanks for the answer guys. For some reason I still think EM is worth a shot so I'm gonna try it a bit tonight and I'll give you feedback (with logs).

[zenga]

3m raid damage short on our first evening, which is about 8k rdps. I changed back to unleashed lightning midfight, as the spirit totems were all over the place and SWG was on cd, and being able to dps the totem while you move towards it is kinda crucial. Most of the tries I wish I didnt have it glyphed, but then there were a couple of tries were it was needed.

[enq]

I really don't think that should be needed, are you like the only ranged or something? That the people who are meant to go in kill the totem is a simple tactic, but not the best one. I often throw filler spells (anything short of LvB/FS) on the totems to help bring them down faster even if it's not me going in. And they are max 2 GCD's away from me anyway.

[zenga]

No we run a full ranged setup (prot war/blood dk - boomkin/ele/mage/spriest/lock - rdruid/hpally/disc) with dps war/hunter/resto shaman sitting out. Mage/boomkin/ele are the 'nukers', spriest and lock the 'dotters'. Our tactic is basically that the lock and spriest call out the team they want to go into the spirit realm consisting of 1 healer 1 dotter & 1 nuker. Ideally the nuker gets as much stacks as possible and ports back after 5s, unless there are too many big adds up. And we try to get the buff on the people with an execute.

Since our groups are formed on the fly it sometimes happened that a totem was killed before someone was inside. It didn't really help that our spriest couldn't see the voodoo and time debuffs on his putbull raidframes, which should be sorted for tonight.

On our 3 best wipes to enrage I had 80 87 and 93 lightning bolts cast (log 1, log 2, log 3). It's me logging so my own numbers should be accurate. Each other bolt seems to proc an overload (roughly, I assume this takes echo into consideration). So yeah definitely room to get an extra bolt or 10 off each fight (including overloads) if I was to unglyph it.

The first SWG is used for running in with prepot, but I guess we could just bring the boss to where we stand (since we lust at the start there is no need for the 4p resto bonus), being able to save swg for when its needed.

[Recom]

So i tried EM last night and it didn't took more than 3 tries before I switched back to Echo... I found it quite hard to use properly (sometimes you have to go to the spirit world right before it comes off cd so you have to delay it) therefore Echo is stronger by a good margin.

[zenga]

Ended up running without UL glyph tonight, and got the kill on attempt 9. Echo beast EM by far here. Ended up with 80k dps, which was exactly the same as our other dps.

[Filthe]

I killed this boss last wednesday on 10-man, and i ran with EoE, EB with the UL glyph. According to my Skada i ended up abit over 80k, but not sure what final numbers were since i´m not the one taking WoL.
I was wondering about when to use Asc? When you have the 22% buff from spirit realm, you normally have it up around 20 seconds when you get up, and you´ll be haste capped on Lava Bursts, so it felt like it fits pretty nicely in there. Problem is, my 10-man runs with 2 warriors, and they will pop their banners during BL which we used sub-20%. So i´m not just sure which would be better
Ended up using Asc half way through the fight when i got a trinket proc just as i got up from the spirit realm with the 22% buff.