Council and well just about everything

[shandi235]

Hey Guys/Gals,

So my guild went 3/16 hc before 5.2 dropped. We walked into Throne of Thunder the Friday after it was released and killed jin'rokh pretty quickly. We hit Horridon's wall and we able to get him to 54% once before he got nerfed. We quickly downed him this past Saturday (no raid Friday). We are now stuck on council.

Here is our logs for Sunday night, which was our first real night of progression on them: http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/h9e8gmtq092lzjtq/

^in these logs I am the guardian druid. If you dig through the guild's other logs any logs uploaded by Shandi235 are from my pov, Rifleman's streams is from our Mage's pov. Not really sure if that makes a difference.

The strat we've settled on is to clump up Mar'li / Sul / Mallak and just keep cleaving them, ignoring the healing spirits and keeping our ret paladin on Sul the entire time to bring him lowish. I think we might just forgo that in order to make the possessions swap faster since it doesn't really seem like Sul is going to die before he gets possessed the 2nd time.

There are a few things that I have noticed for my raiders to be doing - namely using cooldowns more effectively and double potting, etc. But overall I think our dps, as a whole, is just low. I believe that we can be really great and have the gear to be able to get further than we are. But I need some fresh eyes on this. Any input is very useful and helpful. More specifically I'd like to get the warlock and monk's dps higher. I don't know these classes well enough to really approach them about it.

Thanks folks for any help you can provide!

PS the link to the stream channel in my sig also has the raid night recorded, if perhaps seeing what we're doing would be a better tool.
PPS please forgive any grammar or spelling mistakes. I'm very tired and it's very late

[Summer]

The strat we've settled on is to clump up Mar'li / Sul / Mallak and just keep cleaving them, ignoring the healing spirits

Why would you do this? The spirits heal the bosses quite a fair bit, the only two things required to control them are keeping the lowest HP boss (in your case, Sul I guess) separate from Mar'li and having her tank with a /tar blessed + stun macro, maybe put a skull on it as well, then switching ranged dps on it whenever it spawns. It's even on a timer so you know when it's coming

[Voidgazer]

In our raid we have a couple of melee fighters sit on Sul pretty much the entire time and interrupting his spells to minimize the damage he does. I as a warlock also keep dots and pet on him.

Our strategy has been to bring Sul down before he even gets possessed once. And we've been successful at that all the time. We did not stack the bosses and killed loa spirits every time they spawned.

The most annoying moment is probably when you bring down Kazra'jin low enough for Gara'jal's spirit to leave the body, but he gets stuck in the overload and keeps damaging the raid with shadow AoE.

[Truewiley]

This is a feasible strategy. You have to have a fair amount of aoe dps to make it work though.

If your dps isn't geared enough, I would suggest heroing at the start and burning down sul to 50%. At that point, at most 2 dps(1 might be feasible if he is a beast + other players keep dots up on him) keep burning sul while the rest of the dps burn whoever is empowered.

Melee should be priortized for the sul job as then they won't have to chase kaz everywhere. Additionally, only have 1 dps go onto spirits, this should increase overall damage to the boss.

The goal of this strat is too avoid sul empowerment.

After sul is dead find a healthy balance for dps assignments, you want to get the boss down before he empowers but don't want to burn him down too quickly. We found that it was safe to have 1 melee stay on the priest and the rest went to whoever was empowered.


GL

Warlock Advise: with 4 targets, I would personally play affliction. So if he has an affliction spec he knows how to play, that is what i would do. If he wishs to continue the aoe style (3 targets) as destruction, here is what he needs to improve on

If I am reading logs correctly he only had immolate up 30% of the time, that is unacceptable. Try to keep immolate on all targets if aoeing

Needs to keep Rain of Fire up on those three targets constantly (he's not).

With only 3/4 targets, havoc should be on cd(preferably havoc + Chaos bolt) almost always.

He only cast 2 chaos bolts during try 8 (9:25). Should be a lot more

Edit: Yeah, dps looks low if you are cleaving 3 of the bosses for most of the fight.
Edit2: I think 80k damage per second taken is a lot. Don't know if that is normal for a druid but seems like a lot to heal to me.

Additionally, are you tanking malakk primarily? Druids are supposed to be the best choice for it since you can dodge getting the stacks for longer then other tanks.

[Totaltotemic]

There's no reason to let Sul get empowered. Having a lot of adds and raid-wide damage is just something you should be wanting to avoid for the entire fight. Also, you want the possessions swapping as close to 100 energy as possible, making them swap faster just means that they do more damage towards the end of the fight as they do more damage each time the soul leaves them. Burn Sul to 50%, then get Frost King (as far as I know he's always empowered first) to 75% to eject the spirit, then kill Sul. He should never get empowered, he has by far the worst of the empowering abilities in the fight. You can continue this cycle of picking a priority target and then switching to the Possessed boss at 50 energy to exorcise the spirit in an order of Sul --> Priestess --> Frost King to take out dangerous bosses first. There is no reason to spam AoEs on this fight.

[TEHPALLYTANK]

If you have even 1 other boss on top of Sul your ret should be using Divine Storm over TV every single time, it does appear your ret figured out how to properly keep censure stacked on multiple targets so that is helpful. I can't judge your prot pally since they logged out in ret gear, but if they are using the hit>exp/15%>haste priority they should be above 100k dps. Lock and monk are both doing low dps but I am uncertain if it is them playing poorly or if the classes simply don't perform well on that fight.

[Truewiley]

http://www.raidbots.com/dpsbot/Counc...11100000000000

Destruction appears to be middle of pack, monk is 3rd from the bottom. Lock is over hit cap, which doesn't help but doesn't account all of it. With a 501ilvl, lock should be doing a lot more damage

[reflection]

We also did the burn Sul strategy and it worked pretty good. The only real hard time in the fight is lets say the first two minutest till the ice guy gets disempowered. Just use the 100% energy of every boss completely to nuke Sul down before he gets empowered and you have won Afterwards this bossfight is a cake. You can stack up the bosses when Mar'li gets empowered to have a little bit more cleave damage, because she looses her healing add. Of course you have to separate them again when she gets disempowered. And you have to take care whenever the frost guy gets empowered that ranges have to stack because of this insane debuff. But it's pretty easy after you killed Sul.

[Deleted]

i wouldn't be so sure that the warlock or anyone is really over hitcap, armory has been broken for some time now and shows the wrong tool tips, like too much hit (does for me) or wrong tool tips for trinkets and glyphs, i have no idea why blizz won't fix it

[Deleted]

We did pretty much your tactik and killed it yesterday after a lot of tries with trying out different stuff. (about 60)
Our ilvl is not very high as we have people ranging from 495-500. What we did was to stack them all up, popping all cooldowns (+pots) and burning sul as much as we could. For some reason in our later tries our dps on him got better and better and we actually ended up getting him to 50% before second posession.
Tanks: Warr+Druid
Healersisc+pally+shammy
DPS: Feral+Asassination rogue+Frost dk+Fire mage+Survival hunter
Bosses were stacked at all time and healing adds ignored. The only people who were on the priestess adds when she was posessed were our two ranged (hunter+mage). We had a deathgrip getting it into group and possibly a stun from our feral (talented and no dps loss).

What we mostly did was:
Everyone burn sul to 70% and switch slowly off him.
Have all dps besides two melee switch off him (the people who are slow at switching - feral and rogue) and burn frost lord. Make sure people still cleave and dot onto sul. Make them understand that all the damage that matters is damage on the posessed one and damage on sul.
During the 4 sec period between posessions your dps should be nuking sul.
Then everybody besides the feral switch to kazrajin (make rogue max dps on sul and not abondon everything to switch fast).
4 sec sul burning.
High priestess - feral and rogue stay on sul as much as they can. Cooldowns will be up again which means he takes a ton of damage suddenly. Ranged dps focus on him for a few seconds as well. During this part he went down really fast (30-0%).
Our kill try we actually had sul die when priestess was at -80% energy.

This is one of the bosses where amount of tries is really important. Just get it going and get used to it. Our kill was really clean and very non-clusterfuck.
Healers had to help a bit on dps though (fire ele and constant pennance+smite). Stacking up made it a lot easier to manage.

Here's our WoL: http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/5...s=9946&e=10425

[Cairhiin]

Well, we killed it before the nerf and didn't really burn Sul bar at the pull. We tanked Sul and Marli about 30 yards apart, and the two tanks would taunt Frost King over at about 12 stacks. We'd blow blood lust at the start and nuke Sul till first Loa Spirit. Kill the Spirit, and switch DPS to Frost King. After that we basically just DPSed the empowered add, while our Discipline Priest atonement spammed Sul. We also had a Rogue full time on Sul for interrupts. On our first kill, pre-nerf Sul died right after his first sandstorm. On our second kill Sul died way before he got empowered.

We basically have a Holy Paladin, me in this case, stun the Loa Spirit as it spawns, and have two DPS switch to it. I guess grouping them up can work but we had quite a good multidotting setup and didn't see the need for it (Boomkin, SP, and Affliction lock).

[Deleted]

The main problem I see from looking at your logs is your DPS. I can't speak for all classes, but at that item level at least your warlock should do a lot better. I am in no way a great player, but I did an average of 125K DPS on Council fights on my warlock which has an ilvl of 492, ranking me behind the other two warlocks in our group. Tell your warlock to respec affliction for this fight, I don't see destruction outperforming it in any way.

Tell him to try to keep his dots up on as many targets as possible using SB:SS and to refill his shards with Drain Soul on the loa spirits. Even if he's not used to playing affliction he should be able to easilly put out 110K DPS in his gear.

[Pippo89]

Hey, I'll just tell you how we're doing it:

Raid setup
Tanks: Warrior (me), Paladin
Healers: Shamana, Disc, Pally/Holypriest
DPS: Fire-Mage, Enh-Shaman, DK, Hunter, Feral

- Pallytank goes for Mar'li and tanks her on the right side of the circle/room
- Sul and Malakk are my task, I keep them at the outer ring of the circle and move them if Sand traps are blocking pathways.
- Skull banner and my personal burst for some seconds to push threat on Malak to a very high level, then switch to Sul
- 1 Melee (mostly our Enhancement Shaman) stays on Sul all the time, together with me. We have a kick rotation.
- Malakk empowered, all DPS except the shaman switch to him but keep cleaving Sul.
- Debuffed players move to me and the shaman melee.
- We don't taunt, as we have three melees - one of them staying on Sul - and we want to keep movement for them as low as possible because they also run for the Loa spirit. First freeze I shield wall, second freeze Demoralizing shout, third freeze demoralizing shout / pain suppression / guardian angel. After three freezes=stuns, Sul is dead and the damage significantly gets lower.
- Glyphed 'reflect'-totem on both shamans, it works versus empowered Kazra'jin. Place it BEFORE he charges. Mass Spell Reflect also helps for a short time.
- Nothing special on empowered Mar'li.
- Shortly before Sul gets empowered, the pallytank taunts Malakk of me. Adds & two bosses hitting me, and the stun, is way too much so we do it this way.
- Sand adds: Mocking Banner, Leap/Clap into sand adds for aggro and then I move back to Sul and use defensive cooldowns. I normally have Shield Wall ready for that.
- We pop Heroism and kill Sul before the second Sand Storm, or shortly after the second Sand Storm.
Edit: with a bit more gear we'll just use heroism at the pull and burn Sul.
- Kill Sand Adds, move to next empowered boss.
- Fight gets easier and easier.

You must knock the trolls out of the Empower ASAP, or don't even let them empower. Assign your damage dealers to use their cooldowns accordingly.
They must not be empowered for more than a few seconds.

With our trial rogue with somewhat moderate damage, the encounter was quite more difficult.. We couldn't even afford the trial rogue and our warlock together, as the warlock sucks since 5.2.. When you check the setup above, you won't see them listed :P

When all of our good damage dealers are present, the fight is easier as Dark Power is not dangering us and neither do the Loa spirits.

Gear also helps alot. We even notice the few 522 and 528 gear from past week (and we're only on 3/12, first Tortos tries yesterday and it looks good), and this week we even got some Thunderforged items in 10 man!
(Trash boots, 2x agi-trinket from Council.. Yeah some guys are lucky with their bonus rolls.)

Good luck, keep trying and don't hesitate to temporarily remove your weaker damage dealers for stronger ones in this encounter.
Or non-temporarily if they suck and don't show a sign of knowing their class and the will to improve.

[Kiea]

I've killed it twice, with a gear of average 496-8.

The strategy we used is to position the bosses, like so.

It's a simple fight, but here are the important pointers.

1) Place Mar'li and Sul roughly 30 yards from eachother.
2) Burn Sul with bloodlust at the start and then switch to Frost King.
3) Try and always position Frost King next to the Sul / Marli if they're empowered, tank him randomly when Kazra'jin is empowered.
4) When Frost King is empowered, tank him near Sul for cleavage as much as possible.
5) Make sure there is always a frost trap on Mar'li when the add spawns.
6) Make sure your tank tanking Mar'li has a stun for every add (Prot paladins with Fist of Justice works for this).
7) Only double dot Sul if you're having trouble burning down the empowered add.

Other than that, it's a fight about control and standing out of sandstorms, we killed Sul right before the first sandstorm week 1, with having 1 melee sit on him for intterupting. Week 2 we killed him way before, having 2 melee on him the entire time.

Another thing to make this easier is to 2 healing it, using 3 can be done, but it just makes it much, much harder. The only hard part about this fight for healers are Sul, his sand traps can catch people unaware, uninterrupted his sand bolts are high spike damage, and his sand storm hurts quite a bit once empowered. Using 2 healers allow you to kill Sul before any sand storm if your DPS decentish.

[kerumilas]

The easiest strategy BY FAR for us was to focus almost entirely on burning Sul down before he empowers. Unfortunately what this also means is that the fight becomes very hectic once Kazra'jin gets empowered.

Your best chance is going to be having your disc priest do atonement healing, the extra dps is far more valuable than the loss in healing. When I was fistweaving as a MW monk, the fight become a lot easier.

Our strat was like this:
-Pop hero at the beginning, dps focus on Sul.
-Since your lock is destro, have him focus entirely on the empowered boss (even during hero).
-Have your monk focus entirely on Sul, monks aren't the best for target switching.
-Place a marker in the middle of the room and have ranged stay near it during Malakk empower so they don't need to move far to stack up.
-When an empowered boss is at about 70 energy, have all dps except the monk switch to it.
-When Kazra'jin is empowered, have all dps cleave to him or do some sort of damage while still focusing on their respective boss. Its far safer to gradually do damage to him than wait until high energy. If you start having trouble at this part, use raid cooldowns.
-Sul should die before Kazra'jin is broken out, at which point the fight becomes trivial.

Our kill for reference.

[shandi235]

Sorry for the delay guys. All your posts are really helpful to me! I would like to thank everyone for all the useful information!

Additionally, are you tanking malakk primarily? Druids are supposed to be the best choice for it since you can dodge getting the stacks for longer then other tanks.

Yes, I tank Mallak primarily. I need to do a better job of pressing my keybind for Savage Defense. I septn too much time dictating orders and not enough time looking at my own screen. I'm going to change some reforging and get away from stacking mastery so high in favor of avoidance. I might be able to get away with next to 0 tank swaps if I can get lucky.

Thanks folks, I think we are going to be using these various strats and will find a happy medium for what works with our guild, thanks for the help!

I've been on the warlock and monk about their dps. The monk is going to try and regem away from some of his haste.

As for the warlock I am going to talk to him about what is going on with his incinerate uptime and lack of chaos bolting. Any more insights I can bring to him would be appreciated.

@TEHPALLYTANK can you elaborate on what he can do to up his dps? He's always up for information on how to min/max the bext he can. I will get him to log out in his prot gear

[Truewiley]

i wouldn't be so sure that the warlock or anyone is really over hitcap, armory has been broken for some time now and shows the wrong tool tips, like too much hit (does for me) or wrong tool tips for trinkets and glyphs, i have no idea why blizz won't fix it

It has been right for me the entire expansion. Are you accounting for the 1% expertise as a human wielding a sword?

[Deleted]

If you have the DPS to get down all the adds on horridon (pre-nerf) should your DPS be fine on council after the nerf. Your biggest issue is probably that you dont kill the healing add. I guess it will spawn 4-5 times during your tryes and since Sul will pritty much always will be the one with the lowest amount of health will he recive 20-25% healing during the fight. It does not take a long time to kill the add at all.
And IF you lack the dps to bring the Sul down before he gets empowered... its not the end of the world, 1 sandstorm with adds wont be a problem as long as you pop raid cd's after Sul's dead the healing will become a lot easier so dont worry about the mana used on sandstorm.

So yeah kill the adds, thats what makes your dps look bad.

[dkdk]

You have the DPS to kill sul before the empower here are our logs from last week, it shows you actually having more dps than us (we carried a low dps druid through because we couldn't get our rogue on and our lock is bad at times). What we do is, throw me (DK) and our rogue (druid in those logs) on sul until he is dead. Lust off the bat to burn him and everyone except me + other melee swap to frost after the first taunt.

We (the two on sul) only swap off if anyone gets close to 100 energy and we swap almost full time while kaz is empowered to spread the damage.
Everyone should swap off of Kaz when he is empowered and they are low on hp to Sul.

We tanked sul on one side of the room and mar'li on the other with tanks swapping frost dude. We stuned, rooted or whatever the add and ranged blew it up.

Looking at your longed log (8:52 -to note our kill with less dps was 8:29) the heal made you have to dps sul for an extra over 10 million. This is bad and makes your life much harder, don't do it unless you way over dps the encounter.

[Nume]

I know a lot of people suggest the sul burning strat, and I agree it's the best strat if your group can pull it off. However my group was having trouble, and we'd always end up having him get to his empower, which with it being 4th meant a bunch of sand adds which would go kill healers/etc. I know we could've done it better, but whatever, the strategy we came up with that made the fight very easy, as long as you can manage the normal fight, is to do somewhat the opposite of burn sul. We would start the fight with ranged on Kaz and melee on high priestess, just for about 5 secs, then all go on frost king to break his empower, with noone touching Sul. By doing this, Sul was the troll with the highest HP, and thus the 2nd to empower instead of 4th. With it being so early, there were almost no sand adds, so his empower was super easy to deal with. Once he was empowered we basically switched to the typical stick a couple melee on sul while dpsing empowers for the rest of the fight, and easily killed him way before he'd empower again (due to the fact he'd be 4th in the 2nd rotation since he was lowest hp, so you have 6 full empowers to bring him from 75 to 0). I'm not sure if I'm clear, but just giving this because it was a strategy that worked when we were struggling with the others, a strategy for bad ppl so to speak :P.