[Question] Advice on Tortos normal 10-man

[Butler to Baby Sloths]

The key to the fight is getting that first turtle down to interrupt the breath. When you can do that, the rest will follow pretty quickly.

[TEHPALLYTANK]

If all else fails, try this! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUx66ZEDjnQ

[Sonnillon]

This is SPARTA!!!! Anyhow, 27 wipes and best attempt was 10%.

Image1 and Image2 . Unfortunately it is gear dependent (aka more shiny loots you have the better you do). As with our lowest iLvl and lowest HP players used stamina potions, just cause the Quake to hurt less. So we need more gear. But since it is reset today, so we can go from scratch.

What annoys me the most is that the bats most of the time go to our paladin tanking Tortos x_X, few times they go after someone else, but the few hits he gets from bats is enough to almost kill him. So I just end up picking those up from him.

I guess we just need to have the same team next time we are on Tortos or close to it.

[TEHPALLYTANK]

Your paladin tank is being rather bad, he should not ever be taking Snapping Bite without SotR up. Looking through your latest log he is taking full hits from snapping bite over 50% of the time on some attempts as well as taking full hits from Quake Stomp. Your pally tank is having a skill issue, not a gear issue. For a fight like tortos with consistent high damage he will be better off using Divine Purpose as extra procs provide more room for error on a pally tank. I would suggest you switch the tanks so that the pally has bats, then he only need worry about having SotR up for every Quake Stomp (if he doesn't have SotR up or a major CD while bats are on him and Quake Stomp hits then he is pretty much dead). Your low stam players are actually useful because Quake Stomp does % hp damage rather than a flat amount, the lower health they have the lower damage it deals so don't have them try to boost their stam.

[Cyklik]

Hopefully you don't mind me piggybacking onto your thread here, Sonnillon, but we're in a relatively similar situation and could use some guidance/constructive criticism.

Monday night was our first night on Tortos (not allowed to post links yet, so -- WoL /reports/1crfk926imynpmnd/), and as you can see, we made limited progress. For quick reference, here is our raid comp:

Tanks

• Blood DK
• Prot Pally

Healers

• Resto Shaman
• Resto Druid
• Disc Priest

DPS

• Elemental Shaman
• Destro Lock
• Survival Hunter
• Fury Warrior (considering switching to Arms)
• Assassination Rogue

While there were a handful of wipes due to lag and disconnects, the primary source of our troubles seemed to be "random" deaths to the heavy Rockfall set following Quake Stomps. Based on the advice I've gleaned from this thread and others like it, I have some tweaks in mind for when we get back in this week, but I'd love to hear any specific feedback. Some of the major points:

• Tanking - We kept our DK on Tortos and Pally on bats for every attempt on Monday. Would we be better off switching roles? I assume putting a Pally on Tortos would generate a lot of healing threat on bats which, while reducing the likelihood of a healer getting threat, would probably make it challenging for the DK to pull and pile them. Would the big healing numbers from the Pally justify such a change?
• Turtles - I'd mistakenly only had the 3 ranged dps burning the first turtle, which led to several wipes because of the turtle not being dead in time for the interrupt or the kicker not having enough time to position before the breath. When we get back in there, I'll ensure that all dps burns the first turtle so that we don't run into that issue again.
• Bats - I also did not have us kicking extra turtles into the bats to speed up the burn, which I will correct moving forward. As a fairly strong AOE dps, should I (the elemental shaman) be splitting my dps between turtles and bats, sticking with turtles (as we have 2 melee), or prioritizing bats? I just want to make sure they're all/mostly dead before Quake Stomp.
• Quake Stomp - This is where we tend to fall apart. On our decent attempts, we were making it through 3 Quake Stomps with the assistance of my Ancestral Guidance, a resto Healing Tide, and then a SWG Tranq. I've seen strategies mentioned where the raid will all move to the sides of the room at the beginning of the stomp to spawn the Rockfalls and then move back into the center to minimize damage. Is this a common and/or useful method of dealing with them? Is there some other strategy we should be employing? Our disc priest was having trouble timing his Spirit Shells on Monday, but he's preparing for our next night and should be able to help mitigate much more of the damage. We also read that good Cascade usage can be a big help on the fight, so any tips on that would be very welcomed.

Beyond Tortos, I am concerned about our individual performance. I know I goofed a couple of times during all of our attempts (splitting focus between leading the raid and managing my own performance is usually easy enough, but I tunneled on a few of our attempts), and I know there is plenty of room for me to improve my numbers and raid awareness. I guess I'd like some harsh but constructive criticism of the individuals in the raid, including myself. For a more complete picture, here are our logs from the night before -- WoL /reports/i5shirw1d3hl82co/

I am confident we can progress through this tier, and I would like to see each of us make whatever improvements we can in order to be successful.

[TEHPALLYTANK]

Cyklik, your paladin tank only mitigated 27 of the 60 Quake Stomps. That is very much a problem that they need to solve, it is quite possible to survive Quake Stomp while tanking bats as long as you are high enough health (80%-90%) and have either a major CD up or SotR up. Considering where you are in the tier I think a haste build would serve your paladin tank much better, also my previous advice also holds true in that Divine Purpose is likely a more useful choice for this fight considering it allows for a larger number of errors. Swapping out Sacred Shield for Eternal Flame should prove very useful in threat generation on the bats, it is also useful if you pool HP before a Quake Stomp so you can SotR the Stomp then EF right after to top yourself off. They should also swap their Jeweler's gems to stam since it is the JC gem for stam provides 2x the value instead of the 1.5x it does for other stats, those bats do get extremely troublesome if your bat tank doesn't have high enough of an HP pool to prevent them from healing up.

Once our shaman gets it up I can send you the link to one of our Tortos kills if you'd like to see how we executed the fight.

[Cyklik]

Thanks a ton for the really specific feedback there, TEHPALLYTANK! I will be pointing my raiders to this thread, and would very much appreciate any additional logs and/or feedback folks can toss our way.

[Braenne]

Thanks for the info. I was definitely not paying close attention to mitigating the quake stomps. That's something that easily correctable when we head in there this week. For the most part we would have 90% of the bats down before a quake stomp would go off when we were actually making decent attempts, but as Cyklik said that was because he was helping to dps them down.

I'm not 100% on swapping out for more stam. I wasn't ever dieing to bats unless we were in a wipe situation or had a healer down. I used to run a haste build instead of my current mastery build, but switched back over to mastery as I feel like I have a little more mitigation and with the change to GC stacking slightly more mitigative stats and mastery seem to reduce the incoming dmg. I think the difference in the two builds at this point is fairly small.

I'll definitely give EF a whirl. I'm sure it'll do me more good than SS in this fight. I'm wondering if it should be linked in to DP or if I can maintain use of HA. Even though HA is more burst I tend to like it's reliability more than the randomness of DP. I can see DP working much better in a pure haste build as well. I'll give both combinations a go and see what works out better.

Thanks for the inputs.

[eschatological]

BTW what slows but the Ice Trap + Concussive Shot from Hunter work on turtles to slow them down? I tried typhoon, but that didn't have any effect.

Lots of good advice in this thread, but I want to say something here. As a heroic progression hunter, ice trap is a huge pain in the ass. What it does is overwrite any existing slow of equal strength (chilblains, piercing howl, etc), and then when they leave the trap, there is zero slow on the add at all, causing you to reapply your slow or have adds completely un-slowed. I am currently verboten from using ice trap on almost everything ever. Our DK can much more easily snare with a chilblained pestilence. Glyphed CoExhaustion is of course, your best option - don't really know what locks give up to take that glyph though, might not want to do that since a 50% snare is more than enough.

This issue first reared its head on H-Madness of Deathwing when you needed to snare bloods on the last platform, still hasn't been fixed.

[Sonnillon]

Yeh, we came to this discovery ourselves last reset. As warrior was bit annoyed as he had to reslow the turtles once they have cleared the trap. So we stopped using traps all together. But once we sorted that, things became much more controlled.

As for the healing aggro which paladin tank generates while tanking Tortos, works out okei. As most of the time bats will go to him, which makes it much more easier to pick up. He had the habit of concecration+CD to help kill the bats the moment they got into melee range, but I told him that he shouldn't do that before I've established threat. As with his vengeance and my practically none existent vengeance before the bats, it is hard to get the bats off from him.

[eschatological]

TBH, there's no reason why there can't be a tank swap there to take advantage of that vengeance. Paladin tanks who use Battle Healer are putting out massive healing threat, which is basically the only threat which goes out to the bats til they reach the ground. In your setup, you could probably take the boss right before bats, and he can pick up the bats and basically wreck them.

I know in normal and heroic people are using a Tortos tank and a bat tank, but there's no reason why there can't be a swap.

[Definition]

I'd have your rogue spec into Elusiveness and feint every quake stomp , he didn't use feint once. He also got hit by a few rockfalls, Which he can cloak if he's going to be hit by them. Also he only had 60% rupture uptime.

[laplacedemon]

Our disc priest was having trouble timing his Spirit Shells on Monday, but he's preparing for our next night and should be able to help mitigate much more of the damage. We also read that good Cascade usage can be a big help on the fight, so any tips on that would be very welcomed.

While the timer for Quake is pretty accurate, I wasn't able to SS all of them either, because sometimes you have to move from the turtles. For those times, your disc priest can switch to Inner Will, use Power Infusion and cast PW:S on everyone. I leave the bat-tank to last and use Cascade on either of the tanks (usually the bat-tank) when boss is almost finished with casting Quake. I also tried Halo and that's almost as good as Cascade, but has to be cast after Quake.

[dkdk]

Our first kill wowprogress says we were 500 avg ilvl, did about 850k raid dps here is the log. Three healed and killed him in 7:11 which was into his enrage where he just keeps throwing turtles out. We stack the bats up by the other tank so that cleave still hits the boss and melee don't have to move as far. Make sure people (tanks especially) dodge the rockfall, that was our biggest issue, tanks not moving for rockfall.

[Cyklik]

TBH, there's no reason why there can't be a tank swap there to take advantage of that vengeance. Paladin tanks who use Battle Healer are putting out massive healing threat, which is basically the only threat which goes out to the bats til they reach the ground. In your setup, you could probably take the boss right before bats, and he can pick up the bats and basically wreck them.

I know in normal and heroic people are using a Tortos tank and a bat tank, but there's no reason why there can't be a swap.

I don't know why I hadn't thought of this, but it seems like an excellent idea that we will definitely have to try out the next time we're in there.

I'd have your rogue spec into Elusiveness and feint every quake stomp , he didn't use feint once. He also got hit by a few rockfalls, Which he can cloak if he's going to be hit by them. Also he only had 60% rupture uptime.

While the timer for Quake is pretty accurate, I wasn't able to SS all of them either, because sometimes you have to move from the turtles. For those times, your disc priest can switch to Inner Will, use Power Infusion and cast PW:S on everyone. I leave the bat-tank to last and use Cascade on either of the tanks (usually the bat-tank) when boss is almost finished with casting Quake. I also tried Halo and that's almost as good as Cascade, but has to be cast after Quake.

Really appreciate these class/spec specific tips, I will make sure our raiders keep an eye on this thread.

[Qly]

Blow your cooldowns at the beginning of the fight, as long as the first turtle goes down befre the roar the rest is trivial;
just make sure to:
A: i know it seems dumb, but mark the frst one to come out, that way your dps can focus and they know they got the good one
B: slow in anyway you can (hopefully you'll have a DK)

[Cyklik]

Well, thanks to the advice here, we were able to kill that massive bastard tonight. WoL /reports/rxl1ots53z1scm2d/

Really appreciate all the help! Time to go nod off to the first several minutes of Megaera over and over again!

[Sonnillon]

Tortos fell last night. At first it was WTF, why the bats are all over the place when they reached our prot. pala tanking Tortos. Then after a while GM said, didn't we have a rogue trix you the bats... Oh well, since we didn't have a rogue along, we said to our hunter to MD the runaway bats to me (guardian) and well things worked out better. We didn't try the tank swap, but paladin managed to hard stun the bats after every 2 minutes and well bit before the bats hit prot., but Disorienting Roar on the bats (it breaks on damage) gave me enough time to make sure that I had all or most of the bat aggro.

And after wipes and deaths people finally started to paying attention to Rockfall as well, as they got used with the fight more and more. All in all, it was not a perfect kill, but still something.

This is our log - http://worldoflogs.com/reports/enbf6...?s=7171&e=7563

GL to all who is stuck on him, all I can tell you is, the more pulls you make with the same group, the more accustomed they get to the fight and in the end moving from Rockfall and Whirl turtles becomes something they do naturally.

[tist006]

We managed to down Tortos after a few pulls but wiped countless times on Council :/. One big thing is to have a reliable kicker and turtle slows.

[stellvia]

IMHO if you are executing properly, the bats should be dead by the time Quake Stomp goes out. Drag the bats to the front of the room so the Tortos tank can help AOE, kick a shell through the bats, etc. I was getting 100k SCK crits during AOE on them. At the very least there should only be maybe 1-3 left at low health for Stomp, in which case you just finish them off right after that. Or hold onto them and kill with the next bat phase.