Hi,
we have put 4 hours of progression into the boss (About 35 good tries, 10 tries with disconnects and stuff) and seem to be at a stalemate. I would really appreciate some feedback to put this big turtle on this back.
Setup: Blood DK (Boss), Monk (Kiter), 2 Melees (Frost DK/Warri), 2 Heals (Disc/Shaman), 4 Ranged (Lock, Shadow, Hunter, Mage)
Subs: We have a Resto Druid and a Rogue/Mage available to sub in if setup would be better than it is currently. Blood DK can also sub in his 505 ILevel Prot Warrior.
Average Itemlevel: 516 // Progress: 1/13 HC, T15 was 15/16 HC
Basic Tactic: Kite the Bats (MD with Barrage; Kegsmash), Prioritize Turtles > Boss, 70% WL slow on Turtles, Position Healers in the center, Ranged around them, spread out - Melees ignore Turtles (They AoE them as long as they are in melee range, but dont follow them into the room). Disc heals Raid, Shaman heals Blood DK/helps out on raid.
Best Try was about 40%.
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We whipe because of 3 major problems (about 1/3
a) healers die from cave bats
b) monk tank dies from kiting
c) people dying from rockfall because of fail/positioning/losing shield to turtles/quake etc. OR a breath killing us because our designated kicker cant get to it in time (due to turtles/rockfalls)
So, to solve these problems we adjusted accordingly
a) Our healers are "stacked" on the middle/one side. Ranged are in a circle like formation around the middle. The outer lanes are free for our monk to kite in a circle. Hunter misdirects bats and monk tries to get them as soon as they land on the healers with keg smash. Problem now is, if the hunter misdirects too soon, the bats head straigth for our monk and might fuck him in his "rotation", because they come from differente directions all the time and he can't plan it - the might land directly in front of him and stuff like that. If the hunter misdirects too late (like mid-ish, so the bats come down near the healers), the healers get gibbed before the keg smash barrels land. Might also happen that the hunter doesn't see the timer, doesn't make it in time because he is across the room or the monk is out of md range, stuff like that. But if we skip the misdirection, healers are certainly getting gibbed at one point during the encounter (maybe not the first bat spawn, but the 4th or 5th.
Question 1: How do other monks / hunters / healers handle this issue exactly? we know the theory, we just have problems with the details.
b) Our monk tends to get overwhelmed at some point, usually around the 50% mark. There are just too many bats for him to handle and he tends to die from 1-2 bats reaching him or from new bat spawns. To fix this, we planned on nuking the bats at some point (about 60% and 30%). We only gotten to the 60% nuke part yet, but that seemed to work ok. Bats got cleaned up nicely and he started at 0 again. But sometimes he just messes up anyway or DK tank pulls aggro from healing (like, when he needs to sac a ghoul and has 1-2 large DS heals the moment the bats spawn) and the bats nuke the dk or the monk after he tries to "statue-taunt" them back to him and they come at him at a different direction.
Question 2: Anything else we can do about it / help our monk not dying / help him improve his kiting route, playstyle?
c) We tend to lose alot of people. Usualy its smooth till about 60%. After that, shit starts to hit the fan. We only ever reached the 40% mark once. If the monk doesnt die, our healers dont die, someone else will. Healers are usually low on mana (not really oom, but starting to get worrysome) or people start to fail more (I dont really know, since I'm the blood dk and I have my back to the raid like all the time) or we just lose one because of turtles/quake/rockfall combination which just nukes the shield down / healers dont get him up again fast enough etc. Also, it just happens sometimes that our kicker doesn't get to the turtle in time because there are rockfalls on it/turtles are whirling through the other turtle. We haven't figured out a good way to circumvent that. We try to not stand near a dead turtle during quake stomp and stuff, but in all the hectic you can't really avoid it all the time. Only other thing we could do is, always leave 2 dead turtles up at the same time, but that would reduce the uptime of shell concussion on the boss, therefor stretching the fight?
Question 3: Not really much we can do I guess, but maybe we have some positional errors or sth? I had the feeling that healing was better on this when we tried disc/resto druid instead of disc/resto shaman. But we kinda need the mastery/increases hp from our shaman. I'm kinda lost here what to do.
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Question 4: We are currently running 2 Melees. In theory, we have the possibility to go with 0-1 Melees. But, our Frost DK does the best damage atm. and has the best gear, so I would rather not sit him. Only other option would be to sit our undergeared (505) fury Warrior and sub in a Mage / Boomkin (2nd Spec). Would that make the encounter easier? I can't really decide on that, because our turtles tend to die ok-ish - but I fear that yet another Ranged will clutter our positiong and result in even more chaos.
Question 5: We tried tanking the Bats with our Monk tank at first - but they tend to own him. Blood DK gets owned even harder. Would it be viable to put the monk on the Boss and sub in a 505 Itemlevel Prot Warrior to tank the Bats? I guess we would need to switch to 3 Heals then? We can 2-Heal tanking the bats, heal is scarce as it is already. We would need to sub out the Fury Warrior for another Heal then so we dont lose any Ranged. Would that be a good solution to test? That would almost certainly erase Problems a) and b) if we can pull it off (that is, if the warrior can survive). But we might start to run low on turtles then / can't kill them fast enough because we have to AoE the bats aswell?
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Our Logs:
http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-2w6z3kws6etbul3t/
http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-3mujekdthcw4oijh/
http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-pcrqvlpvab3c6m2f/
http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-pubjmdvgs9pl3evs/