Council of Elders 10N Hitting a Brick wall ..

[lientii]

Hello,
I currently lead a somewhat casual 10 man raiding guild and we are currently having issues with Council.

Group makeup -

Tanks:
Warrior
Monk

Healers:
Disc Priest
HPally
MW Monk (Me)

DPS:
Ret pally
Fire Mage
Ele Shaman
Surv Hunter
Destro Lock
(And sometimes Balance Druid)

Here are our logs from last night:
www worldoflogs com/reports/rt-fr6frjw6hvgqa6si/

We have been trying the famous "Burn Sul" strat for the most time, but without much luck.
We have tryed different tank/heal combos, such as 3 heal, 1 tank or 2 heal 2 tank, and it just doesn't seem to be working, Healers can't keep up. Our Brewmaster gets absolutely destroyed from Frigid assult.

Our ret Pally is on Sul full time, interrupting Sand bolt, and the rest of the dps are focusing sul, and swapping to the empowered when needed.

Our disc priest was unavaliable last night, so we attempted 2 Healing it, managed to kill Sul once or twice, but just after, everything fell to pieces.
The Hpally and I (MW) struggled keeping the Brewmaster alive during frigid assult (Prot warrior wasn't as bad).

If anyone notices anything in the logs that may be able to assist me in changing strats around or helping the group out in general, it would be greatly appreciated

[Ergar]

From what i saw after looking at a few goes, your brewmaster's suffle uptime is horrible. It needs to be as close to 100% as possible. Also he has zen sphere, but he isnt casting it too often, when he should cast it every time it falls off.

[ikecc04]

I don't post often but our 10 man casual group was running into the same problems until recently. We 2 tank 3 heal the boss every week. I was unable to pull the logs up as it says the report is expired but ill explain what we do below. I'm guessing if you are unable to kill Sul with 5 dps then dps is low.

We've had great success with stacking all the bosses (Except Kazara -- or roly poly as he's known in our group) and burning sul while cleaving the others. The cleaving is important because it allows you to take some health from the empowered boss while still focusing your dps on Sul. Your group appears to have great spell cleave capabilities. We normally only have 3 ranged switch to the empowered add around 50 or 55 power and designate 2 to stay on Sul for interrupts/burn.

When Kazara is empowered we have all ranged switch. One thing that is very helpful for Kaz is to have your shammie glyph grounding totem and put all the dps in one group. It will minimize the damage taken from the reflect damage but only for players in that group.

I run disc priest as my main and normally help with dps on Sul as well. He should be dead before the end of the 3rd empowerment. Healers can blow all their mana keeping the tanks up and everyone topped off because once sul is dead the fight should be over. Just switch to the empowered boss and burn/kill when they get close to dead even if empower switches.

Our tanks are swapping the frigid assault at 10-12 stacks.

[Deleted]

The far easiest tactic for our group when progressing that boss we found to be simply stacking all bosses up and cleaving, ignoring the loa adds except when they are empowered ofc. Save bloodlust for when Sul becomes empowered and just burn him down. You should only get 1 sand storm which you can cover with healer cooldowns easily.

[Lorol]

As the others say, my guild also found stacking Sul, Malak, and Marli together to be a much easier strat.
1) Start off with everyone on Sul, use hero. Cleave, multidot, but NOT aoe (you have some pretty decent cleave damage in your group).
2) Watch the energy of Malak and have ranged switch to him when he is around 50 energy.
3) Keep melee/tank on Sul to interrupt sandbolt (this provides a lot of the random raid damage, so interrupting it will help tremendously).
4) When Marli empowers just have ranged switch to her when at 50 energy. Make sure to kill the shadow loa spirit asap.
5) Have ranged switch to Kazrajin as soon as he empowers cause he won't be getting as much cleave damage.
6) By the time you get to Sul's empower he should be under 25% health. Have everyone stack on the bosses until the sand adds come out. Once they are out and tanks have them everyone spread back out to not get stuck in quicksand. Healers especially will need to use some sort of threat dump/survival CD as the sand adds like to go after them first. Use raid CDs here.
8) Once Sul dies (which he should right after his first sandstorm, or if your dps is awesome even before he empowers!) the fight is pretty much a guaranteed win. By the time Sul dies we had Malak and Marli around 30% and Kazrajin was 50ish%.
9) We focused Malak down next and he died before he reached his second empowerment.

Oh and my group composition was 2 tanks, 3 healers, 2 melee, 3 ranged. If you have a different number of ranged/melee you may need to switch around how many people switch to the empowered and when.

Good luck!!!

Edit: I went back and looked over your logs (didn't have time earlier, sorry). Looks like you do pretty well during the roughest part of the fight...the first 3-4 min. You even get Sul killed a few times. Without Sul the main things you need to worry about are Tank damage and biting cold from Sul, the shadow adds from Marli, and Overload from Kazrajin. Of these things you seemed to have issues with deaths from Biting cold at times, that is just a healing issue or those players not using personal CDs (or a combination). You also wiped from one of the bosses being at full power, this is just a dps issue. After sul dies just focus dps on whichever boss is empowered, no need to worry about killing one before the other, just switch to the empowered one right when it empowers and you should not have to worry about them reaching full energy. Lastly, for the stacking and cleaving strategy, some of your dps is a bit low, everyone should really be at or above 100k (even tanks can have rather high damage here with all the aoe/vengeance). Sorry again for the late log review!

[thunderdragon2]

lientii what my guild dose is nuke sul at start till 70 energy then go malak till pssesion is broken if kaz is next go to him imeadatly and if marli nuk sul till she has 30 energy altho my guild is 25 man but maybe that will make things easier, but dont ignore the loas

[Spoiledkid]

lientii what my guild dose is nuke sul at start till 70 energy then go malak till pssesion is broken if kaz is next go to him imeadatly and if marli nuk sul till she has 30 energy altho my guild is 25 man but maybe that will make things easier, but dont ignore the loas

You can control which one will be the next. Imho it is better dot Kaz and leave Priestess alone (just some tank damage) so she will be empowered after Malak. Then you can kill Sul before moving to Priestess.

[thunderdragon2]

You can control which one will be the next. Imho it is better dot Kaz and leave Priestess alone (just some tank damage) so she will be empowered after Malak. Then you can kill Sul before moving to Priestess.

i know thats why i said if, but thats the way my guild kills this boss and we are 9/12 normal were are a 25 man raiding guild but same should apply

its usualy kaz 1st after malak with ourt kills

lorol i found when progressing having only ranged swap to possesed expecily on kaz to result in a a wipe because he reflect 10% of the dmg u do to him, tho this may be different for 10 than it is for 25

[Lorol]

lorol i found when progressing having only ranged swap to possesed expecily on kaz to result in a a wipe because he reflect 10% of the dmg u do to him, tho this may be different for 10 than it is for 25

We didn't have any problems having only ranged switch to the empowered, but this could really be all dependent on the dps of raid members and at what energy you start focusing on the empowered boss. The only one we ever had to have melee help out on is Kaz (and only a mobile melee, rogue for us). Switching to Kaz right when he empowers means that its not really a race to down him so the dps dont have to go all out and almost kill themselves :P The only time I really notice the damage from Kazrajin's empower is at the end when he is the only one alive and everyone is killing him.

[Tinykong]

Your monk's damage is extremely low for a stack and burn strat, so is the shuffle uptime. I also find that on this fight, Chi Wave heals for almost 70-80% of a real healer because of the constantly high vengeance.

Breath of fire is also not something he needs to be using on a boss.

[Deleted]

Your brewmaster DPS is quite low. This is our first kill: http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/6...?s=6903&e=7530 can see the brewmaster tops by quite a mile (and was in 490ilvl at the time, opposed to 504 your tank is in) More deeps from a brewmaster = more shields on the raid!

[NRL1515]

Your monk's damage is extremely low for a stack and burn strat, so is the shuffle uptime. I also find that on this fight, Chi Wave heals for almost 70-80% of a real healer because of the constantly high vengeance.

Breath of fire is also not something he needs to be using on a boss.

If he uses Blackout Kick instead of Breath of Fire, not only will he do more damage (Breath of Fire is really only semi-useful on trash, NEVER on bosses - unless you've banked a shit load of shuffle and things are pretty much in hand - but mainly, he should just remove this from his bars during raids), but it will improve his shuffle time as well. It NEEDS to be at least 80%, he's putting a lot of strain on your healers because he's taking way more damage than he should be. The tiger power buff needs to be higher as well, it's our filler spell while waiting for energy to regen.

I see that he took rushing jade wind, but if you guys are doing the burn sul strat, Xuen would help a lot in that regard in that he cleaves, and then once he goes down, you'll really only have Mar'li and Malakk together, and not a whole lot of opportunity to use SCK because Kazra'jin's positioning is not really reliable. Going off his shuffle uptime, obviously chi is harder for him to obtain, so he should refrain SCKing unless there are 3 mobs grouped up.

I'm BrM in our group, and we struggled a little on this boss as well. We went with the burn strat too, but only stacked up Malakk and Sul for cleave while we had Mar'li aggroed onto our OT and we would switch off back and forth from malakk before 15 stacks (usually around 8-10). We put a little dps first on kazra so that we know Mar'li will be empowered after malakk, and once it switches to her, we interrupt her and bring her into the group and aoe down. We did this because our ranged dps had issues trying to dps sul AND kazra, and we couldn't push him past the 25% damage requirement to break empowered.

After breaking mar'li's empower, we usually don't have long before sul is dead, then we can focus the dps onto breaking kazra's empower.

[Nikkaszal]

Make sure your BrM is going into Frigid Assault with as close to a full bank of Elusive Brew as possible, even if it means he caps at 15 for a few seconds before it begins. It's not as big a loss on this fight to have EB capped for a bit until you really need it, because outside of Frigid Assault the melee damage on tanks is pretty negligible.

Tell him to stop using Breath Of Fire. Make him remove it from his bars. Be firm about this.
1) it does piss-all damage to mobs that can't be ignited with BoF's DoT - ie, almost everything in raids outside of trash or small adds like Tortos bats
2) it's 2 Chi that could otherwise have been used for a BOK to extend the Shuffle buff. BrM's without Shuffle up have all the natural hardiness and durability of an overripe banana. His Shuffle uptime is really poor, it should be as close to 100% as fight mechanics allow.

I mean this, get him to take it off his bars until he can manage his Shuffle. Even on fights where BoF can be used to effect, we only use it if we're totally comfortable with sneaking it in without compromising Shuffle.

Have him drop Rushing Jade Wind and pick up Xuen. Our tiger is for single target and monster cleaving. RJW is for sustained large-scale AoE, or for fights like Horridon where you fire it at add spawns to aggro them from afar. On Council, Xuen usually accounts for about 12-14% of my total damqge done, and coupled with the cleave from Keg Smash I am always top DPS for this fight.

[lientii]

Thanks for the feedback guys! I'm taking everyone's opinions into consideration, you have all been very helpful


Also, can anyone confirm that the Shadow Loa spirits will NOT target Melee? I've been stacking the High Priest with Sul/Malak the whole time as I don't recall any melee/Tank getting targeted.

[thunderdragon2]

Thanks for the feedback guys! I'm taking everyone's opinions into consideration, you have all been very helpful


Also, can anyone confirm that the Shadow Loa spirits will NOT target Melee? I've been stacking the High Priest with Sul/Malak the whole time as I don't recall any melee/Tank getting targeted.

i can confirm this wont happen unless theres no1 at range from marli

[lientii]

Our Brewmaster had a read through the feedback we received which resulted in our first kill tonight! Second attempt 3 Heal, 2 Tank

www worldoflogs com/reports/rt-sk0uxyj0q1r995kv/sum/damageDone/?s=1315&e=1784

Thanks again everyone!

[schmearcampain]

The strat we found to work for us:
Raid Comp: 2 tanks, 2 melee dps, 3 ranged dps, 3 healers.

Start of the fight, pop hero, everyone burns sul. We have them all grouped up and ignore the healing adds.
At 30-35% empowerment, ranged dps switch to Frost King.
Melee DPS stay on sul the entire time. trading interrupts. Tanks swap between Frost king and Mar'Li, but I believe they actually DPS Sul for the most part.
When Rollerball empowers, ranged switch to him immediately (since we won't have heroism to help us, and the dmg reflection may keep us from DPS'ing him as hard as we'd like). Again, melee stays on Sul.
Mar'Li empowers and again, ranged switch to her immediately. Melee on Sul. Ranged are also responsible for killing shadowed loa. By 50% empowerment at most, Sul is dead, and melee dps goes to Mar'Li.

From that point on, everyone just swarms the empowered boss. Tanks continue switching on Frost King.

As far as movement goes and avoiding raid damage, which ended being the actual reason we had any trouble with this at all, ranged DPS and healers start the fight in one group. If you view the room from above, it's actually a semi-circle, with the circle cut off by a wall or fence. We start the group at the end of the wall nearer Sul. When quicksand gets cast, it's always at our feet, and we call it out. Everyone moves clockwise around the circle just off to the side of the sand trap. Also, this helps deal with frostbite when Frost king is empowered. Since we're all near each other, the debuff is dealt with and healing all of us is super easy. Cheap AOE heals and it's done. Grounding totems are easier to drop near us too. The only downside here is that rollerball rolls into us regularly. It's not much damage and given how clumped up we are and how little movement we end up doing, it's easier for us regardless of the additional damage.

Keep moving around the circle. When rollerball or marli are empowered, whoever gets biting cold runs outside the group and they get healed.

Once Sul is dead we all spread out and just dps the empowered boss. Anyone with frostbite runs into the melee group around frost king/marli so the tanks can negate the debuff.

[Lorol]

Congratulations! Glad we were able to help