DK Tanking - Megaera

[Copperfil]

Copperfil (blood dk) - US - Uldaman (realm) - Alliance - Serendipitous (guild)


I would like to ask you guys how I can improve my DK tanking skills- given I died first a few attempts (mostly transitioning from the red head to the blue one). I think my gear is OK for this fight but overall I felt like I could do better.

We were doing the GRGRBGR strat. Some of our attempts were solid- had some positioning issues at first, then some people getting killed by Cinder, then other issues.

Usually I do something like this:

Spam death strikes-> especially before and after the breaths for max absorb/heals

I do not use cooldowns on the first snake- dmg is relatively low. We were downing the first one right after 4 breaths (the first one takes more time since we don't have the rampage to start dpsing- on the other heads we down them right before the 4th breath).

On the second head I use Rune tap+Vampiric Blood macro and bone shield if needed. The good thing is we're not having issues on rampage so most of my short cooldowns are up by the next head (VB/RT and healthstones). I save AMS for the 3rd breath (especially the red head) when its up.

I'm saving the pet sac for when my health is 25% or less- using it more as an emergency heal rather than on cooldown.

I use IBF for the 3rd and 5/6th head depending on the damage I'm taking.

Please feel free to comment/critic on our logs/strat/my gear- I would really appreciate it.

[Zethras]

Copperfil (blood dk) - US - Uldaman (realm) - Alliance - Serendipitous (guild)


I would like to ask you guys how I can improve my DK tanking skills- given I died first a few attempts (mostly transitioning from the red head to the blue one). I think my gear is OK for this fight but overall I felt like I could do better.

We were doing the GRGRBGR strat. Some of our attempts were solid- had some positioning issues at first, then some people getting killed by Cinder, then other issues.

Usually I do something like this:

1)Spam death strikes-> especially before and after the breaths for max absorb/heals

I do not use cooldowns on the first snake- dmg is relatively low. We were downing the first one right after 2)4 breaths (the first one takes more time since we don't have the rampage to start dpsing- on the other heads we down them right before the 4th breath).

On the second head I use Rune tap+Vampiric Blood macro and bone shield if needed. The good thing is we're not having issues on rampage so most of my short cooldowns are up by the next head (VB/RT and healthstones). I save AMS for the 3rd breath (especially the red head) when its up.

I'm saving the pet sac for when my health is 25% or less- using it more as an emergency heal rather than on cooldown.

I use IBF for the 3rd and 5/6th head depending on the damage I'm taking.

Please feel free to comment/critic on our logs/strat/my gear- I would really appreciate it.

1) Don't spam death strike, wait till you take a lot of damage, then death strike, and you'll get a much larger bubble, not that matters, Megaera is mostly spell damage, which Blood Shield doesn't absorb.

2) You're getting 4 breaths? That's a dps issue then, in my guild, we get 2 breaths, the damage is much much less.

I was going to tell you to do Bone shield for the first breath, and AMS for the second breath, and rinse/repeat each time it's your turn to tank a head, but seeing as your dps is somewhat lacking, it won't work so much.

My advice, tell your dps to step their game up, there's no reason to be getting 4 breaths. 3 maximum, but 2 is really the ideal number.

[Nillo]

Pretty simple - if you're taking 4 stacks that means your raid dps is lacking a lot and there's little you can do as a tank to stay alive other than increasing your own dps. 3 healing this with some of dong less than 70k dps is a problem you only have around 550k raid dps when even the pug I did last raid had more than 700k (that is 3 healing it with a low dps second tank)

What i found out from the logs:
1) Only around 6 DS/min (should be 9+)
2) More HS than DS (both of them have the same cd meaning the only way you get more HS is if you waste Death Runes on it)
3) Judging by 1 and 2 ... use Runic Corruption instead of Blood Tap since you're obviously not making use of it.

[Deleted]

First week we did megaera I got 4 breaths each head and I never required any outside healing, over 80% of the healing on me was from myself (random smartheals hit me once in a while). Basically just rotate ams (I kept it unglyphed, makes the damage smoother for the harder breaths, if you get very few you can glyph it), vampiric blood (I was using 2p t14, but you should manage anyways if you call for a sac when necessary) and glyphed ibf (really important for meg) with 2-3 saved up death strikes. You'll never take any significant damage from the breaths with a cd+death strikes, the normal attacks barely hurt and you still have erw/ghoul sac for emergencies. Assuming that you have decent gear (510+) the only time you'll ever need direct heals if you do this properly is a high stacked debuff from the red head.

If you execute the above properly I doubt you'll ever die as a dk on megaera, but if you for some reason still have issues just roll with conversion or lichborne as well. There's not really any burst damage if you use your other cds properly (so you hardly need pact/purgatory), and these should ensure that you don't die even if your healers decide to not throw a single smart heal for two minutes.

[Copperfil]

Thank you for the feedback ! I will work on these issues and help my raid improve their dps.

If you or anyone else have further comments/critics they will be greatly appreciated!

[Aeidial]

I generally tank this fight in about half-dps gear. I find that the damage I take is so low that improving my dps and the overall raid's dps to be more important on this fight. Most of the damage taken on this fight is spell-damage so that basically nullifies our mastery. Only thing you can do for that is increase your EH or reduce the amount of spell damage done(aka kill the boss quicker). I don't pop my CD's during rampage, because that's when our healers are using theirs. If you pool a few death strikes for the breaths you'll basically heal yourself and have a large enough shield to take almost no damage from the head's melee attacks. I raid 10m and we found that doing BRBRBRBRB lessened the damage the raid takes by a lot. You can look through my logs if you'd like, I wasn't here for this weeks kill on Meg, but I was for the rest. I'll also link my armory below.
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/characte...Aeidail/simple
http://worldoflogs.com/guilds/164857/

[Deleted]

Ask your raid to save up damage-CDs while you have blue and green up, as the damage is not that heavy then. Tell them to use these CDs when you have red up, so you get it down pretty quickly with red debuffs as low as possible.
We usually take 3-4 breaths on the first head, 2 when red is up, 3 when red is down.

As we do the same GRGRBGR strat there is the problem of 2 consecutive red heads after the blue one. You could swap the last two, so after blue you have red and green up, kill red. Then you'll have blue and green up for the last head which sounds significantly easier to me. Actually I think we're gonna play it like this next time ^^

For the CDs: I usually tank blue/red most of the time, I start with bone shield for the first breath.
AMS for the second, so I get a full RP bar.
If I'm currently tanking a red head, I pop DRW to help killing it asap, double soul reaper, outbreak for double diseases, ghoul and so on.
If you get a third breath, I usually soak it rather unmitigated, pop vamp blood and sac the ghoul. Of course you should also have at least 2 DS to heal the incoming damage and use Rune Tap (hopefully you have the t15-2pc). If it's a red head later in the encounter, I use IBF too. Ask for a healer's tank-CD like hand of purity which is insanely powerful for the red debuff or if you don't have a pally... pain sup or what ever if IBF is on CD.

Another good reason for AMS on breath 2 is that if you use glyphed AMS and still have bone shield stacks left from breath 1, the breath ticks will NOT reduce those bone shield stacks, which is why it double-dips. Because of your bone-shield your AMS doens't have to soak that much damage (-20%) and so it will last longer and protect your HP AND your bone shield stacks for a longer time, usually through all 3 ticks of the breath.

When you tank the blue head, CD-management is a lot less stressfull, as the blue debuff doesn't have any short-term consequences, but as of the damage-reduction of the breath itself, the AMS/bone-shield synergy mentioned above still applies.

But concerning your DPS-Players, the heads SHOULD at least go down shortly after breath 3, so you can get your severely debuffed ass into the intensified healing of a rampage.

oh and after looking at your gear: If you tank blue/red (where red is your main problem) consider using at least one stamina-trinket.
I tank these heads and the damage I get from the red breath+debuff is WAY higher then melee from all the heads combined, so mastery or dodge is less effective and more HP will let your AMS soak more magic damage. I use the random drop one from MV but the Valor-thingy from Shado-Pan has exactly the same stats. If you have it, try it out.

[Deleted]

Usually I do something like this:

Spam death strikes-> especially before and after the breaths for max absorb/heals

Stopped right there. Go to elitistjerks.com and read through the blood DK thread tyvi gathered up.

[Kiqjaq]

1) Don't spam death strike, wait till you take a lot of damage, then death strike, and you'll get a much larger bubble, not that matters, Megaera is mostly spell damage, which Blood Shield doesn't absorb.

Actually, this is a fight where you *do* want to spam Death Strike for part of the time.
(and I'm not getting at all why you'd think Blood Shield doesn't matter on this fight...)

During Rampage you spam all you can to build up a Blood Shield, then as soon as Rampage ends you pop Bone Shield, keep spamming and potentially pop avoidance trinkets, then AMS the first breath. You won't be taking any actual damage for a long time so Bone Shield can carry all the way through the 2nd breath before falling.

Once your Blood Shield falls off then you can revert to a normal style of planned Death Strikes.

[rhapso]

I used Conversion and LB for this fight for the purpose of selfhealing. On our first 2-3 kills I did about 50k selfhealing and Conversion did a hell lot, esp on the head that you do not wnat to kill, but you are tanking, dps is not important AT ALL, so losing out on a few RS (and to some extent DS through rune-refresh RC/RE/BT) isn't that bad.
Esp. with the infinite runic power from breath + AMS => Conversion, it's not that big a loss, but it IS a loss.

Either your dps start to step up their game or you can use Conversion and improve your healing. I just switched it on during the breath and for as long as it took the healers to get me back to 100% hp (with my help of my DS heals). BS / VB for Breath2, AMS for 1 + 4 and LB or IBT for 3rd breath worked quite good for me.
I would post logs, but they are already outdated =/

[Soisoisoi]

Tanked it in about 489 gear (off-spec ) on 25m, pretty much just rotated personal CDs and waited until during/after breath to use Death Strike a few times. That big shield smoothed out the melee damage afterwards and... Well that's about it.

Thinking about it, I wouldn't be surprised if Death Siphon could do you some good if your DPS is that low and you're getting 4 breaths, since it's mostly magic damage.

[elderamy]

First week we did megaera I got 4 breaths each head and I never required any outside healing, over 80% of the healing on me was from myself (random smartheals hit me once in a while). Basically just rotate ams (I kept it unglyphed, makes the damage smoother for the harder breaths, if you get very few you can glyph it), vampiric blood (I was using 2p t14, but you should manage anyways if you call for a sac when necessary) and glyphed ibf (really important for meg) with 2-3 saved up death strikes. You'll never take any significant damage from the breaths with a cd+death strikes, the normal attacks barely hurt and you still have erw/ghoul sac for emergencies. Assuming that you have decent gear (510+) the only time you'll ever need direct heals if you do this properly is a high stacked debuff from the red head.

If you execute the above properly I doubt you'll ever die as a dk on megaera, but if you for some reason still have issues just roll with conversion or lichborne as well. There's not really any burst damage if you use your other cds properly (so you hardly need pact/purgatory), and these should ensure that you don't die even if your healers decide to not throw a single smart heal for two minutes.

Sry but i don't believe in you... unless you dont tank the red one at all...
if you can get close to 120k+ hps for 45 secs as blood tankl, then we're all doing something wrong

[Deleted]

Sry but i don't believe in you... unless you dont tank the red one at all...
if you can get close to 120k+ hps for 45 secs as blood tankl, then we're all doing something wrong

Nope I didn't tank the red one that week, and yes you'll need some outside heals if you do. Having the red one at 3-4 stacks is really the only time though, and this shouldn't put that much pressure on your healers.

[elderamy]

Nope I didn't tank the red one that week, and yes you'll need some outside heals if you do. Having the red one at 3-4 stacks is really the only time though, and this shouldn't put that much pressure on your healers.

Ok fair enough, the blue stacks don't do anything and the green just make your DS better.

Red is a real pain and I don't see ppl killing it with a dk tanking it and going 4 stacks unless you have 4 healers... maybe a pala can since they got a few nice cds

[Deleted]

Ok fair enough, the blue stacks don't do anything and the green just make your DS better.

Red is a real pain and I don't see ppl killing it with a dk tanking it and going 4 stacks unless you have 4 healers... maybe a pala can since they got a few nice cds

Our monk was taking 4 stacks of the fire debuff on that same week, and we were 2 or 3 healing it (can't remember honestly). It's hardly recommended but a tank (meaning that there's always some passive reduction+cds+their mitigation scaling from the additional dmg) taking an additional 30k magic dps (4 over 3 breaths) will hardly force you to use 4 instead of 2 healers. Megaera and possibly Iron Qon are simply the only fights on normal that actually test your healers a bit (if you 2 heal) and lets you notice if they are well, bad.

[elderamy]

Our monk was taking 4 stacks of the fire debuff on that same week, and we were 2 or 3 healing it (can't remember honestly). It's hardly recommended but a tank (meaning that there's always some passive reduction+cds+their mitigation scaling from the additional dmg) taking an additional 30k magic dps (4 over 3 breaths) will hardly force you to use 4 instead of 2 healers. Megaera and possibly Iron Qon are simply the only fights on normal that actually test your healers a bit (if you 2 heal) and lets you notice if they are well, bad.

well other classes have better stuff to handle these dots than we do, 120k +20% for each red killed per second for 45 secs is nasty. But nothing a good tank healer can solve. Still this + rampages will drain mana pretty fast. And if youre doing 4 breaths, the fight will be long.

and what i mean is that with 5 dps doing 100k + 2 tank and proper use of offensive cds on red phases you can get 2 breaths only... So if you're taking 4 breaths i'd assume u're using 4 healers and only 4 dps...

[Gorfion]

If you are killing heads right before the fourth breath your raid dps is low and it could be hard to kill megaera. It may still be doable though, the first week I killed 10m megaera on my paladin alt (my dk main does 25m) we were consistently getting 4 breaths per head at first due to a lot of undergeared people. What helped us push it before 4 breaths was to have both tanks attacking the kill target for the entirety of rampage. If you watch the breath timers you can even attack the other head in between breaths but move quickly to face your head away from melee before a breath comes, although we didn't end up needing to. If you are getting 3 breaths per head you probably won't be able to use a cd on the first breath, but you should be fine as long as you have runes for a death strike or two. Just use bone shield and ams on the second and third breaths as you can, and vampiric blood as needed. Make certain you have icebound fortitude and dancing rune weapon available for the last two heads as those are likely to be the most painful. And don't be afraid to call for an external cd near the end if you are out of cds.

[Tehterokkar]

3 Stacks is the max you should get, if you get 4, you can't kill the boss unless healers/tanks are overgeared(while DPS are undgeared/Need to L2P)