10H Tortos - Issues with bat tank survivability

[Hartlin]

Setup:

Prot Pally (on boss)
BM Monk (on bats)

Resto Shaman
Holy Pally
Holy Priest

Frost Mage
Combat Rogue
Fury Warrior
Shadow Priest
Demo Lock

We've been at this for ~20-25 pulls or so now and the main issue that I'm seeing is our monk's survivability. I'm not the best with WoL so I'm not sure if his shield is falling off far too quickly (due to lack of heals) or if he's just doing something wrong. I'm here in hopes that someone is able to identify the issue, as if he can not lose his shield so frequently (thus causing bats to heal and everything falling behind because of it), life would be much easier..

WoL Link - http://worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-pk...nc=wipes&boss=

We have our lock kicking. Melee swapping to the first wave of turtles to make sure one is dead in time for the breath (rarely an issue). Everyone switching to bats assuming we're keeping up with turtles. Best attempt has been ~60%, ending with tank deaths.

[Grinderofl]

First thing that comes to mind is... why the heck would you put the prot pally on boss and monk on adds? Switch them around and then see how you'll fare.

[Hartlin]

First thing that comes to mind is... why the heck would you put the prot pally on boss and monk on adds? Switch them around and then see how you'll fare.

Because monks are a lot better for picking up bats / kiting them if needed?

[Deleted]

Can't you just have him kite, or even have your prot pally solo tank?

[Vanden]

Without checking your logs, I would recommend swapping the tanks around for the solution closest to what you've been trying so far. However you could also try a couple of other things. The first of which would be solo tanking with your prot paladin. As long as nobody hits the bats they will fly straight to the paladin from his self healing and he will be able to AoE them down with very little help due to his massive vengeance. As long as he keeps up with bites (the only thing that could really spike his shield down and get him low enough for bats to drain) he won't even need that much more heals than 2 tanking. You can stun the adds with your lock/shaman/warrior/monk if things get iffy.

The other thing I would recommend is just having your monk kite the bats around the room without killing them. There are a few dangers to this but if handled right it will work just fine. Without a hunter this is probably not your best bet, but even without misdirection as long as your monk positions himself for the bats' landing (have your hpally use righteous defense to have them hopefully all go to him) he'll be able to pick them up and kite them without taking a melee hit. If you do this you'll want to have a stun on the clump of bats for every Quake Stomp so the monk doesn't get mobbed.

[Metic]

Because monks are a lot better for picking up bats / kiting them if needed?

There should be no "if needed" on kiting. You're either doing it, or you aren't. In 10 man, if you have a good cleaver or 2(which you have), you should be killing the bats, not kiting, in which case the prot pally should be on bats.

[Hartlin]

We've tried solo tanking. Battle Healer just isn't doing as much threat as it used to since the nerf. People are also generally failing at watching their threat, using threat drops when the bats spawn and / or taking the warlock gateway to drop threat. We tried using Salvs and BoPs on people that had threat and weren't using other means of dropping threat, but we weren't getting far with that.

We had a few decent pulls with kiting bats (monk kiting). Again, people would randomly get aggro from bats and end up getting gibbed. We had (and stlil do) been stunning bats right before quake stomps.

Vanden, why have the Prot Pally on bats? Almost every comp (tank-wise) like ours has the Pally on boss, Monk on bats.

[Rigapples]

Not sure it's viable for your setup, but we solo tank with a prot pally. Make sure he has full shield.. Have the Rogue use TotT on the tank, Shadowstep to bats as they enter range, and spam FoK in the air. With Battle Healer on the Pally, there should be zero issues with picking up bats every time unless some bad ranged decided to start hitting them prior to them getting into tank range.

The hardest part here is keeping the tanks shield up with boss + bats. I think our tank does a CD rotation, plus I occasionally drop Smoke Bomb, plus we also have locks stun them so he can pick up a shield again when it is getting low/has fallen.

Its a lot to juggle, but once you get the hang of it (and thanks to huge amounts of vengeance when using a solo tank) it becomes a lot easier to manage and you get an extra DPS so the boss dies faster.

EDIT: Just read your post above, you posted right before me. Your Rogue should go Assassination spec and be tricking the bats to the paladin before they hit the ground via shadowstep. I am the rogue in our group and this makes picking up bats on the tank 10000x easier. Our ranged don't even need to use warlock portals and between me and the battlehealer Pally, our healers never get agro. If your rogue isn't already doing this, you need to smack him. Also, Combat is bad so have him switch :P

[Deja Thoris]

Most attempts I looked at (the longer ones) the problem seemed to lie with bats hitting people other than the tank. Mostly priests, who can fade to reduce threat.

Tbh I'd 2 heal this fight, use the extra dps to kill the bats quicker = lower chance of tank death.

[Hartlin]

Most attempts I looked at (the longer ones) the problem seemed to lie with bats hitting people other than the tank. Mostly priests, who can fade to reduce threat.

Tbh I'd 2 heal this fight, use the extra dps to kill the bats quicker = lower chance of tank death.

Think our healers can cut it 2 healing? Healing honestly felt really sketchy even with 3 healers last night.

Our switch hitter is our Shaman, who would obviously bring a ton of bat damage as Ele.

[Deja Thoris]

I don't see why it can't work. In terms of raw healing output I think your pala needs to step up, otherwise this is about playing a bit smarter, not only asking for "moar!!!" You need to make better use of your defensives and off heals.

- Use devotion aura just after every quake stomp when its up. 25% less dmg is huge, you didn't always.
- You have shammy's and priests with powerful offhealing as well as a rogue that can mitigate a ton of damage and so on.
- Holy pala can HoP a ranged for a stomp, so can the prot pala. Holy pala never used his 1 min CD that reduces magic dmg by 40%, (rockfall is nature dmg)
- Does the priest ever disperse?
And so on.

Theres a lot of little things that every class needs to do to make this work imo.

What I would suggest though is get the paladin healer to find out if his healing style on this fight is the best one? He never uses LoD on this fight which I thought would be a great use of holy power to top off shields. I could be wrong!

Good luck

[devilminion]

we got our first h tortos kill yesterday. imo 2 healing is the way to go. bats need to die b4 stomp happens ( or atleast extremely low). we had the same issue with 1 bat randomly going to a dps or healer or bats dividing in 2 grps, one going to the tank another grp heading a random dps/healer. Its kinda shitty but have your dps be prepared to run to the tank or use portals asap.. esp yr aggro magnets. I tanked the boss as DK and would just spread diseases on bats and run away just so that i dont pull the bats from our pally tank due to highher vengeance. Also, if you are not doing it have yr punter punt turtles on bats too if u have extras.

[Hartlin]

Thanks for all the input everyone. Lots to take from this thread.

[Deleted]

Your monk has atrocious Shuffle uptime, I looked at some other bosses and it was fine there so just tell him/her to stop using Breath of Fire if that means Shuffle will drop.
After that has been fixed you should also look into how much HP the monk has, maybe flask/eat stamina to have a decent buffer, I'd say 650k or so would do, you don't want to instantly drop into drain range if you happen to lose the crystal shell.

[Vanden]

We had a few decent pulls with kiting bats (monk kiting). Again, people would randomly get aggro from bats and end up getting gibbed. We had (and stlil do) been stunning bats right before quake stomps.

Vanden, why have the Prot Pally on bats? Almost every comp (tank-wise) like ours has the Pally on boss, Monk on bats.

For the kiting thing, if you're having bats aggro random people after they've been on the monk then either they aren't staying off them or the monk is not doing it right. I kited the bats on my sub-500 alt monk on our first few kills and it was pretty much spam dizzying haze and roll/transcendence when I ended up in a bad spot.

As far as the protadin tanking the bats, your monk is just doing a couple things wrong with them. First off, he's breath of firing wayyyy too much to the degree that it's affecting his shuffle uptime. I'm not really going terribly in depth with the logs, but his overall uptime seems low in general so I wonder if he is just not doing much in between bat waves. He needs to be getting his shuffle as high as he can when he's not tanking the bats, and only then can he add Breath of Fire in to add to the dps. On the boss if he were to let his shuffle uptime be bad it would be a little painful on the healers but most likely not something that will constantly wipe you like on the bats. There also isn't the added "temptation" to breath of fire and see big numbers. Also he has some pretty low Tiger Power uptime which not only ups his own damage but helps his survivability by making his guards bigger.

I think the prot paladin would just be an easier target to heal on the bats with your monk performing the way he is. If you're adamant on having your monk tanking the bats make him unbind breath of fire and have him get that shuffle uptime higher.

Edit: I'm sorry for harping on your monk a bit but here's a little more since I decided to look at him since he's who I focused on. Dampen Harm is not going to be a good talent for this since one bat by itself is not going to do 20% of his HP and Dampen Harm only works per attack, even though all the bats at once could take 20% of his HP. Definitely go Healing Spheres if he's on bats. Also Chi Wave is not going to do nearly as much damage as Zen Sphere which will also help his shield out a good bit when it detonates.

Just a couple of other tips to increase your damage. Your mage should spec Frost Bomb for a lot more burst AoE on every set of bats and your warlock should consider going affliction or destruction. Affliction can let him slow the turtles endlessly so that they're easier to dodge if that's an issue that you're having, it's also probably going to be the highest spec on the turtles. Destruction will do great bat damage and also provide him with near-endless embers whenever the bats come out so he can tunnel chaos bolts into turtles or do more bat damage.

As far as 2 healing vs 3 healing, I would recommend 2 healing if you're finding yourselves with overlapping sets of adds (turtles or bats). If you're just worried about the boss going down too slowly then it's up to you. Just keep in mind that the berserk isn't really much of an issue and the only times you really need to have dps in check is when the adds are out and when he pushes under 20% and turtles start flying. Hope some of this helped :P

[Simplexity]

2 heal it and have your monk kite bats and your prot pally on boss. It'll take a few tries for him to get the hang of it, but it's very easy and monks have a lot of tools to kite and pick up bats. With the kiting strat, the healing becomes very easy, probably less stressful than any other heroic encounter. Healing is only hard if people don't manage their shields properly.

You just need to kill and slow turtles as quick as possible though, as turtles are really the only thing that can mess up the kiter. I Shadowfuried the adds before Quake Stomps when my monk said he needed some help. Your rogue should be tricksing every set of bats to your monk. It's just execution from then on.

[Tarazet]

Monks can be very good on the bats, but you have to think like a Druid - maximize your avoidance at all times. Shuffle and Elusive Brew make a huge difference in this fight since they cut down so much on the melee damage. The uptime for both should be nearly 100%. I also don't see him using Purifying Brew as much as he could. It's hard to tell, since he didn't take Healing Elixirs, but the high uptime on Heavy Stagger and the Purifier proc tells me he wasn't hitting it enough. It's off the GCD, and free with Purifier. Not using this for clearing Stagger is a waste.

[Blaizze]

Have the Monk kite the bats with the Warlock, assuming Affliction, put up Glyphed Curse of Exhaustion for a 70% slow. That is what we do although we use a DK to kite the bats.

[SurrealNight]

I have the unfortunate job of kiting each week but it does make that aspect of the fight trivial so long as I don't F up. This is 25m HC though so I have two hunters for MD's, picking up Chi Torpedo and Zen Sphere (can roll on you and Tank or someone at once) should help generate some early agro then it's just down to keg spamming.

Tarazet already mentioned issues with BrM's tanking play which could use some improvement if he will continue to do that job.

[hareu]

Because monks are a lot better for picking up bats / kiting them if needed?

if he's dying then obviously he is not kiting them correctly. there is your answer.