[BrM] Solo tanking Garrosh 10M HC

[Deleted]

Hey there,

in our raid we had quite some issues with DPS which made us switch to one-man-tank this fight and it went well so far. A few times we've got into P3. What really wrecks me is the Gripping Despair in P2. The first Dot stacks up to about 8 which is okay - nothing too serious while the second and third ones stack up to 12 hitting me for about 540k per second. I am using Diffuse Magic and Zen Meditation to survive during the Whirling Corruption and almost negating the dot during this time. Moreover we are having two paladins which use Hand of Purity and Hand of Sacrifice to prevent me from dying. On top of that I am using Survival Instincts when things get really tight.

I was wondering whether you have some more hints on how I could improve my survivabilty. I heard about "exploiting" Avert Harm for magic damage, what's so special about this spell? I am usually popping it during the Annihilate in Intermission 1. Btw. our setup consists of a restoration druid, a holy paladin, a moonkin, an elemental shaman, an enhancer, a hunter, a mage, a retribution paladin, a warlock and me as a BrM.

My armory can be found at Neeliyah at Aegwynn-EU

[Jocias]

Avert Harm converts 20% of the spell damage you take into staggered damage. It's a pretty decent magic damage reduction CD so long as you don't kill yourself by standing too close to other raid members also taking damage.

[Enpoli]

Armory: http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/characte...eeliyah/simple

Dropping some Haste and bumping your Mastery up would give you a bigger heal from your 4-piece. Even though it's magical damage that's giving you problems, you can use your stagger to help save you. Most Brewmasters find ~5k Haste to be sufficient.

If tank damage is that big of an issue, I wonder if it would be worthwhile to run Zen Sphere? Just throwing that out there, but it might be worth a pull or two.

[CloudedInSanity]

Hey, there. Our 10M also uses a Monk to solo tank Heroic Garrosh. His name is Falzer, on Magtheridon if you want to take a look.

Things I will suggest:

Always have a cool down for the high stacks of the DoT. There are a lot of choices depending on your raid comp. For example, say you have a Warrior. When there is 12 Seconds until the next Whirling Corruption, the Warrior should use Vigilance on you. It is important that the cool downs you use do not extend into the Whirling, because that is wasted up time. Why? Because the damage from Garrosh's auto swings do significantly more damage to the tank then Whirling will ever do. Also, during Whirling your healers should have a cool down rotation going on to pump out more healing, so that covers the increased damage the tank is receiving via Gripping Despair.

Other cool downs can include Hand of Sac, Hand of Purity, Fort Brew of course ect, ect. Just make sure you always have one up.

So after looking at your healing setup this is what I suggest...

Phase 2 Whirls:

1. Druid Iron Bark 12 Seconds out from Whirl. Pally Devo + Pally CD for Whirl.
2. Pally Hand of Sac + Hand of Purity 12 Seconds out from Whirl. Druid Tranq + Pally Devo for Whirl.
3. Druid Iron Bark 12 Seconds + Fort Brew 20 Seconds out from Whirl. Pally CD + Elemental Healing Tide + AG for whirl.

Phase 2 (After 2nd Intermission)

1. Druid Iron Bark 12 Seconds out from Whirl. Pally Devo + Pally CD + Enhancement Tide + AH for Whirl. (Enh should use personal so he can attack in melee range to AG Heal.

Phase 3:

1. Hand of Purity + Hand of Sac 12 seconds out from Whirl. Druid Tranq + Pally Devo + Elemental Tide + AG.

There should not be a second Whirl, HOWEVER you will still want to use a cool down for it.

Fort Brew 26 Seconds out from Whirl. Follow up with Diffuse Magic 6 Seconds out from Whirl.

Again, I am not saying follow this to the letter. This is just an example of what you can do to get adequate spacing between cool downs while using all of them efficiently to greatly reduce the chance of dying. Also, it may not work perfectly because you may get more Whirls then us, it is hard to say.

Best of luck to you with Garrosh!

[Deleted]

I just came back to thank you, CloudedInSanity for these suggestions. We ended up chaining my personals with 2 Hand of Purities and I did survive after some time of getting used to it. Right now the group is derping way to much thus having so many unnecessary wipes. The only issue so far is our dps which won't be enough to survive P3 but this is nothing about this topic.

Just to leave a nice suggestion: I am using Chi Burst instead of Chi Wave. In P1 it just instantly heals the complete group to 100% which allows us to spawn the weapon in the group. And it does decent damage to the adds. Most importantly, with vengeance it hits MCed ppl like a truck. I mean like 2m hits. Better than my Keg Smash which would snare them. Definitely worth trying it out.

[Leblue]

Something to consider as well for when you're doing solo tanking is how much actual healing you're getting out of the 4 piece. I had the 4 piece for the longest time until I realized that I was getting 500k total healing out of our longest pulls during progression and decided I was better off with the stats from H WF pieces and what not.

My reccomendations for tanking this:

Glyph Guard - when the debuff really starts ramping up, this will be the most consistent damage and will often times work to gib you as you close in on the whirling corruption. I usually guarded during/after the MC for the first set, guard after recieving vigilance at stack 9/10 after the second MC, and then use externals and what not to guard right before the final Whirling Corruption in P2 while popping Avert Harm to help with raid damage.

During the intermissions you should be able to soak the 9 annihilates without proccing your cloak if you do it right which will give you a huge spike in vengence to help boss damage which can help push him before the ToES phase. 1 - 3 I cover with Zen Med, 4 - 5 Diffuse Magic, 6 - 7 Fort Brew + Glyphed Guard, 8 - 9 I have our ret paladin use hand of sacrifice. You could probably ask for iron bark from 7 - 9 since those might get a bit sketchy with your gear.

Here's our logs from our first kill of Garrosh that I solo tanked for our progression. http://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/LBXwcqPHRKD21zJF

[Enpoli]

The 4-piece bonus' worth isn't measured by total healing done... Think of it as how many times it saves your life when you're at really low health and a huge stagger. I've gotten 280-300k heals from it. Same reason we bother to wear the tank cloak instead of the dps one. It's not always the raw stats that save you.

[Leblue]

That's the thing, it wasn't saving me because the damage that turned out to be threatening wasn't damage that was physical (which can be staggered). A lot of the danger comes from the debuff that Garrosh gives you, and unless you're on an incredibly unlucky streak your stagger usually won't rise above 1 mill, maybe 1.5mill. Even at 1.5 mill, that's 225k heal which sounds nice, but that's going to be quickly eaten by a tick of the debuff or just garrosh hitting you. Keep in mind that 150k of that heal as well is healing the stagger tick that just occured to you as well so you took a pretty massive hit before that to begin with.

I'm a huge fan of it for something like solo tanking H Thok or Malkorok's Bloodrage where my stagger ramps up incredibly quickly because all of the damage is physical. On heroic garrosh a lot of the threat is more tied to the shadow damage you have to deal with from the debuff and Whirling Corruption.