Heroic Kromog

[Shieldi]

Hi guys

A friend of mine says his guild is struggling with tank deaths on Kromog hc and he asked me to take a look at his WCL and give him some constructive feedback for what they're doing wrong, and how they can fix it. My problem is I'm not very experienced at reading these logs and all of my typical suggestions to him didn't seem very useful (are the tanks stacking properly, do they handle the slam correctly, etc)

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/4ykKhH1fLtDWGCTP this is the log, and the particular tank which my friend says is struggling the most is the Warrior.

I would appreciate if someone who was better at reading wcl than I am would step in and explain to me what is causing their wipes, it looked to me like the warrior possibly is just having a L2P issue, with his excessive usage of Heroic Strike, and seemingly small usage of shield block, but I don't know for sure.

I would also appreciate if rather than just stepping in and giving me all the answers, if somebody would help me improve my ability to read and understand WCL.

[Deja Thoris]

Well to be fair the warrior was never the first person to die. People always seemed to die before him to derpy shit.

I checked the replay on attempt 4 where the smash did kill him. He kinda shuffled back a bit as the cast was happening. he needs to leap the fuck out, the closer you are the more it hurts and with stacks of warped armor it will comfortably hit you for far in excess of your health pool if you don't mitigate heavily.

This fight is a tosser on heroic and favours stacking healers (ive even pugged it with 3 tanks / 6 healers for 20 people) *lol* - Regardless: His shield block / barrier uptime didn't look too terrible. Like I said tank damage feels excessive to me (tho I was 667 for our first kill), you need to rotate externals like vig for smashes at stacks of warped armor. Also consider asking the holy priest to play disc and shield the nuts off the tank.

[Makh]

The best approach to Kromog is to identify what kinds of deaths you're getting, and then try to find a solution to that type of death.

1. Player's dying to Reverberations: Reverbs do very small amounts of damage, but they spawn when DPS/Heals are at low health. Typically Kromog casts Stone Breath, followed by Slam, which procs Reverbs. People NEED to dodge these. For melee DPS, I recommend running *towards* the boss when they spawn so that they are all behind you.

2. Player's dying during Grasping Hands: If people can't find a hand to save them, assign zones or specifics runes to people. There's no excuse to losing people to this.

3. People running out of hitpoints: This typically happens when the raid healers simply can't keep up, and you start losing people to Stone Breath. The only solution is to use Tranqs and other heavy CDs, or get better healers.

4. Tanks dying: The tank damage from Kromog is extremely high. They should run away from Kromog during Slam to reduce the damage they take, but many deaths will simply come from First of Stone and Melee. Tanks need to use CDs liberally, especially when they are at 2-3 stacks of the debuff. External CDs should be used liberally in the last 20% of the fight. As for healing, I strongly recommend either a disc priest, paladin healer, or both. Tanks rarely die over 20 seconds - it's usually in a 4-5 second spike. Having absorbs makes a huge difference in preventing sudden tank deaths. On some of my better attempts, I've taken 240K damage hits from slams and had it *all* absorbed. That alone can make or break this encounter.

Looking at your logs, you dont have many issues with #2. Your issues are the other three. Make sure people pay attention to reverbs. NO ONE should get hit by these except tanks. They will often finish people off with 20% health, or at least put the raid healers behind on what is already a very difficult fight. Assign 1 or 2 healers to the tanks full time. Pick healers with lots of absorbs (Paladin's are far and away the best at this). Keep telling your raid to focusing on surviving, not on killing the boss. If everyone stays alive for 8 minutes, the boss will be dead.

[Shieldi]

Thank you for the feedback

I will let my friend know what you said and hopefully their priest wouldn't mind switching to disc. They killed Kromog last week with a disc priest but he abruptly quit playing WoW right afterwards.

[Eetabee]

You have a ton of externals not being used enough. Look at buffs for all wipes. Vigilance, sac, Ironbark, life cocoon all being used very very rarely. Slam is easy to predict. Use a cd and if you don't have one ask for an external (or two, you have a ton). Don't forget to also leap or run away for slam. Cds won't help if you're taking a larger than necessary hit with three stacks.