Heroic Will 25 - Opportunistic Strikers

[Xingua]

Trying to come up with a gameplan for Heroic Will (25) for a melee heavy group. In looking over some logs, I can't tell how many melee are on the bosses doing Opportunistic Strikes. Is it just the tanks, with melee only helping sporadically? Other logs looks like there were 2 melee on the bosses for the majority, but not full-time. We generally have 7+ melee in our raids, and even with 2 of them going tank (4-tank strat), I'm not sure how many should be doing the Opportunistic Strike dance.

Any advice would be super, thanks!

[Nitros14]

We had 8 melee on our first kill. Feral and Ret went tank and tanked/soaked strength. Two death knights alternated gorefiend's grasp on rage and helped kill rage with howling blast. Two rogues both on courage and soaking 100% of courage sparks. Two enhance shamans helped kill courage and got on strength when courage weren't up. Whenever there weren't courage or strength up non death knights got on the boss. You have plenty of time in the breaks to DPS the bosses down, no melee should be on them when there's courage/strength to kill.

[Dracodraco]

If you've got a roster, we can be of much more help.

[Xingua]

Thanks, Nitros, that's what I really wasn't clear on. We will probably have a rogue + feral (dispersion) on the courages, Monk + Warrior going tank, 2 DKs doing their DK jobs, and then a retadin/warrior/monk doing your shaman jobs.

Assuming all our melee are on, we have 9 + 2 main tanks, but do you think having extra ranged would be better? Our only geared ranged backups right now are boomkins, which would be helpful from an add control standpoint, but not the best DPS.

We are planning on not stacking adds currently, as we were having trouble detonating 2 sets of Rage sparks properly. Might have to go back to that strat if we don't have the DPS though.

[Dracodraco]

Knockbacks are great. We struggle when all we have is one boomkin and one hunter knockback per set of rages (resto druid's had exams lately, so -1 knockback).
In any case, having a DK soak sparks + tank a str as blood, and grip every other set of rages on each side helps immensely, as long as you have another way of slowing adds (traps won't work well from SV hunters as entrapment prevents adds from being gripped). Then just whatever immunity is aviable for courages. I wouldn't attempt it without 2 hunters, but that's just me, I guess (stun arrow + pushback arrow + deterrence makes hunters fairly usefull for this fight).

[Xingua]

With our druid heavy roster (2 boomkins, 2 restos, 1 feral, 1 guardian), we can roll Ursol's Vortex on the adds which gives us a slow + knockback. It was pretty helpful when we were going for 2 sets of Rages, but ultimately our problem there was inconsistent AOE that would leave 1 or 2 sparks separated from the pack.

[Deleted]

We killed it with a melee every setup I think 10+. We had a rogue on each strength that would swap to the courage to slow and soak the spark and one melee on the boss full time. The key for us killing it was nuking the rages asap so that the melee on the rages have enough time to kill strengths, courages and get back before the next pack of rages spawn. Warlock portals are great for helping the melee move around.

As for killing the rages we had 2 dks specced into chillblanes for the slow and single target grip 2 of the adds into the other 2 where the rest of the melee stunned them at around 30% of their hp a DK aoe gripped and then a warrior stunned with shockwave so all the sparks would pile up on each other to make soaking easier. This may not be necessary but we used 2 shadowpriests and a monk for soaking which do not have the mobility of hunters. Melee will need to keep tab targeting to the highest hp rage so that they all die at the same time if an add dies way before the other 3 you will probably wipe because your soaker wont be able to get them all within their cd.

[Xingua]

Just to follow up on this, with these strategies were you saving a wave of Rages to kill 8 at once? I know that will up DPS, but with current gear level, maybe it's not as necessary anymore.

[Nitros14]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3q4G522gOyQ This is what we did. We found it easier all around to CC them. Increased DPS makes it more controllable, easier to line up soaking, less waves is less chance of something going wrong. The increased DPS makes the end of the fight much less crazy.