Grand Empress normal problem

[Troolari]

Hey!

We are kinda stuck in Grand Empress fight, since when the phase two comes I get obliterated in like 5 seconds from 100 to 0. I can pop all my CD:s and survive a bit, but when they end I get instantly gibbed. Any tips how to survive it until the windblades start focusing on other players and damage on the tank gets lower? Should we be CC:ing the adds or something like that, since it feels impossible to stay alive when they all hit sonic blade at once.

Heres my armory, all help appreciated.

eu.battle.net/wow/en/character/shattered-hand/ Troolari/advanced

I have DP and rune tap now, not the talents the armory shows by the way

[Murdos]

Kill a single Wingblade on each side to start, that dramatically lessens the damage the tank is absorbing.

Also, spec Remorseless Winter there, the Wingblade adds can be stunned; and you should basically be chaining AOE stuns on them with your DPS starting off. In my guild we go Shockwave > Remorseless Winter > Shockwave on our side, and the opposite side has the warlock using Shadowfury solely, because our Bear takes a lot less damage.

Beyond that it's cycling your CDs well enough, but you definitely want to kill at least one wingblade early on and lock down the pack as often as you can.

[Archimand]

pop your shield wall asap, mark one of them as skull to be burned down stun them as much as possible

[Deleted]

In our runs one of our tanks takes the reavers and the other takes the windblades... We usually nuke one or two of the windblades down to minimise damage on the tank. When we first started doing it I'm pretty sure I'd run in and remorseless winter the windblade group but, once a couple are dead the damage should be manageable.

[Deleted]

In my group's kills we always pick one Reaver/3 windblades each, (so each tank takes one side), our dps kill quickly the adds on our warrior (except reaver) and then our warrior taunts my reaver. Below I will describe in detail what I always do to survive the damage from a paladin PoV.
- I have 5 HP ready for 2 shield of the righteous back to back and Pop my Shado Pan 3595 mastery increase trinket for increased physical dmg reduction. After that I stun them with Blinding light (glyphed (an alternate for you would be remonseless winter)). Next I pop Divine protection (glyphed for physical dmg reduction). Finally I use Ardent defender when Divine prot is about to end. I nearly never resort to Guardian.

Additional notes: I always interrupt (if interrupt or AS silence is up) Dispatch, a possible alternative would be to just move away from that windblade. I realized it was doing a lot of damage to be honest. I also try to stun with 30 sec hammer of justice talent one windblade everytime it's up.

In your case, use Winter as an aoe stun, I guess you can use Asphyxiate as a single target stun, DS + Vampiric blood or Bone Shield instead of divine protection, that Rune sword that gives you much more parry along with a hand of sacrifice/vigilance instead of ardent defender and finally IB instead of guardian. I have heard that shield tanks are preferred on Empress and as I am one myself it's hard to judge if this strategy will work good for you too since you are a DK. Also I would advise Liquid of Courage from Shado-Pan instead of Relic of Niuzao. I really hate dodge trinks and they can backfire if luck isn't on your side while mastery on use effect will provide you decent mitigation for 15 secs. Also tell your raid to kill one windblade from your side since it will slightly reduce the dmg you take if you still don't feel like your cooldowns aren't enough.

[Kamiyomi]

biggest thing is Dont tank the boss for the last 15s going into the phase. let your other tank do that and stack up blood charges and then let your runes regen and put up Bonesheild right after you are no longer tanking the boss. You want to go into the phase with a full set of runes up and full blood charges. Once the adds are out and on you pop 3 back to back DS and then IBF. this should tide you over until the adds start focusing and dying. after this it's a cake walk. a preemptive Vamp Blood right when IBF is about to drop is nice on top of it.
Alternatively i like popping DRW instead of IBF to down things faster but you are more spiky doing this.

[Troolari]

Thank you for the answers all.

Yeah I noticed the add phase doesnt favor DK:s too much. Our druid tank with 10 item levels lower actually stayed up much easier than! Gonna try these tips next sunday and we'll see how it goes!

[Deleted]

As a DK you have one of the most amazing CD`s for this. AOD --> It taunts everything except the big add.

Usualy I go with RW, run away from the frozen adds so once the freeze fades their swing wount sync. and the i just pop army. Thats all that you need to do.

We have 2 DK tanks and we never have problems here. (If you are not sure about your gear, just pop IBF while casting army. After the army is out, you can kill one small add on your own.

Usualy we have our DPS (all except for the rogue) to sit on the other DKs adds, so they kill them all off. Once this is done, he taunts my big add and I am left with just the small ones. One problem that I usualy have is that i kill off the small adds on my own just from the vengence I got stacked.

Oh and yes, interrupt the small ones.!

[Deleted]

Heya,

My answers arnt really specific to this fight, but can be applied generally:

1. Dont pop all your cds at once. Aka pop IBF at the start, when there are a few seconds left use remorseless winter, when the stun wears off eighter use DRW or vamperic blood, and when your runes are depleted with little to no RP left use your ERW. By this time some eighter buggered off or if dps are assisting your side will have a few dead adds. If your still taking a beating, pop army
2. Be sure all the adds are in front of you.
3. if all else fails, use an armor potion.
4. Dont stand too close to the other add tank. (fight specific)

[jasonleekungfu]

Thank you for the answers all.

Yeah I noticed the add phase doesnt favor DK:s too much. Our druid tank with 10 item levels lower actually stayed up much easier than! Gonna try these tips next sunday and we'll see how it goes!

I beg to differ. I'd agree if we were talking about Gara'jal or Sha of Fear. But Empress isn't hard for dk at all. I didn't really find that any tank class is at disadvantage for this boss. I saw your ilvl is 490 and it should be a piece of cake for you. Simply chain your IBF / RW / VB+Trinket / DRW and a Windblade should be down during this time. You can have your ghoul out prior to adds for emergency heal.

Another thing I would like to mention about DK's aoe and I assume you already know is that DK's aoe compete with Death Strike on runes. So if you think surviving is a problem, you should save your death runes for Death Strike rather than Blood Boiling.

[Murdos]

Our tanks are Warrior + Druid, both are highly skilled players, but the Druid just takes less damage in the add phase, period. It's that flat 25% magic damage resist just blunting so much of the Reaver's poison damage that the warrior just has to soak between Shield Barrier juggles.

Hate to say it, but so far I'd be willingly to say that outside of Monks with stagger, Druids just take the least amount of damage in that phase of the fight, Passive Mitigation is and always has been pretty amazing for damage like this.

So keep that in mind and stack your AOE stuns and healer cooldowns accordingly, our Warrior ususally gets a Pain Supression that the bear doesn't need, and we're stacking two AOE stuns where the bear just has the one.

[JGWentworth]

What I normally do here is I run out and pop army and throw a dnd on the ground. The army will get all the little guys and you can grab the big guy by the time the army is dead the windblades are chasing people.

[Nillo]

I beg to differ. I'd agree if we were talking about Gara'jal or Sha of Fear. But Empress isn't hard for dk at all. I didn't really find that any tank class is at disadvantage for this boss.

Except that we don't really have the tools to deal with aoe tanking and our aoe dps is shitty compared to other tanks meaning we're kind of bad if you tank the adds as they spawn or even worse try to tank all the windblades.
Dks are fine if you split the groups and only take 2 reavers + 1 windblade. Just like we're fine on Gara'Jal as long as the other tank starts first.

[Imbalanced]

In my group's kills we always pick one Reaver/3 windblades each, (so each tank takes one side), our dps kill quickly the adds on our warrior (except reaver) and then our warrior taunts my reaver.

This is how we do it. Tanked it last week in my offspec gear (484ilvl) rolled small cds(vamp, BS) while adds were on me survived NP

[Nnyco]

if all goes shit, you can always just kite em. spec chillblains, roiling blood, glyph of pestilence and remoreless winter; keep refreshin chillblains with bloodboil however make sure to cominicate with ur other tank to not run into his mobs

[Kiqjaq]

Just have your Army tank the adds, it's a piece of cake.

What I do is pull with IBF up, use Remorseless Winter as it's nearing an end and summon my Army while they're stunned (the Windblades spam an interrupt called Sonic Blade, and I wouldn't rely solely on the DR from channeling to save you anyways, you'll go down faster than my mother after a few martinis). My ghouls taunt the little adds and I keep the big one and aoe. That generally lasts well through the phase easy peasy.

If you have two add phases then you'll need to kite a bit if you can't just facetank.


EDIT: And AMS on cooldown. That dot the poison shockwave puts on you hits harder than you may think.

[Nillo]

EDIT: And AMS on cooldown. That dot the poison shockwave puts on you hits harder than you may think.

The dot comes from their auto hits - and it's generally not high enough to make AMS worth it. On the other hand with a little experience you can time AMS to absorb the AOE which takes away some of the risk of dying to burst damage.

[JGWentworth]

Except that we don't really have the tools to deal with aoe tanking and our aoe dps is shitty compared to other tanks meaning we're kind of bad if you tank the adds as they spawn or even worse try to tank all the windblades.
Dks are fine if you split the groups and only take 2 reavers + 1 windblade. Just like we're fine on Gara'Jal as long as the other tank starts first.

I don't know if I agree with you on the first line there. We have a really good quick pick up tools and BB + RB keeps our dots on everything and a good chunk of damage.

[Kiqjaq]

The dot comes from their auto hits

Right, that's the one. I'm so clever.
Thanks for the correction.

[Nillo]

I don't know if I agree with you on the first line there. We have a really good quick pick up tools and BB + RB keeps our dots on everything and a good chunk of damage.

Let's see:
- To deal some real aoe damage we need to sacrifice some death runes - which works well if you don't take too much damage but otherwise you're toast
- Bone Shield just works better against slower hits
- We only have a delayed aoe stun and it's on a long cd

Just look at how bad DK dps is on aoe fights:
http://www.raidbots.com/dpsbot/Grand...00011111000000
http://www.raidbots.com/dpsbot/Wind_...00011111000000

Compared to single target fights:
http://www.raidbots.com/dpsbot/Blade...00011111000000