Lock tanking on Council - need advice

[Warwithin]

Hello everyone. My guild recently started doing the council fight on both 10 and 25man, and I'm wondering if anyone has any suggestions as how to best do this. I set a dual-spec just for the fight, somewhat of a PvP Destro build, and begin the encounter as follows:

1.) Pop Shadow ward and void walker sacrifice
2.) Wait 20 seconds, then aggro with searing pain
3.) After the first shadowbolt hits, popping my shadow ward and VW sacrifice, I have the disc priest Pain Suppression on me
4.) I redo shadow ward whenever it's up (Relatively soon since it only has 10 sec. on C/D after the pull)
5.) The disc priest puts a GS on me after the pain suppression is up.

After this point, I can usually have 1-2 Nether..things on me, and the rest isn't too complicated. Just sucks when you're on the gun to get 4 of them if the guy I'm tanking gets enraged.

Is there any way to better do this in terms of the initial establishment of the pull? That seems to be the toughest part for my guild.

[gherkin]

http://www.mmo-champion.com/class-wa...ces-tank-spec/

[Gryss]

I tanked this on 25m last night with a basic PvE demo build with no special talents or items. I kept with a 0/56/15 PvE demo build to keep solid DPS on the active prince while tanking and demo has no threat reduction talents in the build. I had one disc priest healing me for the entire fight. And I am sure I caught some stray druid HoTs while I was running around.

On the pull I stood in the back of the room and waited for a MD. (If one isn't available you could demo summon yourself to the back of the room after getting some threat. The other nice part about tanking as demo is the prince is 0% life while he is not active so you can just spam soulfire. once you have a bit of threat and the shadow orbs start spawning you can run around and just hit it with your two instant DoTs that will hold good threat on them and wont kill them to fast. I was able to have 4-5 orbs on me pretty much most of the fight.

When my prince was active I poped meta and just pew pewed my heart out. sometimes I got a tricks, sometimes I did not. But threat was so little of an issue I got vig from our warrior MT to further in the damage reduction.

All in all the hardest part of the fight for me was making sure I was in range of my healer and keeping the shadow orbs off of other healers and DPS in the raid while not running into melee range of my target and get hit for 79823749823 damage. But the most recent blue post says they fixed that.

If you have any other questions I am sure this thread will grow a bit. Hope this works for you.

[Shadowviper]

I go with the standard Lock PvE spec, One very important thing is to Zoom your Camera to max so you can see the ENTIRE ROOM! That is key, to me at least. How my 10 man Guild does it is The tank *bear* charges in at that point im in my Demonic form and since I'm an engineer pop my haste gloves and spam Searing Pain until I am comfortable then start on the orb collecting. I have a macro that i can cast searing pain without targeting the Boss so during times with no orbs spawning I hit that macro for a bit. Watch out for the knock-backs. use Voidwalker for soaking up some damage with the bubble. Shadow Ward whenever you see fit and I've become comfortable with it that if I see a Beach ball of death falling down I cast a few spells and get it back it. Very Fun fight, to me at least

[Rayse]

As noted above: maxing out your camera really helps, so you can keep track of where the purple balls spawn at. Another helpful thing is to turn on enemy nameplates ("V" hotkey by default).

Initial sequence: on pull, I immediately hit Keleseth with 1x Searing Pain just to establish basic threat. Often if we have a hunter available, he also misdirects some Keleseth aggro to me immediately on pull. Once I've done my 1x Searing Pain, my next priority is to pop Shadow Ward and go find the first purple ball (one spawns almost immediately). From there you alternate between building aggro on Keleseth (drop all your dots on him and spam Searing Pain), and picking up more purple balls. You need to always have 3 or more balls on you, and since they slowly die and you can't really predict where they'll spawn, keeping 4-5 on you when you can is a good idea. I wouldn't go past 5 though. At that point just get in casting range of the next one that pops, but wait to pull it until some of your current ones get low on health. I pull the balls with 1x Searing Pain too, keeps things simple.

If the very first target switch is to Keleseth, sometimes you won't have enough aggro built up yet for people to go all out on him. It really depends on (a) whether you got a hunter to help you with aggro, and (b) whether you had to run back and forth all over the room wasting lots of early time picking up purple balls. Sometimes your aggro will be fine because the initial set of balls were easy to reach. In any case, it's important to stress to the raid that *if* Keleseth is the first switch, they need to be extra careful with their aggro meters, because it's possible that you haven't built up a solid threat lead yet, owing to being too busy picking up balls to survive the first giant hit from him.

Once you get through that first switch (or if the first switch is to the other guy instead of Keleseth), it becomes pretty easy. Just maintain 4-5 balls at all times, and keep spamming Searing Pain on Keleseth and throwing dots on him while you're running for more balls. I usually don't Shadow Ward immediately on cooldown. Instead I save it for those "oh crap" situations where I realized too late that 2+ of my purple balls were about to die and the next one I can pick up is across the room.

I use two different Demo specs normally for PvE and PvP. For this fight I stay in my standard Demo PvE spec, but I switch to my PvP gear (which is gemmed with a ton of +sta gems. people are mixed on the whole "PvP Demo and stack sta" setup, but having +sta gear on hand is convenient for Blood Princes too) and equip both of the Brewfest mugs (+170 sta each), giving me around 42K health raid-buffed currently. You probably don't need to get your health that high, but it certainly gives your healer a lot more breathing room to do other things besides spam heals on you and your pet.

Having a summoning circle out somewhere in the room, and being an engineer with the Nitro Boosts enchant on you boots, can help with reaching the purple balls, too. Again, optional, but everything helps if you're having trouble.

[Griefel]

Hello OP, you should ask your guild to have a regular tank tank it, DKs are the best for the job, but any tank would do really, my guild is tanking the caster with warriors(me on 10 man and the warr mt on 25), we tried a mage, then a lock in the 1st days, then switched to tanks and never looked back.

PS: we got the achievement in the 2nd week.

[Glnger]

yea, warlock tanking this is archaic now. People saw the fight and initially assumed that it should be done like Mimron had been.
I mean they can, but any tank can just as easily do it and save the dps for kinetic balls/killing bosses

[gherkin]

I go with the standard Lock PvE spec, One very important thing is to Zoom your Camera to max so you can see the ENTIRE ROOM! That is key, to me at least. How my 10 man Guild does it is The tank *bear* charges in at that point im in my Demonic form and since I'm an engineer pop my haste gloves and spam Searing Pain until I am comfortable then start on the orb collecting. I have a macro that i can cast searing pain without targeting the Boss so during times with no orbs spawning I hit that macro for a bit. Watch out for the knock-backs. use Voidwalker for soaking up some damage with the bubble. Shadow Ward whenever you see fit and I've become comfortable with it that if I see a Beach ball of death falling down I cast a few spells and get it back it. Very Fun fight, to me at least

Stop bringing threads back from the dead. You're a warlock, not a death knight.