« Archives in December, 2012

Garalon 10 Man Normal

Garalon is a reasonably frustrating fight. Getting a general understanding of the mechanics is not too difficult, but putting out enough DPS to beat the enrage timer is a challenge. Ideally everyone is on their game, which includes tanks and healers.

We initially started with tanks kiting the boss, which isn’t fun at all… for the tanks. Without kiting, there’s not a whole lot to do, and the damage a tank takes is really the least of the healers worries. However, when you are kiting, there is a very limited amount of room so that you avoid each other, but also both get hit by the Furious Swipe. Turning Garalon around a corner feels quite claustrophobic, and when you transfer off to a DPS or healer, there’s three characters standing way too close for comfort. Moving on.

We then had one healer and three ranged DPS kiting the boss, and pretty quickly healed through to the enrage timer with a scary amount of health left on the boss. Such a scary amount that I changed from Protection to Arms while “tanking” which just means in this fight, getting hit by every swipe. It worked pretty well, and the healers did a great job so I felt pretty secure on most attempts. To my surprise, Die by the Sword worked for the swipes, so I had that and self healing to help out.

After we sorted that out, we were frustratingly close to a kill.  We scaled back to two healers and two ranged DPS kiting, and eventually three healers and only one ranged DPS kiting to get the most DPS on the boss.

In among the specific strategy changes, we had some lively debate. Do ranged DPS go after the Weak Points debuff aggressively? Do we nuke all the legs all the time? Do we really need to make all the healers kite? Do you maybe want to put a Jade Spirit on that weapon, even though it’s only 463 iLvl? Are you double potting? Why the $#@% does Borg have a $#@%ing FISHING POLE on for this attempt?!?!?!

The consensus was that specifics aside, just do what you need to do to get 80k+ DPS (kiters can get a little slack). Fortunately, the ranged DPS agreed to stay off the front two legs, so that I could get a little extra cleave / weak points time while standing in front of the boss. As far as the double potting, you guys know I look at the logs a bit while I’m writing these posts, right? I know who you are, and my less than subtle message will be some pots in the mail. =P

So eventually we managed to get the boss down in spectacular fashion, with Tinytee throwing out a Dark Bargain for the final crush, and watching the boss topple over just before he joined the rest of us in death!

So Garalon is down, as we take our big three week break over Christmas / New Year.

Blade Lord Ta’yak 10 Man Normal

Fireworks and a Demonic Gateway front and centre to celebrate our Blade Lord Ta’yak kill. We had 11 people online for the night, so Jondayla happily watched the action on the big screen while enjoying a glass of wine.

Blade Lord is a relatively straightforward fight, with plenty of opportunities in the first phase to practise stacking up and spreading out. Unseen Strike is a reasonably annoying mechanic, mostly because there is very little time between the boss reappearing and the strike occurring.  So the ‘be in the cone attack’ strategy turns into ‘stack exactly on the strike target or watch the rest of us die’ strategy.

Overwhelming Assault requires some tank cooldowns for the second application, and forces a regular tank swap, while Wind Step forces people to spread out. Simple stuff, but messing it up can make your healers want to bop you right in the nose.

We would pop hero right after the fist unseen strike, and lay tornadoes all the way down the hallway until the second phase. Intensify makes for an interesting soft enrage mechanic (very soft since there’s a hard enrage) and can lead to some deaths to poorly managed mechanics that you can just get away with at the start of the fight. For our first kill we had 19 stacks of intensify, which was a little unpleasant.

The second phase is just painful. How painful depends on who you ask. So far my responses I’ve experienced ranged from “dodging tornadoes with wind in your face sucks” to “this phase is the nightmare directly from hell that will haunt me for an entire tier and possibly beyond”. Please note: both of those responses had either swearing or tears that I’ve removed from the text.

A selected few got to use the Warlock portal to get them a good way towards the boss which was great (for them). Otherwise we put our shoulder to the wind and tried to work out exactly how close we could cut it to the tornadoes edge, and then enjoyed what a lag spike could make that look like. “Aaaaarrrrrrgggghhhhh, I totally $#@%ing missed that one, I swear”.

When we had a mostly full group up to the first end, we’d all turn around and hoon back in the other direction at 11% using the wind on the edges of tornado valley, and could often get quite close to the boss before everything turned around. The RNG of when each individual tornado would turn around had the potential to also cause some tears, but stiff upper lip, we put that son of a bitch into the ground.

Fortunately, both Dambrath and I used our Greater Coin of Awesome and became glove buddies.