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.
08:47, January 17, 2013Carboxylate /
You forgot to mention how awesome a fight this is for melee.
Diseases on body and 2 front legs? Yes please.
14:37, January 18, 2013Kal /
Borg seeing run around doing nothing, wondering why, and finding out you had a fishing pole equipped. That’s possibly even funnier then when you were smelling Kologarn’s armpits and fell down. ;)