Council fight, they don't share health, and they don't heal to full when one dies.
Our good friend Gara'jal makes a repeat performance here. The way the fight works is that each troll is active the entire fight, but Gara'jal can empower them and their abilities change. Think Heroic Golem Council in Blackwing Descent. When a troll is empowered you need to do 25% of their health to break them out, while they're empowered they'll also start gaining energy. If they reach 100 energy they start to do raid wide damage that increases in damage until they are broken out of empowerment. They also get a buff called Lingering Presence (that stacks) that increases their damage done by 5% after they've been empowered and also increases their energy generation for the next empowerment by 5%.
Frost King Malakk:
Applies a stacking debuff to tanks that will stun them for 15 seconds if it reaches 15 stacks.Biting Cold: Targets a random raid member, they take frost damage and then do frost damage to everyone around them within 4 yards every 2 seconds for 30 seconds.
Empowered Version - Frostbite: Similar to the biting cold, except it has stacks that can only be removed when it damages people around them.
Kazra'jin:
Just kinda does whatever he wants, can't be tanked for the most part.Reckless Charge: Charges to a random raid member, leaves a line in his path that deals nature damage, knocks back people when he lands.
Empowered - Overload: Stuns himself for 20 seconds, reflects 25% of all damage taken as Nature damage.
Sul the Sandcrawler:
Probably the most difficult of the trolls.Sand Bolt - Targets random raid member, deals nature damage to them and anyone within 5 yards of the targeted location.
Quicksand - Spawns a void zone at random raid member's location. Standing in Quicksand gets you stacks of Ensnared, if you get 5 stacks you're rooted in place for 30 seconds. The void zone deals damage so that would be bad.
Empowered - Sandstorm: Deals raid wide nature damage, turns quicksand into Living Sand. When you kill living sand it creates a pool of quicksand. If you get a sandstorm when living sand are still alive they get healed to 100% and increases their damage by 100%.
High Priest Mar'li:
Wrath of the Loa: Interruptible spell that will deal holy (or shadow when empowered) damage to random raid member.Blessed Loa Spirit: Spawns a spirit at her feet that will head towards the lowest health and heal them for 10% of their maximum health. Can be slowed/snared/stunned. Will teleport if it isn't dead within 20 seconds.
Empowered - Shadowed Loa Spirit: Spawns a spirit that will fixate on a random raid member, will kill them instantly if it reaches that player. Again can be slowed/snared/stunned, and will teleport if it's not dead within 20 seconds.
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The first four empowerments are always in the same order: Malakk, Kazra'jin, Sul, Mar'li. After that it's random.
Your tanks will need to grab Mar'li and Sul, and swap Malakk before the debuff hits 15.
ToT - Council of Elders
Tue, 03/19/2013 - 2:12pm
#1
mutagen
ToT - Council of Elders
Random suggestions:
We could do better on the Sand Bolts but we're not as bad as the guild those couple of suggestions are aimed at.
We are taking too much damage from Dark Power, indicating we're not killing the empowered mob quickly enough. I don't know if that is a raid DPS issue or a target switching issue.
It's worth noting though, that as soon as you finish the empowered boss the next boss will empower and every time they switch they leave a stacking buff, so that there is a strong incentive to make each empower go the full 100% rather than switching them more rapidly than necessary.
A few things I pulled out from icy veins.
First: Everyone should check out the class guides that give specific talents etc that are useful for each fight. I know I picked up a few good ideas.
For example, several shamans are reporting that a glyphed grounding totem will completely negate the "overload" of Kazra'jin. - NICE! They report you can drop it before or during the overload.
Several raids are reporting that they had success by stacking all three bosses and ignoring the loa spirits. If we have a cleave/aoe heavy group this might be worth trying. Alternatively, a few suggested having only one ranged dps be in charge of killing the loa spirits to reduce the loss of dps from target switching.
Thanks for the comments!
I'd already decided to tank swap the Frost King. Fatboss suggested not to because it would avoid the Spirits from healing him too easy. This shouldn't be a problem for at least the first part because Sul will be the lowest in health anyway! Plus, Fatboss certainly outgeared the fight since they'd done a ton of Heroic fights in the previous tier. While the extra damage from a stunned tank with two bosses beating on him might not matter to them, it's a different story for us. Simple enough change, just taunt swap the Frost King at 10 stacks.
Our biggest problem from our first attempts was the Dark Power going off. As I recall, it wasn't too bad on the Frost King, but it was very painful on Kazrajin. Not only did it last longer, but we're already taking a lot of damage from Mr. Blanka. Bad combo. For the Frost King, we can split DPS pretty nice because of cleave damage and heroism. For Kazra'jin, we're going to need more focused DPS faster. It's gonna be a pain for the melee, but we need to put everyone on him when he Empowers to make sure we can beat the timer. If we get ahead of the energy gain, we can pull some DPS off and back onto Sul. As Aanvil points out, we don't want to DPS too fast. We need to make sure we have enough to start though.
The other big point is we need to live through the damage. There's quite a bit coming back from Kazra'jin while he's empowered. Since it's reflected, everyone needs to watch their health and stop if they get too low. Also, everyone needs to use personal CDs and Healthstones. The reflected damage is actually nature damage so Cloak of Shadows, Anti-Magic Shield and so on should definitely be used on Kazra'jin. We could also use Devotion Auras! It may also be worth stacking up somewhat. Sul is the main reason stacking is bad. Quicksands and Sand Bolts will do a lot of damage to a stacked raid.
So long as we can survive 1-2 Empowers of Kazra, I think we'll have this fight. I think those are the times we are most likely to die. After Sul dies we can even stack up to heal through his damage since most of the AoE damage will be gone.
That's kind of odd about the Grounding Totem, but go for it Serelyn!
I'm not sure how great our cleave damage is. Rom and Dark both have pretty good cleave. I'm good AoE on 4+ targets, but cleave? Not as much. Not sure about everyone else. Essentially we'd need to do more than 10% damage to the three of them between each Spirit cast. That's just breaking even though. We can try it, but it shouldn't be necessary. We definitely shouldn't need melee on the Spirits though. The ranged should be enough.
Fight should be pretty easy once Sul dies. It's just getting to that point. From what we did on Monday, our focus points are getting more DPS on the Empowered mob, living through Kazra'jin's damage and taunt-swapping the Frost King.
For Science!
It's a dangerous thing, that thinking.
TROLLS. Stupid trolls. Dumb trolls. Blargle trolls. ANYWAY
Q: Do we want to keep two healers on "Frostbite soaking" duty?
A: Up to the healers, but I'm thinking no. Three people stacked up decreases Frostbite damage nicely, but increases chance of Quicksand under your feet. With everything else the healers have to do, seems better to have only one healer dealing with standing in Frostbite. Could have me and a healer do it with one other DPS as backup. A healer as the backup may be fine, but I'm leaning DPS. What do our healers think? (Ok probably a small thing.)
Q: LIVING SAND KILLITKILLITKILLITWITHFIRE
A: [will fill in later]
For Science!
Skarn I agree about the STUPID TROLLS!!!! I HATES THEM, THEY MUST DIE!
Regarding the 2 heals soaking the frostbite, I think it depends on the healer mix. I can move very well and heal, we just need to coordinate the movement piece so we don't all scatter in 3 directions causing the healers to look for the group and miss healing. We will have DPS issues if we change it to DPS. I see it more as a coordination issue than a Healer vs DPS soaking issue.
Regarding the living sands.....
We have to be extremely clear on the HOP or BOP or whatever they are calling it these days. If I'm in the raid... they love me mostest so lets have me stand on Kul and have him bubble me after they run to me. The DPS should also stack and run out as soon as they all come to Kul so we dont all sink in the quicksand. Muta needs to pull Kul out of the sand so he doesn't die.
Rinse, repeat. Not sure the CD on the HOP but if both Kul and Aanvil are in there shouldnt be an issue. If not I'll use all the CD's I can to survive, perhaps shift the LB to me as well. It just seems we need to calm down and focus during that phase as we all tend to run around screaming AHHHHH "kill the adds they are beating on me!" Ok maybe that was just me :)
http://www.wowprogress.com/video/19725-council-of-elders-10man-focus-war...
Boy do the sand adds seem well controlled here. Seems they all stack on Sul tank then the Sul tank kites them slowly to avoid the quicksand.
I meant to get back to this yesterday, but that didn't happen! Obviously.
I agree that BoP (yes I know it's not a Blessing any more, NYAH) should be used on that first set of Sand adds to try to keep you alive, Ardwen. Not right when they spawn, because they'll just ignore you and go after someone else. If they can get close to you and you are close to the tank, then get BoPed it should help a lot. I'm gonna shift up a couple things I was doing. I'm not sure why, maybe I thought I'd get aggro, but I was hanging out on the far side of Kul so he was between me and the adds. (Good spot for Ardwen?) Instead, I should be on the other side using Misdirection to attempt to help get threat for Kulgarr! Not sure what I was thinking. I'll also put my Ice Trap between Kulgarr and the adds, but not right on Sul. Those changes may help a bit. Anything anyone else can do to help corral adds would be very useful. If any go after Swipe, we should probably just leave them on him and work on Sul. They will get a damage boost from the second Sandstorm, but after that we can kill them and never have to worry about them again.
You're right that we need to not panic. :) I'm fine with sticking to 2-heal Frostbite, if you are good with it.
I'm considering a couple variations where we stack all bosses on each other and/or ignore the healing spirits. There's some possible benefit there. Stacking them up depends on how good our cleave damage is. Some of us have good cleave damage, some of us don't! Viability of a "clump" strat could thus vary depending on who is in the raid that night.
Ignoring the healing adds means the damage we spend on them will be put back into the bosses, plus overall DPS should be higher without having to target switch so much. We can also use "Mortal Strike" effects to reduce the actual healing they do. Is that enough to outweigh the healing they do? If we try this, we could probably have two DPS (melee) stay on Sul and the ranged stay on the Empowered one. Without having to switch, that'll give us better damage on the Empowered. And even with the healing still happening, two DPS on Sul should be more than we have now! Could be worth a shot.
For Science!
Moar DPS
I've been looking at WoL and thinking about this fight. The WoL Summary page for Council has some insights. First, 92% of logged attempts are wipes. We're not the only ones having trouble here. A look at Proudmoore progression kind of confirmed that too, we were about 50th on both Jin'rokh and Horridon and as of Tuesday am only 43 guilds had killed Council.
DPS average for a kill: There's a peak at about 670K RDPS and a broader peak centered around 710K RDPS. Possibly the difference between 2 healing and 3 healing it. We're at 630K to 640K before people start dying on the long attempts and that includes a greater percentage of time that we spend under heroism. We already know this from the wipes with Sul at single digit health percentages. Even our wipe DPS is below average (not sure that means anything though).
Our HPS numbers are around the median and averages reported of just below 190K RHPS, which makes sense for 3 healing it. We still had some problems with tank healing Mon night but I think much of that got sorted out.
Average fight duration has a couple peaks, which we'd expect from a fight that some are 2 healing. Wipe times show some peaks which can probably be matched to our wipe times over learning this fight: First empowerment and Dark Power, second Khazra'jin's Overload reflecting damage and the last peak is probably Sul's Sandstorm. As we know, there aren't many wipes past this.
I think the clearest message here is that we need more DPS. We can put some serious attempts into 2 healing it, which will be difficult but I think the damage profile will change when we have quite a bit more DPS (Overload distributed to more healthbars, skip one or more Sandstorms, etc). We can try single tanking it. We can wait until Valor points and LFR and the two bosses we're farming get us the gear. We can go back to old content and farm more tier / weapons. We can even try stacking the raid.
Some other things to try:
One of the tactics I copied above was:
Can we park her over on the side with little ill effect? Icy Veins says Wrath of the Loa is random but Swipe took nearly all of the damage from this, it is clearly threat based. Can we build enough threat to stay above healing for the duration she'd be ignored? We may be even able to deal with it being cast on the non-Frostbite healer(s). We'd have slightly more Wrath of the Loa damage but the extra DPS and simplified healing positioning would likely make up for this.
Along the lines of 2 healing, I've seen claims that 1 tanking and 3 healing went smooth for this fight. I'm not sure if they grouped them up and cleaved it down or parked Marli out of the raid to avoid the spirit heals.
Personal and raid cooldowns:
So we can skip dispelling the root if everyone is ready to be responsible for taking care of themselves (and we're ready for someone to get it twice in a row if they've got a long cooldown).
We also should get some cooldowns organized for the Overload reflect. I was using Spirit Shell for this to allow for high RDPS but that leaves it down the for the first Sandstorm, would be nice to have there.
2 healer Frostbite has a couple of issues. One is moving together to maintain the damage reduction. At one raid we were coordinating on moving to the door (our start/buffing/meal location) but that might not have been communicated to Ardwen. The other is reduced healing while making the adjustment. While I'm more mobile than ever and druids always have been, the extra attention load makes tank healing suffer.
Someone was suggesting Seal of Insight / Battle Healer threat as a great way for a Paladin tank to lock down both the Sandstorm adds and the bats on Tortos.
The good stuff
We're actually making progress, the amount of damage we're taking from Dark Power and Sand Bolt is way down from previous attempts.
According to the folks at elitist jerks, seal of insight and glyph of battle healer are standard tankadin style now for all fights.
Seals
[Seal of Insight] - Formerly known as Seal of Light and is now (and has been for a while, sorry, I was really slow in updating this) our primary tanking seal. It heals the paladin for 0.15*(AP+SP) on each swing as well as restoring a small amount of mana. In addition, it increases casting speed by 10% and improves healing by 5%. Additionally, the Glyph of the Battle Healer (see below under Glyphs) is pretty much mandatory and it requires SoL to be running.
[Glyph of the Battle Healer] – Melee attacks with Seal of Insight heal a nearby (within 30 yards) wounded ally for 30% of damage done by direct physical attacks (auto-attack, physical part of HotR, CS, ShoR). This is really, really good.
I am going to change up a few things spec/glyph wise to generate a bit more AOE threat. I will also go with the Glyph of battle healer and Seal of insight next time if the healers think it is needed, but in general I am not a fan of using those as a default choice. The trade off is a significant loss in threat generation and DPS vs. some bonus self (and a nearby ally) healing. In general I find that with the healers that our guild has we rarely have issues with tank healing (except for when rada has kid aggro...), so it is usually more beneficial to go for the threat & dps. That being said, on the occasions when healing is tough and/or threat is a non issue, I go with the insight.
Sand Adds: I think the real problem with the sand adds is that they are usually spread out all over the room, on different people. It becomes impossible to hold the adds that are on me if I am spending all of my time trying to wrangle random adds off people across the room (with my 8 second single target taunt, and a couple ranged attacks...), and it goes downhill fast from there. So, simple solution... When sand storm is 5-10 seconds away, start to move to, and be ready to stack on Kull... Then when it begins stand in all the pretty holy light on the floor and unless you have misdirect, fan of knives, etc keep shooting the boss for a few seconds. Once I have the little adds on me for say 3-4 seconds, THEN start hitting them!!!! Killing them to fast is bad (creates pools of quick sand at my feet while I am wrangling loose adds). They die pretty quick so a few seconds of DPS on the boss will be fine.
As far as the sand puddles go life grip should really only be used as a last resort, it often spins the tank and is somewhat disorienting... much better than dying, but keep it as a last resort. What does work really really well is hand of purity just as the adds start to die. With that up I take very little damage.
Also I agree a few adds on swipe would be a good thing. Swipe if there are 1 or 2 loose on your side grab um.
Lets kill these trolls tomorrow night!
Kull
The Insight glyph seems like it would help with AoE threat on the Sand adds. Assuming that the healing you do to raid members with it generates threat for you on the Sand. There is extra AoE damage hitting the whole raid during Sandstorm anyway.
You make a good point that we can hold off on attacking the adds for a little bit while you corral them. (Except me and Luv, of course.) Just attacking Sul for a few seconds while you get threat on the adds is just fine. We want him to die fast after all!
For the Quicksand, do you want Aanvil to Freedom you? Also I could hit you with Master's Call! I bet most of you don't even know that can be used on other people, even if you know the spell exists. That assumes I haven't recently used it on myself. >.>
I need to work up a couple new macros...
For Science!
http://www.plusheal.com/forum/post/last/m/1833799/viewthread/6299468-cou...
A variation on stacking the bosses. This guild has the mar'li tank just put in a few hits to get aggro, then go over and dps Sul instead, leaving Mar'li all alone and uninterrupted. The Mar'li tank keeps getting hit by the Loa's but stacks up vengeance to make it worthwhile. If I understand correctly, the DO kill the spirits.
The goal is to kill Sul before he empowers. One contributor to the thread said that they did it with two healers, which might be what we have to try.
The part I really liked about this is that they have their two tanks standing next to each other, then the person with frostbite also stands with the tanks, and in their experience, none of these three people ever got hit by a sand trap or ever got charged. It seems clear that the tanks are immune to sand trap and charge, and possible that the person with frostbite is also.
We might not have the dps to pull this off, but it does have some interesting ideas.
I like the Frostbite with the tanks approach, it concentrates healing on 3 targets (2 with some damage reduction and/or heal bonuses) instead of 5 targets and likely eliminates sand traps as a problem. That post also mentions they don't get charged, which avoids some minor damage and a knockback.
I'm pretty sure we're going to need 6 DPS to pull any of these off, single tanked or 2 healed will probably both work. I might be underestimating the value of vengeance stacking though...
That sounds very interesting. Another benifit to having both tanks stacked is we can interrupt more of the sand bolts. With just me on sul I can get about 50% (more if I get lucky with avenger shield procs), but with swipe also we should get almost all of them and they do 150K in a 5 yard radius of impact so that could be a significant reduction in raid damage.
Only question I have is for Marli is her wrath target always threat based? if so it may be worth trying and it would still hit swipe with enough damage to keep his vengeance high.
Kull
That worked great! After wiping repeatedly on the first two bosses, we got a two shot on council using this strategy. Raiding is strange sometimes.
A few notes for posterity:
3 heals + 2 tanks + 5 dps seemed plenty of dps
Mar'li's bolts consistently hit Swipe and he had huge vengeance stacks and did a ton of dmg.
Frostbite stacking on the tanks worked great and they never got hit by a quicksand or a charge.
Mar'li's healing spirits went down pretty easily (maybe one got through?) with me standing between her and Sul and stunning them every time.
Mar'li's empowered spirits were also easy to handle. They appear to always target the raid member farthest from her, so I made sure that was me as often as possible and then stunned them.
Sul died before he ever empowered. Was it close? It didn't seem that close.
The tanks did some masterful maneuvering of the trolls that I wasn't able to completely follow, but I believe that Mar'li got pulled into the stack when she empowered and then pulled back out afterwards.
As Aanvil said, that was spectacular! The difference in the fight was ridiculous. With Swipe attacking/cleaving Sul and the Frost King, the damage difference was incredible. We didn't need to move the Frost King anywhere, so he could stay and be cleaved with Sul. Didn't need to move melee DPS off of Sul either. Cleave damage plus ranged was enough to prevent Dark Power from going off for long.
Due to not being damaged, Mar'li empowered second and this actually worked out great! The linked strat preferred having Kazra second, but I think Mar'li is better. As Aanvil mentioned, we pulled Mar'li into the pack when she empowered since there were no heal spirits to worry about. This allowed cleave damage to keep hitting Sul and Mar'li, making DPS very similar during both empower phases. Ranged still had to deal with the shadow spirits, but that was no different.
If Kazra had been second, cleave DPS wouldn't have been as good since he runs all over the place. IMO, it was far better with Mar'li second. You're right Aanvil, we weren't even close to Sul's empower. When Kazra empowered, Sul was so low we focused all DPS on him to finish him off before even worrying about Kazra. Then we shifted all DPS to Kazra and knocked him out. Practically nothing left after that!
Only thing to worry about at that point is to make sure the other two don't die before Kazra's HP is brought down some. Need him low enough to die before he blows everyone up with Dark Power once he's alone. Kazra should be the secondary target for ranged, but Mar'li should be the one we want to kill next so we no longer have Spirits to DPS.
It was just amazing. Should be easy to repeat too! I'm stoked! :D
For Science!