My source for succinct tactics is slacking. The ultra short version is "Keep bat tank topped off 100%, kick a turtle in his face when he's about to breathe or when you want a damage buff and have some extra shells."
What worked for us was assigning ranged to nothing but whirl turtles until they all stopped spinning. Melee switched to AoE bats when the offtank had them and ranged helped mop up once turtles were all in their shells.
We just alternated every turtle shell for bats and Tortos, always making sure to keep one up in case a breath came around the time new turtles spawned. If you have more than 3 shells up, kick extras at Tortos or try to line up a shot at the whirl turtles to make stuff die faster.
We also tried to keep healers in the water near him and everyone else away so there was less chance of healers being rocked by turtles. That was really what was killing us initially, the healers being thrown up and a tank dying.
Bring bats into melee and cleave them down, kill them before every quake. Kick turtles so that it hits both bats and Tortos. Remember that rockfall deals damage 20 yards from the center of it (maybe 35k), so if you're in the middle of a lot of them you're still going to die.
I'm glad we could do a couple pulls on him last night so we could get a look at the fight. I really appreciate everyone staying late to do that! Staying late will be very rare, so don't worry about that. :)
Overall, this fight is fairly uncomplicated. Unlike the last two! Probably the highest element of damage is the Snapping Bite on the main tank. So long as we can keep the two tanks alive, everything else should be fine. Keeping the healers away from the ranged sounds like a great idea.
For the Quake Stomp, I hear the damage can be mitigated by personal CDs like Deterrence! So use those as often as you can to make the healer's job easier.
For Science!
The way to hit both the bats and the boss with the shells is for the offtank to be sure and position the bat pile between the boss and a dead turtle shell. That will insure that the shell kick will hit both the bats and the boss. Also for the quake stomp, I saw a good video where the raid would stack right as quake stomp goes off. Right after quake stomp goes off, we have 8 seconds of a ton of those blue AOE circle things that form. So for 8 seconds after the stomp people need to GTFO of the blue circles that spawn like crazy. If we are stacked after stomp, then everyone can move to the left or right together..the whole raid will avoid the blue circles and the damage. Only the tank and turtle kicker should be out of the pile. It worked great in the video I saw and the raid damage was quite managable. Once we figure out how to keep the tanks alive and topped, the whole quake stomp followed by 8 seconds of tons of blue shit will likely wipe us. So lets start work on surviving that right away. Also the healers should probably rotate raid cooldowns for the whole "quake stomp//8 seconds of blue chaos" periods of the fight. I really think we can get this down on Monday.
Glad we could get him down last night! It was rough at some points, but do remember that we killed him with just one night of attempts. (Ok a tiny bit more than that.) One night for a boss is very good! Did anyone figure out what it was that we changed so we actually won?
Far as I could tell, we tended to lose tanks when a Quake Stomp went out. Or if they survived, we lost someone else to falling rocks. Did moving the healers to the side in the water work out? Did tanks just get better at CDs? I did get better at kicking extra turtles at the bats, so perhaps they were dying faster?
Thoughts?
For Science!
Healer positioning didn't seem to help much, I was still all over the place avoiding rockfalls. Maybe if we spread healers out, 2 on one side and one on the other, we could move less but I think movement is just a part of the fight.
Power Word Barrier felt like a mostly useless gesture, both because I wasn't communicating its usage and positioning properly and because of the movement we were all spread out. I may have used it as a personal cooldown though :) Spirit Shell helped some but wasn't optimal because of being spread out.
I focused more healing on tanks and less on the raid, which helped. Raid members aren't in danger of dying right away unless they screw up. On the other hand, tanks can get gibbed by bad combinations or just the incoming damage. I think I got some of the best use ever out of Void Shift in some of those last attempts, I'm not used to having a LoH and especially one that requires me to heal myself up afterwards. I did push emergency bubbles onto raid members in trouble, especially when I couldn't avoid spinning turtles and was bouncing in the air.
I don't see any blinding insights in the log parses, it looks like we just got a little better at staying alive. Of course, I could be missing something obvious...
I'd like to think that I made the difference but I don't think it's true. I did more or less the same healing as Ardwen and I stood in the rockfalls a bit more than her. But hey I was still learning the fight! I only figured out afterwards that rockfalls are nature damage, not physical, and they do damage up to 20 yards not just in the circle, so I'll be better able to use cds next time.
I think one major difference was that Kulgarr switched to seal of insight and glyph of battle healer for the last 5-6 attempts. That added over 7 million in total heals on the kill, about 20k hps in smart heals, close to 10% of total raid healing for the fight just from those two abilities. Kulgarr did 4 million healing to himself with seal of insight and 3 million to the raid with battle healer. Seal of insight was close to 20% of the healing on Kulgarr, more than beacon or power word shield. It also appears that on those last attempts Kulgarr took a lot more damage from cave bats than he did previously, while the healers damage taken from cave bats was negligible. It appears that Kulgarr drew aggro instead of Ardwen.
EDIT: I missed the fact that Kulgarr used insight and battle healer on the first ten attempts too. I'm not sure if that completely discredits my theory or not.
Looking over world of logs I think we can do a lot more on slowing the turtles. I could only see slowing debuffs from Swipe, Bluepea and me on world of logs. I know Skarn was doing traps but I couldn't see that on the logs. It's possible others have similar abilities that I don't know how to look for. Still, most of us should have slowing abilities that we can work into our rotations. One GCD to slow a turtle should save at LEAST one GCD of raid members not getting bounced in the air or having to run as much. Please review your abilities to see what you can do to slow the turtles.
Gota admit Battle healer and insight did a lot more healing (particularly on that last attempt) than I expected. The absorb form sacred shield also contributed a big amount to my "self heals". On the last pull I think I was drawing a lot of bat agro which spiked my vengeance very high and in turn caused more agro and healing and dps. This also made it fairly easy for Swipe to gather the bats and they were already in the right location. I was mostly saving my big cool downs for when I did agro bats, and sometimes for quake stomp. I think I also did better at banking my Holy power so I almost always got off a SoTR at the snap bite. That alone makes a HUGE difference in incoming damage. And it also works for quake stomp. The 52% physical damage reduction from SoTR on last 1.5 seconds so timing is key.
On the last attempt I had several "near death" experiences and I am pretty sure 1 ardent defender "Death" (un-confirmed). So even though we got him, it was realllly close...