We made some progress on this. Challenges include kiting, reliably handing off pheromones, and beating the enrage timer. I'd look at moving to 4 kiters and putting some healers into the kiting rotation. Put some ranged solely on Garalon after the first leg dies with cleaving melee focused on legs, balance this so that they're constantly killing legs.
He's a bit like Rhyolith, except reliably steerable, so he's not really like Rhyolith at all.
Garalon applies Pheromones to whoever first pulls him and will fixate on whoever has Pheromones. Pheromones are passed around by melee-range contact, like Unbound Plague on Putricide except hopefully not bouncing around a zillion times because a bunch of people run for it at once. When you have Pheromones, you'll also radiate raidwide damage (around 10k per second to start), apply a stacking debuff on yourself that increases the damage the entire raid takes from your Pheromones, and you'll also drop puddles of crap behind you. The stacking buff lasts two minutes on 10-man, four minutes on 25-man; you'll be handing it off every 30 seconds, so you'll need a rotation of four/eight people on kiting duty.
Whenever Pheromones gets handed off, or whenever someone stands under Garalon's body, he will Crush, dealing raidwide damage plus an additional very very large amount of damage to anyone dumb enough to be standing underneath him. (There's a big purple circle under him marking where you'll trigger Crush.)
His legs are attackable; breaking his legs and keeping them broken will slow him down. If you're melee, you deal bonus damage to the legs and can cleave off of it for even more bonus damage on the boss! Yay! (Breaking one of his legs takes away 3% of his max health. When he regenerates a leg, that health stays gone.)
Finally, there's Furious Swipe, which deals a bunch of damage in a frontal cone and which causes him to speed up if it doesn't hit at least two people (i.e. the tanks). So: Pheromones-kiters will stay in line with the tanks but out of range of Furious Swipe and try to kite him in a big circle, while all the other ranged stand in the middle of that circle. Trade off Pheromones every ~15-20 stacks. Melee will running around Garalon, re-breaking his legs as needed.
Try using your healers in the rotation for Pheromones, our raid uses all three and a Hunter to manage it. Giving that extra dps and both tanks the ability to help dps on things will make it much easier. You could also have the tanks kill the front left leg any time it spawns and just leave your dps attacking the boss, meaning they can stay around the back right leg and have quick access to the three legs.
My guild flew through everything but got stuck on garalon for about 50 attempts.
There's so many different viable tactics and we had to go through a bunch until we found one that worked for us at which point he dropped in about 5 attempts (We probably switched too much and should have stuck with one earlier, but nevermind.)
What worked in the end for us:
- 1 dps (plate) soak, 1 tank soak. 3 healers.
- 1 of the healers was part of the kiting rotation whilst focusing healing on themselves, the soakers and the kiters. 3 other kiters were ranged dps.
- 2 other healers just spammed raid healing / triage.
I'm certainly willing to try my hand at kiting.
I watched the Fatboss video and it's a good thing I did! They pointed out one very important thing, which really should have been obvious, but we all missed it. The timer on the Pungency stack only starts when you pass off the Pheromones. In other words, we didn't have enough kiters! I took 20 stacks, Muta took 20 stacks and then I waited for my debuff to fall of before taking it again, which means Serelyn took 40 stacks! That's way too much!
The debuff lasts 2 minutes or 120 seconds. A new stack of Pungency is applied to someone in the raid every 2 seconds. (Some raider, even a corpse, always has the debuff so it is always stacking.) Thus for the debuff to wear off, you have to go for 120 seconds without it, or have 60 stacks applied to other raiders. That's a big "oops" on our part. :)
That's easy enough to fix, we just add another kiter into the mix. Using a couple healers as kiters sounds like a good idea. I can stay as a kiter, that's fine. When you are not a kiter, you are free to stand just about anywhere. Whatever is most convenient for healing or DPS. This should make a big difference for us!
Better DPS will also help a lot. It's a new fight and we're still working on the mechanics, so it's fine that DPS is low at first, but we definitely need to bring it up. Our last attempt was around 3:30 long and he got to 70%. The enrage is at 7 minutes. We need to speed that up. Taking a DPS or two out of the kiting rotation should help a lot. We should also use Heroism early on. This will help getting the four legs down right at the start. There's not really a better time to use it later in the fight.
Speaking of the legs, killing them is very helpful! Each dead leg reduces his movement speed by 15%. Four dead legs means he moves 60% slower, which will be a HUGE help to kiting! That will make it much easier to keep the pheromone puddles close together while staying out of his cleave range. Also, killing the legs is the BEST way to do DPS! When a leg dies, it removes 3% of his overall HP. He does not get this back when he heals a leg. It's permanent damage. Killing legs is faster than killing Garalon because you do double damage to the legs if you stand near them. That's easy for the melee, but can be harder for the ranged since the legs keep moving. You should at least be multi-dotting the legs as possible! Oh, melee should mostly ignore the front left leg and let the tanks kill it.
For the tanks, it's really important that they both stay in front of the boss and get hit with the Furious Swipe. If it doesn't hit both of them, Garalon gains 10% damage and 10% speed. That makes it harder to kite and harder to heal. Bad! Getting smacked is actually the most important part of "tanking" this fight. We don't necessarily need "tanks" for it though. Plate DPS should be able to soak the damage just fine. Kul could "tank" as Ret and Auto could "tank" too. This will up our DPS a bit. Luv could even tank the damage using Feint.
So long as we get the kiting and tanking part right, the healing should stay very predictable. And hopefully manageable!
For Science!