[25H] Deathbringer Saurfang

[Meloree]

Here's another fight that's an actual test on heroic - as is appropriate for a tier dropping boss.

You're shooting for a kill in the range of 4:00 to 4:30. Any more than that, and you're likely to get overwhelmed with marks. There isn't much that's more heartbreaking than seeing the boss go from 50k hp to 40%. Holy paladins are brokenly amazing on this fight for a couple of reasons. The first is BoP. A holy paladin can BoP early to remove a boiling blood debuff, delaying Marks, as well as BoP near the end, to ease healing requirements. DG is another great tool here to buy healers some time. The healing setup for this fight is basically 7-x healers, where x is your number of holy paladins. Yes, every holy paladin is worth 2 of anything else. Remind your paladins to refresh beacon right before frenzy starts - they won't have spare GCDs afterwards.

For Blood Beast handling, we did a few things:
1) One of our warlocks went Destro. He'd Shadowfury the adds on spawn, and then kill his own target.
2) Our boomkin stood fairly close to the spawn area, and typhooned right after Shadowfury wore off. He then proceeded to kill his target (the back one, since he was close).
3) Frost traps on melee.
4) Each add got one specific high-burst ranged assigned to it. Afflock multidotted to help out. Mages and Warlocks are great, due to outs.
5) Never root. Never ever. Seriously.
6) Try to avoid having healers in melee range. A badly timed crit chain-heal = 50 BP for Saurfang basically = wipe.

For tanks: Taunt instantly. Everything else is secondary. You can stun an add if required, you can (and should) BoP at some point during Frenzy, you can (and should) DG when your healers look like they'll need it. But make sure your taunt is split seconds away from perfect.

For DPS that isn't on adds: trust other people to do their jobs, you do yours. Mad DPS - if the fight goes on too long, you lose.

For healers: Holy paladins get 2 marks each. Other healers get max one (and nothing else). Plan for 5 marks. BoP a 6th and pray if it happens late.

Other tips:
It helps to have marked people move into melee. They'll pick up a lot of splash healing from Glyph of Holy Light, chain heal, Wild Growth, etc. If they're doing something important (on an add), have a replacement order.
12 yard spread. You can work out positions before hand - there's enough room.
Use heroism during Frenzy. We picked a specific time (3:20) for people to plan cooldown use around. It's slightly more DPS to use it on pull, but we found using heroism to help out the healing was better.
Your healers can DPS for half the fight. Yes, it helps. Wrath spam, Smite spam, Lightning Bolt. If they're not a Holy Paladin, they can be DPSing for 50-70% of the fight - and should be.

[Kihra]

One important thing to understand about this fight is that Saurfang is at his most dangerous when he has high blood power. This is especially important for tanks and healers to keep in mind. When you do a tank swap at high blood power, you're going to get hammered. Mark damage also ramps way up when he's at high blood power.

Basically save cooldowns and Divine Guardian for those high blood power times, and communicate those times on Vent so that your healers know that they will not be able to spare any GCDs during those times.

Also, because this fight only lasts 4-4:30, you really can chain Indestructible Potions. Pop one before the pull, and then pop one again before you next have to tank the boss. It will last you to the end of the fight.

[Boyfriend]

Things my guild did:

For me it helped alot to turn off the sounds on all bossmod warning except on rune of blood, and then whenever my bossmods made a sound I taunted.

We used protection paladin BoPs also to remove Boiling Blood before the first mark, this is easiest when you are tanking and don't have to worry about taunting. (use mouseover macro to BoP someone)

I had one of our mages on focus and used a Righteous Defense on focus target macro to taunt off him whenever 'his' add got close to him; I took a mage because I could also Sacred Shield him for extra damage. If your dps needs it and you have 2 non prot and 1 prot paladin you can potentially have them make macros to taunt all 5 beasts back before they reach their targets (HoR and RD from non prot, and RD from prot paladin, you need to save HoR to taunt boss).

[Xequecal]

If you want to make the blood beasts simple, just have a Mage spec full frost for Imp Blizzard + Permafrost + Chilled to the Bone. They barely move at all and become trivial to kill.

[hoho]

If you want to make the blood beasts simple, just have a Mage spec full frost for Imp Blizzard + Permafrost + Chilled to the Bone. They barely move at all and become trivial to kill.

But wouldn't rooted add just oneshot anyone in range?

[Jaesthenis]

If you want to make the blood beasts simple, just have a Mage spec full frost for Imp Blizzard + Permafrost + Chilled to the Bone. They barely move at all and become trivial to kill.

But wouldn't rooted add just oneshot anyone in range?

Blizzard only slows beasts, it doesn't root them.
Beasts' movement speed will be 25%*88%*90% = 19.8% of their original speed.

[hoho]

Blizzard only slows beasts, it doesn't root them.

Hm, I can swear I've had seen pretty much every frostmage that aoe's freeze mobs in place. Is that some kind of a non-needed talent that adds that effect to blizzard?

[Morendin]

Yes, there is a first tier talent that procs Frozen(which is a root) on Chilled(slow) targets.
Also, since there are multiple talents that give huge damage benefits against Frozen targets I would be unsurprised if Frost mages preferred to Frost Nova before opening up with Blizzard

[Maat]

We were finding that if people dpsing the blood beasts removed their movement debuff in any way, that the beasts would drop threat from them. This included blink, teleports, and HoFs. It's pretty whacky, and hella dangerous, to say the least.

[pfunkmort]

we used 3 holy paladins on our better attempts last week, but didn't have them all on so didn't get a kill later in the week. it's true that they're invaluable, especially as once the tanks are covered, they can take on 2 marks each. ALSO, they can bop blood nova/mark targets, so that they don't get overwhelmed by damage - a recent patch fixed it so that that scenario happened less often, but honestly, it still happens, so any paladin in raid need so know about it and be ready to bop any mark target who gets the blood nova on them, as the damage intake with both is insane. All the above posts are right, for the most part...you can easily get away with five marks going out, but you need high..and more importantly EFFECTIVE...rdps. That means burning down the adds as fast as possible, with as little movement as possible, and then back on the boss for tram time...errr....burn time, between spawns. I honestly think we went to like 6.5 minutes, on most of our attempts, and I think most of THAT was that we weren't focus firing the adds down quickly enough that we had enough time on DBS between spawns. That becomes even more apparent in p2, because marks go faster, and damage is higher, and healer mana is lower - so an extra 30 SECONDS in that phase can make the difference - no matter how quickly you get through the initial 70% burn.

[Repartee]

Things my guild did:

For me it helped alot to turn off the sounds on all bossmod warning except on rune of blood, and then whenever my bossmods made a sound I taunted.

This is a great idea, however...
I use DBM and can't find any option to adjust sounds for each warning.

Using the other tank as a focus target helps visually, but in my 10 man I am usually stunning a beast. My secondary spec has 2 of 2 improved HoJ to be able to stun one every spawn. Having a singular audio cue to know when to taunt would be more efficient since they changed rune of blood to be used right as it comes off cooldown. DBM currently makes a dong sound for every warning .

[pfunkmort]

create a debuff aura for focus in power auras, keep the other tank focused, and have the power aura give an audio queue (in addition to the visual queue)...and it's pretty much cruise control.

[Steve]

I'm sure I must be the last person on the planet to realize this, but the Ret talent sanctified wrath will cause a ret paladin to have half the damage of his/her divine storm and consecration ignore the resilient skin buff of the blood beasts while Avenging Wrath is active. Spent an hour figuring this out on WoL, so I figured I'd toss that fact in here to possibly spare another person some time/anguish.

[hoho]

Our first kill was healed by 2x shamans, disc, holy priest, druid and a paladin. We got 6 marks, 4 in melee. Shamans pretty much solohealed the melees with chainheal spam. We had a destro lock stunning the adds in the beginning, hunter placed frost trap under the boss and boomkin hurricane them away right after the stun. We (generally) had the adds die before they could run back to boss from hurricane. All ranged were on them, spriests spammed VT, others single-targeted. With the VT spam almost always spriests pulled agro from the last couple of surviving mobs, fading just as they were about to reach us gave people quite a bit of time to finish them off. Though we had a couple of tries where a hunter was standing right ontop of me and got eaten when I faded so be careful

http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-3 ... 65&e=12829

[Dianora]

Months behind and yes with 30% buff. We lined up all of our melee behind the tanks with boomkin and elemental shaman standing behind the boss. Melee's primary job is to stun and kill the 3 adds closest to them, and the range kill the remaining adds. Not sure if it's the best solution, but as one of the 2 tanks, I basically tune out everything except what I'm supposed to do.