[10] Cho'Gal (one tank, two healers)

[inthedrops]

You can see in the video that he has an 8-stack at the end. It's not going anywhere.

Last night we were wiping pretty badly to the berserk, not sure what we're doing wrong but pushing into 25% P3 at 9 minutes is just too slow. We were able to peel it back to 8:15ish by blowing Heroism on the pull, but the videos I'm seeing were more like 7:00.

I guess maybe our concerns about DPS may have been valid, we never tried with fewer DPS. No one had the boss except me, no taunts or hunter tricks. You're right that it's 8 stacks when I finally die.

I can see this being a quick way to cheese the fight when gear gets better and you have better DPS than ours.

What isn't shown is the 27 something wipes the day before where our two available healers at the time (Shaman and Druid) couldn't keep me alive at the end of P1. We had a couple 5% wipes in P2 and one attempt where we got him to 128k health. The next day we had a different healer (Paladin) and it took about 5 attempts for him to learn how to heal the fight. He hadn't been there before. On the 6th attempt he was dead.

This is what I posted in guild chat to our paladin healer to help prepare him:

Kyle, just wanted to write something up real quick for you since looks like you're our second healer tonight.

I don't heal, but I've tanked it enough to know when things are dicey.

1. When he sucks up the fire guy (Flame's Orders, emote being "Behold the Might of the Hammer"), his melee hits will do additional fire damage on the tank. This means more tank heals, less raid heals. Fire damage adds about 30k per melee swing.

2. When he sucks up the shadow guy (Shadow's Orders, no emote from what I can tell), he'll do 3 AoE shadow pulses dealing shadow damage to the raid. This means roughly same tank heals, but more raid heals. Shadow pulses are a little higher than 30k each.

Typically it's been the shadow pulses that become dangerous to me because the raid has to get healed up and healing gets behind on me. Just remember that he only does THREE pulses. So if the third went out, and they are alive, they do not need any more healing right away.

I would suggest you use Aura Mastery + Shadow Aura and rotate that with my Divine Guardian when possible during P1. However, make sure they are both available again during P2. This may mean you can only use it once in P1, possibly twice (unsure to be honest)

Since you're running Hermes, I'll call out for Divine Sacrifice. Please have a macro ready for that as well as Lay on Hands. If you are specced into 1:30 HoSac, I will be asking for it for every single Large add spawn. If you cannot spec that way, I will ask for it on the first and third add. Try not to Sac me until the add is in range of me. Otherwise we'll lose up to 5 seconds of it.

Lay on Hands you'll just use on your own free will. Just make sure we both call out when we use it. Mine is available every attempt and I prefer to save it for P2 but that's only happened once or twice.

[baleogthefierce]

Last night we were wiping pretty badly to the berserk, not sure what we're doing wrong but pushing into 25% P3 at 9 minutes is just too slow. We were able to peel it back to 8:15ish by blowing Heroism on the pull, but the videos I'm seeing were more like 7:00.

We did a couple of things to minimize our time spent in phase 1. We positioned the boss fairly close to where the bloods would be spawning so our ranged didn't need to move at all in order to get in position to handle them. The other thing we did was keep a DPS on Cho'gall the entire time regardless of what else was happening. If you can use a tank with reliable interrupts on the large adds, that's yet another DPS you can leave on Cho'gall.

For phase 2, we found that splitting up our DPS/interrupts on different tentacles was far more effective than focusing them down one at a time. The fewer -75% healing received/damage dealt channeled beams applied in that phase, the better.

[PsiVen]

So I know this doesn't concern 1tank/2healing this fight, but here's what our group wound up doing to kill him last night:

Switched from 2 tanks 3 healers to 2 tanks 2 healers
Tanked the boss closer to the middle and killed adds on one of their spawns instead of kiting both to the back
Blew Time Warp early if needed after the 4th Fester to ensure no 5th Ascendant spawned
Kept one DPS on the boss the whole time (ranged, so melee could interrupt)

This got us to P2 faster, but forced us to focus much harder on interrupted MCed people as 2 stacks of Devotion would put us in pretty bad shape immediately. We found that even one screwup would get us to P2 with OOM healers and slightly higher corruption, which meant a quick death. Best wipe was 4.5% using this strategy. If your raid has a fully geared DPS to put in for the 6th slot, you'll probably have more reliable kills this way but it's still pretty unforgiving. Fortunately the unforgiving aspect is a big advantage for learning the fight as you can't slack at all.

So then we switched back to 2 tanks 3 healers, and made a couple changes to ensure our DPS would remain high: 3 people respecced to optimize for this fight, and I switched to maximum damage mode, whereas I was using SoI and spamming WoG with every HP when we were 2healing. My DPS went from 3.7k to 8.1k, and that combined with the increased DPS from respecs meant we were pulling the same RDPS as the 2healer setup except that once we got to P2, it was silky smooth and healers had plenty of mana.

So on the whole, I highly recommend learning the fight with 2 healers but actually killing it with 3 if you can squeeze out enough DPS to beat the 5th Ascendant spawn.

[2Cute2BeStr8]

Gonna try this but if anyone is tanking this before Sunday, feel free to try and bubble taunt as he cast fury of cho'gall to see if you can get the stack not to reapply.

Just so I know . Thanks.

[laterna]

We used a variation of this strategy. I had a warrior, or a feral (we had to swap the warrior out midway through raid), taunting the boss in bear form/shield with CD's up at the 22 second mark, getting the stack, and me taunting back. Seemed to work quite well tbh. My stack never went higher than 2, and made the fight ALOT easier :d We found popping hero at start to be a lifesaver, since most times, we got the 4th add at 29% without hero, and with hero we got him down before the 4th add spawn making the fight quite nicely timed

It was quite nice, and once you get the timing going in your mind, it gets into a rythm...

One question though. How do you handle the big add? I have a pala HoSalv me, then shield wall, then DP/AD. How do you handle the 2nd add when your Bubble wall and AD are down? (I used armor pot/stoneform). Also, how many adds do you have? We pushed well into p2, with 3 sets of adds ( 1 tank 2 healers). One last thing. When you drag the boss to a side, does it ensure the add spawns from that side?

Our setup
Paladin Tank
Paladin Healer
Shaman Healer
Ele Shaman
Boomking
Warrior DPS(unsure of specc)
2xMages (Frosties)
Warlock (destro)
DK frost DW

[inthedrops]

I had to handle the big add differently, having only one tank I REALLY had to stretch my cooldowns. Only cooldown used for the Large add was Hand of Sacrifice.

The Large adds always seemed to spawn in the same side in the same order. Left first, then right, repeat. We had 3 adds.

[laterna]

Not saying about using a 2nd tank, I'm saying about a fury warrior or a feral druid tanking (or ret paladin, or hunter from range) etc etc

[2Cute2BeStr8]

Did this tonight, absolute joke and super easy. All ya have to do is just at about 3 stacks bubbletaunt right as he is casting and your stacks wont get reapplied .

Having a ret/ feral/ dk taunt would probably work. Just need 2 good healers, and at least one with outside CD for help. If both have one its great. I found it fairly simple.. 3 stacks , as fourth is about to apply taunt, bubble, cancelaura.

If you have 2 healers with outside CD's I'd w8 till 4 stacks to get off.

[Strendarr]

Embarrassing kill video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0G7SM4XpiLY

re: "pro accept button clicking" might wanna check and make sure mouse accel is off. That looked a lot like adrenaline-enhanced mouse accel roller coaster action to me.

[inthedrops]

Embarrassing kill video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0G7SM4XpiLY

re: "pro accept button clicking" might wanna check and make sure mouse accel is off. That looked a lot like adrenaline-enhanced mouse accel roller coaster action to me.

Haha It's off, I've never had that happen before. I was overly anxious no doubt.