General Vezax: Mana issues

[Ascendant]

glyph hand of salv would be a bad idea for this fight. the boss isn't tauntable, and if any of your dps are doing their job properly, you won't have a 20% threat lead (especially with the mana difficulties). Even when I tank the fight with my normal rotation, there are 2-4 caster dps threat capped (mostly mages). I use my hand of salv on them during the kite phase.

[fafhrd]

Regarding the threat issues mentioned, this doesn't have to be an issue unless you're bringing a lot of healers, since there's no great imperative to kill him quickly - it's a 10 minute enrage afaik, and I think most guilds getting to him beat the enrage comfortably as is - staying alive, managing mana and avoiding healing him are the tricky parts of the fight, not trying to get a 6 minute kill when an 8 minute one will do. If any of your casters are riding your threat too high, tell them to take a break for a while, unless you're already behind on beating the enrage.

DPS is more important in hard-mode I'd imagine, but even then I think there's an artificial minimum kill duration imposed by the time taken for the animus to form.

[Seloei]

Regarding threat on the boss, last night i was tanking him again, but this time i had the 4 piece bonus from t8 and in the end of the fight, without casters using their 'threat drop' i was still nearly twice ahead of the closest one.
It's hard to keep threat while you are progressing, but once you are mostly geared up, it's a walk in the park again.

[Dem]

Given how hard he hits, this isn't much of a difference. It's just making you more likely to die.

/shrug. It works.

[Ascendant]

Regarding threat on the boss, last night i was tanking him again, but this time i had the 4 piece bonus from t8 and in the end of the fight, without casters using their 'threat drop' i was still nearly twice ahead of the closest one.
It's hard to keep threat while you are progressing, but once you are mostly geared up, it's a walk in the park again.

except you are going to lose the 4 piece bonus (and possibly the 2 piece as well) if you want to optimize your gear. your threat will actually go down as your gear gets better.

All that block value people were wearing before counts for a lot more threat than I predicted. and 2 piece tier 7 was huge too. At this rate, I am going to put armsman on my gloves just to offset this slow decline in my threat output a little. right now, the only 2 fights where dps can pull agro on me are hodir and vezax due to the damage buffs they get. So I might be overreacting.

[Akairos]

Just as a tip, remember that the mana regened is based off the damage taken in the pool. So a shield or resisting the damage affects mana regened

[itankforcash]

-to the people who said they stayed in on the surge...

why add stress to the healers? the fight is harsh on them as it is, not moving on surge is lazy and/or you are just too slow.

In 10 man when I have tanked it, I keep an eye on the healers mana and keep a finger over my bubble wall just incase.

[Dem]

What I would say to you is that every raid is different. We have excellent healers who are not reporting being stressed in this situation.
Your accusations of slowness/laziness just show a lack of thought. It works for us, we 1 shot it, why should we change it?
The hard modes that we're working through at the moment increase the stress, but we're loving it. Hodir Hard was a 1 shot.

[itankforcash]

Please don't try to imply that 10 man hodir hard mode is actually difficult, I did it in 2 minutes and it was still easy.

And no, what I said does not "depend on your healers" it's the best way to handle the fight. (FYI I run it with 2 healers)

Unless you're going to be farming the easymode content all the time?

By telling people "GUYZ IT'S OK TO GET HIT BY SURGE CUZ I HAVE PRO HEALERZ" is just you trying to be elitist.

Move from surge, it's simple, it's easy and you will have to do it for hard mode anyway.

[Legionp]

Kiting this mob is the only reason I tank this and our druid doesn't : ) He sucks at moving fast enough / is too slow without PoJ (he even put on the boot enchant).

[remm]

Kiting this mob is the only reason I tank this and our druid doesn't : ) He sucks at moving fast enough / is too slow without PoJ (he even put on the boot enchant).

Holy priests are extremely useful with their "Body and Soul" shields

[Panzerdin]

Given how hard he hits, this isn't much of a difference. It's just making you more likely to die.

/shrug. It works.

So would tanking him in Blues, it still sucks.

[Seloei]

Staying in to tank the surges is the classical "oh, i have to do somethign different on this fight than just faceroll the keyboard?" thinking. The only reason why to blow DP is when he gets too close when you were LATE running away, so you don't get stomped. Otherwise, save it for the times when you know 2/3 or 4/8 healers are getting mana back and the incoming heals are going to be low.
You can just stay in there and get external cooldowns, but that is like say... tanking sartharion without moving from the flame walls, since you can survive with the cooldown. It's unneeded extra damage taken due to lazyness.
You can remove a part of the damage taken, threat is not an issue if you have atleast a few holy / ret palas who can drop salv on the overzealous DPS.

Tanked the 10 man version with 1/2 SA, did run dry with a few avoidance streaks but most of the time i was at 50%+. I take back what i said earlier that you need 2/2 SA to tank this.

[Serelynn]

I'm on the wall with kiting General Vezax. It's a good thing to save healer mana, and I'm all for anything that makes a boss more interesting to tank, once I tanked Patchwerk moving back and forth through the frogger slimes for fun. However, during the kite, I notice raid DPS dropping as people reposition, and I've seen melee hit by a Shadow Crash that they couldn't have seen through the boss. There was also one very special time I was hit with Mark of the Faceless, Surge of Darkness ended, melee interrupted a Searing Flame... and came too close to me, healing the boss. Bad luck on that, even as I yelled at them to stay away.

I'm sticking to kiting every other Surge of Darkness and using Divine Protection on the ones I stay in. As it stands, fully debuffed on 25 man, General Vezax is hitting for roughly 17,000-18,000 damage and roughly 60% of those attacks are avoided. Damage output from the boss is only moderate and very predictable, two alert healers at a time can keep the tank alive, we usually have two teams of healers, one is active and healing while the other is either conserving mana or regenerating it in the Saronite Vapor.

[Seloei]

You can kite the boss in a path from left to right and then back again, so ranged don't ever move. Your melee... if they can't mash their buttons while pressing walk forward... The only time the dps drops off is when surge of darkness ends and melee is out of range for 4-6 seconds