[10H] Gara'jal the Spiritbinder

[Hespherus]

Do you feel like there are any classes that excel on this fight dps-wise. We have almost all classes available, so we can switch around. Also what do you guys do to maximize your dps on this fight as tanks.

I think im gonna go with the alchemist trinket for that 4k strength every 55 sec for 15 seconds and the 847 expertise plus 4k strength, even though i could lose 50k hp by doing that. Obviously focused shield, but i dont know what else.

[Bellanka]

Boomkins and Shadow Priests seem to be amazing on this fight, especially down below.

I would say Focused Shield would be great to have if you're not timing your DPS/Healer to be down when you're banished, but if your DPS are destroying the Severers having a vengeance-powered AS smacking three of the other ghosts would be more beneficial. I drop consecrates and Light's Hammer on any packs I see as I run from Severer to Severer (not sure if the healing from it works to refresh Spiritual Innervation, and no one could confirm for me), which helped down below.

[timoseewho]

How long do you guys usually end up staying down in the spirit realm? I'm just boggled at how far off my guild is from the enrage (3 heal, 20%) when I see others beat it by 10 secs or sometimes 20. I'm sure the lack of BMAH or Galleon gear like some say wouldn't account for that much:\. Anyone have any recommendations? We've tried 2 healing, but it always ends up with someone being gimped by voodoo+add bolts.

[Kitmajere]

Are your healers helping dps? All 3 should at the start with hero up and prepot, and then 2/3 should dps the majority of the rest of the fight (it really helps to have a disc priest be one of those two, so they're also healing a bit).
We gained 20sec on the enrage by tank/healer gemming/meta/enchanting changes (consider stam and spirit as more or less worthless here) and by having everyone get the new weapon enchants.

[Metherlance]

Finally downed this last night, after freaking 91 wipes. This fight is basically bring the class not the player in 10man, since some classes are great on this and others just plain suck.

Some tips we found useful:

2 heal it. We were ~18% behind on enrage when 3 healing. If you can stack druids, then try with 3 heal.
If you have paladin tank, he SHOULD start the fight. For example our monk tank lost something like 5k dps with me starting, while I lost much more. Using SoT sounds tempting on this boss (SoT did like ~800k damage or so on 5+min tries), but the extra healing from SoI is better, especially when 2 healing.
I actually reforged/gemmed from hard exp/hit cap to soft exp/hit cap with reforging and gemming haste as much as possible.
Have couple of hybrid classes, to heal in spirit realm, for bad luck with dolls (guaranteed to happen couple of times per pull).
Bubble/HoP work on tanks as long as boss fixates to them (bubbling while boss frenzies is pretty awesome), really useful when healers are running low on mana and have bad streak on dolls.
Keep melee with low mobility as back up for spirit realm. Warriors are excellent there, but retri/rogues just plain suck.
When going to spirit realm last time, have your dps pop some cooldowns and try to kill every add before returning. You should have that extra room for the enrage from 2 healing.
Use heroism/blood lust on pull. Have your healers dps also. Pop defensive cooldowns if needed, so healers can focus on dps'ing.
Disc priest is divine here, absorbs are great for doll targets.
Be ready to wipe and wipe and wipe and wipe because of 2 heal rng happiness.

[Hespherus]

How do mistweavers do in this fight, dps-wise, considering they can stay in melee ranged all fight. Are they a good alternative to smite priests?

[Kai]

That's the impression I had after one evening there. We don't have a spriest, warlock or owl but to make up for that, we have a DK tank (which completely blows as they are the highest dmg taken tanks currently, he generally takes 25% more then our prot warrior). Our disc priest goes shadow, so we got at least one good class. but the RNG component of the 10 men version is just mind blowing.

If you 2 heal it, you have a 20% chance on each voodoo doll that the 1 healer outside gets targeted. 4% that it happens twice in a row. Odds that it happens twice or more throughout the whole fight are pretty decent. If our one good dps inside has to heal, we are kinda fucked. Our elemental shaman can do it once, but he's oom after that, so can't have that happen more then once. not even talking about healers having mana problems if healers can't go in.

if you 3 heal it, you have 3 dps and 2 healers outside. now if the dolls hit 2 of the 3 dps (30% each time), you're kinda screwed once again, at least if you don't have one of the good dps classes to go in alone. Although I guess if you 3 heal it, you need the good classes for the inside realm anyway and probably send others out fast/not have them go in at all.

Either way, mechanics are a funny idea, but just doesn't work out very well for 10 men. Pretty frustrating to have to dodge events that are fairly likely to happen over the course of a 6 min fight.

[Kishandra]

For some reason or other, during our heroic garajal progression, we found a ridiculous correlation between people who get voodoo'd and people who enter the spirit realm.

Over a night of attempts, healers and warlocks (our go-to spirit killers) averaged around 100-120 voodoo dolls apiece and dps who never went down into the spirit realm averaged 20-30 voodoo dolls and almost every single one of them happened on the pull. This is well outside statistical variance.

This is for 25m. I'm not sure if the mechanic is in place for 10m as well, but just a warning that voodoo doll assignment is nowhere near random.

[PsiVen]

On the pull as in before these people went into the spirit realm? That sounds threat-based to me.

It seems like on 10 it always chooses exactly one healer to Voodoo Doll, but we've not seen that much of the fight yet. Must not be true if 2-healing works since you would have to send lonely DPS 1/3 of the time.

[Kishandra]

I meant that we had people who went into the spirit realm often and people who didn't. The people who did consistently got voodooed many many times more than the people who didn't.

The few times that the people who didn't go into the spirit realm got voodooed ... were mostly on the pull, before anyone went into the spirit realm.

Also, I'm pretty sure guilds that 2 heal this send a hybrid to heal when healers are on cd and/or voodooed.

[Taroxx]

If you have paladin tank, he SHOULD start the fight.

Is starting the fight with vengeance more important for a paladin than other tanks?

[Metherlance]

If you have paladin tank, he SHOULD start the fight.

Is starting the fight with vengeance more important for a paladin than other tanks?

It seems that at least monks don't gain so much benefit from vengeance, comparing to us. Druids can dps as a cat etc. Can't say for certain how it goes with dk's and warriors though.

[Hespherus]

Was anyone getting any bugs with Garajal not banishing the tank we has fixated on? Or him switching to the tank that was coming out of the spiritual world and banish him again? Because we had that plenty of time.

Also what kind of dps are your tanks pulling. Especially the tank that isnt starting the fight. Is 35k dps low?

[Gab]

Was anyone getting any bugs with Garajal not banishing the tank we has fixated on? Or him switching to the tank that was coming out of the spiritual world and banish him again? Because we had that plenty of time.

We were also getting some strange fixate/banish behavior. Occasionally he would just swap fixates and choose new voodoos or simply banish the wrong tank. Extremely annoying because if the tank who got banished first was fixated again after coming out of the spirit realm then the tank would be out of cds...

Couldn't figure out why, at first we thought it had something to do with BoPs or taunts but it continued even when we weren't BoPing or taunting... Really nothing to go on but can confirm it was happening to us last night, 21-Oct-2012.

[Hespherus]

Yeah, at first we thought it was BoP resetting his aggro, even though we didnt have any issues on wednesday. But then we saw it was happening without BoP either.

It was really random. Sometimes the boss would only switch to the other tank for like 10 seconds, then back to the fixated tank. some other times i tanked the boss for 2 minutes straight, without going into the other realm.

Between these bugs and the ocassional 1 shot by the shadowy minions all targeting the same target, which was also targeted by a voodoo doll, i can only wish this boss would diaf. WTB ez mode tactics