[10N] Council of Elders

[Oleg]

Yeah, but given that its been around for a while, and was used on a boss last tier. They had to know about it, so the fact they didn't change it in 5.2 leads me to assume it is intended.

[Darielle]

It also worked on Lei Shi's Get Away.

[Fenris]

We managed to try it on the last day of the first reset (sadly had to skip one raiding day out of 4 'cause people were missing)

Take the priest away and tank her there,focus and interrupt the sand troll etc


We were having basically 2 problems:

a)The damage from the drakkari troll one-shotting either of us tanks at the swap
b)The charging troll doing tons of damage with the charge

And we never got to the third troll first empower

I guess the first one is a simple matter of getting used to the fight

But the only reason i can think of for the second one is that we are positioning the raid completly wrong.Any advice for that?

[Sagara]

Quick question - from observation, I think Malakk only puts 24-26 stacks of his debuff every time he buffs. Thing is, we also swap two times every buff, while I'm thinking we could afford to swap only once at 13-ish stacks.

[daishan]

I wasn't keeping track of total number of stacks but I aimed to taunt at 10 stacks normal hit 11-12 before he'd run over and we never needed a 2nd switch before the debuff dropped off both of us.

[fuzzygeek]

But the only reason i can think of for the second one is that we are positioning the raid completly wrong.Any advice for that?

We set up two ranged camps and it made all the difference in the world. Also interrupting the hell out of Sul.

On the pull I AS the Priestess and hit Frost and drag the Priestess to the outer ring; then I run like hell for Sul. My OT (bear) and I swap bosses because I have a fuckton of interrupts. We lust and burn Sul, stacking Frost for cleave damage. When Frost hits ~50-60 we focus him to finish off Empower. Ranged camps are on either end of the inner circle so they casually murder any Loas that pop up. Since they're already divided into two groups of three handling Frostbite is a no-brainer. Having two camps also helped cut down on the concentration of Wild Blankas.

When OT hits 12 stacks I taunt Frost. If Priestess gets empowered 2nd I'll run back across and stack Frost on top of her while I interrupt her some and build threat so she doesn't start nuking ranged. When I've got a nice threat lead I'll go back to the Sul pile to dps and -- more importantly -- interrupt.

We try to always have one melee and one tank on Sul for interrupts at all times. Locking him down reduced raid damage a great deal. HoPur on Biting Cold or on the initial application of Frostbite also made a huge difference.

We swap everyone but interrupters onto Blanka, using various raid CDs for the burn. We did get a Sul empower but a major CD and glyphed ele stun made the adds fairly trivial to handle.

[Winkle]

But the only reason i can think of for the second one is that we are positioning the raid completly wrong.Any advice for that?

Well you just move out of his path? It's marked before hand by a grey/silver line along the ground, don't stand in it and you don't get hit.

[Bellanka]

Quick question - from observation, I think Malakk only puts 24-26 stacks of his debuff every time he buffs. Thing is, we also swap two times every buff, while I'm thinking we could afford to swap only once at 13-ish stacks.

You are correct about Malakk, and that's how we do it. I have a target-taunt macro for that boss, and I keep our OT on focus. When they reach 12+ stacks, I just hit my macro and the boss comes running. I'm on Suul the whole fight because of Rebuke, AS/AS+ and the BE racial (saved for when he targets someone really low on health), so I can keep him pretty well interrupted the whole fight.

We have our ranged interrupters use focus target macros for Mar'li as well. It doesn't hurt to keep them shut down as much as possible, and your healers will bake you cookies if you can do it right.

[lakhesis]

Through it now, but I was typing up info for my guild's other raid and figured some other people might have use for it too.

Post nerf, the bosses apparently have 75 million hp each. As I understand it, the adds health was correct so they still have the HP reported on icy-veins.

Boss Health: 75 million. 25% of that is 18.75 million required to break a possession

Timing:
- Dark Power starts casting 68s after Gara'jal's Soul possesses a boss. It does not accelerate on normal, it's always exactly 68 seconds.
- There's 5 seconds between possessions
- Mar'li summons a Loa every 33 seconds
- In our experience, Sul has always been last in the order. So you've got about 224s before he empowers if you draw out every Dark Power to exactly 100%

Damage Output:
- Mar'li does regular tank damage to her primary aggro target (~60k dtps if not interrupted)
- Malakk does slightly light tank damage to his primary target, spiking up substantially during frost strikes (~50k normally, up to 100-125k from the +75k frost damage bursts)
- Sul does regular tank damage randomly throughout the raid (~60k dtps if not interrupted)
- Kazra's damage is totally dependent on your raid's dps & how bad they are at voidzones

Why Kill Sul First:
- Sul's adds have 1.05m hp.
- Sul casts quicksand every 30-40s
- So prior to him empowering+sandstorming, he'll have cast 6-8 Quicksands.
- They'll melee a tank for up to about 40k each, typically 15-30k assuming you chain SotR/CDs/etc
- So during Sul's phase, you'll have to deal with at least two rounds of adds (approx. ~12-16m hp), plus the ~150-200k extra damage on the tanks, plus the damage from Sand Storm, while still doing the regular 18 million HP damage to Sul to break his possession.
- TL;DR: During Sul's empowerment, it's almost like he summons a 5th boss. Therefore Sul must be destroyed (Sul delenda est).

DPS Requirements for a Sull burn strat:
- About 224s before Sul will empower (68x3 + 5x4)
- 18.75m in 68s to break a possession prior to Dark Power, so 275,735 raid dps on the current empowered boss
- 75m in 224s to kill Sul, so 334,821 raid dps on Sul
- Mar'li will summon 6 Loa, two during her empowered phase, so that's 4x 1.39m for the Blessed Loas and 2x 1.85 for the Shadow Loas, for a total of 9.26m in 224s, so an extra 41,339 raid dps (on average over the 224s - the burst required is more like 65k for blessed and 95k for shadowed to kill them in 20s).
- All that adds up to 651,895 total raid DPS required until Sul is dead
- Afterwards it becomes a relaxing ~375k for the rest of the fight

Note:
1) The Mar'li tank's damage is virtually entirely wasted & should be subtracted. They're only doing "useful" damage for this purpose while Mar'li is empowered. If you're a paladin & want to get really cute, you can focus Sul & cast your judgment + glyphed consecrate on him from range (and frisbee, if you want to interrupt Sul instead of Mar'li).
2) I've ignored the 5s breaks between possessions - your ranged will be able to contribute fractionally to the dps on Sul during those windows, so the total dps req is actually slightly lower
3) That's all assuming you let each mob hit 100 energy. If you kill them pre-100%, you're increasing your required DPS. If you let them go over, you're decreasing the DPS requirement at the cost of making the healers cry. So in reality you've probably got +/- about 25k dps to that 652k requirement (my group's kill attempt did it with 663k average in the first 224s, and 621k across the whole fight)
4) Up till the hotfix, the DPS requirement was more like 766k. So definitely not in the realm of normal mode T14 clearing groups I'd have said.

How my raid did it:
- Druid tank + Fury warrior + smiting Disc Priest + Warlock dots/pet on Sul. Interrupting + dpsing him down.
- Everyone else on Sul until the first Loa is summoned, then chasing whichever boss is empowered
- Paladin tank on Mar'li, interrupting as much as possible (so Rebuke -> let her cast once or twice -> AS -> let her cast once or twice -> repeat)
- During the Frost King's frost strikes, Paladin taunts & moves away from Mar'li to stop Loa instantly healing him. This is the heavy tank damage point cos you'll have both heavy single-target hitters, use CDs, especially unglyphed divine protection (frost strikes = magic, mar'li = magic). Once debuff is off the Druid tank they taunt Frost King back & the tank damage settles back down
- During Mar'li's empowerment you can bring her over to the group & everyone can cleave Sul at the same time. Make sure you get her back out again quickly afterwards tho, cos Sul should be lowest on HP by the time you get to her & you can't afford to heal him
- Two ranged were assigned to deal with the Frostbite during empowered Malakk (my group only has two ranged anyway, one of whom was a sub on the night of the kill ). They ran to the healer who was Frostbitten, or if one of them had it they ran to the Disc priest. If they got quicksand while soaking, everyone moved right.
- After enough wipes that I sat down & worked all this crap out my group was on track to get it down via 2 healing pre-hotfix, but were then able to 3 heal it post hotfix (which made things much more comfortable). The DPS requirements are fairly rigid, so the answer to my earlier question of whether you 2 or 3 heal will be "how good are your dps?" Three healing is much safer if your dps make the cut.

[Darielle]

Quick question - from observation, I think Malakk only puts 24-26 stacks of his debuff every time he buffs. Thing is, we also swap two times every buff, while I'm thinking we could afford to swap only once at 13-ish stacks.

Malakk will apply a stack of the debuff on every swing that lands (avoided hits do not apply debuff), and he dual wields.
As long as you taunt halfway through, it will be fine. If you absolutely want to, you could go out a few yards before taunting to make him waste half a second turning and running.

Or you could be Druid and go LOLWATDEBUFF.

[Galiks]

1 tank the fight. get aggro on mar'li initially, then let her free cast at ranged on the tank. burn down sul/empowered one. when frost king begins Frigid Assault, have a ranged taunter (moonkin/holy paladin) take him away with sprint, and taunt it back before it reaches them. continue the taunt bounce until stacks are off.

[Raive]

We ended up using fuzzy's advice of setting up 2 ranged camps (we had 3 healers and 3 ranged dps in the group, just set each group up as 2/1 1/2).

It made a world of difference for helping to control the charges and dealing with frostbite as people were already close together.

I picked up Sul and Malakk on the pull, with our DK tank taking Mar'li out, we taunt swapped at about 12 stacks on malakk, and I would always grab him back after stacks wore off just to help keep tank damage relatively similar (Mar'li does much more tank damage than Sul).

We kept our rogue and I on Sul full time and had everyone else switch to whoever was empowered, knocking out loa spirits as they spawned. We were knocking them out of empower generally a few ticks after they hit 100%.

Had our resto shaman placed in the dps group, in place of the rogue as he wasn't going to be attacking kaz anyways, to drop his grounding totem, and just chained devo aura's if it wasn't up for a stun.

Saved lust for Sul's empower to finish him off before a second sandstorm was cast, then just repositioned the entire raid to a different part of the room with no sandtraps and let out a sigh of relief as the rest of the bosses fell like flies.

[Klaudandus]

Gonna see how it goes tomorrow night. We've been having lots of issue, specially because our dps feels (or maybe is) low... only two are over 100K dps =/

[Calleana]

One thing we found very helpful is to focus tank/ disc priest damage into Sul when he was up and to bring the bosses to Mar'li when she enrages to maximise cleave damage into Sul.

On our last kill only 2 of our DPS managed over 100k so it is possible. (http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/ylqvcbu57j0xr6ox/sum/damageDone/?s=2988&e=3494 for reference)

[Klaudandus]

interesting...

funnily enough, we're surviving longer now, but we die as soon as the sandlings appear... well, shortly after