You were expecting to just stand there and nuke?

This fight is nearly the same as its LFR counterpart with one major difference: Everytime Pheromones is passed from one player to another, Garalon will use Crush.

Reminders on how this works otherwise

• Tanks need to stay infront of Garalon for the whole fight to absorb Furious Swipe. Other players should not be in this frontal cone and healers will need to keep tank health stable for the damage spike.
• Crush is activated whenever Pheromones is passed between players or when a player is under Garalon (the range considered "under" is displayed as a pink/purple circle during the fight). This deals high raid-wide damage and will kill any player under the boss. Don't stand under him and avoid passing pheromones too often.
• Garalon's Legs are the primary dps target - killing a leg stacks a movement debuff on the boss, enabling people to kite him. Standing within the dashed circles will give you a buff increasing the damage you do to the leg. Garalon will mend his legs occassionally so they will to be destroyed again.
• Pheromones damage stacks the longer it is carried by a player - make sure to pass it before healing can not be sustained. Pass the debuff by touching another player.
• The pheromones carriers will need to control the created void zones to not cover too much of the encounter's area whilst remaining out of range of Furious Swipe - Garalon will fixate on the current carrier and should be kited, ideally along the edges of the room.

After last night, it felt like will still need a lot of practise to get the mechanics clear for everyone. Possibly 2 healing will be too hard.

Sunday night will be farm night in MV for the most part - hoping we can return to Garalon the same night though.

Our best attempt so far has seen this boss to 17% before hitting enrage. Let's get this guy down.

Step 1 - More gear. Gear, particularly DPS and healing gear will help us. If we can get enough healing gear, it may be possible to 2 heal, giving us the dps we need to kill the boss. Note that with the patch you can now upgrade your gear with VP and JP. 750 VP is used to upgrade valor and norm/hc raid gear, adding 4 ilvls and can be done twice to an item. 1500 JP is used when upgrading JP, hc 5m, and lfr gear, adding 8 ilvls but can only be done once.

Step 2 - Develop our tactics further.
In Soviet Dread Wastes, bug squishes you!
Crush deals extra damage to anyone within 14yds of the boss. None of the tacts I've seen mention this as a concern so I don't know if we should worry about it. However, is it possible to have dps/healers pre-emp and run away before a crush? Wouldn't this reduce the healing requirement?
Most of our random deaths are occuring due to the extra people being hit by Furious Swipe. This is a relatively large front conal attack which should be avoided. Importantly, if you are getting hit by it as a non-tank then you will also be in range of the extra crush damage. This is mostly an awareness issue

Step 3 - Take advantage of the Mechanics
Because of Garalon's fixate on the Pheromones carrier, he never melees the tanks. Point being, the sole reason tanks are used for us is their stamina and damage reduction cds for Furious Swipe. This means that tanks will find mastery, parry and dodge stats are wasted for this fight.
Tanks should consider swapping items with these stats for those that have expertise, hit, haste and even crit - giving the raid more dps

I've seen comments where raids use 2 plate dps as tanks - and even 2 rogues (we can't do that though). Also, maybe try with 2 healers/2 dps kiting. Awareness of when the next crush is coming is good too so ppl can use their own shields/damage reduction cd's. It's not easy being aware of everything that's happening.

I'm hesitant about using straight plate dps to soak. Tex has experimented with that and it seems like too much damage - in tank specs we've pretty much always got some damage reduction rolling.

I think swapping tank gear for dps gear would be feasible though - similiar levels of stamina and armor should be ok. I'll still need to strap on a shield though

What was the problem with tanks taking Pheromones? Icy veins suggests hunters, tanks and healers as preferred kiters. Furious Swipe is 40yd range so imo tanks can do it just as well. Just take small steps and keep boss close.

Using 2 tanks + 2 healers for kiting should give us enough dps to avoid enrage.

syne wrote:

Actually, I often found myself too close to the boss for my liking (getting caught in the swipe) so tank kiting sounds like a good idea. On the other hand I was often out of reach from the boss as well...
One problem would probably be that they need to be far enough away from each other so they don't pass it along involuntarily. Also I'm not sure the boss always move fast enough to keep up with the kiter. Another thing is passing it along to a non-tank kiter - it has to happen between swipes. How often are the swipes?

We can try tank kiting again I guess - don't think my attempts at it were went that well. Maybe just a practise thing.

Not so keen on having 2 healers do kiting though. There's a reason we wanted 3 healers for this fight as I recall - using 2 healers for kiters basically means we pretty much 2 healing for half the fight. Might be better to have tanks/Ast/Telv as kiters, seeing as Telv's able to still get pet dps out.

Passing it from a tank to a non-tank will be tricky. The swipes are very regular - not sure on exact time but iirc its around every 10secs. We'd also have to pass it back to the tanks which I think would be more dangerous.

I don't think it is a problem for the tanks to avoid each other if one has pheromones though.

Both Jyrd and I kiting seems like a plan to me, especially because of the enrage, provided we can find a way to safely swap to and from the tanks.

I tried tanking in unholy presence for a while, it was very risky (Read: Even with CDs got close to death a lot) and I turned it off right after. I can imagine an actual dps spec taking even more damage, so I'm not too sure about that being a good approach to it.

So this Sunday, we're making a good attempt at this hopefully - assuming I find a replacement for Phil.

Seeing as the boss can't be parried, dodged or block - I have no need of those respective stats and have reforged/enchanted/farmed/restored items towards more stam/rage/dps.

Where'd you find that the boss can't be blocked, parried or dodged?

I don't honestly recall where I saw it. But I did verify it.

World of Logs to the rescue!
www.worldoflogs.com/reports/rt-48qtjl98u...osses&boss=63667
On that page, hovering over a player should show all the attacks that hit said person - this page should be all the damage taken in that one evening on Garalon. Where are the melee attacks that should have hit me when I kited? Answer: He doesn't melee.

Melee attacks would be the only attack we can dodge/parry/block. Everything else is raid-wide or AoE damage which (as far as I know) cannot be affected by passive defensive stats.

Edit: Found another source - Icy Veins' guide for Garalon statesAlso, I think heroic mode activates Garalon's melee attack as part of the difficulty ramp up.

So yeah... I think its totally viable for the tanks to gear differently for this fight

We really need to kill Garalon now guys. We got beaten by Pokémon!

Just wanted to type this out whilst I'm still awake.

Our total raid dps from tonight: 453k DPS (this is up from having 3 healers, which was 417k DPS)
Required total raid dps to beat enrage: 519k DPS

To be blunt, the shortfall needs to be made up somehow. Please could everyone take a moment to re-examine their gear and stats and optimise for this fight alone. Note, as stated earlier for tanks, this may mean that normal stat prioritises get thrown out the window.

We're getting closer.

I need to go through the logs still from last night but it felt like tank/healer kiting may work. It still seems really tight on the enrage timer though.

I would like to know if gear is holding us back? Or if there is a bigger issue somewhere.

I'd say it's down to practice now. This feels like the way to go and as long as we can keep everyone alive while maybe having a bit of luck on which legs mend, we should beat the enrage. Practice (knowing when to move/nuke) makes damage go up as well. Next time...

For what it's worth..

Tex & Phil, front cleave duo! One falls asleep and the other runs into the circle

SQUISH!