Monday, August 18, 2008

[Druid] Addendum to Azgalor sucking

Here's the first anonymous report on Azgalor, where I took only 360k.

And here's the more recent one.

Can you figure out what the problem is? Thanks to EJ, I did. And I feel pretty dumb after hearing it.

As pointed out, I took 21% more hits in the worse one but the fight only lasted 6% longer. Or a total of 19 hits. However, the big thing was that the boss was parried 28 more times by people other than me in that fight compared to only 9 more times in the other. (he was thunderclapped 3 times as well, which also helped, but not so much that it would account for 19 more swings). That 19 extra parries is more than enough to get that many more hits in.

Which I really should have picked up on, since I argued for how awesome expertise is on mitigation in one of my very first posts. Heck, I even had graphs and stuff!

Sigh.

So to sum up: 19 more parries effectively meant 110k more damage over the course of the fight. Yeah, expertise is awesome for mitigation.

So what can I do to fix that? Possibly not a ton. I think I may swap the badge of tenacity for a shard of contempt; that should reduce the number of parries that I produce from 45 to around 35, hopefully. The armor loss will hurt but will hopefully be dealt with via buffs and lucky ancestral fortitude/inspiration procs; without the badge I'll be sitting at roughly 34.8k armor. Repositioning so that the NPCs don't get stupid will be the most important thing to do.

And this is why I like tanking some times - because while you can't always easily see what you did right and wrong, the information is often there. It's just something you have to think about a bit more.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Azgalor can be a rough one, but I've found he's pretty simple to tank as a bear, by going for avoidance. I always tank him for my guild, since we've found it's easier to have our Prot Warrior and Paladin deal with the Doomguards; latest run is at http://wowwebstats.com/l5hkge6jtmrui?s=292447-309631

The main thing I focus on is just stacking Agility buffs for him; Elixir of Major Agility, Grilled Mudfish, and I'm always in the main melee DPS group, with the Enhancement Shaman helping with totem twisting to provide GoA as well. With the rolling HoTs coming in, the damage taken is predictable enough that I never get to low health; fire and silence together is the only slight risk, but it's manageable with solid healing.

Positioning is certainly key, pulling past all the NPCs so they're beating on the side of Azgalor, instead of his face. I usually stand back where I want to tank, just beyond Thrall, and a misdirect to get him back there will move him into perfect position without hassle.

If you have extra Prot Warriors who aren't busy, at least until the Doomguards start stacking up, they can help out with Intervene. That helps equalize the incoming damage, making it even easier on the healers to keep you up without danger.


(As an aside, your Armory link on the main page here doesn't seem to be working to get directly to your character.)

Kalon said...

Hey, cuer! Thanks for coming by :) I'll fix that armory link in a bit.

I go pretty high on avoidance on Azgalor as well. If you look at the parses you'll see that I dodged/missed about 66% of the time in total. I use badge/pocketwatch for an emergency button. He's usually not too much of a problem. This time was unique because of the discrepancy in damage that I took between tries - 360k one week, 470k the next.

I rarely get to be in the melee DPS group, but I usually get a shaman in the hunter group and get GoA.

The big thing I didn't do was pay as much attention to the horde's positioning as I did last time. I had thought their being at his side was enough, but it's clearly too close to the front.