Odd Happenings in the Lair

Last night Mal Katai went back into Gruul's Lair.

First up was good ole High King Maulgar. Last time we faced down the High King and his Council, I was Blindeye the Seer. This time however, I was teamed up with Raydz to tank Olm the Summoner.

Raydz was going to get Olm misdirected to him, and I would taunt off Raydz when he got feared or got the debuff that Olm does up to 2 stacks.

We pull. The pull is everything in this fight. Olm immediately fear Raydz and aggro onto Brindall our Main Tank. I taunt. Righteous Defense is a wonderful taunt, it really is. It taunts up to 3 attackers of your target onto you. And wouldn't you know it, Brindall has aggro on High King Maulgar, so when I taunted, I got him as well. It's a bonus!

Olm melee + High King melee + Arcing Smash.

Sometimes you're windshield, sometimes you're the bug.

The next attempt he was to be misdirected to me. Something went wrong and the misdirect never happened. We did manage to get Olm under control, but somewhere between Blindeye going down and Olm going down, Brindal was killed.

We determined we needed more healing and rearranged the raid a bit.

We pull again, and Raydz and I were able to get Olm under control. Man is he completely annoying to try to tank. He spams death coil and fear constantly. So I spent much of the fight running around like the proverbial chicken with its proverbial head proverbially cut off. But this time we get him down. He drops two Defender tokens and a Mail DPS helm. (If you'd like to read a blog about a tank who actually gets drops, I highly recommend Raydz blog. My last upgrade was early September.)

We take a good 20 minutes to sort out the loot. Luckily, Faceeraser brought beer so I got Honorshammer completely smashed.

We moved onto to the big guy himself, Gruul. Our first attempt was thwarted by our healers getting silenced at just the wrong moment and Brindal getting flattened.

Someone, I'm not going to mention any names (Nakedfighter), but someone pulled when no one was ready and Raistlan (mage) and 2 healers (Sevenn, Dora) were at half mana. As if that wasn't bad enough, Raist tried to blink and manage to blink through the gate and locked out for the attempt. We still managed to get him to 50% before the healers were OOM and we died.

Our 3rd attempt was going well. I had managed to eat every Hurtful Strike except one at the begining when Snowson (Feral Druid) landed a couple of early crits and passed me. Luckily, it was early so it didn't kill him.

This attempt ended when this odd sequence of events happened:

04:32'52.671 Gruul the Dragonkiller's Melee parried by Brindall
04:32'53.562 Honorshammer's Melee hits Gruul the Dragonkiller for 62 (glancing)
04:32'53.796 Honorshammer's Holy Vengeance dots Gruul the Dragonkiller for 113 Holy damage (38 resisted)
04:32'54.125 Gruul the Dragonkiller's Hurtful Strike hits Brindall for 11948 (586 blocked)
04:32'55.140 Gruul the Dragonkiller's Melee hits Brindall for 6939 (586 blocked)
04:32'55.721 Brindall dies
04:32'56.953 Honorshammer's Judgement of Vengeance hits Gruul the Dragonkiller for 612 Holy damage


At 4:32'52 Gruul was aggroed to Brindall. At 53, you can see I'm in melee range. The next second Brindall takes the Hurtful, yet he takes Gruul's next melee. I'm in range to Judge at 56.

After doing some research on Tankspot and Maintankadin, I've come up with two possible theories.

Possible Theory #1. I momentarily passed Brindall on threat, so he became #2, but I had not gotten to 110% threat at which point I would have pulled. This would be akin to getting Prince to enfebble the tank by getting to 101% threat but not being at 110% where you would get his melee.

Possible Theory #2. I was somehow out of melee range. Apparently, Hurtful Strikes have a short range than normal melee attacks because the rather large size of Gruul's model. I know Blizzard has had range issue with him specifically in regards to Consecration not hitting him, and they've had issues with the catform melee range.

Then the guys over at Tankspot, offered that Gruul is not supposed to do a Hurtful Strike when no one is in melee range except the tank. This makes sense. Apparently, sometimes he bugs out and does it anyway. This is not comforting.

One person posted "chances are, no other melee was in range when the hurtful strike went off so it hit the MT while he still had agro. Its not supposed to do that, but it did."

Another posted felt it was a bug.

It is a bug and bizzard is aware of it however there is no fix. Basically you have about a 95% change to get correct hateful strike mechanics but about once or twice a fight it will do something ODD.

That's makes me feel a little better.

I've got so much to keep track of in this fight. My threat, Brindal's threat, melee dps threat (some of which can't be bothered to install a damage meter), Cave Ins, Shatters, my mana bar. Now I've got to be cognisant that I'm always in melee range and its not like Gruul is a stationary target.

Days Since Last upgrade: 26
Justicar Handguards 9/14/2007

Comments

Zerei said…
You guys got the exact same Maulgar loot we did, and I had to look around the site for a minute and make sure you weren't someone I knew. XD Nice blog, got linked here from The Positive Warrior.
Raydz said…
(If you'd like to read a blog about a tank who actually gets drops, I highly recommend Raydz blog. My last upgrade was early September.)

--I cried a little bit for you here.

Popular posts from this blog

Cataclysm Profession Bonuses

Raid Comp Tool

Back To Basics: The 969 Paladin Threat Rotation