Erebor T2 Complete!

[Whiskaran]

Well as a kin we have now completed Erebor T2, thanks especially to Mero for leading and Georgion for doing his "Simon says..." DPS leading.

Of course you all couldn't of managed without me pulling the banners and inviting people to the group.....ahem....

Good day for the kin - lets get a few more T2s under our belts and got smack about that fiery ball of flame thingamajig in Smaug T2!

[the_phoenix]

Sadface, I missed out on it, Hope I will be able to make it this weekend, I am not sure yet ..... but would love to give it a go.
Any opinions btw if having two wardens as DPS in each group is beneficial ? the initial honor guard phase might take some time to burn down but I think it would help with inferno, with self heals and conviction (also conviction in assailment to give -99% threat from healing/Damage) and switching from ranged to melee ?

[Whiskaran]

The tactic we have been following for T2 is all about survivability - lots and lots of healing and well geared tanks and I do think it really has to be guards at this point. We will reorganise things for distributed damage, but today Gurthalion took a couple of 20k hits!

For reference, and for anybody not there today, we did Catapults, Inferno, Blood Rage and Honor Guard.

Without going into any details the ideal group setup is high on healing and low on dps (because you have to stop start so much the dps really don't have to do much).

Something along the lines of:

2 Tanks (Guards)
4 Healers (2 minis 2 RKS works well, one of each per group)
2 Cappys
2 Controllers/Debuffers (1 LM + 1 Burg is nice, 2 LMs is probably better than 2 burgs for the Stun Immunity in addition to control)
2 Dps

In fact now I'm thinking about it I'm going to save that as a template in rapid raid.

[the_phoenix]

yup, I wasen't referring to warden as a tank , I know I might be torn apart with medium gear by initial wave itself, more as a DPS, but that's a really ideal setup .....

[Merowin]

With two LMs you could easily keep all four berserkers down. With an LM and a burg you could only easily keep three of them down, but with a burg you could keep disable on both trolls reducing their damage and attack speed by 20%. The debuffs from two LMs do not stack, and one LM should not have a problem keeping stun immunity on the two tanks for the duration of the honour guard.

The only problem with bringing wardens as dps, Farway, is that with Whisk's setup you only have room for two dps, and you will probably want one of those to be something hard hitting, like Marithil on his hunter, or killing the honour guard will take forever. That leaves one slot for a dps warden, and you will have to compete for that slot with 10 other players. It will simply take a while to get everyone's dps through this fight on T2.

A warden could probably tank the first troll before the inferno starts, but that warden would really have to bring his A game. It's not a setup I would want to try unless that troll is massively debuffed and the healers top tier.

[Marithil]

Either you have lost faith in wardens or this is seriously tough to heal even with guards. Either way you make it sound like a challenge.

[Merowin]

It's a matter of surviving the spike damage. Perception took a 20,000 hit on his guardian, but that big hits should be possible to avoid. A guardian will still get hit for 10,000. On a warden that same hit would be 17,000, and you will have to survive through 30 mins of hits like that without dying. The 20,000 hit Perception took would have been 33,000 on a warden...

[Marithil]

Understood. You're still not helping your case, it's sounding more and more enticing.

[the_phoenix]

It is really challenging to survive/heal as a warden, thought warden's do have some limitation's as a class and only one I could think of is surviving heavy spiked hits, warden's can definitely take multiple small/moderate hits, much more then guards (say with in smaug, no guards can survive without healer, while warden wont need a single heal throughout fight) and do many of the 3/6 mens without healer's.
That being said, I haven't lost faith .... I would love to heal it a couple times and then try to tank it.
Also really helpful would be a guard using CombatAnalysis to check the amount of damage one takes.

[GordyOneShoe]

The original question was about a dps warden. That fits into the dps category and I've always thought that there's no reason a warden can't dps Erebor T1 with the changing damage types (and perhaps even come out on top due to never being nerfed by the troll shields) - but the honour guard needs taking down fast and a dps warden really only begins to shine once it winds up with DoTs etc. And those DoTs on the trolls could be deadly for the group in T2.

I'm struggling to see a way to get our wardens though Erebor T2 without being passengers. I had a tough time keeping Perception up with -40% incoming damage cast on him during some of those big hits (RK skill). We will have to see how that works if we bring the trolls closer together to distribute that damage.

It might be a similar quandary for guards in Smaug?

edit: Freaky wardens such as Mari and Mero do not figure in this point. I'm referring to us mere mortals. :P

[Dallont]

Gotta love that tag "Freaky Wardens", hehe.

I'm looking at the critical defense on Eirbank after that run at the moment as I'm guessing it's needing upping due to the critical changes. The only way we're actually going to know is to try I guess. I'm certain as Mari has indicated before he'd be up for it .

Never tried any of the add-ons, guess I'd better get some sorted so I can actually take a look and see what's going on

[Forestthegreat]

Dallont wrote:

I'm looking at the critical defense on Eirbank after that run at the moment as I'm guessing it's needing upping due to the critical changes. The only way we're actually going to know is to try I guess. I'm certain as Mari has indicated before he'd be up for it . Never tried any of the add-ons, guess I'd better get some sorted so I can actually take a look and see what's going on

Once you get crit defence up to 50% (or fairly close), critical hits should hit for the same amount as regular hits, so it's the devastates that are the problem. Honestly though, with only 100% damage buffs on the trolls it was only those distributed attacks that were doing enough damage to take down my guardian, especially with all those heals.

The challenge I'm really looking forward to is Fires of Smaug. I've run 4 pugs now, none of which had much success, but I'm hoping that this next Saturday (April 6th) we could maybe get another kin raid together for it.

[Merowin]

We tried it again yesterday with the main group in between the two guards so the guard on the 2nd troll wouldn't have to take the distributed damage all on his lonesome, but it didn't go that well. It was too much damage for the squishes in the group.

Next time I suggest we try a three tank setup, with two tanks on the 2nd troll sharing the distributed damage from that troll, and the rest of the raid on the 1st troll. If the two tanks on the 2nd troll are both guards with 20k morale and 70% mitigations they effectively count as 8 players with 10k morale and 40% mitigations. It should make the distributed damage much easier to deal with.

[Marithil]

I have completed your task Mero. I currently have 125% chance to avoid or partially avoid attacks with a 55% partial mitigation. I'm at 70% chance to totally avoid attacks, leaving only 5% to go. I'm ready for this challenge. This is of course with my gambit buffs up. With a cappy buffing me you can safely add 3% to that, with food you may another 1% but I'm not sure, I need to do testing.