Unless it has been buffed then Gruul wasn't especially hard here, server first guilds roflstomped it in pre-raid blues with a few epics thrown around, you should have a hunter or two above 1k dps though, as they can reach those numbers on Gruul quite easily in pre-raid gear with a few Kara bits. You also want to pre-assign rough positions for the entire raid, pre-assign healers and get your melee group to decide which dps get's to stay on the boss during shatter (so that they aren't fighting over it and killing each other).
Ideally use a Warrior main tank with a Feral offtank, make sure your ret paladin (if you have one) is ready to use Lay on Hands on the tank towards the end if needed. Melee dps are strong on the fight but if one of your tanks dies then so does most of your melee dps, so you can be better off more ranged heavy and so long as they are out of melee range they won't get hit by hurtful strike when one of your tanks dies.
Our guilds kill here on Outland a year ago.
With blues, greens, couple epics, only T4 was open on the server.
Really depends on how you're doing the fight, if you're tight on dps you absolutely cannot afford to waste dps like this because you're paying for it at the end of the fight. Just put it this way, none of the good guilds killing this in low end gear when it was current sacrificed melee dps in this way. The boss is absolutely huge, you can fit in a couple of players within the hitbox range during shatter without much risk, two of those positions are taken by the tank (to avoid hurtful strike risk) and that leaves room for a Rogue to stay in for the shatter.Melee need to move AWAY from the boss. not run straight back into melee range when they get thrown.. DPS need to be away, spreading, DPS during shatters doesn't at all matter. It's a survival based fight, if you live, the dps check is easy (it's like, what, 700 dps per 17 DPSers to kill it before 15 growths? That's nothing.
On our video above we had one dps warrior staying in on the shatters, it pays off.
You do not need people in T5 gear come on don't be so ridiculous, you need blues + kara/crafted epics.. With the T5/T6 BOE crafted stuff and S2 gear from Battlegrounds now you can massively overgear this fight just with a pre-raid set. You forget that on retail we didn't have 2.4.3 classes and powerful easy to make crafted gear available at launch, a lot of Warmane fights have more health than retail, but the 2.4.3 talents + higher average gear level more than make up for it on the majority of fights (gruul included).
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Edited: May 12, 2018
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I'm usually the last person to ask for a nerf to a fight, and most of my bug reports end up in fights being harder. But I've said it before and I'll say it again, Gruul is way too hard on this server currently. I hope some staff see these threads and take them seriously enough that we see some tuning done on the next changelog. The shatter range, shatter damage, silence timing after shatter, and Gruul's inflated HP all contribute. I think if one of these four things were changed, it would help a lot.
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Member
I'm not understanding any of these kind of comments, what is so difficult about the boss now compared to 6+ months ago? Gruul has been regularly pugged on Outland, most guilds during my time of playing here killed him on their first progression night in spite of the fact that it was slightly more difficult than retail. The only boss that ever caused a big issue in the early days of the server was Hydross due to having nearly 2x pre-nerf health.
Looking at my first kill video of it, the gear I have equipped. Blue SMV quest helm, slave pens epic neck, ragesteel crafted shoulders, blue netherfury cape (botanica), shadowprowlers chest (epic crafted kara recipe), green quest bracers, ragesteel crafted gloves, green quest belt, blue quest clefthoof hide leggings, blue fel leather boots (crafted), 2x blue quest rings, hourglass + abacus trinkets (blues), dragonmaw + aldor rep sword (enchanted with 2x Crusader), green quest gun.
Not even close to fully Kara/T4 geared is it, and the rest of the raid was roughly equivalent in gear.. So where exactly has "You need T5 gear" come from?Edited: May 13, 2018
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Gruul here is (by design) harder than he was on retail. The version you fought has most of the buffs Spraynard mentions below (5.7 mil hp, increased shatter range, can't cheese ground slam by standing on the rocks, etc). Since your video however, he has changed, and this is what people complain about.
When BT released, or the week after when they were hot fixing bosses, either the timer on Gruul's silence or the implementation of how "cast randomly after cooldown" and "don't cast x during y" boss skills was changed. There is no way to confirm this, as there is no change log for TBC during this period, but I suspect the latter.
What this means is that from Grow 5 or so on, he will always cast silence instantly after shatter, instead the ~5 second pause you would get on retail. This one change makes the fight exponentially harder, as even a completely T5 geared tank can easily get wiped out in that time without cooldowns or good RNG.
People say you need T5 dps to do this because the only way to reliably avoid the above is to kill him at around 10 grows. After this point, lucky double dodges, pocketwatch trinket, shield wall, clutch healer silence resist, but eventually your luck runs out.
On retail, Gruul was a staple PUG fight from 2.0 right through to 2.4, not least thanks to the DST. This was the same on Outland until this change went through, now you will find far fewer groups going, and many getting stuck after the HKM kill.
I especially love your Prince phase 3 report with 0 upvotes ;) not to mention the Void Reaver one. That said, I'd trade both of those to have this fixed: I'm here to play TBC, not have fights artificially harder or easier than they should be.
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Right so assuming the fight is harder because you have the silence issue/bug putting more reliance on tank avoidance RNG, and you're saying you need to kill it below 10 growths to survive, which means the fight is more difficult.People say you need T5 dps to do this because the only way to reliably avoid the above is to kill him at around 10 grows. After this point, lucky double dodges, pocketwatch trinket, shield wall, clutch healer silence resist, but eventually your luck runs out.
But honestly killing it below 10 growths isn't an especially difficult thing to do either, to quote my green/blue equipped raid above we did it in 11 growths and a lot of people were using cheap enchants (crusader, no shoulder enchant etc) and green gems at that point. We were a meme guild at this point and it wasn't until Maggy went down and T5 released that we realised we even had a real raiding guild.
When you consider now that you have T5 + T6 crafted gear available, you have S2 PvP weapons/armor available to everyone, the full enchants are available to everyone (Mongoose etc), and on top of that you have an item shop selling T5/T6 quality gear with many people having said items equipped... It' really should not be difficult for a progression guild to meet a dps requirement of Gruul in 10 growths.
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Gruul on this server has never been perfect, he has 40% more health than he should (a deliberate buff that I'm fine with), the range on his shatter damage is too wide making it harder to avoid, and the timing of his silence makes it so the healers can't heal right after a shatter when the tank needs it the most. There are a plethora of other problems too, but these are the biggest ones that contribute to making it harder than retail.
Most of these bugs have existed since the beginning of the server, but there was another bug that made it so that the fight was MUCH easier, and effectively balanced Gruul to being a properly tuned fight: armor reduced the damage you took from shatter. So essentially there are many bugs that made the fight too hard, and one bug that made the fight easier. However this bug was fixed https://www.warmane.com/bugtracker/report/51065 and none of the other aspects of the fight were tuned accordingly. That's how we have a harder version of Gruul than we did 6 months ago. That bug was fixed 3 months ago btw.
Also, I think the silence timer lining up with ground slam is a new bug too, I don't remember that from when my guild was progressing. See here https://www.warmane.com/bugtracker/report/63887
And the comments here https://www.warmane.com/bugtracker/report/49116
And you're right, Gruul is puggable (I've done it many times), and a coordinated, modern guild can definitely kill him without trouble. But relatively speaking, he is still much harder than he should be. Pugs and casual guilds shouldn't struggle on him the way they do.Edited: May 13, 2018
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From what I can gather then this is the only issue that is really needing to be addressed to fix the problem, as I said blue/green groups were killing Gruul with his buffed health and all the other issues. Most of the Outland bosses are buffed compared to retail to account for the 2.4.3 classes and the fact that due to the progression schedule people have tended to have better gear than intended for progressing.
Like for example when T5 released on Outland people had already been farming T4 for a good while, in addition to having access to Ragesteel/Fel Leather, Spellstrike etc crafted items. When Hyjal launched people had been farming T5 for a long time, and then a large gap to BT.
The instances where the bosses weren't buffed enough compared to retail just fell over, and a lot of the bosses were bugged earlier in the server too, some making them much more difficult (Lurker, Vashj, KT) and others making them easier (Leotheras) but the only boss that was significantly more difficult purely due to over-tuning was Hydross. And sure Outland raiding isn't that much like retail if you look at the details, but it is what it is.
That doesn't really fall in line with my experiences at all, the damage was quite consistent across the board of the raid group. Only time I saw something like this was on Leotheras, with the dot tick being reduced by armor.armor reduced the damage you took from shatterEdited: May 13, 2018
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Then you weren't paying attention. The difference was massive. Guilds went from 1 shotting him with 20 people to making long threads on this forum that same week about how the fight had become impossible. Threads like this one. There were never posts like this before that change. It was more impactful than the leo buff imo.
The armor change was especially a big deal for the melee/tanks who are often near the center. Tanks used to take 70% reduced shatter damage because of their armor, meaning they could pretty much ignore the mechanic. Now they can come out of it very hurt, even if they are just near 1 or 2 people. Couple that with not being able to heal right after the shatter, and you have a big problem. A half HP tank who's being melee'd by gruul while all the healers are silenced. That's the RNG people are talking about here.
I don't have a VR report. And you should upvote the prince one then. A t4 end-boss who doesn't use one of his main abilities is a no-brainer.Edited: May 13, 2018
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Can you provide sources (armor)? I remember pretty specifically analysing shatter damage taken between players within a raid and seeing nothing but consistency, no indication of it being reduced by armor or any particular advantage from high armor classes vs cloth classes, the damage wasn't mitigated by anything and fell in line with expected numbers, a stark contrast to Leo where dps Warriors could be easily healed through 3 stacks of the dot if they equipped a shield, and where the boss could be taunted where it should be immune.
Also your post is a bit out of context, you quoted the part where I'm talking about armor and used that in a generalised sense about the topic. Either way I feel you're over-exaggerating things here, I'd personally like to see some replays of guilds trying/failing this boss with these differences to see where their players are positioned, to see what gear they are using, their raid setups etc.
I remain unconvinced at the moment.Edited: May 13, 2018
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No I can't provide sources. The fight is changed so it's impossible to test that now. I can tell you that as a tank I used to take almost no damage from it. Plus there's the fact that the bug report exists and it was marked fixed. So you know the change was implemented. This is from the March changelog: "Shatter should ignore players armor report #51065"
I really don't care about this personally, as I'll never do Gruul again on this server. I just wanted to give some support for people who are having problems on the fight. You can argue with them I guess, if you still want proof of things that are obvious to anyone who's done the fight before and after. Gruul used to be an absolute joke, maybe even under-tuned, then 3 months ago that bug fix went live and threads like this started popping up. It's not rocket science.Edited: May 13, 2018
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Well I'm not arguing that a silence routinely occuring at the moment of shatter isn't an issue, but that's the only significant issue here. And if people are saying you need to kill the boss in 10 growths to be safe that's fair enough but you certainly don't need T5 gear for that, my guilds first kill in largely blues/greens was 11 growths... So that's my point here, people are over-exaggerating on what is "needed".
If your tanks position well enough they can take 0 damage from the shatter, if you're not in range of other players it doesn't do any damage and then damage is based on proximity (on a per person basis, so a player within 2k damage range of 2 players will take 4k damage for example), good use of the room will result in minimal damage and that factor is a matter of priority for the tanks, I can understand how this can still be an issue in a more casual guild with lower skilled players but it's far from "impossible" as some are stating.
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Yes, I agree with all of that - people are exaggerating. And he isn't THAT hard. He definitely doesn't need to die at 11 growths. I've seen him go as high as 19 on this server before a wipe occurred (lol pugs). But I do feel he is vastly harder than he was on retail, and vastly harder than he was on this server just a few months ago.
Gruul was, and should be, an easy boss. Not to mention the ways that people wipe tend to be very RNG based in it's current iteration which is just bad design.
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This is basically it, he's much harder than he needs to be and it's frustrating because it hurts the server by cutting off one of the only entry level raids. Having a 25 man boss that pugs and new guilds alike can aspire to kill is healthy for the server, having one that you have to drag your guild kicking and screaming back to in order to attune players isn't.
As a healer and healing officer, it's heartbreaking to see the effort of 18-20 players flushed down the toilet because no one in my team beat the silence RNG attempt after attempt. Every other aspect of the fight is good and balanced, but for want of a 5 second window that should be there, it becomes a fight that I don't want to do myself, let along drag along my friends or pugs to.
Two DST's in the last three weeks though, can't complain about everything!
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QA Team
Updated the silence/shatter report. They should no longer overlap once that is fixed and even if they would the reverberation will be delayed to at least 5 seconds after shatter. The shatter damage will also be looked into
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Oh baby! Thanks <3
