tortos guardian tanking

[druideena 14]

Hey guys, I was looking into this boss, and was wondering how you all deal with the bats, did you regem for more stam or just go with your normal setup. did you lower your hit/exp to the level 92 level needed to tank the adds?

[Tarazet 144]

I spent most of Sunday wiping on this until I went on bat duty, then things started going better. We should get it down this week.

First off, if you are on the bats full-time, yes, you should tune your Hit and Expertise ratings around attacking level 92 mobs. There will be periods during which you can only attack the boss, but you won't be tanking him, so I think the tradeoff is acceptable given how much of the stat budget it frees up for more active mitigation.

The bats spam an ability called Drain the Weak. Basically, whenever you are under 550k, they will pelt you with this attack constantly and heal back 10x the damage they are doing to you. This ability can be dodged, parried and blocked. So this is the way you deal with it:

- Take the Heart of the Wild talent for more Stamina.

- Stay out of Rockfall damage at all costs, of course.

- Use Savage Defense liberally to reduce the amount of melee damage you take at all times. It's especially strong against large numbers of tiny hits, and if you do wind up below the 550k threshhold, then you will dodge a large percentage of the Drains as well.

- Use Glyph of Survival Instincts so you can get more frequent use out of its mitigation.

- Quake Stomp mitigation: if unmitigated, this ability will put you under the 550k threshhold, guaranteed, and also stun you. You can pre-emptively cast Survival Instincts or Barkskin to reduce the amount of damage you take from the hit and to limit the size of the bats' heals until you can be topped off. If you miss getting your mitigation up before the hit, you are still able to cast Barkskin while stunned, so you can use this to minimize the amount of damage that you take from the bats and reduce their healing.

- Do not precast Might of Ursoc before Quake Stomp, since Quake Stomp does 30% of your current HP before mitigation - but do use it afterwards if you need it to stop the bats from healing.

In practice, I didn't change any gems, but I run with a lot of green Crit + Stam gems anyway because I have a lot of blue sockets. I mainly just changed around my enchants and used a Stamina flask instead of my usual Agility. As long as you have over 700k fully buffed, you should be fine.