Garalon

[MichaelTheys 10]

Blizzard hotfixed the damage from the classes with cleave.

and his enraged timer went from 6 minutes to 7.

This allrdy was a while but still due that hotfix they should bring his beserk timer to 8min it's allrdy almost impossible with a non cleave class. Now when they fix it it's again terrible annoying, my guild specially recruited a rogue for this fight.

[Guest Lighttouched]

Most basic LFR strat seems to be leaving the Tanks to handle the Pheromone kiting. They switch off between themselves at 20 stacks. This leaves the rest of the raid free to concentrate on avoiding being bad. The pheromone Tank moves backwards, dragging Garalon slowly in a clockwise direction, as close to the wall as possible, leaving the pools at the edges of the room.

The whole raid just follows behind Garalon; DPS focusing on legs, Melee only on back legs (saves them from running willy-nilly under the boss...) and Ranged taking out the front as needed.

As long as the Tanks are capable it's very, very easy.

Two tanks managing pheremones proved the easiest strat for groups that I was in. Pheremone tank kites along the outside edge, other tank stays inside - swap when the debuff drops (non-pheremone tank moves over and takes the pheremones - other tank moves to the inside). Two tanks that have this down can leave a perfect bead of yellow around the outside of the room and the boss drops after about a full rotation around the room.

[Lillocks 0]

We've been doing this with 2 Plate DPS classes (tanks with our OS) soaking, and 3 healers. Having problems making the DPS check so far... are any guilds using 2 healers?

[mordrammo 0]

For Fire Mages, is it better for them to focus on a leg and spread a single DoT to the boss, or to focus on the boss and potentially spread DoTs to several legs at once? I'm thinking that if you can manage to be in the Weak Spot area then the leg is better, but otherwise focus on the boss and hit Inferno Blast often. Problem is, with so much movement staying in the Weak Spot isn't all that easy during long cast times. I find myself mostly scorching to keep up, which feels like a big DPS loss even with the buff.

[Fel 42]

I have a note for the LFR version.

Not sure if it's exactly recommended, but to save trouble on my runs in LFR, I tell them to simply let me take pungency and never have anyone else take it. Since it caps at 20 stacks, and the damage is laughable on LFR, this is a very viable strat which completely eliminates needing anyone to understand pheromones/move/have a clue.

Bit cheesy I suppose but it's completely doable, cfmed as I've done it on both my lock and Hpally the past 2 weeks.

[Guest Daniel]

In LFR, it is possible for only two players to players to handle the Pheromones debuff for the entire fight.

[Guest Deix]

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Two isn't required at all.

[Vlad 411]

Thank you. Updating :)

[Amicitia 8]

Okay so maybe I missed this somewhere, but to be clear, when standing in a weak spot you can only do double damage to the leg in that spot? if standing in a weak spot and you ignore that leg and damage the body, is that regular damage or do you get the benefit of the buff?? one last one, as a DK can you spread your diseases from a leg to other legs and the body? will disease on the body spread to all legs that are up at that time??

[Krazyito 521]

Okay so maybe I missed this somewhere, but to be clear, when standing in a weak spot you can only do double damage to the leg in that spot? if standing in a weak spot and you ignore that leg and damage the body, is that regular damage or do you get the benefit of the buff?? one last one, as a DK can you spread your diseases from a leg to other legs and the body? will disease on the body spread to all legs that are up at that time??

When standing in in a weak spot you only get a damage buff for THAT LEG.. You can spread your DoTs to the body but they wont benefit from a damage boost like the ones on the leg.

[Guest Simca]

My guild finally downed this on 10-man after being stuck for a significant amount of time. The enrage on this boss is INCREDIBLY tight for your average 10-man guild. We had problems with the Blade Lord enrage once or twice and the Elegon enrage several times, but it was NOTHING compared to this fight.

We eventually had to use 0 tanks, 7 DPS, and 3 Healers and force 2 Healers and 2 extremely mobile DPS (warlock with level 90 talent and Hunter) to beat the enrage. We had all DPS focus the first four legs down (to cripple movement) and then had DPS focus the boss except for two players assigned to legs (a Combat Rogue and Frost Mage). We had to do this because we were hitting enrage and the legs had been focused down the whole time just fine but boss DPS was lacking. It made a big difference to assign a "leg team". We used our "psuedo-tanks" to soak Furious Swipes (Prot Warrior who went Arms and Blood DK who went Frost), and healers had to be on the ball to keep them alive. Every Furious Swipes hit would do over 60% of their HP easily, so immediate heals were needed or they would die to the next Furious Swipes, Crush, or sometimes even Pheromone ticks if their HP was around 60% before they got hit.

We feel that some updating to the normal version of this guide would be very helpful because it isn't just us stuck on this fight. There are 7 guilds on our server that are 6/6 2/6 0/4 at the moment, and all the guilds who have beaten this fight are on heroic modes or in Terrace now. As mentioned before, this is an extreme roadblock for average guilds.

[Vlad 411]

My guild finally downed this on 10-man after being stuck for a significant amount of time. The enrage on this boss is INCREDIBLY tight for your average 10-man guild. We had problems with the Blade Lord enrage once or twice and the Elegon enrage several times, but it was NOTHING compared to this fight.

We eventually had to use 0 tanks, 7 DPS, and 3 Healers and force 2 Healers and 2 extremely mobile DPS (warlock with level 90 talent and Hunter) to beat the enrage. We had all DPS focus the first four legs down (to cripple movement) and then had DPS focus the boss except for two players assigned to legs (a Combat Rogue and Frost Mage). We had to do this because we were hitting enrage and the legs had been focused down the whole time just fine but boss DPS was lacking. It made a big difference to assign a "leg team". We used our "psuedo-tanks" to soak Furious Swipes (Prot Warrior who went Arms and Blood DK who went Frost), and healers had to be on the ball to keep them alive. Every Furious Swipes hit would do over 60% of their HP easily, so immediate heals were needed or they would die to the next Furious Swipes, Crush, or sometimes even Pheromone ticks if their HP was around 60% before they got hit.

We feel that some updating to the normal version of this guide would be very helpful because it isn't just us stuck on this fight. There are 7 guilds on our server that are 6/6 2/6 0/4 at the moment, and all the guilds who have beaten this fight are on heroic modes or in Terrace now. As mentioned before, this is an extreme roadblock for average guilds.

Thank you for this post.

I am, of course, happy to update the guide so that killing the boss is easier for everyone. If I understand you correctly, your suggestions are:

• use plate DPS to soak the Furious Swipes
• assign 2 DPS players to leg duty, while the rest focus on Garalon's body

Is that correct?

I don't mean to disagree with you, or sound condescending in any way, but I feel like you are over-stating the difficulty of Garalon in 10-man, or under-stating the difficulty of Terrace of Endless Spring heroic modes. Looking at wowprogress, I see Garalon having been killed by 11,197 guilds in 10-man normal, whereas the first boss in Terrace of Endless Spring has been killed 107 times on heroic mode. Even the most widely killed Heart of Fear heroic mode, Blade Lord Ta'yak, has only been killed 1,700 times in 10-man.

Now, I'll grant you that Garalon's enrage timer can be quite punishing (my guild struggled on it for quite a bit, in 25-man, before finally killing it for the first time in 10-man), but I think that in a raid where everyone is carrying their own weight, going without tanks is not necessary.

As I said, I am happy to include the suggestion, but I'd like a bit more clarification. Were the tanks using DPS or tanking gear? I remember trying to "tank" Garalon in DPS gear before we killed it (10-man, still), as a Frost Death Knight, and the damage on me from the Furious Swipes was simply too high.

Thank you again, and hopefully you can provide me with a few more details so I can update the guide :)

[Clisis 5]

When you do releise the heroic guide for this please do metion the enrage timer is the same as normal (aka 7 minutes) and he does not do crush everytime you pass it (it is now on a CD itself). My guild did this fight right at 7 minutes and how we did this was focus on the inner legs only and tanks would focus on the non inner leg right next to us. :) If this helps any I will provide more infomation

[Guest Guest]

I realize that survival isn't a huge issue for this fight, rather than simply doing enough dps, so maybe this isn't important. But some fairly simple math shows that minimizing the number of Crushes isn't the ideal way to minimize total damage on this fight. Assuming you switch at 20 stacks (and there are no unnecessary Crushes), Pheremones deals much, much more average damage per second, even when Pungency is at minimal stacks (almost two times as much, in fact). If the goal is to switch at the point after which Crush starts doing less average damage than Pheremones, that point is at 12 stacks, or every 24 seconds.

That's also the minimum amount of time that allows you to cycle the debuff between 5 players on 10m (10 players on 25m). It'd take flawless play to actually pull off such a short cycle with only 5 people, but to make the fight easiest on your healers, it's what you should be aiming for. Sometime in the window between 12 stacks (when Crush starts to be desirable) and 20 stacks (when Pheremones begins to threaten a wipe) there'll be an optimal time to maximize dps, but that math is more complex than I really know how to do. Some napkin numbers suggest that switching at 12 stacks results in something less than 140k total HPS being needed for 10m normal, which isn't out of reach for a strong team with only 2 healers and some aggressive offhealing, or 3 healers aggressively dpsing.

Anyway, all I wanted to point out was that Crush isn't nearly the bugbear in this fight that people think it is. It's pretty light raid damage compared to Pheremones at the top end.

[Krazyito 521]

I realize that survival isn't a huge issue for this fight, rather than simply doing enough dps, so maybe this isn't important. But some fairly simple math shows that minimizing the number of Crushes isn't the ideal way to minimize total damage on this fight. Assuming you switch at 20 stacks (and there are no unnecessary Crushes), Pheremones deals much, much more average damage per second, even when Pungency is at minimal stacks (almost two times as much, in fact). If the goal is to switch at the point after which Crush starts doing less average damage than Pheremones, that point is at 12 stacks, or every 24 seconds.

That's also the minimum amount of time that allows you to cycle the debuff between 5 players on 10m (10 players on 25m). It'd take flawless play to actually pull off such a short cycle with only 5 people, but to make the fight easiest on your healers, it's what you should be aiming for. Sometime in the window between 12 stacks (when Crush starts to be desirable) and 20 stacks (when Pheremones begins to threaten a wipe) there'll be an optimal time to maximize dps, but that math is more complex than I really know how to do. Some napkin numbers suggest that switching at 12 stacks results in something less than 140k total HPS being needed for 10m normal, which isn't out of reach for a strong team with only 2 healers and some aggressive offhealing, or 3 healers aggressively dpsing.

Anyway, all I wanted to point out was that Crush isn't nearly the bugbear in this fight that people think it is. It's pretty light raid damage compared to Pheremones at the top end.

While I see your point in having us switch when pheromones would do more damage then crush, You should understand from a healing standpoint that it's easier to heal constant AoE damage then to heal a spike + a stun from crush.

When all the ranged are in a group and all the melee are in a group (I do 25 mans) it is much easier to just do the AoE healing then to worry about getting stunned and topping people off before the stun every 30 seconds.

[Guest Guest]

While I see your point in having us switch when pheromones would do more damage then crush, You should understand from a healing standpoint that it's easier to heal constant AoE damage then to heal a spike + a stun from crush.

When all the ranged are in a group and all the melee are in a group (I do 25 mans) it is much easier to just do the AoE healing then to worry about getting stunned and topping people off before the stun every 30 seconds.

Sure, I can appreciate that fact. I just wanted to point out that it isn't a good idea to assume that the longest possible cycle is the best. It's trivial to show that switching at 19 stacks with 9 people is better than 20 stacks with 8 people, since you would still have the same number of Crushes (10) both ways but you would have less raid damage the first way, for example. An even shorter cycle has clear benefits, even if it isn't clear if those benefits outweigh the cost of increasing the number of Crushes.

It seems to me that it's worth experimenting with, in any case, for any raid that's struggling with the fight.

[Fel 42]

Downed this on heroic this past weekend. Some findings from our progression...

2 tanks, 3 heals, 5 dps (2 melee, 3 ranged).

The fight is fairly easy, with the primary challenge for us being the tight enrage timer and the resultant inability for even one player to die at any point during the fight.

The primary cause of death was players nubbing up the pheromones trail after swapping. Due to the newly 4-minute pungency debuff, you will need about 8 unique players to pass the pheromones before you can begin to rotate back through again.

We quickly discovered two things. 1) Pheromones at 15 - 20 stacks hurts a lot and reduces margin for error exponentially. 2) Due to the nature of the timers, you'll end up with the now-periodic crushes always landing when stacks of pheromones are getting high.

What we did:

Tanks started with pheromones, with the first tank only taking it to around ~10 stacks.

From then on out, no matter how many stacks of pheromones players had, they would pass when the DBM crush timer was at ~ 5 seconds.

In practice, this will mean that you are passing pheromones from anywhere from 15 to 20 stacks, but always ahead of a crush, which means that during the 2-second stun, raid damage is very low.

From here, we set up a CD order amongst our raiders (Healing Tide, Devo, Revival, Devo, Devo. Repeat). After 10 wipes or so, as pheromones passing became more efficient and we progressed farther into the fight, we eliminated the CD order because the healers were well on top of things, and at this point we just had healers use their HPS CDs in a pinch, which proved far more effective.

Phase 2 healing is a joke, the only people taking damage are your tanks, so have your healers DPS wherever possible. It is certainly possible for just one tank to handle phase 2, since we had just one of our tanks hold him at this point while the other DPSed. However, to reduce RNG of deaths dfuring phase 1, we asked our OT (DK) to remain in tank spec. On future attempts we will likely have him go DPS, as I'm confident that the healers can keep up with the increased damage on him during phase 1.

We saved heroism for the final phase when most folks are able to DPS freely, and pheromones passing was just contiued according to the normal order, though of course much simpler now since folks can stand where they like.

Though we did not do this last weekend, it may be beneficial to have your healers back to back from positions 3 to 5 in the pheromones order.

We did: Tank > Tank > Healer > DPS > DPS > Healer > DPS > Healer, repeat, because we wanted to keep the healer kiting spread out.

I think: Tank > Tank > Healer > Healer > Healer> DPS > DPS > DPS, repeat, will work better, because in practice for us the 2nd tank was passing the pheromones to the next person in line just after the phase 2 transition. Using the 2nd order above, your DPS will not need to have pheromones during the final phase and this will help give you a little extra edge if you're facing trouble with the enrage timer. Obviously, ymmv based on your overall DPS, and your raid's ability to handle the 3 healers kiting back to back.

Good luck!

[Krazyito 521]

Since Auracle already posted an in-depth post, I'll keep mine a bit short. In 25 man heroic, we did 6 healers, 2 tanks, and 17 DPS. We kept all range near his back right for the majority of the encounter. We had 8 melee dps running around the boss killing the legs. Usually they would only kill the back right, back left and front left legs. the front right and front left were sometimes left to range to kill if they were too far away for melee to reach with a respectable amount of time or they were sandwiched too close to the pheromone trail. All other ranged DPs would DoT every single leg and then focus on the body.

For the kiters, we switched at 12 stacks of the pheromones debuff and kited around the room as normal. Switching at this low number essentially meant that we used almost the entire raid for the rotation.

For healing, we tried several different methods. From the beginning I (as a MW Monk) would follow the melee group around to heal them. It took me many attempts to figure out what to do so that my mana wasn't completely gone less the half way through the fight (which in the end was using Chi burst more and effectively) Here were our assignments:

• Mistweaver Monk and Holy Paladin following melee groups to heal them.

• A 2nd Holy Paladin solely focusing on keeping the pheromone kiter alive. Our Shaman healer taking pheremone kiting duty half way trough to allow holy paladin to go drink and regain some mana.

• Shaman, Disc Priest, and Druid healing range group and anyone they can be in range of.

• ALL healers (bar holy paladin healing kiters) throw excess heals to tank as often as possible.

Making effective use of your raids healing CD's before, during, and after crush is essential. REMEMBER YOUR WARLOCK COOKIES. Once phase 2 hit (sub-33%) healers took the job of pheromone kiting and swictehd at 12 stacks. By that time almost all the range had taken the pheromones already.

Here is a video I uploaded of our kill.

http-~~-//www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEcFk35aSfE

Edited January 17, 2013 by krazyito65

[Guest Allyne]

I joined a 10-man raid for HoF, and they used an unusual strategy for Garalon. They had a warlock set up a gate close to the boss, and then as close to the doorway as it could go. The entire raid stood back while the warlock agroed the boss, took the pheromone debuff, jumped through the gate, and ran out the door before the boss sealed the door. Apparently there is a few second gap between agro and lockout. The raid then engaged Garalon as soon as pheromones was cast. The warlock then ran way, way far away back through the zone towards the Blade Lord's corpse, using cooldowns to keep from dying. He then died far enough away that Pheromones could not reach the rest of the raid. The trick is to run just far enough that you won't reset the encounter. The rest of the raid then carries on kiting as normal, making sure to steer clear of the stairs, as you can still suffer the damage from Pheromones if you get too close to the doorway.

The trick now is that you're down 1 DPS. It took us 2 attempts with him enraging at 2% and 1% health before we finally downed him (even with one noob repeatedly getting Crushed), so judging from other people's comments about the difficulties with the enrage timer we weren't really having any more problems than if we'd juggled Pheromones around normally. We had 2 healers, one of which was a disc. priest who was smite-healing, which added to our dps, as without damage from Pheromones his heavy duty healing wasn't required.

Mages could also be used to Blink away from Garalon at the beginning and make it to the doorway before it locks, although I don't know if they have the same survivability features that a warlock might have. Any other class with a speed boost (or use Priest talent feathers) might be able to make it. I would suggest the first attempt have the Pheromones sacrifice run until the boss resets, so that they know how far they can go (and nobody will die), then make your second attempt for real.

[Auyssaelre 5]

Tanks don't really sound essential for this fight but they kind of are. If you don't have 2 players in your raid wearing mail (i.e dks, paladins), than they can survive the cleaves that he does and there has to be AT LEAST 2 people at all times standing infront of the boss or you will be facing the dps buff that he gets if that objective isn't reached. So you could get away with 1 tank and a DPS wearing mail armor, but I suggest the 2 tanks to do it because of the tight enrage and the dps needed on the legs.

Hope that helps everyone

Edited April 21, 2013 by Auyssaelre

[Guest Kat]

I joined a 10-man raid for HoF, and they used an unusual strategy for Garalon. They had a warlock set up a gate close to the boss, and then as close to the doorway as it could go. The entire raid stood back while the warlock agroed the boss, took the pheromone debuff, jumped through the gate, and ran out the door before the boss sealed the door. Apparently there is a few second gap between agro and lockout. The raid then engaged Garalon as soon as pheromones was cast. The warlock then ran way, way far away back through the zone towards the Blade Lord's corpse, using cooldowns to keep from dying. He then died far enough away that Pheromones could not reach the rest of the raid. The trick is to run just far enough that you won't reset the encounter. The rest of the raid then carries on kiting as normal, making sure to steer clear of the stairs, as you can still suffer the damage from Pheromones if you get too close to the doorway.

The trick now is that you're down 1 DPS. It took us 2 attempts with him enraging at 2% and 1% health before we finally downed him (even with one noob repeatedly getting Crushed), so judging from other people's comments about the difficulties with the enrage timer we weren't really having any more problems than if we'd juggled Pheromones around normally. We had 2 healers, one of which was a disc. priest who was smite-healing, which added to our dps, as without damage from Pheromones his heavy duty healing wasn't required.

Mages could also be used to Blink away from Garalon at the beginning and make it to the doorway before it locks, although I don't know if they have the same survivability features that a warlock might have. Any other class with a speed boost (or use Priest talent feathers) might be able to make it. I would suggest the first attempt have the Pheromones sacrifice run until the boss resets, so that they know how far they can go (and nobody will die), then make your second attempt for real.

This whole strat is based on what is obviously and exploit and would be a good way to get banned from the game, FYI. Remember ICC and the LK platform bug? Multiple ban hammers went out for that, so I wouldn't offer this as a viable strategy.