ArcherDae wrote:
The group did suffered from a, b, and c. All of those were causing to much AOE damage for me to heal through. I assumed you could not avoid much of that and the healer "should" be able to heal through it.
I was hesitant to blame the group as they were all better geared and longer time players (I was the newbie). Sounds like a combination of a Druids lack of good group healing capability and the groups less then optimal tactics and was not "totaly" my fault :)
One other question: How do you anticipate the teleport? I knew it was coming but not when, I did not notice any signs prior to the actual teleport.
You can use a mod like LittleWigs that will give you a warning when his teleport cooldown is up, but more than that, the teleport isn't quite instant. You'll notice a brief pause, then a flash of light come from the ground under Vorpil as well as each party member. It's only 1-2 seconds of warning, but it's more than enough to get people (who are paying attention) into "get off the platform!" mode.
I've run Shadow Labs countless times and at the risk of sounding arrogant, I'm the first tank I've seen who truly knew how to handle Vorpil off the pull. (I've run it many, many times on my hunter and my shaman in addition to tanking it on my druid). The temptation for most tanks who have a reasonable understanding of the fight is to pull Vorpil from max range and then wait for him to close the gap and start tanking. Once Vorpil closes to melee range, they start pulling him back. That works, but it leaves groups vulnerable to a ton of AoE damage from voidwalkers that spawn in bad places and if the group is taking damage from exploding voidwalkers, chances are good that Vorpil is also getting healed by a fair amount. Also, the more you have to move Vorpil to keep him away from voidies, the more everyone else is having to move. Casters who have to move can't cast. Melee dps who have to move quite often lose out on a bunch of dps potential. There's a better alternative.
If you pull Vorpil fully half way down the hall, you'll never have to deek him around voidwalkers that spawn behind the tank. They'll all spawn behind Vorpil, and they move very slow. It becomes easy to pull Vorpil further back if the voidwalkers start getting too close and you can do so without disrupting healer's/ranged dps, and you can minimize the number of moves so that even melee dps aren't disrupted very much with each move. When he teleports the group, most tanks will pull him to the north hall, but they don't pull him far enough. What I've found to be extremely helpful is to pull him 2/3-3/4 of the way down the north hall before you stop and start tanking him. Again, it means that he's stationary for that much longer before you have to start moving him to keep him clear of the voidwalkers. The longer he stays still, the more threat the tank builds and the more dps the rest of the group can put on him.
The easiest way to see how far you need to pull Vorpil both at the start and after each teleport is to look at the runes on the ground that appear when he starts summoning voidwalkers. The runes themselves always seem to spawn in the same location. Off the pull, I don't even stop and start tanking him until he's several paces beyond the last rune in the southern hall. After a teleport, I pull him well past the last rune in the northern hall before I stop moving and really start tanking him. If your tank is having to pull Vorpil around/through voidwalkers, the tank didn't pull him far enough before he stopped and started tanking.
There can only be a certain number of voidwalkers spawned at any given time. Each time a voidwalker reaches Vorpil and explodes, it means another voidwalker can spawn in a bad spot. By pulling Vorpil so far down the south hall on the initial pull, chances are good that none of the voidwalkers will explode. This means that when you pull him into the north hall after the first teleport, all of the voidwalkers in the south hall will start moving north again...takes them forever to get anywhere near Vorpil. There's risk of significant damage if Vorpil lives long enough to do a second teleport and your party is too slow getting off the platform. There will be a lot of voidwalkers nearby that will start moving to Vorpil right after the port, but as long as your party is on the ball and gets off the platform and south down the hall asap, the damage they take will be minimal.
If Vorpil survives to a third teleport using this strategy, it means your party is badly undergeared and/or isn't making the best use of their dps potential. He's got less than 90k HP in normal mode and as level 70 dungeon bosses go, that's nothing to burn through.
Edited, Jul 30th 2008 4:09pm by AureliusSir