Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Blood Council: no caster tank?

Don't have time at the moment to write up a full strat-thingy, but I did want to alert others to something that worked very well for my guild last night.

Most strats for the Blood Council suggest using a caster tank on Prince Keleseth. We tried this out with our warlock for many attempts, using three healers (one assigned to each tank), with me as the mobile resto druid chasing our noble warlock all over the room as he tanked Keleseth and attempted to round up the shadow orbs. Most of our wipes were from him dieing: it was very difficult to keep him topped off all the time even with his 29k health, and sometimes he'd just get one-shot.

It was suggested that we try having someone with a higher health pool tank the prince, and see if we can handle having 3 melee tanks.

So it was that our feral druid with 55k health in bear stepped up to the plate to tank Keleseth, and within two attempts, the Council was down. Caster tank? Didn't work for us. Bear tank instead? I chased Mr. Scythe-bear up and down and all over the room, him calling out to me when he was going up on the platform or having to go really far so I could anticipate and chase after him through a maze of fellow raiders (gotta stay spread out), fireballs, sparks, and mess. And it worked. He took some big hits, but with that health pool and his survival instincts/barkskin, he was able to stay alive.


Edit: looks like the bear-strat worked out for Virile at Rejuvo, too!

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Of our two groups we used a Feral for one group and a DK for the other group, and they both worked well.

We will probably not be using a caster tank in the 25s after what we learned in the 10s last night.

lissanna said...

This is great advice. My guild has a good feral tank, but our ranged caster tank options are lacking.

Seplaverta said...

One of the problems my guild noticed is that Keleseth will slap our warlock in the face for 50k if he gets too close. Warn your warlocks! Keep your distance :)

Anonymous said...

For what it's worth, Kae, we used a DK on Keleseth tonight in the 25 man as well and it worked out just fine :)

Mark said...

I actually imagine a DK is the optimal choice for the role to be honest due to a higher degree of ranged abilities. Vortex's resident DK is more of the DPS variety, so we made due with a feral instead.

High health seems to be the major key in being able to reliably survive on Keleseth though, which (unfortunately) favours a traditional tank using ranged abilities over an actual ranged tank. I don't imagine that was Blizzard's intention, but it is what it is.

Kae said...

Kitarha (the DK) had offered to tank it; the feral was chosen just because of higher health pool since we didn't know what to expect when we swapped from the warlock. For a long while Kit's offspec was a pvp build since we needed the ice-block-nova-thingy for faction champs, but he has since gone back to a tank offspec :)

Anonymous said...

Oh, I think you mis-understood my comment!

I was just indicating that in the 25's we opted to use a physical tank as opposed to a "caster" tank as well. I wasn't trying to imply that a DK would do a better job than a feral druid! Just confirming that a "caster tank" is in fact not needed in any variation of this encounter :)

Ram said...

As The warrior tank for Kae I'm just sad Spell Reflect doesn't work on most bosses.... though Tanking Valanar was nice. Charging in after a pushback is nice,

Glacey said...

Thanks for the tip! We switched from a caster tank to a feral and got them very next try!