Brutallus

From StratsFu

Overview

Brutallus is a fairly straight-forward tank fight. It requires trading off tanking, general raid damage from Slash, and some focused damage on individuals through Burn. It is an exercise in using group buffs and raid debuffs to your advantage, since the DPS requirements are higher than anything seen before in TBC.

SunwellRadiance is in effect.

Auxiliary Pages

BrutallusBurnAndSlashCalcs

Summary

The Fight

Positioning for Brutallus

MD Brutallus to your first tank, who then steps into position (as marked on diagram to the right.) We arrange the raid in two rows, so the front rows can run in front of the tank to get safe with burn, and the back rows can run in back. (Ranged dps can go about 10-15 yards further back if they wish.)

The exact arrangement doesn't matter as long as everyone is ~5 yards away from everyone else, and everyone has a clear, easy reliable path they can run through if they get burn to reach the safe point. One advantage to this positioning however is that almost everyone can be within chain heal bounce range of the tanks.

Every 10 seconds Brutallus casts Meteor Slash, so your tanks will need to be taunting him to trade off who is tanking.

The first taunt should occur right after Stomp hits the first tank. After that, tanks should taunt when their Meteor Slash stack falls off. If a taunt fails, immediately AE taunt.

He also periodically casts Burn on someone. This can be resisted, cloaked/bubbled/iceblocked, but it can also spread to other members, so the raid needs to keep ~5 yards apart at all time. Since Burn is fire damage and slash increases fire damage done, those with burn need to immediately move to a safe spot (marked on the diagram) for its duration. Taking an extra meteor slash when you have burn usually leads to death.

Stomp is cast every 30.5 seconds, so its timer will drift relative to the other abilities as the fight progresses. If the slash and stomp timers are both "up" at the same time he will slash, and then stomp a bit late (by about a second), but the next stomp is on time and not delayed relative to the timers.

There are tricks you can do with positioning within the group to make the fight slightly easier:

• Anyone with a shadow priest can be behind the group or on the outer edges, since they will not need *any* chain heal bounces. This lets others be close to the tank where they can easily get chain heal bounces (before we made this change we had a lot of random deaths.)

• Ranged DPS can be in the far back if they are having threat issues (as long as they're in a spriest group so therefore won't need heals; see "Can Shadow Priests really heal burn damage on their own"); this allows them to go to 129% instead of 109%. If you do have a "far back" line, make sure they are REALLY far back, so there is room between them and the front two lines for burn victims to run through.

• Mages and Paladins can be on the edge furthest from the burn location, since they will iceblock off the first burn. This lets others be closer so they lose less dps and healing time when they get burn.

• Arrange individual positions before the pull and have everyone in position -- check the angle of your lines if you're going with a line strategy, etc. KJ will require exact positioning as well, so there's no reason not to start practicing with Brutallus.

Abilities Reference

See BrutallusBurnAndSlashCalcs for specific damage numbers and the interactions between Burn and Slash.

• Burn: Cast on one target every 20 seconds (although it is resistable), it immediately begins ticking for 100 damage per second (dps). It ticks ten times, and then doubles in damage. It repeats this behaviour for an entire minute, doubling 5 times in total. The final 6 ticks are 3200 damage each. Additionally, Burn will pulse every second and spread to anyone within 5 yards of the target. It deals fire damage, so Meteor Slash debuffs increase its damage done.
• Meteor Slash: Cast every 12 seconds, it deals 20k damage to whoever is in front of Brutallus, split amongst those in the effect arc. It also applies a stacking debuff that increase fire damage taken by 75%.
• Stomp: Cast every 30.5 seconds, it deals 20k physical damage and decreases armor by 50% for 10 seconds (removes Burn if the tank has it)

Composition

Tanks

While Brutallus can be three-tanked, it is simpler to tank him with two: shortly after Sunwell went live, a patch changed the effect range of slash.

Any combination of druids, warriors, or paladins can tank Brutallus. If you are using a warrior tank, have either a DPS warrior putting up the warrior debuffs, or have your warrior tank second, so debuffs do not interfere with threat generation.

SunwellRadiance is in effect on Brutallus.

Healers

You can do Brutallus with either 7 or 8 healers, depending on class composition and raid strength. 2-3 Shaman make excellent raid healers, as well as providing totems and bloodlust. You will need a healer dedicated to each tank as well: if their health gets low, they must rely on the raid healers to top them off.

Shadow priests can cover all the raid heals on their groups (see WWS Chart and note that Swazzyjr and Masaren are shadow priests, and did as much healing as Talv, who was a dedicated tank healer; also see "Can Shadow Priests really heal burn damage on their own"), and in fact often out-heal dedicated healers. Don't be afraid to relax heals on people in spriest groups -- if you top them up right after slash you don't give VE time to work its magic.

You may want to rearrange how people stand as well: those in spriest groups can be at the very edges of your lines or even completely away from the tanks in the far back. This leaves the spots near the tank free for those without spriests so they can get chain heal bounces more reliably.

DPS

Any set of balanced, strong DPS will work. Specs like Survival Hunters, Ret Paladins, Warlocks, Enhancement Shaman, etc. which boost raid/group DPS are especially strong on Brutallus.

You should aim to synergize at least three full groups of dps for this fight. Ideally, you want to try to get the 4th group as optimized as possible; it is functionally impossible to get all 5 groups optimized and still have your raid force include the necessary 7-8 healers and 2 tanks, so aim for 4 groups and get as much group synergy going as possible. Do not bring extraneous classes / players if you can help it, regardless of personal feelings -- this is a genuine dps race, and you need to optimize the raid for the highest personal and raid dps possible.

One way you can cheat is to bring 2 full melee groups and stick all of them behind the boss for the entire fight. This puts more pressure on the healers (since Meteor Slash is spread among less people, causing more individual damage), but increases raid dps by a reasonable margin. Additionally, having more rogues means more immunities from Burn, which helps a tremendous amount when RNG goes your way.

Mages are especially strong for the same reason (iceblocking off burn.)

Group Composition Notes

If you're having threat issues, make sure your tanks are getting enough group buffs (shaman are the biggest increase.)

Make sure you understand how to create good RaidGroupSynergies.

Tanking

Do's

It can often be useful to delay your taunt just slightly if a stomp is incoming: let the stomp land on the other tank and then immediately taunt, thus reducing the healing need.

Ideally, tanks want to flip Brutallus back and forth between themselves such that no side ever takes more than 3 Meteor Slashes in a row. You cannot taunt Brutallus while Meteor Slash is still active on you and expect to live through the experience.

Whenever your Meteor Slash debuff wears off, give the healers a warning (Taunting in 3 ... 2 ... 1 ... Taunting) and flip Brutallus to you. Do everything you can to mitigate the first 2-3 hits, as those are the hardest for healers to predict / pre-heal.

An additional tip: the tank who is not currently tanking can keep a close eye on stomp timers and call them out with 3-5 second warnings for the healers so the healers have lead time to pre-heal stomp damage that is incoming.

Gear appropriately: while threat matters, you first need to survive to learn the fight -- ideally 21khp minimum, but certainly at least 20khp, and then focus on avoidance. Warriors should be using their cooldowns when they have to eat a Stomp, and healers need to be prepared for a druid eating one.

Don'ts

Don't worry if you get burn: stomp removes burn, so you can't have both up at once. Just stand still and keep tanking.

Don't forget to add dps when not tanking. Ferals can switch to cat form, and can go caster and barkskin shortly before taunting as well. Your DPS may be very key to winning, even as a protection warrior.

It is absolutely critical to never:

• taunt into a stomp (let the stomp land on the other tank and then taunt)
• taunt before your debuff has dropped (unless you know it will drop before the next slash goes out)

Note that you cannot taunt *mid* slash cast and expect it to land on the other group. He will switch targets immediately and slash you instead of his old target.

Timeline

Here's a sample timeline from the start of the pull:

• Pull happens, tank 1 begins tanking.
• Tank 1 will typically take 2 slashes, and then the stomp timer will be up.
• At this time tank 2 taunts and begins tanking (as soon as tank 1 is hit with stomp that is).
• Tank 2 will tank for about 30 seconds.
• As soon as tank 1s slash time is up, tank 1 can taunt it back, and then the normal rotation will be in effect.
• When either tank loses his debuffs, he will then be required to taunt Brutallus within a 3-5 second window, keeping in mind stomp timers and slash timers.

Healing

Tank and burn healers must stay on their assignments. If their health drops, they need to rely on the raid healers to top them off rather than healing themselves.

There are basically three possible healing assignments for this fight:

• dedicated tank healer
• dedicated / semi-dedicated raid healer
• dedicated / semi-dedicated Burn healer

See BrutallusBurnAndSlashCalcs for specific damage numbers and the interactions between Burn and Slash. Also see "Can Shadow Priests really heal burn damage on their own".

Ideal Healer Composition

The ideal healer composition for Brutallus is 2 resto druids covering Burn (and possible LB rolls on the tanks), 3 restoration shamans spamming Chain Heal through the current tank, and 2-3 other dedicated single-target healers whose only job is to heal the tanks. 8 healers really is more comfortable than 7 for this fight, although it is certainly doable with 7 (and even 6). If you are just learning the fight, bring 8 unless you are extremely tight for dps and unable to meet the enrage timer. It's much easier to learn the entire fight with 8 healers, and then drop one to get to the kill than to struggle with the fight because of lack of healing.

Tank Healers

Brutallus hits hard; very very hard at times (when stomp is up). The ideal primary tank healer for this fight is a paladin, preferably in a shadow priest group for double mana regeneration through VT and VE (Spiritual Attunement). Ideally, of the set of dedicated tank healers, assign one to 'pre-heal' the next tank. That is, have someone start healing the tank who is about to taunt before the taunt actually lands. The first combo of Mainhand / Offhand hits from Brutallus can easily exceed 10,000 damage, and having a heal there to absorb some of that is critical.

If you bring 8 healers to a raid, it is highly recommended that at least three be considered 100% dedicated tank healers.

For healing the current Brutallus tank, note that non-Stomp damage is very heal-able using mid-rank spells (Greater Heal 3 or 4 for priests; Holy Light 7, 8 or 9 for paladins). Ideally, you should have a comfortable spell that you spam non-stop for the entire duration of the fight except just prior to, during, and post-Stomp (Stomp). There is a very clear (use BigWigs or DBM) timer for Stomp, and it is trivial to up-rank your spells just prior to the Stomp landing. Not only does Stomp hit for ~ 8-10k damage, but it also reduces your tank's Armor by 50%, which makes him or her take increasing amounts of damage. A typical rotation for a priest would be to spam GH:3 for 15 seconds, then up-rank to GH:7 for 15 seconds, then down-rank to GH:3 again until the tank switch, when the cycle starts all over again.

It is highly recommended that tank healers not cast-cancel on this fight, as the incoming damage can be extremely streaky and brutal. Keep a heal in the pipe at all times, and let the heals go through unless you have exceptionally good reflexes and also have resto druids assisting you with a full load of HoTs.

Burn Healers & Strategy

Burn is an interesting spell (Burn) which unfortunately doesn't show its full mechanics through the data-mined version shown on Wowhead. Essentially, Burn is a modified inverse Doomfire, for those familiar with the Archimonde ability. Note that Brutallus can use Burn upon a single PC once every 20 seconds, although it can be resisted, and often is. Additionally, people using immunities (Ice Block, Divine Shield, Cloak of Shadows) will produce holes in the sequence.

When Burn lands upon a PC, it immediately begins ticking for 100 damage per second (dps). It ticks ten times, and then doubles in damage. It repeats this behaviour for an entire minute, doubling 5 times in total. The final 6 ticks are 3200 damage each. Additionally, Burn will pulse every second and spread to anyone within 5 yards of the PC. Obviously a spread Burn is a very bad thing, and part of your strat will be ensuring everyone is spread so that Burn never spreads.

The actual Burn ticks, assuming no additional debuffs (namely Meteor Slash), will be:

• 10 ticks @ 100 dmg each
• 11 ticks @ 200 dmg each
• 11 ticks @ 400 dmg each
• 11 ticks @ 800 dmg each
• 11 ticks @ 1600 dmg each
• 6 ticks @ 3200 dmg each

There are two hard parts to Burn. The first is the final 10 seconds, when your Burned raider will take 25,600 damage. This obviously must be dealt with by a dedicated healer capable of putting out at least 2000 HpS (note that the Burned person's hit point pool can be used as a buffer, meaning you really only need to heal 25,600 - HP + 1000 (safety margin)). The second hard part is dealing with a simultaneous final-duration-Burn and a Meteor Slash amplified mid-stage Burn. Someone with 3 stacks of Meteor Slash on them will take the following ticks (assuming worst case scenario):

• 10 ticks @ 225 dmg each
• 11 ticks @ 450 dmg each
• 11 ticks @ 900 dmg each
• 9 ticks @ 1800 dmg each
• 2 ticks @ 800 dmg each
• 11 ticks @ 1600 dmg each
• 6 ticks @ 3200 dmg each

This is assuming the person gets the 3rd stack of Meteor Slash the moment before the Burn lands, and thus must be healed through 40 seconds of Amplified Burn. In this case, you basically have two final-duration sequences happening simultaneously, and your strategy must have some preparation for this.

The ideal Burn healers are a pair of restoration druids. 6 Lifeblooms (2 stacks of 3), 2 Rejuvenations, and 2 Regrowths ticking on a Burned PC, together with timed Swiftmends for some point in the final 10 seconds, trivializes Burn healing. However, not everyone has access to two resto druids, and some raids also prefer to use one or both of their resto druids as tank healers (and they are admittedly very strong at this for Brutallus). Accordingly, you may end up using 2 druids, 1 druid and 1 other healer, or 2 non-druids. It is highly recommended that 2 healers be assigned to Burn healing, as it really is an intensive job, and 1 healer will find it extremely difficult to keep up (impossible in some circumstances).

• Two restoration druids

In this case, both druids should maintain LB x3 on all current Burn targets, and only scale up their healing as the Burn victim hits the final 10 seconds. The Lifeblooms will completely heal the person right up until the 6-seconds-remaining mark, so adding Rejuv and Regrowth at 8 and 6.5 seconds ensures perfect coverage. One druid should be assigned to Swiftmend for the terminating Burn victim, while the other should be watching the other two possible targets for possible Slash amplified Burn spike.

• One restoration druid, one single-target healer (priest, paladin, shaman)

Similar to the two druid strategy, the druid should load up a full coverage of HoTs on the Burn victim at the 10-seconds-remaining mark, and then cover the other Burn victims while the single-target healer uses medium-to-high rank spells to achieve 1500+ HpS. Note that this strategy can often leave the single-target healer with little to do (especially when immunities are used), and in this case, the healer should help with tank healing when not needed.

• Two single-target healers (priest, paladin, shaman)

This is the hardest combination to execute, and requires that the two healers communicate extensively beforehand. One healer should cover the high-rank spam spells for the final Burn duration, with the other helping for the final 6 seconds, and otherwise covering the other Burn victims. It is much harder to execute this combination than the other two, simply because Lifebloom is so incredibly powerful when it comes to Burn healing, ticking every second as the Burn ticks.

Note that as part of the raid leader setup for this fight, an area must be designated as the Burn location in a section of the room that will never get hit with Meteor Slash. People must run there as soon as Burn lands on them, and stay there for the entire duration of the Burn. This location must be in range of both of the Burn healers. The only exceptions to the run away mantra are the tanks (who never move) and the melee group, who stay behind Brutallus at all times, and do not need to move in order to avoid Meteor Slash.

Raid Healers

Positioning for Brutallus

There are a number of strats that work for raid healing. Firstly, note that VE is entirely sufficient to keep a group topped up from Meteor Slash, assuming the shadow priest is spec'd properly and has taken 2/2 Improved VE. This is a huge help to raid healing, and makes it much less of an issue.

Obviously ideal raid healers are Circle of Healing priests and restoration shamans. Resto shamans are actually slightly better choices for raid healing simply because you are not guaranteed to have full groups getting hit by Meteor Slash, and because priests are stronger single-target healers, which makes them more suited to tank healing.

If you use Restoration Shamans as your raid healers, you should note that it is possible to configure your raid so that shamans chain-casting Chain Heal using the current tank as their target will heal everyone to full in between Meteor Slash. Ideally, designate one shaman as the assigned FFA raid healer who is allowed to change his or her primary healing target to catch people who may have missed the Chain Heal bounces. See the diagram for an idea as to how to set this up.

Ranged DPS

If you are in a shadow priest group, you don't need to be in chain heal "bounce" range, since your spriest can cover all your healing needs. So back up (as long as there's room for people to run around you) and you can get out of melee range to have a 130% aggro ceiling.

Use cooldowns and lusts at 20%.

Melee DPS

You may need two rows depending on how many melee are on the raid so you all can be in the back and avoid spreading Burn. He has a large hitbox, so two rows are not an issue.

Work with your tanks on their tanking location so melee can avoid parries. Melee never need to stop dps even when burned, since they are already behind him and will never get a slash.

Use cooldowns and lusts at 20%.

Miscellaneous Tips

How to Learn Brutallus

You'll never kill him if you don't know how to survive and heal, and there's little point in wasting huge amounts of consumables while people are getting accustomed to the fight.

Start by just working to make it to enrage. Don't worry about burning expensive DPS consumables while your tanks and healers learn how to wrangle him into submission. Starting with 8 healers can make learning far easier. Once you're comfortable with the fight and pushing dps, you can drop to 7 if need be.

Brutallus is never in the same spot after the pull

Positioning for Brutallus

Brutallus actually requires a sidestep by your first tank after he's arrived. Follow the diagram to the right and Brutallus will end up in a consistent spot that avoids parries.

Increasing DPS

Make sure you understand how to create good RaidGroupSynergies.

Keep an eye on the debuff limit and reduce the number of debuffs if you are going over 40. You may need to learn more about DebuffManagement if you're not familiar enough with it already.

Plan on Curse of Recklessness being up on the boss, and have a designated debuffer (warrior) who has 3/5 or more points in Improved Demoralizing Shout. If one of your hunters has an Owl with Screech, this is another great way to reduce Brutallus' attack power. It is hard to reach the dps requirements without being willing to use CoRecklessness. If you run with only one warlock, they should be casting CoR.

One lesser-known buff is to designate one rogue to spec into Improved Expose Armor, and keep a 5-point EA up at all times. This is a genuinely noticeable dps increase for your physical dps, and can make the difference between a 2% wipe and a kill. Keep in mind that this will cause issues with Sunder Armor (and therefore with your warrior's threat) so be sure to discuss it with him ahead of time if appropriate and follow his wishes.

Stack lust/heroism on your top dps group (whether that's melee, mages, locks, whatever) if you need to. Warriors and Mages need their lusts sub-20%. Other groups can take them (or multiple lusts) whenever they have cooldowns up.

If you have leatherworkers make sure they are using drums.

Demonslaying Elixir (works for Hunters, although it didn't used to before) can help give you a final boost to push to a kill once the fight is stable.

Scroll of Agility V and Scroll of Strength V don't stack with food, but they stack with everything else, freeing you up to use different food.

If you are not raiding with an arms warrior, very seriously consider pushing a Fury warrior to respec, even if just for this fight (although you'll want his debuffs on later fights as well.) Arms is a very significant raid DPS increase that more than makes up for the small personal DPS loss. Same thing with having one hunter as Survival (and your others as BM.)

Can Shadow Priests really heal burn damage on their own?

Yes.

Let's assume a bad situation of a side with only eight soaks the entire time (1-2 are away with burn.) Everyone on that side will take 6875 damage with the first two ticks of Burn. A spriest with Improved VE needs to do 1372 damage to fully heal the damage from Burn.

But you don't have to fully heal the damage: you actually only need to keep everyone's hitpoints above zero. If you assume your raiders have a minimum of 8khp, which means you need to heal back 5,125hp over the course of 20 seconds: 1024dps for 2/2 Imp VE, or 1280 dps for 1/2 Imp VE.

And if your raiders have more than 8000hp (even your mages are closer to 9k than to 8k) then this number drops even further.

The remaining HP gets easily healed during the time the other tank is tanking.

Our tanks keep dying

This can have multiple causes:

• Your tanks may be taunting right before a stomp rather than right after one -- you can never taunt into a stomp, watch the timers and wait a bit
• Your healers may be ignoring instructions and healing themselves or others; it's critical that tank healers heal the tanks regardless

You can help the situation somewhat by giving one (or all) of your paladin tank healers a shadow priest and making sure they increase their HP/second by casting more and larger heals.

If you are in the situation of frequently wiping to tank deaths, stop each time and analyze what happened. It's easy to just keep crashing through without the right data. Use Recount, combat logs, WWS, whatever it takes to see if healers were casting, if they were using the right ranks, if tanks are taunting too early, if healers are too distracted, etc.

People keep spreading burn

Check your raid setup ahead of time -- are people spread out properly?

Watch during the fight -- are people returning to position after having to move for burn?

There's a lot going on, particularly for healers: it can help to call out who has burn so that they can movie quickly. Remember, hanging around means taking another slash, which both makes burn hit harder *and* keeps the slash debuff up for more of the fight.

Outside of that, just drill into everyone's head that there's never an excuse for spreading burn, it's just carelessness. Always know before the fight begins what path you are taking to reach the burn location.

People keep dying from burn

Are they eating extra slashes? If someone is going into a burn with 3-4 slashes, it might be better to cut your losses and just soulstone them and let them die.

Outside of that, check recount: is your druid keeping HoTs up on the burn victims? It can be hard for a druid to heal during the last 12-15 seconds: is the secondary healer stepping in each time, or are they leaving the druid to fend for themselves?

Note that Burn damage can vary

Talents/skills that increase your damage taken will make burn tick for more (e.g. playing with fire.)

Similarly, ones that reduce your damage taken will make it tick for less (defensive stance, elemental warding, etc.)

And of course you can iceblock/bubble/cloak to remove it entirely.

Watch for too many on one side with Burn

Remember that Slash's damage is divided up by the number of players it hits. If 2-3 players on one side are absent due to burn, you may wipe from the heavy damage. Have 1-2 players (e.g. melee) able to step in on a raidleaders call if that happens.

If he enrages

With a bit of planning, you can kill him post-enrage: paladins can divine shield and taunt and buy time for the raid to finish him off. The best approach to this is to move to the side of the majority of the raid, bubble, and then taunt. This keeps Brutallus facing away from your melee in order to maximize what remaining DPS you can muster, as well as prevents a potential meteor slash from wiping out an entire chunk of your raid. A bubble/taunt rotation with multiple paladins is not entirely unheard of in this tactic.

WWS Samples

• 2 April 2008 (second kill): http://wowwebstats.com/jsqkjktzfydzy?s=15584-15953
• 17 June 2008: http://wowwebstats.com/y6sbhtk1bugcm?s=4658-5025
• 1 July 2008: http://wowwebstats.com/u3rxd2s52m4vq?s=3503-3842

Videos

• Tank PoV: still needed
• Entire fight (any PoV): still needed

Discussion

Feel free to visit to talk about the fight or post questions:

http://www.fusion-guild.org/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=30

Loot

• Badge of Justice x 2

T6:

• Belt of the Forgotten Conqueror
• Belt of the Forgotten Protector
• Belt of the Forgotten Vanquisher

Other drops:

• Clutch of Demise
• Collar of the Pit Lord
• Felfury Legplates
• Heart of the Pit
• Leggings of Calamity
• Reign of Misery

Sunmote Turnin Items:

• Felstrength Legplates (from Felfury Legplates)

Patch History

Post-2.4.0

• Slash area of effect changed to be deeper and wider, making a "true" 3 tank strat far harder