Hey guys I’m Mezzy from WoW Weekly and welcome to this warlords of draenor raiding guide. Today we’ll be taking a look at Gruul in Heroic Blackrock Foundry. These tactics also apply to the normal version.
Gruul is back and you gotta feel sorry for the guy, as the orcs have chopped off one of his hands. This results in him not just having his old mechanics, but having new ones too.
First off he has his Petrify / Shatter combination. He will knock players away in a random direction and after the player gets 5 stacks of petrify they will be completely immobile. Gruul will then shatter the player dealing damage not just to the player, but the damage will also hit anyone within 8 yards of that player. This means that petrified players have to move away from each other before the stacks of petrify add up. Your movement speed is also reduced by 20% per stack.
His new and main ability is Inferno Slice, this is a cleaving attack that shares the damage between all players hit. This will put a 30 second DoT on the players hit and another debuff on the tank being hit, increasing their damage taken by Inferno Slice by 20%.
Because of the way this works you will want to split your raid up into 2 groups and have Inferno Slice hit each group 1 slice at a time. This used to be 2 stacks per group but due to nerfs it’s down to 1 on this difficulty. The tanks however, need to take up to 2 stacks instead of 3 due to the timings of the debuffs. This video should show how easy it is to actually execute.
Deal with this as follows: Have your first tank face Gruul away from the two groups. When Gruul starts casting inferno slice, have your second tank stand on the first group and taunt Gruul so that the inferno slice hits them. As soon as inferno slice has been cast, have your first tank taunt back so that he can continue tanking the boss. Your second tank moves over to the other group of dps and healers and will once again taunt Gruul when he starts casting Inferno strike. Your second tank will then keep Gruul, so they move over to the tanking spot. Your first tank will move over to the group that got hit by inferno strike first as their debuff should fall off. At this point you repeat the process.
Your tanks still get hit twice by inferno strike so they should not be afraid to use cooldowns for them.
When not soaking slices you want Gruul to be faced away because of the next ability: Overwhelming Blows. This is another ability that does damage to anyone within 10 yards of the tank and also has a stacking debuff increasing the damage taken by those players. As such, you only want the tank to get hit by it.
The tanks will make or break the fight. It’s up to them to face gruul to the correct groups as soon as possible, without having overwhelming blows hit the groups. If the tank not soaking inferno strikes taunts back quickly enough after the strike has been cast there should be no issues.
Another ability Gruul casts is Overhead Smash, which will inflict heavy damage in a line. This will be cast on random players and needs to be dodged.
Every 1,5 minutes or so Gruul will cast Destructive Rampage, with which he will cast multiple Overhead Smashes. These of course need to be dodged. Gruul can’t be tanked during this ability, giving the healers a chance to catch up on healing.
Finally, Gruul can also cause cave ins, with which the roof will start falling on a circle. You just have to move out of this AoE.
Overall this is not a difficult encounter and it’s a nice throwback to the original Gruul the Dragonslayer.
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