OutDPS!

The third in my series of posts about how to use traps on specific end game boss encounters will focus on the last half of the construct quarter. We’ve gone over Patchwerk, so today I’ll write about Grobbulus and Gluth.

As a reminder for all the new readers sent here from WowInsider, the reason you want to get off as many traps as you can as a survival hunter is to increase the number of lock and load procs per minute you can get. Properly specced, this can be between 4 and 6.

To start with, Grobbulus is a fun encounter that will have you managing several tasks at once. The fight has a few gimmicks. The most important one is that Grob will periodically drop poison clouds that will expand slowly to a fairly large size, as well as put a mutating injection debuff on a random raider (not the tank) which will count down a few seconds and then drop a poison cloud centered where that player stands.

This means that the most effective strategy is one that will get all the clouds placed against the walls of the fight room so the middle of the room is relatively untouched. Typically, the tank will engage Grob on the ramp, and then drag him around the room, moving him every time he drops a cloud.  He’ll leave enough room between the clouds for players with the debuff to drop their cloud and get out.

The other gimmick is that he will summon fallout slime adds by spraying the tank with a cone aoe attack. This means all melee dps has to stand at the Grobb’s back, or else the number of adds summoned goes up.

Ranged DPS (hunters in particular) are reponsible for misdirecting the adds to the offtank, and then burning them down as fast as possible before going back to Grobbulus.

From all of this, where can you place traps? Well, you have several options. Once the fight is in full swing, the adds will be spawned faster than your frost trap cooldown, so the safest route is to try to get a one off on them. If your trap is off cooldown and there’s no slimes handy, you can take advantage of the fact that grobb is a moving target and place a trap in his path. Don’t get close though- that aoe spray he hits the tank with hits hard, and if you’re caught in it, you’ll be increasing the number of slimes he summons.

Next up, we’ll talk about Gluth. Gluth is a big demon dog with one of the most annoying gimmicks in the game. He spawns zombie chows which have to be kited, and periodically decimates the entire room, bring everyone’s health down to 5%, including the zombie chows. Once this happens, the chows will run straight to Gluth and if any make it through, he’ll eat them and regain 5% health.

The other annoying gimmick is that he will do a soft enrage every few seconds which needs to be tranquilized by either a hunter or a rogue.

Any class with a aoe or spammable slow can kite the chows, but typically this means that hunters get picked. We’re seen as a kiting class. Every time I get called on to kite when there’s a death knight off tank doing melee dps, I die a little. That said, I’ve accepted my fate and made a point of getting good at this task. I’ll write up a guide on how to kite sometime, actually.

If you’re not kiting for the fight, where do you get your lock and load procs from? If you answer “by placing my trap under the boss”, then you have just failed. Whoever is kiting can actually use your frost trap! Stand at maximum range, and whenever the trap comes off cooldown, drop it where it will be of use to the kiter. Even if you have to go out of range of the boss to do this. Normally you’ll be assigned an area to drop the trap. When your deadly boss mods addon tells you there will be a decimate soon, try to put the trap in the path between the chows and the boss.

That’s Grobbulus and Gluth folks. I’ll probably do Thaddius next.