Feat: Hodir 25 MT

Thursday night Bubbles successfully tanked Hodir 25. It took two attempts, the first one being an aborted attempt a couple minutes before the enrage timer once it was clear Bubbles wasn't generating enough threat to beat the enrage.

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAHzzU2RmPQ
Download: http://www.filefront.com/14426367/Bubbles-Does-Hodir.wmv/

For the first attempt, I had planned on 2-3 rogues being in the raid and had brought Glyphs of Tricks of the Trade for them to use during the fight, giving 66-100% uptime and adding something like 4k tps. That would bring him close to a normal tank in total TPS and allow the DPS to DPS nearly as hard as they would with a normal tank. Since I was concerned about survivability and thought I wouldn't need to worry about threat, I went with a 53/3/15 build to pick up an extra few thousand HP and letting him break 50k HP buffed. Unfortunately due to the server issues that plagued several realms that night, only one rogue was available. Then about 30 seconds into the fight he announced that it apparently pets are not valid targets for Tricks of the Trade. About 2 minutes shy of the enrage timer Hodir was only at around 50% health because the DPS was waiting on threat with only Auto Attack, Growl, Thunderstomp and two hunters MD's for threat.

Following that attempt, I hearthed to Org to respec to 54/17/0 to enable Bubbles to use his focus dump for more threat. One of the Death Knights in the raid also switch to his hunter to add another MD to the raid, and the other Death Knights used Hysteria on Bubbles whenever it came off cooldown. These together greatly increased his threat and we were able to beat the enrage time by about 30 seconds on the first attempt with these changed.

We used 3 dedicated MT healers, one Resto Druid (Mirloc), one Disc priest (Oboe), and one Resto Shaman (Deranged). This gave Bubbles the 10% reduction to physical damage taken, and large number of HoTs to keep him up whenever healers needed to move, Earth Shield to reduce incoming damage, and quick and powerful single target heals. Unfortunately I don't remember how many raid healers we had for the second attempt, and out RL's combat log stopped working when he DCed before the second attempt. Judging by the combat log though we had 3 raid healers for the first attempt; a Resto Druid (Terokk), one Holy Priest(Arriannis), and one Resto Shaman (Cowpatty). My apologizes to the healers if I messed that up. All other raid members were their normal DPS specs except for one Prot Paladin who stayed Prot for the attack speed slowing effect from Judgements of the Just, increased armor from Improved Devo Aura, and Improved Sacred Shield which was kept on Bubbles.

My gear used:
Armor Plated Combat Shotgun
The Black Heart
Figurine - Monarch Crab
Titanium Frostguard Ring
Icy Scale Boots, Belt and Chestguard
Season 7 Furious Glad or same ilevel Titan-Forged gear in the remaining spots.
Up until the start of Season 8 next Tuesday I'll be trying to log out in this gearset and spec for reference.
All pieces used full Solid Dragon's Eyes or Solid Majestic Zircon, except one Stam/AP epic gem to activate my Austere Earthsiege Diamond meta gem, 19 epic gems in total. All pieces also used the highest level stamina enchants where available. Total unbuffed stamina was 3131 stamina.

Consumables used:
Fish Feast
Guru's Elixer (20 to all stats)
Elixir of Protection
Indestructible Potion

Final pet stats including buffs for the successful attempt:
47052 HP
33150 or 68.52% Armor rating
404 Frost resistance
225 Resilience or 2.74% crit chance reduction

My GOD. So what're you gonna attempt? This could be epic.

Either:

1) Trial of the Grandcrusader 25 man Heroic without healers
2) Solo raid on Orgrimmar (blindfolded)
3) Using Bubbles as a big hairy siege engine to take down the gates in Wintergrasp.

On a side note - 50K health is very impressive - more than most 'proper' tanks have. Go get em tiger... errr gorilla...

I armoried you, all furious and icy scale, very interesting. I'll be curious to see how you do. I wish I had furious gear I'm sitting on mostly deadly right now.

Makes me want to play around with my pvp gear though.

/popcorn

Damn! Best I've come up with is 41k (raid buffed).

Whatever you attempt, bring along a few hunters for DPS too

Ground

Hodir or Mimiron?

Turns out you can't cast Tricks of the Trade on pets. Switching things up a bit for more threat, but he's tanking like a boss.

Edit: Torrent difficulties trying to get the raw footage from the person who was filming. Hopefully video tomorrow followed by a write up.

You slapped Hodir down! Nice!

I love watching Durante stir up the hornet's nest of 'proper tanks' with stunts like this Standby for 200 threads on the offical forums about hunters should not be tanking etc etc etc.

My congratulations and deepest respect for another amazing feat. If only Blizz gave pet tanking achievements

Yowser!

Go-go Bubbles.

I've been thinking multiple times that Hodir would be the perfect chance for a pet tank to shine, due to the fact that the boss himself is fairly 'tank and spank' if you've got enough frost resistance. I just wasn't sure how many HP a pet would need to survive it.

You've got to stop raising the bar for us like this, Durante! I'm still working on managing to get my first MT of a raid other than Naxx.

Kurasu wrote:I've been thinking multiple times that Hodir would be the perfect chance for a pet tank to shine, due to the fact that the boss himself is fairly 'tank and spank' if you've got enough frost resistance. I just wasn't sure how many HP a pet would need to survive it.

I've actually been wondering a bit if Nordh and yourself had been sizing this fight up for a while now, looks like I might have been right.

Since Ulduar came out I knew Hodir was the one to do. Frost damage, no taunting, single target, no complicated movement, generous enrage timer, slow swing speed. The biggest challenge here was actually getting the guild to let me do it. My new guild had gotten all the server firsts from Kara to Kel'thuzad and then all the either server firsts or Horde server firsts for non-hard mode 25 Ulduar, so convincing some of the members to go along with something that didn't count as a hard mode, drop extra loot, go towards progress rank ect. was very difficult. Many members had explicitly told the officers in private that they'd refuse to go to any run that I tanked. Eventually after a month of bugging the raid leader to let me try last night he told me not to tell anyone, but come to the raid with tanking as my duel spec and right before Hodir he'd tell everyone right when we got to Hodir so they couldn't back out.

My methodology for how much HP I wanted was more than double the single largest hit that Hodir could deliver. I wanted to plan for the eventuality that you're going to get hit twice in a row with heals just happening to line up in such a way that he doesn't get healed in between. I don't have the math anymore, but after looking at parses and doing some armor and frost resistance calculations, I figured I wanted 45k or more to lean toward the safe side. When the math put me at ~49k, I couldn't very well stop there. I was speced into Survivalist for the 50k picture and the first attempt, but after the disaster of finding out Tricks doesn't work on pets I had to hearth and respec into GftT. For the second attempt Bubbles was just over 47k.

You've got to stop raising the bar for us like this, Durante! I'm still working on managing to get my first MT of a raid other than Naxx.

You guys are raising the bar all the time. Heroics, soloing old raid bosses and things of that nature can be some much more complex and difficult than tanking raid bosses, just in different ways. Hodir is all about preparation, soloing and 5-man are all about execution, but with a side of preperation. I think of it as two different types of challenges and I'm sure some of the stuff you guys do I wouldn't be able to pull off.

Durante,
I might have WANTED to do it for a long time... Unfortunately, the guild doesn't even want to hear ANYTHING about pet tanking. Don't even wanna let me try. Peak of my career is MT most of Naxx 10 =/

With a guild that will only try hard mode a few times before giving up and just faceroll through Ulduar because they want to get it over with as quick as possible is not really a guild that will let a fight take a tad bit longer than normal because a pet is tanking it.

I KNEW IT WAS HODIR, but only because you had mentioned it a long time ago. Congrats for downing it, it does sound like quite the feat. I expect a VERY detailed explanation of the prep and the talent spec and the gems ( i saw the epic stam gems in every slot! ) and a play by play of the fight, also what you told the healers to do etc.

Its asking alot but you didnt think id let you get away with anything less did you?

Get the video feed up and ill post it on the front page.

Nordh wrote:Unfortunately, the guild doesn't even want to hear ANYTHING about pet tanking. Don't even wanna let me try. Peak of my career is MT most of Naxx 10 =/

I'm in a similar boat, though I have been able to get a few tanking slots in heroics and offtanking Naxx on a fairly regular basis. I've done some Mimiron head-tanking as well, but that has nothing to do with the pet and everything to do with the fact I have over 30K HP in my tanking gear and can shoot well. The Don's done more than a little 'emergency tanking' in Ulduar as well, but The Don is also a ferocity pet (Devilsaur) and doesn't do a good job at full-time tanking. Still, being able to hold threat on a pair of escaped Trash (literally the trash's name) at full-nuke in Ulduar 25 had me starting to think about trying a 10-man tank on someone.

And yes, of all the bosses, Hodir was my #1 choice, Durante, so you were right about that. And for the reasons you mentioned, too.

#2 choice? I'm thinking Freya. After all, 99% of the battle is done with the entire raid on trash and trash alone. Imagine how much threat buildup you'd be able to get while they're 'trashing'.

Kurasu, Mimiron phase 1 and 4 is perfect for pet tanking since they can stay in when he's doing the big AoE. It only hits the pet for 20K or less. Plus every single time he uses the thing that you have to use healer cooldowns for (can't remember the name now), you can use Shell Shield (with turtle).

That said, Mimiron is a lot more focus challenging because you have to really control the fight to be able to make it. There are elements that still can one shot you and your pet.

Phase 3 as hunter isn't that good. We don't have enough dps to hold proper aggro, especially not with tank gear. It's better to take a warlock that has some high threat spells, or simply take a warrior that can Spell Reflect his fireballs. That's some very good aggro building, plus it removes the incoming damage a lot.

The video has been uploaded, but youtube is still processing it. While that's finishing I'll be doing my write up here by editing the first post so its not as buried.

As an aside...

I know that you use Bubbles for sentimental reasons, but does 'Pummel' come in useful when tanking? I sometimes feel that I am missing an interrupt on George the turtle, but I am not sure if it is worth training up a gorilla again for it. (I would have to drop Xerxes the Warp Stalker)

Doug wrote:As an aside...

I know that you use Bubbles for sentimental reasons, but does 'Pummel' come in useful when tanking? I sometimes feel that I am missing an interrupt on George the turtle, but I am not sure if it is worth training up a gorilla again for it. (I would have to drop Xerxes the Warp Stalker)

Only for certain fights. I've been wanting to use him to tank Stormcaller Brundir on the Assembly of Iron encounter for the longest time since he is interpretable, but because of the length of the Pummel cooldown you'd still need a supplementary interrupter, either player or another gorilla. In general though if you're tanking for groups there's going to be someone else that can interrupt for you if need be, so I'd say a turtle or warp stalker make much better general purpose tanking pets.

Video linked to my guild's forum. I doubt that it'll get me much of a chance to do any Ulduar tanking any time soon (mainly because tanks are not something we've got any derth of), but at least it might prove to them that hunter tanks are serious bizniz.

Maybe I can MT some Naxx runs, finally. Now that I'm crit-immune, I bet it'll go a lot smoother....

Horrible quality on the movie =( Was the source that bad, or do you want me to help you with rendering? It's how I make my living.

And not to mention the angle not showing Bubbles more than a few times. =( But I did see something which interested me, Tricks of the Trade were used at least twice. Saw the buff both in the beginning and in the end. So either the rogue used it on someone else, or he failed the first time he tried to use it or something. Wouldn't surprise me, lots of people have problems like not being able to target pets because they aren't in their raid frames =P

He said that he got an error message saying something along the lines of "Target is not a player." I can't remember exactly what it was though, but it should be easy enough to check for in game. I'm guessing he used it on a hunter since they're probably going the best DPS in any fight where threat is the limiting factor.

But yeah, the intended camera man couldn't get any decent footage. That was the night that realms were going offline and generally unstable, and his lag was horrendous. Since my computer just isn't up to the task of recording, instead of a ranged perspective with widescreen footage I had to settle for melee with fullscreen. The best laid plans of mice and men.

Edit: Just tested Tricks in game.

Target is not a player.

A moment of intense pride for me, thanks to you, Durante. I posted the video to our guild board as I said, with the following:

So, now that Panzer's crit-immune, think Lari will let me try? Huh? Huh? Maybe? Kinda? Possibly?

The answer by our guild master, Lariel:

We can do it next time we're at Hodir, but make sure you know what exactly what you're doing, I don't need another reason to make us wipe more.

I don't intend to push the matter, since I do need to gear up a bit more before trying it, but I figured you'd want to see that your video made my GM seriously consider letting me tank in Ulduar. In fact, there's some discussion going on whether Vezax might be an option....

That's great news! I've always hoped that my video's would help other hunters with their tanking, whether it be through showing them a possibility they never thought of before, or convincing others to give them the chance. I hope we see your Vezax movie soon.

Here i was happy soloing the first boss in normal occ. Well, I'm still happy. Just not courageious enough to try the 2nd boss just yet.

Anyhow once i heard of this i decided I want to try it myself. Got my guild to give me one crack at hodir 10.

Do you think there would be any major differences between 10/25? I figure if i have one shot I'm gonna make it work and maybe convince them to give me another shot. Its just hard enough for them to take me seriously when i want to tank heroics.