My guild is so obsessed with warlock tanking - I feel like they have no idea what they are doing. Got them to 80%.
If you can post here, you can go read/youtube a ton of guides on how to beat this encounter. If your guild is failing, suggest using a guide… most guides have warlock tanks.
My guild has 3 raid teams. Two killed Twin Emps, both using warlock tanks.
Post some logs of your wipes and we can tell you where you went wrong.
Warlock tanks are the optimal strategy and they certainly do work when the conditions are right and transitions are done successfully.
Usually if a guild is wiping/struggling on twins it’s the positioning/teleport threat reset that messes them up. Or you could just blame the healers! Lock tanks are the go to strat though.
So we need 3 warlock tanks doing this?
You can manage with two warlock tanks too if you can’t find or don’t have a 3rd.
They should just have a minimum threshold of mitigation/resist and health since Vek’lor hits extremely hard even in full resist gear.
It’s a dance, learn the steps and you’ll have no issues
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3 warlocks is the strat we use to kill them every week. 1 on each side to pick up the caster ASAP, the third floats with the caster group and will try to keep 2nd threat to pick up the caster if he decides to boop a warlock tank.
You know what the biggest cause of wipes on twin Emps is usually? Bad Mages.
Mages need to make sure they stop using fire-based attacks about 5-7 seconds before a possible teleport. If ignite doesn’t drop then the Lock tank can’t get aggro and the caster emp will end up klilling the mage and possibly moving to the center where they can heal.
Also people need to spread out, and get away from the stairs. This is the second big problem I find in Twin Emps. People clumping up acting like the herd animals that we are. Mages again are terrible about this, they should be out on the floor - not anywhere near the stairs or anyone else.
Finally, you need to have healers arranged in a kind of “U” to make sure you have full coverage on the floor. Again, they need to be away form each other.
Extra tips,
1)have everyone pop a Greater Fire protection Potion to help with exploding bugs.
2) Your lock needs to be deep-demo/ruin spec and have 315 Shadow resist with the felhunter pet out.
3) use a third Lock that acts like a floater to help grab aggro if that is a problem.
If you guys are doing all that and still wiping then there is something else terrible going on.
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We’ve done warlocks tanks and have had 2 weeks of 0 death attempts now if we don’t count the warrior who popped MRP + DW + RECK at 20% and got himself stomped 2 weeks ago. Our other MT (fury prot) couldn’t keep up with his threat with a shield on–mitigation tanks are actually pretty useful here…I’d never attempt to DW on this one.
Use offtanks to gather bugs and park them in the center of the stairs spamming demo roar/battle shout. No yellow bugs really helps healers + no explosions on/near warlocks…this was probably the biggest issue we had early on. One melee aggroing a yellow bug and running across gathered 5 more who would then beeline to healers and cause a chain reaction of deaths.
We don’t move our locks at all, even if they have a blizzard on them. It’s negligible in the overall damage they’re taking from shadow bolt even with near capped resists.
I stepped in to help tank recently and if the warriors do the dance correctly you won’t see ANY melee attacks. We found it was slow tank reaction time that enabled their melee attack randomly on the locks (even if they didn’t AE on the port). We see this occasionally in our raid 2 when tanks are slow to move or panic on a punt right before teleport.
Alternatively, we’ve also had luck with a shadow priest stepping in on early attempts to hold threat. They do surprisingly well also.
Warriors should be in full boomer tank gear honestly so they can eat up to 3 shadowbolts on the transition before the lock takes it.
Lock tank works great. Get 315 shadow resist and the majority of his bolts will hit you for about 1k. You should have somewhere in the 6k-8k hp range depending on how buffed you are meaning your healers have plenty of time to heal you.
The only real risk is bad Blizzard Placement with your healers too stacked so they stop healing, bugs blowing up on you combined with other things spiking you, or the boss glitching out and deciding to donk you on the head instead of casting shadowbolts.
From a healer standpoint, the melee tank is much more likely to get random donked than the caster one. The caster tank takes fairly consistent damage which is easy to heal.
Your warlocks should call for damage for the rest of your casters on Vek’lor, otherwise mages can easily rip off of them because they’re in full damage gear, while the tank is in survival gear.
We use 3 warlocks, and have finished the fight with our backup when the main tank died (since Vek’lor can hit incredibly hard unresisted).
Lastly, wherever you decide to tank them, make sure the warrior can still be the closest to them on the swap without triggering Arcane Explosion.
The fight is rinse and repeat, and the tank swaps are crucial. Once you can keep tanks alive and handle the swaps, the fight is very rinse and repeat.
I will say we wiped 5 or 6 times on twins before we killed them. However, since then we haven’t wiped on em. It’s very much a raid coordination fight, not a DPS race. A couple of our kills crossed 10mins
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We use 4 lock tanks, simply because we have 4 locks lol. One main, one backup each side. We wiped once last week because we had a brez bug on one of our melee tanks. When he got back up he immediately pulled aggro and the bosses healed to full. So don’t brez close to a swap.
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It’s a long fight and can go wrong in an instant. Almost no responsibility for me though so I’m just running back and forth praying the important people don’t die.
This^ 10char
That tank thing isn’t a bug. Apperently dead players have their threat frozen. So if a tank dies and is brez’d after a swap, they will rip agro 100% of the time. Same thing if a hunter FD’s before a swap and pops back up after it happens.
Warlock tanking is not a problem, it works well. Some things to consider, and there are a few ways to deal with this fight all that work. This is the method my guild uses, and its effective.
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on swaps make sure range DPS stop, especially mages a few seconds before swap. PWS on both lock and warrior tank that’s picking up just before swap to make sure no one gets exploded instantly. Flask of the Titans on all tanks. Arcane and Shadow protection pots can be nice to star the fight on just in case, and will pad you in the event of a mistake.
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Make sure melee tank picks up boss before melee do by being as closer than the melee DPS.
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Make sure lock tank picks up boss before Range start to DPS.
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I don’t know for absolute certain, but I think every time they swap it drops threat to zero, so dont get too nuts.
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Have your range deal with enraged adds instead of the melee, because your range can sit in the middle comfortably and Zug zug the adds without really harming their damage a lot. This is a very good thing for hunters to do because they have ridiculous range burst damage on demand. If your raid is melee heavy and a lot are, then 1 hunter per melee group is common and more than enough to get the job done.
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Watch out for adds that have glowy red antenna, they do not move and they do not chase, they just get big and go boom… Simply move out of the way.