Dark Claw and Haunting Gaze abilities from Minion of Doubt and Haunting of Sha from Temple of the Jade Serpent are overtuned, they are doing too much dmg on tanks that have low magic dmg rection like monks. Each uninterruptible cast on a 15 is doing >50% of the life of a monk tank 395 and dont even fill stagger. This is also a problem with the spec.
3 Likes
You can stop the casts with hard cc. Theese abilities have cds, so just ask the the party to help you or kite.
Another option is reroll to pwar. Pwar is blizzard’s poster child for tanks now. They did only funny nerfs to pwar and almost deleted VDH who used to be ranked equally with their poster child.
BDK is also a good option to deal with these as long as you dont get oneshot.
1 Like
I know Dark Gaze hits like a truck, but isn’t Haunting Gaze the interruptible fear? Or am I getting the abilities mixed up with something else.
There is a fear yes, but the gaze is a tank buster frontal (silver cast) that cannot be interrupted but can be CCD (stun/blind/ incap/gauge ect)
And I believe you are talking about dark claw which is an ability from a different mob, the minion of doubt I believe (also slaps the tank)
The fear is like Haunting Scream or something like that. Pretty sure Scream is in the name at least
1 Like
I’ve never known Dark Gaze or w/e that ability is to crush tanks. Dark Claw, on the other hand, just deletes them if there’s more than one. The final pull in particular has to be kited. I’ve never seen a tank survive holding that pull in a 14 or higher.
I think it’s fine to have a couple of mobs in a single dungeon that need to be kited.
Those mobs are overtuned, blizzard should wonder a new formation for that pack and thing about some nerf on dark claw.
That pack before the final boss obliterates basically any tank I see unless you have insane burst aoe and stuns. Even my pretty decently geared Prot Warrior toon, almost 400 ilvl, got obliterated at +19
I just assume I don’t know what I’m doing for that last pull and that I’m just trying to buy time for the DPS before I die. Basically kite it back out to the 3rd boss courtyard and hope DPS go hard on them.
Glad to see others enjoy it just as much.
One skill people have kinda forgotten is the idea of desyncing mob attacks and abilities. It used to be a thing where as tanks, we’d ask people not to use aoe stuns unless we call for them, because that’d make all the mobs in a pack autoattack/cast in the same instant coming out of the aoe stun, essentially making incoming damage into gib spikes.
In a pull like that one where there are 3 Minions who can all cast Dark Claw, by default they all cast Dark Claw at the same time. At least from what I’ve seen and what other people I know have seen, that seems to be reliable behaviour from those mobs.
People’s general response to events like that is to aoe stun, but what that typically does is simply change the timing when they all cast Dark Claw at the same time for one huge burst. Great if a mob dies within 10 seconds so they’ll never cast at all, not so much when it’s going to live longer.
By contrast, if you cycle single target stuns out of sequence, what you can actually do is desync their abilities. Let’s say you stun Minion #1 with Hammer of Justice a few seconds in (before it starts casting Dark Claw), then Minion #2 with another single target stun 2 seconds after that.
What you’ll do if you get the timing right is have Minion #3 cast Dark Claw while the other 2 are still stunned, a couple of seconds later Minion #1 will come out of the stun to cast Dark Claw, and a couple of seconds after that Minion #2 will come out of its stun to cast Dark Claw. You’ve essentially turned what WAS one big burst of, say, 3x200k damage events, into 3 separate 200k damage events spread out over a few seconds, each with a couple of seconds in between for heals to land and make you healthier in time for the next hit.
Now that their cooldowns are de-synced, they won’t re-sync barring other factors (e.g. if one of them is busy casting something else, delaying its Dark Claw cast). Even if you don’t do it perfectly, and only desync one cast, that’s effectively reducing the damage of the incoming burst combo by up to 33% (probably a bit lower because other mobs, autoattacks etc.).
Of course, Dark Claw isn’t the only damage or mechanic in the pull, so eventually particularly with increased keystone levels damage intake will probably get so high you’ll inevitably still have to kite. But that sort of thing should delay when that threshold is hit, and even if you’re at a keystone level where Dark Claw ISN’T quite gibbing you, it’s still good practice to do that just to make a healer’s life easier, and give you additional time to react to incoming damage if you need it.
2 Likes
This is great advice. Thank you!
Get your popcorn ready!!! I sit in the pocket!! 
This is correct, and never mentioned! This strategy applies to many mobs throughout the dungeons as well , the wolves in HOV are a great example. Stagger single target stuns so the jumps become easier to deal with one at a time as opposed to a multi leap combo death situation.
To add to the issues with the last pull of the dungeon, the sha fervents, so if you kite him, the group gets slammed, and the dark claws 4x + gaze + melees are too much to handle so what do you do? Hard single target the sha, then kiting is an option after you cycle through your defensives/externals. Another option, you CC the sha, and pull it onto the boss (with sanguine a bit tricky, but doable). Lastly, if you lust early and often you should have it for that pack at the end. The trash is the obstacle in TJS on fort week, so full send it whenever it’s available!
I last fully mained tanking in WotLK (did main it for a while in WoD and Legion), but this is true. My BDK dies frequently to eating many attacks simultaneously. I try to hold Storm Bolt (where it isn’t mandatory for another interrupt) to interrupt one Dark Claw, so he isn’t eating all of them.
This was kind of a problem with Shockwave when tanking at-gear level for anything. Stunning everything at once meant everything’s attack timers were resynced and it leading to massive spike damage.