Gruul the Dragon Killer - Gruuls Lair (Not spelt Grull!)

Gruul is a fairly mean mother and can be found in the Blades Edge Mountains. His level, and that of the instance is pretty much aimed for those that can clear Kara without breaking a sweat, and his loot tends to be a nice improvement on what you will have gained from Kara.

When you get to Gruul everyone must stand inside the instance, the gates will close on you otherwise when the fight begins. But lets get to the basics, who is Gruul?

Well Gruul is named because he kicked the Black Dragonflights arse, he is also the overlord of the ogres in outlands, so beware his power!

His health stands at 3,415,000 hp and he has a few spells and effects that can decimate your raid group, these are

• Basic Melee: 3k to 3.5k at the start of the fight on tanks about once every 2 seconds.
• Growth: Self-buff, increases damage done by 15% every 30 seconds, size increased by 10%.
• Hurtful Strike: Hits the 2nd highest aggro in melee range. A second and third tank is needed to mitigate this, it hits for 12350-13650 physical damage. If no secondary target is within melee, this hits the first target available within melee range. This damage increases after each growth.
• Reverberation: A raid wide silence for 4 seconds. Not dispellable. Can be reduced by anti-silence abilities.
• Cave In: Random AoE which causes ~3000 damage every 3 seconds in the area. The AoE damage is preceded by ground shake in the affected area and is visible on the roof. This occurs more frequently as the fight progresses. Cave in damage counts as melee damage and can be mitigated by armour. Growth also affects Cave In.
• Ground Slam: Zone-wide knock back into a random direction, starts the effect Gronn Lord's Grasp.
• Gronn Lord's Grasp: Stacking debuff after a Ground slam that reduced movement speed by 20%. stacks 5 times after 5 secs then causes Stoned. This can only be dispelled by complete Immunity effects and Cloak of Shadows (possibly escape artist, Blessing of Protection does NOT work). Players who dispel Gronn Lord's Grasp will STILL shatter, which makes it important that they still stay away from others.
• Stoned: Stuns the player Occurs after 5 stacks of Gronn Lord's Grasp.
• Shatter: After being Stoned, Gruul will shatter everyone in the raid, the damage dealt increasing if players are closer to each other. This damage is physical, and goes through immunity shields such as Divine Shield and Ice Block. The Damage changes according to range from 1100 if just within 15 yards of another player to over 8k if next to the player.(Pets will get stunned but will not effect the shatter)

Because Gruul is constantly growing High DPS is essential, with each DPS player in your group having a minimum of 600-700 DPS to ensure he goes down fast, in addition priests should have a minimum 1800 + healing and very good MP5, since the fight generally takes just under 8 minutes and requires constant tank and raid healing.

This boss will cause a lot of raid damage if your team is not 100% on the ball, cave ins and shatter do huge amounts of raid damage, and will exhaust all healers from mana if DPS do not help themselves recover from it.

All DPS should carry bandages, healthstones and healing potions for this boss. Whenever any significant damage is taken use some of these things immediately. It is amazing how often DPS and even tanks will shout at healers for not using mana pots while in the same breath they will argue against using potions themselves.

Healers here should be looking at around +1800 healing to be able to keep on top of raid and tank damage, which will be significant. And tanks should have around 18-21k hp with high armour mitigation and uncritability/crushability (If possible for class)

Gruul is pure melee damage, so mages cast amplify magic on the group!

The tactics are fairly straightforward, your three tanks must constantly top the agro meters to avoid hurtful strike taking out your DPS. After shatter everyone without exception must heal themselves with bandages, pots or healthstones. This is a very intensive fight on all classes, in Gruuls Lair Healers have to do a massive amount of raid wide healing, DPS need to get Gruul down before he simply grows too large and the tanks take a significant amount of damage, especially towards the end of the fight. You should use everything at your disposal to make sure this goes well.

While the tactics are debateable I have found that the most effective method with an average group is to save cooldowns till the first grow (30 seconds into the fight). This allows your tanks to get their agro up and then lets your DPS all out nuke the boss down.

Cave ins can be avoided completely, you have 3 seconds to get out of them. You should not be taking any damage from these.

Shatter is the usual cause of wipe in Gruuls Lair. In most cases significant damage can be avoided, however it is fairly luck based. Too many people get thrown together and it is simply impossible to move quickly enough. Fortunately there is a safe zone that can be utilised, if you get on top of or behind the rocks you can prevent yourself from being flung across the room. Obviously only one person can do this in each group of rocks, as you will still shatter, however it can be a raid saver to have your healers remain at full health.

Deadly Boss Mods or a similar add-on is pretty much essential for this boss, it will warn you when you are in a cave in and it brings up a little box telling you If you are too close to somebody.

The key to shatter is only worry about the people in front of you, run into a space and trust the raid member behind you will not follow you. The problem with this is that everyone in your raid group needs to conform to this rule, otherwise chaos can ensue.

Apart from shatter this boss is fairly easy, he is however quite an obvious gear check. Defeating Gruul is a way to say your guild is ready for ZA and Magtheridon.