Brawler's Guild tips?

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Vephriel
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Brawler's Guild tips?

Unread post by Vephriel »

I thought I'd make a general thread for this, if anyone wants to share tips or ask questions and whatnot.

I absolutely loved the Brawler's Guild last season (it was the first time I really got into it), and I'm really excited to see it return!

I've had no troubles so far, except for now when I reached the Meatball fight. Any tips for this guy? D: I know the general strategy and what I have to do, but I just can't seem to collect the orbs quickly enough and then burn him down fast enough before I die. I'm trying as BM since it's the spec I'm familiar with.
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Re: Brawler's Guild tips?

Unread post by Aggannor »

Reached Rank 8 yesterday with my BM hunter, item level 886 and 11/20 ranks on Spiritbound for those interested in gear.

Overall tips that I can give for the guild are:
1) Brawler's potions don't share cooldown with normal DPS-potions, meaning that you can use Brawler and, for example, Prolonged Power for total of 5500 on all stats. Also, remember to drink right as you are ported to the arena, so you can drink both ones again after a minute.
2) If Azsuna's PvP world quest is up, you can pick 15% stat buff from flowers there. This can be used in Brawler's Guild, and is not removed on death.

As for Meatball, there isn't much to suggest than saving all cooldowns and nuking him around 40-45 sec into the encounter, as he enrages around one minute. Also, Stampede might be worth a shot, as the fight is more about burst than sustained damage.
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Re: Brawler's Guild tips?

Unread post by cowmuflage »

Just asking is the old Brawlers mount still gettable or is it retired?
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Re: Brawler's Guild tips?

Unread post by Aggannor »

cowmuflage wrote:Just asking is the old Brawlers mount still gettable or is it retired?
Seems to be retired, not on vendor list and I haven't read anything about it being available from anywhere else.
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Re: Brawler's Guild tips?

Unread post by Vephriel »

Thanks for the tips Aggannor, I might try Stampede. My main problem seems to be just /surviving/ until the burst phase because my pet dies really quick, or doesn't hold aggro very well. :x

Also Cow I believe the old mount is retired now and they're kind of a once-a-season type thing.
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Re: Brawler's Guild tips?

Unread post by Xella »

I only see the new basilisk on Quackenbush, so if the old mushan is still available it's been moved to a different vendor.

If you're betting on the fights while queueing, make sure the brawler's guild-specific graveyard is active—you will lose your betting stacks if you leave the area (and you'll leave the area if you release while the graveyard isn't there). You can see how long is left on the graveyard if it's already up by looking at the person you turn the Blood-Soaked Angel Figurine into (Lidiya Peyton for Alliance); I don't know why it took me so long to figure that one out, maybe cos the other duration buffs are marked on the person you actually interact with to use it, but you can't click on the giant spirit healer, lol.

Dippy WILL kill you (or your pet) if it gets cornered against a wall, as the knockback from getting hit won't actually knock it back.

Master Paku forces you to auto-run—having seen the fight several times now that's another thing that I feel a little silly for not realizing sooner, but it was a bit disorienting when I actually went to fight it myself.

Burnstachio is nonsense. There is no tell when a piece of ground will go from being safe to being instant death so stay toward the front of the line of cleared tiles if you can. If two clouds path over the same tile, the tile's safe duration will NOT be refreshed by the second cloud. Aspect of the Turtle works to avoid the instant death from the fire if you find yourself going in the wrong direction for too long, but you'll only have it for one bubble (and you'll probably need two or three unless you play something incredibly bursty). Burnstachio takes no damage while you don't have the water bubble on and the bubble only lasts for 10-12 seconds, so if you're not immediately on him once you've got your bubble, consider holding your cooldowns until your next one (the number of DHs that pop meta with like 3-4s left on their bubble makes me sad, lol). One foot over any given line will instantly kill you and doubling back to choose a "better" cloud to follow will almost always also instantly kill you, and it's very plausible to hit the insta-death enrage because you chose the wrong random cloud to follow. This fight could be a lot better if the ground lit up the way, say, smart stampers on mythic Hans & Franz did so you KNEW when something was about to re-ignite, but since that isn't a thing here, it's just super frustrating and not fun and is why you'll see people do this fight over and over and over :|

The buffs from Meatball stop stacking at 50; a DK friend never got there cos he's so bursty but I needed to get all 50 stacks before I blew my cooldowns and even at 887 I was much closer to the enrage than I wanted to be. Once you've got all 50 stacks you can stop running around unless they're about to fall off. I believe the arcane bubble stacks spawn based on hits, so if you're having difficulty getting enough stacks to happen fast enough, consider using Volley. It's awful damage single target now (which makes me real angry because I feel obligated to take it for AoE MD) but it hits a LOT in rapid succession with a lowish cooldown, which means you've got more options for getting your buff up faster with it. I don't know if crows hits as rapidly, but the 1m CD makes me suspect that even though crows is better ST damage, volley would be better for the buff. The buff also heals you so getting more stacks of it faster may also solve the survivability issue (esp if you take aggro off your pet)

GG Engineering's rockets seem even less accurate than they were in previous seasons and this was another fight where I was a lot closer to the enrage than I would like; do your best to bait the rockets into hitting the enemies but once they port into a shield focus that; the rockets will still hit the shield but I lost a LOT of time waiting for the rockets instead of just focusing the shield down myself. The shield persists for like 5-7s after the shield itself is killed, which is annoying.

Stitches' "you die when you hit 10 stacks" debuff is applied on HIT, so consider having your pet feign at some point; I wasn't even thinking about play dead at this point so I ended up using HotP. Disengage will take you far enough to reset your stacks but stacks can come up faster than Disengage resets; Farstrider might actually be useful here, but on the flip side Posthaste may clear the hook stacks—I was using Trailblazer because I forgot to swap before running down and queueing, lol :x

Blackmange is a lot of staring at the ground; the insta-kill mechanic goes off as soon as the line reaches the cannon; it's safe to move back into that lane even before the new one has spawned as long as the cannon itself has fired. Always have your next move planned in case the new line is one of the super fast ones.

Millie Watt CAN polymorph your pet and your pet will NOT take damage from the electric circles (and thus be broken out of the poly); cast play dead during the chicken cast (or before it to be safe) or your pet will be out of the action for like, 20s at a time. Once you have aggro you should be okay, but I was still completely blanking on the existence of Play Dead as a separate ability to Feign Death at this point and was getting very frustrated with how much damage I was losing.

Dupree is first target priority on the Ogrewatch (hisssssssssssssss) fight; the tooltip for the ability says that it kills everything "in his line of sight" but his line of sight is 360° because shenanigans so even though killing the "support" first makes logical sense, you really don't want to. The cast time is... 90 seconds, I believe, so doing as much cleave as you can while focusing him down can be super helpful.

Nibbleh can bite me forever. Start the fight in a corner of the arena (for Alliance, he spawns on the southwest corner, furthest from the entrance to the deeprun tram) and kite him continuously; you can never touch an area of the arena that he's already walked on because if he touches his own trail he'll gain a damage done and (more importantly) reduced damage taken buff that stacks. Turning on walk and walking backwards keeps him at the perfect speed, but if you're a caster you may not want to do that because then you'll never have time to cast before you have to move again. The big problem here for BM is that you can't make your pet walk the same way you do, nor can you control where your pets are in any given moment, so if your pet pulls aggro, Nibbleh will stop moving and (unless you are LIGHTNING quick, which I am not) start gaining stacks of the damage reduction. There's a couple ways to deal with this (including "not being BM" if you have another spec you're comfortable with; I'm reasonably certain Nibbleh was the catalyst for my switching from BM full time to pre-Legion survival full-time. Might have been Hexos, actually, but it was one of the two), but the way that I went about it was keeping my pet (a core hound, for heroism) on passive for the first 15-20s of the fight, blowing my entire focus bar on abilities that weren't kill command, and then—once I finally started using my pets—having them play dead on cooldown. This was the first fight I felt obligated to quadruple-pot, food, flask, and hero on, and I only just barely made it (3s left 'til instadeath). Using a more accurate threat meter than the default would probably be useful here, so you only feign your pets when they actually NEED to feign, and you lose less pet uptime, and if I hadn't killed it when I did I would have logged out to install one.

Serpent of Old is another fight to start in a corner. Each corner has its own totem that gives him a stacking buff that lasts for 25-30 seconds; you'll have to decide which buffs are best for you, but you'll need to rotate between 2-3 of the totems so the buffs don't go too high. Make sure you don't move back to a previous totem until its stacks have fallen off, and try to stay to the edges of the arena—if you go diagonally through it or are close to the middle at any point, you may pick up stacks of all four (and refresh buffs you were trying to get to fall off). The Alliance arena, clockwise from the northeast corner (the entrance to the guild and where your body gets ported out of the arena to), is Invigorating (haste and movement speed), Ferocity (damage done), Warding (reduced damage taken), and Healing (healing). I personally swapped between Ferocity and Warding, and I ended up taking my stacks on both pretty high; swapping to a third totem (Invigorating, probably) may have been for the best but you'll have to decide what's best for you.

Epicus Maximus is where I'm at right now; I'm consistently less than 2 million health short of the enrage with quad pots, food, flasks, augment runes, and pet hero (and now with an actual DPS legendary, too :|). I'm only at 3/20 on Spiritbound so increasing that would probably make this a lot easier but on the flip side we're also getting buffed on Tuesday so I'm probably just going to wait at this point and see if 46% cobra shot is enough to make it up (unless murloc freedom comes up again). From an actual mechanic standpoint there's not much here for BM; if Destructolaser feels like being nice and coming in between each Blue Crush cast you're golden, but if it doesn't you may not be able to interrupt every Blue Crush. I still haven't figured out how, for example, a balance druid is expected to deal with this fight, and it's been available for several seasons now. I'm sure it's doable, but boy howdy.
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Re: Brawler's Guild tips?

Unread post by peanutbuttercup »

Vephriel wrote:Thanks for the tips Aggannor, I might try Stampede. My main problem seems to be just /surviving/ until the burst phase because my pet dies really quick, or doesn't hold aggro very well. :x
I had trouble with Meatball as BM as well. I tried semi-casually tanking it, pet died. Tried kiting him around with my pet in reserve, just so that the pet would be alive for burn phase, but I couldn't keep him slowed enough while getting purple orbs and not dying at the same time.

In the end instead of going full dps mode, I went full tank mode. Used a tenacity SB (a pet with shell like a beetle might work too). Keep Mend Pet up full time, let the SB auto-cast Spirit Mend on itself, be prepared to pop Last Stand (I see so few hunters use this) and as a last resort, Exhilaration. By that point you should have enough orbs to stop running around, pot, hit all dps CDs, and just burn him down.
Vephriel wrote:Also Cow I believe the old mount is retired now and they're kind of a once-a-season type thing.
The old mount is currently retired and was available for 2 seasons. This is brawler season 3. Season 1 and 2 pretty much had same bosses and same rewards and let you carry over the invite. Now you need a new invite to get in.
Aggannor wrote:1) Brawler's potions don't share cooldown with normal DPS-potions, meaning that you can use Brawler and, for example, Prolonged Power for total of 5500 on all stats. Also, remember to drink right as you are ported to the arena, so you can drink both ones again after a minute.
Ok that is GREAT to know, as enrage timers can get pretty tight by rank 6 or so. I was double potting the brawler's versions but didn't think of trying the non-brawler ones.
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Re: Brawler's Guild tips?

Unread post by peanutbuttercup »

I haven't yet finished so I can only comment on the ones I have done, but here's my tips.
Xella wrote:Dippy WILL kill you (or your pet) if it gets cornered against a wall, as the knockback from getting hit won't actually knock it back.
With Dippy you actually want to spread out the timing of your attacks, so when he rushes forward you always have something, even Cobra Shot, and when he gets close to the wall, just don't do anything more than auto shot so he'll begin moving away from the wall again (you can completely stop attacking if needed but I saw no need for that).
Xella wrote:Stitches' "you die when you hit 10 stacks" debuff is applied on HIT, so consider having your pet feign at some point; I wasn't even thinking about play dead at this point so I ended up using HotP. Disengage will take you far enough to reset your stacks but stacks can come up faster than Disengage resets;
You can disengage out of about every other one (depends). Really isn't necessary as you just need to take 1 step out of the green. Pet will easily stay alive if you put it in passive when you back out or use Move Pet to move it out of the green.
Xella wrote:Blackmange is a lot of staring at the ground; the insta-kill mechanic goes off as soon as the line reaches the cannon; it's safe to move back into that lane even before the new one has spawned as long as the cannon itself has fired. Always have your next move planned in case the new line is one of the super fast ones.
I really enjoyed Blackmange. Moderate amount of movement but controlled and fairly slow so it's mostly just side stepping. But yes you will spend the entire fight staring at the ground looking for black lines. For me the best placement is to stand with your back right up against the row of cannons, and just side step as you watch lines come towards you.
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Re: Brawler's Guild tips?

Unread post by Vephriel »

Thanks PBC! I tried out the advice people mentioned and I just beat Meatball my first attempt today! :) The barrage helped I think for sure with getting more of the orbs quickly, and stampede was a good choice as well.
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Re: Brawler's Guild tips?

Unread post by cowmuflage »

Ah butts oh well.
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Re: Brawler's Guild tips?

Unread post by Vephriel »

God, so I've made it to Nibbleh, and GUH. ._. I know I remember beating him before as BM in the earlier season, but now I can't remember what strategy I used lmao.
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Re: Brawler's Guild tips?

Unread post by Xella »

Heads up: quad-potting is no longer a thing; the BG potions are both on their expected cooldowns now. There were a couple other hotfixes (including one to drop the GG Engineering shield as soon as the thing that generates it dies, which will make that fight MUCH less punishing enragewise), but that's the big one I think.
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Re: Brawler's Guild tips?

Unread post by Vephriel »

Xella wrote:Heads up: quad-potting is no longer a thing; the BG potions are both on their expected cooldowns now. There were a couple other hotfixes (including one to drop the GG Engineering shield as soon as the thing that generates it dies, which will make that fight MUCH less punishing enragewise), but that's the big one I think.
Aw man. ;_; That was so handy....well, I guess I'm glad I got to where I am now and was able to take advantage of it for some of the tough fights. *sadly deletes potion macro*
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Re: Brawler's Guild tips?

Unread post by peanutbuttercup »

Xella wrote:Heads up: quad-potting is no longer a thing; the BG potions are both on their expected cooldowns now. There were a couple other hotfixes (including one to drop the GG Engineering shield as soon as the thing that generates it dies, which will make that fight MUCH less punishing enragewise), but that's the big one I think.
I just saw that and came to post. Some of these fights are going to be a little more painful until ilvls improve.
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Re: Brawler's Guild tips?

Unread post by Xella »

Ash'katzuum is one of the random brawls you can encounter when someone's turned in a bag of chipped dice (along with Burnstachio, Nibbleh, and Ray D Tear—buyer beware!) and more importantly he's one of the new shirt bosses. His gimmick's pretty obvious—he constantly summons minipets that run around randomly(?) and they do a LOT of damage to you if they hit you. As BM, your pet will eat nearly all of these instantly, and take full damage from them, and he casts it a LOT. I ended up rezzing my pet somewhere along the lines of twelve times (including HotP) and couldn't stop my pet from eating them, even when I should have had aggro.

On the flip side, even with just a leftover flask+heroism (no food or potting or augment rune) I seemed to have enough time to manually rez my pet as often as was needed, and since my pet ate nearly all of the minipet bombs I didn't have to worry about most of the actual fight mechanics. Still, my poor Chromaggus has seen better days, lol :x
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Re: Brawler's Guild tips?

Unread post by peanutbuttercup »

Another round of tips for rank 7!

Nibbleh: Works exactly like the previous version did. You need to keep the snake moving without letting it touch the green trail. As a BM hunter the only thing you really have to be careful of is to NOT let your pet pull aggro. So standard way to start is to stand by a wall on pull about 20 yards from spawn point, WITH PET ON PASSIVE, and begin walking backward as you dps. When Nibbleh hits about the point where you were standing on pull, go ahead and send your pet in and it shouldn't pull aggro. Back up into corner, let the snake catch up (very important for a clean turn), turn and continue backing up along wall. Nibbleh moves fairly slowly so no reason to panic and turn and run, just back peddle and you'll easily outpace him. Be sure to navigate around any puddles Nibbleh spits out around the room, otherwise you want to stay ahead of him, slowing down around corners to let him catch up, and parking the green trail as close to the others as possible. Biggest mistake I see is people do not place the green trail as tightly around the edges/previous trail as possible, and run out of room.

Editing to add: Also learned today that he requires 400k sustained dps to kill. Or very, very close to it. Watched a guy finish just in nick of time and he was at something like 399.5k.

Serpent of Old: This is like the Mingus Diggs (sp?) fight from previous seasons, except the columns aren't far apart and the serpent spits out deadly void zones. Ideally you'd pick 3 columns to rotate between, managing stacks so that he doesn't do too much healing or too much damage, etc. But someone gave me a good tip - if your gear is good enough (I have close to 3 mil health), you can actually ignore having to move him between columns! So I pulled the serpent to the haste/ movement speed column and face tanked it in the corner behind the column (the pet will die to void zones eventually), slowly rotating around the boss in the corner to place my puddles. Invigoration and Aspect of Turtle are handy for heals if you get low, Heart of the Phoenix should be enough to keep your pet in the fight too.
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Re: Brawler's Guild tips?

Unread post by Xella »

It's real hard to test because you don't unlock the challenge card until you beat it (I'm pretty sure) and it's only part of the random rotation, but I _THINK_ you need to get the first hit in on Hexos; I managed to RNG into him twice tonight (I've given up on Ray D Tear for now, need more artifact levels or gear or something) but both times I think he tried to latch onto my pet and not me. Either that or the whole "if you don't start the fight dead center in the room you're hosed" bug is still alive, which would... not be the best, given how many fights you really do NOT want to start dead center of the room, lol.

Either way, the fight ended with both me and my pet alive and unfeigned within about five seconds both times :| If anyone else can confirm or knows for sure how to deal with that, let me know; I'm pretty sure I was SV for Hexos before because of pet pathing and downtime issues, but new blink strikes may have fixed that.
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Re: Brawler's Guild tips?

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Aggannor wrote:2) If Azsuna's PvP world quest is up, you can pick 15% stat buff from flowers there. This can be used in Brawler's Guild, and is not removed on death.
I'd never seen this flower before (though Operation: Murloc Freedom is the PvP WQ I'm least likely to do, for a lot of reasons) so it took me a while to find one. It's called Timeworn Songflower and the only one I saw was on the south side of the area, near the road into the area but Wowhead seems to indicate at least two spawnpoints.

I can confirm it does still work as of right now (Jan 20 at about 6pm pacific), and it was the extra oomph I needed to get Ray D. Tear dead before the hard enrage; I'm sure the extra 2% damage from the last four levels of my artifact helped too but I suspect 2% over two minutes isn't 2-5 million damage, lol :x I haven't actually died with it on so I can't confirm the "persists through death" part but if they didn't change it to only work in the world quest area I can't imagine they'd have changed it to fall off if you die, since that seems the more minor of the two.
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Re: Brawler's Guild tips?

Unread post by peanutbuttercup »

Xella wrote:It's real hard to test because you don't unlock the challenge card until you beat it (I'm pretty sure) and it's only part of the random rotation, but I _THINK_ you need to get the first hit in on Hexos; I managed to RNG into him twice tonight (I've given up on Ray D Tear for now, need more artifact levels or gear or something) but both times I think he tried to latch onto my pet and not me. Either that or the whole "if you don't start the fight dead center in the room you're hosed" bug is still alive, which would... not be the best, given how many fights you really do NOT want to start dead center of the room, lol.

Either way, the fight ended with both me and my pet alive and unfeigned within about five seconds both times :| If anyone else can confirm or knows for sure how to deal with that, let me know; I'm pretty sure I was SV for Hexos before because of pet pathing and downtime issues, but new blink strikes may have fixed that.
I did Hexos twice the last few days (didn't want him, but can't choose!) and found him far easier than in the past. The maze is far more forgiving this time around, otherwise it works the same as before. I beat him both times with no issue. I always start random brawls with my pet on passive and it takes me a second or two to register what the fight is (and try to remember what to do), and so he definitely latched onto me and not the pet.

I've gotten Ray D Tear on random several times (boo) and yeah, I'm going to need more gear to pull the required dps to beat it.
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Re: Brawler's Guild tips?

Unread post by Divixon »

Im trying to get the invatation but cant seem to get it, been doing all the dailys including class ones. but nothing, what am i doing wrong?
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