• Intermission

After killing Kalecgos using our own strategy and execution style, it's refreshing to see so many other strategies that also work to complete this encounter. In fact for almost all of his abilities, different guilds/guides seem to handle them in completely different ways! I don't want my post to look like a kill-guide, but I would like to note a few examples:


Portal rotations:

The size of the portal group seems to be the biggest difference. 5 small groups could work, as would 4 'party' based groups. We use 3 very rough 'starting' groups taking port 1-3-4or5 (with tanks on their own obviously for all rotation methods). "Floating" healers can also be used. Some methods have set people joining every portal, some purposely miss particular portals. In my example, once all of the 3 'starting groups' have gone down and then back up again, they don't really think of themselves as groups anymore, only individuals trying to get the next possible portal -- which also happens to be the same portal the rest of their group is aiming for.


Positioning:

Not so much difference at the bottom I guess, the optimal position is obvious provided you raid with a shaman or two.

At the top however, some guilds keep their portal rotation groups in physical grouped locations around the platform. Personally I think it's pretty intuitive to use the ready-made "safe zone" that is already drawn on the platform. In the dead center of the Dragon's platform, have every person with Mental Exhaustion to group up, running to the outer ring only when their Exhaustion debuff is about to fade. Anyone in the outer ring then runs to the next portal that spawns, wherever it may be. More room for portal targets to spread, and a nice clumped up group for chain heal. Two completely different methods, advantages and disadvantages for both, and both work.


"Forced Portals":

The random factor to portals. They suck you down, you cant control it! Both positioning methods get around this in their own way.

Physically grouped 'portal groups' get around this by being able to easily see their group have a portal land near them, and all follow suit. The person that was forced into the portal remains in that persons group.

The 'center safe spot' method cannot get forced ports after the 3rd portal spawn (because Kalec's only valid portal targets are people that are going down next portal anyway). But they can sometimes get forced ports in port 1, and rare but possible for port 2 and 3. If a healer/decurser gets forced, a quick on-the-fly swap takes care of that for the rest of the fight.


The Curse:

This is what intrigues me the most of all the mechanics. For our kill, we just stuck to 'decurse when it's around 15 seconds'. We had 2 people die to curses on our kill, and in general it was quite sloppy (watching lifeblooms stack on you and frostbolts hit the boss while you die to curse isnt fun!), but it did the job. I'm very curious if anyone has tried either of these two methods successfully, and it's the main reason I want to make this post.

- Out range the jump effect of the curse. I think we tried this once while getting to grips with the fight, and it got lost in discussion and it didnt seem to work anyway. We certainly did not try a collaborated effort though. If the entire Demon area was to stand on one side, and the tank taunt while standing as far away from the center as possible, could most curses be removed within 5 seconds of it being applied? This relies on one thing, that the curse can actually be out of ranged.

- A method that I think is a great idea borrowed from an old fight: SR tank(or 2). When a curse is cast, keep dispelling it until it ends up on the person(or 2) wearing max Shadow Resist. Once it's on this person, heal them through the last few ticks, which should only hit for around 1k/second with 75% resists. This relies on one thing, that the curse does not jump after it fades naturally.

The current 'dispel at 15 seconds' just seems sloppy to me.



Apologies if anyone feels I went into too much detail on the abilities/tactics, but it's hard to comment on how different strategies are without comparing them.