Hello!

First of all, great forum

Secondly, two questions I would like to ask about this encounter and you guys:

1. What's your order of Poly/Elementals? Do you fight elementals 1st or wait for mass Poly and then bring him to 40%HP and fight Elementals?

2. What's, in your opinion, safe difference between his health/mana to engage Elementals 1st and after them deal with Poly.

We got 2 groups in K. on him, and so far we're doing it that way: bring him down to 48-50%HP, stop dps, wait for him to burn mana, survive Poly and then bring him down to 40% and fight elementals. However, I'm not sure it's a good idea. I would rather bring him down to 40% ASAP, fight elementals and then after they've gone deal with Poly. What do you guys think?

Is your dps holding back? Are you interrupting as much as possible? Once your raid gets good enough at this, you can see poly free kills or very close. Last night we got polyed at 2%. Interrupt everything but arcane missles, and you'll find that he doesn't go out of mana very quickly.

Having a warlock helps tons, and designate a tank (druid works well) to aggro all of the elementals so they can be contained and easily healed.

If you're getting poly'd, something's wrong.

When we kill him he still has a lot of mana left. Just bring 3 healers and the rest dps. He shouldn't be close to out of mana when you kill him.

Also...why not interrupt arcane missiles? We interrupt everything. He melees quite often when he's locked out of all magic schools and his crushings hit for less than any of his spells.

One of our Kara groups (the one sans warlock) had some issues with this fight as well, but interestingly enough never once had him poly unless people were dead. It should be easily manageable by your group unless you have really low interrupts or are DPS light. Try locking out the Fire/Frost schools with pummel and kick, with Earthshock and CS as backups. You should be able to keep him from Polying pretty easily.

So I guess the answer is, try and avoid poly by improving your interrupts and don't worry about it. If you end up being interrupt light, I'd guess you don't want to deal with Poly while the adds are going to town on your raid.

The reason for not interrupting Arcane Missiles (which I'm stealing from those who have posted up this answer before, there's lots of conversation that's already been had about this in the Karazhan mega-thread) is that the mana is already spent up front, so other than the damage done, you're doing yourself a favor by letting him occupy himself by finishing the casting.

get past 40% and you will see =P

I think the ability of people to kill him before Poly depends largely on raid composition. When we killed him, we had 4 healers and 2 prot warriors in the group that day, and there was no way we were getting him down quickly. And I would imagine having Shamans, with an interrupt on a 6s cooldown, would help out a lot here.

But really both way are perfectly valid. Your raid needs to handle Poly like any other ability.
--Position carefully behind Blizzard when he's about to do it.
--Plan out your first few interrupts. These are key.
--Have the whole raid use a healthstone/potion. The first few seconds after Pyro are dangerous, with healers scrambling to top off the group again, and everyone self-healing by 3-4k helps them out quite a bit.


Some people let him Poly during Elementals, right? How does that work? I always figured the Elementals would break a bunch of sheep and leave you with dead party members.

A couple of things. Its only worth it to interrupt fireballs and frostbolts, not missiles because he has already used the mana on the first missile, and you run the risk of all his schools being interrupted and he runs around like an idiot which can cause a variety of issues. Its not entirely true, the only time you interrupt missiles is if it could possibly risk killing someone, which should be rare if your healers are sufficient.

Honestly you can survive the polymorph, I know many guilds do, just keep everyone topped off and they should live, but that really isn't optimal. While the warlock thing works, a Paladin in Frost resistance gear I found to be more effective because there is no interruption of damage really, they can agro all 4 relatively easily and just chain cast heals on themselves to stay alive and keep agro. Last Aran kill he died I think with 40% mana left or so, was the easiest Aran kill I ever did with the paladin tank over the warlock cc.

We've made it through the Polymorph during the Elementals. It is by no means an ideal strategy, but it worked for us when we were 1 DPSer/interrupter down before like 60%. 1 warlock took care of 2 adds (banish/fear) while the priests and warriors tried to keep the rest under control. Basically, I just had everyone take a fire potion when his mana was at about 50k (he Polymorphs at ~34k mana) and it became rather trivial.

Again, it's not really ideal since if you are low on DPS/interrupts you'd be better holding him off at like 45% until he starts to drink to minimize your chances for an elemental 1 shotting someone and reducing consumable use. But hell, I have like 200 stacks of GFPP on the guild bank leftover from 4H Thane soaks so it didn't really feel like a hit.

You only need at max two healers (if their decently geared/smart) for this encounter. Let all of your other healers pretend they can DPS. We were bringing around four healers for our first few attempts, and had to wait for the polymorph everytime, usually losing one person in all the confusion. Decided after a few wipes to just have two healers pretend like they could dps. He died with about 40-50% mana left, we interrupted everything and the two healers (priest/resto druid) ended up with about 65% mana.

My guild did our first attempt on Aran on Thursday, going back in today. We only had time for one attempt before we had to go, and we basically got insta-gibbed as we ran in the room. I was very surprised at just how fast his cast times are and how frequent. Is there a good method for the pull to make sure the interrupts are good to go, or do we pretty much just eat 1-2 casts right off the bat?

Call it out on vent and run in all at once. Warriors/druids time their charge/intercept so they are all there at once ready to stop the first cast(s).

Never had a problem with this really.

Just have everyone go in at the same time and start interrupts as he aggros, though you should be able to eat a couple casts anyways.

Edit: Beaten.

We usually have our mage take the first spell, no matter what it is, the ranged CS gives me time to position for my pummel...

Quick question for everyone..Does everyone do an interupt rotation, or does each class have a specific spell? (Like if you have only one rogue and one warrior, which is our current set up). We tried to have the warrior interupt fireballs, and the rogue frost, and whenever the mage could, arcane, I feel as though we are wasting cool downs and tonight we will go to a rotation.

Any experience or preference for anyone else?

We've never bothered with an intterupt rotation. We just kinda brute force it and interrupt fire/frost spells whenever you can. If your having problems getting an unwanted poly and are missing to many spells, try it though.

Seperating interupts by spell school is exactly how our group does it, excluding Arcane. One thing to add, is that you do not want to lock out his spells during Blizzard and Flame Wreath.

I am not sure exactly what his cooldowns are or why even though you don't interupt Arcane that he can get his spells locked out, but it seems that he can.

In order to prevent him from running around during those aforementioned events we let all frost go during them. During this time we only interupt Fire.

It is my experience that it is far better to let him nail people with a few Frostbolts than to have a rogue or dps warrior eating his melee.

I have a question for you healers here, what spells do you use on this encounter? Do you spam the fast flash heal/regrowth/LHW, or do you go for gheals/HT(or just rejuv+LB)/HW? Are they "too slow" for you? I'm extremely tempted to respec from enh to resto for this one fight and see if it really is that bad using 2.5 cast spells because I can't believe that it is but who knows, maybe I'm wrong and I have a bit too little healing gear to check it out for myself.

The only time I use long cast heals is in the lull when Aran is casting his big explosion, other than that I find them cumbersome in the hectic flow of the fight. It also affords me more opportunities to earth shock fire/frost casts.

Downranked HL most of the time for me, although that's a 2 second cast with Light's Grace.

I find myself chaincasting HW rank 10.

Hang on a sec here - if we interrupt him during those spells why wouldn't he be meleeing the tank? Does his random targeting of spells continue with his melee system?