There is occasionally a delay from when he casts one spell, gets interrupted and goes for a melee attack before trying to cast the next spell. This can be demonstrated by a mage counterspelling what Aran is casting straight after an Arcane explosion, he will try to move towards the person with the highest aggro.
Originally Posted by Koban
Is the shade of Aran immune to mindnumbing poison?
I can imagine this could help alot.
Our guild is currently at shade of aran with 13% our best attempt, but so far I couldn't attend to those raids.
No, youll be very lucky to find a boss who is not immune to mindnumbing/CoT. Afaik the elementals are not immune to it though.
My advice to anyone who is having major troubles in this fight would be to take two warlocks, it makes the fight much easier.
Bringing a 4th healer might help as well. We tried Aran the other night and had to fill the 10th slot with a healer, but it actually worked out very well. Even though interrupts weren't perfect(I think I got hit with 2 fireballs and a frostbolt, for example) no one was ever in danger of dying .
Overall it increased the room for error, imo. We still nearly managed to kill him before he poly'd(<20% at that point, iirc). Overall, we took in a group filled partially(4+) by new players, including the lock, and it turned out to be one of our best nights Aran-wise. He seems to be the one boss that we'll always wipe on a few times, but this time things worked very differently.
Do people really take 3-4 healers to kara and do it endurance style? That's 30-40% of your 10 man raid as non dps healers. 4 healers would be 2 per group which sounds a little crazy what are they even doing 90% of the time, it can't be healing because that ratio is 1 healer : 2 non healer, who is there to heal?
Do you have 0 feral druids or shadow priests in your guild? That number of pure healers sounds pretty high.
Have you experimented with less healers and more dps, especially hybrid dps (shadow priest, elemental shaman, feral druid)?
The universe is run by the complex interweaving of three elements. Energy, matter, and enlightened self-interest.
In our 'original' kara group we had 4 healers (2 priests, pala, druid), but nowadays we usually take 3. Doing the old Nightbane without 4 healers would have been extremely tough.
Do people really take 3-4 healers to kara and do it endurance style? That's 30-40% of your 10 man raid as non dps healers. 4 healers would be 2 per group which sounds a little crazy what are they even doing 90% of the time, it can't be healing because that ratio is 1 healer : 2 non healer, who is there to heal?
Do you have 0 feral druids or shadow priests in your guild? That number of pure healers sounds pretty high.
Have you experimented with less healers and more dps, especially hybrid dps (shadow priest, elemental shaman, feral druid)?
0 active feral druids, 1 active sp(2 kara raids). I also don't think our healers us the focus macro for Aran to heal who he's targetting, so heals can lag behind at times. We did however, have only 1 tank(had to have the resto druid go bear form for the double pull after Curator), so dps wasn't too bad.
Usually when we bring 3 healers(2 paladins and a priest usually) and solid dps for the rest of the spots, he's down before the poly; but with so much change in our group setups, this usually isn't the case.
5 interrupts.
2 banishes.
2 long fears.
3 healers.
Reliable "tanking" by a fury warrior who stays #1 in threat for when you interrupt all 3 schools, so stupid doesn't go running around the room like a chicken with his head cut off.
With that combination, it should be near impossible to screw it up. Having said that ... sometimes physical dps can be ... "special" ... we took 5 interrupts one night and wiped due to a series of events that started with 3 straight casts getting off (fireball, frostbolt, frostbolt) taking out a healer. With 5 interrupts, lock down both fire and frost (2 each), and have the 5th person on pickup duty, taking out AM whenever possible, just to save on some healing.
Do people really take 3-4 healers to kara and do it endurance style? That's 30-40% of your 10 man raid as non dps healers. 4 healers would be 2 per group which sounds a little crazy what are they even doing 90% of the time, it can't be healing because that ratio is 1 healer : 2 non healer, who is there to heal?
Do you have 0 feral druids or shadow priests in your guild? That number of pure healers sounds pretty high.
Have you experimented with less healers and more dps, especially hybrid dps (shadow priest, elemental shaman, feral druid)?
We run with up to 3 pure healers, and 2-3 hybrids available.
Last week we cleared everything but Prince and Netherspite with:
- holy priest
- holy paladin
- boomkin in healer gear
TBH, if your dps is good enough, you can easily run with 4 healers, 2-3 pure and 1-2 hybrid who can off-dps when needed (i.e. when healing doesn't demand it). Most of the time, 2 healers are enough for your tank(s), but depending on the intelligence of your raid, sometimes spot damage goes off on the raid, and tank healers can't afford to switch off if there's only one or two of them.
When we run with only 2 healers in the library, tanks tend to die. There's almost no margin for error on the big guardians -- if you stop healing the tank for long enough to top up the raid, s/he can easily take a couple of big hits and you'll never recover from it.
I'm amazed four healers was brought up since I thought the idea was to move to two healers as you get better geared. That's what we tried to do and it worked splendidly this weekend: Prince kill, two healers, everything else down but Aran (grrrr), Netherspite (never tried) and Nightbane (first try ever, bugged out afterward).
Obviously it depends on WHICH two healers but I can't imagine purposely lowering your dps on alot of those fights.
Mages have a set time that they want you to ask for food, and that time is pull #4 of the night. You may notice them putting a little snack table down before the raid, that's them cooking the food for you to demand on pull 4. --Nork
If you can successfully kill Nightbane with 2 healers, I'd like to hear about it. And then, please farm him for 3 or 4 weeks so it's not just a fluke.
I like the Nightbane fight. It's well-designed. It's simple in execution. But even with the best-geared tank in the world, there's a lot of damage flying around.
Nightbane himself hits moderately hard, and with only 2 healers, there is zero room for error. A bad placement on a scorched earth, and a healer gets feared ... and your tank dies. Healer screws up placement, and gets feared ... and your tank dies.
And that's not even talking about what happens when Nightbane takes off, drops skeletons on the sacrificial sucker, and then starts smoking blasts on your sacrificial healer.
We never, ever, ever run with only 2 healers. It's way too stressful on those healers (I've cleared a solid chunk of trash, from Curator to Aran, with only 2 healers - I hated it). 3 healers are common, and once in a while, on certain boss fights, we'll bring in a 4th if they need gear or something.
We did kill Netherspite on the weekend with a priest and paladin only, but we had a shadow priest healing one group with VE, so it doesn't really count.
I can't speak to Nightbane since we had one attempt (ever) before the doors decided not to reopen. Reasonably solid attempt. Prior to that we cleared post-Curator to a Prince kill with two healers, one tank and not a single wipe. Those were our two best healers and there weren't any compaints; I kept asking them if they wanted me to pop into my healing gear to help out here or there only to be repeatedly told to shut up and make the melee happy with Unleashed Rage.
We usually roll with three healers and there are fights (Maiden) where I hang back and heal; I could see Nightbane being one of them. I just figure if you CAN do something with less healing then you probably SHOULD. YMMV, of course.
Mages have a set time that they want you to ask for food, and that time is pull #4 of the night. You may notice them putting a little snack table down before the raid, that's them cooking the food for you to demand on pull 4. --Nork
I haven't found any of the trash to require more than two healers, although I might perhaps mention that I never bother topping off the raid during the protectors - they don't do enough scatter damage to actually kill anyone, and that's what bandages are for. Prince phase 2 with only two healers would be tricky, however (unless your tank significantly outgears the encounter) and I have trouble imagining how two healers would manage to last (mana-wise) through all of Nightbane, given his constant heavy damage and the length of the fight (plus, as mentioned, if one healer gets temporarily incapacitated due to charred earth or fear you have a problem).
Aran I have found adding healers often makes the fight more controllable. There are a lot of bad things in that encounter that can be solved by an extra person spamming heals - caught in a blizzard by a flame wreath, dragon's breath + blizzard, elemental focus fire + Aran not being interrupted, etc. We use a wait-out-the-poly strategy though so DPS is a non-issue.
Lately we've been doing everything with 2 paladins + 1 shadow priest and 1 elemental shaman who dps fulltime now pretty much. I don't even get to be in the shadow priest group normally as imp devo aura biatch.
I guess Nightbane is an exception where 3 healers might be needed or less risky. Rain of bones is always almost on one of us paladins along with some of the adds until they die which is very quickly with 6-7 dps.
I definitely think Aran is ez mode with 2 geared healers as long as you have 1 warlock.
Last edited by Ragnor : 05/21/07 at 3:14 AM.
The universe is run by the complex interweaving of three elements. Energy, matter, and enlightened self-interest.
We have done full kara with 2 healers multiple times, granted we out gear it but its not like we use consumables at all in there. There is definately a risk on nightbane with just 2 healers but its very much doable and everything dies so much faster with the higher dps.
Are people still breaking off melee dps from flame wreaths? I remember a lot of previous strategies included seperating from everyone in order to avoid flame wreaths spawning on top of other players (or to allegedly prevent them from ever happening, but I've never seen this happen). However, last night I caught hooked up with a druid and both of each other snagged flame wreath and we basically stared at each other for a second waiting for the explosion, and then I turned around to continue shadowbolting and never had a single flame wreath proc.
You don't get blown up because you get someone else's flame wreath, you get it from moving through the edge of ANY wreath and gaining or losing the associated debuff. There is no reason, especially with enemy cast bars/boss mods, that your melee can't position themselves appropriately during the flame wreath cast and be plugging away at Aran while the wreaths are up. Everyone better take their hands off the movement keys if its a big pack and one of them has the wreath.
There is also no reason why if your melee is out of position, don't have wreaths, and can move to Aran without crossing a wreath that they can't move to him to dps. The everyone don't move during flame wreath is a product of there is always one person who allowed to move will find the wreath and blow up half your raid.
Last edited by Zeln : 05/22/07 at 11:54 AM.
Reason: I can't capitalize Aran apparently.
It doesn't sound to me like there would be any positioning involved if Aran is controlled in the middle. Just keep plugging away in his face and don't move/strafe at all when the flame wreaths are up. This is assuming of course, the removal of dragon's breath =)
Anyway, good to know; I got tired of losing our interrupt rotations to some wow-wiki strat =(
Another option is to offtank the elementals. We usually run without a warlock, but do have a MT warrior and OT druid that bring FrR gear for this fight. The damage they sustain from the elementals is minimal and makes it much easier on the healers. We adopted this strat because the healers were consistently drawing healing aggro and getting focused by the elementals.
I believe both tanks have around 200-250 FrR buffed for the fight.
Just did him again tonight. 3 healers(2 paladins + 1 tree druid), 3 melee dps(1 warr in tanking gear[nfc why], 1 in dps gear, 1 rogue) 2 mages, 1 lock, 1 hunters.
When he summoned adds we did the usual fear + banish parts. But we tried dpsing them and were amazed at how much their hp was reduced. So we put the two mages and the hunter on the adds, killed 3 of them, and still nearly dropped him before the poly(poly'd us at 2% hp). This makes the fight much much more manageable, even without a warlock. Our first attempt of the night he poly'd us at about 15%, then the 3 adds that were up focus fired our healers down So this is definitely something to consider if the adds are giving you trouble.
I'd estimate the adds now have about 15k hp(one arcane shot dropped one to 96%, i figure that's about 600 damage at least).
While the removal of Dragon's Breath and the considerable health nerf of his Elementals makes things easier, we did run into one problem tonight.
Blizzard. It seems to be moving much faster than before now, and it caused us a lot of trouble. We had to run into the right position as soon as it spawned, as it seemed to cover over half the room in a matter of seconds. The total duration was reduced just like the patch notes said, but the area it covers remains unchanged, leading to some turbo-mode Blizzards.
Anyone else had problems with this, or do we just suck?
The fast moving blizzards suuuuuuuuuuuuuuck. We were getting screwed a lot by it; mostly because everyone was relearning it, and it still has that "phantom blizzard effect". It was terrible.
We eventually took him down after a number of tries, refining strategies for our party. He was definitely easier than before, but the phantom blizzard is just so terribly annoying.
He still seemed to pyroblast/frostbolt snakes/hunter pets too. No pets were setting off flame wreaths luckily.
05/20/07, 12:03 PM
So this is definitely something to consider if the adds are giving you trouble. 
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