Our most recent Shade kill had Aran's Pyroblast on 7.2% resist, so I think it is resistable.

This was really the change that allowed us to break through and win in this fight. I'd highly recommend that if you have problems with him moving or meleeing your rogues/fury warriors/enhance shamans that you throw your MT in his crit gear in defensive stance and have him "tank" the shade. I did it in mostly DPS gear, and while my DPS was reduced and I had to wear a shield to interrupt, we gained a huge amount of control on this fight, and killed him immediately afterward after struggling for several weeks with losing people to stupid stuff around 40-50%, just in time to ruin our chances.

90% of our problems went away when I started tanking him. YMMV.

We never really tried it with that in mind, however since melee dps is so high on him, 90% of the time he will almost never look away from me. I had him chain casting at me (interupted ofcourse) from 75%-20% one fight. I was sure he didnt hold a normal hate list while casting, but he does hold some form of one, since on more than one occasion he has tried to chain nuke me.

This was in full Fury DPS gear in Berzerker stance.

However he shouldnt ever melee unless you interupt all of his casts. We interupt all Frost/Fire and just let his AM's through, since they are easy to heal through and its a long cast. Never get a pyroblast doing this.

He will *always* melee me while casting blizzard, flame wreath, and quite often in the split second between normal spell casts.

This is what we found as well. He was meleeing our warriors (particularly our fury warrior) a LOT during the fight, and then after he died he chased our hunter all over creation. I was convinced for a long, long time that we were interrupting arcane somehow, so we took one attempt where NO ONE interrupted anything, and we just burned him. He hit our fury warrior as usual with melee in between casts and during the prep for blizz and wreath, while chain casting anything he wanted. Our conclusion was that he will melee high threat DPS regardless of proper interrupt rotations. We then decided to tank him.

Immediately after I started gaining threat on him, he never moved again. Healers knew I would take the melee blows, and I soaked them much more easily than a fury warrior could have, since most of the time I dodged anyway. I was still able to interrupt as usual in a 3 person rotation (warrior, warrior, shaman) with very little getting through. I did about 85% of my previous DPS with devastate spam even though I had sword/board on (after the devastate change in 2.1, this may change), and we didn't have issues staying ahead of mana. The one hitch was when the adds came - he chased me to the side of the room, causing some issues. Thereafter, we had someone else tank the adds, I stayed in to DPS and interrupt during adds, and he died.

I don't know if this was specific for my group, but this was one of two major modifications (along with using our most reliable ranged DPSer as a "beacon" for the others to follow in order to stay out of blizzard) that took us from wiping repeatedly to a two-shot the following week.

We found that what you described worked well for us too. I placed a raid target over my head for others to follow during blizzards, had a bear tank, and interrupted everything.

It is a good way to learn how the fight works.

That's not -10% mitigation, that's -mitigation +any bonus damage effects. You can't bring a mob below zero mitigation, so Kick can't deal more than 110 damage unless there is some +damage raid synergy on either you or Shade at the time.

Find Weakness kick on a 0 armor target. Could get even higher with blood frenzy =).

Duh, my bad. Anyway, to expand on it further, TopScoreFu goes ballistic every once in awhile while we're fighting Shade of Aran. Every one of those times, it's been with CoR + Faerie Fire + Sunder up, not excluding any of them. Maybe the warrior's not keeping a stack of 5 Sunder up well enough otherwise in my group, but I haven't seen my best damage without CoR up.

This is strange, I just went back and did the fight for the first time in a few weeks, having been sitting and letting others in for the kill. I did notice one spot where he just stopped casting and melee'd a bit. He wasnt fully interupted because I was on fire interupts and my pummel didnt land in time, so it might just be a small % chance to melee instead of cast.
However, during all of his special spell prep time (blizzard, flamewreath, etc) he never melee'd us once.

Then again, he also polied us at 40% mana when he was at 2% hp and only sheeped 8 people while the last two beat the piss out of him. He never pyro'd and we killed him, so it wasnt the most bug free of kills. =P

I've noticed alot of fights bug out alot more frequently now. I think somehow around the Gruul change that Blizzard seriously broke something.

First post so hello all.

Aran still bugs out if he dies from a DOT. Even after a soft reset he needs to be killed again, along with all the trash, yey.

We did him this Monday and noticed, well we 'seemed' to notice that he moved around far more than normal. Not sure if he was tweaked from the previous maintenance day but he seemed far more erratic. We eventually killed him with some 'serverley pissed off DPS'.
He also polied us at 16k mana which was the lowest we had seen sofar. I know it's a skill fight but I hate this man. Probably explains me respeccing from Holy to Shadow, free at last.

But did you get loot from the GM killing Aran?

I wish our GM experience had been that good. He bugged for us last night (we killed him JUST as he poly'd) and the GM was kinda clueless. Double loot, I guess. We couldn't convince him to spawn Aran and then kill him again for us, so it looks like we'll be doing it the old fashioned way. Woo hoo, or something.

Yeah we tried that, and got no response. So I opted to do one myself out of frustration. I had a GM respond pretty quick, but of course it was the standard 'We are aware of this bug, our develop.......' etc etc.

Double loot, but stoped us getting in a second try at Nightbane

Our GM told us to "Vanquish your foe and reap the rewards anew". Gogo RP server and all that, but it wasn't exactly the answer we were hoping for . . .

Has anyone noticed Aran being a little more...physical?

We came in tonight to kill him, only to find that he's carrying a 2h sword. (?) He didn't have the sword a few days ago (on the same instance ID)

http://akrin.net/wow/kara/aran_bug/sword.jpg

He was also meleeing constantly - even while casting.

http://akrin.net/wow/kara/aran_bug/AM_melee.jpg

In the latter screenshot he melee'd me, while channeling an AM on me at the same time. We're completely confused here - never had this much trouble with him before. Anyone seen this happening, or is our Aran just totally bugged out?

I don't think I have a screenshot of it, but I'm almost certain he melee'd me while casting a Frostbolt. He also crushed me (in cat form) for 3562, which is much much higher than anything I've seen from him previously.

I've obviously seen him melee people before (when all three schools were locked out) but never anywhere near this often. (or this hard)

He was a complete spastic for us on thursday and saturday. We actually didn't kill him last thursday and were delayed because of it. Without locking out all 3 schools, he was still racing around and meleeing people before starting his next spell.

We've taken to "tanking" Aran. We use a wait-for-poly strategy so we just have the ranged classes basically stand around until he runs out of mana (letting a warrior of some kind get an enormous aggro lead). Once the poly is over we then burn him down while the warrior (usually one of our fury warriors) takes the periodic hits. Keeps him in the center of the room pretty reliably.

Aran with a sword though... that's really weird.

Last night on our Aran kill we had him pretty much meleeing like usual. That means he casts spells most of the time and sometimes runs off to melee someone for 1~2 hits before starting to cast again. So in other words I did not notice anything strange about his behavior.

Aran is really a boss that reading the strategies on him only gets you half way there. The first week we fought Aran we killed him on the second day of trying. So we assumed that we knew the fight. In retrospect we just got really lucking on his special abilities, and had two warlocks that night. We then wiped on him many times without a kill for the next two weeks.

What ended up helping the most was stopping between attempts and refine our strategy. Why did we wipe? What could we change? What was working well and what wasn't? There are a lot of things you can tweak from what other people do. For example: on the elemental phase we'd have our one warlock (usually only run with one, two warlocks for our first kill was a fluke) CC two adds, have a bear druid tank a third, and all ranged DPS kill the fourth, then kill the one tanked by the druid. We tried the fear rotations and ignore them, didn't work for us. We tried the tank and ignore, didn't work. Killing them really helped us.

I'm also of the opinion that besides Illhoof (only spent about 40 minutes trying him so far) that Aran is the hardest fight in the instance. We killed Aran on day one of this last week, and in the next three days killed Netherspite, Prince, and Nightbane (and this is not having tried any of these bosses before this week). While a lot of the "random" elements in Aran can be controlled to a degree, but it seems like there are too many ways to make little mistake that can lead to a wipe. It requires both a good strategy where everyone knows what their responsibilities are, and very good execution.

Aran is a very fun fight imho purely since it has some random elements that keep you on your toes. Since I rerolled I went to Kara last weekend for the first time. We had some folks in our raid that had already killed Aran on their main or previous main, however we also had quite a lot of folks who saw him first time. Aran is clearly in another league than the bosses earlier on (we oneshotted the first three, needing 3 tries for Romulo and 2 for the Curator). Aran really kept us trying for 4-5 hours, because folks had to get used to interrupting all time while keeping the dps up. We went for a 43% damage stop strat in order to avoid polymorph during the time the elementals spawn. The pyro raped our healers 3 or 4 times but in the end healthstone, pot and swift heals did it for us. We tried to shut down all schools as good as we could (arcane was only occasionally counterspelled) otherwise we just dpsed as hard as we could. When the elementals spawned, chaos errupted somehow (our warlock controlled two adds more or less (unless he was silenced) and the other two were feared, trapped and partially ignored.
In the end the success depends on the individual performance - nobody should get hurt by the three major spells and interrupt/heal as good as possible.