Hi,
My guild decided to start High King in next week. I have done some research about the fight and had ideas about what will happen. However, I still have a few questions about this fight and I hope to be prepared before starting this boss:

- Is my group geared enough ? (My group is 3 warrior, 1-2 restore druid, 3 holy priest, 2 shadow priest, 4-5 paladins (1 prot, others are holy), 3 hunters, 3 warlocks, 3 mages, 1 restore shaman, the rest could be other dps (rogue, feral druid, etc). We are running 2 Kara raids with raid 1 cleared kara + nightbane 3 times and raid 2 on Aran.
This is our MT on high king's armory: http://armory.worldofwarcraft.com/ch...nnoroth&n=Ammy

- For the warlock tank. From the strats it's very possible to tank him by his felhunter, do we really need 1 OT? I meant with 2 warlocks can we have 2 warlock run in, 1 got deathcoil'd, 1st warlock enslaves 1, tank him, wait for next Fel and the second warlock enslaves it, tank him, repeat?

- I knew that silence shot, priest silence, rogue imp. kick silence effect can go through Blindeye's shield. But in case we don't have these, is it easy to get the shield down before he finish the heal (4s + ~2 = ~6s with CoT on)? 25k dmg in 6s with 8 dps :-/ (we lose 2 hunter, 1 mage, 1 lock on tanking)

- Do the other tank on add - warlock and priest - need to be well geared as the main tank? For example, this is the profile of the warrior gonna tank Blindeye: http://armory.worldofwarcraft.com/ch...oroth&n=Callar, the other warrior is a bit more geared but he's on dps gear atm -,-"


Thank you for reading / answering my post

This is our MT on high king's armory: http://armory.worldofwarcraft.com/ch...nnoroth&n=Ammy
That seems more than good enough; the first time we killed Maulgar was with a less well geared warrior tanking it.

- For the warlock tank. From the strats it's very possible to tank him by his felhunter, do we really need 1 OT? I meant with 2 warlocks can we have 2 warlock run in, 1 got deathcoil'd, 1st warlock enslaves 1, tank him, wait for next Fel and the second warlock enslaves it, tank him, repeat?
Enslave Demon is a very fickle thing. With emphasis on very.

- I knew that silence shot, priest silence, rogue imp. kick silence effect can go through Blindeye's shield. But in case we don't have these, is it easy to get the shield down before he finish the heal (4s + ~2 = ~6s with CoT on)? 25k dmg in 6s with 8 dps :-/ (we lose 2 hunter, 1 mage, 1 lock on tanking)
I'm pretty sure Blindeye is immune to actual silence effects like the ones you mentioned. I recommend having a bear tank him since they do more damage while tanking, which puts the DPS requirement at about 460 average for each person, which should be very easily doable. The mage tanking Krosh should also have enough time to help out with killing the other ogres, it isn't terribly hard to keep aggro on Krosh.

- Do the other tank on add - warlock and priest - need to be well geared as the main tank? For example, this is the profile of the warrior gonna tank Blindeye: http://armory.worldofwarcraft.com/ch...oroth&n=Callar, the other warrior is a bit more geared but he's on dps gear atm -,-"
Those really don't need good gear. Blindeye's attacks are very weak, and the tank on the Warlock add is more there as a 'just in case' thing.

With the mage tank, it's mostly lots of stamina that you need. Green 'of stamina' gear is fine, but over 11k health buffed is what you need to be looking at.

We do use off tanks on the warlock because sometimes he deathcoils people or they get thrown around.

And we've had dps warriors tanking the priest in dps gear, and resto druids tanking it in heal gear. Just about anything can tank it, really But the idea is you burn it down fast anyway.

I'd second the Enslave Demon thing. We found it easier/more consistent to use 2 real tanks there and to simply banish the felpuppies.

Just to agree with what's been said already - yes you do need a Warrior on the Warlock - Felhunters break or go walkabout early quite often. If the Warlock goes running about you are looking at a wipe. We use a Prot warrior on him but will also stick a Fury/Prot one there as we usually have Warriors to spare. I don't think they take a great deal of damage.

I usually tank the Priest on my Feral. Get your tank to use as much dps gear as possible while maintaining enough defence to avoid crits and a sensible amount of armour - the Priest hits like a girl and this should allow your dps to go almost full-out on him. Between Bash/Kicks/Stuns etc he will do very minimal (if any) self-healing and his bubble for the AoE heal will go down very fast.

If you've cleared Karazhan then your gear should be more than adequate for the Maulgar encounter.

I wouldn't advice using 2 hunters on Kiggler, one druid is much, much easier. This would also free two dps classes, which would help you down everything faster. Even a resto specced druid wearing a few tank items should be able to tank Kiggler. 0-1 resto druid, 1 resto shaman and 3 holy priests and 3-4 holy paladins is plenty of healing for the entire encounter, especially with 2 shadow priests.

Also I agree on above posts about Olm, he's much easier to contain with 2 tanks.
Tell your warlocks just to banish the adds and you'll have freed up more dps for Blindeye.

Looking at your setup, I'd assign the following classes to tanking;
Maulgar: Your best geared MT, he needs to bring a flask and misc potions (ironshield/agi/etc).
Krosh: Mage with loads of stamina gear; around 10k unbuffed should do the trick.
Kiggler: Druid in (semi)tanking gear.
Olm: Two random warriors or prot paladin.
Blindeye: Random warrior or prot paladin. Pick the one with the lowest health/weakest gear, he wont be tanking that much, only spamming taunt a lot. :-)

One last word of advice - it's all about the pull. Get that sorted and the fight is relatively easy. We use a Paladin to run in and bubble, that gets them all moving towards your tanks who can pull from there. Feral can Faerie Fire to pull, Hunters misdirect etc. Your tanks have to be on the ball to get anough aggro on their targets before the heal bombs start landing on your MT.

Just purge the shield, its easiest solution.

Thank you for your replies.

I think we may replace 1-3 healers with dps then, just worried about healing tanks but if the adds do not hit hard I think it won't be problem.

I didn't know that we can purge the shield... if purge works will Dispel magic work as well (since they have the same mechanic)?
BTW, I'm not really sure since we haven't started yet, but I heard that Blindeye's shield only protect him from Interupt / Stun effect so I guess'd Silence would work, wouldn't it? :/

I will try having druid tanking the shaman, it would help freeing 2 hunters for dps. Just wonder if it's harder to keep him up than 2 hunters since people said the aoe of shaman will add up a lot of damage on the tank.

Now you get me confused. I've looked up his shield on Thott.

http://thottbot.com/s33147

It doesn't say it is magic effect, but i'm 99% sure that our shamans were able to purge it. I'm not very familiar with purge, does it follow other dispel abilities behavior - i.e. when there is nothing to remove it won't cast ?

Purge and Dispel Magic (And Mass Dispel) don't work on Blindeye's Shield. You just need to do the 25k damage quick enough, which isn't that hard.

The shield can not be purged.

^_^ I also wanted to say, we've had a lot of success with hunter tanks on Kiggler. They're still doing the majority of their dps even with some NR gear on, and the pair can easily be healed by a single offspec healer. A melee character tanking them has many more issues. Also, after Kiggler's down, the hunters can feign and go to regular dps gear.

However, I have heard of what may be a superior strat... Moonkin Druid tank. We don't have an Oomkin in our guild atm, but an Oomkin can tank from range and is immune to the Poly.

We use a moonkin to tank the shaman and ... it makes it very easy.

A question about shaman - even though we killed Maulgar quite a few times now, every now and then Kiggler completely ignores hunters tanking him and starts casting at random people in raid. I could understand it if he was targeting healers, which he does at times, but at some tries he was targeting random warrior that certainly didn't have any agro on him, beyond the basic 1 or whatever. What's with this?

I don't understand why you should use NR gear on the hunters tanking the shaman. If you have enough resources you can easily spare 1 off-healer to heal the hunters. It's not that they take a lot of damage anyway. We mostly only have 3 hunters in the raid, from which we have 2 on the shaman and 1 on normal DPS duty and assisting at the pull with misdirection.

By the time we start DPS on the shaman the hunters already got it to about 50-60%

However we were also doubting with the warlock. We used several methods of tanking (2 normal tanks, 2 warlocks enslaving or a combination) and for me as a healer it's all just as hard to do. Healing 2 tanks that take dot, deathcoil and melee damage were hard to keep up but doable. However solo healing a felhound tanking was simply impossible for me. In that case we use 2 healers.

I still don't fully understand the mechanism there either. Frankly I think it's a bug in the poly switch, but I'm not sure. Certainly the moment he runs is when he polys one of the hunters but rather than switching to the other ignores him and runs for anyone else. Typically nuking a healer, or going for a tank that happens to be close to him.

(The fact that he runs to a close tank smells like aggro reset, but when a hunter gets a shot back on him he has it back solidly)

Some strategy posts claim that his knockback AoE reduces aggro which might explain this but not really, because it really seem to happen exactly at the poly.

My theory is that the temporary aggro reset of poly goes wrong sometimes causing this effect. If this is true a moonkin should have no aggro issues, even if eating knockbacks.

If I'm the hunter who is not polymorphed when this happened, I just lean into him and usually get him back very quickly. Main problem being that he actually may run out of distance and you have to chase him down.

We thought it was problems holding aggro due to NR gear and we have gone lower in the NR gear to up the damage. Let the hunter with the lower AP go hawk. But it didn't change all that much for this happening. I'm still inclined to believe that it's to do with the polymorph moment.

To test this I tried to max-range the knockback and it is possible for a while, but he does tend to close in on you and with lack of backup space eventually one will eat knockbacks. But it certainly doesn't explain why he'd run for a tank and not a healer occasionally.

For practical purposes, he typically just ends up nuking a healer once for 2k NR damage and then is back on the hunters which is no biggie. Healers shouldn't take any damage and can be easily topped off again when it happens.

We have this happening roughly once on each pull we have, no matter how we try to avoid it happening (with distance, less NR gear etc). Typical victim is a healer which rarely is a big deal. If it's a tank we end up wiping because our offtanks are surprised and try offtanking him out of reflex which ends up bad.

Alright, maybe it's just the knockback and the reason why the poly switch is the moment he runs is because the one poly'd didn't have time to build aggro and has fallen behind... then the right thing is to either try max-range it as long as possible, or just live with it... in most cases it isn't too bad.

Of course if it is the knockback, there is a hard aggro plateau, and you will have to kill the priest and lock fast enough before reaching it or hunters/moonkin will lose him permanently.

I think we may have had something resembling this once, but usually it isn't a problem.

Give the hunters a shadow priest and don't gimp them with too much NR gear and the deaggro becomes a non-issue. Even if he does start to hit someone else it doesn't matter...he does so little damage as long as you keep him at range.

How do you handle the warlock without a dedicated tank? If I remember correctly, he will not spawn a felhunter right at the pull, but rather 5-10 seconds into it. And usually the first person to aggro him also get a Death Coil. I'm quite eager to know how you manage it, as we can barely make it with one tank.

He summons the felhound right away (roughly 2 second cast though I'd guess). We still have 2 tanks on him at pull though, one to eat the deathcoil and one to bridge the time to get the first felhound enslaved.

We went in last night for the first time and we killed him after about 3 hours from zoning in.

I was mostly concerned about the pull but we figured that in about 2-3 pulls. The hardest part of the fight for us was to grab the warlock and place him at his spot. We decided to use 2 warriors tanks on the warlock and banish/enslave the adds.

Our setup was:

MT (Warrior) on Maulgar - 1 Priest, 1 Druid, 1 Paladin, 1 Shaman healers
Druid tank on Priest - 1 Priest healer
2 Warrior tanks on Warlock - 1 Paladin, 1 Shaman healers
2 Hunters on Shaman - same healers as tanks on Warlock
1 Mage on Mage - 1 Priest healer

DPS (except those who were tanking) was:
3 Warlocks
1 Shaman (Enhancement, Me )
3 Mages
3 Rogues

Healing was not a problem for anyone.
The MT had a drop to about 5% early in the fight but after that he was mostly toped off. Hunters had pretty decent NR gear (200+ each with aspect) and didn't need much healing.
The mage tank had about 9k HP unbuffed and fully buffed he was healable even when getting the full fireballs.
The druid tank on the priest didn't get hit much so healing him was trivial.
The 2 warriors on the warlock didn't drop more than 50% hp and they had around 14k hp.

We did use flasks on most of the healers, all the tanks and some DPS but they were definately not needed (except MT).

One last thing, don't forget about Maulgar's enrage. We had only 1 try where we killed all the adds, and we killed him that try but since we had forgotten about the enrage a LOT of our raid died.

We actually only have 1 Warlock on Enslaving duty.

When a new dog comes out, another warlock throws a CoS up on the new dog, and banishes the old one (since the enslaving Warlock picks up new ones as they come, releasing the old). With 15% +hit and CoS up, I don't think we've ever had one break enslave early, and resists are an extremely rare occurance.

We also have a Warrior in there for keeping new spawns' attention until they can be Enslaved.