We've spent some time working on this encounter recently and, given the number of permutations in strategy, I was wondering what your experience has been. Where do you tank your adds, in what order do you kill them, how do you lock down your priest, and have you gotten remotely close to beating enrage without being potted to the gills?

The primer to this thread is a bit too needy.

Yes, you can beat the enrage timer, with 9 healers, without consumables... rather easily. I'd consider 9 healers more than required to heal the encounter as well... most guilds probably run 8.

In terms of optimal strategy, don't read any guides you find online, and you're halfway there to killing him...

This is the one example of a decent berserk timer (ITS BERSERK PEOPLE NOT ENRAGE KLFDSJFLSJ) in the game so far. I don't think Hydross needs one for instance.

Fathom-Lord in the Tunnel (We will call this N because I am awful at the compass)
Hunter and his Pet in the NE corner.
Shaman in the Middle of the Room.
Preist in the SE Corner.

Shaman -> Hunter -> Pet -> Priest -> Loots (hopefully)

For the priest, make a warlock be the CoT Bitch, when anything you are killing gets to 60%, have a 3 mage rotation who run around CS'ing her heal.

Everything else should be figured out or explain already... I think?

The tuning of this fight seemed odd compared to the rest of the fights in SSC.

One thing I wondered was why is the elemental pet banishable but the spore bat not banishable. I'm all for 'random' encounters but it seems kind of silly. They should either be both CCable or both non-CCable.

Also we kill Hunter -> Shaman -> Priest and pull each one to a separate corner of the room.

Lastly, I think his enrage/beserk is the much more forgiving than Hydross or Leotheras.

I was wondering if we were missing something about the spore bat since it's hard to judge if blizzard just wanted the banishable pet the easier version of the fight or theres some form of cc that we overlooked. For us, balancing healing has been the tough part so far since the shaman seems to destroy the tank. Though now im curious if we were just running 1-2 healer short.

As is the case with all other areas of WoW, you should always assume the shaman is the most dangerous enemy you face and plan accordingly!

Ya our tanks suck... Should be fine next time we get to him with 1 less healer.

Try using grounding totem in the shaman tanks group, absorbs the shocks and lessens the chance of the burst. We tank the shaman and the hunter together in the south east for bladeflurry etc. At 60% on the hunter a rogue(me) runs to the left and i just keep mind-numbing up and help the warrior bash the heals on the priest. Hunter>Shaman>Pet>Priest>Karathress.

Edit: id say hes harder than Tidewalker, atleast for us.

Hard to really compare the fight to Morogrim; this is far more execution based but gets significantly easier as soon as the Shaman dies assuming you haven't had (m)any deaths. Morogrim is just a 14 minute snoozefest where you do the exact same thing 15 times in a row.

I read everywhere that this fight is rediculously easy, and should not take more than a couple of pulls to get down. Problem is, we've been at him twice now, 1.5 raids total, and are making next to no progress.

I think our strategy is flawed somewhere, but I can't figure out exactly how.

Healing is our only downfall, from how I'm understanding our wipes. We'll lose this or that tank, or we'll lose our healers, then we die. How do people distribute their healers? I noticed the suggestion of a grounding totem in the Shaman tank's group, so that's something we hadn't tried.

We've only ever gotten the hunter down, before losing control of the attempt, so we haven't had the chance to see how our the healers are supposed to transition.

Here's how we've spread the healing:

We had a Paladin healing the Karathress tank, a Paladin + Priest healing the raid and Hunter tank, Shaman healing the priest tank, and a Priest + Paladin + Druid healing the Shaman tank, with an additional priest healing the Shaman tank's healers through the totem damage.

Something is wrong here, and I'm just a rogue, so I can't figure it out. I don't see where the damage is going in the raid from a healer's perspective.

I like the idea of the grounding totem reducing the damage taken by the Shaman tank, are there any other things that can be done?

We've tried killing the Shaman first, but the Hunter group's healers go OOM due to stings then the Hunter tank dies, however with our more recent strategy, killing the Hunter first, the Shaman healers tend to die, and then, naturally, so does the Shaman tank. Every now and then, the shaman healing the Priest tank will get knocked down and the tank will get smoked.

So I'm at a loss to explain how we can't seem to manage this ever so simple fight. What's going wrong?!

Try:

Hunter + Shaman > Priest > Karathress.

Burn the Hunter down with all aoe effects active (blade flurry, multishot, etc), but once you get at the Shaman, pop all Heroisms/Bloodlusts you have. That Shaman has to die fast. Alternatively, try killing the Shaman first with Heroisms/Bloodlusts. It's all about killing them before the strain on the healers becomes too much.

A question to ask to your healers is if the Shaman healers are not taking additional damage from the Priest. I know they're not *that* dumb, but it's always possible :P

Here's how we do it. I think it's interesting and somewhat simple.

Pull:
- Karathress is tanked on his spawn point with 1 good paladin.
- Priest is pulled towards the Leotheras hallway. 1 paladin, 1 priest, 1 warrior, 1 rogue, and 1 mage on this team.
- The Shaman and hunter are pulled together, across the room from Karathress's location.

The shaman and hunter are stacked together, with DPS focused on the hunter. Anytime a spitfire totem is dropped, the DPS switches and burns it down in 0-1 pulses. After the hunter dies, we kill the hunter pet and the shaman.

Advantages:

- The Karathress tank does not need another healer for a long time.
- DPS is much more efficient killing two adjacent targets (Hunter/Shaman). Bladeflurry, whirlwind, cleave, multishot, dots, etc. We usually have both dead in ~ 4 minutes, with the priest down to ~60%.
- The spitfire totem is well suppressed by raid DPS
- The hunter dies first, reducing mana drains

Disadvantages:
- Your DPS needs to be on the ball to kill the spitfire totem
- The shaman is alive for longer, requiring more healing for that tank.

Good luck.

I'm not a fan of the Bosskillers and other such writeups for this fight.

Stack the hunter and shaman. It distributes the damage/mana-drain from their attacks among a larger pool of people. You don't end up with the same healers getting mana-drained repeatedly, or the same few people being hit by Spitfire/Multishot and then dying to Karathress's bolt.

Here's our setup:
1) Warrior tank, 1 rogue (mind-numbing), and 1 priest on the Priest in one corner (we use the one behind their initial spawn point), no one else nearby.
2) Warrior tank, 1 paladin on Karathress -- they get half the room
3) Druid tank on Hunter+pet (if not elemental), and Druid tank on the Shaman. All other members of the raid are in this corner. One healer on the hunter tank, three healers on the shaman tank, and anyone else on the raid.

Burn timers to kill the shaman ASAP. As soon as the shaman dies, one of his healers breaks off to help the priest healer (who has a very taxing job solo-healing himself, the tank, and the rogue), and the other breaks off to help the Karathress healer so there are no accidents during repositioning on Spitfires.

At this point you basically win, as there really shouldn't be any way for deaths to occur once the shaman is dead.

As a note: the rogue on Caribdis will also want Wound Poison MH till the group gets around to killing him, as if you're positioned correctly you're not getting totems till the Shaman/Hunter are dead.

The rogue will also want some coffee or other means of staying awake.

Praetorians way has a couple good bonuses.
1) You can use a druid on the hunter, and he can swipe, to threat up on the pet.
2) Since your stacking the druids mobs on top of the shaman who is tanked by a warrior, all 3 get demo shout and thunderclap.
3) Burning ae attacks such as blade flurry, cleave, whirlwind, multi shot, etc, all help to kill the shman faster, and cause damage on the mobs the druid is tanking.

Doesn't the hunter and pet also get Tidalvess' windfury totem, though? That's the main reason we have kept them separated.

We use 9 healers almost all the time, we find it is substantially easier than with 8, but if you flask(we don't), 8 should be more than sufficient.

We tank karathress where he is and I move him around a bit once totems drop to keep them oor of my healers. As said tank shaman+hunter on top of each other, and priest in a corner with rog/sha/war/dru.

If you have only 8 healers, assign a stronger healer to the priest and hope the rogue is good at interuppts. We use the rogue+shaman for that.

We've always just had 8 healers, one paladin on the MT, 2 healers on the hunter tank, 3 healers on the shaman tank, and 2 healers on the priest (warrior/rogue/priest/shaman on caribdis). It's never been particularly stressful on them afaik.

A few points to elaborate on this:

1. Always kill the Spitfire totems. Make a macro to target them. This should be obvious, but apparently some people ignore them. Killing the totems takes like 4-5 seconds and makes the healers' lives much, much easier.

2. The rogue on the priest doesn't need to be on her until the shaman hits 50% life. Mobs won't cast heals until they or nearby mobs are at 50% life. Just sprint over to the priest once the shaman hits ~55%.

3. Alternate healing setup:

Karathress - 2 healers
Shaman - 3 healers (after he dies, 1 goes to priest, the other 2 go to Karathress tank)
Hunter - 2 healers (after he dies, these healers go to priest)
Priest - 1 healer

4. Your shaman tank should chug armor potions, STA food, etc. to avoid unlucky one-rounding. You may just want to flask him if you're having problems with him being gibbed. Also make sure a priest or shaman is healing him for ancestral fort/inspiration.

If you are using a Rogue on Caribdis and spitfire totems are dieing too slow at Tidalvess, you may want to try moving a Warlock with a Felhound to Caribdis along with a healing Shaman. Between Curse of Tongues, the Felhound and the occasional shock from the Shaman interrupts are no problem. Rogues are probably the best at killing spitfire totems, whereas warlocks are only mediocre at it.

1 on MT (Priest or Paladin), 2 on Shaman tank (Paladin or Priest), 2 on Priest (Priest or Paladin), Druid and Shaman following the raid around should be more than adequate for healing, and as long as your raid doesn't run away too far from Karathress or Hunter you should be fine regarding bolts and stings as someone said earlier.

Regarding the Spitfire Totem, has anyone else observed it spawning improperly? I've observed that the shaman spawns the totem within 2 yards every time. However, when Karathress spawns the totem, it frequently goes elsewhere.

When we're killing Karathress, this is not really a problem; the totem will occasionally drop 10-15 yards away in the middle of our healers and ranged DPS and we are able to adjust. However, when are killing the priest, we've had the totem spawn in the middle of our raid across the room. It caught us off guard and caused some serious pain in conjunction with the priest's AE attack.

Has anyone else observed this and determined the cause?