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?

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.

Strats should be fairly obvious but your shaman tank and healers should be ready for some silly burst damage! glhf

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.

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

We have two healers at each mob and kill the shaman first. The shaman healers move to the middle of the room to heal the Karathress healers once the shaman dies, because the Karathress healers will then be eating a fire totem + shadow blasts. Kill the hunter second because his healers will be struggling with mana. Move to the priest where Chain Heal shines. By the time you're on Karathress the fight is won and healing is easy.

That's our healing setup in a nutshell.

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.