We tank the shaman, hunter, and pet right on top of each other. There's really nothing to worry about other than burst damage on your shaman tank. We use a bear, so it's not that big of an issue.

Our Karathess tank kites him back and forth across the room, away from the spitfires. After the shaman dies, one of the healers peels off to heal the Karathess healers, who take an occasional spitfire. After we kill the priest, everyone heals to full and we all charge in. I guess you could pull Karathess to you, but I don't see it making a big difference. The totems go down in 2-3 seconds, and I think the pulse is every 3 or 4. At worst, you take one tick.

We've been using a bear as well and stacking the hunter, shaman, and pet. We've had no major problems with burst damage...the only times we've had problems with him dropping has been when we're bad about totem killing and he takes a few fireballs plus a frost shock.


I think our problem was that we had folks bandage if they were low and then go in, so we ended up going in waves rather than all at once.

Just curious, has any guild try killing karathress right after the hunter is down? (Kill hunter 1st)

I'm thinking of this idea since the priest and shaman can be tanked away from the raid. As long as the priest/shaman tank can be kept up until karathress is down this idea seem to be fine.

When the boss reaches a set ammount of hp (60 IIRC) he gains a damage and speedbuff from every add that is alive:
Blessing of the Tides - Spells - World of Warcraft

Thanks to the advice and information in this thread, we got our first Karathress kill last night. Took a total of 8 attempts, 3 of which were aborted pretty quickly (I love fights you can leash without too much trouble).

Wow Web Stats

We used the positioning described by Gurgthock pretty early in the thread, stacking the Shaman and Hunter together and killing the Shaman first. Again, thanks to all the discussion here, it was a very straight forward fight for us to learn.

Today in our fresh id we encountered some strange problems on Fathomlord Karathress.

Every time we killed the hunter and the shaman, Karathress began to one-shot poeple - which were at full hp - with his Cataclysmic Bolt, which should only deal damage equal to 50% max-hp.
Also his Sear Nova occasionally hits (no crits according to the combat log) for up to 7k and the Spitfire-Totem for up to 6k.

We kill the hunter first, so we thought there might be a new coherence with the Beast Within-Buff on Karathress, but there were no one-shotting until the Shaman was dead.

Does anyone else experience a similar behaviour?

ps: Every time the enrage was minute's away (assuming the timer is still 10 minutes).

We kill him every reset for quite a few weeks now and I would remember for such a thing, if there were any. The only one-shotting happened to us in this fight is an unlucky Tidalvess' WF and FS combo, but that is well-known.

Maybe you did catch an obscure bug or something, those numbers are way out of line.

I have a few questions

1. Stacking hunter+shaman together
- who do you kill first? (Shaman is what i hear.)
- when a totem spawns, does all dps hit it or just people with "fast casts"?
- is there a way to create a raid warning for a totem spawn (I dont remember if boss mods announces this)
- how fast should a totem go down?
- on the topic of "fast casts" - do you ask dps to vary their spell/dps rotation/cycles when dealing with shaman and totems? Or do they just cancel their 2 second cast and swap to the totem.
- I assume karathress is on the other side of the room. Do you keep the raid in range of the 80yd shadowbolts or does the paladin MT healer just eat it?
- at this point in time, how many do you have on the priest? Just a warrior and his healer or a rogue and others?
- how long do you take to kill both?
- how many rogues do you take? They seem to be the best classes to benefit from having mobs together. Our dps warriors would be offtanking and we have only 1 hunter

2. Hunter pet tank
- I hear a 5th tank helps here. Can a holy/prot paladin handle it? 41/20 in healing gear?
- If pet requires a prot paladin, can he tank it in healing gear?

3. Priest
- Do you attempt to dps this target at all while dealing with the shaman and hunter?
- Is the DPS loss by asking rogues to mind numb the priest and wound poison the add target worthwhile?

4. Karathress healing
- The moment Tidalvass goes down - who do you send to help the paladin? We have paladins, priests and druids that could open up. I think direct healing is more useful right? (leave hots for raid healing priest damage?)
- Do you attempt to kite karathress back and forth once he gets the totem? Does that create range issues for the healers?

5. Random crap that happens
- I read that sometimes the shadowbolts cause a totem to spawn midraid. Just have ranged deal with it at that point right?


I'm trying to consolidate techniques for the shaman+hunter stacking strategy.

Normally, you kill the Shaman first, since he's by far the most dangerous add. When a totem spawn, all DPS nukes it. If only the people with "fast casts" hit it, it's going to take longer to die, and that's bad. We normally kept the raid within range of Cataclysm bolts, but that was moreso positioning errors than anything. If we don't kill both within...four minutes or so...it's a wipe. We're lucky to have one Rogue. I will point out that our last kill actually had me die to the Hunter add + pet right before the Shaman went down, and the bear managed to pick it up from swipe aggro.

Do not try to have someone in healing gear tanking the pet, you won't like the result. It's not a major issue compared to the other adds (it can certainly be solo healed), but it will kill someone in healing gear - it hits for well over 4k with Beast Within up. You're better off just having a tank pick both up - stick the healer that you would have had on the pet tank on the hunter/pet tank and you'll be fine. They don't do much burst, though they do a fairly impressive amount of DPS together.

If you do not have Curse of Tongues up on the Priest, you should most definitely have Mind Numbing poison up. The heal is incredibly fast. Wound poisoning the adds is most likely worthwhile, it's really freaking hard to get all the heals and every missed heal brings you considerably closer to the enrage. I don't believe that our Rogue does anything besides auto-attack and kick, usually.

Still have everyone deal with it. Losing ten seconds of DPS on Karathress is not as bad as losing two seconds on a Spitfire, unless you're almost to enrage.

Generally we still have 8 healers in the raid due to morogrim.

Priest: Northwest, 1 warrior, 1 rogue, 2 healers, 1 mage and 1 warlock on her.
Karathess: Southeast, 1 warrior, 1-2 healers
Shaman+Hunter: Northeast, Each tanked by a druid. Rest of the raid here also.

Kill the shaman, then hunter and pet. (blade flurry, cleave, ww, sweeping strikes, dot them both)
Finish the priest (who should already be on 20-30% by now) - Rogue + tanking warrior needs to interrupt.
Heal everyone up fast, then move to Karathess.

He should be dead 1-2 minutes before the enrage timer without too much effort.

When on the priest i got Mind Numbing Poison on offhand, just as a failsave. The warlock also keeps Curse of Tongues up constantly and dots her up.
Both me and the warrior interrupt her.
When i'm expecting a heal i just autoattack, and only build a quick few combo points + do SnD while my kick is on cooldown.
At most we miss 1-2 heals by her, but we have a MS warrior on the adds so the effect is pretty minimal.

Sorry, but I am too lazy to read whole topic. Yesterday we tried FLK, and we had only one problem - hunter's pet. We even had dedicated tank/healer for it. But we still failed. Is it general stupidity of tank/healer or there is some trick with pet tanking? Any tips for it?

Eh, we just let the Hunter tank pick up and tank the pet also and we just ignore the totem and nuke the shaman down then kill it and move on. Switching between the shaman and the totem is a horrible loss in DPS and just increases your chances of the tank getting gibbed.

We always come in from Leo's side and separate them, no need to put the hunter and shaman on top of each other. If you just put the hunter tank and his healer behind one pillar and the priest group behind the other they wont be hit by bolts or the totem. Put 1 shaman to raid heal on shaman and nuke him down. The most difficult part of this fight is the initial pull, everything after that is just nuke/heal spam fest. Boring fight.

The reason for putting the shaman + hunter together are to spread the mana drain that the hunter does, and you get bonus damage by cleaving n all.
The bolts also ignore LoS, or at least they do when we go to him. They are affected by range however, but it's better to get them down fast.

The totem doesnt ignore LOS so having the hunter tank & his healer not taking that damage makes the fight more stable, our ranged DPS are positioned between them so they take the mana drain debuff as well as the totem damage to spread it out. Made the fight much smoother for us at least.

You only switch to the totem for about 3 seconds, thats not a monumental loss in DPS compared to having someone constantly raid healing when they could instead just be healing the Tidalvess tank (not to mention the extra damage the totem is doing to your tank). Different strokes for different folks I guess.

It's a big loss for rogues. Our dps cycles are geared toward 100% time on a single target. If we have to switch targets, we a) lose our combo points, and b) have to restart our cycle from the beginning. It's not really a big deal on this fight since the dps requirement isn't really very high to begin with, just saying.

We tend to have everyone (including rogues) jump on the spitfire totems as soon as they're up. It depends how many healers you run with and if you can afford to dedicated someone full-time healing raid damage from totems, but I've always found it much easier from a healer's perspective.

Our raid leader has DBM configured to announce Spitfire Totems as soon as they spawn, and all DPS jumps on them immediately. As a result, they can generally kill the totem before it shoots even once if they're lucky, otherwise no more than one tick will hit the raid. Generally, we get our kills with 2min left on the enrage timer, so the loss of on-boss DPS from swapping targets doesn't seem to affect us too badly.

We've been killing Karathress pretty solidly, but the above priest team never proved very effective for us. I got several complaints that she would freeze-stun everyone, then pop a heal, nothing the rogue/tank could do about it (and no shaman healer). Instead, we have a warrior, warlock, healer on the priest, and the warrior stops the heal if not frozen, the warlock (felhunter) stops it if the warrior is frozen (warlock can also life drain and get his life back).

Question for me is, how does one stop the "freeze-heal" combo the priest does if both interrupts are melee? We didn't see a good solution so we pulled the rogue out and put a warlock in. Been working for us, just curious why the rogue/warrior combos given they can both be stunned simultaneously.

We use 7 healers, healing is never a problem. And we usually have MS up on our current target so a heal isnt that bad plus the priest will only heal targets below 60% health so the rogue or whomever is interrupting can just be ready for the first heal tathat point and dps fully up until that point.

To be honest with you, we started out this way and double freezing doesn't happened that often to interfere with the kill, so we didn't really bother changing it around.

It wasn't a significant boss to us, he went down on the 5th try first and apart from 1-2 bad pulls happening now and then, it's always one shot, whatever setup we have.

Gonna try this next time though, thanks for the info

We do a few things different than the last poster, so here's the rundown. We just got him down recently, so all our mistakes are fresh in my mind.

Yes, the shaman is tying up the most healers and has the potential to do the most damage. He also ties up raid dps killing totems. The sooner he is dead, the sooner the raid is killing with efficiency.
Everyone takes the totem as the #1 target. Interrupt spell cast and get on it. If everyone does this, you will kill before it casts. Your healers will have that much more mana for it. Anyone who has done C'thun is familiar with the 'quick burn' of the eyestalks, we treat the totem like that (instants and short casts, efficiency is less important than speed)

This is a toughy. We've tried both and are FAR more successful having the raid eat bolts (he stays out of range of the shaman/hunter/priest tanks obviously). In fact, using this strategy we added a healer (9 total) dedicated to the raid and found that without having to heal themselves, ranged did more damage despite taking more overall damage simply by having the dedicated healer.

We have a team of 4. Warrior/Priest (instants and bind are huge here), Elemental Shammy and a Warlock. She's at under 60% by the time we get to her.

We usually have all 3 adds dead at 5 minutes. Once the shaman is down, it goes pretty quick since dps is not killing totems anymore until FLK himself. We usually take 3 rogues for the constant DPS (no mana issues there).

We use a warrior for good reason. A good warrior has zero issues with the pet, we have the Misdirect pops 2 on the Hunter and saves his 3rd shot in the event the pet spawns while the Hunter is running to the warrior. The Warrior is in the same group as the Feral tanking the Shaman so he can give Commanding and also TC/Demo the Shaman in addition to the Hunter.

Warlock CoT, elemental shaman shocking. As stated above, rogues do maximum dps by not being on the priest and the lock/shaman have the Priestess below 60% when the raid gets to her-she dies in 45s or less.

We send the 3 direct shaman healers over for a total of 5 on FLK. 3 are healing the MT and repositioning with him, 2 are out of range of the totem and their only job is to heal the healers. The Hunter tank comes over when his add is dead and after a reposition he runs in, rages up, drops TC/Demo and gets out. The 2 healer healers heal him up as well.

This is rarely an issue EXCEPT when the raid is still dpsing adds. Tell your healers to expect it and have them move accordingly to new positions (MT should move too). This has only wiped us in that situation and only because the healers were not ready for it.

Wow, forgetful. Please delete this.