My guild had its first serious Illhoof attempt last night and due to the fact that we don't have any regular warlocks we decided to try the magic absorption + max FR approach. According to the official World of Warcraft's resistances page if you are resistance-capped (which for the non-elite imps is 345 to 350 FR - I had 370 with paladin FR aura) then you should fully resist, on average, 25% of any fire based attacks.

Some back-of-the-envelope figures and calculations (I'm at work at the moment so I can't access my combat log, but will dig into that tonight/tomorrow): in full FR gear I have ~8.5k mana so a resist will restore 425 mana. I'm not sure what the cast time of the imp fireball is but I suspect 1.5s, in which case I should on average have 1 resist every six seconds, giving (425 / 6) ~= 71 mana per second ~= 355 mp5 from a single imp. Assuming a worst case scenario with a 3s cast, that's still ~= 178 mp5 from a single imp.

Spamming rank 3 AE costs 615 mp5. So best case scenario (1.5 fireball second cast) I should only need 2 imps banging on me to sustain that indefinitely, worst case (3s cast) 4 (note this isn't accounting for regular mp5 from spirit/mage armor or clearcasting, so this is still a pessimistic estimate).

However in practice I needed 10+ imps to keep my mana up, even using such a downranked AE (I expected to be able to use rank 5 comfortably but quickly went oom when doing so). Obviously this is a Bad Thing as the imps don't die quickly enough, more damage is taken by the raid, extra people are required to AoE removing valuable Illhoof dps time, AE becomes less effective as soon as there are more than 10 targets etc. etc.

This leads me to believe either that the full resist rate is significantly lower than 25%, or that there is a distinction between a full resist and resisting 100% damage (the WoW resistances page lists both at 25% but taken additively that gives you 125% overall, so I assumed they are the same thing), or that I'm overlooking something/my maths is sucky.

Has anyone else tried this approach and had success? Have other people noticed a significantly lower full resist rate than expected (maybe warriors at the Hydross encounter)? Lastly, does anyone have concrete data on the imp fireball cast times and spawn rate so that I can more accurately theorycraft the encounter?

I'll post again/edit this post once I've had a chance to dig into the combat logs.

We use a paly with ~200 FR gear in most of our groups. He just concecrates the imp spawn, uses RF and heals. When there are about 30-40 imps I let lose my fire elemental and it kills them all.

As for your strat, i could see it working, and really you only have to do enough damage to keep agro away from the healers. But in my experiance Illhoof has been a dps race for us, taking away a mages dps from the boss isn't ideal.

We've tried a similar approach - mage with Legacy of the Mtn King and Magic Absorbtion AOEs, a warlock helps clear the imps out after every sacrifice.

Our mage has never really had mana issues, but we don't use the mage solo-AEing them to *death*, only agroing them to keep healing focused and easy.

I'm guessing Magic Absorption probably has some sort of cooldown before it can proc again. In fact, I was pretty sure the talent description indicated that it did, but I don't see that when I look at wowhead. At any rate, other similar passive abilities (like the shaman resto tree one) have cooldowns. Even a 4 or 5 second cooldown would (obviously) seriously reduce the mana regained. Check your log and see if there's some sort of minimum interval?

One thing you might consider is doing a coordinated AOE taunt (by your MT, who can pop shield wall or simply tank through it, as their damage is really not that bad) + Evocation when you start to get low on mana.


All of our strategies (we've used the pally tanking one, mage tanking, warlock w/hellfire tanking, etc) revolve around having one person collecting the imps to make healing easy, and then either ignoring them permanently or doing focused bursts of AOE (after each sacrifice, or after every sacrifice).

We've never had success where we had one person attempting to both agro AND kill the imps, all by himself. Agro and hold while we burn illhoof down? Yes. Agro and hold, with someone else assisting in AOEing them to death periodically? Yes. Agro and killing them on your own? Doesn't seem to work well.



If you have no warlocks, I'd say try having a paladin tank and you AOE the imps after every sacrifice. With Spiritual Attunement, your paladin's healing power will actually be *increased* by this strategy if the other healers focus on healing him and he focuses on healing other players who take damage. It's a vicious cycle.

Even low level AE spam should kill an imp all on its own after 25 - 35s (depending whether using rank 3/4/5 AE). If the previously stated spawn rate (1 per 2s) is correct that means there will be a maximum of about 15 imps up at once (unless I get sacrificed). As an amusing aside, with 15 imps/1.5s fireball casts I should in theory have ~5300 mp5 or ~2650 mp5 with 3s casts. That would be rather impressive.

I'd appreciate it if you could ask your mage what rank AE (s)he uses; or if (s)he uses a different AoE spell at all. Also, did you have any issues with the imps aggroing onto healers? If the AE spam is too low level I imagine healers would pull aggro (especially during the sacrifice) so a periodic clearout would probably be required. Also did (s)he not spec into Arcane Subtlety (-40% threat from arcane)?

I checked Thottbot and there is a 1 second cooldown before the effect can occur again, which would help explain this (iirc this is not on the talent tooltip though). However, even counting this effect, you would expect that it would be proccing more or less constantly with 10 or more imps - if 10 fireballs all land at once then there is a 94% (1 - 0.75^10) chance the effect will proc if it is not on cooldown, and it would never be on cooldown so long as the imp casts are longer than 1s (my maths isn't up to dealing with staggered fireball casts, unfortunately, but intuitively that shouldn't make too much difference).

I'll check for the minimum time between procs when I parse the logs tonight.

while this doesn't answer the theorical side of the original question, speaking from personal experience, the proper way to do this fight is to put max fr (260-ish+ bufffed is more than enough), and the trick is that you do *not* want the imps to die. All that you have to do to maximize magic absorption is to get aggro from all imps, and ideally not kill any.

rank 4 arcane explosion is sustenable pretty much indefinitly, and is good enough (even with -40% threat from arcane spells) to grab aggro from all imps. Keep in mind, the more imps are alive, the less threat your healer generates to all of them, making it easier for you to pick up aggro. If you put mage armor with dampen magic, you should have every fireball hit you for 25-30 dmg, which is ridiculously easy to heal, even if 30 imps are shooting you.

If anything, put your sporeggar +200 mana/kill trinket with like mark of defiance and you're set.

BTW: magic absorption only procs on full resists as far as I know.

Why don't you just have a warrior kill the imps. With sweeping strikes/whirlwind/cleave to aoe and all the free damage from victory rush, I don't see why a single warrior couldn't keep the imps fairly thin. Hell a VR crit would probably 1 shot an imp.

Does the mana return trinket work in instances? I'd always assumed it wouldnt, especially with regards 25-man. Thinking about it, there's no reason not to make instance mobs eligible for xp.....

I would imagine Magic Absorption would be great on this fight, but interesting theorycraft aside, I don't think there's much strategic value in trying to abuse it to the maximum extent.

On the other hand, I don't think I've ever not had a Warlock in my KZ group. We just have the Warlock tank/kill the Imps with constant SoC. I back up with AoE to help kill some imps or grab some aggro if the Warlock has Amplify Flames. So maybe if I were ever the only AoE class in a group, the content of this thread would seem much more useful.

Resistances never increase rate of full resists on partially resistable spells. You'll only get the 4-5% level based miss as imps are level 69-70. There was a thread about this some time back if you do a search.

As far as viability of Magic Absorption for Illhoof goes it works fine for us. I'm at 300+ FR to minimize the damage taken and combined with improved Dampen Magic I don't need too much healing. You want regen heavy gear for this and as said before don't kill off the imps too fast, the more you have up more regen you get.

I believe he uses rank 4.

Nope, no agro issues with healers. We just clear them out because it's always seemed to work best for us.

He's got 2/2 Arcane Subtlety.

If what one of the above posters says (regarding resistances not actually changing your level-based full resist chance) is correct, that might make the difference? Our guy has only a very few pieces of FR gear that he swaps in, and mostly wears his normal stuff (always using a LotMK, which at least helps to give him *some* resistance). I'm not sure how that would affect his mana pool and regen as compared to yours, but I'm guessing it makes a difference if you're swapping in a full suit (and gaining nothing from it w/regard to Magic Absorption procs).

That's interesting. There's no talent that helps reduce SoC interrupts, is there? Or do the imps just never build up to the point where that's a problem?

Given the (seemingly) reduced HP of the imps, I don't see much reason -not- to kill them really. I'm sure one DPSer dedicated to killing them could more or less keep them under control nowadays?

We were using a Warlock as per normal last night, and most of the imps seemed to die in 2-3 Seed of Corruption hits...so they certainly don't have a lot of HP nowadays.

Ideally, though, SoC is the best tool for the job. Warlocks are easy to heal, don't have mana problems, and typically have a large HP buffer. Really should be bringing at least 1 Warlock to a Kara group anyhow for various reasons.

That said, I would try assigning a Mage to single-target them down and AE clear them if/when they build up. I don't see much reason to use high resistance gear, though. I'm usually healing on this fight, and even back when imps would often be stacked on the Warlock up to 8-9 of them, it was never really a problem outhealing it with Dampen Magic up. A Mage with Dampen Magic up should be able to handle 4-5 on them without any resist gear and never have it present a serious problem for the healers.

(As a note from a healing perspective...Renew and Prayer of Mending every CD is typically enough to outheal all but the most extreme cases of burst with the debuff up.)