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.

While I don't know the exact spell casting time of the Imps, I'm pretty certain one imp will spawn every 2 seconds.

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.

We did Illhoof pre-patch with no warlocks, 2 mages, a feral druid, 3 warriors (2 DPS 1 Prot), 1 enhancement shaman, one resto shaman, a holy pally and a holy priest.

We took him out fairly easily by having Kil'rek tanked next to Illhoof and having all three warriors cleave as much as possible. The healers would call out when mages should AoE and with some proper mana management the mages were able to AoE the imps regularly without going OOM by the end of the fight.

I'm assuming that with the nerf to the imps it should be even easier to attempt that strategy.

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.....

yes it does, all that it requires is that you* deal the killing shot. I was using the combination of those 2 trinkets because I was literally aiming at allowing me to last as long sa required, and ideally get very low spell dmg/crit% to make sure I didn't kill any imp. But if you spam rank 4 arcane explosion you will kill a few from time to time, just enough to make the sporeggar power infused mushroom nice to have, despise the 10s internal cooldown.

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.

Earth Sheild + Concentration Aura.

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.)

We have killed Illhoof pre2.1 patch using both the Warlock and Mage AoE tactics.
Mage used some 250ish FR (inluding Pala aura) and spammed ArcExplosion (not sure what rank though). He would kill imps at an acceptable rate and he had no problem being healed. He did have to use Mana potion whenever possible though, he didnt get enough full resists to replenish his mana fast enough.
Warlock strategy wasnt different, Destruction spec (although not needed I believe) and Hellfire spam. SoC strategy never seemed to work good enough for us.

Have your tanks position Illhoof near the center of the room. Have your Warlock spam SoC on Illhoof. Pretty much free, constant AEs for the entire fight with little risk.

The Warlock method works the best simply because you don't need to worry about a Warlock running OOM for the purposes of AE. Mages, on the other hand, can easily have issues--especially if you aren't able to kill him very quickly.

One good idea I heard was if you are using a mage to "tank" the imps via arcane explosion is to get the Lignthning Capacitor off Illhoof (for future kills anyway) and have Illhoof targeted.

Should proc just about every time you AE I'd imagine.

About a two months ago when we were working on Illhoof, I equipped the trinket before we engaged, hoping to be able to wand low targets every 10s or so to keep my mana up. I tried wanding when they were around 5%, no luck. I tried CoC, AE, Ice Lance, Fireblast, but nothing would proc it (SCT showed the killing blow for me). My conclusion at the time is that the imps didn't yield XP due to being minions (like the C'Thun tentacles at some point). If it's changed, that's cool, but when I tested it, it didn't work.

I am fairly positive I was getting 200 mana returns from time to time back when I was doing karazhan.

For reasons oblivious to me, Magic Absorption has a 1 second cooldown (which is stated in the talent tooltip very clearly).

Also, killing the imps should definitely procc the Power Infused Mushroom, as it proccs spirit tap for me all the time - only reason I attack the buggers.

Post patch we found that killing Kri'lek everytime he pops was the best way do the fight. Pre-patch we just kindof ignored Kri'lek an let AOE on the imps and Blade Flurry do the job, but Post patch he seems to have a lot fewer HP. We just had a DPS tank on him (for my group, me in bear in full DPS gear) and then one DPSer (could have used more but wanted to keep the shadow priest mana regen consistent and other rogue keep wound poison up on illhoof) and just took him down right away each time he was summoned. A DPS warrior tanking Kri'lek probably works better since as someone said above, Whirlwind helps keep the imps under control, however I think I helped some with swipe spam. I was getting a lot of multi-crits for extra rage for more swipes.

Taking Kri'lek down right away also takes a little pressure off the healers, as well as freeing up your OT to just DPS chains and Illhoof. Increased damage to Illhoof after Kri'lek dies doesn't hurt either.

I can confirm this is true - I did some quick analysis of the WoW combat log and out of 1522 imp firebolts only 72 (4.7%) were fully resisted. By far the majority (71.8%) were 75% resisted. Interestingly none were entirely unresisted (at first I thought my analysis script must be missing the lines where there is no "(x resisted)" but after checking and actually manually scrolling through the entries there just were _no_ fully unresisted attacks.

This does, however, directly conflict with the information provided on the official WoW resistances page which clearly states that against a same level mob with capped resistances and partially resistable spells, you should resist 100% of the damage 25% of the time. Blizzard should really update this (and IMO modify how Magic Absorption works - I considered it of marginal use when I thought 25% full resist rate was achievable; given that it is in fact capped at 4% against same level mobs/1% against bosses, it's practically worthless: that's a rant for another day, however).

Of the 72 full resists 70 gave a Magic Absorption proc; I imagine the other two occurred < 1 second after the previous proc and thus were inhibited by the cooldown (which as various people have pointed out is listed on the tooltip - my bad.)

Reworking the theorycraft using a 5% resist rate, estimated 1.5s cast (still hard to quantify accurately as the firebolts have a travel time), 8.5k mana pool and rank 4 AE spam (835 mp5 required):

1 imp will have 1 attack resisted approximately every 30s, giving 430 mp30 or 72 mp5. Hence you need 12 imps banging on you to have a halfway decent chance of maintaining your mana pool (this doesn't account for mage armor/shadow priest/other mana returns, however).

In an ideal world imp control would be handed to a warlock, but we don't have one who raids regularly yet. Nor do we have any shaman, and only 1 fury warrior. I'm sure these are viable strategies but they just aren't available to my guild

I hadn't considered using these (although in hindsight they are the obvious choices). Once you get going and are regularly killing imps with the AE spam the Power Infused Mushroom essentially gives you 100mp5, which is awesome - equipping it will almost double my base in-combat regen.

Nether Protection should get rid of SoC interruption.