I suspected as much, because I kept insisting on having MD done after each transition, but they kept claiming that it wouldn't do anything. I have all the logs saved at home so will be nice to confirm this - is there a formal message to look for in a log file for when the whirlwind is over?

Whirlwind fades from Leotheras the Blind.

Do you use a bossmods package? It's really hard for me to think of a fight that benefits more from raidwide use of Bigwigs (or equivalent, but I personally love Bigwigs these days -- it's perfect) than Leotheras. Having every single person in your raid knowing, to the second, when Whirlwind is going to end, when he's going to transform, when he's going to cast demons, etc., is invaluable.

I use bigwigs yeah, and I assume most of my guild does. We also have one person call out transitions on vent for added warning, I just didn't konw what line to look out for.

Will check out exactly how misdirections/whirlwind were done.

In fairness we lost like 4 or 5 dps usually by the time we get to 15%. It is annoying to say the least. Good to know we can use MD to keep people up - last night on the best attempt we had him at 3% on a wipe, but a hunter pulled him all the way across the room right after a whirlwind, feigned deathed him on a necro, then pulled him back right after getting 5 or 6 dps killed, leading to a heartbreaking wipe.

We use and broadcast BigWigs, we only have 2 hunters in the guild so we really don't have much choice who we bring. We've even got someone spamming macros for when whirlwinds begin and end for the people who forgot to bring the chinstrap for their drool cups too. Everyone knows the fight pretty well and honestly the transitions aren't that painful, it's just sub-15% that is a problem.

I'd agree with this. One of our locks got a bit too eager during the early part of the demon phase and pulled aggro off me (and I was lucky enough to get whispered). Each spell reflect did about 2500-2900. You can easily lop off half his life just by making sure you have 25 rage at all times. I also cheated a bit and used an autoblocker (the cooldown had just ended when I got whispered).

I had about 10 seconds to spare when my demon died, so I would think anyone should be able to kill their demon. The physical form hits pretty soft (I'm tanking both forms and he crit me once for 8k, everything else was 6k or less), so there's no reason not to stack some +dmg gear, +block, or other mixed use stats.

We had three sub 20% attempts on Thursday, we still need to think through what our strategy is going to be to wipe the chaos blast debuff at 15%. Since most of our dps is taking place during the demon phase, it's likely I'll have a few stacks prior to the shift.

Soulstone on your favourite paladin + DI the chaos blast tank will wipe all of the chaos blast debuffs if you don't feel like waiting.

I would say "yes" although I have not tested it. It really isn't germane though as the main reason to use a warlock is the extra aggro on searing pain (plus the whole warlocks are imba for a million reasons thing). The innate extra HP doesn't hurt but it really doesn't matter as I'd be hard pressed to hold aggro on him in demon even if it were somehow a good idea. Soul Link I still feel is not at all needed and we kill him fine without a lock respeccing.

Play with concepts though, it's always a good thing.

Nevertheless it would be really funny to tank him as a mage. And I'm the only one in our guild who already has the fire resistance needed, so I would really like to try it. There are two problems left:
1. If Ice Block doesn't remove the debuff, it's very hard if not impossible.
2. As you already mentioned, holding aggro as a Frost mage is also not easy...but I believe it's possible with misdirect and AP+PoM at the beginning and without skilled threat reduction/Blessing of Salvation.

The spec I would use is:
http://www.wow-europe.com/en/info/ba...10200310030000
Advantages:
-I get 10% less Fire damage.
-If I have too many debuff stacks, I can Ice Block for a split second and shoot an Ice Lance at Leotheras to immediately regain my old threat level.
-Mages have Fire Spell Shield.
-Mage Armor grants me +18 to all resistances and 15% mana regeneration in fight.
-No threat reduction, in phase 1 I can nuke with Blessing of Salvation and Invisibility but in phase 2 I'm able to generate much more threat (at least I hope so^^).
-I get 5% of my total mana back on every resist, so mana shouldn't be an issue.
-I've got nearly all damage talents of a normal Arcane/Frost mage.

I'm aware of the fact that warlocks are probably still much better tanks, but I like to do things differently .

We had everyone download DBM as a mandatory addon the night we first did leotheras (before the 2.1 nerf), and we got him to 3% or something our first night of attempts.

These raid mods are pretty nice. Pretty good for vashjay also.

Tried to zerg him down on 15%... forgeting he is immune to everything if he starts his scene in Human form. Is it worth waiting for him to go into Demon form at ~16%, or should we just let him do his speech, wait for whirlwind, and only then finish him off? Didn't really check the timers, but we had a bit of time left, and we lost basically all meelee trying to beat him up doing his RP. Is there some set time he goes demon/human at ~1-2 minutes to enrage?

Even though some people here have mentioned a zerg working for them - it does not mean it is a good idea, or feasible. Just treat the last 15%, like the first 15% - they are no different other than 4 people (3 healers, 1 tank) are predisposed. The rest of the raid is doing the same thing. Control the human element and "phase 3" is "a joke."

One thing I'd like to add.

I'm reasonably convinced that the whirlwind is not completely random. When I unload on him before phase 3 he sticks to me a whole hell of a lot better than he does in phase 3 when people are going crazy. There seems to be a lot more whirlwind damage taken on the raid in phase 3 when the dps are flinging at full speed.

Having become resigned to the fact that many people in my guild don't want to adjust from the DPS zerg Leotheras used to be into the less-is-more, threat sensitive fight it has become, I decided to put our Warlock back on tanking the Demon.

The one aspect I was worried about with doing this was having to kill my own Inner Demon should I get one. I'd tried many different methods before and could never quite pull it off but tonight I was prepared using the information other prot Warriors have posted in here. I threw on only a handful of DPS items (Red Belt of Battle, Bracers of Eradication, Ring of a Thousand Marks, Serpentshrine Shurikan and Bloodlust Brooch), used a Major Fort + Fel Strength and stayed in Battle Stance to keep 100 rage each demon phase.

Low and behold, first Insidious Whispers, I get one and sigh.

I popped both trinkets, turned to it, Shield Slammed once, Heroic Striked once, Spell Reflected for what seemed like 2/3rds of it's life and crit my first Execute and it was dead. I was absolutely stunned. All the trouble it had given me in the past and it was dropped in seconds.

Honestly, it's information like this and the Seering Totem "discovery" making a fight I despise much more comfortable that make me want to go on about how glorious threads like this are.

In what was without a doubt one of the most unlucky things I've ever seen, our warlock got initial agro on a demon phase over me. He stacked up to 6 with 365 FR in about 20s, then I stole agro off him. I stacked up to 3 in 10s, then 30s into the phase 3 healers (two MT healers) got demons and I got three more non-resists in a row stacking to 6 and dying with only a single healer about 36 seconds into the demon phase.
Just thought I'd share that since it struck me as amazingly improbable.

Not as improbable as 5 priests getting fel rage in a row, mt being stunned, ot being kb'ed half a second later, and then the next rage target, and OT disconnecting.

Randomness is part of this game, for better or for worse.

One time on Hydross our Frost tank with 365 resistance and 487 Defense got crit on a 25% resist at the 100% stack. Extremely low odds, but sooner or later it'll happen. We've seen enough ludicrously unlucky things in raiding to plan around it.

hello offtopic.

A warrior will take less damage from blasts (def stance/improved), and most likely have more health so can take more stacks.

Warlocks can still do pretty well with on health/survivability with Soul Link and stacking stam gear on top of the FR stuff.

A warlock will do more threat (searing pain + timed CoD > warrior in FR gear).

The warrior won't have to worry about killing his demon (shouldn't be a problem really, but it has been an issue if you read the rest of this thread).

Both have their advantages, and both their disadvantages. The learning curve should be pretty reasonable with both now. You're probably best off doing Leo as then you can get access to Vashj, just because people will probably be more motivated to do it than doing Al'ar.

Totally agree on this. We went there yesterday for the first time, had two unlucky 1 % wipes (or rather not unlucky but succumbing to the "must zerg" urge that cost us a ton of dps on the target) and in general I had only a few problems killing the demon if my trinkets were up (even though my dps gear is not as good as yours). Though I must admit that sometimes it gets pretty close if the demon refuses to cast or your styles don't crit. But its certainly doable with the right gear mix.
The searing totem trick works like a charm. I'm pretty confident we kill him tonight.

However we were pretty surprised since the fight has often been called one of the more difficult in SSC. Yet as mentioned we got him to 1 % twice after 3 or 4 pulls even though some of us were pretty unprepared (some healers didn't had DPS stuff in their bags, our hunter missed his wingclips due to having not upped his weaponskill for his raidweapon...)

It used to be very difficult, requiring that basically everyone play perfectly because of the extreme DPS requirements. You needed tons of DPS (full pots/flasks), but you also needed not to pull aggro and to make sure no one died. HP on the whispers was also a bit higher. Today people can die, screw up aggro, etc and you can still beat the enrage timer. He's about on the same level with every other boss in SSC, minus Vashj.

We encountered some weird threat issues at the 15% split yesterday.

He was in demon form when he reached 15% and we continued DPSing through his RP speech. We stopped 3-4 seconds before the split and our warlock (who has been tanking him in demon the whole fight) picked up the demon and warrior picked up the human as normal. Due to bad stacks our warlock died around the second whirlwind. The demon then ignores the healers and goes for our warrior tank. After the warrior tank dies the demon continues on a rogue, killing him too. Our warlock had soulstoned and reported doing around 15 SP. He gains aggro again after the rogue died. We proceed to kill him a severely ugly way.

So what is the deal with the threat? Warlock picks him up easily after split. Warrior and rogue does no threat and gains aggro. Does threat from the RP phase get transferred? But then why does the warlock pick him up so easily at the split? This isn't the first time it has happened either. I would say he goes for the healers 70% of the time and for the warrior tank the last 30%.

I've picked up FLK after killing the third add with just 2-3 shield slams when an MT died. Overcoming healing aggro is trivial - and we're talking about pulling aggro on FLK after maybe 6 minutes have passed over healers - vs probably 60 seconds in your situation.

Blade flurry, whirlwind? Those alone will do it.

The warrior and rogue didn't touch the demon at all. All except warrior tank ran out after the RP speech due to WW. It could be lifebloom/PoM, but I still don't see how it managed to overcome the normal healing. Besides, our warlock instantly soulstoned and only managed to pull aggro after the warrior and the rogue had died. 15 SPs should overcome the self-healing and random threat (BR, shouts etc) easily.