LiteSabre

Just wanted to start a thread to talk about Kael, get some advice from guilds that've gotten him on farm. Also pointing out some potential block points that gave us a headache and guilds working on him might do well to avoid. :P

The weapons. Do you AoE them down or focus fire? Our guild's strat involves focussing the axe down, then AoEing the hell out of the remaining weapons (except for the bow), which seems to work alright, but nearly every vid I've seen features focus fire. Is there something I'm missing?

At the beginning of Kael's phase, as soon as he becomes targetable, how do you deal with it if one of the add tanks gets MCed? We go melee on Tellonicus and ranged on Thaladred, then Sanguinar, then ranged go on to Capernian. We don't really have the DPS to get them all down in time (at least not yet), and we lost at least one attempt today when Sanguinar's tank got MCed. Just chalk it up to bad luck and hope it doesn't happen next time?

I'm thinking that perhaps we could kill Sanguinar first instead of Tellonicus, since the engineer is rather easy to kite and not take any damage, but then there's the whole issue of Sanguinar being a pain in the ass to DPS if you can't get him down with as little fears as possible. It's simply more efficient as I see it to DPS Tellonicus first, but then the headache that can arise if Sanguinar's tank is MCed is just horrible.

Pyroblast. Do you take out the shield, or let the MT eat the second blast? On a warrior tank with 3/3 imp. defensive stance and the mace buff, a pyroblast's top damage is 25850. Our MT is a cow with around 22.5K HP buffed, so with combination of PW:S and a nightmare seed/fire pot/last stand/shield wall, he can take a top damage blast and just make it through alive.

Using this method, we just concentrated on getting the eggs down and ignored the shield completely. It worked for us, but I wonder if it'd be easier to just burn it and save the tank the seed/pot costs.

Various movies I've watched vary from eating the first pyroblast phase and then burning the shield after getting the adds down, eating the blast every time like we currently do, and just completely destroying the shield every time it's up, which I've seen only once.

 

Binge

Effective kill order and use of the weapons are key. In your case, take a look at the Staff's on use.

Its ok to have a weapon or two still up when the adds spawn, and its ok for an add or two to still be up when Kael spawns. Phase 3 -> 4 transition is the tough part of this fight, at least for us. Once you've got past that you should be golden.

 

dukes

The advantage of single targetting the weapons is that then you have the first couple of weapons to kill the later ones. We normally have ranged on Staff->Bow->Axe, melee on HealerMace->Dagger->Sword, and then the shield just gets tanked through the add phases.

When the adds res, we have the shield up (as I said), and offtank that. A warrior goes and grabs the fear guy (Sanguinar) and takes him into a corner, while the melee take the shield to ~50% to let the engineer tank get threat. The ranged burn Thaladred. Normally we have everything but Capernian/Sanguinar/Shield down before Kael releases (with Sanguinar on <10% and the shield on <20%) and burn Sang/Shield down, then casters go on to Capernian and normally have her down before Kael does the first pyro.

If you just kite the pheonixes and don't put any DPS on them, they will egg about 5 seconds after you break the pyro-shield. We had some insane DPS last night - got the second pyro-shield down before even the first pyro went off. You should always be able to get the shields before the second pyro if you leave the Pheonixes.

We didn't kill him until we sorted out the Mind Control though. We never had tanks getting controlled, but losing 3 people for 30 seconds is a pretty big hit with the egg/shield requirements.

 

LiteSabre

Hmm? The staff doesn't prevent MC, which is what wiped us that time Sanguinar's tank was controlled.

In regards to kill order, we normally have only the shield still up (~30%) when the adds are revived, and - as I said before - Sanguinar (around 30%) and Capernian up when Kael pops.

The comment about the phoenix egg time and pyroblast time coinciding if they're kited was a very good tip, thanks.

The thing is, sometimes Sanguinar's fear comes before zerker's CD is up, making him bolt for the healer. This is why we try and take the shield down ASAP so Sanguinar's tanker can use it to avoid that particular dilemma.

 

Trouble

Single targeting, we were no where close to having the weapons down in time. We had like two weapons are 60%+ and one at 80%. Having all caster nuke the hell out of the staff and then proceeding to AoE got us a lot closer to the goal. I believe with very good execution we can have everything dead before the timer is up, or dying right as it is up.

 

Binge

Sorry, still half asleep and thinking about Toy stun, not MC.

Sanguinar should be dead by phase 4. We typically have dynamite boy up still when Kael pops, with two hunters kiting (in the event of an unlucky MC on a hunter).

 

LiteSabre

So your kill order is Thaladred+Sanguinar, then engineer and astromancer? That's pretty much what I was thinking about, but it just seems like there'd be too much wasted DPS on Sanguinar if he's not compeletely focussed on and gets off a bunch of fears.

 

dukes

We have an undead warrior for the extra fear break. Other than that, sometimes he just takes it but healers (normally a paladin on him iirc so he has bubble in case) standing at max range and we have no ranged on him, so it will always break before anyone dies.

 

Binge

Melee on Sanguinar, Ranged on Thaladred. Typically Thaladred dies before Sanguinar, but we run a caster heavy raid and we have one of our unused (at that point in the fight) tanks chase Thaladred around stacking dagger debuff, so the casters have a bonus that way.

I guess our strat is kinda like, "what can't we deal with, let's eliminate that possibility". MC'ing Sanguinar tank sucks, Thaladred's randomness during phase 4 would be tough to deal with. Its much easier to control Astromancer and Engineer for the 30 seconds or a minute it takes to make them die during Phase 4 while all the other crap is going on.

Thanks Dukes for that nice hint on the Phoenixes, we'll have to do that next time we klil him.

 

Hand

You can use a prot warrior to hit the MC'd people with the dagger to dispell the MC.

 

dukes

That's what we did, but I didn't want to give it away in a "oh yeah you do exactly this" to sort it out if they hadn't stated they were having problems with it! We did have our dispel-bitch mind controlled a couple of times, which was a pain, but normal CC is still pretty good.

 

◊ Praetorian

I'd assume that at this point anyone who's working on Kael and reads these forums probably knows about the existence of bosskillers so things like that aren't really "secret."

Or just go to http://www.thottbot.com/s36478 and click on "Affected spells" and see what's on the list. :P

Anyway, I think for handling p2 and p3, it's both about playing to your strengths as a guild (guilds that had a lot of success AoEing Hydross can very easily translate that into success on the weapons, for example), but also about thinking in terms of which things represent the greatest threats to your raid, but also which can be used for the greatest benefit. The dagger and bow are the key to getting through p2+p3 quickly and efficiently, and the staff+shield are the key to surviving p4 thereafter.

 

Hiba

We killed today first time, and we noticed some changes on Kael. Compared to yesterday, we could not reset the encounter by pulling the adds away from the room, not in any phase (we lost a person even on p1 to conflag+fireball combo on random target and tried to reset). Also, this might be an onyxia deeb breath type comment, but DPS commented that the shield was definetely easier to break today compared to yesterday, around 85k hp only in it (100k earlier). Yesterday we managed to break the shield once in time, today we did not fail a single time. We had today all kinds of plans of MT eating the pyro with consumables+PW:S and even some intervenes, but the shield simply was down way before second pyro cast was finished.

Lightwell object increased in size to make it easier to click.

 

◊ Quigon

To the previous poster - read the tooltip for intervene.
We got our tank in such high HP that he could survive every pyroblast (he's not a tauren either)... Just one simple pw:s. We also did other things on top of this.

As for the weapons:
I don't recommend AE'ing at all. The goal is not to kill all the weapons before phase 3 really. I put significant time into theorycrafting this fight and basically came to the conclusion that most of the strategies out there use a pretty poor order of killing the weapons.

The ideal kill order is actually infinity blades, bow. But killing the bow second is unrealistic since it teleports and screws your dps. Killing infinity blades first shaves nearly 18 full seconds off of phase 2. Killing disintegration first doesn't even buy you 6 seconds (it actually hurts your dps due to the loot time). There is also no reason to split melee and casters in phase 2 except perhaps on the bow, OR if you're killing everything as a melee and standing around. We have cosmic die as the emote sounds, and devastation dies as the melee get to the engineer.

You can avoid the MC from sanguinar by not tanking him too close to Kael. You also do far more dps in phase 3 by killing the engineer first - but that should be obvious.

My recommended phase two kill order is:
Infinity blades, Cosmic Infuser, Staff of Disintigration, Netherstrand Longbow, Warped Slicer, Melee->Engineer->bulwark, Casters->Devastation->Thaladred->Bulwark. Then all casters on sanguinar, astro, eggs.
Bulwark doesn't spike you from behind, and needs to die before kael is up really. The key to phase 3 is how fast you kill Thaladred, and that comes down to how well people kite him. Phase 4 has all sorts of additional strategies you can employ, but aren't worth discussing here. Phase 5 is free loot.

The tank who was tanking devastation and offtanking the bulwark can easily debuff thaladred for the kite while the shield beats on his back (better than wasting another dps slot to do the same damn thing).

 

◊ Praetorian

But if you can kill all the weapons before phase 3, why wouldn't you? The simplest approach (what we do), in my view, is to have the ranged all burn the bow right away, while melee lock down the caster weapons and the tanks stack everything else and get solid aggro on them. By the time the bow dies, the tanks all have solid aggro, and then you just unload with AoE, with the benefit of hunters adding 25% damage taken to whatever the melee are currently working on. (Single-target DPS then focuses the daggers next to get the magic damage bonus going as well.) Our repeatable-every-time benchmark is everyone who needs one having a mace, staff, dagger, etc., 30+ seconds before p3 starts, with the axe usually dying right as the adds pop up, a few seconds after Kael yells.

 

dukes

We split melee and casters as the Axe whirlwinds (which obviously melee want to avoid), the Staff frost novas (again, melee avoid), and the Bow teleports (melee avoid running around). In contrast, the Healing mace gets single targetted, then when its on 10% melee group get bloodlust and blade flurry on sword/dagger. We could probably do the whole thing faster if we went bow + dagger, then healing + staff, but we've done it with this kill order and people are used to it now (not the greatest reason tbh, especially after 2 kills) and it would mean having a separate interrupter on the mace (focus target for a shaman maybe).

It just reduces melee run time and caster DPS goes up significantly just because of having the staff anyway (although it's not as much of a gain as if the tank on their mobs had the dagger, but it's still an increase). As we tank the caster at the very back of the room it's impractical to have it die as late as you seem to because of movement distance.

As for the MC and dagger thing - yeah it's probably on bosskillers and stuff, but why mention it unless they ask? I just said that it's the thing that let us get P4/5 under control, not that it's an essential piece of every Kael strat (i'm sure there are guilds who don't use it at all and still keep the end under control through good use of CC's).

 

Darkmgl

How much health did that tank need Quigon, 21,500ish? Someone said the max on Pyro can go as high as 23100 so seems about right with power word shield.

Just curious since we're gonna really dig into him soon, got most of the strategy planned out but was wondering what sorta gear I should put on for him.

 

◊ Quigon

If you're going to AE why wouldn't you get the infinity blades first? Its even more significant for AE, and considering a prot tank can debuff a mob in under 10 seconds its relatively powerful. Killing the bow and blades first is definitely ideal, but it isn't always practical due to the cosmic and disintegration causing other problems. Are you killing the shield as well before phase 3?

We have everything dead before the adds pop up except the shield with our strat, and we're not using AE.

 

◊ Praetorian

I'm pretty sure the max possible pyro is ~22k'ish. For complete safety you can alternate PW:S+Seed and PW:S+Major Fire Protection.

 

◊ Praetorian

Well, you can't just start AoEing right away for aggro reasons, so something needs to die while aggro is being solidified. You could do the daggers in that time, but the daggers are going to get AoE'd anyway, so reducing the AoE clump from 5 mobs to 4 right away just reduces the damage of every Seed/AE by 20%. At the same time, the two mobs that aren't AoE-friendly are the axe and the bow (since the bow blinks around so you can't keep it inside the AoE pile at all reliably). As between the axe and the bow, getting the bow killed first obviously offers a larger advantage, so we opted for that.

 

◊ Quigon

Pretty sure its 23250 or so.
Either that or 23100. I'm not sure if the 6% from imp defensive is associative or additive to the 10%. If its associative, which I assumed, its 23.3k.

55,000 * 0.9 * 0.94 * 0.5 = 23265.

 

◊ Praetorian

See, that's what math told me as well, but I think Imp DS actually does more than the tooltip says it does.... Question: How much damage does Scalding Water on Lurker tick for on a prot tank with 3/3 IDS?

 

Darkmgl

Thanks Praet, 22k is pretty easy with consumables like that then! Anyways we were thinking of something unorthodox for the weapons too....

Was gonna try melees on the staff > dagger, ranged on the bow, mages loot up the staff and melees loot up the dagger and split up to stack the debuff on everything but the axe, then aoe them all down with single target ranged on the mace. Axe last?

That +25% spell damage on most of the weapons seems huge for boosting up the aoe.


... Scalding Water, come to think of it I don't remember what it hits me for exactly but now that you mention it, it doesn't seem like its only -16%. I recall it for hitting me for under 400 a tick...

 

◊ Quigon

I dunno, you can move that bow around if you backup while the taunt debuff is active.
The reason I see to kill the bow first is there is a multi-shot, cosmic ae, and disintigration instagib that is entirely possible if you're not interrupting the disint in an AE strategy.
And for those reading this - infinity blades = daggers. Its stupid, but thats how they're named.

 

◊ Quigon

It ticks for 385 I believe,
But our MT reported pyroblasts at basically 22.9k. Now whether he was right or not, I can't personally verify.