Doing a fight with no new people is worlds different from even 1 or 2 new people. Much less 5. Our kaels have always included new people, so they have taken a few hours. I think 2-3 hours of wiping our second time (with 15 new people), and maybe 4-5 pulls our third time (with about 8).
We're planning on keying about 8 new people this week and I've set aside 4 hours just to do Kael. We may 1 shot it, or we could wipe half the day, but hey, thats how it works when you're keying/catching people up. If we did kael with 0-1 new players I can almost guarantee that we'd 1 shot him, but that isn't what you're doing is it?
We did bt/hyjal this week and basically 1 shot everything since we had no newbies present.

Wiping even on farm content will happen - it used to be particularly common in naxx and ssc/tk25 initially (although not so much hyjal/bt it seems).

You'll hear stories about how guilds clear almost all of naxx in 1 night, and how guilds do both tk25/ssc 3 hours or some absurd figure; hell perhaps even by guilds not as progressed as your own. People will read this like a wowwikki fact book and spout it off like guilds shouldn't wipe on farm content, and you should've killed vashj 2 hours ago! Seriously just ignore this bullshit and you'll be better off. The fact is every guild has a bad night from time to time, and you can get them in waves. That doesn't mean much more than you had a bad night. I can't even begin to tell you the stories I've heard of guilds stuck on X,Y,Hydross, Z bosses all night after their 10th kill.

Although new players, poor strategy, and fatigue cause 90% of these "Bad nights." But no one has a guild of 25 100% players who have alts that fit all stacking roles, so teaching new players new content, and dealing with hours of trash that might wear people down from 100% is a reality.

The only trouble I have with drawing a comparison between C'thun and Kael'thas is what comes after it. I wholeheartedly agree with the principle shown but there was essentially nothing after C'thun that required killing it.

What was killing our guild was the fact that we had been farming SSC and TK to the point of tedium. We can get SSC down in a single sitting, Vashj inside four attempts, everything else one shot, no consumables used at all. TK is the same - we actually cleared all trash, Al'ar, Void Reaver and Astromancer in under three hours this week. We could pretty much kill everything except Vashj with our eyes closed and would then have the rest of the raiding week to clear out wave after wave of Kael'thas trash with no escape.

If you couldn't kill C'thun there was always Naxx, or BWL, or MC, or AQ20, or ZG and, of course, you'd already cleared out the rest of AQ40, a feat a whole lot more rewarding than clearing out TK. Sure, I understand and accept that everything in that list except Naxx were lower tiers of progression but the point is, they were there as a release if you needed a brief step back to reflect.

Almost anything can create disruption. A lot of it has to do with being in the right rhythm and mindset. Occasionally a small problem creates a wipe. Either it is just dealt with and forgotten and the rest of the evening goes as normal, or it somehow weighs on people and the rest of the evening turns to crap (at least that's how it goes for us).

Nostalgia for the loss. I'd rather gouge my eyes out than run KZ on my main again. Running previously farmed content isn't as much of a "release" as you're making it out to be.

Kael is much bigger of a road block than anything pre-TBC though. This is good, though, in my opinion. Otherwise, many guilds (including our own, most likely) would skip him for quite a while until BT content started becoming difficult. It's commonly held that Kael is one of the best fights TBC has to offer, so I'm sure Blizz did it so that the encounter wouldn't go to waste, seeing as they spent so much time on it.

Just to hammer home what people have been saying here - even a single new person makes Kael'thas significantly harder. So much of the fight is just about awareness of where you're supposed to be and what you're supposed to be doing at any given time that rotating new people in for attunements makes things that much harder. A few weeks ago we were trying to attune a handful of people and I was sitting out because two of them were hunters. I'm our primary phoenix kiter, and we have another very competant hunter who handles them if I die or we get a second spawn, but I could just hear things falling apart on vent attempt after attempt. Eventually we gave up on attuning as many new people that week, I came back in, and we won. I guess the lesson is to pace your attunements - you don't need 40 people attuned right away, so take it a few at a time. Sure, that means some people have to sit out of BT and Hjyal, and that sucks, but so does spending 5 hours wiping to a boss you're supposed to have on farm.

Some really great points were brought up the last few posts I just wanted to add my 2 cents to it.

Yeah Kael is pretty damn hard when you get to him. He is a gatekeeper boss. If you can't motivate people to kill him just affirm the fact that once he is dead you really are in "Candy Land" and life in general is much, much better.

Repeat kills are tough. I try to keep new people to a maximum of 5 because we never felt it was worth wiping over and over when we could be learning a new fight or whatever. Our second kael kill was a 1-shot until a freak accident at the start of phase 5 (don't ask) and ended up being a 4-shot. 3rd kill was a 1shot as well with 5 more new people. I think 5 people is a very good number of new people.

The one thing I wanted to specifically bring up is that when swapping in new people try not to change out the people doing the IMPORTANT jobs. Don't swap your capernian tank, your bow tank, your phoenix kiter/CCers. Keep those people in because re-training people on important jobs is much harder and time consuming than telling random_monkey_01 to DPS X mob or heal X tank.

Guilds will always have bad nights we just prefer not to talk about them. Last week we saved SSC for Monday night thinking oh its on farm we'll just blow right through. It ended up taking us 5 hours to down Moro/Kara/Leo/Vashj with a ton of retarded wipes on everything. Last night it took us 3.5 hours Hydross -> Vashj. My point is that if you have a bad night forget about it and move the fuck on.

Back to Kael. I think the trash sucks as well, but only because the fight is so long. If you can manage to recover in his room so you don't have to reclear the 3 6-packs that does help a lot in my mind as well.

Phase 4 is only hard if you make it hard. People screaming they are mind controlled with chaotic tones in the voice, yelling about flamestrikes and kicks and shields and other things really make it seem harder than it is. Tell people to calm the fuck down there are 2 things to do. Kill eggs, break barriers. Mind control is not an issue just have mages sheep the people until they can be broken. For you main tanks out there. If a phoenix spawns behind kael it is useful if you tell the kiter "I'm moving kael (left or right) take the phoenix the opposite way!" That way you don't train the rogues with hellfire.

Anyway I think Kael is one of the most rewarding bosses thus far in the game and perfect difficulty for his place in progression. Don't burn out on him, if you are try shorter progression sessions over more days and that has helped us get through burnout in the past.

One thing that can really help is to ask your guildmates to write up a little summary of their job on your guild forum or whatever. It's one thing to tell someone to tank the engineer but it's a completely other thing to explain him all the little tricks than can happen like how to react when thaladred aggros you, how to quickly aggro him at the start of p4, being sure you always have the mace buff, etc... It will save you many wipes if you just communicate and transmit what you learnt.

See, that's the problem. I had a hard time pin-pointing it on anyone by the end of the night. Anything and everything that could happen at the worst time, did. It was mostly individual screw-ups that never happened more than once.

I guess the difficulty in this fight is keeping your head in the game just long enough (~30 minutes) not to screw up. On the attempt we killed him, I had called it as being the last attempt of the night, Trash was respawning and everyone was irritated... and we did it flawlessly. No deaths. I just don't understand where that play was lurking the entire night.

Funny thing about it, I don't think any of the people we were keying that particular night died early on any of the attempts -- they all picked it up very quickly. So, I suppose it can be chalked up to a lack of focus or practice on our main raiders.

I would say the only person this doesn't apply to is the Sanguinar tank.

Of course, I'm probably delusional, fear isn't a major factor in The Burning Crusade right?

Right.

Though with the shield, catching fears in p3 is much less of an issue.

Come on now...that particular fear is really nothing at all to complain about. You don't even have to switch stances to prevent it, just click your shield once.

Edit: See above

I've found that looting/selecting problems with picking up the legendary weapons is just something that decreases over time. People will complain when they have to get used to clicking in the midst of melee DPS and AoE, but it becomes much easier after about a night of wipes. There's no realistic, effective solution besides telling the AoE/Melee to back out as quickly as possible after their weapon dies. Also, when looting, don't stand on top of the weapon.

When learning Kael'thas we found that "shifting" the aoe pack after certain weapons died really helped us out alot in looting the weapons quickly and efficiently.

Also a question, I've never used the shield for fears before so I dont know exactly how it works with them as I am always on kael during phase4, but during one of the attempts we had last week I had gotten Intimidating Shouted(Warrior fear) just as I was about to click the shield when the initial pyro was about half way through its cast. I proceeded to start spamming on the shield but it didn't remove the fear, does it interact differently with warrior fear because it's considered physical? Always a possibility that I wasnt clicking on it properly or clicking another button in the panic, but it's never fun taking a pyro to the back for 22k when theres seemingly nothing I can do about it.

I thought the shield doesn't work like berserker rage at all, meaning it simply makes you immune to fear, rather than making you immune + removing fear effects. So pre-emptively hit it or you cannot avoid fears :/

No you can actually click the shield during fear, just like Berserker rage.
I noticed this several times when I got feared with something like half a second of cooldown left on the shield.

Hmm the other option is you were the primary target of his intimidating shout. Intimidating shout functions like a stun on the primary target (breaks on any damage), once again not sure exactly how that would interact with the shield.

You dont even need the shield for tanking Sanguinar his fears are relatively long and on the off chance he fears early he will only run off for 2-3 seconds before you break the fear and snaps back to you quickly.

It wasnt Lord Sanguinar, it was a mind controlled warrior in the raid who casted Intimidating Shout(which is physical not magical), I wouldn't have been the primary target as I ran when it hit me, just wasn't quite sure if it worked or not with the shield.

What helped us tremendously was doing the fight 3 days straight with the same setup - especially those "I'll loot the shield, mace and staff and take them to Persons X,Y and Z" jobs got way more secure.

The fight finally "clicked" when one of our resto-shammies was late one day and we had only 6 of the planned healers online; we decided to try just "how it feels" and added another caster instead (we never raided with less than 8 healers before - exception being Astromancer):
All of a sudden we finished phase 3 with only Capernian alive. That freed up another MC-Dispeller and healer and thus made the fight a lot easier compared to Sanguinar still being alive.

We were fortunate enough to get our second kill yesterday within 2 hours of tries while finishing another 13 keys and thus being done with attunements for a while - though we didn't switch out any overly important persons (Capernian/Sanguinar/KT tanks + phoenix kiter being the most critical ones in my opinion) - and yet I still expect quite a few wipes to him in the future

I emphasize once more what Quigon mentioned:
Don't put yourself under pressure by "standards" that you read about in any forum (and yet I'm doing it every so often myself ).
A lot of what you read about is (vastly) exaggerated anyways - especially when it comes to clearing times or consumables "not" used, as there usually is *always* someone in the raid who used them.

we are about to start on KT this week. Just need to kill solarian on sunday to start him, and i was wondering if someone could answer a few questions for me:

1. Which classes pick up which weapons? I know hunters get the bow tanks get the shield and casters take the staff? Also what is there function? I also saw gurgthock mention a pally loots the dagger for a OT on weapons

2. For phase 3 what is the correct kill order if we are going to go with a similar AOE strat as EJ

3. Could I get a few tips on the mechanics of the phoniex + pyro abilities that KT does


I apologize in advance if this is asking for to much game mechanics on the fight and should just experience it for myself, but i do like to go into a fight alittle bit prepared as my guild is not super hardcore, and normally alot of guilds have bleeding edge content on farm by the time we get to it.

This post bothers me a bit - but I'll try and be helpful and simply say reread the thread. And don't go into this fight with only 1 strategy in mind, because your guild may not execute well that way. I would also put a little more thought and effort into your post since you're sort of expecting someone to respond out of their own good heart to give you advice and help, and really poor grammar shits on these forums - that really are offering you and thousands of others a lot of help and community - maybe I'm overreacting to a few uncapped letters.

Again though, read the discussions between Praetorian and I and many others about AE'ing and which order weapons should be killed in - as for who loots what, I'd recommend wowhead.com and reading the descriptions on the weapons themselves. (I believe page 1).

Honestly, your guild may not be "super hardcore," but your guild doesn't need to be. If you're the raid leader, you should be able to figure out this sort of information on your own, and come with slightly more informed questions. Read the bosskillers writeup (which, for Kael, is actually very good, even if it is slanted towards one particular strat). There are a ton of videos, many of which are very cool. I think the Last Resort video is kind of the definitive Kael video, though you should watch a couple of others too to see the different approaches people take. Ask yourself what the pros/cons of those approaches are, and decide which you favor. Then come here with informed questions beyond "what is the kill order" and "what are the mechanics."

Unless you're in Nihilum, Curse, LR, DnT, etc., you're not going to have to develop the skill of learning new bosses in a complete vacuum. Instead hone the skill of absorbing the information that's out there. Visit warcraftmovies.com regularly, check WWS parses of fights you're going to do, and search ability names that you see used there on Thottbot. It's all easier than it sounds, and developing that skill will serve your guild far, far better in the long run than running here to ask for canned strats.