We're currently working on him and have hit phase 4 several times now and gradually getting better at getting advisors down before phase 4. We tried the AoE tactic for a while with 6 -7 mages/locks and just could not get weapons down satisfactory, I dont understand how you are able to do it with 5. On our best AoE attempts we had 5 weapons down 15 seconds before phase 3, shield on 40% and Axe on full hp.
There are likely a lot of improvements you can do to your strategy. First of all, have the axe in the AoE (tank it a little to the side). It might cause a couple of wipes when ppl are getting used to it, but it is definately worth it. I'd also suggest you pull the bow into the AoE. We have our hunter pick it up, and then run back a bit so that it moves into a good position.
Make sure your warlocks are using CoS on all weapons (easy to do in the small 'waiting' period while weapons are being positioned). An extra 10% dps for your AoErs is very important. I hope your shadow priest(s) are tabbing through all weapons as well, to maximise dps and stack shadow weaving.
Make sure you're using Heroisms in the best possible way. This means switching groups around to give your mages and warlocks as many heroisms as possible. We have an elemental shaman grouped with the mages, but have to swap in our enhancement shaman (+the MTs warlock) with the warlocks. Swap em back right after heroism is cast of course. Only if you are 100% sure phase 2 is going to go perfect should you save any heroisms for phase 3 imo.
Also, not totally related, but I'd suggest your mace and staff tanks pull them out before they die, so everyone can loot easily.
And how can you say 5 dead weapons is not good? When we tried single-target for a day, we didn't even get 4 down. It's very doable with that, and if you start pulling the axe into AoE, You're down to just 1 weapon, on 40%.
Originally Posted by Giske
We tried having Thaladred killed first and it was a disaster, Remote Toy got gazed people owned all over the place and it took ages getting him down. I dont know if it was just ranged DPS playing poorly, but doing engineer first has yielded the best results for us so far. We've noticed the staff buff has a nasty tendency to just drop off so thats why Remote Toy was causing deaths.
All I can say is, there is a very good reason pretty much everyone kills Thaladred first. All casters should be spamming the staff all the time, there is no way anyone should get stunned by the toys.
I guess we just need more experience handling phase 3 and the phase 4 transition, we've only put in about 6 hours of wipes on him so far, should be able to get another 5-ish hours the upcoming reset. Much like Vashj I suppose where we wiped retardely for the first 3 weeks of killing her until we started 1-2 shotting her.
My guild had some problems with kael ( the night after our first stable p4 where we died to him not coping with pyro ) the MT + about 4-5 core raiders left the guild, so we had some downtime away from kael before we came back to him ( we had spent about 5-6 nights total on him ) and I felt with another night we would have downed him before those guys left.
Our problems with the old group were that we had the phasehift bulwark and devastation up going into p3, which really stressed the healers and made it harder to transition smoothly into phase 4.
The solution of course - was optimising our dps in phase 2, we generally have 3-4 mages and 2-4 locks per raid.
We have gone from having 2 weapons up moving into p2, to having all weapons down in p2 with up to 10-20s left to p3 without any dps gearing up - just altering strategy.
As already stated, we position all weapons around the staff with the exceptions of the bow and axe - the bow is over on the east side and is dps'd first - during this period we get shadowweaving+cos and a set of dots on the axe.
All melee+tanks+aoers on the rest of the weapons are on the west side of the room with the staff and positioned to the west, the axe is moved so that its whirlwind doesnt hit anyone else but catches some/enough of the aoe damage that it dies in p2.
The other key to phase 2 is that melee/single target dps is assigned to the daggers so they die first - I also make sure to recieve a Blessing of freedom to deal with the frostnova and move them out of the around at around 20-25% of their life so they are easily lootable by everyone who needs them, melee dps then splits up to max debuff as many of the weapons as possible .
@Exog. Off topic a bit here, but could you tell me what mods your using? And what is that Mod thats telling you your MH and OH speed at the bottom just to the right?
Also, I've read every word of this thread and thanks for all the people that gave imput A Very VERY interesting read.
Have youtried turning enemy name plates on? It might be easier to loot the weapons all bunched up. Had to do that when season 2 came out everyone was cowding the vendor.
Well we didn't kill him last night. Still having "issues" with our tank surviving the pyro blasts. Not from a lack of HP or consumables, but from a lack of comunication. On our best attempt we had KT at 75% going into the 2nd round of pyro blasts when the MT says on vent "ok pws me now" and the priest assigned to do it says "can't i'm out of mana." Tank got hit with a 21000 pyro blast and only had 20500 health with the nightmare seed up. I wanted to kill someone. In any case once we get that sorted out, which shouldn't take too long we should have him down.
Getting back to how we deal with phases 2 and 3, since a few people asked we generally roll with:
4 tanks -2 feral, 2 prot
6 healers - 3 Pallies, 2 Druids, 1 Priest
4 melee - Whatevers on.
4 Non AOE ranged - 2 Shadow Priests, 2 Hunters
7 AOE - 3 Locks and 4 mages typically
It does very sometimes and we have 3 melee and 8 AOE but the group composition right now is really just based around maximizing our strat and keeping the people with experience in as much as possible.
For phase 2 we have the four tanks pick up 5 of the weapons (axe, daggers, mace, shield+sword) with a hunter tanking the bow. All these weapons are grouped up around the bow and then the axe is backed in slowly to make sure it's only hitting it's tank.
During this time everyone else burns down the staff (we don't have anyone tank it but you can stunlock it so that it really doesn't do anything(for your shadow priests blackout is hax on this fight)).
Once the staff is dead the casters pick it up and all aoe goes to town on the weapons (keep COS up obviously). All the melee moves onto the mace and burns it down and our shadow priests split onto the axe and the mace (I'm usually on the axe and I focus fire it while keeping dots on the shield, 15% more damage from SoC helps a lot to balance out the damage. Once the mace is dead all the melee switch to the daggers and the shadow priest on the mace moves to the shield. The tank for the mace also taunts the shield to better distribute aggro. The dagger and bow generally die about the same time (15 seconds left and at that point all melee move to the sword. The shield axe and sword all die with about 5-10 seconds left.
So with that said don't try this verbatim, we started with an aoe strat and then fine tuned it to make sure everything was dying at the right time. I would suggest just doing that.
In phase 3 we put the melee dps on telonicus (engineer) along with 1 shadow priest (generally me, i'm in the healer group to help with mana so single target dps really helps me to that end. Also i provide the staff aura for those people.) and 1 hunter. All other ranged go onto thaledred. Thal usually dies with about 1:15 left and Telonicus dies with about 1 minute left. Then everyone jumps on Sanguinar. He dies with about 15 seconds left and by the time KT pops we have calpernian at 60% or so. We have a rule for her though which says, if you can't dps outside of 30 yards you don't dps her. No one gets conflagged. This means the shadow priests put up enough dots to get misery and shadow weaving on her then move up to work on KT and provide the staff buff.
About 30 seconds in we are all on KT and ready to start the real fight >.<.
Also I wouldn't say our dps is stellar by any means. Out top dps even through the AOE phases comes from our two shadow priests and we are holding 900 dps. I think where we really excel is in our quickness of movement. Everything in phases 1-3 is very automated at this point. All I say during these phases are "ok phase 2/3 incoming think of what you need to do next and be ready to do it."
Not surviving pyro sounds like a mistake in your strategy, not a max hp issue. On most of our kills, Kael doesn't get a single pyro cast off.
Our strategy is all dps on Kael as soon as the shield goes up - typically 5 sec before the pyro warning goes off. As soon as the Pyro castbar goes up on Kael, have your tank hit the Phaseshift Bulwark - this will eat the first Pyro completely. It's a 4sec buff, so make sure the MT isn't using the clicky too early. I click it half way through the pyro castbar, just to make sure.
With all your dps on Kael, there is absolutely no way the shield doesn't come down in time to kick the second Pyro.
That said, killing Kael is pretty much about how well you handle the 'exceptional' cases - the accidents that happen all the time. So your MT should have a fire protection pot and nightmare seeds just in case - and be ready to last stand if needed to survive mistakes with the pyro shield.
We typically kill the phoenix right after the pyro is down, just so that it doesn't survive long enough to sync with the next pyro.
For the record, we've both wiped and survived some pretty insane combinations in P4 on Kael - just because MC adds so many possibilities for accidents. Last night he MCd me - the main tank - and I was on top of the threat list at the time. I have absolutely no clue how that is even possible. We've had our arms war MS the main tank - that was entertaining. Also, we run fear ward on the MT during phase 4 because we've had two wipes due to MCd warriors intimidating shout hitting the MT.
Well we didn't kill him last night. Still having "issues" with our tank surviving the pyro blasts. Not from a lack of HP or consumables, but from a lack of comunication. On our best attempt we had KT at 75% going into the 2nd round of pyro blasts when the MT says on vent "ok pws me now" and the priest assigned to do it says "can't i'm out of mana." Tank got hit with a 21000 pyro blast and only had 20500 health with the nightmare seed up. I wanted to kill someone. In any case once we get that sorted out, which shouldn't take too long we should have him down.
That seems a bit low to me for having Nightmare seed up. at 20.5k, a 1.5k PW:S would get him to being able to take 22k damage, and a Pyro is fully capable of doing over 23k. I'd really recommend stacking a bit higher on him. Our first kill I believe I was at 20.6k with imp/flask/30 stam food, so a Nightmare seed put me at 22.6, even then it was sketchy if Shield wasn't up in time, and if you're in the range of him being possibly 1 shot through a shield he should look into getting higher HP (IMO)
Well we made a choice to just eat pyro blasts when we started working on this encounter since our guild isn't particuarly great at putting out high dps. However if it continues to be an issue then i'm definately game to try it. As for why we decided to do this came from a post i put on our internal forums about how to live through it:
For the pyroblasts that we will have to deal with. Looking at the top end damage we see:
55,000
27500 after mace buff
23100 after Imp Def stance
21300 after PWS is taken off
21200 after BoS is taken off
Now here is where things change up. We have 4 abilities we can use to mitigate this further. Major Fire Protection Potions, Nightmare Seed, Last Stand, Shield Wall.
With Major fire protection potions.
18400
With just Nightmare Seed
19200
With just Last Stand
16400
With just Shield Wall
10600
Now if we throw out Nightmare Seeds we are at a little bit higher health then our MT's usually have but it is easily doable with a flask and a few HP trinkets. Then in order to survive we have to do the following.
Major Fire Protection Potion
Last Stand
Major Fire Protection Potion
Shield Wall
Major Fire Protection Potion
If our tanks can get up to 19300 health or higher we can use nightmare seeds and we can extend the cycle to:
Nightmare Seed
Major Fire Protection Potion
Last Stand
Major Fire Protection Potion
Nightmare Seed
Major Fire Protection Potion
Shield Wall
Major Fire Protection Potion
Nightmare Seed
Major Fire Protection Potion
Meaning we can go from ~6.5 minutes in phase 4 to ~11.5 minutes in phase 4 if we have to.
All this is using the lowest values for each of buffs and the maximum value for the damage done by the spell.
Our tank has just about 19500 health fully buffed so it just made sence to not even bother with it. Right now our real problem is making sure the melee kick the third, the bulwark shield is up for the first, and POM and PWS are up for the second.
That seems a bit low to me for having Nightmare seed up. at 20.5k, a 1.5k PW:S would get him to being able to take 22k damage, and a Pyro is fully capable of doing over 23k. I'd really recommend stacking a bit higher on him. Our first kill I believe I was at 20.6k with imp/flask/30 stam food, so a Nightmare seed put me at 22.6, even then it was sketchy if Shield wasn't up in time, and if you're in the range of him being possibly 1 shot through a shield he should look into getting higher HP (IMO)
I agree and we made a huge push this last week to get the dark moon decks for our tanks however certain cards just don't like to drop. As for the nightmare seed, i can only take the tanks word for it that it was up. Still waiting for the WWS file to be posted since he should have had 21500 health with the seed up.
I really think at this point people are still in shock and awe of "ZOMG it's phase 4 /crap pants" and aren't thinking clearly.
Last edited by cheebamonkey : 08/14/07 at 3:50 PM.
Reason: spelling
One thing with pyros, the second pyro should be interuptable - if you have a phoenix coming up near a shield dont dps it, leave it till the shield is down, and call ranged to switch.
I use shield>2xconsumable ( nightmare seed+pot ) on the first set of pyros, then last stand the second set then shield wall then 2x consumable if they are back up on the 4th - not sure if you can get them back up for a 4th set of pyros. The key is waiting till 2nd pyro is ~70% before using a CD so if it is interupted you dont need to use anything.
Also dont forget to use the shield every CD in phase 5 because you're not taking pyros and it reduces your damage obv ).
My base HP tanking kael ( no hyjal/bt gear yet ) is 20200 ish.
The consumables/cds should be emergencies just in case the 2nd pyro isnt interupted - not a necessity for every set.
I agree and we made a huge push this last week to get the dark moon decks for our tanks however certain cards just don't like to drop. As for the nightmare seed, i can only take the tanks word for it that it was up. Still waiting for the WWS file to be posted since he should have had 21500 health with the seed up.
I really think at this point people are still in shock and awe of "ZOMG it's phase 4 /crap pants" and aren't thinking clearly.
21.5k with seed is much more reasonable than 20.5k, it still leaves room for the "damn I just died by 100hp" scenario but much more unlikely. As I said, I went in and we learned it with me at 20.6k or thereabouts, not interrupting the second Pyro ever. To this day we don't reliably get the second Pyro, simply because that's now how we learned it. You'll be perfectly capable of handling it with consumables for the Pyro's instead of ignoring everything to get that shield down or bust.
As for 19.5 without Darkmoon cards, that's not bad, and if you get the kill with that (and you can) that's great, it will become easier with higher tank HP as you find that the pyro's don't become scary and people don't worry as much, 20.5 shocked me as far too low, 21.5 with a seed is lower than I personally would go with, but it should be fine to get a kill.
I've been crunching numbers today and came up with that its fully possible to take the shield from 100% to 0% while killing Thaladred & Telonicus from secondary damage and putting 1 hunter full time on it, this will let a BM hunter use his pet more efficiently than on Thaladred plus stack the 25% physical debuff on it for rogue flurries and warrior cleaves & whirlwinds. Keeping the dagger debuff up on the shield combined with dots from affliction locks & spriests + Curse of Doom from Capernian tank & destro lock the shield should actually die before Thaladred if it enters phase 3 with less than 100% health which it surely will due to the dots & tank damage during phase 2.
I'm eager to test this out, but it all points towards being the most efficient way of dealing with the 7th weapon in phase 3.
I was wondering if anyone has tried tanking the astromancer with Nether Protection and what the result of going immune to fire dmg would be.
I was wondering if anyone's tried kiting/tanking phoenixes w/ a nether protection warlock XD. Not that I'm likely to get my guild to try it (we tried to tank Vashj striders once w/ a druid in shadow protection gear once, that was a good laugh . . .). But I think it might be kind of elegant if the warlock had some FR on and stood far enough away that the phoenix would fly towards but not eventually reach healers or whomever was next on aggro list during nether protection proc, and then turn around afterwards, confining it to a small and controllable area of the room.
Last edited by spiderella : 08/15/07 at 5:54 PM.
Reason: completing thoughts ftw
Just killed him tonight for the first try. I'll save the WWS link for that forum. One thing that got us which we weren't expecting was for those nether clouds to move. On one attempt where we wiped at 20% our MT landed only to find he had 2k Health left >.<. Also we picked up a few random stam trinkets (violet badge and whatnot) and got our tank to 20500 health fully buffed which made all the difference, had a few time where has was below 1k after a pyro during the night. Anyways thanks for the tips along the way.
As for how well things went along the way we had all weapons dead with 10 seconds left as usual. Single target the staff, AOE the rest with the melee going Mace, Daggers, Sword and with hunters on the bow and Shadow priests on the sheild/axe after the staff was dead.
Had Thal, Telonicus, and Sanguinar dead with 20 seconds left. We had melee and hunters start on Telonicus with one shadow priest with them (mana for the healers), all the rest of the casters on Thal. Both died about the same time at about 1:10 left in phase 3. Then everyone zerg Sang. After that all melee and I went over with the MT on KT, the rest finish off Capernian.
We ate the 2nd pyroblasts of each set in phase 4, tank had 20500 health fully buffed. Had a very good interupt rotation on the fireballs, only 11 landed on the MT the whole fight. Also we tanked the Phoenixes and DPS'ed them down (both them and the eggs). Another adjustment we made tonight was having hunters dispell MC on ranged, and melee tanking care of other melee
I think that covers it all. Most of it has been covered in other posts but this is what worked for us.
OK just wondering if anyone has had this happen to them. We went back to Kael'thas to get some attunements done for new guild members. We had problems for the early part of the night some people playing dumb etc. Our last attempt of the night we played to our potential and easily got Kael to his 50% cinematic. Then he rose up, and disappeared. We're all combat locked and the legendaries have despawned. Tried doing a /target kael command and all I got was the dumb warlock pet. Just a heads up and looking for a possible explanation as to why.
Seems like from what I'm reading here, simply eating the 2nd Pyroblast and never DPSing the shield is a strategy several guilds use. What's the minimum buffed HP a tank needs to keep eating Pyroblasts(keeping Shield Wall out of the rotation)? I assume with enough you can simply Last Stand the first, Major Fire Prot, and then just PW:S.
We decided to use the single target strat approach and it seems to work quite well...except for the part where we seem to be -way- behind on killing weapons and advisors.
This was our set-up during our last session with Kael -
3 holy paladins
1 resto druid
2 holy priest
1 resto shaman
our set-up consisted of 7 healers and 4 tanks.
kill order is split between ranged and melee :
melee - staff>mace( help ranged finish off mace)>dagger>sword
ranged - mace >bow>axe > guy who gazes > shield. hunter would assist melee once the bow dies.
we had our prot warrior on the mace and dagger ( debuffing guy who does the gaze ability later on), a feral druid on shield and swords ( tanking engineer later on), a feral druid on axe, and a DPS warrior tanking the staff ( tanking AoE fear guy later on). also a hunter tanking the bow.
control was fine for the most part. however we seems to have just WAY too much weapons up by phase 3. on our best attempts, going into phase 3, we have the shield ( locks use CoD on it) and sword up. the shield and sword was at near 100%, and melee had to bring the sword from 100% to 0% basically right at the start of phase 3 before they can DPS the engineer. the axe dies a few seconds into phase 3.
on p3 we have melee on engineer>aoe fear, and ranged on the gaze guy. melee manages to kill engineer shortly before kael comes up, and the gaze guy was at like 25% when kael spawns.
chaos came at that point >.< the best we managed was like maybe 30 seconds into p4 before people started dying quickly. is single target supposed to be like this? or is our dps sucking? or are we bringing too many healers?
Also, what do you guys think of cutting healing down....? i read about people bringing 5 healers? i think bringing only 5 will allow us to push higher dps, and also free up that DPS warrior...so it'll add 3 DPS, or around 20% more raid damage or so. would it be too much damage for 5 healers to take?
5 healers is complete suicide, we've been bringing 6. Healing isnt much of a problem on this fight, you need enough tanks to control everything and you need enough dps to make stuff go dead within a reasonable amount of time. We havent killed him yet, but we're pretty close. All I can say is keep practicing and tweaking phase 2, its the most crucial part of the fight.
Its just a really draining fight where 1 mistake will wipe you, add in the horrible trash and you get the worst fight to learn in the game basically.
5 healers is complete suicide, we've been bringing 6. Healing isnt much of a problem on this fight, you need enough tanks to control everything and you need enough dps to make stuff go dead within a reasonable amount of time. We havent killed him yet, but we're pretty close. All I can say is keep practicing and tweaking phase 2, its the most crucial part of the fight.
Its just a really draining fight where 1 mistake will wipe you, add in the horrible trash and you get the worst fight to learn in the game basically.
We are using similar kill order as you do Warbo, though we are killing staff and mace with all raid focusing on those 2, and then splitting in the same way you do. From my perspective I get a huge deal of damage on last 2 weapons, linking BF, haste trinket, berserking, and haste potion in one macro and using it with AR on daggers, which should be max debuffed with sunders, FF, and maybe CoR aswell to enhance BF damage. In 15 seconds of BF action it might be possible to do 45k extra damage to sword, so with 3 rogues doing the same sword is going to be badly damaged when we finish off daggers. Usually we have about 10 seconds to loot weapons, though casters are usually finishing off axe at this point.
When p3 starts, we have hunter tanking Telonicus, which works really well, as aggro he generates is simply fantastic. You might try to bring more shamans, if you have them in your roster, as bloodlusts can help your ranged to kill Thaladread faster if you will be hotswapping shamans.
08/14/07, 9:03 AM
A Very VERY interesting read.
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