There is no reason not to debuff Thaladred with the dagger. A tank will not get gibbed by him while applying the debuff - I wasn't paying full attention while dragging the shield round (so casters could dot it) and ended up having to "tank" thaladred through the phase - it's a bit healing intensive, but it's possible (as long as he doesn't target you a second time, and then the knockback should save you anyway).

Our kill:
http://files.filefront.com/celebrity...0141;/fileinfo .html

Doesn't show Phase 1. It's a pretty clean kill really - we've had 2 and they both went down exactly the same even though we had 6-7 people who had never done the fight the second time. Our second kill was incredibly clean, one death to a random conflag+fireball in p1 and that was it - not sure if we had any in P1 in the first kill (but Kirr(shaman) managed to die 3 times in the first kill I think, l2p). We did have 4 bloodlusts on the second kill though, which helps DPS rather heavily The video shows that if you time it right (as I said earlier) you should have the egg from a pheonix about 2 seconds after the pyro-shield goes down.

The entire point of the fight is to have the Staff and Mace for P3, the shield for P4, and Thaladred down for P4/5 or else it's pretty much a wipe. If your DPS sucks that much that that's all you can get down, then you should still be able to control the fight. It might take a bit longer, but it should still be possible.

The fight has changed quite a few times. IIRC the engineer did the silencing spell between the big 2.1 patch and the hotfix after.

When we first started doing Kael, the astromancer did the always so fun void zones for example. We actually thought that we could have killed Kael in that original version --- with the MT using the staff a few hundred times to get aggro and what not. But then the fight got changed into maybe the most overtuned fight in WoW history and we gave up and didn't try Kael again until after the 2.1 patch.

Ehm, the fight was hardly doable pre 2.1. The problem was that Kael was building up aggro before he actually spawned. There's a patch with the notes 'kael now correctly resets aggro when he enters the fight.'. Good luck trying to win the fight with healers tanking kael until the tank finally overaggroes them.

But yeah, it got changed a lot. It used to work like chromy. The darkener had either shadowstep or the ranged attack that he's got now. Astromancer was either shadow bolt/void zones (ticking for 6k btw) or fireball/conflag (ticking for 1500 isntead of the 500 now) and the engineer was doing either the stun or a debuff on the tank that silenced any healer landing a non-hot heal on him for 15 seconds. That's why you see LR hunter kiting the engineer in their video. Because just straight up warrior tanking (which is the easiest solution now) was posibble but required good coordination among healers in p1 and was impossible in p2.

And yeah, you can debuff the gazer with the dagger but we have one prot tank tanking the fear dude and one prot tank tanking the engineer. I suppose we should just change the engineer tank from prot warrior to bear and have the prot warrior add 25% spelldmg. Should increase dps on the darkener by a ton.

Right, after I posted I thought that maybe someone might wonder about that so I did a ninja edit but you were too fast;p

Personally, I don't like AoE. I've seen it done in videos, and it looks great. However, we haven't had much success with it. We prefer the focus-fire & tab-dot route. Regardless, the weapon kill order sets the tone for the hardest phase in the encounter: Phase 3. You should have 5-6 down by the time the next phase starts. Devastation and Warp Blades provide the smallest benefit and pose the least threat. If anything, these should be killed last. The rest can be done in any order, since it's easy to kill at least five before Phase 3 starts. I like having a Shield for Sanguinar's tank, Maces for Capernian and Staves for everyone. Dagger & Bow greatly increases DPS in Phase 1. Sword and Axe are meh.

I totally agree with you. My guild does Capernian > Thaladred > Telonicus > Sanguinar. It's solid, but I prefer a different order. We kill KT pretty easily, and "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". However, for the sake of argument and advice for other guilds, I think Thaladred should go down first. IMO, this fight is won and lost in Phase Three (Advisor respawn). Phase 3 is crucial because you want the advisors to be as close to dead as possible coming into Phase 4. Your kill order should reflect this. Second of all, you need to eliminate the biggest threats first, in order to go into Phase 4 with a full head of steam. Your kill order should reflect this as well.

Thaladred is the biggest problem this phase. It seems simple: If you are gazed, run the fuck away from him. However, there are a few things to consider. First of all, many players make the mistake of thinking "There is a 1/25 chance he will pick me next. He won't Gaze me. I don't have to move out of his way." If 5-10 players think this way, I guarantee many many Thaladred accidents. As a result, all players must respect Thaladred's space and act as if they are the next person to be Gazed. This horribly compromises your DPS. As ranged DPS repositions, their casting-time is limited. If Thaladred goes down first, the DPS done to the next target will be a lot steadier. Basically...

-Telonicus requires the attention of one player: Bomb Kiter
-Capernian requires the attention of two players: Warlock & Healer
-Sanguinar requires the attention of two to three players: Tank & Healer(s)
-Thaladred requires the attention of twenty-five players: Everyone

That is exactly what we do, bear on engineer - our MT on thaladred.

Its funny you mention that cause on what was almost our first kill we had two elites and two striders up and it was only like a 1% wipe. The shock blasts are scary as hell if they land with all that goin on though.

Here's what we do

When weapons spawn, we have a hunter tank the bow off to the side of the raid, so multishots wont hit anyone but the hunter. One healer is easily enough to keep the hunter up.
A dps warrior (fury, arms, doesn't matter) dps tanks the Mace. All of the melee dps kills the mace as well. Then the rest of the weapons are either single or double tanked and everything is aoe'd down. (The axe is tanked a bit off to the side so it wont kill people, but still gets hit by aoe). Make sure your melee dps is interrupting the heals of the mace, and your casters are interrupting the casts of the staff. Paladins assist with stuns on the Staff. BOF on crucial tanks when they get frost nova'd. When melee finish with the mace, they switch to the staff, then anything else alive.

Everything is dead before the adds are revived, sometimes though the bow might just barely be left alive (sub 40ish, dies quickly as people switch to it and finish it off).

Telonicus - Warrior tank
Capernian - Warlock tank
Sanguinar - Warrior tank

Immediatly the hunter and all the melee dps go on Telonicus, and burn him down, while all of the ranged casters + a prot warrior kill Thaladred. (warrior uses dagger to put up the magic debuff). Once those two adds are dead, the whole raid switches over and kills Sanguinar. Done properly and efficiently, you'll have 3 adds and all weapons dead before Kael spawns.

At that point it's just Capernian and Kael up, and Capernian is so easily controlled that she quickly falls over and you're left with just Kael. We burn through the shields, and our last kill a single pyroblast didn't get off (after the first one abosrbed by the Bulwark, that is, so it went first pyro cast, second interrupt, third interrupt).

Make sure you have people with the staff, Use: 'ing it periodically to refresh the buff, positioned all around the room making sure everyone has the buff. Otherwise stuff gets nasty as a potentially key offtank (Phoenix OT, capernian OT, etc) gets confused and you get in trouble.

Have your extra prot warriors/rogues use the daggers to dispel MC's off people, spamming shiv/hamstring so you don't kill them waiting for it to proc.

Sounds about exactly the way we do it.

If you can look past the messy UI (and the fact that he cant see flamestrikes ) it gives a decent idea of one the ways you can do the transition.

http://showdown.cr0w.net/media.php?file=10

We almost manage to have always weapons bar the Axe down before the adds spawn again, the axe is in that kill quickly finished off before all ranged go for Thaladred and melee with a hunter goes for the engineer.

We've been doing some tries this evening, but in phase 1 we keep getting Conflags on our Druid Moonkin tanking Grand Astromancer Capernian, screwing everything up from the start when she starts running for other people, is this supposed to happen? We tried having the druid outranging it, but Capernian ran up to her alot quicker than the druid could move away. Any thoughts?

Either someone else isn't in range or your moonkin isn't top threat.

Ok, now we had our Moonkin on 35~yards range, several other people within 30~ yards, no one above the druid on threat, suddenly Capernian leaps 15 yards towards the druid and conflags it. Why?

::Edit:: Might it be just because we use a moonkin? Some kind of de-target ability that only works against humanoids or something?

Flaky caster AI. You never saw Vek'lor randomly do similar things with a warlock tanking him? We had the best results with our tank standing at like 30.5 yards away (easy for a warlock with 30yd range, just back up until you're OOR, then take a tiny tiny step forward). Can replicate this with any 30yd range spell, of course.

We didn't play around too much with the range and just accepted that it can hit the tank at any time. It helps to have a lot of people in range as possible conflag targets to minimize the chance of it hitting your tank. Also be ready to heal #2 in threat. Anyone who is in the top threat spots absolutely has to stay in her fireball range so she doesn't run through the raid and starts AE'ing.

I also sometimes run into her melee range and out again just in time to not get hit by the AE. Cuts the number of fireballs in half.

What we do to remove the randomness of Capernian during stage 1 is have a Hunter FD, put some AR on, and send their pet in. Capernian will then proceed to chain cast AE. She will still use conflag on the raid, but she will stay in place. The only time she ever fireballs is right after a conflag, but that rarely happens.

I was actually playing a warlock back in AQ40, tanking Vek'lor. I remember him bolting towards me at some points, then I just moved 1 step in whatever direction and he stopped.

Now we tried having a warlock tanking Capernian without any other changes, and it worked really fine. No leaping conflagerates there

::Edit:: Some more tries with a warlock, no conflagerate on the warlock. And when I talked about our moonkin getting Conflagerates I didnt mean 1-2, I meant 70% of all conflagerates targeted upon him.

::Edit 2:: Off-topic and totally random: The Cosmic Infuser 'proc' activates from Bloodthirst heals. :O

We have 2 "tanks" on it - one warlock wearing (minor) fire resist and a bit of stam gear (primary tank who also tanks it in p3/4) and the second is just the warlock with highest stam using an imp, standing near (but not too near) the first tank. We always seem to get the first conflag on the main warlock.

We do the same thing. Second lock tries to stay under first on threat, but if she conflags MT/FR lock twice we just say fuckit and burn her down with the non FR lock tank, it's easily heal able.

Let the range tank shoot her right where she spawns and have warriors/bears TC/hit her once, just build a bit of aggro, all other guys oor. If the first conflag hits your ranged tank, she'll start fireballing a warrior/bear. Heal that up. When conflag stops, move her to where you want to tank her. If the first conflag hits a tank/bear, let the ranged tank move her right then while 1 guy heals up that guy. Once she's positioned, have guys that can easily survive her conflag stand within 30y. And have as many as possible. You can have 2 guys on top of each other, easily healable. Or just lot's of guys 6-7y away from each other. Just make sure there's a lot in range so chances your tank gets hit are low.
If your tank gets conflagged anyway, full dps stop and just heal that guy through. But this way you minimize the chance for conflag to screw you over.

Ok, thank you for these words

I'm not sure how that's supposed to be handled in p3 though, but I guess we'll find out

::Edit:: I suck at typing after I've raided.

That's what the staff is for.

Conflag has a 30 yard range and fireball has a 35 yard range. Your tank needs to stay between 30 and 35 yards, and you need conflag sponges within 30 yards. She still occassionlly shoots one fireball at people when she turns to conflag them, but you can use Grounding Totem to absorb it.