No, no, no, no ...

1. The staff buff lasts 15 minutes.
2. The staff buff is never used up!

The mechanic behind the staff buff is quite complicated, that's why there's so much contradicting information.
It's a combination of a buff and an aura. Meaning:
When you use the staff, you activate an aura, which grants a buff (Mental Protection Field). When you leave the aura range, you lose the buff and you will never gain it again, even if you run inside the aura range. You can only gain it again if the staff-wielder activates the staff.

That's why people are told to macro the staff use. In phase 3/4 your raid moves all over the place, which leads to lost auras due to moving out of range.

So you don't have to put a staff in each grp since its an aura? just make sure they stick together?

I've never bothered to figure out the real mechanics of the aura (I just slaved it to my AM, AB or Fireball depending on spec at the time) but I can guarantee that you can leave the area and be just fine if enough people are doing the same. It absolutely does not require you to be in my (or any other staff user's) group is all I can tell you.

That is true, the aura is raidwide within 30 yards of the person with the debuff. Just make sure people with the staff debuff are evenly distributed around the room.

So they changed the staff? It used to be a charge that had to be reapplied after every disorient. We had our Capernian tank wlock stand next to our MT and the staff buff absolutely dropped off every single time he used the disorient. Havent killed Kael in a while now though so things might have changed.

I'm looking forward to see how the nerf affects us. We were before patch at everything dead but shield (20%), sword (10%), axe (50%). And in p3 telonicus and thaladred dead.
I'm hoping we will get to almost downing the axe at the end of p2. And in p3 also capernian dead.
Reclearing to him tonight. Anyone got some experience already?

We killed Kael last night easily (1-shot), after 2 days of wiping Sunday + Monday. This was our first Kael kill since some major guild rebuilding, so at least 50% of the raid had not previously killed him.

As expected we went from having weapons barely down when advisors up, and Sang up when Kael came out to standing around waiting for advisors to spawn and Copernian dying as Kael came out.

We did encounter a possible bug where people who were nowhere near Kael in P5 had the -HP debuff stacked on them several times - in this case a lock who has done the fight many times, there's no way he was in melee range of Kael at any point in p5. Is there any other way to get the debuff?

It has nothing to do with proximity to kael. There are 3-4 roaming clouds that move across the ground. They are extremely hard to see, and appear something akin to a 2-dimensional circle of air. Hard to explain, but look closely at the ground around kael and you'll see them.

First kill for us last night after clearing the rest of TK as well (and getting a late start due to patch/addon issues for some people.)

As Dralmoo says above, the changes do make a noticeable difference. We went from just barely getting all weapons down at the end of P2 and just barely having Sang/Tel/Thal down at the end of P3 to having weapons down with 20 seconds to spare and having all four advisors down at the start of P4. What made it even more striking was that we had no shadow priest last night, whereas we've had at least one on every previous attempt that was even moderately productive.

It's not just the nerf to weapon/advisor hp. Almost every dps class got some kind of buff and the sum total of all of them really adds up to a significant change in the encounter. I'd say they probably overshot the mark a little with the nerf, but at this point I'm not complaining.

Much thanks to everyone who's posted advice/thoughts/strategies in this thread. They helped us a lot.

The Nether Vapor debuff did seem to affect people more than usual, but nothing that we couldn't handle. I was sitting next to my warrior friend, who was on MC duty and he got down to 5k health at one point thanks to the debuff, I wasn't paying enough attention to whether or not he was banging on KT during gravity lapse though.

Went from about 10-15 seconds of downtime from Phase 2-3 to a good 30 seconds of sitting around regenning mana. Phase 3-4 went from Capernian around halfway to all advisors dead about 5-10 seconds before Kael popped. Two shock barriers before Phase 5. Only 2 phoenixes the entire fight with the second turning into an egg with Kael at 10%

Well, that's good to know! Previously I was always DPS/dispel duty and just floated very far back from Kael and just avoided them, I guess.

Well that was a funky double post 3 hours later.

On topic, some people have been reporting that Arcane Shot now dispels KT's shield. Anyone else test/find this?

It's probably related to the "arcane shots dispell everything" bug going on. I wouldn't count on it to actually work forever.

Hi, my guild is currently doing very excellent on Kael. We are getting into stage 4 well, but we believe our MT is a bit under-geared at the moment (22000ish health with max buffs, mitigation, but pyroblasts are around 23000) to handle the 3 pyroblasts. We are going to try the new pain suppression most likely, and that may solve the issue, but I was wondering if there are any other factors we are missing to survive these pyroblasts. I was thinking perhaps intervene could absorb one if it works, or maybe trying to get a max hp bear druid with barkskin up to take it. Any ideas are greatly welcome.

Oh also Arcane shot doesn't work anymore on the shield.

Use the Legendary Shield to absorb the first. DPS needs to be burning the crap out of the shield. If you can't interrupt the second, use a Fire Protection potion, last stand, nightmare seed, etc. 3rd pyro is always interruptible. Either way bosskillers.com or a brief search of anything explaining the fight would have strategies for the shock barrier and pyroblast.

We were consistently getting into P4 before the nerf and we got our 1st kill tonight on just the 3rd try. The nerf has made the fight a lot more forgiving now. We had 1 rogue die early in phase 2 & we still ended up killing him comfortably.

Can't even begin to say how both happy and dismayed I am at the same time. Yay it makes it a lot easier for us to key people, naaay it's way to easy for anyone to do now. It used to be a DPS race, now it's like everything down before P4 then go sit in a corner. Oh well I'm gonna look on the bright side, easier to key people !=)

well, have to remember, a good bit of your raid probably picked up some new heroic gear pieces. many classes also got dps buffs and mana efficiency buffs.

that + the 10% advisors and weapons hp loss definitely makes the encounter different.


We got our first kill last night as i'm sure many guilds did and will this week. having 5 separate phases (which guilds who outgear kael always had) instead of the blended p2/p3/p4 does significantly loosen the difficulty of this fight.

In a sense it cheapens the accomplishment for those of us who killed him "pre-nerf", so I understand the sentiment. A lot of guilds will be moving into BT/MH but I suspect they will still struggle to move past Teron/Azgalor too fast. It took us a long time to kill Kael due to reteaching the fight and losing a lot of geared players but BT fights seem to me at least, to have much better learning curves. I'd rather wipe and learn a boss like Gurtogg than the old Kael, the fight is just so long each wipe had a significant cost.

I don't see how it cheapens the accomplishment of those of us who killed pre-nerf at all. I think it, if anything, would cheapen the people who kill him now, because they don't have the chance to kill him at his pre-2.3 state. Is it easier? Sure. Does it affect me at all? Nope - I probably won't see KT again for another month.

We get to brag (if you're into that sort of thing) "Yea, we killed him pre-2.3" and it means we had a harder fight to deal with and anyone who might care will understand that.

Agreed, if it cheapens the accomplishment of anyone, if you care, it would be people who now are able to kill him. Guilds that killed him previously can still look at that as a point of pride, hell my guild still has people who occasionally mention how we killed Ragnaros pre-some nerf or another.

Another decent size nerf to the encounter comes from Druid battle-rez being dropped to a 20 minute cooldown, with a fight as long as Kael you're probably gonna have it up every attempt if you're making decent progress.

Kael is a great, great encounter. I don't know if anyone else feels this way, but its one of the few fights I really enjoy doing as a raid leader, I really feel like I can have a meaningful effect on it, giving precise instructions, managing the group and targets, swapping groups around if necessary, etc. Contrast that to Vashj, where normally all I say is "Come on guys, focus!" while some tainted despawns on the far side of the room or something.

We were pretty close to a kill before the patch and it does not bother me at all that he is nerfed when we face him tonight. I doubt it will lessen the feeling of joy when he hits the floor.
As for bragging rights for the people who did kill him before 2.3, congratulations to you all, but it does not lessen my game enjoyment.