Yes, but those guys are killing them^^ As I understand, you must use a class ability for decursing the MC which oftenly are doing lot of domage. But as you said, we must give more priority on MC.

We have never used more than six healers for Kael'thas. When I did the fight with my priest I didn't find the healing strain to be that hard. If I recall correctly I didn't even have to use potions at every cooldown.

Is your phoenix tank wearing some fire resistance gear? Do you have him in a group with a paladin for fire res aura? We usually have the paladin heal the tank for simplicity.

I definately think it is more an issue about being clear with assignements to healers than healers not coping unless your healers are undergeared. This may sound stupid, but make sure the one healing has looted and equipped the mace. The mace buff is very important to keep up on the Phoenix tank.

Mind control we deal with by having mages sheep then the free prot warrior and dps warriors dispell. We prefer to have the rouges get as much time on Kael'thas as possible, but if a warrior get mind controlled, they have to help out with dispelling too. They have to use a low damage attack to dispel. I don't know exactly what they are using but I have seen suggestions about using shiv/hamstring.

Yes maybe with 6 healers, fire resistance should be usefull.

Thank you,

I ran into some trouble our last kill where I (feral druid picking up phoenix) would get mind controlled by Kael, but once it was dispelled I was unable to use any abilities on my action-bars. I couldn't use any feral abilities and it threw out errors telling me I couldn't use that shape-shifted, none of the buttons for shifting forms worked, and attempting to use abilities that usually bring me out of form automatically refused to let me do just that.

After a panicky moment of auto-attack tanking a phoenix, I took a gamble and right-clicked the bear form buff and normality was restored. Has this happened to anyone before? I've not seen that kind of behaviour with other mind control abilities.

Also, ogotaï, I've never worn fire resistance to tank the phoenix in this phase, only regular tanking setup (I also tank weapons and telonicus). When a phoenix pops I have 1 dedicated healer, the incoming damage is quite easy to heal through.

In that case, how many healer who have in your raid and how many Phoenix tanker do you have?

Thank you all for your advice.

I've done the phoenix tanking solo without FR gear. Usually I have two healers on me, one on each side of the platform, and whomever I'm closer to is in charge of healing me. So effectively one healer at any given time, but my healers don't have to follow me around. I tank them off to either side of KT, with my back against a wall. This allows melee to quickly switch off KT onto the eggs when they're up. I think we brought ~7 healers total, although I might be mistaken on that.

A key part of that phase is that 2 phoenixes are never up at the same time. This almost always led to a wipe for us. It's useful to note that while the phoenixes will kill themself, they can also be killed earlier if that's more convenient with your KT-shield timing.

When we finally got our first kill, we found it so much easier to not dps the barrier at all - the tank should always be prepared to eat two pyros anyway, and the third will always be interrupted. Since it makes sense for the tank to use his pot/vine cd on the first pyro and the shield on the second pyro, interrupting the 2nd pyro gives no gain whatsoever.

By ignoring the barrier entirely, it made phoenix timing a non-issue. If an egg spawned, everyone switched to it straight away. If the barrier was up and a phoenix was up, everyone killed the phoenix and then killed the egg, then back to Kael.

This is conditional on your raid DPS of course. Our raid found that we were able to interrupt the FIRST pyro. Curse of doom timing helped greatly but we were still able to put out enough DPS to finish off the shield and interrupt that pyro. Even if we had dead people or people not all on Kael yet (MC's or whatever), we were still ALWAYS able to interrupt the second pyro.

Of course, we also ran with me MTing Kael (Yes, pallies can MT him fine) and one prot warrior OT for Sanguinar. It actually happened by accident as we were doing a 2 warrior / 1 prot pally setup and our Kael tank DC'd. I stepped up and we killed him the next attempt (On our second kill). We also ran with only 6 healers. Having only 6 healers and 2 tanks makes for a LOT of raid DPS.

I just called out on vent where DPS went. If we had time to burn down the phoenix and egg before pyro, I switched raid dps to the phoenix/egg. If we did not have enough time, we burned down kael and burned down the shield then immediately switched to the phoenix/egg.

Hmm people kill the pheonix? We just made our hunter kite him around, and park the egg near the melee for easy disposal.

Hi Yesterday we down KT. Thank you all for your avdices. But I have one more question, is there a but on KT during the damage is doing.

I explain:

2 times in P5, KT OS our MT1, he was full life and receive a damage of 459 damage and die.

Forgot I just saw that he was affected with a debuff which decrease his life

Is getting all the weapons down before P2 ends required? Kael caught us at a bad time, Vash down 3 weeks before 2.4 our Kael attempts were interrupted when 2.4 came out and we spend only a few hours on him every week. We one shot vashj 3-4 weeks in a row, the first week of 2.4 we one shot kaz'goral on our first attempt and the week after. Things were looking up then we go back to kael and just nightmare raid.

Our initial strat was all ranged on bow, melee on mace. Then aoe the rest. The problem with that was the staff kept teleporting around and positioning the axe to get in aoe range without killing anyone is a delicate matter.

We changed it to ranged nuke bow, range nuke staff, melee on mace, ranged aoes the rest but it's taking too long. P3 comes thaladred walks over and starts smashing faces. By the time P4 hits, kael is loose and it's just chaos with 2 or more advisors up.

So a few questions:
-Someone suggested sanguinars aoe fear can be line of sighted if we tank him behind the two pillars on the top left of kael (behind master engineer). is that true?

-Should we concentrate on getting all the weapons down in p2 or is it typical to leave the shield and axe through p3?

-if weapons are up in p2 should dps switch to kill thaladred before finishing off weapons?

When I killed him a couple months back, I instructed the AOE DPS to start earlier. We moved from all ranged killing the bow then AOE to start AOE at 60% Bow. Our melee killed the staff at the same time and we had a rogue keep the mace in control in the AOE, only to be taunted when at 10%. The only problem with this strategy was the fact that the shield was getting out of hand sometimes, killing a warlock. Not only did this speed up our P2 by about 20 seconds, we got this part of the fight down that night. This fight in my opinion is all about phase 2 -> 3. Once it goes smoothly, you just have to deal with unlucky mind controls and interrupting Kael.

I don't know if it can be LoS, but a tank should stance it and a healer should outrange it easily. Usually, you should tank sanginar and telonicus on opposite sides of the room. Leaving 1-2 weapons up is doable, but you run into the fact that you might end up behind in phase 3 by a minute or so. Thaldred, once dead in phase 3 makes it very easy to manage.

Remember your goal should be to kill all weapons in phase 2, it's an ideal situation for the rest of the fight.

The staff is teleporting? I wasn't aware it could do that... it never did that on us.

Anyway, we had weapon problems with all ranged on bow so I changed it to do an AoE earlier.

At start, mages + huntesr on bow, warlocks curse all the weapons for AoE and do some bow damage.
At 1:25 left on phase 2, I tell ranged to get off the bow and onto aoe, and I have a shaman heroism the warlocks(all 3 of our kills we had 6 aoe, 3 locks in one group 3 mages in another, shaman with both of them)
At 1:00 left I have the shaman in the mage group mana tide
At 0:45 left (heroism expiring) I swap the shamans and have the new lock shaman heroism again. And I have the new mage shaman mana tide (if he/she is resto), or I tell all the druids to burn their innervates on the mages - I preassign 1 druid to each mage (our final kill we only had 1 druid, so I just had him to the highest DPS mage)

Hunters finished off the mace when the bow died.
Shadow priests burned the axe the entire time, since they don't want to switch targets.

We did *much* better when I started managing mana tide/innervate/heroism, and when I had the aoe start such that they'd get 2 full heroisms.

I believe we also had all locks seed the shield - although possibly they agreed on different targets in advance and seeded 3 different ones.

On our first kill the shield died about 5 seconds after p2 ended, on subsequent kills about 5 seconds before p2 ended.

The axe was a problem until our tank learned to position it correctly - after that it tended to die easily in time.

Our problems are in phase 4. We are fine on barrier, and pyros.

We are doing poor on phoenix and MC.

We were initially spread out around the front stairs, with kael somewhat to the right, and phoenix tank to the left of the raid

People can switch from Kael, to egg, easily.

But it took forever for the two free offtanks to knock people out of MC since so spread out.

We grouped people up in front of the stairs, so MC people are closer, and get knocked out of MC much much more quickly.

But now we get screwed by a few things

-Flamestrike killing people since they were CC'd by mind control people, OR people CC'd the mind control people (hunter traps, ice novas) and those persons cannot move.

Phoenix FR tank gets MC'D ALL THE TIME and though the notes all say 'no big deal', for us it means people die. By the time we get the FR tank knocked out of MC (dodge, dodge, block, parry, miss...) and regains control of the phoenix, it already killed a healer, did hellfire to all kinds of people, etc

(Dual purpose, FR prot warrior eats conflags, then tanks mace, then does phoenix's in 4)

-The staff buffers for both the MT and FR tank get MC'ed, then we get hit with disorient. So the MT wandering around stupid in circles while kael kills people.

We played around with this a LOT and heres how we get them all down.

Theres typicall four melees in our raid. One on mace, one on staff, one on daggers, and one enhancement shaman "tanking" the staff.

Hunters, mages on the bow.

Warlocks dot bow, mace, shield, and doom on the axe.
We have a maladiction lock and a shadow priest debuffing all.

Once im comfortable with tanking my two weapons (threat wise, maybe a slam/dev each) I call it out on vent. Warlocks begin seeding like mad. Mages and hunters stay on the bow. I have macros made to target my specific weapons so I dont have to tab through the pile, and omen tracks them individually so I can see which I have to work harder on

Bow dies. Mages join the AOE. Hunters loot / equip the bow.

Hunters are split up (mace, staff, AXE since the axe doesnt get all the aoe.) Now their putting 25% phys debuff on two of those weapons, coupled with the melees.

The ONLY person who should loot the staff early is your Capra tank. People stopping to mouse over the pile etc and mess around and get staff and equip it are not doing AOE damage. They can get it after just fine.

NO HEROISM. We used to, but I moved heroism pops to phase 3 to get the advisors down. We still down the weapons with 10-15s to spare without it.

The MC is indeed by far the most random and most annoying to control element. Have your mages and warlocks setup their grid to show the MC debuff and have them spam sheeps and banish (on druids) to prevent MC'd people doing bad stuff while the dispellers chase them up.

Don't group. It just means a bad phoenix will cause massive raid damage and it also means everyone has to move all the time to avoid flamestrikes (since it's targeted on a player as opposed to a random spot). Your MC breakers (spare tanks, rogues) should have 50% increased movement speed from the sword buff. We had one particular attentive rogue doing pretty much all the dispelling work on his own while the free tank (we ran KT with three tanks) helped out a bit and watched the Phoenix.

That shouldn't happen. MC'd people don't take damage from Flamestrikes. What can happen is your tanks using hamstring to break the MC causing them to move slow and die to it. Tell them to use sunder. Also rogues should be spamming poisonless Shiv. Use more people if you feel it's too slow - Phase 4 is anything but a DPS race. If you GET to phase 4 you already passed the DPS check and the raid coordination check. All that remains is the execution check and the longevity check.

Stop using fire resist to tank this and assign a backup tank. Seriously, it's very simple to heal with one healer without using ANY fire resist thanks to the mace buff. If he gets MC'd, another tank intercepts in and taunts. We used a prot pally as main phoenix tank since he could bubble out of an MC, but warriors can spellreflect the hellfire. Just have one on standby = problem solved. If both get MC'd at the same time.... well hope your healer can kite for a few seconds ;-)

It's also advicable to tank the phoenix ~30 yards away from the raid so that people have some time to react.

Have your entire caster lineup macro /use staff of disintegration into their most spammed spell. That will make sure the buff gets applied to every second or so. Some people will tell you that causes problems, which it can on paper due to how the buff works, but the window for that to happen is so small it's neglicable. The only person that ever got disoriented with us is the phoenix tank because he was 40 yards away from everyone. That was easily fixed by assigning a caster to sort him with an aura.

The Phoenix consumes its own life (I think he loses 10% every 2 sec, or something like this).
All you want is :
- make sure he is consuming himself far from the raid (because of the AoE damage)
- that he dies not too far from the melee (so that they can kill the egg without having to go across the whole room for that).

We used a hunter (usually myself) for that.
Wait for the little "fire-swirl" that indicates the phenix' spawn, gain aggro on it, and kite it to the back of the room.
Feign Death when he is around 30~40%, and let it go back to the healers. He'll die on the way, on the first steps of Kael's platform, if you timed it well.

That way, you do not take any DPS off Kael, your non-tanking tanks have time to make use of the daggers on controlled raiders, you avoid AoE fire damage from the Phoenixes, and you decide where it dies.

Thats interesting. Even far left of the room would work doing that.

No problems with feign death cooldown?

Ever get MC'ed while kiting it away?

I have to change something; either ranged DPS on phoenix then burning the egg, or kiting it away and back

The "tank+backup tank" just means dead raiders; every single attempt the phoenix tank gets mind controlled and things get messed up. Its pretty aggravating cuz its a lot of work to get into phase 4, then watch everyone die. Patience is running thin >.< people are beginning to argue; rare for us.

No, never had troubles with FD cooldown.
The spawning rate of phoenixes is more than 30 sec, I believe.
I even had time to DPS Kael a little between spawns.

I remember one FD being resisted. I just asked for a healer to come my way, and kited the Phoenix back in.

Also got controlled once right before the phoenix spawns, and asked another hunter to kite it for me.

We've always done that, since the first time we got into P4, so people in my raid just take easy-handling of Phoenixes as granted and never worried about it. (I might have said, while summing up the fight before our first pull "At this point, there'll be phoenixes. I'll just kite them, don't worry about them and kill the eggs".)
Healers position themselves on Kael's Sides, damage dealers expect the egg to be in the steps : how it got there does not matter.
The Phoenixes don't have to be a raid concern. A couple of people need to worry about it, and let the rest do their thing.

I guess you could approach any boss fight that way, and break everything down into small manageable tasks, and ask dedicated teams/people to handle each little event.
That is probably Vashj' legacy, the way I see it.

Last night we tried this strategy. I gave the hunters a dry demonstration before we pulled trash. It worked decent, but there was a lot of small problems with kiting them. After a few attempts kiting, we switched back to tanking them with the FR tank. We got a little lucky with less mind controls, and most phoenix's spawned right by the phoenix tank.

One of the bigger problems with kiting, if the phoenix wasn't kited well the first time, the egg wouldn't die. Then we had two phoenix's alive, and the hunter couldn't kite both very well. Timing would have been better if we had a setup more like yours (kite toward the north wall, yes?) but we didnt have the 'room' to do it correctly with ours. We did try it though.

We downed Kael'Thas for the first time last night. It was amazing. Thank you to people who commented, and Elitist Jerks for all the good information here.

Well, grats on the kill.

As far as our setup is concerned, Kael was tanked where he originally stands (not sure what you call the North wall).
I would grab the phoenixes from where they spawn (never really far away from Kael) and run toward the section that is between the 2 entrances (where we tank Capernian).
If spamming Arcane while kiting, I'd have to feign death just before reaching the wall if I want the Phoenix to die more or less on the steps.

We got through p4 cleanly the second time we saw it (last night) after spending 3-4 nights worth of attempts in p2/p3 (mostly pre-2.4). We got to p5 with everyone alive, however, nobody knew what to do in p5 and we thought there would be a gravity lapse immeditely. Everyone started running out while the main tank was near Kael and he got no heals. Yeah, wiping in p5 is not fun. I think we'll kill him next time we go back to TK, but we're also working on Archimonde, making very good progress on him the first night we saw him.

A combination of things got us through p2 for anyone still having trouble with it.

Raid makeup: We went from 7 healers in initial tries to 6. We usually carry two shadow priests as well. Six healers was more than enough to handle healing the raid. I think we had 4 tanks (2 prot warriors, 1 Prot Pally (who was tanking phoenixes), 1 Feral Druid). 7 classical AOE classes (4 mages, 3 locks)

p1 - To get how to effectively kill/kite Thaladred in p3, we had everyone in their p3 positions (including melee+tanks+healers). We did a few dry runs to make sure everyone knew where to move to if they got gazed, including p3 tanks/healers. I was tanking Capernian on my Warlock with zero FR (I'm 0/21/40 with no nether protection) with a Pally healing me solo in p3 and a Pally+Priest in p1. Initially we had a Destro Lock w/ Nether Prot eating conflags but Nether Prot proc'd too often and I ended up getting conflag'd too much, so we switched to an affliction lock and it went much smoother.

We made sure all the tanks got Free Action Potions in case of getting toyed in p1. That way we only had to wait till they had 30 seconds left in their toy.

p2 - We had one shadow priest putting a rank 1 SW:P on every single weapon to get misery+shadowweaving on. We had our Malediction lock putting CoS on every weapon as well, and all the locks threw a CoD on the Axe. We had a rogue on the Mace from the start for interrupts, and a hunter tanking the bow. Then we had ALL dps on the bow and it would be gibbed in a short amount of time (barely having to teleport once). After this, we burned all bloodlusts and AOE'd the rest of the weapons down, with single target DPS moving to the mace then staff and daggers. Using this strategy we had nearly all the weapons down by the start of p3. Healers would frequently loot extra weapons to carry them to the appropriate p3 tank.

p3 - In p1, Capernian dies near the back wall, Thaladred dies near the east wall, Telonicus near the northwest near Kael, and Sanguinar on the west wall. We had all Ranged DPS minus a hunter on Thaladred except for one who hung around Telonicus giving the staff aura. We had our MT equip the dagger and go and apply the debuff to Thaladred. We had all melee dps + one caster dps w/ the staff + hunter nuking down Telonicus at the start of p3 while Thaladred was going down.

After Thaladred went down, we had caster DPS move to Capernian. She would die realtively quickly, after which caster DPS would move to Sanguinar while melee dps would be near Kael. We always started p4 with Sanguinar at about 50% getting nuked down by ranged dps with the other advisors down.

p4 - We use a Prot Pally to pickup Phoenixes and tank them. We let Phoenixes kill themselves for the most part, except for the last 10% of their health or so. A switch to DPS'ing the Phoenix early meant paying attention to the egg early as well, and I don't think we ever had a Phoenix hatch. When Kael put up his Barrier, we found bursting throw it was relatively easy.