• Khlysti

With ~250 SR on Kaz'rogal ive never had more than 2 drains, and I much prefer slightly lower dps from gear, but 0 (or very near 0) risk of 3 drains in a row. We did this fight with ~250 on all casters and I think all had similar experiences to me (masses of resists, very few drains). Doing it with 0 resist (or just priest buff) and just burning it and trying to get it down before people explode seems way riskier. Full mother gear would probably leave you unlucky to get one drain all fight on kaz'rogal.

For order I would think
Rage -> Anetheron -> Naj'entus -> Supremus -> Akama -> Kaz'rogal -> Gorefiend -> Az'galor -> Bloodboil -> Archimonde -> RoS -> Mother -> Council -> Illidan
would be the easiest progression route, as alot of the early BT stuff is quite easy, however simply going all out on Hyjal would clearly give you T6 loot and an enboss down much quicker.

 

◊ Quigon

While anatheron and Kaz'rogal may not be the hardest bosses - their trash is tedious and time consuming - 1 wipe is another half hour, whereas in bt you might wipe the same number of times but go again in 5 minutes. I can't recommend anatheron before naj'entus, supremus, and akama, as all of those bosses can be killed your first night in under 3-4 hours.

The boss itself is also harder than the first three of BT.

 

Smoker

Thats kinda like gambling, think our tank got 20k burst in 1 second.

We wiped at Azgalor for 1,5 days before we found out that SR is the shit, and killing the adds(we just offtanked em before, got him to 28% back then)
Anyway we gathered our hearts and oneshotted him, really easy boss with 200-250 SR buffed.

 

DarKNecross

You guys just have an OT and DPS down the adds? We've just OT'ed him and gotten 3% best.

http://crimson-guild.com

 

Haet

I dont see why it woulda been to hard to add rep to the trash in the last patch

personally i dont mind hyjal trash now that its 8 waves. It sucks that its a grind with no reward but the bosses have very reasonable learning curves to compensate for the difficulty/lengthyness of the trash, and the trash is more intense so its not like clearing to a boss after wiping until respawns; its almost fun.
I think my guild was discouraged from pushing hyjal progress bc of the trash but once we killed teron and got back into hyjal we realized that it wasnt so bad. Its unlike conventional raid dungeons; you earn the loot rather than proving you are good enough for it.

 

bambr

What place Kael'thas can take in difficulty line of all this BT/Hyjal bosses? Seems like Hyjal/BT up to Reliquary of Souls -> Kael'thas -> RoS-Illidan.

 

◊ Quigon

Just an amusing picture - I died after this...

 

DarKNecross

Has anyone noticed Azgalor hardly ever, if not never, performs a Crushing/Critical Strike, even when he's running around post-wipe killing people or attacking Thrall?
I could understand Shield Block vs. 3.5 swing speed, but nobody getting one of those seems surprising.
Maybe my Recap is broken, however the last few times I checked him there were 0 Crushings and 0 Crits.

http://crimson-guild.com

 

Schneeb

We killed azgalor the first time we ever saw the boss (transitioning from 'easymode' infernal waves back to the ghoul/abom zerg got 2/3 gungho tanks killed the first few wave attempts), we knew he had a rain of fire and people would get turned into adds, heres how our learning process went:

So he runs up the center of the camp and our tank goes to meet him, he moves him incase he could cleave thrall, we get our first silence and on vent people just said "ah a silence, does that affect everyone?" we assumed it did with someone stating they resisted the first one ... I guess imp conc aura and some lucky resists help on the silence.

We went on, some dangerous RoF's on melee later we had one of our feral tanking 2/3 demons and he was around 20% hp, the feral stating the demons weren't hitting that hard but seemed to have some bursty damage.

We continued to plow through his HP, I used lay on hands after a silence at 15% ish giving the tank the armor buff and we continued on waiting for an 'enrage' etc he died without any suprises leaving us to mop up some adds and assign the loot.

Certainly for us (Tank has most of the BT random items by now) it was an anticlimactic kill.

DISCLAIMER: Im really dont want to brag, for us it was a fairly easy ride. I don't recall who got the add debuff - I think we didn't lose any healers till later on or we soulstoned each person. Just curious what people are finding most difficult.

 

Lila

We had a 1% wipe the second time we pulled Azgalor. Then we wiped an entire evening because of Thrall, before we finally killed him.

 

DarKNecross

The main issue we were having with the fight was tank damage during the silence. Easy fix- we started doing Intervenes during Silence. Worked well, Main Tank isn't dying.
Second issue was the adds. They spawn, get picked up, damage, etc. (You probably noticed the Thrash when you mentioned burst damage). After about 3 adds I'm spamming max rank Holy Light on the add tank, knowing he may not live through the next silence. We started using two tanks on adds, alternating pickups. Doing this made it so tanks wouldn't die to silence.

One thing I would reccomend, which we didn't have, is bring two resto druids for Swiftmend after silence ends. Plus, the HoTs during the silence don't hurt.

http://crimson-guild.com

 

Dots

I have been wondering about the lack of crushing blows as well, though not on Azgalor but on Archimonde and Mother Shahraz. Has anyone ever been crushed by either or did they just remove CB's from some of the heavy hitters?

 

◊ Praetorian

Patchwerk and Loatheb used to be unable to crush. I expect it's nothing new. When Demo fell off I've seen Azgalor melee our tank for 10.5k noncrush, and he has really excellent gear. If he could crush, it'd be a bit unfair. At the same time, though, Azgalor attacks very slowly so I'd always just assumed our MT was blocking everything. But if he can't crush NPCs either, then that makes sense.

Archimonde definitely can't crush. Zero recorded crushings over 3+ hours of attempts, even during wipes. Probably because, again, he can potentially silence the raid and he also can potentially get a +50% damage done effect. Testing probably showed that crushings could simply result in "unfair" deaths under these circumstances.

 

Demi9OD

Shadow resist just seems like a poor idea unless none of your mana classes carry super mana pots with them. Kaz is a DPS check and wearing SR just means your more likely to extend the fight and hit his soft enrage. Curse of recklessness and all 6 Tauren Warriors beating on him from behind is the real juice on this fight.

 

Dots

They changed Hydross as well because his crushes were deemed unfair. Though his crushes couldn't be prevented at all.
Oh well, glad to play horde side so I won't get replaced by a bear on Archimonde. :P

 

Lila

The fact that several guilds do use shadow resistance on this fight, with success, proves its a working tactic at least. You could also say that not wearing shadow resistance will prolong the fight, as manausers have to preserve more and some might go oom or die.

Different tactics works for different guilds. I don't think we were anywhere near the enrage; at least I can't recall the fight being especially long. We had about 260 shadow resistance buffed on all mana users. With the BT crafted gear that's just 3-4 slots.

 

Demi9OD

Raid make-up makes a big difference too. We run caster heavy and can't really rely on the 2 rogues and 1 Fury war to make up for lost caster DPS.

 

Lila

We usually have one melee group with 3 rogues and an enhancement shaman, and either a fury warrior or a feral druid.

I guess other important factors in this fight is how many shadow priests you run with and whether you keep judgements up or not.

 

kaib

I tried medium SR (like 150ish) on that mana burn boss. It didn't do jack. I resisted like 1 mana burn out of 4-5 or something. In return I gimped myself quite a bit by replacing neck + cloak + bracer. We just used 0 and kicked his sorry ass. Exploding doesn't kill you really. Just make sure you don't hit anyone else and keep on wanding.
For the 4th boss we just off tanked infernals, SSing a few guys that got the debuff. We also kited the boss back and forth so thrall didn't get owned by the rain of fire. At 25% or so a tank that had 1-2 adds got transformed, that kinda sucked (and killed me, even worse!). Still, wasn't so bad. And Thrall was on 60% when the boss died. If you are having HP problems with Thrall, you really need to move the boss more.
If you have SS/CR cooldowns avaible, it's probably much safer to kill the first few adds and get those guys back up again. If you don't have those, I think you need to zerg him. Otherwise your raid runs out of players too fast.

 

dukes

We did it without having ss/cr available and just offtanked everything. Ended up with 4 doomguards pounding on me (which got decidedly dicy when I was warpstomped+thrash attacks+silence) which was maybe a tad too far. If you kill the first two and then just burn him while offtanking the rest I can see it being easy enough without cr/ss really.

 

◊ Praetorian

For Azgalor we don't use any melee DPS on him. Melee kill Doomguards at a camp out of range of everything. This reduces the RoF at Azgalor and means that not only Thrall but also tons of Tauren Warriors and such can survive for a long time. I think NPCs did 1mil damage total to Azgalor for us. We also don't use any SR. With just the priest SR buff someone almost always resists it, plus you have Imp Conc to reduce the duration. And if everyone gets silenced, a paladin can just bubble out of it if needed. I don't think we had any close calls on our MT at all really.

 

kaib

I'll take that back with the SR. We just killed it again, although I wasn't in the raid. But they used the crafted epic gear for mother and apparently mana drain was a total joke in that gear. A guy had 5 or 6 full resists. That means it's definitely worth it.

 

Smoker

Yup, we got the same tactic as Elitist Jerks, melee on the adds far away and taurens and ranged on the boss, combined with 200-250 SR on everyone.

 

• Tristanian

I can't say much on Kaz'rogal since we killed him on our first pull without any shadow resistance, though we already knew about the mana drain and advised all mana classes to simply spam potions as much as possible (plus spreading), then we pretty much burned him down. It did get a lot tedious in the end but we eventually pulled it off.

Azgalor on the other hand was pretty annoying, not that much because of the Rain of Fire or silences (we used 2 healing druids and pretty much "drowned" the tank in hots, mana isn't a serious issue at all), but due to the simple fact that Thrall had suicidal tendencies. On our kill, we actually ended up just offtanking the doomguards, using a warrior and a bear (we had about 6 overall I think) and used melee normally on the boss (major/greater fire pots helped a lot). All in all, I believe Blizzard really needs to review the NPC behavior in some of the encounters. Jaina meleeing infernals or Thrall just standing inside Rain of Fire, sometimes leaves you with little choice, since the NPC's aren't even healable. Maybe they nerfed them a bit too much, then again maybe we aren't doing the fights the way they were intended. Time will tell, I guess.

 

Dawme