When then only Illidan should have a quest drop like all end tier (chest) bosses except golemgagg :p

We took 10 and a half hours to clear BT, TK and SSC so far this week. I doubt Hyjal is more than 3 hours. With some routine the schedule should clear up to attune new people if you killed Illidan.

Theres also the possibility of doing only one of the 2 instances for Hyjal attunement. Of course it delays the attunement by one week, but it still gets the job done and doesnt put too much stress on the schedule. Some more planning ahead is required for this tho.

Maledict pointed out the more serious attunement problem in my opinion. When you spend the maximum amount of time on the early BT and Hyjal progress, having to attune new people is the worst setback during that and frustrating for all those who are attuned and want to go to the next bosses.

We are dealing with the same problem right now. We cleared the first 4 bosses within our first week of being in Black Temple, but in order to continue moving at a decent pace in BT and Hyjal we are needing to Recruit people. Our server has one other guild that has killed Vashj, so our Recruit pool is VERY small, and we were required to head back into SSC and TK to get them Attuned, which didn't go so well for a couple reasons. Having to teach 4-5 new people an encounter they have never seen, plus the fact that most of our Raiders were obviously unhappy about being in SSC and TK when we should be making progress in BT and Hyjal. Either way, hopefully after this round of Recruits is attuned we can move on and continue in BT and Hyjal.

Agreed this is an irritating issue.
Its not simply the fact of attunement, but in Hyjal & BT the tailoring gear (which most priests, mages, locs will have) becomes a real liability, so you need to gear them up atleast a little, and certain classes (holy priests) still really need the 2x T5 bonus to help out on mana issues and other bonuses etc.

So thats 2 incentives to go there... for new people, and the older members who have almost everything from those instances really loose interest in going.. except if their item drops.. which ofcourse will most likely go to them and not the new recruit that has to be geared up... prolonging the process yet another week.
This is especially annoying in guilds which have a lacking of one token drop, especially on Defender - where you will most likely still have alot of Druids & Priests with an unholy passion to finally get those few key items (mostly the chest..) which tanks always got before, and making them pass it when its among the best for the slot untill Illidan... unlikely

Most of us groan when its announced SSC or TK, and the runs are never really that good or focused and it becomes a downward spiral from there, sad

Just because it's entertaining:

Man I LOVE GMs... cause everyone can survive 100k Shadow dmg hits mirite?

Or it could be "intended" as a "Nope, that's now how you do it!" warning, the same way as when the elementals charge and enrage.

Personally my guess is it's just something they're aware of and not planning to change soon so it's "Working as intended" Impossible to say if they coded it in on purpose or what (seems strange he'd even have a melee attack in his shadow demon form if it was completely unintentional) I'm just glad we haven't had it happen yet since we heard about that early on and just made sure not to push him to 30% to spawn Maievv if he was about to transform.

Yea not saying that its a hard thing to get around. We've never encountered that specific bug before so we did not know what to expect. It's just annoying when a "last attempt" is going so well then this happens and we have to put another day of raiding in. I was looking forward to a free Saturday (not raiding but I'd prob spend all my time on Wow anyway!)

I missed any posts that warned about doing that early on. We won't let it happen again. I don't think there's any reason this would be coded on purpose. I'll assume it's a bug they'll fix someday.

Yeah my guess is that it's a bug that they just can't figure out what is causing, and thus labeled it as "working as intended"

I'm just mostly curious where the 100k shadow damage melees come from, and why they coded it at 100k in his shadow demon form when he doesn't melee outside of the bug.

We had Illidan soul drain half the raid while trapped today; he went from ~15% to somewhere around 28% or so. It didn't wipe us, so we just shrugged and carried on, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't working as intended.

Also: today Maiev decided to stand inside demon form Illidan's aura once while doing her Mad DPS and was >20% when we killed him. Does anyone know what happens if she goes to 0%? Does she despawn and the whole encounter is reset? I sincerely hope not, because I really had enough with suicidal NPCs and resetting encounters with Thrall and Jaina. :P

Nah, we know it's a frontal cone, but it did go off after he was trapped. The trap activated properly, he took increased damage, was on his knees and hurting... then he suddenly got up, drained the raid, enraged, and stayed like that (not attacking, just enraged) until he went demon again.

I think flagging for an instance should have the following options:
1) regular quest (kill kael + vashj for hyjal, for example)
or
2) Gurg's suggested 80% rule - you can go into the dungeon without an attunement if 80% of the raid is keyed.
3) Something like Dukes suggests above - a way to complete your personal flag for the dungeon just by being in it for a suitable amount of time. 5 kill fragments = attunement, or perhaps rep equivalent to two or three full clears would be suitable.

Putting the backflag scroll on the last boss helps guilds who have completed the dungeon, but doesn't help guilds breaking into the new content. As folk have pointed out, as you start getting into the dungeon your recruitment needs become really painful because you have to stop progress to go back a tier and attune folk. For guilds with 6 raid nights a week that's not so bad, but a 3-4 raid group completely halts all progress to key someone.

Illidan always does one ability after coming out of the trap it seems. I've seen Shear, a melee (lolz dps warrior got 1 shot) flame burst, and I've seen draw soul. I think I also saw him draw soul and then enrage and 1 shot a rogue once.

Generally it seems if no one is in melee range nothing bad happens, only draw soul can possibly be bad if no one is in melee and that seems pretty rare as the one action.

Last week Illidan used his one second of freedom after being trapped to Flame Crash, and the flames appeared underneath his highest-aggro target (a Hunter, since we'd just unloaded on him). It was unexpected. And regarding Maiev, if her hit points hit zero she'll emote "Maiev Shadowsong falls to the floor," then stand back up a few seconds later at full HP.

My guild just finished our Hearts of Darkenss farming and will begin working on Mother. Since she will die within the next 2 weeks I thought it would be a good idea to start gathering information on the Illidari Council. However there seems to be a lack of information out there and I was wondering if anybody could shed some light onto the abilities of the members of the Illidari Council. We are not looking for a strategy, just some information on the individuals.

Whats we know so far is that the Mage needs to have the dampen magic ability spellstolen and the paladin has some judgements and consecration ability. Any other info on the other two would be a great help.

Indeed there is strangly a small void when it comes to information about this one boss, I know everyone says that once you see it a few times you know everything, but sometimes its nice to know beforehand for (specificly raid leaders) to atleast gather some basic information while working... pre-plan a base strategy and such.

The only other thing I know of beside that said above is the Priest with a shield making her basicly invulnerable and its not up all the time (however its up alot...) and when not its best to nuker her as shes quite weak. However as I've never been at the encounter dont take this as a fact untill other people inform you who have been there

re: Darkkazul
Its not at being hand-fed the tactic, however basic knowledge of the abilities is very useful to work out our 'own' strategy which can be modified from then, it saves 30-45mins of working out/explaining the new tatcic mid-raid and all

We had yesterday Illidan at 1% when trap ended, people did not stop DPS like normally when trap is about to end (so it will normally go to MT who will face the boss away from the raid when trap ends) to prevent the draw soul. Healed 12% which proved to be too much for us at that point. Fairly easy to avoid if you encounter that once, but the in my opinion Blizzard should fix the instant use of ability when trap ends. Really annoying "feature" when you are learning the fight.

A couple tips on Council that will save you a number of wipes.

1.) Have the mage spellsteal every time he can (thanks to Gurgthock I think for this one)

2.) The pull...have you mage tank do the initial pull from the very very left side, all the way at the left wall. You can get to just below the lip of the stairs before aggroing. You can have him test this by having everyone else stay outside the room while he inches up to see where agro pulls. They leash outside the door so the raid will be safe.

3.) Mage initiates agro by running in at full speed spamming spellsteal. Once he's got the buff he can fire blast for agro and PoM pyro if he's arcane. We had druids tanking the rogue, so they snagged agro immediately with moonfire. We had misdirects for the paladin and priest. Some of them will get very close to smacking your mage but as long as the other pullers know what they're doing he won't get hit. It is important that your mage is running in to get that spellsteal off. Until you get it down you will have many pulls where the mage falls over dead in the first 3 seconds of the pull either due to not spellstealing in time or the others not getting picked up in time.

4.) The rogue. This isn't confirmed but our druids we had tanking the rogue said he would always reappear within 10-15 yards of where he was before he dissapeared. At first we thought it could be anywhere which lead to them not always being positioned well to pick him up quickly.

5.) The mage has a melee range activated arcane explosion exactly like Capernian or the caster Twin Emperor. We didn't realize this until about an hour in because no one actually went up next to the mage until then. In retrospect it's something we could have probably assumed, but no one said we're smart.


The rest of the fight is relatively simple. Positioning doesn't have to be precise, there is usually not huge burst damage except on the Paladin tank who we used 3 healers on. People need to be aware and not stand in the AoE, and help keep themselves alive but that should be second nature if you've gotten to this point.

Interrupts need to be coordinated. What worked for us is a rogue and the warrior tank doing interrupts when spell immune and then a resto shaman (sometimes elemental shaman) as well as two mages for melee immune. Shaman attempts to interrupt every heal, mages alternate interrupts on heals as a backup in case of resists. It's very easy to interrupt as the spell cast is slow as hell. Just have your caster interrupters set up focus macros for it and have them not be completely retarded.

The difficulty of the encounter is mainly in the endurance part, which ultimately means the fight isn't all that difficult for any guild capable of reaching it. The few gotchas for us were the initial pull, setting up a good interrupt team, getting everyone used to avoiding the specific types of damage going out and living, and healers getting used to healing it. We also had the learning curve for some the aforementioned things as well as some other small details. This is the same for most fights with no complete strategy guide written out because you usually can't ascertain a lot of the small details from a video.

Bopping the mage just before he runs in saves a hell of a lot of time and effort getting correct positioning. He'll never get gibbed by the other adds as they just ignore the mage (well, the paladin and the rogue will at least, I'm not certain about the priest), but he'll get full agro on the mage mob and be able to deal with it fine. It also helps a lot if they're frost spec so they can have ice barrier on with cooldown ready to soak up some damage if something bad happens. It's not like they have a disadvantage from being frost for shahraz/illidan anyway.

Another thing that helps is to make sure no-one jumps. It's a hard thing to do for people like me who are used to just jumping constantly regardless of fight (trust me, it pains me to do shahraz and council without touching the jump key), but it seems the server calculates AoE effects when you're on the ground, so sometimes jumping out of consecration instead of running will make you take a tick or two when you shouldn't have.

Having someone on shield duty for envenoms helps a bit too if you can spare it. A full stack + envenom is around 8-9k damage total, which means stam gear, healthstones, health pots (or nature/fire/frost, all help) and having some kind of awareness of where you are in the room in relation to who is assigned to it helps (if you have an assigned healer, which we have).

We just use blessing of protection to the mage that pulls to prevent rogue hitting him. Mage might eat 1 empowed smite from the priest, but we have raid healers healing him on the pull. We have only 1 miss direction usually which is used to get the paladin to MT.

See, it is good to talk about fights and remove the magic and mystery. =D Other people come up with stuff you didn't think of or didn't want to waste a wipe trying.