I like the Illidari Council too, as a melee DPS there are so many "Oh shit!" moments that can kill me if I just even dare to blink an eye. Say that you move too slow out of Gathios' Consencration, so you take two ticks (really slow, but hey, just to give an example) and then you get a Flamestrike too. You can start kissing the floor, because that's where you'll be.

I just have a soft spot for fights that continuously require movement, I've always loved fights such as Twin Emperors, Four Horsemen, Heigan, Thaddius, ... and I think I can add the Council to the list, as a melee DPS at least. The only part that is annoying is that I have to redrop totems if Gathios is kited a little too far away, but hey :P.

Not to mention you can nuke pretty hard on them too. And being unfocused isn't going to let you just stroll through it either, one mistake at 10% and it can be over.

As a resto druid it pretty much exemplifies the "topping the meters isn't necessarily fun" concept. I stand still and rotate lifebloom through 3 targets for 10 minutes, moving/healthstoning if I happen to get an AoE on me. It's definitely my least favorite fight in the zone, if not all of TBC.

With Twin Emps everyone at least you alternated healing phases, and had to keep moving away from exploding bugs (if you spread out some healers on the floor).

I really enjoy healing on Illidari Council as well. I heal the Lady Malande tank, and whatever raid healing I can do when she isn't chain casting smites. Usually healing anyone that happens to get deadly poison that's still in my range. I enjoy the predictable damage, where you have to time a large heal to go off right after the damage. That timing aspect of it all at least feels like a way for healers to distinguish themselves.

My complaint about the fight though, and what it's missing compared to the twin emps, is the size and the grandeur. Twin Emps had the giant eye when you walked into that huge room. It was also a huge distance that you had to keep them separated by. If there had been a larger room, and a mechanic forcing the Council to be separated by a greater distance, it would have added a better feeling, and probably greater difficulty, since that type of mechanic stops a lot of the cross healing that happens. If I could never get help healing my tank, or myself, then it would certainly be a more challenging encounter from my point of view at least.

I definitely still like the Council encounter simply because I'm always the sole mage healer, and we tank the mage far away from everyone else. If something happens to me or to the mage, it's 100% my fault, so I have to be paying attention. I have to cover myself from Envenoms (sometimes multiple), Blizzards, and Flamestrikes, so I myself am usually pretty busy. However, it's still one of the only fights I find myself sometimes zoning out in, and it may be because we're segregated from the rest of the group and I have only a vague idea of what's going on anywhere else.

There are a few reasons I would say it's not like Twin Emps:

The first has already been mentioned, where you have this HUGE room with two really big guys with a cool little script a a big eye when you first enter the room. I remember when we beat Huhu, it was quite an experience walking in there for the first time, whereas the Council has nothing like that (more like, "Who are these guys and why are we fighting them?"). It was also no small feat getting through the Twin Emps trash for the first time.

The second reason is because one of the coolest aspects of the Twin Emps encounter was that you had to constantly be switching things up due to their teleport. The same thing for 4 Horsemen... the healers and DPS had to constantly move to a new area because of the debuff and fight someone new. With Council, however, there are separate teams that do different things to handle a member of the Council, but that's all they do for the entire duration of the fight. Everyone just kills Gathios, the interrupters on Malande just do their thing, the Mage tank and healer stay in their spot, and the Rogue tank chases him down most of the fight.

I do like the fight, definitely. I just don't think it's quite as cool or as challenging as 4 Horsemen or Twin Emps (especially since Twin Emps was the first time everyone saw this type of fight gimmick, so it was new and special then). I guess what I'm trying to say is there's a difference between busy and interesting... Council keeps you busy, sure, but it doesn't do anything that's particularly interesting. =)

I still find the fight incredibly aggrevating due to the number of ways that people can get gibbed. They should introduce a slight cooldown between how fast he can do flamestrike and blizzard :/

This seems like the rose colored glasses of nostalgia to me. I remember doing Twin Emperors for the first time and it was extremely intense. As a healer it required SO much focus for 15 minutes straight. And the size of the room made it so that someone needed to keep tabs on the status of the two healing teams-- if two people on one side went down or out of mana, someone needed to be ready to swap sides. But as we got more mileage with the fight, it just became a 15 minute fight of doing the same thing over and over. It's not that different from Illidari council. In fact, council is even more complicated, except for the potential of tank transitions.

Now I'm not saying the fight is a borefest. I like any fight where there are ample opportunities to screw things up, because it's an opportunity to do things well, and it's very satisfying to execute everything perfectly, or nearly so. Fights like Archimonde, Illidan, Kael'Thas' and Vashj fit this description, as does Illidari Council. I still find the fight a lot of fun.

11/1 21:42:49.468 You are afflicted by Deadly Poison.
11/1 21:42:49.468 You are afflicted by Consecration.
11/1 21:42:49.484 You suffer 2250 Holy damage from Gathios the Shatterer's Consecration.
11/1 21:42:51.078 You suffer 1000 Nature damage from Veras Darkshadow's Deadly Poison.
11/1 21:42:51.562 You attack. Gathios the Shatterer dodges.
11/1 21:42:52.031 You suffer 1000 Nature damage from Veras Darkshadow's Deadly Poison.
11/1 21:42:52.328 You gain Water Shield.
11/1 21:42:53.062 You gain 12 Mana from Mana Spring Totem V's Mana Spring.
11/1 21:42:53.234 You suffer 1000 Nature damage from Veras Darkshadow's Deadly Poison.
11/1 21:42:53.406 Deadly Poison fades from you.
11/1 21:42:53.828 Veras Darkshadow's Envenom hits you for 5165 Nature damage.
11/1 21:42:54.218 You gain Renew.
11/1 21:42:54.312 Your equipped items suffer a 10% durability loss.
11/1 21:42:54.312 You fail to cast Lesser Healing Wave: Interrupted.
11/1 21:42:54.312 High Nethermancer Zerevor's Flamestrike hits you for 5084 Fire damage.
11/1 21:42:54.656 You die.


Like that? :P I cursed a little when it happened, but oh well I just think of it as part of the fight. And that's what combat resses are for, right?

Council doesn't involve the extreme burst damage of the Twin Emperors on any of the tanks. I mean, sometimes Gathios will land a big hit string while the DOT is ticking on the tank, but if a decent stream of heals are landing it's no problem...even while learning. Unbalancing Strike was MASSIVE damage especially if you weren't using Demo Shout, the sort of damage where a tank could definitely get two-shotted and you wanted a Priest on PW:Shield duty full-time. Council also lacks the spacing/threat components of the Twin Emps, and the DPS race feels easier to win. I don't think it's nearly as intense, though I still enjoy it because I have a soft spot for healing/endurance fights.

This seems like a healer mistake to me. You died 5 seconds after receiving the deadly poison debuff. Our healers configured Grid to look for that debuff and one or two people are assigned to heal the afflicted people as soon as they get it. Your first heal was a renew, 4 seconds in. That renew should have been a shield, of course. You took 15500 damage total. Assuming you had 10k health buffed and the shield prevents 2k damage, you only needed 3500 in other heals to survive. One potion and one healthstone at the 4 second mark would have done that. Or another healer could have started casting a large heal 1 second after you were afflicted by deadly poison. You would have been hurting, but you would have survived.

I guess my point is that this was not an unavoidable, instant death situation. It was really bad luck, but not a guaranteed death. The encounter was providing the opportunity for people to make mistakes.

Well, I left the Blizzard just before it out, so I was definitely not on full health. Wasn't my intention to show burst damage, no. Was my intention to show bad luck combinations. If I go back to my combatlog I took a Blizzard, Consecration, Deadly Poison and Flamestrike in ~6 seconds. Yeah, a heal or two might've saved me, but both healthstone and healthpotion were on cooldown (damn haste potion addiction).

Lets say he was fully topped after the consecration and deadly poison ticks, that's still 10.2k damage delivered in 0.5 seconds. While there is a healer mistake in there, it is still a decent example of what can be so cruel about this fight. And it is for exactly those situations that I think this fight is so stupid. With so many envenoms, flamestrikes and blizzards going around and the time it takes to execute this fight ... yeah, not the best of combinations.

I guess what the fight tries to push is an urgency on the healers to keep on top of the situation while the raid spreads out. Several people getting hit by flamestrike and blizzard, melee getting careless with consecration and so forth can quickly spell doom for your raid. So on two fronts its an endurance fight, the raid as a whole needs to navigate carefully while the healers battle to keep the raid alive.

A side effect of all these abilities in the fight is that some of them will collide and have the very real potential to instagib someone. That's what I don't like about this fight, otherwise I very much like it. It's just sad that the fight needs to derive most of its difficulty from this aspect.

There are definitely a few gib situations, but very rare, much more often is the death due to preventable but barely preventable kinds of things, usually it ends up being melee, but it's never fun when you get envenom on a melee, then you get a chain of Flame Strike, Consecrate, and Blizzard on top of people.

The thing is, the fight is extremely forgiving for a few random deaths as well, the enrage timer is a non issue essentially, and if you've got a few combat rezzes, you can deal with a few healers dieing if you get them up quick. I like the fight for the most part, but I get bored of it about halfway in every week because it's so long, and I just can't stand it if people decide to be dumb all night and we wipe a few times.

It was actually a pretty big nightmare for us the 2 first weeks we killed them as we thought that it would be a good idea to just heal wrath damage and not interrupt it. With no interrupts on wrath it was really a hectic kill and we only did it by doing pretty decent dps before the combination of wrath+whatever pretty much instagibbed too many people. The third week we figured we should interrupt wrath and suddenly it was really smooth. But it shows how flipping one switch makes a fight go from medium difficulity to really hard (for the healers at least).

I didn't participate in the two hours of attempts we had on Council after our first Mother kill last week, but reviewing the WWS showed how evil the wrath can be when combined with any other damage. I made the suggestion to have more interrupters on the Priest for this week's go at them so that both CoH and the Wrath are interrupted and hopefully minimize the gib situations more.

We found Council vastly harder to learn because we missed this little observation early on.


One thing I'm curious about is healer setup. Bosskillers suggests 7 healers, with around 4 on the Gathios tank, but in practise we found this to be grossly different from our needs.

Typically we take 9 healers to this fight, but we find we're pretty comfortable with just 2 resto shamans keeping the Gathios tank up.
Probably we learned the fight with 9 because of not interrupting the wrath early on, but we keep this balance anyway.

Are folk typically using ~7ish healers, or is ~9ish more common?

For Council I would say that 8-9 healers is what most guilds are bringing with 7 healers on the low side for this encounter. We do it with 8-9 personally and I wouldn't want to bring anymore then 9 because that just seems unnecessary. I also really wouldn't want to do it with anything less then 8 either. So 8-9 seems to be ideal. Worst part is though we haven't had a resto druid with us for all of BT and Hyjal which annoys me because all I read is that a smart resto druid can do amazing things on fights like Council.

With that said something interesting happened on council this reset. Our feral druid tanking Lady Malande ends up biting the dust at around 30% due to a nasty combo of flamestrike, blizzard and Divine Wrath. I end up calling a wipe thinking we're boned and there's no way we're making through when our rogue on kicks calls out "I can tank this" and he ends up tanking Lady Malande for the rest of the 30% hp. Thankfully he was in his full HP pvp gear so he had a ton of HP to soak up Empowered Smite and Divine Wrath. I bit my tongue after that one.

A resto druid can pull ahead of #2 on healing meters by 50% easily. Stack lifebloom on the Gathios, Malande and Zerevor tank. Lovely really.

We usually put two paladins on the Gathios tank along with a lifebloom stack and the tank has yet to die.

Yep so I hear. What a shame, there really seems to be a shortage of resto druids. We've been looking for a resto druid forever and when I check the guild recruitment forums to see what other guilds are in the market for, there are a ton of guilds that are looking for a resto druid also that have BT on farm. One of these days I guess.

We sure as hell don't have a problem with healing in the guild, our healers are all awesome but my god rolling lifeblooms on multiple tanks like in Council really seems that it would make healing very 'stable' allowing other healers to toss some raid healing that would of otherwise been on the tanks full-time.

Usually I'm on raid healing for council and I'm generally a good 15-20% ahead of next healer. Paladins are downright amazing raid healers for Council. The raid damage council puts out isn't very ideal for chain heal unless it's used into the meele on Gathios. Our strat focus on spreading the hell out so chain heal isnt the best to use. Most of the raid damage happens on 1-2 targets at a time hitting 1-2 targets for a ton of damage and holy paladins are really good at fast single target raid healing of this nature with aggressive holy light spam. Now only to get a 4th holy paladin to put light on the raid for me *drool*.

Last night Illidan transitioned 30% at the start of a demon phase and we didn't see any problems with it. He yelled, became bigger, and turned black as he hit 30%. His model went back to the normal form and casted shadow prison right away (before casting a single shadow blast). We simply bop the warlock tank and Illidan came right back to me. Was a smooth one shot.

Not sure if it means he was fixed or not, as we have never experienced the bug firsthand.

Yeh, we assign a resto druid to solo heal the mage and priest tank both at the council and he can do just fine with some minor help until his hots start properly rolling. It's pretty wicked really and leaves a lot of healing free to be devoted to the raid in general.

We still use 9 healers though, but that's mostly because 9 is a good number to have throughout Gurt--->Illidan. Actually gurtogg--->Illidan is a very cohesive part of the zone, you need 3 tanks, 9 healers and 13 dps to do it give or take, depending on various guild strategies. It's convinient if you do that part at a different day than the first one.

Just a quick question here. Our guild will soon be progressing into black temple, and I was wondering if there is trash before the first boss that can be farmed with five people or so?

Sorry if it's already covered in the thread - thread search was of no help!

Not really.. you have quite a few big pulls and the smaller pulls (2-3 mobs) have tons of health and i imagine would be extremely difficult for a 5 man group to even attempt.

Also the drop rates from those mobs are extremely bad or dont exist at all? I dont really see much drop untill Supremus is dead then you start getting some decent drop rates from what ive seen.