We run with 5 groups: NW, NE, SW, SE, and melee center. Each ranged group has at least two healers and one decurser. Each group tries to stick together near their shaman and/or decurser. It's been pretty reliable for us.

I think the most important point of our strat is that each group is a "unit" that is responsible for it's own survival. The idea is that more than one or two units shouldn't be out of commission (Doomfire or Air Burst) at one time, so the MT should still have plenty of healing. If Doomfire is ubiquitous in any one quadrant, that group slides to the side a bit and other groups compensate, but the units should always stay together with some distance between each other. Sometimes, someone will call out to throw extra heals to so-and-so or decurse someone, so the other groups will help out, but for the most part, we're completely independant.

Of course, we also run with 4 shaman almost 100% of the time, so that helped a lot when fears were unpredictable. =b

It's worked very well for us, though now it's probably not completely necessary, since you can't be Gripped way far away (always getting Air Burst as a group means there's always healers and always a decurser to keep the group alive). The predictable fears now make it even easier, too. We usually 1- or 2-shot him every week with this strat, and have been for a while.

Also, remember that you can dispell the fear, if your group doesn't have a shaman and you see someone running towards fire. That helps a lot with unnecessary extra healing.

We do this with four groups instead of five. This allows each group to have two healers and one decurser instead of spreading those tasks more thinly.

Do you mean that you have 3 ranged groups + 1 melee group, and there are two healers and a decurser with the melee? It seems unnecessary to me to have those classes with the melee because the ranged groups are always within range of the melee to heal/decurse.

This is pretty much our strat, except without 4 Shamans :<. Wish there were more around for Alliance.

I'm sure this has been mentioned earlier in the thread, but put raid icons on your decursers. People who get gripped in an unusual area can call out and head towards the nearest icon this way.

Four ranged groups. I wasn't even thinking about melee because it's a given they're there, plus I hate melee! Each of the four ranged groups has two healers and a decurser and they overlap coverage on the melee.

just wanted to say we switched to 360 strat and 2 shotted him tonight feels great to finally get him down =)

We got this guy finally last night. Lots of helpful posts towards the end of this thread, thanks.

I have to say though, what a miserable fight and I do not look forward to future Hyjal trips. It took us 84 pulls total, spread out among 5 nights on him.

He needs a quest item turn in IMO, or a 5th loot of some kind.

Only the final boss of a tier usually has a fifth item (quest) like Kael, Mag, Nef, Kel, Cthun.
For t6 it should be Illidan but he doesnt drop such item .

What are you talking about? [Blessed Medallion of Karabor] is the best quest reward ever =)

I agree it would be nice to have an additional quest reward from either Illidan or Archi, though. The city-wide events for Ony/Nef/Kael are a lot of fun when they go off the first time.

I've heard that originally, Blizzard intended for the 3 haste rings and an unknown fourth item to be the quest reward from the Illidan drop (and I would bet the Blessed Medallion is the fourth item, so you would get the necklace and your choice of a ring.), but there was a failure in internal communications somewhere so the rings were added as trash drops instead. It would explain why the rings are ilvl 151, which only comes from Illidan or Archimonde, as opposed to 141 like everything else.

It almost seems like no one cares the overlord of Outland is dead, the way it is now. Maiev doesn't even stick around very long to tell you job well done. Very anti-climactic, if you ask me.

I do hope they get around to adding something.

In a relative sense it is a far more epic lore-wise encounter than the other end bosses prior to TBC. Its a good start lets say.

That also might be the explanation as to why the rings are not marked "Unique", similar to many quest rewards.

Since i'm curious, and discovered this after our first kill ... after you down Archimonde, where do the night elves go? I went up to talk to Tyrande and there was nobody there save for a pair of ghouls.

OK, but read this - quoted from the magazine article

That has the potential to sound very epic! Imagine a sort of race-against-the-clock to stop the half-summoned Kil'jaeden from taking full form in Azeroth (which surely would lead to its destruction)

A bunch of undead bum rush Tyrande's outpost and kill them if you don't intervene. We went up to try and talk to her to see if more mining nodes spawned and were greeted with several undead, killed them, and then all she had to say was "A great victory has taken place today!"

Our guild were trying this encounter for slightly less than 2 nights, using the 3 teams positioned in triangle around him. Got to around 36% after our first 10 attempts or so on the first day and pretty much always reaching 30-50% on our second day, but still haven't killed him yet. Everyone seem to perform at their best trying to avoid deaths, but "random" unavoidable stuff always seem to wipe us (like Airburst + Grip for example).

The thing that i'm wondering the most is how does your raid DPS meter look like on the actual kill?
We seem to have a huge problem with ranged dps classes being extremely low, unlike all other encounters. We fit in the 10 minute enrage timer perfectly, but the dmg difference between the melee and casters/ranged is insane. We got him to 34% on our last attempt yesterday and the meters looked something like : Whole melee group (2 warriors, 1 rogue, 1enh shaman, 1 feral druid) had around 10-13% raid dps each. The average dps for the melee group is around 1 - 1.3k each. The 6th on meters was a shadow priest with only 4.5%, the rest were even lower, some lower than MT. (noone died till ~36-37%).
We've gotten Doomfire on melee group only 3 times in 2 days (20-25 attempts each), so i'm wondering if it would be better to bring in another full melee dps group (assuming they spread in 2 camps around archimonde's mob square)? How would it effect the amount of Doomfire and Airburst on melee?

I'm pretty sure some guilds tried it so any feedback would be appreciated. As well as tips on how to improve ranged dps in this encounter.

Maybe your ranged are clumping up too much, causing air burst to decrease damage too much? What seemed to work for us was to tell ranged camps to spread out as much as possible within their section, centered around their shaman. The biggest thing I can think of other than that is to just be mindful of the fear timer. It's perfectly safe to stand right next to the tail of a doomfire right after a fear is over, and it will despawn before fear is up again for example.

I'd really like to see some changes made to this fight. I hate that you can, and should if possible, brute force him. Our two kills so far (1-nighted hyjal for our 2nd kill) have been with 5 shamans, 2 dwarf shadow priests, and 1 dwarf healing priest. I personally feel like we haven't mastered the fight, but fear warded shamans dropping instant tremor and the priests/paladins in their group dispelling any shamans that didn't get fear ward instantly so they can do the same just brings down the difficulty SO much. I also hate any fight that makes me chain-shift with shadowform or go without shadowform just because of fear ward.

I respecced to holy for this particular fight as I found dps'ing out of shadowform kinda impractical and subpar. Fear ward is always sort of a burden for me since I respecced shadow ever since Nightbane

Melee are usually on top, but if you stack too much melee you increase the likelyhood of bad things happening to all of them at once. Some of your casters will be running from a doomfire at any given point. I have not had an Archimonde attempt yet when I did not spend at least 20 seconds of every minute making sure doomfire did not kill me.

I'm not so sure about that, to be honest. We went through hell and back (literally) since the beginning of this expansion with the sole purpose of defeating the Betrayer and freeing Outland from the grips of a ruthless demon and all we are getting (besides the loot of course) is pretty much a /pat in the back. Certainly not the best way to conclude this "chapter" of the story, so to speak. If anything, as has been stated before, Kael'thas feels a lot more epic than a rehashed Leotheras with a couple of extra twists/phases and increased duration.