Does spell reflecting the blue fire still work? or was that fixed?
I tried a few times but couldn't get it to kill the fire and for the most part I was too busy to investigate more.

Illidan just has a chance to use one of his abilities before going into Demon form after being trapped. It's probably not based on anything at all, it just happens sometimes. Forewarned is forearmed, none of his abilities should pose problems.

Fixed.

You can spell reflect the fireballs in phase 2 but not the laser residue.

I have seen him kill a melee twice while he is hunched over (swipes at them from his knees). Is this along the same lines? They both must have happened after traps, because that's the only reason melee would be attacking him when he's down. Is it advisable for a tank to be the last one to leave melee range then? Or should DPS just stop on him a few seconds earlier?

Yeah we ran into this last night, immediately as the trap ended he decided to drain soul, and as luck would have it our fury warrior pulled aggro at the same time. 7%->28%, was good times.

It's along the same lines, every time he's come out of trap that I've seen (barring maybe 1 or 2) he's targeted the highest person on threat and done something. It's been times when a melee passed me and got ruined, or he'll cast draw soul, shear, or flame crash then fall to the ground. In general we never have melee in for the last little bit before he stands up again except on the second trap because either he's dead well before standing up or someone was retarded and we're trying to kill him before we get ruined because our warlock tank died or something. Usually for the first one I can stay top threat and therefore he targets me and does something, and that's juts not a problem.

Was the mage just combat rezzed? As far as I know the way it works is that they give a hidden "buff" to players within their range. Everyone that has a buff won't be charged. Sometimes when a Shaman ankhs or a player is rezzed he doesn't get the "buff" quickly enough and the elemental can charge that player. Happened for us to a Shaman yesterday as well.

Could be similar to whenever we combat ressed someone they got instagibbed?(p2) But maybe that was just bad luck.

Yeah, if anyone is combat rez'd in P2, at least one of the flames will instantly charge and kill them.

I've also seen it happen where someone DC'd just before P2 started and then logged in again in the middle of P2. BAM! Flame of Azzinoth charges them and kills them.

As discussed previously in this thread, there seems to be a hidden buff given to everyone within about 20 yds of each warglaive. As such, if you move out of that area, or are rez'd, you don't have the buff and the flame charges you.

To clarify, if someone is charged, then THEY were at fault somehow, not the position of the tank or the flame being tanked.

It's not really a question about the flames, but since this is the only Illidan thread:

Does mortal strike/wound poison actually affect the healing from his draw soul?

In every log I've seen, every draw soul healed him for 32767 (=2^15-^1, the largest 2byte integer).
Not once was it a different numbers. Over all the dozen wipes I checked, there must have been an event where he healed without a debuff.
The same for Illidari Council, actually. Every heal from Lady Malande healed for 32767, and I'm quite sure many guilds use an MS warrior on Gathios, and do not have any healing debuff on Zerevor.


So, does anyone know if that's maybe just a display bug (any tank who can check their own logs?) in the game, or with WWS?
Or does MS/WP simply not matter for the healing on Illidan/Illidari Council?


Edit:
Thanks for the replies!
MS/WP work on him, but WWS caps healing at 32767, so it's not displayed.

I believe WWS log numbers are capped to 16 bit signed integers, which is why you are seeing the 32767 number.

You'd think they'd use unsigned ints, since negative damage doesn't really make much sense and it doubles your dynamic range.

Anyway, sorry for the derail. Back to Illidan...

Getting back to the whole "Flames of Azzinoth":

I'm one of the tanks for my guild in this stage, and after a lot of practice and research into the phase, theres a few comments I want to make.

Firstly, my initial 'exposure' to this phase, if you will, was via an instructional video by 'Zyklon' that was circulated on our guild forums. In this video, small, slow, constant movements are encouraged by the tank, and I guess thats what I imagine that the majority of tanks would be doing. (Correct me if I'm wrong!)

Now, the actual reality of this phase is that the Flame of Azzinoth will cast a patch of Blaze, several yards square, every 10 seconds or so. The first patch will appear just as the Fire Blast is cast for the first time, and the period for both Blaze / Blast is very close together, but will gradually move out of synch as the fight progresses. This patch of flame will be cast at the tank's feet. It is not affected by where the Flame of Azzinoth is at the time of casting.

By using this information, it is possible to make sharp movements, just as Blaze is cast, to keep the damage to a minimum. Theoretically, it would be possible to take zero blaze damage over the entire fight, or at least only one tick per Blaze cast. However, other aspects to the fight, such as the blue Demon Flames, dodging the Eye Blast, as well as lag and worrying about aggro generation will obviously lead to more Blaze damage.

I guess what I'm saying is that with a proper understanding of the mechanics of this phase its possible to take a LOT less damage from Blaze than you might think. As a guide, I think I took about 1/4 as much damage from Blaze as from the Flame's melee attack last Illidan kill, and I'm sure that theres tanks out there that can, or have done, a lot better than this.

I completely agree with all of this. It definitely gets harder to predict the Blaze patches as the fight goes on. Using these sharp movements, the best ratio I've managed is 5.8:1 (215k flame, 37k blaze). With an accurate blaze timer you could probably do better.

I read through the first 8 pages of this thread, and have to say; I've learned pretty much everything I need to know; except for 2 questions:

1) Since the anti-charge "totem fix", does this also apply to Rebirth targets in Phase 2? Or only totems?
2) Earlier in the thread, it was stated that the Blue flames created by Illidan's Eye Laser can be destroyed via Spell Reflect just like A'lar's Flame Patches. Is this still possible? Or was it fixed? Also, can the flames created by Illidan's Flame Crash also be destroyed by Spell Reflect?

Thanks in advance.

1) Not sure, haven't tried it, we just CR them at the end of the phase.

2) You cannot destroy the blue flame anymore using spell reflect . Not sure about the flame crash, its easy enough to just move him though.

You can either gradually drag it along a path, or you can use step-movements (or sharp-movements) to move when blaze is about to drop/has dropped. By stepping your movements, it should be possible to avoid most of the blaze damage. As a druid (or warrior/paladin using resillience gear) it's likely you'll get dazed every so often, but its certainly possible to avoid more damage with step-movements than dragging it very slowly.

Does anyone else get desyncing of the blast (the conal flame thing the flames do) and the blaze dropping? When we started I was under the assumption they're supposed to be linked, but often theres a 1-2 second swing either way on the blaze dropping before or after the conal attack which stays throughout that whole instance of the fight (i.e. each time you start it, not each time you reset the instance).

Last night we saw something new:

Maiev literally dropped the first trap directly under Illidan. We were panicked for a moment trying to figure out where the hell it was until I realized it was right under his model. It instantly trapped him. Because there was no elapsed time between the trap going down and it being applied, the trap actually wore off him about 5-10 sec before he was due to transform. So he popped up, one-shotted a melee who had overaggroed, and then resumed beating on our tank while enraged for a good while before he finally transformed. Confused the hell out of us.

On a separate note, pretty much purely for epeen, has anyone been able to do p3 in just one demon phase? We've been getting him to like 32% right before his second transformation the last couple of weeks and then backing off rather than risk having him change phases during or after a transformation. The temporary patch 2.2 "bug" pretty much permanently took like 6 minutes off our kill times and the fight is around 13min total for us now. It's funny how rethinking DPS vs. control can make such a large difference, without changing raid composition at all (we've always brought 8 healers, and continue to do so).

Dukes, I have also had that problem tanking flames. It seems like there is just some sort of delay for the Blaze appearing after their AoE Cone attack. I typically try to anticipate this and move early, and it seems to work out alright. In other words, even though there is a delay, the Blaze will still appear in the spot where the AoE Cone hit you originally, and not where you have moved premptively. You can actually use this to your advantage, and avoid alot of Blaze damage.

Also, on the subject of tanking with resilience and getting dazed, I don't remember once having a problem with daze if you use strafing primarily. In fact, I can't think of any point in my kiting path where my back is exposed to the flame. The one trouble spot I can imagine is at the top end of your path where you have to turn the flame around and head back toward it's starting position. I simply wait for an AoE fire attack, warn the melee to move over TS, then strafe and turn the flame, never exposing my back. It's true that the flame is pointed at the raid briefly during this move, but I time the Fire Attacks/Blazes to avoid any risk.

How the hell do you output that much dps? We get him to 53% or so at the first transformation. We barely touch him in p4 though, since we're focusing mostly on control.

How do you do p4 then? We're usually very careful with p4 to avoid people dying to demons.

Well obviously we all have full t6 or equivalent gear so we kind of outgear the fight to an extent. But mainly it's just a matter of being aggressive with DPS, ranged up front DPSing him for the first 10-15sec of his demon phases, backing off as he casts demons, burning them down, and then getting in another 5-10sec of DPS on him until it's time to stop for the transition back to humanoid form. We have three pretty awesome arcane mages (RIP MSD ) which helps too. WWS from last night: Loading...

We've only got 2 kills under our belt but we're in the same boat, where we're waiting a full demon phase w/o dps to drop him to 30. The biggest thing that makes a kill go that fast(for us) is assigned positions to move to for the first flame burst. People are able to dps him for 10seconds then move to their spots to avoid splashing. After demons pop out spriests etc can leapfrog the front line of warlocks/mages and do full dps to demons and Illidan.