My guild has finally gotten a night with a few clean phase 2s, on phase 3 we spread out to give Illidan space, but we always screw up on healing people that get agonizing flames or being too spread out to kill shadow demons when he shifts. We keep being told to get as far back and spread out as possible, but is there a limit to spreading out? I mean, I'd like to be close enough to be in range of more than one and having to run far to catch any others,

You don't need to spread out that much, it's pretty much like Najentus, 5 yards or so, you must really stand right next to someone to give him Flames or chain his AOE. As for demons, simply don't spread out in wide arc, it's better to have some people closer to boss, so demons will head in roughly the same directions. If your raid is covering whole 180 degrees around boss, range will be a problem. Also, you really limit the effectivness of your own AOE, which can take them out very quickly if they stay clumped.

The key for spreading out is really just experience. When we were first learning the fight I didn't worry too much about spreading out in phase 3 since it's easily healed through, however I would periodically check to see if people were clumped up and verbaly warn them over vent when they were. For phase 4 though, leading up to our first kill, I had the guild practice spreading out and coming back in and went around checking where people were and making sure everyone was spaced out enough from each other (about 8 yards). All that can be worked on before you even pull and should help make people more familiar with the fight without having to wait and see if you make it past phase 2 or not.

For dealing with the demons what really helped us was effective AOE and slowing. When he has 2 seconds till demons all the locks start spamming SoC and the mages start casting Blizzard. One pretty much always has Imp blizzard so along with a hunter trap most of the time they are dead before the melee even have time to get up there. The last thing is we use shadow priests as our first line of players (we usually have 3) to pick and single target them. All in all it works really well for us.

As for a basic order for phase 4 though we have Spriests in the front inside of MF distance, then we have warlocks and mages spread out around them making sure to be in rage to use blizzard and SoC, then healers behind them (except for the SR tanks healer), and finaly melee.

If you are having trouble spreading out then you should do a couple mock runs for practice. Like Kampa said, you still want to be close enough together for heals and demon killing. A 90 degree cone should suffice.

Have everyone spread out into their positions prior to engaging. Then your raid leader can make optimizations by making sure the healers are spread out, putting some good ranged burst damage up front, and making sure there's room for the warlock tank and healers. Once you've found a setup that makes sense, tell everyone to remember it.

*sorry, please delete*

hey guys =)

i've just specced feral again, and as a feral druid, one of my tasks will be to tank one of illidans adds. now i have some issues with my pcs performance, and im not sure if my pcs not gonna totally suck on fps when it comes to the add tanking, with all the animated textures of the flames, beam and so on.

so my question is, how low can i set my spell details, without missing a blaze or a blue beam or standing in a blue beam and with my graphic details thinking im not getting damage (being killed) of it.

and another question i have, is it sometimes even helpful to lower the spell details, because at most effects like the blue beam or blaze, the area in which you take damage is lower than the actual graphic effect.

thank you guys in advance =)



and sorry for my bad english

regards, dalrok

The distance from elemental to blade matters as far as I know.

By the way, has anyone else noticed that the melee who are dpsing the elementals get hit by the blaze if they are an orc even though they are standing at the exact same spot with the undead rogues or max distance?
We had this issue for a while,our main dps warrior and enhancement shaman kept dying to blazes and thus we had to stock lots of deviate fishes.It doesn't happen anymore.

Just wanted to inform if it happens to you, don't know if it has been mentioned.

I typically run with horridly low FPS on nearly every encounter, especially those with lots of spells going off.

During phase two, ill turn my spell detail to minimum to help my FPS out. This effectively makes it safer for me to inch to the very edge of the blazes without going too far because of terrible FPS. Outside of that, I find low spell detail ideal for this stage as well, as it gives me exactly the spots that are dangerous without the extra 'fluff' that is the cause for poor performance (fps performance).

So yes, you can turn it down and see everything. Another boss, although OT that I find it useful for is the Dragonhawk boss in ZA. Seems like lower spell detail gives you a better estimate on where to stand (although easy anyways).

I will usually use Ogre suits in phase two so that I have a 'seemingly' larger hitbox then normal, allowing me to hit the flames where others normally can't hit them. Our Tauren Enhancement Shaman on occasion will be hitting the flames when the orcs/trolls/uds can't. Mind you, I've only done this two times (on recent kills) and it might have just been me being a bit more reckless in trying to get as close as possible. Regardless, if it doesn't actually help in the way described, you at the very least look cool with a sick dance.

Low spell detail helps in my opinion, on our first full night last night I turned it down midway through the evening and found it much easier. However, BIG CAUTION here as the spell detail effect on the eyebeam is slightly smaller than the range of the damage, so make sure you don't play with fire too much when dodging the eyebeams. On the blaze patches it is a major help. Good luck.

I was very disappointed in this fight. We got our first kill last week.

I believe it took us 30ish attempts and he was down with only 5 or so hours of work. Almost all of that time was spent perfecting P2. I look back at pre-nerf Kael'thas and can't understand how a T5 end-instance boss is harder than (what is supposed to be) the hardest boss in the game at the moment. We spent an enormous amount of time on Kael'thas. Easily two weeks of time over 4-5 full raid nights. Yet Illidan has one single phase that is challenging? At least make it a burn fight or something. His enrage is way too soft. It's something like 20 minutes right? We were at 17:50 on our first first kill. I really think it could be 15:00 and been more of a real challenge.

We were in a similar situation. We killed him within 2 raids (today) and most of the time was spent in P2 (but also a bit of time in p4 to avoid people dying from the volleys).
However I do think Illidan is fine and that its Kael thats simply overtuned. I also dont think a 15min enrage timer would make for a fun fight and Id rather see some other way of increasing the complexity of the fight instead if its necessary.

To add to the actual topic of the thread, we killed him using a 4camp phase 2 strat which was very beneficial and we had very few deaths/wipes because of the aoe damage.

My guild just came back from a 2-3 week raiding break from the holidays and managed to get Shahraz in 3 attempts, Council in 6 attempts (both on Thursday) and 1 night of attempts on Illidan for our first kill on Sunday. The fact that Illidan is a fight that falls in the hands of P2 tanks, we basically got it down in less than 8 attempts (out of a total of 19 which took roughly 4 hours).

This thread was a huge help for a lot of things to cover. This fight isn't necessarily as hard as kael, but that is also because theres less responsibility for the raid overall.

For Kael you had legendary weapons that had to be used (clicking the staff wasn't hard, but making sure people were always in range was a real big issue). For illidan, you learn a lot of the pre-requisites from earlier encounters. After P2 was down, the only issue we had were people keeping their distance for demons. I unluckily got 2 demons on me and died, but I was able to res up and just keep healing. The biggest thing is you can pre-plan everything you want to do, before actually engaging, so we spent about 30 minutes doing some pretty retarded looking drills where I called out phases and people moved to their spots. Once people got that down it became clockwork.

The key things I can say attributed to our kill from this thread are:

1) The diagram picture for phase 2 showing safe/unsafe spots - it is a very good reference point for tanks to start their learning from.
2) Pre-planning your positioning before the fight. It may seem tedious, but 5 yards is a small area and assigning people to a "reset" spot for phase 3 is easily one of the best ideas you can do.
3) Seed of corruption on illidan right before he throws out demons - throw that with a snare and they are at around 60-70% before they even reach the raid. Ranged can blow some cooldowns to kill 1-2 until the flame burst when the rest of the melee can just run in and clean up.
4) Phase 5 is basically utilizing your tanks' cooldowns based on how far the traps are. For our first kill we had them laid out pretty easy, but we blew cooldowns just to guarantee nothing crazy happened.

As most people have said, the hard part is getting to illidan but its also all in your P2 tanks.

We noticed a dwarf priest can't heal a gnome warrior tank in phase 2. Oddly enough, we seem to have had some issues with a human priest healing the gnome warrior too, but not as bad as the dwarf one.

Night elf and draenei priests have no issues healing the gnome though. But lol, the dwarf -> gnome thing was the cause of two wipes for us.

Now I know, its not the exact thing as stated, but certainly think it is related. Also, I do believe Hortus said Taurens in tauren's form have a larger hit-box than tauren druids in kitty form. So, seeing as how undeads are smaller, I think that would explain why the orc got hit.

I'm sure this has been mentioned here before, but Hunter/Warlock tracking for Illidan during P2 is really nice. Pick someone vocal to call out where he's moving to. He pretty much always Eye Beams right after he moves. If you're looking at a standard diagram of P2 group positions, I may call:
(Our tanks)

"Illidan moving south (or north) of Valderath"
"Illidan moving south (or north) of Temis."

The tanks knows that when he stops, Illidan has a set path he will Eye Beam. It's the same everytime and he always does it right after he finishes moving. Plus it gives melee a heads up if they are on a tank's add to back out.

We got our first kill last night after about 5 hours of total pulls and I did have one question after spending some time today reading through this whole thread. I noticed a lot of people making a big deal about traps and a few tanks commenting on having to blow SW/LS to get through enrages. My question being is was his enraged damage nerfed recently or something? We tanked him through 3 normal phases sub 30% on our kill (a few dps dead) and not once did we bother with a trap, they were all in some god awful place. I was healing the MT the entire time and I noticed he took hits slightly more often but the enrage damage to me at least looked no different than the non enraged damage.

Just curious if it was nerfed recently because it didn't seem to make any difference weather or not he was enraged or not.

Our MT profile in case it makes any difference. Buffed he was sitting at just under 22k HP. The World of Warcraft Armory

His enrage is (1.3 sec cast)

Damage increased by 50%.
Attack speed increased by 30%.

Lasts 20 seconds.

(Enrage - Spells - World of Warcraft)

Illidan uses no specials, only auto-attack. He dual-wields. Enraged he will a bit harder but he will never one-shot the tank. So if healers are spamming the MT he should be healed between hits and should survive. Last Stand / dodge trinkets etc help out since they lessen the likelihood your tank will be hit by another attack before he is healed (which will probably lead to his death ...and a threat even if he's not enraged)

Unless the trap is close we don't bother and just heal it through. Tell your healers to spam and keep HoTs running.

Enrage will also increase the damage done by Parasites and Agonizing Flames, so watch it. We usually keep a healer (usually a Shaman) in the back to heal Agonizing and Parasites.

This is incorrect, he will not always use Eye Beam right after he is done moving. It seems a bit random within a certain time-frame. He will sometimes even move twice before using it, though this is rare and I have never seen it happen before the third beam.

/console CameraDistanceMaxFactor 4 + bird's eye view works really fine for a flame tank. My flame is getting dps'ed first and I really have time to see it all with a boss mod timer, unless there is a flame at mid/south at the start which is after 10-20 seconds of tanking.

That's like the only hard obstacle and that's when I gotta move really fast,so you may just want to call the movements till the first one, after that it gets easier.

You can just have your main tank call it all, but "eye blast just behind you!!!" may not work sometimes, so it's all an awareness check really.

Elixir of detect demon also works (it does not count towards your flask/elixir limit).

We have our MT do this, since the MT really has no role in p2. He calls out whose side Illidan is on, and if the beam is coming from north or south. He also watches Illidan and you can see him begin to charge up a Shadow Barrage a second before it actually starts, which is additional useful feedback along with a bossmod timer.

We also use our MT to call out eyebeams in phase 2. He'll also let the FR tanks know whether they need to move, and whether to move out or in. Basically it removes any element of doubt from the FR tank, and we haven't had any problems in Phase 2 since we switched to this technique.

We only recently got Illidan down (2 kills so far) and everytime we try to put him in a trap it always screws us, either from healers not moving quickly enough or the warlock tank having to adjust and the raid not really picking up on it. Just continuing the fight from the earlier phases, ignoring the traps completely and just healing through the enrage has made things a lot easier.

We killed Illidan in our ~30th attempt. I basically like the fight, but i think it i svery bad tuned. All his raidwide phase 3-5 abilities are a non-issue if you watch your range and deadly if you close the gap between two players. I personally think they should be tuned way harder for the correct range, and a little bit less heavy when 3 people are too close. There should be a problematic situation but not instant death. And i think the traps should play a far more important role. We just ignored them as they where in really bad places. The non-trap enrage should be an issue, atm its just safer to ignore them as this enrage is easily healable. They should fix trap positioning and then make the enrage really hard. It's a funny element but now you don't need to use it.