◊ Penguin

The blaze patch and the aoe breath are separate. They start linked fairly close together, but over the course of the fight they seem to desync a bit, to the point where the Flame with do the breath animation+damage, then wait 3 or 4 seconds and place the blaze patch. If you start moving when the breath happens, the blaze (which is targeted on you) will appear in your new spot. I generally run my camera at an odd angle to spot the blaze patch on the ground, and rely on our raidleader to call an eye beam on my side.

There's not some hidden "but he tries really hard" variable built into the game. -Slake

I always love the "it doesn't fit my style of play" line. There are only two styles of play; Correct, and Incorrect. The only people that ever use this line are people with the incorrect style of play. -Sebudai

 

Natural

We had a weird phase 2 last night. One of the elementals charged a DPS warrior who was attacking the opposite elemental. He was nowhere near aggro limits, out of melee range, and standing right on top of a warglaive. Luckily we were not treated to a flame patch in the middle of the raid nor an enrage, so we made it through. A nasty bug nonetheless.

 

◊ Penguin

I realize you've been farming Illidan for months, but you're sure it wasn't the "ran straight across and tripped a charge" bugs that have been seen before? If he was on that side the entire time, then it was probably a legitimate hiccup in the code somewhere, I know we've never seen an unexplainable charge.

There's not some hidden "but he tries really hard" variable built into the game. -Slake

I always love the "it doesn't fit my style of play" line. There are only two styles of play; Correct, and Incorrect. The only people that ever use this line are people with the incorrect style of play. -Sebudai

 

Natural

He did switch from one elemental to another, went straight through, and died in front of the other warglaive. Sounds like it's a known bug as you've described it, but I guess we haven't had it happen before.

 

◊ Penguin

I guess it wasn't as well-known as I thought. I'll try to explain it as best I understand it.

Basically what happened: The two warglaives act as totems, pulsing a hidden debuff on players that flags them "not a valid charge target". This used to not reapply to shaman totems recast in P2 or combat rezed players, which is where that whole mess came from (fixed now). It's possible when running straight across the middle where the glaive zones overlap to have the debuff from Glaive A fade before the pulse from Glaive B reapplies it. This makes you a valid charge target, and Flame A charges. The debuff from Glaive B applies mid-charge or so, which is probably why Flame A doesn't Enrage when it reaches the player.

[edit] Clarity, removed untested speculation.

There's not some hidden "but he tries really hard" variable built into the game. -Slake

I always love the "it doesn't fit my style of play" line. There are only two styles of play; Correct, and Incorrect. The only people that ever use this line are people with the incorrect style of play. -Sebudai

 

Bharlin

Alas, it appears you were lucky and we were not. The answer we received today was, that the "specialist GM" was not able to reconstruct from his log data, that Illidan had actually been killed. Of course, since yesterday was reset, there was no way to prove that Illidan had not respawned, either. No loot for us. Anyone have a suggestion?

 

Othia

I'm afraid it looks as though you're essentially screwed; resets mean a GM can't look at the instance directly and see what's going on, and it's unlikely a "normal" GM will have access to raid logs, and the "Specialist" GM probably can't be bothered.

You could always try ticketing a GM again, and have them raise the ticket to a higher level. I remember hearing a lot of storys of early Illidan kills with similar bugs, GMs even then were pretty harsh. I don't want to turn this into a burning GMs at the stake discussion, but what gives with some of their attitudes sometimes?

 

Brunkor

That would explain things.
Now I just need to learn how to see that through all the blue crap and such then

 

Buiden

This is almost 100% reproducible when you intercept from 1 flame to the other. Just wait in the middle a couple ticks while swapping sides is all you can do to avoid it :/

 

Bharlin

After emailing customer support and opening a post on the customer support forums, we were, to our utmost surprise contacted by another GM today who acknowledged the legitimacy of our kill and who informed us of the loot we were elligible to. We were given some time to decide upon the allocation of the loot and told to open another ticket when we are done. It appears, that the first "specialist" who we dealt with, had no idea of the how exactly the Illidan fight was designed and therefore just gave us the standard textbook answers. While I am naturally very happy about the issue being resolved for us, I also understand that quite a few guilds have not had their loot reimbursed.

I can only encourage you guys to not give up, post on the customer support forums and send an email to the appropriate customer support address, if the GM processing your ticket is not willing (or able) to help you. Good luck.

 

zimira

I think it has already been mentioned that setting spell detail to low makes it a lot easier to see the blazes.
What also helps me is the SCT, if the damage is 1250(3750 resisted) or 2500(2500 resisted) you are in a blaze and need to move. Those 2 things helped me get a grip on how far you need to move to get out of a blaze

 

Brunkor

Yeah, I tend to forget that until I get really frustrated though, since I keep spell detail on max everywhere else
I found the built in SCT to be kind of lackluster, so I actually went with Parrot just for the flame tanking, works much better(though Blaze shows up as "unknown", no biggie though).

Ah well, one shot yesterday, and tanking was indeed easier with the knowledge about the cone AoE and blaze not being synchronized, so that bit of information was much appreciated.
Of course, he kept blasting me with Blue Beam of Death, so I still took a metric ton of damage, but hey...

 

Touf

I use sound myself. The blue flame doesn't cause a burning noise while the green one does.

 

Karmen

We had our first night of real attempts on him last night. One thing that really sticks out as a tank is the hitbox for the Eyebeam has to be double the size of the spell animation. It's probably the most annoying thing I've dealt with to date in raiding. Dying while my corpse was clearly on the grate and not even in the blue flame animation is a bit ridiculous.

Regardless, if multiple beams hit your side it becomes a bit hard to see the Blaze's being dropped. I take it tanks just wait to see Blaze damage before moving then as noted above?

Late Night Raiding www.skeletoncrew.org

 

Natural

Yeah--it can be hard to see the blaze if you have demon fire along the ground. But after you've done the encounter a few times you will probably develop an internal timer for the blaze. Then you look for the animation and listen for the sound confirmation before quickly strafing out.

 

Inaiwae

- deleted, i wrote faster than i was thinking -

 

Omedan

We've been working on Illidan for about 2 weeks now, our tanks are starting to get the hang of moving the flames around, but I've been having some difficulty managing aggro on the Flames, even when I try holding back or letting a full Curse of Agony complete it's course and then begin DPS.

From any other caster DPS out there that have done this, should I try splitting my casting between flames or just play it old school and estimate what my threat should be?

 

Zaran

If you use Omen and actually pull the first tanks bar out you can get the accurate threat for the one flame instead of the messed up threat for both (since they are the same name).

Beyond that we have a feral druid or prot pally tank the first one. Warriors are great to tank the second kill target as they have way more "oh shit" buttons that can come in handy and nothing beats a prot pally in threat generation when any tank would be wearing full FR.

From our DPS experience in regards to DPS on the flames... (First flame, second tank should have agro locked by the time they get to his)

Prot pally = go all out DPS, bloodlust at will you will not pull agro.
Feral druid = give him a few seconds of no dps, light dps for a few the first 5 seconds or so after that then all out.
Warrior = give him a good 5-10 seconds of no dps, another 5-10 seconds of light dps then all out, careful if you get a long string of crits.

This is just what we've noticed since we started farming Illidan and keep in mind, this is from the perspective of several 2200+ DPS warlocks so take it for what its worth.

 

• Daboran

Firstly, once your tanks have more experience with the Flames their threat will improve fast. It's a pretty intense job and for the first few tries your tank will be concentrating far more on just staying alive from Flames Patch/Eye Beam and his kite path than actually generating max threat (if he uses point and click then I'd guess it will take twice as long :P )

Until 2.4 comes in with unique mob IDs then no threat meter is going to give you accurate data for the Flames as they have the same name. Thus means that not only are you seeing the tank threat on both mobs, but heals that assign threat to the tank (Lifebloom/PoM/Earthshield) are also skewing the results.
As well as this tank threat will depend a lot on the quality of the gear they are wearing to supplement the crafted fire resist items - I went for using a Chromatic Flask, 3 epic crafted items, Blastguard Belt and S3 chest so that I could maximize threat on the Flames. If you want to help your Feral out on this, prioritize him for T6 so that he gains the 2-set threat bonus on Mangle.

In short, use Omen as only a rough guide and if you feel you are cutting it fine just swap targets to the other Flame for 10-15 secs.

Once your Flame tanks are experienced with the kiting and gear up with better items in their non-resist slots the situation will improve quite fast.

 

Omedan

Thanks for the advice! I'll try pulling out the first tank's bar from omen tonight, we normally have a prot paladin tanking the first flame we are dpsing and a feral druid holding onto the other one. I was thinking it would be better to swap targets every now and then after a couple of crits as well.

 

Natural

Focus as much damage as possible into the primary target without pulling aggro. If you are ranged DPS and threat limited you should be hitting both targets, period. Hitting the second flame is always better than holding back and doing nothing.

 

Karmen

One thing that was a bit odd for us last night was in his transition from demon back to human we'd have a hunter misdirect to the MT. Two out of three times though Illidan would just run right to the hunter even though misdirect was still up. Anybody know what causes this and what the hunters need to do in going forward to avoid this? I"m guessing having the MT be close enough on the transition so he can beat on him some himself wouldn't be a bad idea either. Any help would be great, thanks.

Late Night Raiding www.skeletoncrew.org

 

Krazen

Thanks for the tip. I've been maintaining a Curse of Agony on flame 2, as well as sending about 20% of my shadowbolts in that direction, but I believe that's too cautious. I could probably pile more dps on the first flame.

 

• Daboran

Read one page back in this thread - it's a known problem.

 

Karmen

One page back just contains people asking similar questions, there's no answer other than someone guessing it's probably a bug. Guess we'll just go forward on the assumption the MT needs to be ready to get aggro himself.

Late Night Raiding www.skeletoncrew.org