It's more of a delay than a bug. He doesn't immediately clear his threat after the animation sometimes. Just tell your Hunter to watch target/target and not fire until Illidan has acquired a new target. Your MT should always be right next to him waiting to shield bash/slam and not rely on a MD.

How often is it expected that your main tank would get sheared? During p1, a missed shear is pretty healable, but we had a final phase wipe because of shear+enrage landing. Is it best to built the majority of threat with HS spam, and devastate/revenge a 2-3 times after each shear then keep the GCD free for shield blocking the next shear?


Also, what is the best way for handling parasites in the final phases of the fight when everyone needs to stay spread out? We used 2 camps, with a hunter+mage on the front left and front right sides of the raid and had people running to these spots, and keeping them pretty clear to avoid stacking agonizing flames, but maybe having a single spot in the center as the parasite dump would be easier. Things got a bit hectic when we had a bad death or two and panic ensued.


Anyway, got him to 2% in our first 8 hours or so of attempts, even having to rotate offtanks on the flames (which cost us a few hours for the new tank to learn p2), thanks to the help of this thread.

Shield Block is not on the global cooldown, it only requires available rage.

Missing a shear is going to happen once or twice, but it shouldn't. Shield Block is off the GCD, so the tank just has to be ready.

We just have people with parasites go into the grate, it's not going to kill you if agonizing flames gets cast on 2 people while they're running.

I'm going to disagree with the above slightly. Yes when learning the MT is probably going to take a couple of Shears and ultimately they are healable as long as your healers watch for it, but after 8 hours of attempts your MT should have the cast pattern engrained on his memory and NEVER get Shear.

Best place for Parasites after P2 is over is the middle of the grate, just position your Mages on the edge of the grate and tell everyone that it's a "no-go" area unless they have a Parasite.

Our tank still gets sheared every now and then because he's raid leading so he tends to unfocus on what he's doing to reposition people or what not(and some people definitely like to be in the cone AE thingie range while dpsing, for some reason), but he has yet to die to it. Maybe if you get shared when he's enraged you die, but besides that really shear is easy to heal, since every healer in the raid is pretty much only healing the tank at that time, and mostly using hots to keep agonizing/parasited people up.

Strange, ive seen our tanks take about 15+ shears over many kills and it has only ever killed the tank once as a result. The tank will almost always live through it as the healers have nothing else to spam heals on most of the time.

Tank survivial under shear is pure luck and you can't blame healers here. Illidan is fully capable of delivering more damage in 1 second than total tank hp under shear. It's possible that tank will not have enough rage for shield block on very start of p1 or p3, but if he is getting shear on constant basis, he is doing something wrong.

Yeah I guess we've never been unlucky enough to get big double hits during shear or parry resets(and even those actually take a decent amount of time when you have 6healers spam healing). And it doesn't happen often, but it does happen. I can see why too, if you lose focus on tanking to raid lead asking people to move or whatever, you'll probably go back to your reflexes, and these involve using shield block whenever it's up, it's like breathing when all you do is tank 5days a week(well less once illidan is on farm I guess) for 1+year ^^. I wasn't saying, it's fine, you can tank all shears tho. Just saying that when it does happen, you also have to be unlucky even more for your tank to die to it cause it's not like, 95%deathrate like eating an eye beam(I think we saved our druid once on those, but that might be mixed memories).

I tank Illidan as a paladin, so I get the occasional shear just due to holy shield being kind of a pain (on the global cooldown, same duration as recast). I tend to just say screw it and keep it up 24/7 rather than try to use it during shear, due to how much threat'd suffer trying to keep my gcd free whenever shear is 'due'. But probably once every 3 attempts or so a shear gets through due to the split second it's down before reapplied due to latency, or just illidan eating through 8 charges in 8 seconds (very rare, only happened once).

I've yet to die to a shear, however. I just immediately pop an ironshield and click my trinket if it happens (nightmare seed too if I remember, which I rarely do) - sadly I don't have a really good one like moroes or hydross's, so I use the parry/armor click one from Zul'Aman. The extra 5000 armor brings me to around 24500, and at 24500 armor he just _barely_ will not be able to one round me from the ~9800ish hp I have sheared. If a shaman or priest has procced the +25% armor it's not even close. What a terrible shame we have 1 resto shaman and 0 holy priests on most raids.

One thing I really should parse my logs for, and perhaps this is better said in a paladin mechanics thread, but does anyone know if ardent defender is triggered mid round? For instance, if his mainhand hit takes me to 30%, would his offhand hit's damage be reduced, even though they're hitting at nearly the exact same time? It'd explain my results as well, I suppose, but I simply don't know one way or the other.

Would it not be possible to bubble shear off as a paladin? (Chance of getting a melee DPS gibbed of course, but depending on where in the fight you're at that may be a preferable risk.)

I'm honestly not sure Anedris. I know you can't BoP it, and I HEARD divine shield doesn't remove it, but I haven't actually tested first hand because I didn't want to embitter the guild toward paladin tanks more than they already are, hoho.

I've had the opportunity to try that out before, and it's indeed impossible to remove Shear with either Divine Shield or Blessing of Protection.

It has been recommended to us that for first few Illidan kills to ignore traps altogether. My question is how tough is it to heal through his enrages? Would 4 healers be sufficient to heal through?

Your healers have nothing else to heal at this point, so they should all be on it. Sure, someone might have a parasite debuff or in the final stages of agonizing flames - but thats only needs one persons attention.

In my experience, its the confusion surrounding the enrage that is directly responsible for most tank deaths - not the actual enrage itself. This is because during the enrage/trap period there can be lots of talking on vent: things like 'the traps there' + 'are we getting the trap' + 'ignore the trap' + 'hes going to enrage" + minimap being pinged like crazy and people just lose concentration, or start moving to/away from a trap and healing on the tank momentarily drops/stops.

Living through the enrage is relatively easy - just communicate with the raid when its coming/when traps are being used or ignored etc.

We are currently going with 9 healers at the moment. So yeah we have more than enough that can spam heal. Do most guilds just go for ignoring the trap? Because I'm thinking if the enrages are not hard to heal thru, why not Bloodlust and make get the kill as quickly as possible?

We have had alot of deaths looking like this:


Is our tank too slow with shield block, does he lag or is there something strange happening?

That looks like plenty of time. The only x factor I can think of is did he turn away from Illidan at any point? A lot of warriors manage to get themselves sheared by turning too much while moving and losing their frontal avoidance.

This is what our GM posted later.

Hey, i'm from the same guild. I can comfirm that our MT does not turn too much away when side stepping Illidan out of the flames.

What an original thought was, that after landing in phase 3, the server could possibly think that the MT was behind illidan, as he will be dragging him across the room to the new tank spot at quite a fast pace. It doesn't explain why this happens in phase 1 though.

Two things that helped us a lot in dealing with the panic and confusion that can happen on new phases when there is a lot going on are:
1. Practice phase 2 and phase 4 assigned placements. Just do it a few times until it feels natural to everyone. Phase 3/5 people can just spread out a bit more fluidly, but you should really assign specific spots for phase 2 (4 points) and the demon phase imo.
2. Spread out in phase 1, as if it were phases 3/5. Have a designated "parasite pit" spot with a marked hunter/mage standing by it, trap/flare down, and practice staying spread out and having people who get the parasite run to the spot without having to get yelled at or reminded. Once it becomes second nature to do this without being babysat, it helps a lot minimizing confusion later on.

We had two of our earliest attempts that failed because of parasites getting out of control in the last phases and confusion/panic ensued. Someone couldn't find the parasite pit area and started chain infections during a transition to the demon phase, during which half the raid got blown up. Just practice the spreading, and running parasites to a specific location, while it's safe. It should save you some time and frustration.

Seeing a lot of NPC parries the last couple of days in hyjal I was wondering if maiev's positioning in regards to illidan tanking makes a significant difference. We're just having fun on illidan since we killed IC first time yesterday, so we tried it but now I'm thinking about minor differences in the critical phases, planning ahead before the reset this week.

Anyway, does it benefit a lot on how to position illidan ? Ofcourse taking in consideration that i won't position him against the raid, watching flame patches etc. Or should I just let her do her thing (since she isn't attacking that often) and hoping not to get an unlucky parry streak from myself, a rogue and maiev ?