Pyros

Well there's almost nothing else to heal during the normal phase, even the agonizing flames only start to grow near the demon phase, so yea you should have all your healers on the tank. I said we don't notice, mostly because like, the healthbar goes down then back up instantly. We bring 8healers too.

Obviously it's the same as shear, he can still die instantly with bad luck. Never happened to us though. Don't know about the hps, the tank burns some cooldowns during the enrage, but on our kills we never bothered running to a trap unless it was right next to it. You shouldn't get more than 2, maybe 3 enrage, you can cover one easily with shield wall, a second with trinkets/last stand, I guess you're fucked for the last one and have to be lucky.

Anyway once you get P2 down and the P3 rotations down, even if you wipe, it's only slowing you down by 10mins every week. The probability to wipe due to tank death during enrage twice in a row is probably pretty low, and the rest of the fight is not really random at all, it's easy to do. In comparison we still wipe more often to archimonde, mainly because we don't use any of the "smart" strat, we just wing it, so every once in a while, there will be like 6people out of decurse range at a time, or doomfires all around the melees ^^.

 

crimsonsentinel

I'm wondering how people are assigning their resto druids on phase 2 for healing. We usually raid with 2 out of 8 healers, and I have them HOTing the 2 infernal tanks. However, it seems like the tanks take enough burst that they still require 2 full other full time healers on them each, so that leaves only 3 people on the raid which seems a bit low at times. Basically I have 1 pally, 1 pally/priest (whoever is on) and 2 sets of druid HOTs on each MT, which works well so far. That leaves 2 resto shaman and myself (CoH priest) on raid.

Do most guilds have their druids heal the tanks and if so, do they only have 1 other healer on them? Or are druids better lifeblooming the raid?

 

Anedris

We killed him for the first time tonight, and we had two druids HoTing both tanks, one additional paladin on each tank, and then one DS priest assigned to watch both tanks (so a total of five healers devoted to the flame tanks). This left us a probably excessive amount of raid healing (two resto shammies and two CoH priests).

 

khel

Our standard healing setup is 2 holy paladins, 2 holy priests, 1 resto druid, 3 resto shamans. 1 paladin flash spamming each offtank, 1 shaman stopcasting max rank healing wave on each, and resto druid hotting both (3x lifebloom + rejuv). 2 CoH priests and a shaman chain healing is more than enough raid healing if you use the 4 points strategy. It works out very nicely.

 

Jalhar

We usually take 8 - 9 healers for Illidan: in phase 2, the 2 resto druids keep LBx3 + rejuv on the 2 offtanks, 2 of the paladins heal one off-tank each, and the rest (2 priests 1-2 shammies 1 paladin) heal the raid. Unless offtanks move too slowly or are not FR-capped, they shouldn't require more than 2 sets of hots and a direct healer each.

As the Illidan splashbolt is quite unpredictable (it can land several times in a row on the same group), lifebloom is unefficient to heal the raid in this situation. Circle of healing and chain heal are quite amazing though ^^

 

• Daboran

We run two Resto Druids usually and yes, assign them to the Flame tanks. They should be able to keep HoTs running on both tanks easily - we add a Paladin to each tank plus one more healer who splits his healing between Flame tanks and raid healing.

Once your Flame tanks get some practice in, you will find that incoming damage will decrease substantially. It is possible to tank the Flames and only ever receive melee or blue flame damage, which is nowhere near the amount of damage that the yellow flame patches cause. After 5-6 kills now I believe that all our healers except the Druids do varying amounts of raid healing during phase 2.

 

Mano

Coming fresh from our first Illidan kill on Sunday*, I think we killed him with 9 healer in the end. We started with 8 but then one of our melee had to go and we had a choice between melee or healer replacement and opted for the healer.

We only had one druid, so I'm not exactly sure what he healed. But generally two shamans and 1-2 COH priests are raid healing, while the rest is on the flame tanks in P2.

The biggest problem is actually dark barrage healing: who does it, who makes small/fast casts vs long casts, making sure some of the healer stay on the off tanks, etc.

* we count it as kill with 24 persons, cause one of our damage warriors wanted to play with fire at the start of P2

 

Tyrian

Heres how we do Phase 2 healing every week:

- 8 or 9 Healers. (Recommend taking 9 to be comfortable, even if its doable with less - a la Illidari Council)

- 2 raid Healers. Always 1 Shaman + 1 COH priest. If you use 4 group strat (Ill get to that in a sec) your COH will always be top healing in phase 2, period - that spell is simply made for 4pt positioning like this fight.
- Each elemental tank gets 3 healers. One of the healers must be a paladin. If you use druids , a druid heals one tank with bombs but keeps lifebloom stacks on both.
- One of the Paladins is assigned to be 'Dark barrage topup'. Every time there is a dark barrage he will immediately switch to heal that person. This means that during that period the Elemental tank he was previously on will have only 2 healers, so you want to make sure you have 2 geared/good healers on that tank to compensate.


Most importantly, 4-point phase 2 positioning is highly recommended for easier Phase 2 control for one massive reason: COH. Just make sure you do the obvious thing and setup your 4 groups correctly so COH will be healing all 5 people in-group at a time when they get by Fireballs.

 

cheebamonkey

Lately we've been trying to speed up our illidan kills and so far we've gotten him down to 14 minutes. Next week we're gonna try and blow heroisms right at the start and then again as they pop up which should shave more time off. Anyways I've notice that a lot of the guilds that are killing him faster than us have their melee doing considerably more damage than ours. Our dps spread is typically Shadow Priests/Locks at the top, then mages/hunters, then finaly the melee who are usually way behind. What are people doing to max our their melee dps on this guy, specifically during phase 2?

 

Gofa

Same with us. Our latest Illidan kill (hell, no shadowpriest + going oom ) -> Wow Web Stats

Going from 66% -> 30% we have 2 demon phases. I assume faster killing guilds only have 1 demon phase so melee can almost dps Illidan the entire time. If you're lucky and get a good trap + blow heroism the second phase 4 starts, I imagine Illidan *could* go down without any additional demon phase sub 30%.

So altogether you have a total of 1 demon phase + melee can do pretty decent on flames as well if your tanks are willing to take the risk of getting some extra fire damage so that your melee can continue dpsing.

 

KooZ

Had a very unlucky night on illidan, where our 2nd attempt went really well with a new flame tank, quite stable into P3.4,5 with 9 healers there, then parasites ran around and screwed us.

Some tries later, switching in an additional healer to ease up on P2, we've got some very unlucky streaks.

1st : Wow Web Stats - Double parry during enrage

2nd time they asked me to use traps, well they're screwed imo, you really have to pull him over and maiev usually lays her traps 2-3y away from the back wall where we position illidan near.

A turnaround on 6% made him go back to 20% again and killing a couple raidmembers too.

Still a lot of randomness going on in this fight and if someone is not 100% focussed the entire fight things go wrong really fast, I'm hoping we can speed things up in the future with less healers/more DPS.

 

dakalro

As our MT put it when we were first killing him, if you don't avoid at least some of his hits while he's enraged, he's gonna gib you. Just chances are high you are gonna avoid something and having all healers -2 (the parasite/fire healers) simply spamming max rank helps. Traps are nice but doubt they're there for 100% use due to their positioning. If you get a lucky one, you use it, he's dead, if not, life goes on.

 

Vitae

22:02'09.122 Kooz's Heroic Strike hits Illidan Stormrage for 278
22:02'09.122 Kooz's Devastate hits Illidan Stormrage for 227
22:02'09.669 Illidan Stormrage's Melee parried by Kooz

This occurs 0.547 seconds after your last attacks. I highly doubt you swing this fast. It also says his melee parried by you.

Unless you have a deliberately confusing combat log, that really looks like YOU parried him twice. That doesn't speed up attacks. You just went 1.5 seconds with your only direct heal being a Flash of Light. You should have 6-7 healers on you at that point - you should be getting at least 10k in heals every 1.5s. You don't need bad luck on parries for him to do 32k damage in that time span.

 

• Latito

Yea Kooz.. you parried Illidan, not the other way around. Effectively, you were attacking faster, not Illidan. Unlucky would be Illidan parring your melee and devastate back-to-back. Something like:
Ilildan hits you
You attack, Illidan parries
Illidan hits you
Your devestate is parried by Illidan
Illidan hits you.

That is a double-parry.

It looks to me like one of your melee was being parried by Illidan for him to get that attack off at 08.738. (just 0.250 seconds after his last attack).

Checking the log.. THIS is what caused the parry-haste:
22:02'08.571 Doomstriker's Melee parried by Illidan Stormrage

That said, you really should be getting more heals, as the above poster pointed out. With 9 healers in the raid, you should have a good 7-8 on you. When Maive places the trap, have someone designated to see where it is and make a call if you should move to it or not. If that person (generally a raid leader or some officer who isn't melee / MT) elects to not use the trap, say so and all healers should be spam-healing as soon as he enrages until he goes Demon form again. 1 flash heal in 1.4 seconds is just not acceptable. In fact, looking at the log.. you had just a SINGLE healer on you (appart from HoTs).. and they were flash of lighting. This is Illidan, not Prince. Heal more.

From the WWS charts.. you had 10 healers. 3 priests, 3 druids, 3 paladins, 1 shaman. Stick a druid or paladin on the Parasite / Agonizing stuff. During enrages you should have 3 priests, 1 shaman and 2 paladins spam healing you for max-rank big heals. The 2 druids who aren't on Parasite / Agonizing should have full hots up. My guild is generally doing Illidan with 6-7 healers now and we'll just spam the MT through enrage. Granted, we expect to 1-shot him every week so using Shield Wall on the first enrage and Last Stand on the second (if he ever even lasts that long) isn't uncommon. Just saying, you *can* do it with fewer healers - as long as they are all spamming. Healers who aren't healing the MT at that point (aside from the 1-2 assigned to raid dmg..) aren't helping anyone.

 

KooZ

well we've killed it yesterday... sorry I misunderstood the combat log at that time,

I do use a macro that might give you some insight on my 'weird' combat log

Really easy, spammable macro bound to 4 seperate keys on my keyboard to prevent RSI

I'll slap my healers for a bit now

 

Sataniss

Last night was really our first solid attempts at Illidan. We got him to around 50% or so on 2-3 attempts. Our p1/3 setup seems to be no problem. We're not losing anyone to flames and parasites are staying under control. Also last night we managed p2 rather well once the tanks got comfortable and DPS took their ADD medication .

My question is how do guilds handle p4, that seemed to be our biggest source of confusion atm (which is understandable since we've only seen it about 2-3 times). Do you normally preassign group placements? Or atleast tell certain classes/roles to be at certain places/distances? I'm trying to set it up so we can practice it ahead of time but I'm having trouble coming up with a method to do it.

Also, when/if do you send your melee in to dps the demons? As soon as they spawn or after the flame burst that comes 5 seconds after they spawn?

 

Kayaton

Specifically for Phase 2: We use the four point method, healing groups north and south with a few ranged built in, melee on one side, ranged on the other. Once the phase starts, all dps, melee included starts laying into the flame on the melee side, we hold off on all cooldowns until the first eye blast. If the first eye blast is headed for the flame that has the melee on it, the melee and caster group will switch sides and then blow all cooldowns, bloodlust, drums of war, etc etc. The faster we get one flame down, the better. If the eye blast is headed towards the other flame that doesn't have melee on it, cooldowns are blown right away and the flame is dead before the next eye blast starts.

Our tanks do an exceptional job of pushing the flame inwards towards the grate as the ground starts filling up with flames giving the mellee as much uptime as possible. If we are sub 20% on the flame and there's no room left to stand safely, the tank will start popping his health cooldowns, Last Stand, Nightmare Seeds, etc in successive order so he can stand in the flame while mellee finishes it.

Then you switch mellee and caster groups up, and the 2nd tank has a harder time keeping the flame in mellee range, but with the extra healers that are freed up from the first FR tank not needing them anymore, it allows for more freedom for standing in the flames for maximum mellee uptime.

As far as phase 3-5 go, we are still perfecting our speed strategy (Positioning mainly), but as it stands, we are at about a 15 minute kill.

 

Tyrian

Phase 4 is very easy - when people relax and know what to expect. Heres an easy way to do it, where there is no DPS on illidan during the phase, no need for spec-specific things like Improved Blizzard etc and rarely a time where your worried the demons will actually reach their target - your just focused on Survival. There are of course many ways to handle phase 4, some are riskier or more dangerous than others. We treat phase 4 as nothing more than a 1 minute survival-break - there is no need to DPS illidan, so heres how to play it safe:



Healers are yellow, dps is green. The warlock tank has all Paladins on him (3 usually) and the remaining 6 become the raid healers.It goes roughly like this:

Picture 1 - Phase 4 starts, everyone is spread out.
Picture 1-2- First flame burst hits, immediately after that everyone runs to the far back wall like in the second picture and waits for shadow demons. (its OK to group up here, because the next flame burst is a long way off)
Picture 2+ - Shadow demons arrive, all DPS immediately runs forward from the back wall and begins to spread out in preparation for the next flame burst. Healers remain stationary.

The key to executing this smoothly during the fight - is practising it before the fight. You don't really need to do pre-set group positions, just tell people to pick a spot before the fight during your role play and stick to it for the rest of the night. The other things to consider is , make sure your melee spread out evenly from left to right. Also, make sure you have very strong ranged DPS near the right side in case your Warlock tank gets a demon - it needs to be nuked fast by someone who can get in range quickly (Mages blink in etc)

Doing PH4 this way will ensure that every shadow demon will have to travel to the back of the room. The one exception (demons that stun the warlock tank) you will have a special plan in place for: Strong, fast ranged DPS ready to move up immediately after the Shadow Demons spawn to save him, in addition to the warlock tank being as far back as is possible before they spawn (without aoe'ing his pallys to death) and earthbinds/frost traps between Illidan->Warlock tank to buy extra time.

 

• Latito

So the sequence of events is basically this:
-Illidan transforms into a demon, Warlock picks up aggro
-Everyone runs back a decent bit, stays spread out
-Flame Burst goes out, everyone takes 3k dmg
-Everyone runs way the hell back - basically as far away from Illidan as possible, keeping 3-5 yards away from everyone else. Generally this means spreading your entire raid about 2 ppl deep along the wall furthest from Illidan.
-Demons spawn
-Melee start to trickle forward.. staying spread out
-Flame Burst (occasionally you may get 2 ppl w/ demons standing near each other who are forced to take a double-hit. not a big deal)
-Kill Demons
-Spread out, just like for first Flame Burst
-Flame Burst
-Back onto Illidan

Key concepts are just spreading out for Flame Bursts and getting a lot of distance between yourself and Illidan for Demons.

 

Sataniss

Sweet! Thanks a lot for the quick replies! Really helpful info that I'll definitly put to use this week. Once everyone gets used to it i'm sure it will go much much smoother. Especially now that we have a much better attack plan .

 

cheebamonkey

Our strat for phase 4 consists of a few set rules and a lot of yelling on my behalf at the people who don't go to the right spots. The basics is a somewhat strict hiarchy on who is closest to the boss:

1: Shadow Priests - we usually run with 3 and these guys, myself included are always fairly close to him, our job is to select short targets quickly and keep them slowed and also to slow any that don't get snared by totems or traps or imp blizzard if we have it.
2: Warlocks and Mages - The way we kill the demons is very AOE heavy so it's important that those who can stay close enough to AEO, meaning warlocks in seed range and mages in blizzard range.
3: Hunters - We rarely bring more than 2 hunters so they can usually mix in with the locks and mages and concentrate on focus firing any with short lifelines.
4: Healers - Naturally they just need to be spread out around the raid with at least 2 in range of the warlock tanks (and usually 3). Shaman Frost shocking strays that need to be slowed can help.
5: Melee - Naturally they are in the back, if they can they run in and help kill but usually it's not needed.

For killing them we play totems and a trap at illidans feet right as he goes into phase 4 and with about 2 seconds before demons mages start blizzarding and warlocks start seeding. If all goes well they are all dead before they get out of the trap, if all doesn't go well with the aoe everyone switches to single target and assists the shadow priests.

I gotta say though I like the above strategy from Tyrian a lot since it seems idiot proof but this works well for us and the only time it fails is when someone forgets to put down a trap and totems and we don't have our imp Blizzard mage all rolled into one incredible moment of failure.

Also to answer the other question earlier on healers, we usually roll with 8 - 9 but recently we've been pushing 7 in an attempt to wake us up for sunwell and we usually have 2 restos + 2 Pallies on the tanks and then have 2 Shaman and a CoH priest on the raid. It can get a bit tough at times but there is enough healing to prevent the raid from dying long enough for illidan to cast eyebeam which gives the healers time to catch up. You should never need more than 4 healers on the Flame tanks though, if they are dying with hots from two druids and a pally you should probably look at how much damage they are taking and if they are kiting the flames effectively. There is a huge difference between how much damage from flame patch they take now and how much they took when we first learned it.

 

Sinborn

The important part of this phase is don't blow up from being too close to each other, or illidan, or the warlock tank. Just make absolutely sure your raid is watching the flame burst timer so they don't go charging the demon heading at the warlock tank 3 seconds before flame burst goes out and destroys them. If they are properly slowed, and you are spread out, you have time.

There's alot of room to spread out in this phase, so use it. If you have a trusted mage, make him pick up imp. blizzard and permafrost, and get him to stand at about 36 yards from illidan, between the raid and the boss. Start casting it about 4 seconds before the timer is up, and cast it again to keep them slowed. Hunter traps are good, but imp blizzard is much better. Use both. Give him an assist so if he's targeted with a demon, he can mark it. Precasting blizzard is good cause even if he's targeted, you get 4.5 seconds of 25% movement speed at the targeted mage.

The worst stuff that can happen is warlock tank has parasites going into P4, or the warlock tank/slowing mage getting targeted with demons. IMO it's all very simple compared to the random shit that is archimonde.

 

◊ pewsey

Thanks to input from Oggie this is what we do as well. Imp Blizzard + Seeds = demons die before they are out of the blizzard.

So, as a result our P3/P4 positions for the ranged are the same, and the melee run through the raid to the back to just hang out.

It works remarkably well.

Pewsey has heard about tact and discretion, but tends to regard them much as children view vegetables.
Nemesis: "Pewsey is single-handedly turning around every guy in the BB that didn't want to have kids."
Viator: Because I had a baby so I'm better than non-breeders.

 

Krazen

Last night, I pulled aggro on the second flame. My approach is to split bolts on both elementals while the first is up (I'd say I tossed maybe 7-8 bolts at Elemental 2 while 1 was alive). I got the 2nd dark barrage, Shadow Warded, Coiled Elemental 2, and lifedrained it, and pulled.

I have no idea what happened, or how, just throwing it out there.

 

Charsi

Has Illidan been tanked by a feral Druid yet? Because we did tonight, and i'm curious to know if anyone has done it before us. We used 3 warriors on an Intervene rotation, but it was hardly perfect and the Druid still took a shear or two.