Depending how you handle positioning on the time period the first flame burst but before the demons pop, this would perhaps be viable. Keep in mind it means your locks and perhaps mages would have to be closer sooner, which could potentially be troublesome should one of them get a demon.

For reference, we had everyone except the lock tank and his assigned healers run to the back of the room after the first flame burst, wait for demons to spawn, reposition slightly before the second flame burst, then kill demons. What you've enquired about does sound feasible for the way our guild handles phase 4, but it could potentially be an issue if by bad luck multiple AOE casters cop the demons.

Thanks for all the advice...we got our first kill tonight. Epic kill....lost everyone but one elemental shaman to parasites during the death scene as they got out of hand going into the last demon phase and we just nuked Illy down rather than cleaning them up.

Side note, do the parasites / parasite debuff deal extra damage during the enrage? I'm pretty sure we lost people due to excitement and resulting losses of focus (first pull sub 40%), but if there's a change in the mechanic that I missed I'd love to warn our healers.

My guild is close to beating Illidan (~20% best attempt), thanks to much of the advice in this thread, but one problem we've had is properly spacing ourselves during phase three and five for some quality damage dealing. I did some research into DBM's distance window and discovered (to me) a pretty surprising fact -- it can only measure two distinct distances, 9.9 yards and 15 yards. It can't actually measure any real detail beyond that.

Now, everything I've read says Illidan's burst and flames have a range of 5 yards, not 10, meaning the DBM window is extremely inaccurate, allowing for much tighter packing (four times as dense!). So for those who have done this fight more times, and before I kill someone experimenting with this tomorrow night, can you confirm in fact the range is 5 yards, and DBM's window is way over aggressive?

If so, this affects other fights (Hydross, Naj'entus, etc) though not nearly as much as those abilities (supposedly) are eight yards, which is close enough. In a way, this tells me I (and probably 99.9%) of other raiders depend too much on DBM/BigWigs without really questioning the details of what goes on under the hood.

Before the fight tell people to spread out and remember their positioning for p3 and p4, we also chose one side for handling parasites and 2 mages closest to that spot. When p3 started everyone just ran to their spots keeping the range and there were no problems really. Last time in p4 we moved melee way back before the demon spawn, but for this week we'll try the opposite and put them in line with closest ranged classes, so that can do a bit of damage to demons.

Also as for timing SoC on Illidan, tell your locks to start spamming it 8 or so seconds before demon spawn, I can't explain how much easier fight will be with proper timing of SoC.

Yes you're right. I can't say if it is 5 yards or maybe 6 yards, but it is smaller than DBM rangeframe will tell you.


@maddfez
No, they won't deal any additional damage. It's just that in phase 5 Illidan will spawn parasites more often (almost twice as much I would say) so your mages and healers really need to watch out.

I'm fairly sure his enrage does increase the damage done by both parasites and agonizing flames, though I am not 100% positive of that.

I am absolutely positive that Enrage increases Agonizing Flames damage, as I've had it happen to me before (ended up dying to a nearly-simultaneous 6.5k tick + Flame Burst).

I need advice for phase2..
Our raid leader insist on doing some strat he saw in Videos, but with our raid setup( HEAAVY MELE DPS) it does'nt seem smart to have all mele runing around, and coming back the raid when is not posible to dps the flames..

Can anyone give me pros and cons on this positioning?



We proly gona have just 3 groups, even 2 in the middle, becouse 2 full groups are Mele dps, and the tank group has 3 of 5 or 4 of 5 Mele too..

Please, dont sugest change the raid setup, i need a strat that works for this.

Well, the only thing I really see wrong with that is the kiting path on the elementals. In that strategy, you're asking for an enrage by kiting them too far from the warglaive that they spawned from. Basically, you're kiting on the wrong "loop" -they always need to be near the glaive they spawned from.

Other thing is eye-beams are drawn incorrectly.

Raid positioned nicely. We only had 3 groups, and then the melee group. Melee group is closest to the flame.

Here's the exact mechanics, from what I understand it:
- Anyone within 25 yards of either warglaive gets a buff that makes them immune to being charged.
- Anyone who doesn't have this invisible buff and is 20 yards away from an elemental will get charged. This explains the "battle-rezzing" bug, where you battle-rez someone at a group, and an elemental instantly charges them.
- If an elemental ever goes 25 yards or more away from the warglaive that they spawned from, they will enrage.
- Easy "wipe" scenario is that someone is 20 yards away, gets charged, and the charge removes the elemtal from the 25 yard radius.
- It is NOT true that "charge=wipe," we've seen several where he charged someone but was still within range of the war-glaive. Also, if he does charge and enrage, he should still go back to the tank, so if the tank can "run away" to the far-side of the warglaive, the elemental might get hit by the warglaive aura again and kill the enrage.

Other notable things:
- Eye-beams ALWAYS hit the warglaive. So, you can picture the entire route as soon as you see it spawn, because it's going to always hit the war-glaive. (This is drawn incorrectly on your picture).

Basically your diagram is drawn incorrectly by a factor of 90°; your kite paths are in the wrong spots and the eye beams do not look like that. Just look back in this thread, there are some quite excellent diagrams of allowable kite spots and beam pathing.

Also, the melee cannot follow the Flame in the manner shown by your diagram. The Flame leaves a blaze patch on it's current aggro target every few seconds, and people not wearing FR die really, really quickly to it. Until your tanks get really good at moving them, you're going to get minimal DPS time with melee, as the Blazes and the blue fire left by the Eye Beam will lock you out from being able to attack it.

what about now?
I tested the pathing, its ok, the flames dont enrage, and everyone stays on range..

At the end of your kiting path your 3 groups are too close together, so it is very likely that all of them will get hit by the fireball Illidan casts.

Another problem is that the whole raid has to move around all the time to not get hit by the cone of fire each flame makes. As a consequence your healers will have a really hard time keeping everyone alive and your ranged dps is kind of screwed up.

So the dps loss of your ranged dps negates the dps gain your melees might have with your strat.

--

Even if you are a heavy melee orientated raid just use the suggested strategies. It will be a lot easier although your phase 2 might take 1 minute longer - but that really shouldn't be a problem at all.

- Your melee cannot follow in that path. They'll be standing in blazes pretty quickly.
- There's no reason to spiral inward, unless you're doing it to avoid eye-beams.
- Groups on the interior are too close together. This is what really will kill you. The reason you can't tank the flames on the grate is because it forces people to group up just a little bit more, which causes more people to get hit by fireballs, which is what kills you. Groups really can't be moving.
-Kite path does not work is VERY sketchy. Your 25 yard range indicator is really pushing it, and I'd go so far to say it's incorrect. It might work, but why risk it?
- Tank messes up and it's looking at the raid. At the very start of your ktie path, the fire elementals cone attacks are hitting g1 and g3.

Our melee DPS is only in for about 70% of the phase. They're in for the first full-rotation of the warglaive (I sometimes stand in a blaze if we're healer-heavy). Melee just unload while standing in the grate. Once I get to the end of my "arc" and start having to go back, melee get off and just chill. Usually it's at 30%, and they're able to go attack the other one.

It's not fatal if your melee can't dps in phase 2, the enrage timer is still 25 minutes.

Just think of it this way, do you want 25 people to learn to move, or 2 (+a little awareness with the melee)?

Keep it simple, 2 people are all you need moving - the flame tanks. Get the melee to sit in a safe spot and level their ranged weapons! Moving all the groups, in particular the healers, is a very bad idea.

To help with flame tank dps we bloodlust the ranged groups during that phase, bloodlust will be up again before the fight is over.

Not going to 100% rule it out, but I'm thinking only bringing 2 ranged DPS to Illidan is a bad idea. Did you really bring no mages or were they dead during the phase?

1 Fire Mage.. really usefull for that phase.
again, stop trying to change the raid setup.. focus on the strat i propose..

Find his flaws, becouse for now i canot see any.

Simply put, if you're trying to learn Illidan P2 or Demon phases using 2-3 total ranged dps, you're probably asking for an extra 8+ hours of learning. Balance your raid, you'll be glad you did it later on.

Another point is that your melee will recieve really much damage. I just image 13-14 melees chasing a flame taking more than every second fireball...
On a sidenote, just try your strat and see if it works for you or if it not. If you give it some trys, you'll see whether it's flawless or if you run into problems, you might want to change something.

Out of curiosity how will you deal with parasites?

fire mage can deal with them alone.. hunter helps if needed, earthbind totems nova traps.. all of them works well..
Wish i could say, OK LETS DO THIS STRAT NOW!
that does'tn work becouse no raid leader will even try something diferent if there is'nt any cool video explaining the strat on the web.. :/

the thing is.. even with not that many mele, the strat seems easy for the tanks, and mele can do something.. and so far, i dont see any problem with it, still waiting for that someone that tells me.. U CANT DO THAT BECOUSE ... a HUGE RED BEAM will land on top of your MT killing the entire server.. i dont know, something that im not considering maybe?

Additionally, you're going to have issues dealing with Shadow Demons. It goes something like Flame Burst, Shadow Demons [ranged start killing them now], Flame Burst [melee goes in now], Demons die and you spread out for the final Flame Burst before the phase ends. But with just the two ranged DPS, you will struggle to get Demons down and chances are you're going to lose people close to Illidan (worst case: the Warlock tank), never mind if the Mage or Warlock are one of the two to get a Demon. If you send melee in to kill them as soon as they spawn, they (as in, the melee) will die to the overlapping Flame Burst damage.

The reason your Phase 2 strat will have a higher failure rate is due to the melee clumping behind the Flame. Sure if they are super careful and the stars align, they won't take Blaze damage, but having 2 full melee groups + some from the tank group running around clumped will dramatically increase raid healing required (splash Fireball damage), which means healing on other stuff (e.g. Flame tanks, Barrage targets etc) will stretch thin. There will be far less margin of error (if any at all), casualties are likely.

Of course, all this could be offset by having the Flame die quicker due to your incredibly synergistic melee dps raid, but I honestly wouldn't put my money on it. There's melee heavy, and then there's borderline ridiculous .. and (I don't mean to be rude or snide) you are veering towards the latter.