Inaiwae

I tank Flames with combination of resilience and defense. As any other fight, and i guess as 99% of all druids. No strange hits are happening to me.

 

• Chicken

To put it simply, when Illidan hits 30%, his aggro doesn't clear. He will be forced to leave his demon form to use Shadow Prison however, but he retains his demon form aggro. Threat meters can't properly tell the event of Illidan leaving demon form to use Shadow Prison apart from Illidan leaving demon form normally however.

Either way, it comes down to the simple fact that you should always ensure you're in a humanoid phase when Illidan hits 30%.

buff /bʌf/ Pronunciation[buhf]
–verb (used with object)
- to reduce or deaden the force of

 

Touf

We just killed him with a transition in demon form. He ran off and whacked a shadow priest (I think we cast BoP on the warlock tank) but after that the tank had him back with an MD. It seemed all right.

 

sovelis41

As was said earlier, this is almost certainly an enrage. One thing that's happened to us before is that flames have leashed (pulled just barely over the line), and haven't changed color. Everyone assumed it was a double stack blaze or something, but upon review of Grim Reaper it was definitely a straight up melee hit. If I can find the WWS of it I'll post it here, but this was a while ago; probably as far back as attempts trying to get our second kill.

You pay for the whole chair, but you only need the edge.

 

Promii

This seems the most likely. The flame I was tanking did not change color either, but if I recall correctly I was indeed at the far end of my kiting path. I will try to be a bit more conservative with my path on our next attempts.

 

• moz

I think it was mentioned briefly here but I'd like to reinforce the point that the +15 FR cloak enchant from CC (easily obtainable) is excellent in giving you additional flexibility in working out your best FR set (instead of using blue/green FR cloaks). From a feral tanking standpoint it allowed me to slap a +15FR enchant on Pepe's Shroud of Pacification giving me two very good stats for this fight (dodge. hit) -- the lack of armor compared to something like Slikk's is a non-issue with elemental damage anyway.

In order to help ferals who might be gearing up for P2 tanking given you only have access to gear up to this point --

Work in 2pc T6 and all the badge gear and you have a very nice setup. The Signet of Eternal Life from ZA is also really handy. For reference I used the following;

T6 hat / shoulders for the 2pc bonus
Quest Neck
Pepe's Shroud w/ 15 FR enchant
Badge Chest w/ 15 resil
Vindicator's Bracers w/ 12 def enchant
Badge Gloves w/ stam
Blastguard Belt w/ 2x sapphires
Badge Pants
Badge Boots w/ stam/boar's
Signet of Eternal Life
Phoenix Fire Band
Commendation of Kael'Thas
Moroes' Lucky Pocket Watch (alternatively use a Darkmoon card for more stam but the on-use is nice to have here)

Staff of the Forest Lord (again armor is a non-issue)

All this stuff is very achievable even if you've spent a relatively short time clearing to Illidan. Gives you ~17.4k HP, 299 FR unbuffed (should be at ~23K HP buffed without imp) and uncrittable with a little hit and reasonable dodge.

 

Ja7us

Another trick, if you're having trouble maintaining uncrittable and keeping your set bonuses and FR cap, is to use the [Onyxia Blood Talisman]. It's a 100% drop from Ony, so very easy to get, and the stats are actually remarkably good, especially for Paladins and Warriors who can make use of the parry.

 

biatch0

Regarding the "immune spot" for flame tanks; I've found this spot a couple of times before but never really made a note of where exactly it was. I did notice that it provided complete immunity from green/blue fire, however I did not have the guts to try and see if it also provided immunity to the eye beams and have always moved out if the eye beam heads towards my side. In doing so, I end up taking a large spike when moving out of that spot (from the X stack of blazes all around the immunity spot).

Assuming this spot really does give immunity to eye beam, it would make this phase a complete joke (and by relation almost the entire fight).

 

• Chicken

There's actually a few different spots, though I don't hunt for them myself. There's at least one spot that gives you blaze immunity which is also in an area where Eye Beams never hit. I try to avoid using these spots however, or at least, I try to avoid standing still in them to avoid Blaze damage for the entire encounter. There's no fun in taking the challenge out of things.

Yesterday was actually the first time I made use of one of these spots for an extended period of time, and that was more of an accident. I'd initially moved there to dodge a second Eye Beam in a row on my side, and then noticed I wasn't taking Blaze damage and decided to be lazy for once.

It did make that part of the fight extremely boring though, while I'd normally call tanking the Flames of Azzinoth one of the more enjoyable and challenging tanking jobs out there.

buff /bʌf/ Pronunciation[buhf]
–verb (used with object)
- to reduce or deaden the force of

 

Jagiya

Thanks to the above posters. I feel a little safer knowing that it's not a character-specific issue.
Now if I could figure out why I'm able to walk through the fire barrier at Brutallus...

 

Tamzin

I don't normally post my movies on EJ because any posts just get buried like a tear drop in the ocean hehe but, a mate just is insisting I should, bit late really to post it it's way old now but if anyone needs it still, I made a tactical guide movie on Illidan you can see it here: Tactical Guide - Illidan by Tamzin

 

Kaacee

We killed him for the first time on Monday, thanks for all the help in this thread. The fight does feel very repeatable. Even though we did not try to stack the raid, it helped a lot to bring 9 healers.

Did anyone else feel their first kill was sorta anti-climactic? We killed him during P5. I was reminding everyone to keep calm and focus on the demons, then they just disappeared, Illidan kneeled down, and a few people were confused, "Is he dead?" Might be because he is not immediately lootable. Meh.

 

Jezz

Heh, exactly what we thought. We killed him for the first time today and it was just as a demon phase was about to happen, he kneels over and and people were just like "Is he dead?". Then suddenely the screams started coming in when we realised he actually was

But yeah, definitely anti climatic.

 

Incoherence

Ours was anything but; on that attempt, we'd actually gotten a trap to work, and the DPS got a bit trigger happy. Illidan stands up at 1%, casts Draw Soul on about 8 people to heal to about 12%, then immediately transitions. This is a great way to guarantee that when you do finally settle down and kill him during the next elf phase, Ventrilo explodes.

 

Harwin

Thanks to this thread, we got our first kill Sunday.

...and about 15 seconds later most of us were dead due to loose parasites and some fool trying to melee them to death, plus us being excited. (I turned off my interface for an immediate post-kill screenshot and then had a hell of a time targetting parasites)

 

Gunn

Has anyone ever tried to tank both Glaives at the same time in the middle of them on the grate?
Basically just standing there with 5-6 healers spamming you?

 

Blacksen

We thought about it actually several times. You could have everyone spread out enough that fireballs would never hit more than one person. Tanks would never have to worry about eye-beams, only the ranged and healers. However, the problem really becomes the massive amounts of damage + the crowded factor. The flames can only move 25 yards away from their glaive (you visually can see them "linked" to it). Remember now that your tank is having to dodge TWO blazes on each flame in that small little area where each flame is within 25 yards of its glaive.

It's plausible, especially with a well geared tank FR, but not really practical. Much easier to just use two. 25 minute enrage timer, so it's not a DPS race.

 

Gunn

I think if I stand there without kiting them I'm going to take an average of 7k damage per second.
I believe we're going to try it tonight just to see. I'll post my results.

The reason we're doing this is because we lost 1 of our 3 FR tanks. Our back up FR tank sometimes has connection issues. It really may come down to me tanking both flames one of these evenings until we get a fully FR geared 3rd tank.

 

Turgid

Our Flame tanks take nearly that just tanking 1 if they don't move and get 3 blazes going on them. Plus melee and cone dmg.

 

◊ Bryne

You're grossly underestimating this. Wouldn't 12 stacked Blazes be something like 15k incoming DPS at 75% resist?

You might last past the first or second round of Blazes, but much past that probably isn't going to happen until you come back in Icecrown gear, unless my math or recall are totally off.

 

Gunn

I think you folks are right. Moving to avoid multiple stacks of blazes is a necessity. I may be able to take up to 4 blazes on me at once but then I would need to move. I'll have to determine the radius of flame overlap in the middle.

 

• Chicken

This image isn't perfectly accurate but it's the one I've always personally gone by:



There's some room in the middle of the grate where the two flame auras overlap. With some care it should be possible to keep the flames in there while also moving for Blazes.

buff /bʌf/ Pronunciation[buhf]
–verb (used with object)
- to reduce or deaden the force of

 

seminarca

Another suggestion: you could try getting your Leotheras/Capernian Warlock to tank one of the Flames. Somebody posted about having done it successfully earlier. If they still have their FR gear, this could be an option until you get your replacement tank ready. I'll try to find a link to that post.

edit: Here are the posts in question:
http://elitistjerks.com/710839-post647.html
http://elitistjerks.com/711325-post651.html
http://elitistjerks.com/711392-post652.html

This guy tanked a Flame and Demon form Illidan, of course you don't need to complicate it that much if you can muster 2 Warlocks for this. The big difference from tanking Leotheras/Capernian would be having to make up crit immunity since the Flames can crit on their melee attacks whereas the spells of the former two don't crit. Arena gear + full FR with a defensive Demonology build would be ideal I imagine.

 

PsiVen

I don't really see the advantage of doing that, apart from not having enough tanks. I would expect threat to be pretty bad, and the damage intake to be much worse than just using an undergeared or even offspec tank.

 

Touf

I've heard reports of someone tanking the flame and Illidan, it should be quite easy with Sunwell gear.