Lymmel

This thread and the video helped a lot, I think we killed both flames for the first time on our 6th attempt ever, once our druid tank bothered to read raid chat and listen to us telling him he can un-zoom his camera more than the interface options allowed him to.

It's interesting to note how these things help, since we learnt everything we could about p.2 and got over it real soon, then we hadn't given much attention to p.4 and he leveled us there with people just spreading out wherever. We took more time learning demon phase on our own than learning p.2 from ej thread/guides/videos.

As for aoe on the demons, we abandoned the idea after a bit and placed melee at the front, ranged at the back, didn't dps him at all in demon form. Some still did the aoe but it wasn't a vital part of our tactics. Demons are really no problem as soon as you figure out you need to spread out in a way you don't get flame burst splash but you are close enough for demons as well. If your people are suitably close to each other you can reach and kill them easily. That, and we put a fire resistance cauldron up every 2-3 attempts too.

 

Ramalama

We made a change in our P2 position tonight that made raid healing much easier. Instead of a loose, random spread across the grid, we stacked into 4 tight piles based on group number, each out of range of the other. This made it so two quick Circle of Healing casts would compensate for each fireball.

As an alliance guild with few active shaman, this more than compensated for lack of chain heals and allowed us to run three raid healers (two CoH priest and our only resto shaman), two dedicated healers per flame tank and 8th 'spot' healer. After we made this change P2 heals were very clean, even with no consumables.

It may seem obvious in hindsight, but anyone having trouble with the considerable P2 raid damage should consider repositioning to use Circle of Healing to its fullest.

 

Gruten

Definitely agree, the 4-group strat was the main reason we got our Phase 2s clean. Really makes it easy to chain heal/PoH/CoH.

 

Mneme

I've been looking at WWS logs of the fight, but admitedly I am not too familiar with the format of the site and I can't really find what I'm looking for.

My question is: can the Flames of Azzinoth crush? And if so, is there any way to avoid this? Since they hit for fire damage, I assume normal elemental rules would seem to apply (i.e. you can't block them and push crushes off the table.)

My reason for asking this is that I am one of the tanks in my guild with an FR set already made, and I'm wondering if I'll be able to tank a Flame successfully when we get to Illidan. (I'm a paladin btw.)

My current stats in FR gear: 375 FR, 490 defense, 11.1k hp unbuffed. These are of course subject to improvement as I pick up better gear for the slots I can afford to replace (neck, rings, belt, shoulders, etc.) The issue is that if they *can* crush and you *can* block them, I'm sitting like 15% avoidance short of where I'd need to be to be uncrushable due to Holy Shield only giving 30% block.

Any prot paladins out there have experience/success tanking one of these guys? I'd love to have a role in this encounter, and if I can save someone else the money/time of getting an FR set together that would be great too.

 

Davia

We've used a prot paladin for tanking the Flames successfully, since our Feral Druid has been having connection issues the last few weeks.

 

Wueste

We always use a protection paladin for flame tanking. Here is a wws log from our kill last night: Pisces - WWS

Our second tank always was a protection warrior. Never had any problems with both of them, unless they made mistakes with eye beam or didn't move fast enough. After phase 2, our protection paladin always help with healing, he could also try to make some damage, both isn't very effective.

 

Mneme

Mmm, you got that right. 700hp FoL hits ftw?

Thanks for the responses!

 

Ghaash

I am pretty scared of our tanks by now. I monitored the ratio of damage for our first 30 tries and one tank never got better than 2:1 while the other tank was stuck at 1:1 (sometimes even more blaze damage than melee). Eye Blast death of the second tank also happened every other attempt.

What really helped us to get through phase 2 (when the tanks allowed us to), was assigning 4 camps where people just stand on top of each other. Our previous attempts followed the idea of being evenly spread.

 

PsiVen

Spot healing is more handy than holding your dick, which is how we employ our other flame tank(s) in p3 and beyond

 

Pase

We have everyone spread out in 5 groups,

North - East - South - West - Middle

Mark one person up in those groups, and everyone stands ON TOP OF THEM. Not 1 yd to the side, but on top of them. If any healer has to move they move into another group, not between two. This way the least people as possible take raid damage and you can focus more on FR tanks, which is really needed sometimes.

We have our tanks standing at the warglaives (ofc, due to the enrager) and no melee damage at all.

Have both your FR tanks using /console CameraDistanceMaxFactor 4 and zoom max out, you can't miss the big beam coming towards you then. Also, the blue flame only ticks for ~500 while going through it later.

Dunno how helping this can be after all those pages, but if they help anyone I'm glad

 

Mneme

My job on Kael is tanking the phoenixes and a random weapon. I just run around judging Wisdom on stuff and pretending I'm useful for the other 20 minutes.

 

Lymmel

Don't be, the ratio presented in this thread is nowhere near a realistic estimate of first timers there. Our first kill ratios were same as yours, it takes time to learn this phase for tanks especially as at first they are always looking for the eye blast more than anything else and their ratio won't be good. You can still kill the glaives fine with that though, our tanks took almost 2:1 and we barely spread out at all and we just had healers compensating to get past the phase.

 

◊ Regen

Indeed, I use oTweaks (manually increase max zoom + max tab distance) ~ Turns out blizzard's default zoom distance is 15, I set mine to 50 and it works great for tanking the Flames (mainly because you have a much greater view, can easily see where the entire raid is and eye blasts from a fair distance
Index of /oTweaks/

Can't say phase 2 took that long to learn, pretty much one eye blast a piece to get a feel for the real radius of the beam once able to recognize it from a distance

Audillidan.divx - FileFront.com (First kill), Should should a decent zoom distance I use for Illidan P2

====

Zooming out can make encounters in general alot easier especially when dealing with awareness fights.

Barcode's video posted on R&D is an amazing tutorial, definitely took advantage of his "start the flame at the end of his path then run through him after first blaze"

===

Don't think the "crushing" question has been directly responded to either, The mobs themselves can only crit and not crush, probably why druids are viable FR tanks for this in the first place.

 

Buiden

To answer the original question:

- No they cannot crush
- No you cannot block their attacks so block rating/% is useless

Your only concerns should be FR Cap, Crit Immune, Hitpoints in that order.

 

Clandestine

AoEing the Shadow Demons seems like a bad idea. We have our warlocks toss in 1-2 seeds for the Shadow Demons, with the rest of the ranged single targetting. The warlocks then assist in single targetting. Trying to rely on AoE seems doomed to disappointment, as if even two of your AoE classes get paralyzed, you definitely won't be able to finish the Demons. AoEing would also be difficult at best because the Demons tend to spread out, as your raid should be spread in a good 150º around Illidan, nearly. In particular a Shadow Demon fixating on your warlock tank would probably spell death.

The entire raid is capable of doing damage to the Shadow Demons and you don't need to have any other form of DPS during this phase. There's no reason to complicate things by trying to set up an overly intricate method of defeating a fairly simple part of the fight.

 

Ghaash

You are absolutely right!
We downed Illidan yesterday (44 pulls total thanks to this thread) and i abandoned the idea of aoeing the demons very quickly. We switched to running away from Illidan after the first Flame Burst and earned more success. Optimizing that strategy from "just get as far back as possible" to "try to be as close together as possible" minimized the mentioned spreading-out of the demons. First pull with this strategy together with reaching 55% Illidan first time became the kill.
We messed up 30% transition and got 2 parasites up but managed to survive with quick Hammer of Justice's after the dialog between Illidan and Maiev.

/edit: Illidan's enrage seems to affect Agonizing Flames and parasite debuff. One of our shaman got 2 Agonizing Flame ticks for 7200. Have your group healers watch out for raid-dmg while enraged.

 

◊ Regen

Hamstring / Shiv'ing Crip Poison / Piercing Howl?(usually don't have this in a raid) / Pre-placed frost-traps (shadow demons spawn approx. half-way through demon phase)

All of the above can be used to snare the demons effectively

Best thing to do is to make sure everyone knows exactly where to place themselves as soon as he goes demon form (and to back up a considerable amount before demons spawn)

Phase 5 is where you need to do this on the fly, take the extra minute and save yourself some grief in p 3/4.

==
From my experience the only way anyone will die in demon phase/shadow demons is if melee splash damage people to death when trying to kill shadow demons. Make sure melee is either spread out on different mobs or timing their attacks so no-one is clumped up when a Fire-volley happens.

 

Clandestine

Yes, the enrage affects all damage he does, including Agonizing Flames and the parasites.

 

Herm

This seems to lack any real thought or attempt to optimize your strategy. Sure, it can hurt to have your AOE classes stunned, but it also greatly aids in killing them provided you avoid any bad luck. Whether you single target or not, dps'ers getting demons will slow your dps. DPS lost is DPS lost, whether it's single target or AOE. It doesn't change the fact that everyone besides the AOE classes can single target DPS, regardless of who is stunned. Adding this single target DPS to the AOE just ensures the demons die ultra quick. Doing only one or only the other just seems to make things less effective overall.

It's very rare that our demons ever make it more than a few yards from Illidan. If some of our AOE happens to get paralyzed, they simply make it a bit further out before being killed by shadow priests, hunters, our elemental shaman, and eventually the melee. No harm, no foul. Clearly either way works, but combining both AOE and single target seems like a much more effective way to handle them, especially for guilds first leaning the phase.

 

Natural

I agree that 2:1 is a good target for a first timer. They need to learn the trick to blaze--start moving when you see the animation, rather than the fire on the ground. With this in mind you can almost completely avoid it Blaze damage. Since my previous post, the best ratio I've managed is 5.8:1 (215k flame, 37k blaze).

 

Buiden

I have a question for people who have seen it, maybe you can shed some light on this for me. Back when this thread first got going a couple months back there was a lot of talk about Illidan immediately using draw soul (or another ability) after he bursts out of his trap.

I just wanted to say that after reading that I always call for a misdirect during trap and for high threat DPS to position themselves away from most of the raid, as a just in case measure. The thing is that in our 7 kills he has never done anything except IMMEDIATELY go into demon form. No melee, no ability, nothing, he just hunches over and changes.

So, my question is how are people seeing this happen? Does it still happen?

 

Caligula

It still happens. It happened to a horde guild on our server the night of their first kill. Apparently they were celebrating at 1% when Illidan broke out of the trap and soul drained, resulting in many a sad face.

 

◊ Regen

Only way I see Illidan casting draw soul before switching to demon after a trap is if the trap literally spawned underneath him (In which case on all otherwise-normal attempts the travel time from enrage --> trap is long enough so the traped time runs into the demon form timer.)

 

Buiden

Now that makes some sense to me, from the time the trap drops to the time he transforms is lets say 20 seconds, but the trap only lasts 15(?) seconds of that. I am pulling these numbers out of thin air as I don't know the exact values but it is starting to make sense.

Every time we use the trap it is a good 5-10 seconds after she drops it when he ends up being trapped thus leading to him going from trap to demon instantly. This is really good information.

 

Lodekim

Yeah we've still seen him do the one ability after a trap, though now I just keep building threat and usually hold it over everyone else during the trap. It wouldn't surprise me if it was based on how long you took to get to the trap though, I usually do pretty much the same thing every time and get him in the trap right after the enrage (I've done a few right before, but I stopped that cause I just don't like him enraging and then doing an action after the trap)