First, I must say that I am aware there are threads on both Vashj and Kael, but my thread has nothing to do with the designs of the fight or strategy.

I think the individual encounter of the Kael'thas fight is wonderfully designed and an amazing fight, allowing for every players dreams to hold a legendary. But the fight is hard and it certainly is a very significant focal point. And this is where my issue lies...

Why kill Kael'thas every week when you can focus on Black Temple and Hyjal? Yes, I am sure you can argue there's a robe there that you won't have an upgrade until Illidan or something. But in a situation like that, why waste 1-2 days on that sort of thing when you could be learning Archimonde and getting bigger upgrades for other slots?

My guild has not downed Kael'thas yet, but we are very close, getting into Phase 4 quite often now. But we haven't done Vashj in 2-3 weeks and we probably won't be killing Kael'thas for more than 2-3 weeks. Once everyone is attuned, why bother?

To me, however, I think this is poor design on Blizzard's part. No longer will you see people with their full sets and more importantly, no longer will you get a lot of bang out of the Kael'thas fight. The fight is challenging and certainly has the steepest learning curve of any fight in SSC/TK/KZ... that means that changing too many people in your raid might cause a couple of wipes (thus why I listed Kael'thas kills as 1-2 days previously).

It seems like a waste to have this wonderful fight that will only be done a handful of times by the handful of guilds even capable of downing him. And with the incredible amount of "checks" (like gear/dps checks) built into the fight, I don't think it will be pugged anytime soon.

That said, I am sorry if this topic is not relevant on these boards of forums. I am curious as to what others think, however. Personally, I think this fight might have just been a victim to the "shotgun" approach Blizzard used with the expansion. (That is, throwing everything out all at once -- I do believe there's another long and length thread on that, however).

I think they're wonderful training grounds fights. Kael moreso than Vashj. Kael just requires nearly everyone in the raid to have a solid grasp of every mob's abilities and what can kill them, and what's going on all over the fight.

It's hard because of that. But once a player learns it and succesfully kills him a few times, they're probably a better player because of it.

I think it is in a fine spot and am already a bit upset to see they're changing the fight from it's current perfect form (imo).

We find Vashj to be a worse fight than Kael these days. Kael is much more controllable and less unforgiving, if you lose 1 person on Vashj you usually wipe. Lose 10 guys on Kael and you can still power through and kill him.

And, you'll find yourself going back to attune people, trust me. Just a wrist slitting Vashj with half of the healers needing the Vial. I never want to do her again, but I know we'll be back somewhere down the road to attune new guys for whomever quits.

In regards to the placement, I find Vashj to be placed perfectly, but Kael is a bit wrong.

I think Kael is fine where he is, like Xaviera posted above - it's a wonderful training for your raid that will surely prove useful in the later fights of Black Temple.
Yes, it's true that you can skip Kael once you are attuned, but why would you? TK is a very fast clear and once you get good at Kael it's pretty hard to wipe on him, really. You'd have to do some really stupid shit to wipe on him once you get everything sorted.
That said, I wouldn't skip him considering the loot he drops, imo.

Agreed with the OP, after our first Kael kill, the next several kills were easy one shots, with minimal deaths. It's difficult to learn, but fairly easy to repeat even with 1-2 new people, plus with the previous bosses in the zone being just as easy to repeat, TK proves to be a quick yet rewarding raid with Kael loot almost on par with BT / Hyjal loot.

I've seen it posted here before, but if you have the means to take down Kael, you can take down every boss currently in the game. It's a very good test to see how your raid will perform on the BT difficulty level.

I can see the original poster's point though. My guild has only killed Kael 4 times now, but in the last week and half alone they've gotten 2 hyjal and 3 BT bosses down. They have already moved SSC/TK to offnights, and only to attune some people. In a semi-casual guild that raids 4+1 (sunday raids aren't always mandatory) and generally a little over 4 hours a night, there isn't always time to farm SSC/TK now. The degree of difficulty going from Kael into Hyjal/BT is a huge drop down until you are more than halfway through both zones it seems. At that point, you are farming about as many hyjal/BT bosses as there are in SSC/TK. Basically, if you can kill Kael, you don't need to anymore. It's a bonus to farm those zones, assuming your guild raids enough to do so.

On a forum like this, where a bunch of people probably have guilds that raid 5-6 days, or days but 5+ hours each time, you can still fit in those zones for a while. But, with guilds that are trying to squeeze the most out of their raid hours each week, it's more valuable to focus on hyjal/bt.

I do agree that ssc/tk should just go quicker and quicker, making it easier to fit in, but if you are going there to attune people, you are probably bringing people that are unfamiliar with vashj/kael and that makes those fights take more attempts then normal till they learn it. If you are bringing your "A team" then they could probably be making good progress on new bosses in hyjal/bt for better drops.

I'm not saying Kael needs to be nerfed, having just done it myself for the first time yesterday, I think it's an amazing fight the way it is. I think maybe there should be a gear check fight earlier in hyjal/bt though. I bet I just made some enemies for suggesting a gear check fight though

In a nutshell, it's Rag all over again. People would cheerfully farm Vashj and Kael but clearing all of SSC for Vashj when you are in Hyjal/BT is unpopular to say the least. Kael is not quite as bad but it's still enough of an annoyance (considering that all the other boss loot is shard-bait for the most part) that I don't see people lining up for the opportunity.

Hey, we're just entering into Hyjal/BT as I speak and we're still attuning our raidforce for optimal numbers on those fights. As such we're still clearing SSC/TK and it's around a night for each one. The thing is, we'll definitely be dropping them soon and when we do, attuning others is going to be painful. Learn a new boss tonight or go backflag Mr. 55% attendance? Hmm, tough one that.

Isn't this exactly why he is in the wrong place in the game, though?

We will probably be working on Kael soon as a guild, and I personally am looking forward to seeing the fight. But, objectively, looking at the statistics for a number of realms in addition to hearing a lot of first-hand experience from other raiding friends, Kael seems horribly placed in the context of progression.

WoW has a long history of "gatekeepers", but I think Kael may take the cake in terms of being a huge block to new content. At this point, I'm inclined to say that the effect of it is a little too dramatic.

If you look at a server like Kazzak-EU (which I pick due to knowing some players there, and also for being very prolific), you have 23 guilds that are at least working on Vashj, or have higher progression. Of those 23 guilds, 11 have not killed Kael. Of the 12 higher progression guilds, 9 have killed at least 6 bosses in Hyjal/TK, and 6 have Hyjal cleared. Seems like quite a dramatic split, honestly. On Mal'ganis, you again appear to have 8 guilds working on Vashj/Kael, 2 in-between guilds (which will probably skyrocket soon), then 8 guilds with 6+ Hyjal/BT kills.

It would appear that perhaps Kael is a bit too hard, or the other bosses are a bit too easy. I guess I'll find out first-hand soon enough.

As for the placement itself, gateway bosses are all well and good, but why exactly have one that creates such a divisive split in the raiding scene? Also, is it really good to add such a serious blocker as the end of a raid zone, stopping closure and a sense of completing a zone, rather than the first boss in another zone? If Rage Winterchill, for instance, was the serious block to Hyjal/BT, wouldn't that be "better" in terms of a sense of progression?

Vael was OK as a blocker, for instance... but if you met Vael at the bottom of Molten Core, and had to kill him to proceed to BWL, would it have been as accepted? I kinda doubt it, really.

First off I have an answer for you request regarding vashj

Vashj_Bridge_Exploit.wmv - FileFront.com

Now getting back to the original post this is exactly what my guild has decided to do. We killed vashj first and then about a month later got kael and since then we've spent 3 weeks getting everyone attuned and now we're through. If we pick up some recruits who need one of the kills we've talked about clearing them on alternate weeks to keep our progression strong in BT/Hyjal. However the reason for this has little to do with the difficulty of Kael and Vashj. Both of those fights we really enjoy doing. The problem lies in the relative difficulty of BT/Hyjal bosses. There is no need to farm previous instances because the gear level required for these bosses isn't very high. Were not looking at a jump from BWL or AQ to Naxx, this is like jumping from BWL to AQ or hell maybe even from MC to BWL. I really think blizzard dropped the ball on tuning the elements of many fights in these instances to require at least most of your guild having 5/5 T5 before you progress very far. And I don't want to have to spend all my time farming gear to get gear but when in just 2-3 weeks you can progress almost through to both of the end bosses where a place like naxx took even the best guilds many more weeks to do says something about how toned down the fights are especially given the level of loot they drop in comparison to fights like vashj and kael.

It's really just a by-product of having so much raid content in the game at launch, in classic WoW guilds were stuck in Molten Core until BWL was released, then BWL until AQ was implemented and so on. I don't necessarily think either are too hard for there position – but they do become obsolete once you get everyone keyed up for BT & CoT: MH.

I agree with what said above completely once you have done the fights there are for the most parts pretty easily repeatable – the hard part comes from trying to balance the amount people you backflag at once – finding the balance between experience (and an easy kill) or a bunch of fresh Apps who need the vials but have never seen the fight before can be a bit tricky. Yes they can watch video's read stats etc but nothing beats personal experience on a fight.

Sooner or later there needs to be a blocking boss or you'd find that content pre-BT would be pointless; It would be great to see more people in BT but down tuning either of these fights isn't the way to go.

However, there were many guilds making headway into the early Naxx bosses who couldn't get past Twin Emperors. They couldn't get past the mid-level Naxx bosses, of course, but they still got to play with some of the content.

They should have kept the Scrolls-idea. Except, change it a little:

Scroll of the Maelstrom
Use: Combine with Scroll of the Sun to create Scroll of Eternity.

Scroll of the Sun
Use: Combine with Scroll of the Maelstrom to create Scroll of Eternity.

Scroll of Eternity
Use: Attunes the target to Caverns of Time: Mount Hyjal.

Fixed :P.

Our guild is working on Vashj right now, and it plain out depresses me that I may only kill her 4-6 times, its a fun fight, but SSC takes a while to get through and we may just not have the time even when we start working on Kael. These encounters are the most well done in both their instances and I don't see why the devs don't want them to be accessable week to week.

I completely agree with what people are saying about Vael, the block should be in the start of the new instance, rather than in the one before.

This cuts both ways though ~ Blizzard seems to be going out of their way to create parallel instances to try to avoid the step up in difficulty that was Ragnaros > Razorgore & Vael. A block at the start of an instances creates another whole set of issues for the 'average' guild getting people to turn up for a no-loot night can be hellish.

To OP - i actually like others here think placement is perfekt - its nice that the end boss is actually a raid tester and not the early ones.

Like also stated there should however maybe be some way of attunening reqruits to a guild that has farmed this content. This is where we also see alot of lost time and effort and makes the kills themselves alot harder due to 3-6 new people on an attunement night.

That said, I'm kinda sad we'll not see Vashj and Kael for a long time now except maybe for some attunement purposes. I honestly think this is some of the best fights i have access to ingame atm - being done with MH and halfway through BT atm. Amusing fights that can get on ur nerves if people fuck up, but can be so fun and rewarding when ppl know their jobs and perform Oh and vashj was so kind to give me her bow this last kill for quite some time now - happy me

This is the big issue I want to highlight, just better said.

I disagree with much of this thread. Some points:

1. There used to be a chorus complaining about farming bosses for months to be geared enough for the next tier of content. Killing a boss "only" 4-6 times (1-1.5 months) is a godsend compared with spending half a year to gear people up for the next tier. I am glad it's not necessary.

2. Claiming Vael was a better "check" than Kael may forget the past. People were stuck on Vael for some time; guilds broke up, teeth were gnashed. The complaint was that guilds that had completed MC couldn't get any progression into BWL. It doesn't matter where the "stall" is, people complain about a hard fight that becomes a progression speed bump.

The challenge (and most of the fun) I personally get from raiding comes from: (1) beating the content for the first time, through a combination of strategy and execution, and (2) over time, refining that execution to the point where it's trivial.

One the execution is easy it's a farm run, and isn't worth running except for gear to see character progression (i.e., to continue to raid harder things). I did like C'thun, but I got to do (1) and (2) with him, so I don't need to go back. Kael is similar.

I'm pretty sure this wouldn't work if the guild had not already unlocked Vashj's bridge console.

I've tried it, it does.

I think it's a bit odd that nothing after Kael is as hard as him (welllll maybe Illidan, still working on him so no final opinion yet)

Just seems like a design choice just there to stall people

The way I was thinking was it was alot faster to kill Razorgore then go attempt Vael then it is to kill 5 bosses in SSC and attempt Vashj. It takes us a night to kill the first five bosses in SSC, then we go to Vashj the next night. For Vael you could have a progression night with 30 minutes at the start to get through Razorgore, then go to Vael.

You still have no loot nights with trying to kill Vashj, they just come after the night of the first 5 bosses in SSC (Comparable to clearing MC?).

I couldn't agree with this more.

Having reached Illidan and been unable to pitch a satisfactory raid for the past two weeks, we decided to recruit and attune a bunch of new people. We killed Kael'thas on our second attempt tonight with seven new people (and the first wipe was only because the tanks forgot where each weapons spawn) despite having six dead going into P5.

Vashj, on the other hand, took about 6-7 attempts and the raid wanted to kill each other by the end of the night. With only four people on Elemental duty, if one died it was basically game over and lord does recovery at Vashj suck.

No one really cares about doing TK as Al'ar, Void Reaver and Solarian are a joke and once Kael'thas isn't tearing your guild to pieces, it's a deeply enjoyable fight. SSC on the other hand is a tiring ordeal full of trash that shouldn't kill those outgearing it so much so easily and no one wants to do it ever.

With regards to the actual topic, I feel both Vashj and Kael'thas are perfect in their positioning right now. Once they tone down Kael'thas' trash and the absurd length of time needed for phase one, there will be many, many more kills by guilds that deserve to kill it. If it wasn't required for Black Temple attunement then I would agree he is horribly out of place.