For those kind of things I'm pretty sure the damage dealt is fixed from the moment the spell finishes, so gaining the Dampen Magic buff 0.6 seconds before the bolt hits you most likely means it had already finished casting on the server, even if it looks like you were on time with spellstealing yourself.

Edit: Though now I think about it, going immune to something does work mid-way through it traveling to you.

Here is what we do, and we haven't screwed up a single pull since we thought it up:

Misdirects go up. Paladin Bops me. Paladin bubbles himself and runs in gaining initial aggro, I follow in directly behind him. Misdirects go out. I get 2nd proximity aggro while also spellstealing as I get in range. I jump and spellsteal because I'm afraid of being LOS'd at bottom of stairs, though I can't really confirm it helps at all since I don't want to wipe to find out. I fireblast immediatly after, get in position, and for the next 10 minutes rotate dps/spellsteal/detect magic/counterspell my focus target.

The lag issues I had with spellstealing and still dying from the first night have disappeared, as the paladin is eating the first blast anyways and giving me an extra few seconds.

Someone in this thread said you should assign a healer to dispelling the poison dot. However, yesterday (our first night on Council), the dot seemed to be unremovable.

Did I miss anything?

Thottbot World of Warcraft: Deadly Poison

As you can see, the dot is unremovable. A healer is assigned to precast a large heal in order to heal the anticipated envenom damage. Configure your grid debuffs accordingly.

Meh, we are experiencing huge problems with council - which is kind of weird seeing as how many people here describe the fight as boring and even easy. The pull works just fine - after that it's either a tank dying (not counting idiotic DDs) or CoH not being interrupted properly.

How many healers do you bring to this encounter and how do you assign them?

We bring 8-9 healers typically in any given week, just because theres really no reason not too.

The DPS requirement is extremely low and there isn't a point in the fight where it becomes any more difficult then the first minute of the fight.

We typically have 1 Rogue assigned to kicking CoH, along with 2 mages and a resto shaman for backup. This typically works for us. You just need to pay careful attention to what Blessing the Priest has active, and whether or not she is magic immune or physical immune. From what I can tell its almost always physical immune. CoH casts extremely slow with Tongues or Mindnumbing up so you should have ample time to coordinate interupts. Depending on the immunty the rogue can trek over and DPS the paladin during physical immune for a few seconds to help 'shorten' this long fight.

Like I said, DPS requirement is low. The people prone to dying from AoE's are going to die at some point on this fight and thats ok, because you really only need a few DPSers up. Try not to clump up too much and use as much of the room as possible so that a blizzard/flamestrike doesn't hit like 5+ people at once.

Really the only unavoidable deaths from what I can tell is when someone gets deadly poison and gets targetted by flamestrike or blizzard (sometimes a combination of both). Anything else is due to a failure to interupt the holy fire or slow reaction times.

When we first went in there we were all about trying to kill as fast as possible, which includes DPSing through the reflective shield. Because of that healing was kinda stressed and took more attention off of people who desperately needed the raid healing from Blizz/Flame. Went a lot smoother when people stopped attacking during the shield and simply waited for whatever they were suppose to interupt.

Thank you both!

"dependant on how reactive your raid is" Ah, so I'll bring 10 healers -.-

We'll try again tonight. We have four hours and our best attempt was (REALLY LUCKY ONE) 25% using all ss and combat rez options. Usually the fight ends at 80% with either the MT dying or several CoH getting through because one or two of the interrupters are down.

Does your MT spellreflect the judgement ?
It's a lot of aggro/damage and a lot less burst damage from the paladin. We only had a dead mt when the healers were bombarded with blizzards/flamestrikes/poisons.
But i agree, it's a huge difference between 8 and 9 healers, with 8 healers we had a lot of random deaths and one dead healer meant a wipe. With 9 we could hold out long enough to ress the dead healer.

Have any of the hunters noticed what if any of the buffs we are able to dispel during this phase with arcane shot?

I am searching around but thought I would ask here as well.

Healerwise I believe we take 8-9, I'm not too sure actually. What I do know however is that 3 of them are assigned to the Gathios tank, because he can take some serious burst damage. That'll be one 2 Paladins & 1 Shaman. We have one assigned healer to heal Deadly Poison (Priest) and one healer per tank on Veras, Malande and Zerevor. (Druids stacking Lifebloom on all 3 I believe, that's 2 druids and a random other healer). The other 2-3 are purely healing the raid.

Don't just blame your healers however, depending on how well your raid reacts there can be a LOT of raiddamage at the same time going on.

It's one of those fights where Binding Heal is quite good, especially for MT/mage tank healing - seeing as you can't really use CoH for raid healing due to people constantly spreading out.

I don't think we tried it with more than 8 healers, having 3 people on raid healing is more than enough, assuming no one takes multiple ticks from AOEs. There are some "almost 1 shot" situation, but additional healer would not change that at all, as it's all down to people reaction, not lack of healing. I don't think I noticed a big change between 7 and 8 - big thing is interrupting Divine Wrath, as it's large part of raid damage.

Much easier to tell people to pay attention to Blizzard/Flamestrike/Consecrate, than to stack healers. It only drags the fight longer, and it already takes ages to bring them down.

Why would you precast a large heal for the envenom? Usually you take several deadly poison ticks, we've never really had any 1-2 ticks and then envenom - we always seem to get 3-4. That means you'll usually take plenty of damage before the envenom and we find it's safer to just top people as much as possible, ie. fast heals and quick.

Paladins are actually quite good raid healers here, since the fight requires an almost constant spam of heals and FoL works nicely for that.

We have our druid stack LB on all four tanks. His healing output is insane on this fight (almost reaching 1mill healing with ~10% overheal).

Also, I'm interested what people are using for interrupts. We run warrior tank, enhancement shaman (optimal a elemental) and two magi. Shaman interrupts every Wrath and is backup on heals, magi are primarily on heals and warrior is on heal when spell shielded. Barring the resists from our shaman only the spell warded Wrath go through. I save my Intercept for these occasions, however. Could this be done with less players? Or are there better class compositions? Not that it really matter, but I like to optimize stuff.

Thanks to this thread and all the contributors, we are now on Illidan after only a mere 3 hour learning curve. Personally we gave it a few shots and they we're ~80%ish; I gave my Archimonde speech of I want to HIT the enrage timer. I don't care about damage; just interrupt heals and divine wrath and DO NOT die. We got him to about 50% (healed twice) and we lasted about 12.5minutes. Following attempt the same speech was given and words of encouragement. Down they went with a very long 1%.

We didn't honestly have an ideal raid and it was the last attempt of the night; due to the holiday people are still missing raids and we only had 25 and a person had to go after that shot.

Raid setup:
3 Warriors - 1 Prot on Paladin, 1 Prot on Priest, 1 MS on Paladin
3 Paladins - 1 on Druid (me), 2 on Paladin Tank
3 Druids - 1 Feral on Rogue, 2 Raid Healing with Hots
2 Shamans - 1 on Priest tank, 1 raid healing.
3 Hunters - Paladin
1 Warlock - Tongues and tons of dots.
3 Mages - all 2 on the Priest and 1 on the mage
4 Rogues - 2 Spamming Deadly Throw/Kick on Priest; 2 on the Paladin
3 Priests - 2 Shadow 1 Holy

Used 3 combat rezes and had about 4 dead at 1% mark (damn flamestrikes).

Honestly get your interrupts on rotation and remember like Archi its NOT a DPS race, but an endurance fight and you'll overcome it quickly.

Druid raid healing with hots is terrible, especially on fights where damage is unpredictable You make rolling lifebloom druids sad pandas. For more infos, check the Embrace the lifebloom thread.

Damn, your druid must be extremly skilled or have an extremly low latency, as for myself I can't keep LB on more than 3 targets, and for this fight specifically, due to our use of the room, LoS issues would prevent me to do more than 3 anyway. On a side note, I prefer to roll rejuv + lifebloom on 2 tanks and be able to swiftmend at will than roll lifebloom on 4 tanks and lose the stacks because of a bad event. I'm still around 1k HPS during the whole fight with that, that's ok for me Furthermore, with 2 druids stacking rejuv + lifebloom on him, our priest tank doesn't need more healing.

As for interrupts, we use pretty much the same setup with one additional rogue : the tank himself, 1 rogue, 1 enhancement or elemental shaman, and 2 mages as backup. On our last kill the rogue died around 50% and one or two heals went through after that (bad misses or resists I think), leading to a kill 10 seconds or more into enrage and quite a few players lying on the ground.

As for the last % being long, it's nothing but normal : the first % is very short (1 damage is enough), because the UI rounds the numbers down except when it is 0.yz%. So xx.yz = xx%, except 0.yz% which is 1%. Thus, the last % is actually from 1.99% to 0%, making it around...2% ^^

I haven't seen this posted about, maybe I missed it. A while back Hortus posted a list of known bugs that were due for a patch (WoW Forums -> 2.3 Known Issues list), and the very first NPC one reads:
-Hammer of Justice from Gathios the Shatterer is able to be reflected.

As I understand it, that means tanks will no longer be able to reflect anything he does. I'm not looking forward to having a 7k hit added on to the incoming, and the fun it takes out of tanking that mob.

A question directed at Warlocks specifically:

Have you found that Affliction provides a significant DPS advantage over destruction at all, or is that not the case? At first glance it sounds like Affliction should be able to come on top due to the multiple target nature of this fight. However there are the issues of positioning/range/los, reflective shields on the priest (would require extra raid healing, which would not be optimal when learning the encounter) and the 30 second vanishes that may hinder such a large boost in practice. Wondering if any Warlocks that have tried both specs on this encounter would be able to shed some light on this.

I know other people have commented on strange spellsteal related deaths, but we had our first kill today and I thought id share two of mine :

Wow Web Stats



Usually the holy smite is interrupted on the pull but we had a resist - so ignore that - but I clearly had the dampen magic buff and then I took a full damage arcane bolt.



In this one the recount of my fight states the mage steals back my dampen magic (before I even have it), then I gain dampen magic - and finally I then take a full damage arcane bolt....?

Our pull method is this: Paladin bops mage (me) . I run in and spam spellsteal as I run to grab dampen magic, then immediately fire blasts the mage to get agro. I try to make sure im not moving when im in range to spellsteal to avoid possibly movement-failures others have mentioned. Misdirects go out, tanks grab the other adds and a warriors/mage interupt the priest as she casts the first holy smite. This worked flawlessly every time, except the strange cases In the screenshots where I die to arcane bolts, even though I have dampen magic. Ive never seen the mage spellsteal from ME before, except these 1-2 strange pulls. Can someone shed some light on it?

On the first one, I believe it was said earlier in the thread that a Spellsteal that occurs after he casts, but before the projectile lands would still do full damage, even if the Dampen had been gained by that point. It had to do with the when the damage is calculated, which is apparently when he casts, not when it lands.

On the second image, I've never heard of that one. I serve the role of Zerevor tank healer and have never seen anything as bizarre as that occur. For the most part it's just fairly constant damage doing a little less third of his life a shot. The only real excitement I get is when I get targetted by poison (don't forget Stoneform if you are a dwarf!), Veras comes after me (Stun resist this week got me killed) or I get hit by Holy Fire. Our mage could be doing some Spellsteal trading with Zerevor, but I would think that over time if that was the case I would have seen him take a full strength bolt a time or two (and I haven't). I'll have to ask him if there is more going on than I know about.

The Mage stealing your dampen magic is simply a combat log bug. The names are just printed in the wrong order. I'd imagine that the deaths result from stealing the buff a split second too late combined with a bit of lag. If the spellsteal goes through while the Arcane Bolt is in the air, it wont register the Dampen magic.

Thanks for the insight, could you please clarify whether the damage is calculated at the beginning of his cast or the end as the bolt actually leaves him?

According to my first picture:

- I spellstole at 5.599 seconds
- Killed at 7.510 seconds

Given that he has a 2 second cast time, going backwards, You would say I would need to have spellstole at 5.510 seconds (7.510 - 2.0 ) in order to have the dampen magic registered correctly before he BEGAN his cast.

If this is true, then I was 0.089 seconds to slow in spellstealing? wow....

Is that correct. I spose I should add, despite everyone seeming to agree the fight is too long (our first kill was 15 min, 25 seconds) its alot of fun from the Mage Tank POV, imo. Lots of target switching (depending on who gets bopped), situational awareness (dodging/avoiding aoe) and watching multiple targets for interrupts (focus macro counterspells on priest while im dps'ing mage) in addition to managing your own spellsteals/Dampen Magic - made for what I felt was a always-on-your-toes enjoyable experience.

Well the best I can tell, given I am not a mage - I'm just healing - is that it has to be calculated at the end of his 2 second cast. From my point of view, we have the Mage run in to aggro and Zerevor seems to start firing almost right off. If it calculated at the start of cast I would think that getting that first Spellsteal off would be ridiculously hard.

This goes along with what I have noticed on my own healing. When I start a cast with a temporary healing buff (my Exalted Hyjal ring, for example) and it wears off before the cast completes the healing buff appears to not apply. That would confirm to me that buff alterations to damage/healing take place when the spell completes casting. Of course, it's impossible without a large sample to tell for sure that I am not just getting lucky, but the ring buff does do a noticeable increase to my healing averages when it is up. I do know that the ring buff wearing off mid Consecrate pulse will take immediate effect on any remaining pulses (damage drops by 5-10ish), so that damage is taken on a pulse by pulse basis, not at cast start time.