Raiste

First off, I searched through most of the forums and saw some mixed discussion about Azgalor and Kaz'rogal in the Kaz thread. If admins feel like this is repetitive feel free to delete.

Background: we've killed Azgalor twice now. No real issues with trash when everyone is sharp but there are several aspects of this fights that bug me as RL and just feels like we are doing it wrong because we have such a hard time on him while not even breaking a sweat on the first 3.

Our usual raid compo: we generally have 1 MT, 2 OTs for doomguards (feral + prot pally), 5 melee dps (1 enh shammie, 3 rogues, 1 fury warriors), 8-9 ranged dps (2 hunters, 3 mages, 3 warlocks, 1 shadow priest) 8-9 healers (2 druids, 2-3 pallies, 2 priests, 2 shammies).

Current arrangement: we tank the boss by the tauren and OT the doomguards by the trolls in the back to help the doomguard dps. Healing wise we have 4 healers on the MT 2 on the OTs and 2-3 raid (melee) healers.

Resists: Healers all wear full/partial SR (250-365 range) for silences. No one else wears any resists except for casters who try to wear some SR for the silences (we dont have that much made yet to generally just the BT neck and priest buff). Melee wears no resists fire or shadow.

Now seems like we have two counter balancing issues. We had our first two kills by only keeping 3 rogues in RoF range (all casters and healers at 35 yrds+) with CH from two shammies to heal them. This left all the rest of the melee along with short range casters (1 shadow priest, 1 arcane mage) on doomguard dps. Needless to say the dps was very low on the boss. It took us 9+ minutes to get both the first kills. To improve DPS we've tried having more melee on the boss which really just lead to either death because of silence/RoF or if melee ran out constantly, severe lack of DPS due to constant RoF on melee. So my question here is several part:

1. How to split DPS for this such that there is enough dps for doomguards to stay under control as well as to keep the boss DPS high? For the doomguards we get all the trolls involved but haven't had much luck getting both thrall and the trolls involved. How many people are generally dpsing the doomguards?

2. Melee dps vs RoF on the boss: This is brutal. Melee put out fantastic DPS because they are not hampered by the silence but they get RoFd so often especially if all the ranged are outranging the RoF. Would having more casters in the RoF and thus giving him more targets to RoF other than melee help this? how do people handle raid healing with RoF and silence bad luck?

3. Resists: how much of an impact does SR on the casters make? Do anyone but healers even wear SR for this fight? How about FR use for the melee?

 

exog

Our top dps dude on this fight is a rogue with all the epic FR gear.

 

Stangg

When we did this, we tank Azgalor far away from thrall so he doesn't get involved, then when people get the debuff they run over to where thrall stands and die so that he tanks the doomguards.

 

Illundai

Our melee uses Fire res yeah. I run with 200 or so buffed with totem.

 

Ridan

We usually don't dps the doomguard at all.
We tank Azgalor near to Thrall and tank the doomguards by the Tauren camp. The Tauren will dps the Doomguard and stun them (which really help when you have 4 doomguards on your tank).

We also have 5 melee dps (2/3 rogues, fury warrior and me as an Enh shaman) and we all try to wear arround 200 buffed fire resist.

Fire resist on the caster is useless as they should spread so only one is in the rain of fire.

The melee dps on the other hand almost always get in the rain of fire all at once. The more melee dps you have, the more rains they'll take.

 

Amonra

I cant see any reason not to have the short range casters on Azgalor. Even short range is plenty of room to move out of rain of fire. Plus if you have the shadow priest on the add then you are losing a huge chunk of damage due to no misery/shadow weaving on azgalor and your shadow priest will probably be out of range of the rest of the dps for VT/VE.

You are getting the Tauren involved with Azgalor which is good. They will die to rain of fire after a while but they can output pretty good dps.

You are probably better off getting Thrall involved on the doomguards rather than the trolls at the back. Thrall outputs some very respectable dps. We get doomed people to run over towards Thrall before they die and the doomguards get tanked next to Thrall so he helps kill them (and does a pretty good job just by himself). We don't quite keep up with the doomguard spawn rate and there are usually 2 up by the time Azgalor dies but thats really not a problem. I think we use a couple of rogues on the doomguards to help down them, this means that we only have 2-3 melee to heal on Azgalor. Those melee need to dodge rain of fire and accept the dps loss.

I would say you have a healer or two more than you really need to. Not fatal, but it makes the fight longer. Due to the nature of the fight with your dps going down as people get killed by doom, a bit more dps can greatly shorten the fight.

Finally, our healers wear a good amount of SR gear, but nobody else wears any resist gear.

 

Mearis

We had our first very very brief attempt on him yesterday, since we started the trash waves to see what they would be like and we ended up spawning the boss more or less accidentally, and we went without fixed positions, a few things were confusing:

- Fire resist gear on the melees. Is it worth it for melees to wear it? Is it worth it for melees to try to run in and out? Do you just have 3 or 4 melees on him with JoL + Chain Healing keeping them up, or even with FR melees dodge the rain of fire?

- Thrall/Tauren warriors. Should Thrall be on the boss or should he stay on the doomguards? It seems like the faster you burn him, the fewer doomguards you'll get.

It doesn't feel like a hard fight at all, our first completely chaotic attempt ended with him at 65% and we had a horrendously suboptimal raid and no strategy to speak of.

 

• Chicken

We usually have Thrall and the Tauren (and any other NPCs that aren't that troll camp that's way too far back) on Azgalor himself and all our melee exclusively focus on the doomguards. That's generally a prot warrior, 2-3 rogues, an enhancement shaman and 2 feral druids on the doomguards exclusively.

It makes the fight quite long (~8 minutes), but it works for us. We usually only have one doomguard up at a time, though unless there's a resisted Doom (Which does happen occasionally) there's barely any time that the melee are standing around twiddling their thumbs, and with only one doomguard up the damage dealt is easily healable by a single person. (Who should probably wear a few pieces of SR to cover silences)

You don't even need a fully specced healer on the doomguard tank that way, I've healed the tank on them myself very often. A paladin actually works well too because Judgement of Light is strong enough to outheal the damage dealt to melee by the War Stomp the doomguards do from time to time.

 

Lymmel

1. We don't have anyone on doomguards but 2 tanks, 1 paladin to heal them and thrall. We tank azgalor at the tauren camp. We tried doing the opposite once, but the healers didn't get it, they didn't follow the tank, he died and we decided we would rather stick to pre-buffed-Thrall habits.

2. We don't like melee dps a lot there, sure they are great but very unsafe too. That said, they shouldn't die to RoF either way. It's easy to survive Rof even without any heal, provided they come shortly after.

3. We used the neck for healers back at the first kill and fr neck+ring for everyone, but not sure what healers are wearing these days.

 

dukes

Theres probably 3 main ways to do this fight:

-Melee in, no resistance. This requires quite a lot of healing, but can be cut down considerably by making sure all casters are within range of RoF but spread out all around him. For this tactic your melee should know that they need to take care of themselves, and sitting in RoF really isn't a good thing to do at all.

-Melee in, with resistance. Less healing required but possibly less DPS overall because of "gimp" gear on melee. Also requires people to farm extra gear if they don't have fire res. Either have casters in to reduce the overall fire on melee (better with less resistance gear), or casters out (high resistance).

-Melee out. Putting melee on doomguards or just having them AFK elsewhere. Probably best to have melee on doomguards, just to reduce the "pressure" on your tank.

We use the first, with casters in range but spread. Doomguards are tanked by thrall, who (with his cronies) manages to put out enough DPS to kill enough doomguards that we only ever end up with 2 by the end (get 4 or 5 dooms total in general).

Jol should be a given for any melee damage fight (helps even on the doomguards, as the stun does damage iirc).

SR helps a lot for silences, and healers should be organised so that even if the MT healers are silenced, he doesn't get no heals (generally easiest with having HoT healers refreshing).

It's entirely possible to do the fight without killing doomguards. Originally (before the silence = agro change) we had all NPC's in on the boss and just offtanked the doomguards. It's not too much of an issue if a DG tank gets doomed, because they're tauntable and you get about 20 seconds to sort it out.

 

Mearis

Dukes, a question - for tactic 1, how many healers do you use, and how many are assigned on raid healing? I am worried that people will take a tick of two of RoF and die before they end up getting a heal.

 

dukes

Either 7 or 8. 7 is a bit dodgy sometimes (had a tank death = wipe a couple of times). I think its normally one druid on the doomguard tanks, with a raid healer assigned to keep an eye on them too, and then 3 people on the MT most of the time, with raid healers watching him during silences too (leaves either 4 or 5 people raid healing).

It probably won't work if you have a lot of people who are slow to move out of fire or who never use health stone/pots. Random deaths = bad.

 

Lymmel

We use 8 healers while having melee dps on him as well. Typically a resto shaman is doing all the raid healing. I think tank gear and how the rng treats your tank is a major factor, our tank has stopped being really threatened being close to instagibbed by azgalor with all the gear he has now so healers have a bit more space to heal the raid.

 

D4vE

Basically we use the melee on doomguard tactic, but we call them in at 35% to burn the boss down, while doomguards are only offtanked. With CloS, healthstone, fire res pot most of us usually last long enough to kill him before doomguards overwhelm us =)

In the beginning, when we had little to no shadowres, we had all warriors in tank gear intervening the MT on silences.

 

Giske

Melee on Doomguards, run in with blood lust at 50% then back out again when hes at 30-25% and the casters finish him off. No FR gear used.

 

Mearis

Do your shadowpriests dps the boss or the doomguards? And Thrall + Tauren on the boss I assume right?

 

Tyrian

Its about time Azgalor got his own thread - hes certainly not a pushover fight - until your guild finds good working strategys for ROF, group positioning, silence management on MT healers, doomguard management and NPC involvement. Thats alot of stuff guilds need to work out.

 

Caligula

I'm not sure why anyone bothers to dps the doomguards at all. If you keep Thrall and his grunts alive they can solo the doomguards (just put 2 tanks over there with a couple healers) and every dps class can focus on the boss.

If for some reason your strat involves dpsing the doomguards, I'd hope that you'd put your shadow priests on the boss anyway. Our efficiency lies in single target dps.

 

Mearis

If your strategy is based on outraging the Rof, as Giske's strategy seems to be, shadowpriest would be basically eating rain of fire after rain of fire.

 

tedv

We just put all the casters on Azgalor and spread out a lot. We might get one or two deaths from rain of fire, but it's generally pretty safe. For the record, I've tried everything from no shadow resist gear (80 resist) to max (363 resist) and I post the best overall damage with maximum gear. I'd recommend your casters wear every piece of epic shadow resist gear they own.

 

patoddy

Our guild uses the melee on Doomgaurds strat. Tank the doom guards over near Thrall. Two healers in Full SR and the rest in 100-150. Get your casters to spread out around him at absolute max range. We normally get our shadow priests to get a rhythm going. After each RoF they normally have time to run in refresh dots and do a couple of mind flays. You can also send them to area without anyone else around and let them dps as normal and keep themselves up with ve/shields and hs. We do use the melee at the start for the first RoF and let them CoS it before they head over to doom guards.

We originally killed and farmed him for a while using the melee in strat but have since found the melee out strat to be far more manageable and allot less hectic.

 

• Jamor

We use the melee out strategy, and for a while had no trouble getting the tauren warriors and thrall on the boss to suplement DPS.

The last 3 weeks or so, having a much harder time getting the tauren involved. Yesterday we drug Azaglor through the tauren camp and only half of them aggro'ed on him despite getting silenced. It really drags the fight out to not have that DPS on the boss (even though they die about 60% through the fight). Anyone else see this happen recently?

 

• Chicken

The 2.2 patch changed it so the NPCs don't get aggroed by the silence any more. We just first MD Azgalor to where Thrall and our MT are standing, and then move him to the Tauren camp where we tank him.

 

Virtue

We basicly tried out and succeded killing Azgalor with all the strategies given above, , and I must admit engaging taurens+thrall to dps Azgalor and letting melee nuke doomguards out of silence range is the most comfortable one. 1 Shaman is able to keep the melee and doomguard tank , melee (5 or so) doing around 700ish dps thru the fight without risking death, and thrall and his crew replacing our melee without being in need of healing.
*RoF mechanic has been detailly explained(and its relation to azgalor's huge hitbox) in other topics.So I won't get into it , but better avoid it!

 

Giske

Taurens on Azgalor, Thrall on Doomguards, spriests on Azgalor along with all other ranged DPS.

Edit: Guess I should clarify that we tried having melee sit in and DPS, even in FR, but found Azgalor to just machine gun RoF the melee and kill off the Tauren Warriors so our efforts in getting them involved were pointless. With keeping melee out until 50% the fight is much more controlled and the Tauren Warriors last much longer. spriests dont get hit by RoF much more than others since some of the mages have to go close anyway depending on their spec.

We just drop a FR cauldron at the last wave, everyone pots up and it usually saves people when he puts RoF right next to each other. This fight is pretty annoying tbh, you can get really unlucky with Dooms and have 4-5 healers in a row (we've seen it) or you can be lucky and just have melee get doomed (who dont really do much on this fight anyway)

We tank him right next to the hut north of Tauren Warriors position, east of the gargoyle spawn. Its close enough to Thrall to not get any loot issues and we never have someone Doom away from the OT cause they had to run miles and miles.

We just use SS and CR until we run out for the first Dooms, usually we have 5-6 SS/CR for him so we can get through the fight with like 1-2 dead at the end.

They really could tone down RoF a bit though, theres not much you can do when he decides to put RoF on you then another one right in front of you when you are running away.