we had a lot of trouble while learning this guy, but I think we finally perfected a strategy for repeat kills. Our problem in the past had mainly been lack of raid positioning and just telling people to spread out and avoid RoF's.

Instead, we put all MT healers clumped up together 40 yards away from the tank (and should be behind him too, so they're 40+ yards away from Azgalor), and a separate ranged DPS group positioned in between the healer group and the doomguard tanks (this is mainly so a warlock can easily SS whoever gets doomed as they run past). Everyone in the ranged DPS group has to be 35+ yards away from Azgalor. As long as no one steps in, there should never be any RoF in either group. This allows ranged to go nearly all out and keeps healers focused on the tank.

Any ranged DPS who doesn't have 35+ yard range (ie. shadowpriests) and melee are positioned at Azgalor's butt. Melee should wear FR. This group should have a dedicated healer (chain heal works wonders) and should be the ONLY group being hit by ROF's. Obviously they won't be doing as much DPS as the ranged who have 35+ yards, but it keeps the fight much more controllable and less random. Dooms are never a problem with soulstones and combat rezzes (and healers with their SR gear often flat out resist it). Prioritize soulstones for the ranged DPS (w/ 35+ yards) and MT healers, as they'll be doing the most DPS in the fight.

We got our first kill tonight but mid way doomguards ran towards the MT area, aggroed the Taurens, in the end the Taurens and Thrall ended up killing the doomguards and then went on full out on Az. This of course helped in the downing Azgalor (making the last 30% go real fast). Do you think such a stunt is just pure luck or could be repeatable?

After trying a control based strategy, I can't stress enough how easy this fight became when we started just putting ranged on Azgalor, w/ everyone outranging the rain of fire. We tanked Azgalor at Thrall, with a bear. The Doomguards were tanked at the Tauren Warrior camp. Our melee DPS (~5), 2 tanks and 2 healers dealt w/ the Doomguards. All the ranged were on Azgalor, all outranging the rain of fire....the only damage taken during the fight was on the Main Tank, the Doomguard tanks, and whatever the doomguards warstomp did to (small incidental amount).

The ranged DPS and the healers literally took zero damage during this fight...I can't remember a fight since Molten Core where healing was this focused and easy. We mitigated the first 5 dooms via 3 soulstones and 2 battle Rez's, and killed him around the 7:30 mark. Thrall was at about 40% health at that point from RoF. The main tank takes hefty damage, but when you can tell 6 healers they can solely focus on the main tank it shouldn't be an issue. Ranged can really focus on their DPS when they only stand in one spot and just have to worry about occasional silences.

After our first kill of Azgalor the week before ("standard" strat, off-tanked Doomguards and let Taurens kill them while everyone focused Azgalor), I was quite worried about going up against him this week, I expected several wipes and alot of luck being necessary to kill him. Changing our strat made the fight ridiculously straightforward and easy.

Thank you Orestus. We used this strat, and downed him after 3 tries. First 2 we lost the MT in silence at about 20% both times and having the wrong healers on the Doomguard tank. 3rd time we just ripped through him, and sent all the melee in at 10% to finish him off.

The only really tricky part of the fight is the initial MD to the tank, and him rotating Azgalor. We just keep everybody out of range and have lots of HoTs on the tank until he's in position (about 4-5 seconds max)

Most of the casters had about 170 SR, and I resisted about 75% of the silences (guesstimate). I think Thrall was about 35% by the time he died, but he wasn't close to dying at all.

Seems like people who try the fight from multiple strategy perspectives agree on Orestus's viewpoint. This is echoed a few times in this post - and really sums up the thread.
That being said, its not how we kill him

One additional thing to note. Make sure everyone in your raid does something to Azgalor right at the start or at the end to get on his aggro table, we had our doomguard tank, 2 healers, and a couple of the rogues who spent the whole fight off w/ the doomguards at the Tauren camp not be on the Master loot list when we killed him. Hitting him w/ a ranged attack or spell right at the start before the 1st doom should solve that problem.

Okay, this one is stumping me. How do you pull the bastard?

It takes almost a minute for him to kill the guards up front if we don't try to grab him. If we do grab him, we can either tank him there, or try to move him; misdirection is not nearly enough threat to get him off the guards. Tanking him there means bringing Thrall/tauren warriors in becomes risky and delayed since it requires bringing a doomguard close to the raid. Moving him to either encampment risks a lot of RoF damage on the healers. How do other people handle this?

We let the gate guards die on the waves so its always a clear run through. We found that those guards dont help us as much as being able to get the big hitters involved earlier, so those poor lil sacrifices don't last too long in our MH runs =).

If you find you need them, just kill them off on the last wave.

Not that we really need them, or that we try to keep them alive... they just don't die. We tried letting those guys pick up the mobs first, but it ended up with them not even engaging in combat, the mobs running right past them to our camp and going straight at the shadow priest who hadn't heard "stand behind the tanks and let the guards grab them" on vent. We'll try a bit harder to get them dead next time.

Drag Abominations close to them, their Aura is deadly for NPCs, especially when stacked. Same with Infernals, but it's bit harder, since those are too spread out and die fast.
Doesn't Enrage/Doom timer start ticking after he engages NPCs? And wouldn't Silence put you in combat? Never really tried waiting, it wasn't worth it, so I have no idea, but Anaetheron drops Infernals regardless of player involvement.

I misdirect him through the NPC's, though we usually just have a few alive when Azgalor comes. It was really no problem, but you have to MD+shoot BEFORE the npc's aggro him. Have a 2nd hunter ready for an immediate 2nd misdirect if you want to be extra safe.

If you shoot him before he reaches the npc's then he will take off towards the main tank with the npc's chasing and trying to keep up. Just be ready early

Yep, this thread has been invaluable. Thanks for all the pointers. Should have had a one-shot last night on him but the healers on our first pull had Azgalor between them and the tank which somehow resulted in them getting RoF'd. Quick rehash on positioning and another quick run through the trash and we had a dead boss. Very nice!

Some of the positions Ive found fun to read, this is how we do it and have always one-shotted him since our first kill.



The greens arrows show which direction a DPS member will run if they get Rain of Fire. For us this is paramount. If you get rain of fire dont run around stupidly in a random direction - run immediately to your designated healer as the diagram shows. As you can see we use:

- 4 dedicated MT healers
- the DPS/MT healer on the far right only heals DPS when they come to him, otherwise he will heal the MT instead
- The melee all run backwards to the bottom melee healer. This should preferably be a druid so they can keep full lifebloom stacks on 4 melee at a time
- All ranged dps standing in pairs (grouping people who can out-range rof up together). With this setup there will only be 2 ranged people at a time affected by ROF (or 5 melee, lol!)
- The Left side DPS healer will heal any ranged dps that come towards him.
- A paladin and 2 doomguard tanks are handling all the doomguards

We have thrall on the boss, all doomguards are killed off by Taurens and the NPCs from the very far top camp . The first doomguard is dragged all the way to the far top camp with headhunters/shamans to grab those npcs (their healing wards are gold) and he pulls them all back towards where the Tauren are standing to create a mass NPC zerg with healing ward goodness. When we first learnt the fight many of us used ~200 sr but lately its not necessary. I would recommend you put SR on key people while you learn the fight, however.

We found no need to do anything like 'melee on doomguards' or 'only dps azgalor if you can out range rof'. Everyone dps's Azgalor and if you get ROF - Simply react fast and head to your healer. Return back to dps once your topped up to full again. Personally I find those two strats silly, but im sure they work fine for guilds that choose to use them.

Its probably worth adding, despite one-shotting him for months now - we take 5 min to roleplay and setup positions in advance (with symbols on healers heads) before we start Azgalor trash EVERY week, so everyone knows their exact spot to stand when the boss arrives. The last thing you want is a clueless DPS member chaining ROF onto a healer and killing them both, which can happen when people arent given a specific direction on where to position themself (especially if they are new to the fight or not in every week)

What we do is right after wave 8 when everyone is eating/drinking buffing(behind the first line of NPC's) we send all of our rogues out in front of the gate to just chain distract him until we're all set and ready. We usually get atleast a minute or two(baring distract resists) in before we run out of distance until he reaches the NPC's but it's more then enough time to swap gear and get our MT in position etc.. then we just MD him right to the tank who is standing near Thrall.

Remember to have your Hunters click off BoS and catch him before the NPCs get on him and all is well. We do the Rogue Distraction thing and then have the hunters chain-misdirect him to the desired location and catch a fresh salv after the fact. Well, or at least I think that's what we did but at least half the time we let the front NPCs just croak anyhow.

Can anyone clarify here: Is 35 a hard range limit on the RoF, or is it approximate?

The reason I ask is because our last attempt tonight wiped when a big RoF took out most of the casters and healers. We're not entirely sure who caused it, but our frost mage has only 1/2 points in the range-extension talent, giving him a 33-yard range instead of 36.

He's fine with respeccing to get the second point, but I'd like to know if anyone can shed any light on this. (Because if that's not the problem, then we still don't know what is.)

First a disclaimer, I've not yet killed this boss.

We had our first and only try so far last night after killing Kaz'rogal. We just spread out around his back side and whoever got doomed ran to Thrall where we had an OT pick up the doomguards. We didn't kill him though. We had him at ~54% with minimal deaths and plenty of time on the enrage timer when the MT died during a silence. I'm sure that we would have killed him if we had time for 1 or 2 more pulls (hopefully today).

Sure we get hit by rain of fire sometimes, but it's not really hard to move away from it and get a hot or use a bandage. And spreading out means that only 1 to 3 players will ever get hit by one rain of fire. To me, clumping up and not using melee(?) seems like an over complicated way of doing it.

Yea removing the one factor of the fight that is hard/annoying, Rain of fire, seems like an overcomplicated thing to do. I agree lets just spread people out in ROF, have a couple die if unlucky, have less doom targets, have tanks get overrun by doomguards. It's all good!

Yes, I'm aware of all this. What I want is an answer to the question I asked:

Is 35 yards the precise range limit on RoF targeting?

What's hard about rain of fire? If fire starts raining from the heavens, you move. Lots of bosses has AoE elements, people should be used to watch their screen and react to it.

Why would tanks get overrun by doomguards?

If you're trying to be ironic, you're not very successful at it.

If your smart with your NPCS, this will not happen. Hint: Putting players on doomguards is in no way needed to control them.

I would like to re-state for the record that you can turn this fight into a very simple tank and spank by following these four easy steps. Note: you can't stack melee with this strategy. You need some ranged dps.

1) Tank the boss where Thrall stands
2) Tank the Doomguards by the Tauren Warriors
3) Don't let anyone but the MT get within 36 yards of the boss. Ever.
4) Put melee, and anyone who can't dps from 36 yards on the Doomguards

The MT is the only one to take any real damage. It simplifies the fight, the healers have only one real target to heal, and Thrall dps's the boss for the entire encounter.

We tried this last night, and it is hands down a better strategy than getting chunks of your raid set on fire.