We did a little dancing practice on Azgalor after seeing Illidari Council. Not only is dodging and healing important, but also spreading out and returning to original position to avoid clumping after an AE drops is necessary. Even if people run out of fire quickly, 7-8 people doing this is difficult to heal in the same way 2-3 people standing in fire is. We do assign some rough positioning on these fights, and getting these positions fine-tuned a bit made the difference for us. I suppose this really isn't something new (Vael? C'Thun? Magmadar or Onyxia even?), but was enough of a problem that our raid had to brush up on it a bit.

We'll be working on this boss at the end of this reset and certainly next reset, and I can whole-heartedly say I'm glad I browsed this thread first and saw the "out-range RoF" strat. Why would you want to use this strat as opposed to the "standard?" Simple, the trash waves. If I can use a strat that minimizes greatly the risk in a fight, and cuts down the amount of times I have to do trash to get attempts in, I'm going to use it. This is unique to Hyjal because of the default 30mins of trash before each boss mechanic. This is the same reason we have only melee attack Anetheron, and outrange carrion swarm. We don't like clearing trash, we like killing bosses. If you've made it to Azgalor, your raid knows how to effectively get out of "death-from-above" aoe. I'd rather have extra wipes on Archi and Council than have extra clears on Azgalor, simple as that.

Again, the question remains: Is there some specific skill taught by the RoF that is not taught by the half-a-dozen-plus AoE fights that have to be beaten prior to seeing Azgalor?

There's no need to speculate about the internal psychological dynamics of our raid; the answer is quite simply that we don't feel the need to make any fight more difficult than it has to be (within the bounds of non-exploitation, of course), especially a fight that can be done once every half hour at most.

EDIT:

Yes, exactly. I couldn't have said it better.

For what my reply is worth, I just want to add that my guild recently downed Azgalor with incredible ease using the following method:

- No melee DPS
- 5 healers 40 yards behind MT
- Ranged DPS and 2 healers 35-40+ yards behind Azgalor
- Azgalor tanked near Thrall, Doomguards by Tauren warriors


That's it. The only person to take RoF the entire fight (until we brought rogues in at 20%) was the main tank. This method makes the fight so ridiculously easy, I almost fell asleep.

We did have a shadow priest on Azgalor, despite his shorter range. However, we kept him at a 90 degree angle from the MT healers and the ranged DPS. And he ran in and out mainly to keep up Misery and Shadow Weaving.

Try this method out. The key is no melee DPS. It results in a bit slower, yet steady and much more controlled fight that, to me, knocked Azgalor down to Rage Winterchill difficulty.

So you have 7-8 ranged dps on infernals? o-O

We do, and they just switch to the infernal and right back to Anetheron. Do we do it differently then you? I'm not sure what you're trying to accomplish here Tyrian. We use a strategy to outrange the RoF and it works. Like many posters above have said, I'd rather teach this "dodging aoe" mechanic on a fight that doesn't have a 30 minute trash clear before it.

The strategy works, and we've seen this many times in the past. Vashj and Kael come to mind with the "do it the way it works for your guild" because that's the way your guild is going to deal with it the best. If someone is capable of getting repeatable kills on bosses using a strat that removes one of the mechanics, why not let them? If Blizzard didn't want us to outrange RoF, they would have made the range 40+ yards.

None taken. We only had 6 healers the night we were trying Azgalor. We had some issues getting through the trash and we wanted to actually get in boss attempts sometime during that night. When he waltzed on up, I suggested that everyone who could dps from 36+ yards, do so and avoid RoF. We've just stuck to what we did that first night because it worked. His hitbox is huge, so we could question if the Rain of Fire targeting radius should be larger, but it's the way the fight is. Even if they upped it to "40 yards" tank healers would still be able to outrange the Rain of Fire and we'd have to hire more DPS healers.

We tried for the first time last night. First attempt, melee in, typical first attempt wipe. On the second attempt, we managed to lobby the raid leader to try the "melee out" strategy, and scored what seemed like a fairly comfortable kill.

We had both Thrall and the Tauren Warriors attacking Azgalor (achieved via the highly technical strategy of first dragging Azgalor near Thrall, then dragging him over to the Tauren Warriors and then back again). Thrall, the Tauren and the Dire Wolves ended doing about 1.1 million of the 3.9 million damage we did to Azgalor, which pretty much made up any DPS we lost from not having the melee involved.

Most of the healers had around 150 SR resist from the Medallion, cloak and priest buff. Looks like I resisted about 7 of the 17 Howls we got.

Personally, given the choice between the risky and complicated strategy, or the slow but safe one, I'd opt for the latter. Your mileage may vary.

Not sure why you were responding to his post here. In his post he was replying to a guy who said their guild on Anatheron has only melee ever attack the boss. And has the ranged only attack the infernals. Which seems to me unless you run really melee heavy (and if you did they'd pretty much all take the swarm since melee tend to clump behind bosses) to be pretty silly. It's not like the healing requirements of Anatheron are that hard. Just spread out and don't be silly. Lengthening the fight unnecessarily by having only 5-7 dps'ers on the boss out of 13-14+ in the raid seems suboptimal.

I think it is probably known but in case people don't know there seems to be a good reason for melee to hit Azgalor at least once. Our whole melee group was on doomlords and didn't even attempt to attack azgalor. For that we were not on the loot list and the master looter couldn't give us anything. It's a good strategy though. We got him on the second attempt.

We got our first kill last night, on our first pull of the night and only second pull ever. We didn't go in with a very comprehensive strategy, just spread out, run out of rain of fire, if you get doomed run to Thrall. For whatever reason we had one feral and two dps warriors on doomguards and the remaining melee (1 feral 2 rogues) on Azgalor, but they didn't last long. Once the boss melee was dead we shifted around a bit so healers and long-range dps could be out of rain of fire range which stabilized things quite a bit. We had the warriors suicide rush at around 15% and our MT execute-tanked the last 5% or so, and we finished him off with maybe 5-10 seconds to spare on the berzerk timer. One of the most exciting first kills we've had in TBC since we managed it so narrowly.

We've killed Azgalor a few times already, and our last kill was a clean and fun one-shot. Some of our previous problems were due to dps either standing in RoF and "just finishing that last spell" or dps seeing the RoF and then running off completely in the wrong direction from healers. We also had some silence related issues that fixed themselves each week as more and more SR gear was being crafted for the healers.

To combat some of the issues we had with healing I bring along 2 resto druids who keep all hots on the MT. They are also encouraged to hot up the melee to offset some of the dot the RoF leaves. We bring 8 healers total, 4 on MT including the two resto druids and then usually two paladins. I like to keep a paladin by the doomguards, and then the rest of the healers are assigned to raid heal unless the doomguard healer needs assistance. The trick we used is to put a raid icon on the healers heads. After getting used to Archimonde, I found that by marking the healers people have a quick visual of who to run to. On the flip side, healers can make sure they are spread out so that you don't get a a chunk of four healers standing together under a single RoF.

You can argue that people should be able to spread themselves out, and know where their healer is without the use of the icons. I would agree, but it is a safety net that provides a no-hassle kill for us.

Another interesting strategy we tried out is to "half and half" the melee on doomguards and Azgalor.

We stuck a feral (who could offtank as necessary) and rogue on the guards and the enhance shaman (fire resist totem) and the rest on Az. The ranged and healers just spread out as needed, generally staying close to their groups and mostly in RoF range. By eliminating half the melee from RoF range, we were only taking enough RoF to use cloak of shadows + random potion timers as needed and had probably 90% dps time - this strat brought us to a comfortable 5-6 minute kill with 1 doomguard up at the end.

Just a quick question on NPC aggro:

Did any one of you ever had the problem of an npc pulling aggro on Azgalor away from your MT?

Yesterday we did our usual MH-run with bosses 1-4. Everything went quite smoothely up until Azgalor.

We pulled him with a hunter misdirecting him on our MT.
The MT started building aggro like usual, everything was fine.
About 10-20 seconds after the pull an Orc Grunt NPC came running from behind and started hitting Azgalor.
Still everything went fine for about a minute or so, MT was decently ahead in aggro on every single DD, when suddenly Azgalor targeted the Grunt behind him, turned around, smashed the NPC and while doing that obliterated the whole melee group with one single cleave (16k+ dmg on rogues).

Have any of you experienced similar?
I can't believe that the orc NPC can build up THAT much aggro over our experienced and very capable MT!?

An orc grunt certainly wouldn't generate enough threat to pull aggro from a tank. It sounds like it was probably a Blessing of Protection misclick from a paladin.

Does anyone have a link to a layour of the Orc base or know where I could find/get one?

I'm trying to make my guild's own version of these bosskillers maps for our strats for Kaz and Az, but I would rather not have the watermarks and have to go through and remove their icons.

Not so much for Azgalor, but definitely for Kaz'rogal - we make sure that we let one of the later waves kill all the NPC's at the front gate.

We have had the hunters complain (and they're not retarded) that the various NPCs will hold aggro over a MD to the MT.

So, while I've never seen this happen - and it does sound a little on the fantasy side - I can believe that it's vaguely possible.

There's a program most of the sites use, I think it's WoW Map Viwer? Wow Model Viewer? Allows you to extract maps so you can edit them in an image editor.

only killed this boss once so far, for it I wore 200fr (epic badge set), I stayed in most rain of fires, just movin out sometimes when I wasn't sure (I don't trust healers!), wearin the fr does gimp my dps a bit, I was thinkin maybe I should just wear my dps gear and move out of it when it is near by, will need to do some testin on it, any ideas?

We currently kill this boss without melee (they kill the doomguards). I have a standing policy that if any melee puts together 200 unbuffed FR I'll assign them a healer and they can attack Azgalor. (None of them have taken me up on this yet.) We have at various times had our melee attack him without FR (last 10% of the fight, etc.) and they have always died within about 30 seconds (with one shaman spamming chain heal on them, so probably not quite as much healing as could be allocated, but they *really* don't last long in the fire).

It's not THAT bad, unless your melees are really slow. We don't use any specific strat for this boss, we just have everyone dpsing and try to spread out, somewhat. Anyone can run out of a rain and not die from the dot with a healthstone or potion, or a single heal. If they're not lucky and run in another, they obviously need some healing, but you can definitely keep everyone up rather easily. Rogues can cloak of shadow it I'm pretty sure, and warriors can intervene out of melee range into the healers to be easier to heal. While the tank takes some burst, you should have enough healers to spare some renews/lifeblooms on dotted people so they live.

I suspect a large reason our melee die so fast is that we have the ranged and healers outranging it, so half the fires fall on the MT and the other half fall on Thrall (and hence on the melee). (So yes, shouldn't be nearly so bad - i.e., continuous and overlapping fire - if you give Azgalor more targets to shoot at.)