We have all rogues on Azgalor (with about 200FR) and every other melee (no FR) is on doomguards. It's worked well for us so far, and melee have only died if they got doomguarded.

All of your rogues wearing the BoJ Fresist gear I assume? Is it really worth it to get em to farm 100 badges to get all that stuff? Or is it feasibile to have ranged on Az and melee (semi wasted) on Doom G's?

We use a mix between outranging and not. We have all the melee in, with some FR, and some casters that doesnt have enough to outrange it (Arcane Mages/Aff/SPriest), in range of RoF. When RoF hits the melee, we just heal them up. Going with the "stay in strat" from old VR, and it works fine. Enough SR on healers and it's never gonna be a problem keeping melee alive.

The casters that are in range (they kinda have a own little spot where they spread out around), move out of RoF range but towards raid healers (to get heals... doh), and then reposition again when it's over.

We've had max 1 melee DPS on the doomguards, and it's they've never been a problem really. A druid tank on this boss is also quite advisable, armor and dodge really rocks this boss.

Not farming FR and having the melee on doomguards definitely works fine if you just want to get through the fight. Wether it's actually better than wearing FR and DPSing more vs not wearing it is a different story.

Our first kill came last night and we went with all melee on the Doomguards until 20 percent, then swap to the boss. We also kept our 2 SPs on Azgalor (away from the bulk of the raid) and assigned them a resto sham to heal up any RoF damage.

As previously stated, a feral tank here is cherry. Also, if you have at least one prot warrior free during the fight, having them intervene during the silences makes keeping the druid tank alive at all times a trivial matter.

I see no reason to make your melee farm that many badges for FR gear.

We stick our melee (usually 3 rogues, fury war and enhance shaman) on doomguards and just have the range burn down Az. Unless your guild is melee heavy or your melee usually heavily out perform ranged then I see no reason to enforce that much badge wastage on them.

With 2.4 coming out, I decided to save my badges and use the crafted blues instead -- takes about 15 each of primal fires and waters to make the JC necklace and the 3 LW blues. With a green level 70 of Fire Prot cape enchanted with +7 FR, I have 200 unbuffed, and we get our shaman to drop a FR totem.

Erm, what? Aoe chaining? As far as I know, that's only a targeted aoe. Fire on the ground, in a circle. Move out of the fire.

As for the strat, we have no dps on the Doomguards at all. They're tanked by the tauren hut, by a warrior. The person with the debuff runs and dies there. A pally tank is on standby to pick up the newly spawned mob, if it gets away from the warrior. With all 6 taurens alive, the Doomguards will never be a problem, since they get chainstunned anyway.
All the dps is on Azgalor. On the first kills we had 3 healers in full sr gear. Nowadays, I think they mix it up a little. As long as everyone moves out of the aoe on time, there shouldn't be any problems.

This is half true. With 6 tauren warriors alive, the doomguards aren't a problem. The doomguards are immune to stuns though. (Your doomguard tank, sadly, is not.)

Do you speak from experience, or do you just think they are immune to the stuns from the taurens? Because if you speak from experience, I find the fact that the taurens have been chainstunning the doomguards on every single Azgalor kill for us absolutely amazing.

All dps on Azgalor and just letting the doomguards stack up is more fun imo.

This is how we do it.

- We tank Azgalor at Thrall, with Thrall engaged attacking Azgalor.
- All melee is at the Tauren camp DPSing doomguards, with enough melee they are never an issue. Plus that's no wasted FR needed for the melee.
- If our raid is melee light that particular night, we'll have the first person to get Doom run to the Troll camp and aggro the Trolls. We make sure to have a Paladin healing (or our Paladin tank) the Doomguard tank to put BoF on him so he doesn't get stunned running the Doomguard and Trolls to the Tauren camp.
- Shadow Priests stay on Azgalor, but seperated from the rest of the raid. We have a Druid assigned to watch them. If they get RoF they just run out and get healed.
- Around 10-15% the melee gets on Azgalor and burns him down.

Doing it this way we've never had a problem with RoF (except for the occasional tard that stands too close), and Doomguards are ridiculously easy to manage

I speak from experience. I have been the doomguard tank for every azgalor kill of my guild. I'm staring at their un-stunned faces for 5 minutes every week.

Look at: Tauren Warrior - WWS : The tauren warrior's stun is called 'war stomp'.
now at: Ghoul - WWS : When this effect lands, it applys a debuff.
finally at : Lesser Doomguard - WWS : This debuff never landed on the doomguards.

What about the Dazed debuff, though?

The doomguard tank says that the taurens stun(or otherwise cc) the doomguards, so I just assumed it's the war stomp. If I'm mistaken, I apologize.

All NPCs can apply daze, but daze only slows movement speed, unless your tank is running around kiting the doomguards(between stuns), doubt it's very useful. I think the point of taurens is just so that doomguards do die after a while, else they just pile up and pile up, and I guess at some point the tank dies(there's only so much dmg you can take while stunned). We use thrall and the taurens on the doomguards ourselves, one healer, one tank, then everyone else on Azgalor, people running out of fire how they can. Thrall kills the doomguards as they spawn pretty much, so we never have to dps them, but if we're being unlucky on dooms and losing all our dps, then our doomguard tank gets closer and ranged dps finish the doomguard before next, so thrall switches to azgalor.

P.S.: I was direct answering, however I have no idea if taurens do stun doomguards or not. I'm healing the main tank by standing on the exact opposite side, and I've never have gotten doom yet(in like 3months) so I can't tell what's happening over there. However daze mechanics are the same for every mob, I have yet to see a mob immune to the daze of another mob.

Since I read through this thread in preperation to our first visit with Azgalor, and since the guild leader and myself had somewhat of a difference of opinion on strategy (which is common) I thought that I would let people who are still struggling with this know what our, what I now consider successful, strategy on this encounter was. (We have just had our second Azgalor kill, and we have only "pulled" him two times.)

I will start off by saying that I was originally of the opinion we should put the melee in on Azgalor, and just heal through the RoF damage so that the encounter did not take too long, as we all know that the longer something takes, the greater chance there is for something to go wrong. However, we ultimately opted for the "melee out" strategy and I feel we had relative ease learning and repeating our success with this encounter.

We did the following things which I think were important in leading to our success:

1. Shadow Resist. The first thing that we did was have all mana users/casters equip their BT medallion for the shadow resist, which was all we had available to us our first kill. This week, we made it a priority to use some of our precious few Hearts of Darkness to craft the Night's End cloak for all healers that were in the raid and had the shadow resist enchant put onto the cloaks, and healers wore the cloaks in addition to the medallion. While the cloaks are not nessecary, and we did not have them for our first kill, I will definitively state that I resisted about 70% of the silences throughout the duration of the enounter, which is significant as a healer. We will be distributing additional cloaks to our additional mana users for next week's kill, as we feel the raid DPS will go up if the casters see the same success in resisting the silences as the healers did.

2. Tanks. After going through this thread we decided to have a Feral Druid tank Azgalor, he doesn't take a ton of damage and has the life to survive if an unfortunate amount of healers become silienced. We had our two protection warriors tank the doomguards. One warrior was a static tank and would tank all of the guards, while the other tank was a roaming tank to go pick up doomguards that didn't make it to the "death spot" for whatever reason. He would then bring it back to the static tank who would take it off of him so that he was free to scout the next one if needed. We found this helpful, as it meant we never had a loose doomguard eating our raid. Additionally, we marked the static tank with a raid icon (the big blue box, which is highly visable) so that he was easily visible when people became doomed, even if they paniced. We had a second feral druid as a back up, should one of the warriors become doomed.

3. Positioning. We opted to tank Azgalor over by Thrall, and our tank was careful to position him so that Thrall was not subject to being cleaved. We had all tank healers at max range behind the tank. All RANGED dps was at max range opposite of the healers, so that if they ate a RoF for some reason, they were not jepordizing the healers. We do run with an arcane mage, affliction locks, and shadow priests who cannot always out range the rain of fire. Those particular people were instructed to find their own little corner of the world away from everyone else, so that if they got RoF they were the only people to eat it (this is VERY important), and got out of it quickly. Our affliction locks would cast only DoTs until a rain of fire was cast. While a RoF was casting they would slide in to cast a few SB, but as soon as the RoF was done, they went back to max range casting only DoTs. Generally speaking our MT was the only person to eat RoF, and it was not difficult to heal him through the damage.

Our doomguard death spot is back by the tauren warriors. All of our MELEE were assigned to be back in this spot, and they killed the doomguards as they came up. I do not think that we had more than two doomguards on the tank at one time. We assigned one resto shaman positioned in that area to heal the two tanks and the melee. We found tanking the doomguards back by the tauren beneficial as they do a fair bit of damage themselves, and their warstomp helps mitigate the damage to the tank.

At 10% we let the melee come in and DPS Azgalor.

While this positioning does make the fight longer, it is fairly failsafe; the only deaths we have ever had were due to dooms. To us, having a slightly longer, but clean kill, was better than having a somewhat quicker, potentially sloppy kill.

4. Healing. Healing with the positioning mentioned above is relatively simple. Our first kill we used 7 healers, 5 full time on the main tank, 1 on the Doomguard tanks/melee, and 1 that roved and got anyone who inadvertantly ate a rain of fire. Since our first kill we have reverted to taking 8 healers for MH over the 7 we used in SSC/TK as we discovered the extra healing far outweighed the missing DPS on the trash, as fewer people died. It is completely possible with 7 healers, but it was definately easier with 8. We have 6 healers on the MT (2 priests, 2 resto druids, 1 resto shama, 1 paladin), 1 paladin that roams to catch someone that may have gotten hit with a RoF, and 1 resto shaman on the Doomguard group. We ran full druid and priest HoTs on the tank during the silence. It is important that your healers make sure the tank is fully hotted and topped off going into the silence. While we were successful our first kill with just the BT neck as our shadow resist (and only 1 resto druid), the amount of resists from just adding the SR cape on the healers was shocking, at least to me. The more siliences that your healers resist, the more trivial this encounter becomes.

5. Doom Recovery. Lastly, I think what helped us is that we had a "doom recovery" plan in place. We are highly fortunate because we tend to run with 4-5 warlocks (our last kill, however, we had only 3), and usually 4-5 druids (2 resto, 2 feral and sometimes a moonkin). Before the trash, all warlocks make sure they have soulstones made, and have a stoning rotation worked out for when the dooms hit. As the dooms land, the warlocks get the doomed person stoned. Once the stones are spent, or if the person got missed, we run druid rezzes (which are not always up, as they sometimes get used on the trash if a key person to succeed on the trash has perished and needs to be alive). Even though we have a slower kill because we leave the melee out of the mix, we generally have not hade more than 1 or 2 people dead from dooms at the end of the encounter.

While we may not have had a pleothra of kills on this boss, we have killed him with relative ease everytime we have faced him, and I think that we have a solid strategy that works for us, and that is easily repeatable with out much left to chance, and without much risk.

While I do not claim to be a master strategist, I do hope the insight that I have provided above is helpful to those trying to learn the encounter and like me were hesitant to go with a "melee out" type of strategy.

The Almighty Waylessaggravating came down and said, "Let Azgalor come to the cows instead!"

Melee does not need Fire Resist for this encounter. They quite simply need to run out of AOE. If they are incapable of running out of AOE on Azgalor, they will be incapable of running out of AOE in every other Burning Crusade encounter. As melee, if you run out of AOE, you will survive with 1-2k HP. In a particularly bad scenario, you may take more damage. This can be countered via a Healthstone, Health Potion, Cloak of Shadows/Defensive Stance. Don't forget about Gift of the Naaru, Alliance Enhancement Shamans. The melee can take care of themselves, but odds are they will have several healers assigned to them. There's absolutely no reason for melee--or any raid member--to die outside of the Doomguard debuff. I believe Azgalor is Burning Crusade's crash course in how to run out of fire.

And while we're on the note of having Taurens attack Azgalor, here's something that might not have been mentioned. The Trolls up there can drop Healing Ward Totems that are incredibly powerful and can almost solo heal your Doomguard tanks! Bringing them into the fray (but keeping them out of Azgalor's range, obviously) may allow you to drop a healer.

Or just have melee kill Doomguards and let your MT be the only person in the raid inside RoF range, making it so easy the healers end up playing naughts and crosses with the corpses of Doom victims while the ranged dps kill Azgalor.

Just one thing to mention - we did this strategy on our first Doomguard kill, and several of our melee and our Doomguard tank were unable to loot by being out of range.

Make sure they all do *something* to the boss (enrage, throw something, shoot an arrow) whatever.

So far no GM has been unwilling to give our tank the breastplate, so I thought I'd provide some friendly advice before it happens to you.

(For the record, we haven't tried the "make sure you damage him" yet, but I know before they WEREN'T on his threatlist and didn't get to loot, so it can't hurt)

Um, why wouldn't you have all your melee open up on him like we do and then run out on the first rain of fire and wait for the first doomguard at the designated spot? We get him down to 80-90% this way depending on luck and rain dodging skill.

It's free, easy, dps with no risk and it would obviate whatever loot bug is occurring.

We wanted no rain of fire on the tank/melee for sure. We have 3-4 warlocks so we're not really worried about raid DPS on him.
And the doomguard tank doesn't do a lot of damage anyway so was just standing at the tank spot.