I'm not sure if all Sunwell discussion is entirely embargoed, or if some non-strategy discussion of the sheer trash volume is permissible. If this post is inappropriate, then please delete it with my apologies.

I wasn't precisely counting during our clear this evening, but there seemed to be something on the order of ~15 or so trash pulls in front of Kalecgos. Compare this to the eight waves in front of Winterchill, or the seven trash pulls in front of Naj'entus, and it seems clear that Blizzard is taking a very different design approach for the final instance of this expansion. It's rougly double the number of trash pulls, and some of the early ones are quite complicated with little margin for error on the initial aggro. I can't think of another raid instance other than Molten Core with this much trash in front of the very first boss.

Did anyone happen to notice if the two-hour respawn was full or partial? I'm assuming it is a full respawn, but didn't think to check before leaving the instance.

One thing to think about with the number of trash pulls is that after Kalecgos, there are two pulls to Brutallus. Also, there is no trash after Brut as the Felmyst encounter happens right after. So all that trash is essentially for three different bosses.

I believe the two-hour respawn was full trash repops by the way.

Try and forget that this is the most mind-numbing and repetitive trash in the game for a minute. There's 2 pulls between Kalecgos and Brutallus. No trash between Brutallus and Felmyst.

It's designed that way on purpose, the trash is upfront so you can still get Sunmotes and epics, while giving you a nice break as you get past the first boss. They also tuned the trash upwards from what we saw, which will prevent L24M Sunwell in General.

I'll take this over SSC or TK trash anyday.

It's kind of a pain, but the potential haul of best-in-slot epics (to say nothing of Marks, Sunmotes, gems, what-have-you) is worth it. Imagine you're a guild who's clearing through BT right now, or maybe just killed Illidan. You probably don't have the gear to really make a run at Brutallus, but with practice you can definitely kill Kalecgos (who's mostly execution) and you can get a lot of sweet gear on the way. I picked up a pair of gloves tonight on the second pull that I'll use as my best-in-slot item until WOTLK. No exaggeration. And this is kinda weird to say, but the fact that the trash got buffed the way it did since PTR makes it better IMO. It used to be mind-numbing go-AFK-for-five-pulls stuff and now it's somewhat challenging and requires your raid to be pretty on-the-ball. That's better for raid focus than, say, the Illidari Council trash.

It reminds me of SSC/TK 1.0 quite a lot. It's extremely frustrating and can completely demolish your raid in seconds if you aren't near perfectly executing the pulls. And there's a lot of it. And it respawns 'fairly' quick. The only upside is that there's not much in the rest of the instance!

Ghando's post sums it up well. We went into this trash handling it the same way we did on the PTR and got absolutely shit on for a while, until we decided to completely switch things up and handle it the way it deserves. The trash serves as a sleight deterrent (as some people wanted), to being able to just "attempt a boss forever until you learn it and raid for 8 hours a night" since it respawns and there's no real safe spot to avoid it all at.

What exactly was changed from PTR? I can think of the needed buffs to CCable scouts and the general buff the trash got a week or two into the PTR (before they disabled Kalecgos). If anything, one of the pulls was made easier on live. But then again, the trash is trivial if you have enough Mages that can keep a mob sheeped decently well.


LF5M Mages for Sunwell Plateau trash farming, PST! Gear doesn't matter!

The only pull I felt was really annoying was the through the arch scout pull.

You can hunter FD pull Kalecgos and res your entire raid if you wipe as well. Once you get to Kalecgos you can have as many attempts on him as you want as long as you can wipe recover. This is aided by the fact that the people in the Demon realm have 30s to run to the safe zone when the outer world wipes. A hunter can than FD pull and you have another 30s to res the rest of your raid and you can rebuff and attempt from there.

Yeah, the largest issue with this trash is how trivialized it is by one class ability (polymorph). 1-2 mages and its pretty damn challenging. 5 mages and its a complete and utter joke. Slight oversight, I'd say.

That's the pull that got a lot easier since PTR.

They were completely unrootable/snarable for us on the PTR. We just killed them like the ZA patrols except without the roots.

Pretty much the only upside of us not killing him tonight. We got a late start and were in there for maybe a total of two hours. And having not seen Kalecgos at all on PTR, we didn't really know what to expect. Only got three half-ass attempts in before trash respawned, so we said screw it after repops. No real rush. Time to go back in tomorrow and rip Kal a new one.

The trash is definitely a little bit tougher then what it was on the public test realm, nothing too unreasonable however.

I'll admit that I am not 100% certain, but the robots at the very least seem to have a lot more health then what they did on the PTR. If memory serves they just seemed to melt away on the test server with your full raid group on them, but perhaps this is just ignorance on my part. Also, there is an additional one of them on the final pathway to Kalecgos (as someone already mentioned).

As far as the elf packs go I can't really confirm (our old parses have since expired and the new ones seem to be having difficulty at the moment). Perhaps the numbers aspect of them was changed (in regards to health/damage) but nothing too drastic.

Trash seems fairly tuned however, and definitely challenging. Unlike SSC 1.0, the trash is neither over tuned, nor long (I count it as short solely because its basically trash tied to three bosses). Finally unlike BT trash it at least has people constantly on their toes. Personally I'll take long challenging trash over long easy trash.

Now if only they would fix the bugs that continue to persist with the patrolling BE packs on the upper levels heading to Kalecgos.

Don't tell me they still mass-evade ?

Your favored gem is a Seaspray and you're using a trinket with +40 int, it will be anyones guess as to whether that or your guild's inabilty to clear thirty minutes of trash in less than two hours will prevent you from killing Kalecgos.

No evades from what I saw, but some of them tend to spaz out and get stuck while passing through archways .. still pullable though (but dangerous, because if two from a patrolling group get stuck and you pull them while the other two are near a different group of mobs, it'll probably pull that 2nd group as well).

Yes, I'm aware. It's also still the only pull that really qualifies as at all difficult; the rest just require concentration.

First, I want to say I really appreciate the trash in Sunwell. I have been very tired of the mind numbing trash clears in BT/Hyjal. My guild never did any time on the PTR as a guild so we had alot to learn. The only real bug that we noticed last night were the imps. If you wipe, and yes we wiped a decent amount then the imps stay up. When you come back in the imps have an amazingly large agro range. We had probably 5 wipes just from imps agro chaining mob packs.

I will ask one quick question. On the protector's chain lightning. What is the mechanic? We split our raids up in groups and had them stand 15+ yards apart with the tank and melee counting as one group. The lightning would chain irradically (even across the room), but seem to stop when it got resisted! By spliting groups up it was easy to heal with chain/coh so it isn't a huge issue, I am just curious.

Good luck to everyone in Sunwell!

We went at the trash last night for the first time and to my knowledge had almost no previous experience from anyone on the PTR. I think we are doing something wrong.

Our strat; with 4 mages, i made sure that the warlock analogs were top priority for sheep, mages were second importance, healers third. Melee mobs and dragonhawks were tanked/killed first.

First few pulls of single partolling protector and static groups were easy. The first scout group gave us a hell of a time though, 3 wipes learning that crap. First, a question; How long does the scout have to channel the robot before it becomes active?

What we were doing was killing any protectors in the area we could reach easily, waiting until the scout pathed as close to the raid as possible, distracting it, and then lining up and timing all of our range DPS to blast him at the same time. Regardless or not of success the nearest Blood Elf group would pull at the same time as well, so tanks and mages had to be on the ball to pick that up.

Was anyone NOT killing the first deactivated protector on the left and blasting the scout first? It seems the scout would run closer/parallel to the raid if the first protector was still up, but if you kill the first deactivated one on the left the scout runs AWAY from the raid, not allowing time to get a second volley/instant casts off on it.

We got through it, but it took over an hour. At least we got some sweet trash loots.

It seems to hit a set number of people regardless of the range you are at, we saw it jump all across the area even after being told to spread out. Our CoH priest was of the opinion that we should have just clumped up to make the healing easier.

By the way, is it intentional that when you kill a scout the static packs of elves nearby immediately aggro, or are we doing something wrong there?

We just assumed its part of the pull.... if he didnt aggro the pull would be quite easy..