• Daboran

As mentioned already, yes, but make sure your tanks get priority on drops in MH, BT and Sunwell. They will need it. You cannot underestimate how much fully T6-geared Warriors/Ferals will help you in Sunwell.

On the same note, if you are serious about Sunwell you should be focussing on getting every class their T6 4-set bonus regardless of who happens to be "winning" your flavour of dkp system. Although for some classes it's not essential, for most it pretty much is.

 

Brissa

Its funny how one 4p set bonus can increase the dps of that class by 6% (warlock) and increase others by 1% (fury warrior)

In matters more pertaining to this particular thread I found the information about damage reduction from arcane resistance very interesting. I will consider trying that out for our next kalecgos raid (we have killed him twice, but arent really close to calling it farm)

 

bluenote

I would have to disagree, as a tank I thought it was a gear check because I could assure you a T4/T5 geared tank would not be able to tank this boss, you really need to be geared to survive the damage the demon boss/dragon puts out.

 

Brissa

But as has been said everyone outfits their tanks first anyway (or should if they arent) so the point becomes fairly moot for most guilds who should be at this stage of progression.

Sure T4/T5 geared tanks would have an extremely hard time if not impossible but that doesnt really contradict the argument that it is an execution based encounter rather than gear based.
Most people would probably agree that Illidan or Archimonde are execution based encounters but that you still wouldnt want to do them in purely karazhan gear.

The world isnt black and white and it should be obvious that all encounters require some degree of gearing and that this degree varies depending on the encounter.

 

armitageiii

After 3 weeks of attempts on this guy.

We kept wondering why we had terrible luck with portals.

So we tried it without Pets + Totems on dragon and killed him on that attempt. First time even getting to the enrage.

So it definitely makes the difference.

 

Keeva

This may seem like a silly question, but does anyone have any tips for how to take a portal more reliably?

I am usually the first one to the portal, but often the last one to manage to get in - and occasionally I can't get in at all before it despawns. Even if I'm the last person standing out there (so it's not always because of the cooldown). Sometimes it's because of silly things like the dragon flapping his wings in front of my face, or people walking in front of me - but sometimes I can't get in even when the portal is out in the open (I sometimes have the same problem clicking on spines from Najentus).

We've killed him, I know how the fight works etc, but occasionally I just can't get in the stupid portal and it's so frustrating - not to mention embarrassing, clicking a portal is not supposed to require a whole lot of brainpower or skill. Is it lag? Should I be spamming on the portal, or clicking slowly and deliberately? Holding my tongue just right? Checking the tides and phases of the moon? Do you know of any reasons (other than LoS and the portal cooldown) that might be interfering?

Thanks for humouring me.

 

Kegsta

Entering the portal has a 1 second cooldown, so if it takes 5 seconds for the second person to get in, the last person is probably going to miss it. Its not always the last persons fault. Also I just spam the click button.

We haven't killed him yet, with 10 healers we got to the enrage and banished inner demon, while outside got smashed. We are going to try AR cloak + trinkets next time with less healers and see how that goes.

I have a feeling our dps is stupidly low which is causing the problem, some of our attempts are 7-8 minutes long, and some of our players have a big case of LTP after 6+ hours of attempts.

 

Fydar

We are at the same point as SC - killed Illidan 5 times, and downed Kalecgos tonight. The last 10 attempts were almost 100% related to portal management. Once we got everyone through the 4th portal (or sooner), things started to click, and we got the kill.

Oddly enough we did almost the same thing with the enrage, killing the demon at 14% on the dragon. I'm quite happy that I decided on a whim to get 15sec SW tonight while respec-ing instead of the usual 10 or 13.

 

Vandermonde

How's your framerate/connection? I am in the bottom 10% of fps of my guild at any given time and am consistently sitting on a portal spamming to no effect until everyone else standing at it is ushered through. It's entirely possible i just suck at clicking, but i figured i'd put it out there.

 

Finky

Having looked through this thread twice now I can't see the answer to this question:

Why is 1-3-5 tank rotation the preferred? Why not 1-3-4?

thanks.

 

Brodnax

I believe because it is tough for the first warrior to get out and get to tanking the dragon quickly enough for the main tank to get to and enter the fourth portal.

On another note, In regard to the Curse of boundless agony. I have heard people commenting on the curse randomly disappearing sometimes. Have any shamans tested to see if grounding totems eat this? Would probably be too good to be true but figured it would be worth asking.

 

Fydar

As long as people let the first demon tank through the first portal, you should have no problems doing 1-3-4. People just have to be smart about letting the huge cow with a square on his head to the front of the line.

 

Denogran

What's the upside to doing 1-3-4 as opposed to 1-3-5? Personally( although we haven't killed him yet ), I've always found it a lot more stable on the tanking if we're spread out for the tanking, and when I've taken the 4th portal on accident things didn't go quite as smoothly.

 

fizbannis

1-3-4 Pros:
Less arcane buffet stacking
No real chance of portal overlapping

1-3-4 Cons:
First rotation takes practice to get down (getting the original dragon tank through the 4th portal before it despawns)
Team one comes back almost simultaneously as team four goes through the portal - meaning their could be issues with healing

1-3-5 Pros:
The floating healer in portal 5 makes for the 'critical' points to be a little easier to heal
No chance of tank missing the 4th portal as he goes through the 5th anyways.

1-3-5 Cons:
Higher arcane buffet stacking
More of a chance of people taking the wrong portal as their spectral exhaustion may wear off before the portal despawns making them think they should go through

Thats what I can think of off the top of my head..correct me if i'm wrong or missed something. We haven't downed him yet. Best attempt was 30% / 28% with 25 alive when all hell started breaking loose. I think a healer died from coming back from the demon realm right on top of the person that was about to be ported and blowed up. A tank ended up dying as a result.

 

fingoldin

Just wanted to reiterate an observation made previously which helped out my guild on this fight about skipped portals, hunter pets, shaman totems, etc. We were struggling with bringing him down until last night, having downed illidan for the first time a couple weeks before 2.4. Now, not sure if it was just luck, or what, but we were having a bitch of a time with the portals. Namely, weird things going on like waiting upwards to a minute for a portal to go, getting the first four fine, but on the second rotation of portals, having one get skipped and occur upwards of 45-60 seconds after the previous portal, etc. Our best attempt was only around the 30% mark.

Then, one member remembered someone commenting about earlier in the threads someone saying that the portal was trying to target totems and pets. So, we did one attempt with no hunter pets out and no shaman totems, and it was an easy kill on the first attempt like that with portals happening very reliably, and everything just feeling so much easier. The difference was night and day when we did that and we didn't have any weird timing issues with portals spawning and such. Now, it might have been blind luck that we did that (and that we didn't have an issue at all pushing through the enrage), but we'll see next week. Just, if you are struggling and it seems like portals are skipping often and not coming when they should be, try it sans totems and pets up top.

Edit: This was with a three tank setup going in 1-3-4 and using a four group rotation with 8-9 healers.

 

lairpie

We usually run with 3 hunters and 4 shaman lately, so this is a bit unnerving. In our first real night of attempts last week we didn't seem to have any problems with it, but perhaps it only happens farther into the fight. We go to something like 15% top and 30% bottom, without anyone really reporting that their portals seemed to be missing, but having less experience, we might just not have much of a feel for when they should come.

Has anyone killed him with a large number of hunter pets and totems in the raid and definitely not had any portals missing?

 

Keeva

Normally fairly good, some nights are worse than others. Last night I had horrible, horrible lag (disconnected me once in the demon realm, and another close call) and yet I made every single portal without any problems. *shrug*

I'll keep my framerate up this week so I can check it out. Maybe I think I'm getting their first but I'm actually not.

At any rate.. back to spamming!

 

Anedris

We killed him today with 2 hunters (both using pets) and 3 shamans (using totems) and in four hours we had a portal skip exactly once (which I attribute to someone standing too close to the hedge). So either we're brilliantly lucky or using pets and totems does not appreciably affect the chance of a portal skipping.

 

Mags

I can relate to Keeva's issues with portals. After trying several different combinations, I've found spam-clicking the most effective at getting me through the portal eventually. Zooming your camera way out can also be detrimental in this fight - nothing like not being able to see the portal because something is in the way. If I remember I try to swing my camera around to show my group so I can see where the portal is.

As far as overall difficulty - I think by the time you get to Illidan and kill him, you've probably collected enough gear along the way to beat Kalecgos. There's a certain level of gear required, but success or failure seems ultimately to depend on execution. I see a lot of posts by guild that killed him, or at least reached the enrage very quickly on Kalecgos. We are not one of those guilds. We've been working on him a couple of nights per week ever since the patch, and last night was the first night where things really clicked and we hit the enrage a few times. We might have even killed except for some mistakes on one enrage, and a badly timed tank disconnect on the other (human Kalecgos died). I can't point to one thing we did differently that made the difference - I suspect it was a combination of more familiarity with the fight, perhaps slightly different raid make-up, some fine tuning in positioning to avoid spectral blast splash damage.

 

koyori

I think the chances of missing portals being caused by pets or totems are fairly low or i'd actually view them as non existant based on what i've heard so far considering that it never seems to happen at the start of the fight, we had some rather bad balance today and ended up with 5-6shamans and we had only 1 missing portal that during 3 hours of wiping. I'm suspecting that it's just as simple as that the missing portals are just missing since there's noone eligible for a portal which makes him skip a round. What Fingoldin wrote Just seems to support this perfectly as well. Frequency of missed portals seems atleast to be way to low to be caused by totems or pets.

 

fizbannis

I'm still curious as to how many guilds use 1-3-5 for tanks and how many use 1-3-4. We've used 1-3-5 since we've started attempts and most of our wipes are tank deaths. Its hard to tell if it is due to the setup or if portal rotations just aren't going how they should be. Throw in the mix people making mistakes and blowing each other up causing healer deaths which also result in tank deaths.

In the beginning we were struggling keeping the tanks alive on the first couple of portals. We've now had a few attempts where we get to about 30% with 25 up and thats when a tank dies.

Has anyone had any success switching from one strat to the other? Any guilds that have tried both find one to be much easier? If we struggle the same way this week I'm probably going to switch it up to 1-3-4 but I'm afraid of trying to fix something thats not broken if its something else causing the problem.

 

lairpie

When are your healers going through the portals. Our only issue regarding tank death didn't really have to do with the tank, but rather where 2 healers are popping up right as the last 2 healers are going down. We're bringing a 9th healer and having a paly bubble his stacks off early then be the lone healer with portal 5, or just overloading on resto druids (yay full s3 resto geared alts and ferals) so that the hots can keep up during that transition.

 

fizbannis

Healers are going through the portals whenever they can. When someone in a team gets ported they call out their team number and that team (containing 2 healers) zergs the portal. We have a 9th healer (paladin) floating to wait for the fifth portal. One of the problems we come across is when the floater gets targeted for the 4th portal and we have to keep a non-paladin in the dragon realm who can't bubble out of their stacks.

Edit: The current point we're wiping at is the 6th portal. Team 4 is coming back from the demon realm while team 1 is entering the demon realm, leaving the floating healadin + the tank alone in the demon realm (not technically alone, but 2 healers leaving and 2 healers coming)

 

Thessaly

After we took Totems and Pets out, we were still getting missed portals. I had everyone take a few steps closer to the center, which caused a bit of crowding before the first portal, and suddenly, no more missed portals. The portals have a pretty big area of effect, I think, which means that if you're too close to the edge, it will fizzle. If you're still getting fizzles, just make people stand further from the edge. Telling people "don't stand in the bushes" wasn't sufficient for us.