sovelis41

It's not a Brutallus-level dps check, but if your DPSers are being very lazy and are just worried about the portals/spacing/etc, then you will wipe during the enrage because there are too many curses, bad portal timing, or skipped portals. The difference in stability of a 5.5min kill vs. an 8min kill is quite substantial. Seems bleedingly obvious, but I see a lot of guilds play way too defensively on this boss and make it harder on themselves.

A good example of a fight where your DPS can focus on staying alive and the boss dies is Archimonde. The DPS component is actually what turned this fight into 1-2 attempt farm mode for us. We just said "yea, don't miss portals, group where you need to be, but you really need to be going all out on DPS here because it is going to make the fight much easier on us."

The numbers I look for are 50-55% on both bosses after completing one full rotation, ~25% when completing two rotations, and then the fight is over by the third one (average kill of about 6 mins). These numbers can rely quite a bit on how well you can divide up your portal groups and keep some synergy.

@Portal Skipping
After trying pretty much everything when learning to keep portals from skipping (no totems, some totems, no pets, etc), and still getting skipped portals, we decided to just roll the dice, and more often than not we get no skipped portals. I'm not sure if the Bush Theory (tm) holds water or not, but it's the only one you can somewhat "control" and not effect your raid adversely as opposed to not using totems or pets.

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Gofa

Yes, I get your point Sovelis41. Sure, the faster you can kill the boss, the less curses are there and the chances to do mistakes are lower. But my point was a different one.

First of all you won't bring more than 3 mages anyway to the boss. Compared to 12-15 damage dealers that you bring to this fight, 3 mages are a rather small fraction of your entire dps. I'm not sure when the first(second, third...) curse starts, but from my gut feeling I can dps 2-3minutes into the fight without having to decurse more than 1-2 times. We kill him after ~5minutes so half of the time I can dps without spending much time decursing. Even if I spent more time decursing than dealing damage after the first curse, it won't matter that much in my opinion. I'm not sure about the numbers, but I guess the difference between a raid with either 3 "late decursing mage" or 3 "early decursing mage" won't be more than an maximum of +-~30seconds fight duration.

I think it's much better to decurse too early than too late (for obvious reasons). A curse in combination with an unlucky shadowbolt volley or a high stacked arcane debuff *might* kill you. Or let me put it differently: You could have survived an unlucky event if you didn't get some 800+ curse ticks in the meantime.

To sum it up: I think it's better to extend the fight duration by some seconds and play it safely than to risk something and decurse too late to push out some more dps. You want to have everyone up for the final 10% enrage, especially when you are learning this fight. That's the only part of the fight where dps matters and if you have 9 other damage dealer beside your mages and they are all live, that's enough dps to finish Kalecgos up.


Despite decursing, you want to maximize your dps as good as possible as a mage in this fight - that's for sure. Of course it is far from perfect to decurse the curse after 3 seconds and you should talk to them, but it's still doable to kill Kalecgos just fine. That was my whole point I was trying to make - you won't wipe because your mages decurse too early.

 

sovelis41

Sorry if that came off a little pretentious, now that I re-read it, I could have written less. My point was more of an overall fight philosophy. Sometimes when you tell people they have a job that is important in a fight they tend to tunnel-vision on it and ignore fundamentals. This is a common theme in a lot of my raids so I tend to hone in on it quickly.

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Airraid

Having farmed Illidan for about 6 weeks now we're about to start on Kalec this week. This thread has been very insightful; we're going to push the 9 healer and 3 tank strat to start as it seems the best all round learning setup. The only question I haven't really seen an answer to as yet is what's the window between banishing and despawn? If you get the dragon down, how long do you have to finish off the demon? Is it Romulo/Core Hound style where it's a matter of just a few seconds or is it closer to 10 or 15 seconds?

 

Nethris

Unless the mechanics have changed, the enrage buff happens every 5 seconds after one hits 10%, and someone mentioned killing the demon too fast and having the dragon left at 15% with the demon banished, and zerging him down ending up with 10 enrage stacks (total of 50 seconds or so past when the demon hit 10%) - if there is a despawn timer, which I haven't seen reference to hard evidence of but haven't read the entire thread, it's pretty secondary to the stacking enrage buff and the fact that once one is banished, you don't have portals and either can't get any more people into the demon realm to finish him off, or have everyone in the dragon realm with arcane debuffs and curses stacking up as well as the increasing damage on your tank. Getting both to about 11% before one hits 10% in control of the fight with everyone up, and then maintaining control as long as possible while your dps goes nuts seems far more central than timing issues, though banishing the dragon too fast can cause a "wipe" even if no one dies.

 

• Daboran

A lot of this fight is timing your dps. As long as all your healers are up and running you can survive a fair while but that isn't the point. You should aim for both Dragon and Demon at 15% initially. Once you have this wait until you have enough dps in each "world" - there's no point in having all your dps in Dragon when you start the burn.

From experience, you should aim at all costs to banish the Demon first. I usually get both to the aforementioned 15%, then wait until we have 1 party in Demon then another on the way to that world before I call to nuke. Make sure people keep taking thier portals until you judge that Demon will banish with those already there.

The main problem is that once you banish the Dragon, you won't get any more portals to the Demon world. It's perfectly possible to save the fight if Demon is banished but people are dead - it's impossible to retrieve it if you lose too much dps in Demon world and banish the Dragon.

 

sovelis41

The short answer to your question: There is no link/hard reset on the enrage. You can live as long as human kalecgos is alive, and you have people alive in the dragon world (no one with dragon = encounter reset). This becomes increasingly more difficult as the enrage goes on.

Long Answer: You'll have to judge when it is best to trigger the enrage for your raid setup. My comments on this are a few pages back, but my strategy for the enrage is based around my melee group (standard melee setup + 1 decurse, typically resto druid). If the demon is under 20%, both health bars are reasonably even, and the melee group gets ported down, I tell them to hit their heroism, and instruct everyone to ignore portals unless the need for a tank to port arises.

The melee group finishes the demon and is typically back when the dragon is nearing the banish point and they finish it. This strategy is based around a few points:

1. Sathrovarr is more dangerous than Kalecgos during enrage. He has teh ability to end your raid abruptly if the human Kalecgos is killed, thus, banishing him as soon as possible gives you the best chance of success. We've had numerous kills with no tanks and the dragon walking around killing people with as much as 5% (as far as I can remember) to burn.

2. You know your DPS and how much it is going to take to finish the demon at X% with no more DPS portalling.

This will take some judgement, and it is best when learning if you start the enrage as close to 10% as possible, but remember: CONTROL the fight, don't let your raid start the enrage before you are ready. If you aren't ready (health bars uneven), then you need to rein in your DPS. You can succinctly control the dragon damage and bring him to 12% and hold him there. The demon is much different, Kalecgos does a substantial amount of DPS so we stop him at 18-20% if the need arises (spot check their health bars as you close in on the 20% mark).

3. Wait to shield wall on the dragon, it will likely wear off before the fight is over, so if you can keep your tank up through some enrage stacks, do it, and then hit the shield wall for when the damge starts getting out of control.

[e]4. There are situations where the portal rotation just doesn't line up with the health the way I want it, and sitting and waiting is a recipe for bad timing and RNG deaths. To counter this I use a 3/8 tank-healer setup which gives me two 4 DPS groups to trigger the enrage with.

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Harwin

Earlier in this thread someone said there was a 30 second link. That human Kalecgos was alive and reasonably healthy( he should have been able to finish Sathrovarr himself) when the last player ported back up to the dragon, and
the encounter reset shortly after.

I haven't seen the link myself - our 1% wipes have been verifiably for other reasons, not a secret 30 second link, but neither have we run past that 30 seconds to know it doesn't exist. I just remember seeing that post earlier in this thread.

Edit: I've tried a number of search terms including on individual pages, but short of rereading the whole thread again I can't seem to find that post.

 

sovelis41

You would be surprised how incredibly fast Sath can rip through Kalecgos during the enrage. This is why it's essential to ensure the demon is banished before there is no one left downstairs.

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Dralmoo

He does a lot of extra damage to Kalecgos when enraged.

 

Regen

Roughly 2% a hit (maybe more? I seem to recall 2% though), not only is it essential to ensure hes banished before no one is left it is even more essential to make sure a tank is downstairs when the enrage goes. The attempt can end quick depending on how much previous abuse Kalecgos took.

 

tommynt

I have read whole thread and it was really helpful for much stuff - still I have 1 question:

we have a 3 Tank/ 4 Group Tactic with 1/2/2/2/2 Healers - 1 Healer goes through 1. to help when 4th group and 1. Tank is in danger on top plattform.

The thing I m not sure of is if the 2nd tank (who went towards 1. portal) should taunt kind of right after the went back to top which should lead to a 5th MT only portal.

2nd option should be to wait with taunt till debuff is waering off on 1. port group so that the 5th portal is the portal for exactly same people as the 1. one just with different tanks.

Also I m not 100% sure how Tanks should keep rotating in both mentioned cases.

 

Raiste

the method you suggest would create problems with tanking in the demon realm. Since if you wait for the debuff on the first group to wear off, the second tank to go down would have returned to the dragon realm as well by then and you would be losing large chunks off Human Kalec's health. Also your initial dragon tank should be able to enter the 4th portal that spawns at least 2/3 rds of the time anyways. Just make sure that the tank knows that if there is a 5th portal that he shouldn't taunt the demon until adequate healing can be assured in the demon realm.

 

tommynt

Is it a good idea that the 1. Tank of Dragon enters the 4th portal?

We actually didnt want mess up the 1-3-5-7-9 Rotation of the Tanks.

 

sovelis41

Kind of depends on the number of healers, your strat, and whether this is actually possible. If you have 8 healers, trying to get him down in the 4th portal is your best bet so he doesnt get ported alone. Sometimes this isnt possibel due to portal location, when the first demon tank comes back up, and the travel time for all of that. Usually it isnt a problem for us either way, but it could be when learning for sure.

Best bet: Stay safe, bring 9 healers, and setup contingencies so you have 2 healers going down in portals 1-4 and a tank healer going with your tank in the 5th portal. Setting up worst case scenarios is another layer of pre-pull management on this fight. Just makes sure everyone knows what do if certain people get ported (isolate them into specific groups where possible).

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MatsT

A good starting point is that the tanks arriving at a new location should always taunt the boss off the current tank as soon as he gets there, and the dragon tank should always enter a portal as soon as he can after being taunted from. The problem with having the first dragon tank enter portal 4 is that the first tank entering might not be out at that point. Depending on how far away from the dragon the tank entered and exited the demon realm, his reaction speed and the randomness of the portal timers, he will enter either the 4th or the 5th portal, and which one of them it is doesn't really matter.

As for a tank ending up alone with the demon, you should make a healer rotation that makes sure there are always at least 3 healers inside, and even if you get screwed by bad spawns it's easy enough to let the npc take back aggro for a while and soak some damage (or worst case use a soulstone).

 

sovelis41

Quick 3.0 question: For those that have done the fight after the patch, if a heroism is cast, do only people in that realm gain the buff/exhaustion or is the entire raid still affected?

Edit: The buff notes on wowhead say 100 yards, I'm not sure if the demon world is withing 100 yards of kalecgos' room phsycially inside of the Sunwell map, which is why I ask the question.

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Ralnar

It's a question of phase not distance, if I'm not mistaken. If you were to hearth while in the demon realm you'd end up at your bind point will the camera filters and limited NPC interaction.