Kalecgos - more than one way to save a dragon - Page 4

Tyrian · 04/02/08, 1:06 PM

To the people using a quadrant method rather than a safe zone method, do you ever take portal spawn AoE damage? We found it was very difficult to spread out until we use the center of the platform as a "debuff only" zone

Depends on how you set up the four group areas. We tank the dragon on the far side, sideon and the four strict portal-group areas (facing the dragon) are Left, Middle, Right, Back. Other strategies tank the dragon in the middle and have it more like North, South, East, West. Using NSEW has pros (easier to spread out) and cons: the thing that stopped me switching to that strategy was that you might have to run through the dragon when your ported back up and that each side has difficulty seeing whats happening on the other. With the dragon side-on, everyone is always on the same side of the dragon, can readily and immediately see whats happening in all other areas of the platform and never have to worry about frost breathe/tail swipe/running through the dragon when they get ported back up to apex point.

Although we did have some issues with Spectral spawn AOE damage, it was really only on learning attempts. Once you tell people that you must spread out when your spectral exhaustion debuff is close to expiring , it becomes alot more natural and easy. We decided not to use a 'safe zone' up top. You always ran back to your original group location where you began the fight once you were ported back up. The middle group (standing in what other guilds call 'the debuff only zone' is where our melee group and their 2 healers (mt+group) stand only. Any extra melee are actually placed into a range group and move with that group. For example, if you were a rogue in the Far right group (because the middle melee group was full), whenever your debuff would expire you would run to your range group and stand near your mages etc - waiting for a portal down to spawn. This will ensure that that groups portal will spawn directly on all 5 of them, and not in melee range and force 4 people to have to move 20+ yards to where you were dpsing the dragon.

Finally, the fanboy in me is dying to say it: Amazing job designing this fight, Blizzard. I can only hope Kil'jaeden is just as good...

tangent · 04/02/08, 1:44 PM

Zugstab mentioned this though we refined it a bit more.
With three tanks you can almost always have a taunt for whoever eats the strikes (tank or Kalecgos). When two tanks are inside they can taunt off each other. When there's just one they can let Kalecgos tank until he's knocked down.
On our kill last week the break down was 4 strikes on Kalecgos, 4 on the first tank in the rotation, 3 on the second and 2 on the third. Without looking at the logs I can't tell how many of the strikes on tanks were followed by taunts but I'd guess it's over half. So healers only had to heal through 4-5 bad strikes instead of 13.

Diameter · 04/02/08, 2:46 PM

For those of you who have downed Kalecgos, how did you deal with the curse? Is there a mod that tracks the duration of debuffs on players? I'm looking for this because from what I've read decursers are supposed to let the curse tick for 15-20 seconds before decursing it. I don't believe Grid has this capability but please correct me if I'm wrong.

thorin5 · 04/02/08, 2:47 PM

Deadly Boss Mods has timer bars for the curse, along with Arcane Buffet and other timers as well.

Tyrian · 04/02/08, 3:59 PM

At the very end of a fight, your decursers might have to make a quick decision on whether its worth actually decursing or ignoring it (and dps'ing instead) for the very final seconds.

The dragon enrage gets so crazy (for us) on our kill and learning attempts. On our kill, all MT's died and Kalecgos tanked the demon until death and the Dragon was being evasion tanked for a rogue for 2%. It came down to a decision between "We will wipe in 15 seconds, Should I still decurse these people, even if it means I do 0 dps and we might not kill the enrage fast enough?" VS "Since we're going to die in 15 seconds anyway and the curse is harmless for 15 seconds, I should just forget the curse and do max DPS and hope everything dies before the curse+enrage wouldve killed us anyway"

(This is assuming your doing spam decursing up to that point, and everyone starts off near 25-30 second duration when you make the decision)

jaske · 04/02/08, 7:26 PM

I really think the enrage is 50% of the fight, maybe more, for us now that our strats down getting to 10% with everyone up is easy, getting a good group down to finish the demon (melee group normally). As well as keeping Kalecgos the human alive for the enrage (we try and keep all 3 tanks up top[might change this]), and actually finishing it all off its the hardest part. Oh and our wonderfull server helps loads, actively raiding for 1/3rd of your planed raid time is awesome.

Tyrian · 04/02/08, 8:50 PM

The enrage is definetely not to be underestimated as something you can just brush off as "dont worry - we can easily finish off the last 10%, just zerg it!". People just need to try and keep calm and stay in control for as long as possible, before things start slowly sliding to chaos.

Whitemane · 04/02/08, 10:31 PM

Something we tend to do, to bridge that 3rd to 4th portal gap, is to take in a 9th healer. The 9th healer is usually a paladin specifically assigned to bubble up after 3rd portal and just max rank spam holy light on the tank.

Found that to help quite a lot. An extra paladin in the raid allows you to not be completely screwed if that specific paladin gets ported.

Illundai · 04/02/08, 10:59 PM

Originally Posted by Jalhar

I wonder if we are the only ones to use a 5 groups rotation, 2 healers (1 group healer / 1 tank healer) / 1 decurser per group (yay for resto druids being able to fullfill both roles ^^) ? The main advantage of this strategy is that there is *always* at least 2 groups in and 2 groups out, and thus always 2 healers on whatever tank (dragon or demon, given the fact the first demon tank waits for 2 groups to be inside inner veil to taunt). The obvious drawback is the super high number of healers and decursers needed, especially group healers (shammy or priest), so the dps is a bit slow (we had our first kill on the 7th minute mark), thus decursers have some job at the end.
With this strategy, damage on demon & dragon is pretty much the same after some time into the fight, with the use of first dps cooldowns inside, and good communication, dragon and demon reach 10% at the same time.

We decided to use this strategy because we had a lot of problems to make more than 5 players to take one portal (cooldown, old computers, keyboard turning, portal unclickable, etc) and to have every group surviving until the end. Now that we are fluent with portal clicking, I feel tempted to try the 4 self-sufficient groups + tank group (3 tank + 1 healer + 1 random) strategy to improve the dps. I however see a problem doing so : given the fact that there is a portal every 20 seconds, the fourth group is entering inner veil at the same time the first group is going out, making the rotation on dragon tanking risky. Plus, the dps on dragon & demon is asymetric, which can lead to problems into enrage. How do you fix that ?

Yeah; we use the same strategy. However it proved to be a pain in the ass today to reproduce, so I'm definitely going to change away from this strat to a 3/8 strategy (we used 4/9). Problem is just that it takes too long and thus is subsceptible to more mistakes. Not good.

Grayson Carlyle · 04/03/08, 5:53 AM

A note on incoming damage.

I went over our logs from the last night of attempts to see how we can reduce incoming damage.
Total arcane damage over the night was 7.45M damage, total shadow damage from Curse of Boundless Agony and Shadow Bolt Volley was 4.45M damage. Total resist rates were 7% and ~32% (and on that note, the application of Curse of Boundless Agony cannot be resisted).

There is a lot more arcane damage taken during the fight than shadow, and on top of that, total arcane damage taken while in the real world is calculated by 250n^2+250n, where n is the number of applications of Arcane Buffet. Since it's quadratic, each % of Arcane Resist will reduce damage taken by quite a bit more than 1%. If you want to make up for not having full sets of T6 gear and all the sta that comes on them, wearing a bit of Arcane Resist will go a lot further than wearing a bit of Shadow Resist.

edewen · 04/03/08, 6:41 AM

Wearing any resist is simply stupid. The only + to resist gear int his fight is the extra stam for low health players. The arcane is predictable and if your having problems healing it then your healers simply need to get better. As far as total incoming damage from arcane vs shadow. The Shadow is the unpredictable damage. Downstairs you need to keep people above 5k or a shadowbolt volley will drop them as well as if your taking alot of curse damage thats the decursers fault.

Vilnix · 04/03/08, 10:20 AM

vorda · 04/03/08, 10:24 AM

How do you think positioning is affecting glancing blows?
hint: each word is a hyperlink

Grayson Carlyle · 04/03/08, 12:52 PM

Originally Posted by edewen

Downstairs you need to keep people above 5k or a shadowbolt volley will drop them as well as if your taking alot of curse damage thats the decursers fault.

I'm wondering if you've even a hint of the healing on this fight. 5k on 3 people every ~8s is nothing when it's easy for 4-5 people to be taking 6-8k Arcane Buffets every 5s up top, and total curse damage is laughable. I made the comment because people were using Shadow Resist.

cheebamonkey · 04/03/08, 2:05 PM

We do a 2222 plus 1 extra rotation on healers but lately I've been thinking of trying a 31113 rotation using 5 groups.

First portal pops and 1 tank plus 3 healers go down
Second pops and 1 healer and 4 dps go down
Third pops and 1 healer and 5 dps go down
Forth pops and 1 healer and 5 dps go down
Fifth pops and 1 tank and 3 healers go down

The downside to this is you have to time your 10% enrage properly otherwise risk no having enough above or below and you have only 2 tanks. The upside is you should never have any portal unused and you shouldn't have any randomness in between attempts on who gets portals.

Fenador · 04/03/08, 2:55 PM

Originally Posted by Illundai

Yeah; we use the same strategy. However it proved to be a pain in the ass today to reproduce, so I'm definitely going to change away from this strat to a 3/8 strategy (we used 4/9). Problem is just that it takes too long and thus is subsceptible to more mistakes. Not good.

I actually like the 5 group strategy, we don't use 2 healers per group though, we can usually drop it down to 9 or 8 reasonable.

Group 1 - 3 healers(2Tank, 1 Raid)
Group 2 - 1 Healer(Raid)
Group 3 - 1 Healer(Tank)
Group 4 - 2 Healers(1Tank, 1 Raid)
Group 5 - 2 Healers(1Tank, 1 Raid)

0:20 - 3 healers inside 2 on Tanks, 1 on Raid, 6 healers outside 3 on raid 3 on tank
0:40 - 4 healers inside 2 on tanks, 2 on raid, 5 healers outside 3 on tank 2 on raid
1:00 - 5 healers inside 3 on tank 2 on raid, 4 healers outside 2 on tank 2 on raid
1:20 - 4 healers inside, 2 on tank 2 on raid, 5 healers outside 3 on tank 2 on raid
1:40 - 5 healers inside, 3 on tank 2 on raid, 4 healers outside 2 mt 2 on raid
2:00 - 4 healers inside, 2 on tank 2 on raid, 5 healers outside 3 on tank 2 on raid
2:20 - 5 healers inside, 3 on tank 2 on raid, 4 healers outside (2 on tank, 2 on raid)
etc

Important things to note is that group 5 will either have to have a way to reset stacks, have a decent amount of hp(11kish) or wear Arcane Res.

The raid leader should switch the people Kalecgos sucks into the correct groups for the first 4 portals. After that, the rotation will force Kalec to choose the correct groups.

Crunch times are as group 1 is coming out, and going in, at these times theres 4 healers jumping between realms. Tanks should have their fingers on their Oh-Shit abilities.

Edit: fixed some numbers

Kargoroth · 04/03/08, 11:29 PM

Originally Posted by cheebamonkey

We do a 2222 plus 1 extra rotation on healers but lately I've been thinking of trying a 31113 rotation using 5 groups.

First portal pops and 1 tank plus 3 healers go down
Second pops and 1 healer and 4 dps go down
Third pops and 1 healer and 5 dps go down
Forth pops and 1 healer and 5 dps go down
Fifth pops and 1 tank and 3 healers go down

The downside to this is you have to time your 10% enrage properly otherwise risk no having enough above or below and you have only 2 tanks. The upside is you should never have any portal unused and you shouldn't have any randomness in between attempts on who gets portals.

How would you assign people in a nonsymmetrical rotation? This sounds like a communication nightmare to me, or at least an awful lot to memorize if you predict all the different posibilities, given you never know who wil be ported each time; it could be a healer or a tank from any group...

Is it even possible to direct people on the fly? 15 seconds isnt much time...

Edghar · 04/04/08, 2:21 AM

I was wondering the same thing myself. I realize that these staggered rotations of healers are superior than 2-2-2-2 on paper, but actually doing it seems to be a logistical nightmare. For those that do these types of rotations, how do you plan for it, and what kind of adjustments do you make on unexpected ports?

darkomenz · 04/04/08, 2:53 AM

I have created a mod that places raid icon on players that are about to be ported.

Some of you may find this useful.

URL: KalecgosIcons | World of Warcraft Addons | Curse

Vandermonde · 04/04/08, 3:01 AM

Originally Posted by edewen

Wearing any resist is simply stupid. The only + to resist gear int his fight is the extra stam for low health players. The arcane is predictable and if your having problems healing it then your healers simply need to get better. As far as total incoming damage from arcane vs shadow. The Shadow is the unpredictable damage. Downstairs you need to keep people above 5k or a shadowbolt volley will drop them as well as if your taking alot of curse damage thats the decursers fault.

Our mages are talking about putting on some sr, just because they are spending a lot of their time later in the fight decursing, which to state the obvious, does not benefit from dps stats.

• Daboran · 04/04/08, 3:06 AM

Originally Posted by Edghar

I was wondering the same thing myself. I realize that these staggered rotations of healers are superior than 2-2-2-2 on paper, but actually doing it seems to be a logistical nightmare. For those that do these types of rotations, how do you plan for it, and what kind of adjustments do you make on unexpected ports?

We went with 2-2-2-3 for just that reason - when you're learning a fight the maxim "keep it simple, stupid" works every time.

It all depends on your raid and their strengths, but in general simplifying the fight always improves performance in our experience. People just do better when you give them a simple instruction like "if your group ports, go with them".

Ashen · 04/04/08, 3:44 AM

Originally Posted by Vandermonde

Our mages are talking about putting on some sr, just because they are spending a lot of their time later in the fight decursing, which to state the obvious, does not benefit from dps stats.

Trust me, you do not need Shadow Resistance on them. Sure, later in the fight they're decursing. Earlier in the fight they're DPSing. Understand that the enrage mechanic in this fight, isn't really just the 10%. It's the number of curses you have bouncing around. And when you DO hit that enrage, you will need a lot of DPS to burn quickly. There comes a point where you decurse and then stop, because in the 15 seconds that all those curses start to matter, Kalecgos needs to die.

Kalecgos isn't about resistance. You'll find that the fights in Sunwell aren't meant to follow a cheesy, gimmicky tactic. It's about execution based on skill, experience, and gear.

Northerner · 04/04/08, 3:46 AM

Originally Posted by Vandermonde

Our mages are talking about putting on some sr, just because they are spending a lot of their time later in the fight decursing, which to state the obvious, does not benefit from dps stats.

I've considered it certainly and I think it has some viability. I will also admit though that I am thinking my raid is presently taking the dps angle too carefully. As we are (god, still...) working out the portal rotations and such properly, it is hard to determine the benefits and cost. I'm inclined to think that our early damage and specifically our early burst on demand to even out the two sides is worth more than our potential late survivability.

Besides, if anything I'd think AR and again, frankly, the healing off of raid damage is rarely a direct wipe cause. I could as easily advocate some small raidwide AR on key people but I don't think it is needed. Neither have curse deaths really been a primary issue for us but there we are. The decision matrix of "decurse" or "dps" is a tricky one at the enrage and especially so at sub 20% where bloodlusted mages can dominate either target. 2.5k dps out versus a clearing of 100 to 3k incoming every GCD is a tricky beast to play on the fly but it is doable of course. Assigning druids to shift and handle late decursing is not a bad option either but I think you are making a mistake if you take your best burst dps off the table in execution range.

Viv · 04/04/08, 4:19 AM

Their enrage - what is the buff that the demon gains?

For the dragon, it's pretty straighforward: once the enrage is triggered, he gets a tick of Crazed Rage - Spells - World of Warcraft every 5 seconds, and every tick increments his stack of Crazed Rage - Spells - World of Warcraft.

But I haven't been able to spot any unusual buffs being applied to the demon around the time that the dragon first gains Crazed Rage...