After killing Kalecgos using our own strategy and execution style, it's refreshing to see so many other strategies that also work to complete this encounter. In fact for almost all of his abilities, different guilds/guides seem to handle them in completely different ways! I don't want my post to look like a kill-guide, but I would like to note a few examples:


Portal rotations:

The size of the portal group seems to be the biggest difference. 5 small groups could work, as would 4 'party' based groups. We use 3 very rough 'starting' groups taking port 1-3-4or5 (with tanks on their own obviously for all rotation methods). "Floating" healers can also be used. Some methods have set people joining every portal, some purposely miss particular portals. In my example, once all of the 3 'starting groups' have gone down and then back up again, they don't really think of themselves as groups anymore, only individuals trying to get the next possible portal -- which also happens to be the same portal the rest of their group is aiming for.


Positioning:

Not so much difference at the bottom I guess, the optimal position is obvious provided you raid with a shaman or two.

At the top however, some guilds keep their portal rotation groups in physical grouped locations around the platform. Personally I think it's pretty intuitive to use the ready-made "safe zone" that is already drawn on the platform. In the dead center of the Dragon's platform, have every person with Mental Exhaustion to group up, running to the outer ring only when their Exhaustion debuff is about to fade. Anyone in the outer ring then runs to the next portal that spawns, wherever it may be. More room for portal targets to spread, and a nice clumped up group for chain heal. Two completely different methods, advantages and disadvantages for both, and both work.


"Forced Portals":

The random factor to portals. They suck you down, you cant control it! Both positioning methods get around this in their own way.

Physically grouped 'portal groups' get around this by being able to easily see their group have a portal land near them, and all follow suit. The person that was forced into the portal remains in that persons group.

The 'center safe spot' method cannot get forced ports after the 3rd portal spawn (because Kalec's only valid portal targets are people that are going down next portal anyway). But they can sometimes get forced ports in port 1, and rare but possible for port 2 and 3. If a healer/decurser gets forced, a quick on-the-fly swap takes care of that for the rest of the fight.


The Curse:

This is what intrigues me the most of all the mechanics. For our kill, we just stuck to 'decurse when it's around 15 seconds'. We had 2 people die to curses on our kill, and in general it was quite sloppy (watching lifeblooms stack on you and frostbolts hit the boss while you die to curse isnt fun!), but it did the job. I'm very curious if anyone has tried either of these two methods successfully, and it's the main reason I want to make this post.

- Out range the jump effect of the curse. I think we tried this once while getting to grips with the fight, and it got lost in discussion and it didnt seem to work anyway. We certainly did not try a collaborated effort though. If the entire Demon area was to stand on one side, and the tank taunt while standing as far away from the center as possible, could most curses be removed within 5 seconds of it being applied? This relies on one thing, that the curse can actually be out of ranged.

- A method that I think is a great idea borrowed from an old fight: SR tank(or 2). When a curse is cast, keep dispelling it until it ends up on the person(or 2) wearing max Shadow Resist. Once it's on this person, heal them through the last few ticks, which should only hit for around 1k/second with 75% resists. This relies on one thing, that the curse does not jump after it fades naturally.

The current 'dispel at 15 seconds' just seems sloppy to me.



Apologies if anyone feels I went into too much detail on the abilities/tactics, but it's hard to comment on how different strategies are without comparing them.

We tried outranging it. It appeared to work once, then failed the next three times. Since we stopped trying, every so often a curse seems to disappear for no reason. As for the SR tank, when the curse runs its full duration it does jump to another target.

We just based our strategy off eliminating the randomness of the portal spawns. 4 groups, each group contains 2 healers 1 tank 1 decurser and some synergized dps. Whoever gets ported calls their group and that group goes, if a tank that is currently tanking has to go down because his group is ported then another tank taunts and he goes.

Curse wise we would let it tick till it because a threat then de-cursed it (once someone had the curse for around 15~s we would de-curse it.)

Some tactics say the curse jumps to a nearby target. Is it any nearby target (range check) or nearest target? Also can the curse stack? And if there is a tactic relying on having curse soaks with high SR - considering it stacks - don't you need a soak in every portal group?

Well that just about squanders my hopes of those two alternate methods. I knew it couldn't stack, but it's a shame if still jumps when it times out.

We have been doing this exact same thing as well, except our tanks are in group 1, which ends up with something like this:

G1: Tank Tank Tank Healer DPS
G2-3-4-5: Healer Druid DPS DPS DPS or Healer Healer Mage DPS DPS

We have the healer in group 1, as well as the DPS go as floaters, and have been using that healer (a paladin) to go with the first group to get ported to trivialize healing on our first Demon tank until a second group zones in. However, an issue that we've been having is that at 9-11 stacks on me (which is just prior to my heading into a portal after being relieved by tank 1) with only one other group on the "live" side, healing becomes a serious issue. We've only gotten maybe a dozen pulls in on him so far and have been having to replace people on the fly (= relearning) quite frequently due to extenuating circumstances unfortunately, but have been getting him into the mid-30's, with DPS on both targets being fairly similar.

At this point, I'm just wondering if it'd be more wise to either let the group 1 paladin stay behind until I get ported too, to help in healing through the rather serious arcane buffet stacks (in addition to being able to rid himself of stacks at a moment's notice) or whether we should bring a 10th healer altogether. I consider myself gear capped, and our first demon tank (a paladin) is missing maybe two pieces (T6 shoulders / Bulwark) - so I like to believe our gear is sufficient to tank those positions even with 9 healers, but I may be mistaken. I guess this is where I ask what we could do to alleviate this issue? Run with 10 healers? Use the floater on my portal? (by the way, we try to port tanks on portals 1-3-5-7-...) Or even change up which portals we take? I believe transitioning tanks at 1-3-4-6-8-9 etc. might be doable but cutting it extremely close.

On a different note, one thing we noticed other than the commonly known "don't stand on the hedges or you'll mess portals up," "don't stack up or you'll get blown up by portals" etc. was that the demon's shadowbolt volley seems to be a RSTS conal attack. Initially people were spread out in the demon phase which made AoE healing a nightmare, we then stacked them up which made healing considerably easier but in turn, incoming damage was through the roof - finally we had them fan out around the rear arc of Sathrovarr, at melee range, which seemed to require the least amount of healing while still allowing for high CoH/Brainheal efficiency.

The curse jump seems pretty random and not determined by range. One other thing I noticed was if someone dies with a curse on them, the damage continues where it left off on the next person it jumps to (as opposed to resetting damage as if it were decursed). This may also be the case if someone uses an effect that makes them invulnerable (bubble, iceblock). During one of our attempts people started dying and I received a curse that started ticking at 800.

Having curse for the whole 30 seconds also makes it jump

Since the dps requirement isnt that high, it helps when people wear 1-2 pieces of shadowr-es (like cloak and neck). It gives additional stamina and helps mitigating the curse.
Also the curse counts as damage from the previous person, so you dont need max shadow boss level resistance for good results.
2 pieces with buff is usually enough to mitigate over 25%.

No. Neither can be Spell Reflected, I have tried both.

Any clue on how Revitalize works? He seems to only cast it on people who don't have a mana bar. I have tried standing directly in front of him and meleeing the demon as well to see if that had anything to do with it and I could not get it to land on me no matter what I did. The combat log showed only rogues and warriors getting it.