I don't mean to argue with you but if your tank is dying every time shouldn't you change that? The melee should be spread out between portals 2 and 3 with the first dragon tank going in portal 4. If the melee group always goes up with one of the 4 groups they will always have a decurser unless your decurser fails and misses his portal but that's a different issue.

The tank is dying after the 3rd portal, not the 4th. So, even if we switched to 2+2+2+3 we'd still have the same number of healers up top at the time our tank keeps dying.

Splitting up the melee might be something we need to do if it causes issues - it hasn't yet because we haven't gotten that far. The reason I wanted to keep them together is because not many of the other teams have that great of group synergy, and so melee would be able to even out the DPS with cooldowns if the dragon is dropping faster than the demon or vice versa.

So my guild keeps fucking up one the final stretch. We've made him enrage several times and people just screw up on the portals. Which is sad because we've downed him two or three times and all of those times I can manage to do it right while high. I was sober last night so....

Sorry sorry, digressing. An idea I just had from reading here is to have the groups stand in the relative same area. That means when the portal explodes, group order could be switched and you just go then. I would say base this on healers and tanks so the dps makes sure to stand like when we fight Najentus. Close enough to quickly hop the portal, but far enough to not get hit by splash damage. Thinking more about this, I seem to be adding too much complexity to the fight as the group order would be determined randomly, but that way the randomness is lessed...right?

Thoughts on my theory would be nice. I really don't know if this is harder or easier than the curreent bread and butter.

Just to make sure, we mostly have been trying 2-2-2-2-1, with myself (MT1) going in portal 5 with the extra healer. If you do 3-2-2-2, the idea is that MT1 tanks the dragon until Portal #5 spawns on whoever the first group that went down was, right?

When we did it that way, the first time someone missed portal #4 and got portal #5 early, the second time I wound up tanking the dragon with very high arcane stacks while waiting for the delayed portal #5 to spawn, and I died. I'm assuming that second case is normal and it was just healer execution failure there, but wanted to make sure i'm not missing anything.

On our 2nd night of attempts, I tucked along my violet badge trinket. Gnome racial (10AR), MotW and violet badge brought me in at 88 AR. Over the course of the night, I resisted around 20% AR damage on attempts while my moonkin compadre in my group was less than half.

The next night, a lot more people brought the trinket and we killed him with 8 healers and 5 decursers (3 mages, 2 druids) doing 2-2-2-2.

Excessive AR's not needed for this fight by any stretch, and when you come out of the spectral realm, I believe you can clump up with your group momentarily with the spectral exhaustion debuff for chain heals up top without worry from portal damage. But having that bit of AR reduced raid healing noticeably and helped our healers focus on the tanks.

Did have a wipe where the dragon died and the folks down below couldn't pull off the last 2% which then killed human form Kalecgos. But killed it shortly after.

The first tank should make a point of getting into the 4th portal. To make this happen have the 2nd tank be the first one into the first portal. He should just stand in the middle and wait for it and get there asap. He will then pop back in the dragon phase in plenty of time to taunt off the first tank who can then make it into the 4th portal. Doing it this way ensures that everyone gets into the first 4 portals so that the 5th portal doesn't spawn until the first groups debuffs wear off and you never have to try to heal through an insane amount of arcane damage on the main tank by trying to make him stay out the whole time.

If you use a 3/2/2/2 and manage to get everyone into the first 4 portals, isn't it possible that he will skip the 5th portal entirely if group 1 still has the exhaustion debuff? This would mean it would be 50 seconds between portals and could leave you short healers in the phantom zone.

I'm looking at the Arcane Resistance question, and debating the merits of:
a) [Cloak of Arcane Evasion] (enchanted +15)
b) [Violet Badge]
c) Both

Seems to me that most classes will lose more by dropping a trinket than a cloak.

Make it easy on yourself, if you want your players to have a single piece of AR then have them pick what to change. Perhaps there are some of your raiders who havn't been able to pick up a good trinket, then let them swap the trinket and vice versa.

I have question on the healing side of the fight. How are holy priests healing the tank? What spells, i'm spam healing the tank in my group with FH9, Rewn, POM, and occasionly shield, but finding that after we wipe, I'm not keeping up in the healing meters. The tank in my group isn't dieing, but I'm finding im taking the blame for wipe since I'm not top places for healing. Regardless of the fact that I'm sometimes I'm not in the same realm that the tank dies in. So generally just trieing to improve my performance.

Cryptmagic, if your guild is more focused on healing meters than actual proper healing I suggest that you start CoHing the raid instead of being on the tank. Or educate your guild about healing and how meters don't really mean anything.

I heal tanks with my own holy priest, using mainly GH2 (hits for ~3.5k), GH9 (~5.5k), binding heal, renew and ProM. Apart from renewing myself and the tank and some binding heal when arcane buffets start hitting for >2k, I don't do any raid healing.

It is a bit manaintensive fight, so you might want to switch to gheals from fheal, but not knowing how you play your priest and how your guild's healing is sorted, giving such an advice is without proper foundation.

Yeah i used gheal for a while, but was told it wasn't enough, and that spaming FH9 or FH6 was better. Also we usually have a problem when the last group is in the dragon realm, and usually he has one tank healer, and another raid healer. A few groups had 3 healers, where two were spamming the tank, and another was on the party. Also we were told that we should disregard being efficent in our mana, and if neccessary chain consume potions to keep mana up. We went from 8-9 healers, to eleven, but near 30-50% mark people seem to die, sometimes tanks other times players. We have gotten to 0 on the demon and 13 percent on the dragon, but atleast one group is dead with a few stragglers from the other group dieing.

There really isn't enough information here to provide a solution, but with ELEVEN healers, I think deaths are either due to heavy curse buildup due to low DPS, or simply healers who frankly, aren't very good. Just to be sure, how long have you been farming Illidan?

We have been farming Illidan for 5-6 weeks, and supposedly have been told that the kal fight is not a gear check.

Not to be harsh, but it sounds like your guild doesn't much belong in Sunwell from what you're describing. Your RLs are yelling at you for being low on the heal meters when tank healing? Are they back in SSC? Not to mention as above mentioned, Priests are amazing Raid healers here with PoH and CoH...

If you are forced to tank heal, stay with your usual rotation of Gheal 3/4 cancel/cast. If your guild is going to get on your for being efficient and playing Priest right, I'd suggest finding a new one.

I'm actually in a pretty similar situation as Cryptmagic - killed Illidan 8 times or so and now wiping on Kalecgos.

We seem to have 2 problems basically:
- it takes a long time till the whole going-into-the-portal seems to work (i.e. something like 10 attempts on each raid night). This obviously screws up the whole rest of the fight regarding rotation/healing/arcane debuff stacking too high.
- Our shamans (including me) can't keep their group up reliably with >~9 arcane debuffs by chain heal spamming (damage is too high and CH can't always jump). Now we're discussing if we have to switch to LHW because of the shorter cast time. Myself I think that when/if the portal rotation works, the healing also seems to work - but as soon as the rotation is screwed up so is the healing.

I basically want to try these things or know if anybody tried them:
a) is LHW feasible in healing the arcane debuffs for a whole fight? (incl a shadow priest). My best guess is we won't heal enough like this and maybe run into mana problems.
b) do I/we just have to trust on a good portal rotation for healing? Which would basically suck and imply we could just wait for the first nerf.
c) I'll gem/enchant my new "haste set" with ~12% spell haste with Chainheal spam. I'll lose some healing/much MP5/4t6 bonus but the HPS should go up (tested this already with the unenchanted items on the trash).
d) we'll also try Violet Badge+ arcane resist cloak+ MDW for lessened healing load.

Personally I hope that c) and/or d) will bring the solution because a) has very unwelcome reminiscences to MC/BWL times and b) is just ... jergh.

I'll try to round up a WWS report (with the usual caveats for this fight) if it would be any help.

I worked out the mathematics behind using Arcane Resistance on this fight. I made the following assumptions:

1) Kalecgos casts as a level 73 character
2) The spell has a binary resist check

For a 10% resist rate against a level 73 character, you need 49 arcane resistance.

Lets say you take a string of 10 pulses of the arcane AE with this 1/10 resist rate. If you resist the first one, you resist 500 damage + 500 damage on the next 9 pulses (since you also resisted a debuff stack). That is 5000 damage total (500 + 500*9). Now lets say you resisted the 10th one of 10 pulses. You resist the 5000 damage pulse and the debuff, but since the 10th was your last one, there is no more damage resisted due to missing the debuff, so still 5000 damage total. In fact, it is now obvious that you resist the same percentage of the total damage regardless of which buff you resist in the series of pulses. While less intuitive, this is also the case for more than 1 resist in a series.

The total damage for 10 pulses of the spell is 27,500. Since your 10% resist rate caused you to resist a total of 5000 of that damage, you effectively resisted 18.18% of the damage with only a 10% resist rate! It is exceedingly clear that arcane resistance is far more valuable on this fight, at least for small amounts, simply due to the way the mechanic works (and requires no fancy coding to make the spell more easily resistable). But the higher your arcane resistance, the smaller the differential returns will be, since 100% resist rate can only yield 100% damage mitigated.

Here is a small table to enlighten the situation:

Resist Rate - Damage Mitigation Rate
10% ------------18.18%
20%-------------34.54%
30%-------------49.09%


The trinket + cloak + enchant + MoTW is approximately 130 Arcane Resistance. this puts you nearly to that 30% resistance range where you'll resist half of the damage done by the arcane AE.

Since the trinket + cloak is a very minor sacrifice to take 50% less damage against the dragon, I feel that this should be something all guilds consider at all gear levels.

Flask of Chromatic Wonder is a wonderful thing for this fight, 35 arcane resistance, and 18 to all stats.
That plus trinket plus motw is all you really need AR wise.

Is my guild geared enough to try our Sunwell and Kalecgos now? We have killed Archimonde and Ilildan a few times already. Nowadays, we can usually clear MH in one day. and BT in two days. So, should we be trying Sunwell and Kalecgos now or should we farm MH & BT a bit more?

I'd say your ready, that was the point we were at when we started sunwell, Kalec took the entire week, now it's been 5 weeks and we have 5 Kalec kills, 2 Brut(Kill 3 tommorow if all goes exactly as planned), and are currently taking every single oppurtunity to make jokes regarding Mass Dispel(Felmyst blargh).

Last night our raid had 4 hunter pets in it and we had a mess of trouble of with missing portals.

In 6 of our 15 attempts, we had portals missing their spawn times by upwards of 30-40 seconds. Most of the time it was in the first rotation of portals as well. One attempt, the very first portal didn't even spawn.

We knew about not standing in the bushes, but this was the first we heard about hunter pets messing up portal spawns. A GM ticket also suggested non-combat pets could be the culprit.

While nothing is certain, we saw an abnormally large amount of missed portals in a hunter pet stacked raid. I'd like to hear if anyone else has seen similar results. If so, our hunters army was planning on respec'ing marks for the night.

Absolutely. At the very least you will come out ahead with the possibility of epics/patterns dropping from the trash on the way to Kalecgos.

Kalecgos isn't really a gear check as much as its a massive coordination check. The only real gear check is how well equipped your tanks are (2-4 depending on your strategy). So in that sense not a gear check at all considering most guilds generally decide to gear their tanks up first.

Any spare time should be spent on the trash. It's a step up from previous trash but the rewards are so much greater. Some guild members however will likely groan about farming trash though, even if the loot is best in slot ;/