Hence that not being in the misclarification..... No one that does brutallus can deny that druids take less spike damage from pure mathematics with total armor pre and post stomp, as well as being part of the reason some warriors opted to gem for avoidance.

It's a minor change, but I could Blink through the force field last night and I'm pretty sure I couldn't when I tried pre-2.4.2.

In response to using 8 healers, that got us our first kill, as the 9th healer staying out caused some portal troubles. We ran with two shadow priests that day for their excellent raid healing and the regen to keep the lower number of healers going.

Last night Kalecgos failed to spawn a portal when he should have, and for quite some time afterwards. During the issue we confirmed that no one was standing in the bushes and thereby ruled out that factor. Upon reaching 9 debuffs I Ice Blocked to help reduce raid damage, and as usual stayed in my block to skip the forthcoming debuff aswell.

At this point my Raid Leader told me that being Ice Blocked will make you immune to the portal spawn, and if Kalec targets you will cause a portal to be skipped (essentially stating I caused the problem). I KNOW for certain that I have been ported on multiple occasions whilst Ice Blocked, and I am simply wondering if anyone has more information about the effects of Immunity Spells such as Ice Block and Divine Shield on portal spawns.

Are there times when it will situationally cause a missed portal? Were changes made in 2.4.2 to this mechanic? Can anyone else confirm that they have indeed been ported while using an immune effect?

I have been looking for some form of viaual or written confirmation regarding Immunities allowing or disallowing portal spawns, but have been unable to find anything. Hence I am posting this.

Thanks in advance.

[quote=Regen;748000]4th Portal: Only G1 is left, G1 follows with hopefully the MT. If you can avoid a wasted 5th portal you are now locked down to G3, G2, G4, G1 for the rest of the fight.
QUOTE]

Question on what to do if this happens. (MT and his healer don't make the 4th portal) Do you have the tank and healer take the fifth portal by themselves or with portal group 1, whose exaustion debuff by this point I assume has worn off. In other words, do you have the first portal group wait till portal 6 to go a second time?

We had similar issues with portal skips last week. After we removed everyone from Groups 6-8 and told hunters to dismiss their pets, these portal skips ceased to occur. Also, I'm 90% sure that I've been portaled while in Iceblock

Iceblock is fine. I have been ported twice while I was in the iceblock. So it doesn't cause any issues.

Update on sitaution from last nights kill:

2 Pulls with 50 seconds between portals. We verified proper spread as well as no one in the bushes. We then proceded to have a pull where no portal was spawned untill 1:05 into the fight, leading to the the 2nd to last and last groups to go in for their first spectral phase needing to be in defensive mode as far as health and buffet stacking.

We had our hunter dismiss his pet on next pull and portals started normally, but still had a scare around 70% into the fight when the last person came back from the spectral realm before the next portal spawned (no one in spectral for ~3-5 seconds).

Still got the kill but some of the twichtiest portal spawing ive seen since the encounter went live.

We got our first kill yesterday, after some unsuccesfull tries with a 5 portal rotation, we switched and removed the fifth portal from the rotation and it just clicked, encounter was done on the 2nd pull after that.

I was afraid that we cannot squeeze the raid into only 4 portals, but it worked and no one missed a single portal because of lag or the 15 sec limit. It was 7-6-6-6, with tanks on 1-2-4 and a decurser on each portal.

The damage distribution in the 2 realms were more even, easier to control and there was no strain on healers whatsoever because of the fifth portal spawning on people with highly stacked debuffs, which made the positioning errors more forgiving and reduce the numbers of accidental deaths in the dragon realm from 4-5 whole fight to zero.

The dragon was on 2% when the demon banished, so it was good game for him too. We didn't noticed the pet bug, even with 2 hunter pets out all the time on all of them pulls and the pets were even able to hit the boss in each realm. However I can confirm than Blink through the energy wall works now.

Our setup was 9 healers (2 druid, 3 shaman, 3 paladins and 1 CoH priest), 3 tanks (2 warrior, 1 druid) and 13 dps (2 rogues, 2 hunters, 1 enh. shaman, 1 ele. shaman, 2 warlocks, 1 dps warrior, 2 mages, 2 shadow priests).

Thanks for the information in this topic and I hope I can help you all out whom working on the poor dragon with some more insight.

I have been wrecking my head over the issue with missing portals for a good while now. Kalecgos is likely the fight that has brought us the most problem to bring to decent farm status yet. The typical scenario is that portal #6 is skipped and then the group order becomes messed up with death and a wipe following.

I think though we have finally cracked it. As far as I can tell, portal #6 frequently tries to spawn during the last few seconds of the duration of the spectral exhaustion debuff on the first person to get teleported, and thus has no legitimate target. Unfortunately though, there is no real practical way to use 6 portal groups, which would ensure the debuff has run out before you run out of people who can use portals. What we did the last handful of pulls tonight was a typical 4 group rotation + a paladin as 5th group, but with our tanks using portals #2, #4 and #6 (instead of the typical 1, 3, and 5). This way the third tank became "group 6", and allowed the portal to spawn. As I mentioned, we didn't get very many attempts at this, four in total I believe. But it did look very promising. The 6th portal opend up on the third tank every time, on schedule, and the portal order was maintained successfully. It remains to be seen if this was just random chance, but it gives some hope of making the fight more stable for us.

it does, however leave the question open about what to do about portal #7 and onwards..

So we haven't had issues with Kalec until tonight when we had a full 15 people in the raid on stand-by. When we got to Kalec, we had missed portal after missed portal. There were no totems in the dragon realm, no pets, no one hugging terrain--nothing. We just kept missing portals.

Frustrated, I browsed various sites to try to figure out what was going on. One of the previous posts on this thread mentioned removing everyone in groups 6 through 8 (those on stand-by) I did that and we killed him the next attempt with no missed portals.

These things are seriously related? WTF.

So we spent last night dealing with missed portals during every attempt. We eventually muscled through it (we didn't know about removing people from group 6)..And dealt with the excess arcane debuffs. We kill Kalecgos and the demon (human is still alive)..and he disappears..30 seconds later he is back, we seem unable to kill him, he simply respawns.

GM's said the fight is bugged but they can't help us =-/.

I know this has probably been answered before, but what is the minimum amount of health required to begin tanking this boss, not just the trash to him. And not just like "be in full T6" I'm talking how much HP and avoidance is recommended, and I suppose armor would be nice to know too. Thank you.

I'm not a pro tank, but looking at our MTs stats, the following is a more or less good starting point for a successful dragon / demon tank:

HP 18k, armor 19k, dodge 25%, parry 21%, block 29% and around 80 hit rating with a defense of 515-520. Those are unbuffed values. We just defeated him 3 weeks ago, so we are not that far ahead, only some T6+ items here and there.

After checking out your armory profile, it seems that you need some significant upgrades to have a real chance at him. Badge items will get you only so far.

You might want to look at this profile for starters.

I know that I'm not near tanking it, I'm just wondering for curiosity. My guild's just starting TK. I think personally I'm a bit stacked for TK (VR at least) wouldn't you agree?

Defense doesn't matter, just hard to get a nice tanking set at that point without getting into the 510+ defense range. The other numbers are pretty accurate though, you want to be over 20k HP raid buffed without an imp (depending on your strat, our tank group is three tanks and 2 holy pallies). Somewhere close to 20k armor is also useful. You lose 20 dodge and 5 miss, so those numbers also aren't as critical, but this guy does hit rather hard, and given that your healers are going to be flying around through portals, you might have moments where you're really getting rocked. Corrupting strike + normal hits can knock ~15k hp off you pretty damn quickly.

Successful kills for me, in pretty much the gear I logged out in, included chain-chuggage of Ironshield Potions and judicious use of Healthstones. Hit food is also pretty helpful for reducing taunt resists, which can be a killer.

I know you didn't want to hear "be in full T6," or anything close to that, but the reality is that SW bosses hit pretty damn hard, and the fights are challenging enough where you need to be pretty decked out to tank the bosses. Not saying that you can't be bailed out by awesome healers or DPS, but you're making everyone's life a lot harder by doing so.

Edit:
You're quite well geared for TK, but this is the completely wrong thread to ask that. Check the Protection Warrior thread in the Class Mechanics forum.

Ugh. Wasted an entire night on this boss which we've killed several times before. Almost every attempt had one or more skipped portals. We've tried everything suggested in this thread. Anyone else have any theories as to the cause? We're will to try anything regardless of how crazy it is. There is nothing worse than a bugged encounter.

We use a typical 22221 healer rotation with tanks taking 1, 3, and 5. He was even skipping portals when we had ample people up top without exhaustion.

If you're missing portals, I'd put money on someone being too close to the bushes. I see it quite a bit, I look around and see people who are too close to the bushes and have to tell them to move. The main reasons I believe are that they don't realise or consider that they are too close, or that they know but are one of the mutes on vent who can't pipe up to tell people to move so they can have space to move forward. Always look for human error before you talk about a bugged encounter.

With my old guild we killed Kalecgos with 4 groups of 7/5/5/4 a floating healer and 3 tanks.

Out guild disbanded and we joined forces with another, lesser progressed guild (5/9 bt). Last week we killed Kalecgos also with our new guild, but due to setup limitations we used a 2 tank tactic. You need quite some dps to pull this of, but it certainly works. Here is how you kill Kalecgos with only 2 tanks:

1 Melee Group (5 dps) with a shaman and druid as healers for the group in another physical raid group
3 Groups with each 3 dps 1 aoe healer 1 tankhealer - inlcuding 1 decurser.
1 floating healer (paladin)
2 well geared tanks

9 healer, 2 tanks, 14 dps

Positioning: we used the central safe zone positioning. As long as you have spectral exhaustion you may stand in the center of the platform easing healing. As soon as the debuff fades walk to the outer realm to avoid hitting people with portals. Dragon is tanked at the far edge of the platform, melee stand on the outer side of the dragon (back directing to Brutalus). Clump up behind the demon in the spectral realm to ease healing.

Portaling works as follows:
If you're part of group 1, 2, 3, 4 and get portaled call it out on vent. Your groups follows you into the portal.

The floating healer takes as many portals as possible into the spectral realm, effectivly joining the first group portaled to spectral realm. Due to size issues, the floating healer skips any portals of group 1 (melee group; effectivly 7 people).

Tanks, pretty much like the floating healer, must be as much in the demon realm as possible. Tank A tanks kalecgos on pull, tank B joins the first portal spawn and taunts the demon as soon as at least 3 healers are in the spectral realm (effectively not taunting the demon on portal 1 if the melee group is portaled first). As soon as tank A returns to the dragon plane he will stand close to tank A and both will wait for the next portal spawn. As soon as the portal spawns tank B will taunt the dragon and tank A will join the portal. They will keep this rotation until the end of the fight.

Bad Portals:
Bad Portals are portals where Non-Group-Members are potaled, eg floating healer or a tank. The big bonus of this strat is it reduces possibility of bad portals immensly. The only situation a bad portal could occur on is portal 1 or on portal 2 if the first portal was on the melee group (in this case the floating healer would still be around). In any case just let group 2 join the bad portal, they will be available for sure, since it's either portal 1 or the first portal was on group 1 (melee). If on any later ocassion the floating healer becomes the portal he simply calls out the group he joined with at the beginning to join him into the spectral realm.

Although human kalecgos will take a lot of damage from the demon during tank rotation it is possible to kill kalecgos this way, if your dps is enough to reduce the number of tank rotations and thus the amount of damage human kalecgos needs to tank himself.

Good luck!

I'm sorry but just because you CAN pull it off with two tanks doesn't mean it's smart to try. Kalec will take far too much damage from the Demon, and you need the stars to align with your portal timers and DPS so that you aren't forced to tank transition during enrage.

After reading the whole thread twice I still have a few questions.

We downed Kalecgos last id for the first time, thanks to this thread after finally we equipped everyone with a little bit of arcane resistance (trinket+back+enchant) which imo helped a lot in shortening the learning curve, but we still had a couple of problems this id and I'm sure the kill last id was pretty lucky afterwards, although we often reached the 10% mark before the kill. There were still too many things not working as they should, simply because of our strategy the tank went alone through the 5th portal which we luckily somehow managed during the kill attempt.

We're going on a 2/2/2/2 strategy with 3 tanks going into the 1st, 3rd and 5th portal. As already mentioned the tank went alone through the 5th portal, to avoid this situation we wanted to delay the fith portal as long as the debuff of the first grp that entered a portal weared off like it's described in this thread. As we found out, the spawn of the portal doesnt happen immediately when someone is free to port using this strat. It seems more that Kalecgos is "skipping" the fith portal and you have wait for the 6th to spawn which a couple of times resulted in being the whole raid infront of the dragon and no one being "upstairs" at the demon. This resulted in a couple of wipes.

Next id we're going to a 2/2/2/2/1 strat to avoid the delay and alyways having at least one healer up with the tank, but can anyone confirm that it's indeed quite "dangerous" to force a delay?

Furthermore, how do you handle if the "floating-healer" is ported by one of the first 4 portals? Simply assign a substitute healer from a different grp? Hopefully my raid is going to realize what I mean when I'm gonna explain this...
And last question, when following this strat, how to manage a tankport on the second portal? Going on with 1,2,4 for the tanks and the floating healer then assign to any grp? Wouldn't this result in a complete chaos?

When we used the floating healer strategy we would assign a tank and a raid healer in each of the four main groups. If the floating healer got the portal, the next (lowest numbered) main group would take the portal minus the tank healer in that group. That tank healer would now become the new floating healer. It sounds a bit complicated, but it's not bad if the whole raid understands the strategy.

Personally, we don't use the floating healing strategy anymore. We've moved on to a five group strategy where each of the five groups has a dedicated tank healer and a dedicated raid healer. Technically, this requires 10 healers. If you have 10 healers, that's great. Otherwise, shadow priests can fill in as raid healers with Imp VE. To offset the large amount of arcane damage being taken by the people waiting for the 5th portal, we have everyone wear an AR cloak and AR trinket. This strategy has proven to be much more repeatable than the floater strategy for us.