Portals vary in time. They are on a cooldown timer, not a strict timer.

We have the third tank going in portal 4 with 1 healer and the 4th portal group. In the situations where he can't make the 4th portal, yes, he goes in portal 5 solo (with a healer).

These sorts of rotations can lead to long stretches with the entire raid upstairs or most of the raid downstairs, which is fine and still very controllable. Your primary goal is to make sure a tank is not stranded on a side without any healing on him or her at all.

Kalecgos is the only fight where I actually want 4 Holy Paladins in the raid (Although, of course, you can manage fine with other classes if needed). This is because in a 4-portal setup, you can guarantee at any point in the rotation (even the difficult 3 down+1 up or 3up + 1 down transition areas) there will be a Paladin healing the MT of that realm.

It really sounds like a "4 group rotation" is a "5 group rotations with 1 really small group (Tank3+healer)"

If portal times are really 20-25 secs then each full rotation will be very stable at 2 mins since Kalecgos will almost always end up waiting for a debuff to fade so he can portal someone after P4 or P5. Especially if your tank makes P4 instead of forcing a P5.

Since you guys are so helpful I will share some - you probably already know this one.
Have a paladin bubble off the debufs and take over as T2. This makes the first rotation much easier on tank healing.

New EJ member...hope I don't sound too dumb here

but we just started our attempts on Kalecgos. We've had illidan down for roughly 3 weeks now. We formed as a kara guild only 4-5 months ago and so we're really undergeared for SW. I mean, if you armoryd some of us, some of us still have some kara gear on.

Anyways, first issue is when I go into the portal to tank, I'm taunting and Kalecgos seems to always pull threat off of me. I taunt again, and bamb, he's pulled threat again. I don't normally have problems with TPS, but for some reason I'm only getting around 500 tps when I'm down below and even in 5 man heroics when im not getting any freaking threat at all cause of so much armor mitigation I still generate about 900-1000 tps so I'm not sure what's going on here.

We only had 30 minutes of attempt this weekend, so I couldn't get a real grasp on what was going on, we kinda just wanted to familiarize ourselves with the trash and get an idea of how the fight looks like. We did about 3 attempts in total.

So when we were at about portal 5, Kalecgos was at like 67% health down below cause he was tanking sathr so much, while sathr was at like 85%. Is this normal?

Lastly, someone was saying I should only taunt after the corrupting strike and when it says Kalecgos has been weakened and is stunned? Is this true?

Human-form Kalecgos does a periodic high-threat move that makes it difficult to hold aggro off of him; you can keep damage off of him best by recognizing the emote that comes with this (I'm not sure what it is exactly) and taunting after it.

In the same vein, Sathrovarr does a stun/knockdown move on his current threat target periodically, which causes you to lose all dodge/parry/block while stunned. Some tanks prefer free action potions to deal with this; others prefer to simply chain-chug ironshields as usual.

It's normal for Human-Kalecgos' health to be lower than Sathrovarr's early in the encounter, since they spend a good deal of time just beating on each other at the beginning of the fight before anyone gets teleported into the demon ream. As you get better at the fight you'll find that damage on Sathrovarr is "catching up" to damage on Kalecgos.

Personally I just taunt as soon as I know my healers are ready and then lay in with all the high-threat moves I have and hope for the best. If I hold aggro great; if I lose it I just taunt again as soon as I can. After some practice on the fight you'll find you have enough of a cushion that you don't have to worry too much about Kalecgos' health.

Hunter Misdirects can also help you establish a better threat hold on Sathrovarr, and it's not like they're using them for anything else during the fight, barring one on the pull. As mentioned, FAPs are a tremendous help. The 2-second stun on Corrupting Strike is an absolutely brutal threat loss.

It also helps for each tank to taunt off the tank before them, piggybacking over their threat. The first tank down obviously doesn't have this luxury, but if you're running a 3-tank strat, all subsequent tanks can do so.

I dont quite understand what you mean. For us, a '4 group rotation' is a 4 group rotation, not 5.

If your referring to the 5 raids groups of 25 people. 4 of these are portal groups and the 5th group is dissolved into the others. The fifth group contains 3 tanks + 2 others for us. The 3 tanks are in their own rotation (they go down with the other 4 groups) and 2 remaining people of that group are attached to another portal group. There is no 5th 'really small' portal group.

Generally the 25 people in the raid would be divided into 4 portal groups that have: 6, 7, 6, 6 people going down each. Numbers may vary depending on your guilds setup.

It seems that hunter pets are now able to DPS during the demon phase due to the new patch.

Our portal rotation tonight was flawless, coming about 30 seconds on the dot, no mysterious skips or delays. We might have just been lucky. How were others' experiences, post patch?

We didn't have any missed portals last night as well, which was unusual. We also used totems and pets in the dragon realm, which we wouldn't normally do because of we never knew what caused missed portals.

The onus on a tank for this fight is not so much to generate insane threat to shield kalecgos, it is more of a test of your dps not to miss portals and to dps the demon as hard as possible to make up for the hp deficit those 2 started off with. There is a substantial amount of raid damage here so your healers will be taxed, and as a tank your priority should be on survivability to help your healers out some, "live to taunt on the next cooldown" basically.

From my exp, it is hard to pull aggro off kalecgos on the first few portals but as the fight nears the end it becomes much easier to make the demon stick onto you.

Not to burst anyone's bubble, but we had several missed portals last night. No one was near bushes, etc. We don't usually have a problem with missing portals, it's usually pretty regular for us. We found the portals varied last night.

Seems the same to me. Probably just random or whatever.

If Kalecgos targets the current main tank for the random portal spawn, the portal will be skipped altogether and you will have to wait 20-25 seconds for the next one. This can really screw you over, so it's good to make sure that the tank coming out taunts as soon as possible so that your Dragon tank have the debuff, and thus can't be random targetted.

This is interesting. We use a typical 3tank/9healer strategy and our original tank takes the 5th portal, so you would think we'd be seeing some skipped portals in the beginning of the fight. However we never have a skipped portal in the initial rotation. I'll keep an eye out for this.

That said, if it is really as simple as the spell erroneously counting the tank as a legitimate target, I can't imagine it would have remained a mystery for so long.

For us it's been the opposite at least, once the first main tank has been taunted off, it almost never happens. Getting major screwups like "0 healers inside" doesn't happen later in the fight. Not sure if i've ever seen the first portal be skipped though, that's kind of weird, but it almost always happens on portals 2-3 or possibly 4 (if the first tank entering hasn't gotten out and taunted yet).

We spent the entire weekend on this PITA. We eventually won on, of course, the very last try of the weekend. Eventually, fwiw, we went to a 10th healer. I'm not sure what "missed portal mania" is really all about. I'd guess that in about 40-50 attempts, we had maybe one try where a portal was genuinely "skipped". You'd think we'd have had plenty of time for the RNG to screw us over in that many failures.

I have remarkably little to add to the discussion other than that we managed to die to incredibly stupid things over and over. First, people got blown up by portals. Then, they figured that out. Then people, died to having too little health and splash damage killed them, so we convinced people to worry about not dying. Eventually, we put people in their Violet Badges, which gives everyone a 15% arcane resist with improved Gift of the Wild. Maybe that helped a bit, altho I'm skeptical.

Eventually, it was the next day, and a couple of truly not good people were not there. We overstacked healers so that every group had someone really competent on raidwide and someone competent on tank healing. I'm not really convinced there is any purpose trying to do this with 8 healers by the way. And it has nothing to do with mana or healer skill. It has to do with the fact that you could get caught with simply not having enough of them up top or down below at the right instant. Once the transitioning starts, if you are shy of healer bodies and they are not yet back from the portal, you are running some RNG risks on who is left to tank heal up top and keep people alive who have been up there forever eating arcane buffets.

Seems like one of your Brutallus DPSers should have a healer alt by now that can play it for Kalecgos so you are switching toons and not people. You're going to want at least those 9 healers -- if not more -- to learn the twins eventually anyway. My guild will probably learn the twins with 11 at this point. Sadly.

Anyway, thanks for the tips.

We are having all sorts of problems with our healers keeping the tanks up at the moment, we've managed a best of 30% on both demon/dragon.

Both myself and our other spriest have gone 2/2 Imp VE to help take some of the load of the healers, but I think its going to have to come down to more healers in the raid to get him down.

We had the opposite experience of Yang. We first killed him with a 5-portal rotation but have since found a 4-portal rotation much less prone to screw-ups, primarily because people spend less time up top and thus take less buffet damage. Every group has enough healing attached to it to keep it alive so skipped portals should never cause healing coverage gaps.

Whatever works though, obviously.

Same with my raid group. Originally we learned this with 3 tanks, 9 healers (sometimes 10), and 5 portals. We got our first kill in what seemed like a short amount of time compared to other guilds on the server. Then partially due to summer RL stuff and mediocre raider performance, we didn't get our repeat kill for another 3 or 4 resets. We were wiping to some dumb things like tanks dieing (both realms), portal bounce deaths buffet stacking, you name it and it was there.

After reading a bit here I decided to give the 4 portal strat a try. For whatever reason our healing smoothed out, and living was no longer a problem, but we would still get to the end and just start falling over. With an added emphasis for people to really max DPS AND get into their portals correctly, we've since been able to repeat every week. On top of that, we even run with 8 healers now and see no noticeable difference in tank or raid healing (although we tend to have a good amount of resto shamans, 3 to 4 usually). This always makes swapping for Brutallus much easier on our subs.

Also, as far as portal skipping goes, we've gone no totems no pets and full totems/pets, and the only thing that seems to be causing it is if people are in the bushes. We get the odd skip mid rotation where Kalec waits too long to cast a portal than two groups swap in the rotation, but that's usually no big deal if the healers are ready.

We've been using a 5-ish portal rotation with a "blank" portal, so to speak. The first four main portals have 5-6 people jumping in them. The fifth portal is just the tank that started by tanking Kalecgos and a personal healer (resto druid). We've now one-shot this guy the past few weeks, this past week doing it with 7 healers.

Generally, our problem has also consisted of keeping tanks alive during all the ruckus. Using sync'd Recounts and WWS, however, I can say that a LOT of the overhealing is done on the raid, and if you're having problems keeping tanks up, just stress tank healing more. In the demon realm, shamans cast chain-heal on the tanks to bounce around off others. In the Dragon realm, the tank damage isn't nearly as extreme as long as you can maintain a good tank rotation. No tank should ever feel too much burst except the first tank, simply because no tank should be tanking the dragon longer than a minute.

How many healers are you currently using? My guild had to use 9 healers (with a 4 portal strat) while we were learning to get our first kill. I've heard of some guilds going up to 10, as well. Make sure to emphasize to your group healers that if their the raid isn't in danger of dying, they need to spam on the tank. This seems like a no-brainer, but after we started emphasizing this, we were able to drop down to 8 healers and have much 'faster' kills now.

Hmm, sounds like a lot of it comes down to your positioning and availability of healers - we've only got 2 resto shammies in the guild, so relying on chain heal to keep people up bouncing off of the tank simply doesn't work, we just run healer heavy with CoH spammers. I don't feel the different portal rotation strategies make a HUGE difference either way, and once your group is solidly comfortable with the encounter you can likely just adapt as necessary, but it's definitely interesting to note how large the variance in number of healers I'm seeing is. I honestly can't imagine doing the fight with 7 myself, so I think it's cool to be able to
We usually run 10 healers and kill him in about 5 minutes.