So yeah, we'll never be able to do this with 7 healers.. Well, maybe I mis-speak... We'll never even try to do this with 7 healers. We have more and I'm unclear what happens to your 7 healer configuration when you have a late portal and there are virtually no healers in one realm or the other. But, obviously, you kill him, so more power to you.

We, on the other hand, have a couple kills now with 10 healers and we'll definitely cut that to 9. Since two of our healers are a rogue/priest (myself) and a holy/ret paladin (the GM), it means we are swapping without any people changes and so while there is a time and cost hit, there is no one cooling their heels outside the instance and a slight delay in getting a few extra bracers for said toons.

Honestly, the math on 8 or more healers looks like this: Every single group in a 4-portal rotation has someone who does nothing but tank heal and someone who does nothing but raid heal. And that makes it a good deal more comfortable for us than various other strategies we messed with that didn't have that going on. Blacksen says the dragon tank shouldn't take extreme damage, but our first one sure does and it's not that unusual for someone to take spikey damage later. Perhaps his guild's tanks are somehow better geared, altho we've been farming Illidan for long enough, I'm not sure why that would be.

Anyway, it's a good discussion and the thread title does seem apt.

7 healers still has it fairly easy, just requires a rotation you're probably not accustomed to.

For raid healing, it works very similarly to the way your mages manage to raid-decurse when you only bring 3 mages. The damage in both the demon realm and the dragon realm is fairly minimal to the raid and, in my opinion, can be healed by only 1 raid healer on each side.

For tank healing, you only really need 1 tank healer in the dragon realm, as his damage is fairly minimal. In the demon realm, we just have everyone group up and have resto shamans bounce heals off the tank. Ironshields and smart use of cooldowns also helps.

Add 1 more spot-healer (CoH priest or Resto Druid) that heals both tanks and raid, and there you go - 7 healers.

Again, the key is setting up a solid rotation for portals that doesn't involve any question of where the healers are. We set it up so that each tank had one healer, and every time that tank was about to take a portal, that healer took the same portal. This leaves 4 raid healers to go with their groups.

We tried that Blacksen, but if the healer got the port and the tank wasn't ready to take it yet, we had to swap, and that was confusing healers. We ultimately decided to go with 10 healer/5 portal rotation (no kill yet, but a 1% wipe ) so that each healer took the portal with his group, no questions asked.

I think its great this strategy works for you, but would respectfully reject the idea that "7 healers still has it faily easy". The raid damage taken in the dragon realm is not really as easily dismissed as 'is faily minimal to the raid' either. Is a seven healer setup possible? Sure - but certainly not something i'd recommend new guilds approach the fight and try to emulate at all. The main reason (from my experience) against this, is there would be theres almost no margin of error to recover from problems or mistakes.

We have done the fight with 2 tanks in the past, but usually take 3 or even 4. Why take more? Because if something goes wrong (eg, tank dies) , the attempt won't be ruined but can continue with simply one less tank.

Seven healers is akin to taking two tanks. If you take 9-10 healers and lose 1-2, you should be able to continue on with ~8 quite strongly, but if you take 7 and lose 1-2, your likely crippled with only ~5-6 if your only part way through the attempt.

One thing I'm curious about is positioning in the Demon realm. I've seen lots of things along the lines of "stack on the tank and bounce chain-heals through him", but I wasn't sure I wanted the melee getting parried. When we positioned to one side of the Demon the shamans were saying their chain-heals weren't bouncing from the tank ie out of range.

Simply move closer in to the demons hit box.

Chain heal can certainly bounce from DPS (at his back) to the tank.

I think this is something important to note. This fight can be made multitudes easier through the smart use of BL/Heroism. We do something incredibly similar to this, in that we have people use CDs outside to keep stuff relatively even (demon generally dies faster because there's no spreading out to avoid portal splash), and the moment we have the melee group below at 25% or less we rip BL and take him down.

Part of this is knowing exactly what your DPS groups are capable of. Melee is generally our strongest group on that fight simply because we keep them all together (generally dps warr, enh, rogue, rogue with a resto druid in the fifth slot, CoH priest floats with us from group 1). All the other groups get mix and matched because we need to keep decurses spread and healing self sufficient. Given these circumstances, the melee group can drop 25% off the demon generally before BL fades, and when we're in a position where the melee group alone can take the demon out (usually there is still one group half way into their time inside) we call bloodlusts and just tell people to stop taking portals. By dictating the pace of the last 20-25% and rushing through the enrage on your own terms, you can essentially trivialize the enrage portion of the fight (IE, Sath will be enraged for a shorter period of time, and the real danger of the enrage is him potentially killing human kalec).

The other important part is you have a clear cut call on DPS. Instead of slowing down towards the enrage for more control, you just ramp up and blow straight through it, and it gives people ample warning of the enrage. Everyone knows that when melee gets their bloodlust call, enrage is coming in 5-10 seconds depending on where Sath was when we get ported. Sath is banished so quickly that he doesn't have time to get really dangerous with enrage stacking, and it gives the longest amount of time for burning the dragon up top between ports (and each port is only taking 1 person out of the top side fight).

Does anyone have a good combined wws parse for this event? We got our first kill tonight, and I combined three logs for the following parses. It would be great to have something for comparison.


Kill:

Wow Web Stats

Another good attempt:

Wow Web Stats

Tonight we went back to Kalecgos with 8 healers after killing him successfully last week with 10 healers. Here is my feedback on this:

1. With a 10 healer strategy you can "glue" 2 healers onto the first and second tanks in portals, and have 2 per party. This allows us to keep the entire raid up. What are the downsides? Well you a) need 10 healers online and b) risk having a much longer fight including longer enrage. We did our kill this way though.

2. Tonight we wiped at 5% using an 8 healer strategy. 3 healers are assigned "glued" to follow 1 tank each, while each of the other 4 parties has 1 raid healer each. For the most part this worked really well, in fact I'd say initially its as stable as bringing 10 healers. Problems arise though with tank deaths.

Next attempt on Kalecgos will bring 9 healers. We will have all tanks in G1 with 1 "floating" healer. 2 healers per party will cover the rest - its a hybrid of the above, and I think probably the best way to do this fight.

One of the most important things for me as a raid leader is "what is the optimum amount of healers per fight?" I have not yet earned the privelege to begin posting here, but I will be making this topic first. Some members have joined our guild where they've done Council with 6-7 healers and we use 10. This is insane but food for thought and relevent to EJ.

We did our kill with 9 healers.

In order to optimize the melee DPS we did a resto druid, enh, rogue, rogue, fury war group. We put a shaman in G5 and assigned them to rotate when that group received their portal. It worked really well. We had 5 shaman. If we had 4, I would have assigned a COH Priest to that group instead.

The recent suggestion to call heroism on the demon and stop taking portals, combined with those healing assignments were the key to our first kill. We even overcame most of the dragon realm getting portalled by one slow person. It was very satisfying.

Early on in this thread there was some discussion of a 3-0-3-0-3 strategy. Does anyone still use it? Did anyone try it and hate it? Later discussion seems to have settled into 2-2-2-2 vs. 2-2-2-2-1 vs. 2-2-2-2-2 and variations on those. I would think that some AR would make it easier to keep the fifth group alive, and that non-decursing dps could fit themselves into the second and fourth portals so that you aren't trying to funnel more than 6-7 people into a single portal.

The guilds I've talked to on my server seem to use 2-2-2-2-1, so I'll probably go with the "standard," even if I like 3-0-3-0-3 better on paper.

We finally got him tonight. We ended up with 10 (well, 9--one was in very scrubby gear brought in for decursing) healers on a 7/5/6/5/2 rotation, with tanks going down on 1 3 and 5 (with a healer permanently attached to the third tank). The fifth tank had to wait on his taunt of Sathrovarr for the next group (with a healer or two) to come down, but once we got that tweak out of the way, he went down easy as pie. First time seeing the enrage, and got through it with ten dead.

Thank you all so much for your advice!

We usually bring 8 healers and use 2 tanks, sometimes our healers are also decursing if needed. We dont really have many issues with keeping people alive and if we wipe its due to someone doing something stupid, not a tactical failure.

We simply stick 2 healers with each portal group, one assigned to raidheal and one assigned to tank heal. This means that there are basically always atleast 2 healers in each realm, regardless of what happenes. Sometimes you can get unlucky though with a taunt resist on the dragon, meaning one tank will be singleported. This is usually fixed by max hots/bop/trinkets/sw etc (if you are unlucky he will get stuck downstairs alone)

I dont know how many guilds use our strat but it does work quite well. In the start we spread out with 2 groups on each sideof the room, so that each group can expect where their portal will be, once you have been ported down into the spectral realm once and you come back up then we simply make a small group on the left side of the room where everyone bunches up. Then people move to spread out on the right hand side of the room as their debuff is about to go out. This way you can see who can take a portal next and you minimize portal damage taken by the raid. However if one player is unattentive and spawns a portal in the middle of the group it can easily lead to a wipe or a tank death, but thats just something that you have to work on ^^

With full end-BT gear, a priest can easily heal the tank and keep his group up by himself. Any other healing class can do so with an spriest, even Paladins. We like to take 7-8 healers on Kalec to minimize swapping out for Brut. Our 'solo' healers don't follow any different rotation - we use the standard "stick with your group & take the same portal" strat, with only tanks on a separate rotation. We've done 7 healer Kalec with the following raid comp:

G1: Tank, Priest, 3 dps
G2: Tank, Priest, Spriest, 2 dps
G3: Tank, Pal, Spriest, 2 dps
G4: Pal (tank), Sha (group), 3 dps
G5: Dru (tank), Sha (group), 3 dps

I am really in doubt about this. If your in the dragon realm and you already have some debuffs, it's really hard to solo heal this. The demon can also deal very spiky damage: If you don't spam heals on your tank, they can die almost instantly. I don't think it's reliable possible to heal both on your own - your group and your tank.

I'm not even sure what healing strategy I would use to do that. Cast CoH if tank is full, pray he doesn't fall too much before GCD is up to cast a GHeal on him in time? Pray no one in my group doens't fall too much in the interim and can survive with only a CoH in between? There are times when we've had a demon-realm tank die with healers watching him and simply being a fraction of a second late during a chain cast on an unlucky combo. There are times in the dragon realm, especially at the start or due to late portals where tank healing gets thin... Again, I can't imagine that person also worrying about group healing.

You certainly don't want to try with less than 9 healers, but sometimes it's either try with 7-8 or don't try at all, which was the case for us. It's not ideal, but it's one way of doing it. We also had fully BT geared stam stacking feral tanks (23-25k hp fully raid buffed), which I'm sure helped mitigate rng spikes, and everyone wore at least one piece of arcane resist.

Unfortunately I don't have the details on how our priests heal it: I suspect it's CoH/Gheal weaving with PoH when the tank in your group is in the same realm, with a focus on group healing outside and focus on tank healing inside. Also, Corrupting Strike (which is the only thing requiring 2 tank healers) is on a ~20s timer, so you can adjust your healing to reflect that.

If you run 3 tank strat its not hard for tanks to get a grasp of simple tanking strat - wait for Kalecgos to get corrupting strike, then taunt, do threat for ~10 sec then stop using aggro moves. Kalecgos gets it back just before next corrupting, then you taunt again etc. He has way more hp then needed for this strat with 3 tanks. With 2 i often use it as well, if there is a risk with healing (sometimes your healers desync a bit, and you look into 10 sec periods with 1 healer etc).

Corrupting strike while deadly on tanks (13k damage , no dodge/parry for 3 sec so basically 1 free hit in after totalling like 20k damage) , is nothing for kalecgos. His avoidance is nonexistant anyway (base 5% or so dodge/parry), and low boss armor - 6200 i believe. A normal demon swing hits him harder then corrupting strike, so letting him eat them is not much risk for his health.

It also has added benefit of making the aggro more stable and often REDUCING damage on kalecgos. Nothing worse then new tanks to the fight taunting him off just before corrupting - eating all the huge spike the demon can do, then losing aggro because kalecgos kept fighting while tank was stunned and pulled it back. Sometimes it can repeat multiple times, resulting in MORE damage on kalecgos (remember that swings> corrupting strikes for him), MORE damage on tanks, and general mayhem,

If you have some bad luck, the priest group can be alone in dragon plan for significant time, having to face 2*3-4k on the group with MT healing duty, that's not *that* easy.

I personnally see Kalec as a min/max fight, ie if everybody plays ok (say don't suck on portals), you win or lose by keeping the MTs alive in dragon plan (and not being idiot the last 10%, banning the dragon with too much %left on demon for exemple...) , so that you want each of the group being able to deal with it without much pain.

It is doable with a Brutallus lineup, but it means some efforts from the raid and people are unfortunatelly a bit lazy on 'farmed' boss.

First Post for me, but i'm reading the forum for quite a while.
I'm from Switzerland so, my writing skills are not perfect. Sorry.

We have killed Illidan a some months ago but we couldn't focus hard on the new sunwell boss because of the EM2008 (football), summerholidays and some peope quitting the game.

Our raid is trying to kill Kalegos for quite some time and last night we killed Sathrovarr but Kalegos was at 12% when we were wiped out. I told them before, we have to end up with nearly same HP for both of them, but the won't listen to me.

So, our best try was Sathrovarr at 10% going enrage while Kalegos was still at 27%! HP. We zerged the dragon down to 12% but that was our limit.

Now my question:
What did we do wrong?
we were there with 10 healers, not all in T6 but most of them. We play save at first, spread out into 4 groups and tank the dragon on on side of the area.We used our cooldowns in the demonrealm .We normally raid with a 3 tank setup and a 4 group strategie with 1 tankhealer and 1 grouphealer and 2 healers from group 1 (with the 3 tanks) are floating with the first and the last tank.
All players coming form the demonrealm and so having the debuff were standing in the middle of the circle, in the last ~10 sek of the debuff we went to the left side, not standing near the raid or other players.

I thought we should have the gear for this encounter, the dmg was a bit low but i have never read before that the DPS had to stop in the demonrealm and wait for the HP of the dragon to go down. Any idea?

We've had to hold dps on one side or the other on occasion. If your ports are all on time, and you save _all_ your cooldowns, are slow to start dps up top, etc, you can easily get the demon guy down too fast. On the other hand, if your first port takes forever, the dragon will often be far below the demon. DBM and Bossmods both have status indicators for health, your dps should have a good idea of what each percent is at. We try to get both down below ~15%, then have as much dps as possible go into the next portal that pops up and just go all out. Usually have the demon banished with the dragon up top between 4 and 6%.

I feel really silly for asking this, but let's say you use a 2/2/2/2/1 rotation with a setup like
G1: tankx3, dps, paladin
G2-5: 2healer, 3 dps
What happens if 2 groups get ported, but then the pala from G1? Do you switch him on the fly with a remaning healer in the dragon realm, just send another group up with him, thus leaving only 2 healers in the dragon realm or do you just not send anyone up with him?
That just really confuses me while I think about it and I dont like to be confused when we're fighting Kalecgos.