Frah

Dont know how people are pulling off 4 group rotations really. From our experience so far the 1st group in will loose the debuff 10-15 seconds after the 5th portal spawns meaning they cant enter. I confirmed this using WWS so its not just some muppet using an excuse.

 

Dokos

I can't say for sure but I think he'll try to fit a quota of shadowbolts when he's cooldown is up.

1 person ports in. Gets almost instantly hit by a shadowbolt. If no one joins next he'll keep shadowbolting until he meets X number of casts with an internal cooldown to prevent instagib.

The first group to get ported usually takes a lot of burst.

 

Smooglab

In the demon-phase he switches his target to someone, casts the volley on that person and it will jump to the two closest players So no matter if you spread out or clump up, the damage input is going to be the same. But since clumping up makes healing a lot easier, and seeing the curse can't be outranged, there is no reason not to clump up in this phase. The curse kinda is the enrage-timer in this encounter.

We tried with several slighty different tactics, but as the OP has stated, there really isn't just one working tactic on this fight - this mainly concerns the "portal rotations". Imo it's all what your raid's strongest part is. Is it communication, anticipation or remembering a set rotation?

We used a tactic where the first 4 portal-rotations were somewhat fixed and after these 4 rotations everyone had been in demon phase and would have the debuff not allowing them to take another portal. At this point, we just went with "go down when your debuff is gone" and let the encounter decide the rotation for you. Other than that it's a matter of spreading in normal phase and clumping up in demon phase. As for the curse, I don't think trying to outrange or mitigate it with resistance gear is a reliable tactic.

On a sidenote, nothing in this encounter is spellreflectable.

This can easily be handled by letting your tank not tank the demon in this phase, but instead let him be tanked by the NPC until your second group joins in.

Terrified. Mortified. Petrified. Stupefied... by you!

 

Apop

Does anyone know if this curse jumps after its time expires? I can't seem to track this info down after looking thru some WWS and wow databases. I was under the impression that it would not jump if it ticked through its full duration but that is just speculation based off of the spell description: Curse of Boundless Agony - Spells - World of Warcraft It says "When removed...." not "When it expires" or other language.

Also, for the record our WWS of the fight only shows warriors and rogues taking the "Breath: Revitalize" but I'm going on the assumption that this is because most everyone was standing behind Sathrovarr rather than between he and the dragon. Does anyone have any thoughts on what causes Kalecgos to cast revitalize? Is it just random? Any triggering at all that anyone has detected?

 

Blutelf

The shadow bolt volley does only ever seem to hit two, three targets at the most, from what I have seen.

We have tried Kalecgos with the "two healers, one decurser per group" method but the 8 healers have been very taxed. We might bring 9 next time and assign one to Grp 1.

EDIT: indeed, with a 4 group rotation your MT will be the target of Portal 5 and the only one eligible to go through.

 

Dralmoo

That DOC above is basically what we've been doing, and if you look at you can see one of our real problem areas - at 100 seconds, there are only 2 healers on top and the people left up top have a ton of debuffs - as MT1 I'm always in some danger here. I was thinking of bringing a 9th healer and having them shadow MT1, basically, to alleviate that somewhat. Does anyone do the fight with 9 healers? Or do I just need better healers?

I may use that DOC as a template to help visualize a 3 group rotation, so thanks again for making it.

 

• Slake

Yes, I have seen it jump myself when the duration expired and the person with the curse didn't die, it jumped to another target. Additionally, if it jumps to someone who already has a curse, it just jumps again immediately.

There is no way to remove Curse of Boundless Agony once it is in play until your entire raid is dead; it is his soft enrage, and allowing a way of 'removing' it from the fight wouldn't make much sense. If you are getting to the point that CoBA is what is killing you, you're either taking way too many healers, or your dps is terrible.

+Ma's Reversing

 

Blutelf

We had tried 9 Healers and it worked out better. The main difficulty seems to be people not spreading out well enough and eating portal spawn damage as well as shadow bolt volleys shortly after.

 

Teez

It jumps when it expires, too.

One guild on my server (Royal Militia) uses Mages in full AR+SR to soak CoA's and be able to withstand alot of buffets since all they have them doing is spam decursing until it ends up on themselves. They did get a kill with that strat, too.

That being said, there seem to be quite a few different feasible strats for this fight, another slightly odd, but definitely not stupid strat was the Arcane Resist MT one - a paladin tanking Kalecgos for the entire duration of the fight in partial AR (150 unbuffed or something I think it was? He said he was using belt, legs and trinket, can't remember if he was using the cloak too.) He died during the enrage but a Warrior picked it up off of him, I guess it worked in the end is what matters.

Warrior - Shaman - Priest

 

Pigz

We run 4 groups fixed rotation and have a pally healer try to take the 5th portal to ensure there is an extra healer up top during the group 1-4 transition. He can divine shield off the increased damage debuff and stay up comfortably. Of course it doesn't' always end up happening this way, but when it does it seems to be a huge help.

 

Cybelirrae

Sorry to interrupt the discussion, but has the moratorium on Kalec discussion been lifted because there have been sufficient kills?

Edit: Please delete my post as I fail at reading stickies.

 

Tacitus

We had enough kills a few days ago, the discussion is free on Kalecgos and Brutallus since they've been dead for a week. See the sticky for more info.

Brotherhood, Peace, Unity

Welcome back, Comrade

 

Robeh

I was noticing the same thing on every attempt as MT1 with a 4 group rotation. I find myself using my last stand, shadowmoon insignia, nightmare seed and ironshield potions on those 2 healer moments constantly.

Group 1 - Healers enter late

Group 2 - Healers enter first

Group 3 - Healers enter late

If your healers aren't the first or the last people to enter the portal you will have times up top where you only have 2 healers on the dragon tank due to the overlapping. You will constantly end up with 6 healers in the portal on your initial rotation 1-2 of which have 5-6 seconds remaining before they are ported out. There is really no way to curb this unless your healers are trying to jump in the portals first or be the last in their groups to enter, besides the fact they should be topping off their groups as they are entering the portal (there should be 4 healers in the portal always after the first 2 groups) and making sure the MT on the dragon is topped off and they have applied their hots before entering. We chose to have the healers going in last and we don't suffer from the overlapping quite as bad anymore.

The main killer for us was having X person miss his initial portal then having that person get ported. Everyone would get confused and not know which group has to enter with said player. If this happens just have that person join the next group that "should" enter the portal, they will be a part of this group full time from there on out.

I haven't tried using a person in SR the manipulating the curse onto them, I feel that it would be a waste of GCD's on our druids and mages if they are decursing under the 15 second mark. I don't see the curse being a problem unless it reaches the 20+ second mark but even then it's fully healable.

How is everyone handling their bloodlusts? I've been utilizing them in the demon realm on the first portal rotation and if there are 2 groups in the demon realm I will start moving members from one group into the "bloodlust" group momentarily. Are you guys saving them for 10% dragon/demon?

 

Newb1e

Does anyone know the exact cooldown on the Spectral Blast ability? I thought it to be 25 seconds, though our WWS Logs show portals occuring within 21 seconds of each other, that's why I'm asking.

 

◊ Kalman

The minimum time (cooldown) is 20 seconds; the maximum time isn't certain, but I've never seen one take longer than 40 seconds (I think 37 is the longest I've seen).

It isn't a strict timered ability.

 

Storm

Does anyone have a good feel of the portal finer details? I've read different strat guides and seen different answers, some saying that the delay between clicks is approx 2 secs and it is very tough to get 6 people through a portal, and others that say it is closer to one second.

Is it possible to get seven or eight people through one portal?

Thank you.

 

Gragnarth

The best way to tell if the portal is open is to listen. Turn on your game sound. Whenever somebody takes it, it makes a little woosh sound, and nobody can get in until the sound is over.

 

Newb1e

On one of our attempts, we had 8 people go through one portal, so yes, it is possible but I don't know how difficult it is to reproduce this as I never had problems getting through and didn't bother too much with the delay.

 

Sholdak

If your whole raid correctly takes the first 4 portals, there will be no valid target for the 5th one and it will be delayed until the 1st group's debuff expires. You have to be careful to keep your Dragon tank tanking until the 5th one spawns though so that he doesn't get ported alone.

There's a 2 second cooldown on using a portal, and it lasts for 15 seconds, with the initial person being ported at 0 seconds. Therefore you can get a maximum of 8 people through.

 

Copernicus

Except for the time when no one can get the ability, because everyone has the Spectral Exhaustion debuff.

I could swear that there were times where he seemed to skip casting the spell (the bushes bug that has been referred to) but I can't confirm that from WWS due to the difficulty in recording between the two zones.

---

For portals, we easily had eight people go through one portal once people had everything figured out. From looking at our WWS, the cooldown is one second for each click. I'm not too sure if we ever had nine people get through at once.

From our WWS for Spectral Realm debuff (all the same portal)-

22:03'26.640 Greenlight is afflicted by Spectral Realm (the initial target it was spawned on)
22:03'29.953 Reddo is afflicted by Spectral Realm
22:03'31.859 Ambiorix is afflicted by Spectral Realm
22:03'33.484 Nathano is afflicted by Spectral Realm
22:03'34.781 Nomen is afflicted by Spectral Realm
22:03'37.078 Beastlol is afflicted by Spectral Realm
22:03'38.343 Swyft is afflicted by Spectral Realm
22:03'40.296 Rhama is afflicted by Spectral Realm

 

Xelopheris

Kalecgos will not spawn a portal if nobody is elligible.

4 groups taking portals, decided in order of someone getting ported (everyone else goes with their group)

Group 5 should consist of three tanks, a healer (preferably resto druid) and one other. The resto druid should go with the first portal, no matter what. The other DPS should be with a set group. Tanks go in 1 and 3, taunting 5 seconds after transition in or out, and taking the next immediate portal for the rest of the fight.

The resto druid who takes the first portal will be able to help on the healing of the tank below, since there may be only 1 healer if you get unlucky with portal/group composition. They will also pop up above shortly before the fourth portal group gets ported, who will be taking heavy damage from the buffets.

Everyone has to be aware of when they need to port. If someone misses a portal, there's a chance that they will get ported before anyone else's exhaustion is up, and put a huge delay on portals, leading to the next four portals happening with far more buffet stacks than necessary.

The best thing to remember is to stop dps at 12% dragon, 13% demon (kalecgos will knock a bit off). Wait for a transition to place 2 groups in each phase and burn. If you burn the demon too fast (i.e. 3 groups below), kalecgos' enrage will stack pretty high and he'll eat through your tank. If you burn kalecgos too fast, he will stop porting people below, and unless the demon is at 2% when the last group falls out, kalecgos won't be able to solo him.

 

Nekrataal

We used a 4Grp + Tankport. I did a diagram to show, that it should be way better to divide the Healers not even on all grps but more like 3-1-1-4 (9 Healersetup):

The white Area is the Dragonpart, the grey Area is the Demonzone.White Dots are Healers, Red DD, Brown are Tanks (click to resize):



But basically i'd say you can't really plan it exactly like that, as different Portal entering Times combined with the Cooldown of the Portals (20s-25s) messes things up a little bit.

WWS Kalecgos Kill

 

◊ Regen

Using around 100 AR (trinket+one piece+motw) causes significantly less raid healing up top and opens up alot of leeway for people who missed a portal or the initial "4th group".

When taunting upstairs it is usually wise to wait until a portal spawns for the current tank before taunting to make sure the current MT does not get selected as soon as you taunt (fairly high chance depending on how many groups your using).

I'm curious as whether you can Free action potion/living action downstairs to avoid the stun, I'm fairly certain you couldn't on PTR - unconfirmed on live.

In regards to revitalize - I didn't pay that much attention down stairs, but from what I saw it looked like he was casting it on himself (self-heal).

 

Cybelirrae

You can definitely use a Free Action Pot. Our druid tank took one prior to his portal and he felt much more in control. A horde guild on my server told me all their tanks take them, even the warriors who prefer them to ironshields.

 

chetal

I have been eating free action pots as a feral tank before I taunt the demon, but have not noticed a significant difference in the burst damage I take. I would not suggest it for warriors over ironshield.