pope master

Nothing about the log is consistent (from a single PoV).

 

Zophos

One of our guild mates tracked down the following information in the past concerning Kalecgos and WWS. (Perhaps it's from one of the WWS threads, I admit to not knowing.) While I agree it has its issues with damage, this would at least suggest healing is accurate:

Feel free to correct me if this is no longer the case and I'll remove its content.

Guild Master - Epignosis

 

pope master

Hmm, you might be right. I just gave our WWS a cursory glance when I first uploaded it and all of our healers seemed way out of whack. They must have been out of whack, not the log

 

cs-cam

I just tried doing a search and replace on the log file, changing all instanced of Sathrovarr and Kalecgos with the neutral flag to having a hostile flag and it's still missing a lot of DPS information. The healing looks spot on though so I may have done it wrong.

 

pfg

Our guild just did our first serious attempts last night and although we got good progress we did not get a kill. This was at least partially due to "tank swap" and other exception case handling. So now there is a question that I would love to have a clear cut answer for and its this:

Is there or is there not a maximum number of people that can take a portal, and if so how many.

My understanding from all the reading I did was that there is not a maximum, the portal is up for 15 seconds and it "takes" about 1 second for someone to use the portal. In theory you could get 15 people but that just wont happen as you need to run over to portel etc etc and you do not want get that many on one portal. What we would like to do is get 6 on every portal and 7 or 1 on one of the portals depending on who's left for the fifth.

Thanks in advance.

 

Riljrak

There is a 1.5 sec CD on the portal (Its been stated somewhere in this thread already i think) and its active for 10 secs ? It pretty much works out that the maximun number of people you can get down one portal is 7.

 

Jezz

Yeah about 7 if people have half decent reaction times, if you get unlucky and it spawns on the other side of the room with people who aren't the quickest to react then it could be reduced.

 

bludwork

We are having a hell of a time with this boss, but I need some clarification on druid healing. We put druids and paladins on tank healing, priests and shamsns on group healing. Most of the druids are mostly casting hots and some rejuvs in the logs, it just doesn't seem enough to keep the tanks up. Should I swap the druids with priests for tank healing?

 

kalbear

I don't think a druid is enough to keep up a tank by themselves. The way we use our druids is as the unattached healer. In each group we have one decurser, one main tank healer (either a priest or a paladin), and one raid healer (either a priest, shaman or druid depending on who is there). We then have a resto druid in the tank group who goes in on the first portal.

If you can get the portal rotation down, the fight is not too hard from a healing perspective. The biggest danger is the transitions where one realm has 3 groups of healers and the other has 1. That's where you'll likely face issues.

 

Azziza

Recently our guild started working on Kalecgos, and we had a question regarding decursing. We use the standard 3 tank / 4 group rotation, but we were thinking of having a 2-mage rotation for decursing (as we don't have any reliable resto druids available atm). Is it possible to make this work for decursing, assuming mages set up an independent portal rotation? Can a backup boomkin suffice to cover the scenario where the 2 mages end up on the same realm? Also, are we making this unnecessarily harder on ourselves than simply bringing in 3 mages + 1 boomkin as per the accepted strategy?

Thanks in advance.

 

kalbear

I can't imagine that any less than 3 decursers will work towards the end stages of the fight. There will come a point where you will need your decursers to be doing nothing but decursing. Only two is pretty close. We bring 5 decursers in total, and even that becomes pretty close.

If a portal is missed for your setup at an inopportune time, chances are it'll be a wipe because of it.

 

bludwork

hrm we are not missing portals although the portal splash stupidity continues on some attempts. We use 4 groups on 5 rotations, Kalecgos tank+palyhealer take 5th portal.

g1:
druid (tank healer)
coh priest (grp healer)

g2:
druid (tank healer)
shaman (grp healer)

g3:
paly (tank healer)
coh priest (grp healer)

g4:
druid (tank healer)
coh priest (grp healer)

g5:
kalec tank
paladin (sticky kalec tank healer)

During tank transitions, espcially the first one if it's a druid healer they can barely keep both tanks up during the switch. Initially I thought it was because they weren't casing their big heals and relying too much on hots which won't work for that kind of burst damage.

 

kalbear

For that fight, I would probably switch the roles but not the actual groups of your healers. Have your druids primarily focused on raid healing, and have your CoH healers primarily focused on tank healing. As long as they have inspiration they should be a bigger win for your tanks, and they'll be able to do the larger heals more efficiently. That + the HoTs should result in more stability for your tanks, particularly at the 3/1 or 1/3 transitions.

Also, around the time the 7th portal will hit I would imagine you'd be running into problems downstairs. At that point you'll have one pally healer, one druid and one shaman. What's worse is around the 9th portal, where those are the only ones upstairs for a bit. If you are already dictating who goes in what portal no matter what group they're in (which, by the way, kind of hoses CoH priests for raid healing) you might want to switch a druid out and put in a CoH priest in instead.

 

seminarca

Druids most definitely can be tank healers on this fight, you just have to hammer it into their heads that they need to be more liberal about using Regrowth. Additionally, Swiftmend is a great tool for Corrupting Strike (Regrowth/Swiftmend is a fairly powerful 2 sec bomb, more so if the Druid is specced Imp Regrowth), and there's always NS if things get really hairy. Keep in mind the raid healer will be CHing or CoHing through the tank as well.

Tanks need to not be as gung ho as normal, to allow the Druid with them time to get their HoTs up before taunting (especially during the first portal). Clear communication between tanks and healers is really important. If the Resto Druid is one of the latter people to go through the portal, they need to let the tank know not to taunt early.

 

Bronwyn

I have finished reading the whole thread again (it's become quite long) and I still haven't (neither from my own experience) found an answer to why sometimes there are no portals when there should be one ...

current theories include:
- there are no skipped portals unless everybody has the spectral exhaustion debuff / is tanking
- portals can be skipped if you are too close to the hedge
- portals can be skipped if there are pets in the dragon realm
- portals can be skipped if there are totems in the dragon realm

In our last two kills there have defintitely been lengthy periods without any portal even though there were TWO groups without debuffs. This pretty much renders theory one false for me.

Since there ARE skipped portals (at least for us) on a very regular basis, I'd love to know it there are any defintive answers out there. Maybe even a blue post that I have missed ...

 

Pheroz

I've found that the more that I yell "get away from the fucking bushes", the less skipped portals there are. We see virtually no skipped portals, and when we do see them, it's pretty much garunteed that someone was too close.

As far as I can tell, all other theories on skipped portals are garbage. Pets, totems resistances - none of it matters. If the portal cant spawn becuase someone is too close to the bushes, thats the only reason it doesn't spawn.

Be careful that your not positioning the dragon so that the tank or melee is too close to the bushes, then make it clear to everyone else that if they are too close to the bushes, they will wipe the raid.

 

Bronwyn

Thanks for your answer - still, I'm wondering why we are not getting some portals, as we tend to stand roughly 8-10 yards away from the bushes ... (we use the grey circle as a landmark).

 

Denogran

As far as I can tell the bushes theory is rather false as well. I think sometimes portals just take a while. As best as I can tell, they're on a variable cooldown, another one of those boss spells that _can_ be cast when the CD is up, but doesn't necessarily have to be.

 

Pheroz

While there is always variance in when he casts the portals, anytime its over 40 seconds between portals, it's not a result of that variance and is a skipped portal. I'm highly confident in the bush theory. It fit's with blizzard mechanics (see Gurtogg's fel rage failing becuase or lack of room for the target to grow). If you doubt the bush theory, I highly recommend you do a Kalecgos attempt where everyone hugs the bushes.

 

Kewangeder

Note, too, that you'd have to get practically inside the bushes. I've seen portals successfully opened (and used routinely) shoved pretty close - like, a human step away from the edge. (It's the portals inside Kalecgos' hitbox, rather, that seem to elude our clicks.)

Perhaps someone out there has a screenshot of how close one can be? Just for reference? As one of the "outer" raiders, I never have any problem being both safely distanced and eligible for porting. It can be done.

 

Denogran

I wish I could get my guild to try this once, there's almost no way they'd go for it.

My biggest problem with the bush theory( which as I understand it is that the bushes prevent a portal from opening, much like being in a cramped space will prevent a heroism from happening), is that on "skipped portals" Kalecgos won't actually target anyone. Unless this bug is completely inconsistent with every other bug out there, you would guess that he would target someone, turn, try to cast the portal, the portal would not succeed, and he would go back to the tank. I've never seen that happen.

Also, where did you get the 40 second number from?

 

Mideci

The bush theory is very consistent with each patch in vanilla WoW leading to an increase in the frequency of Onyxia's deep breath ability being used.

The fact that we routinely have people stand pretty much next to the bushes and spawn portals without incident would indicate that there is nothing particularly magical about the bushes. That said, we do get "late portal" or "very late portal" calls on vent now and again. What most of you would call "skipped portals". I'd defy anyway to look around our raid, look at the list above, and reliably correlate it to any of the things on said list. It's possible that the encounter is simply buggy. It's possible that the skipped portal is when the RNG picks the dragon tank and the logic of the encounter -- for whatever reason -- fails to pick another target quickly enough to actually open a portal and some subroutine needs to reset.

Who knows? I'm not hugely convinced this matters. I mean our guild is pretty awful at this fight. We spent 3 hours wiping on it last weekend (before killing him in 10 mins the next night, go figure) after having a bunch of successful kills. Late / skipped portals are not an auto-wipe for us. Generally, what screws it for us is when enough people fail at portal rotations and / or our tank healing break downs.

 

emoon3

We killed him last night with a 2 tank, 10 healer strat that seemed easier for us to control.

Tank Group

Tank1
Tank2
Dedicated Tank1 healer
Dedicated Tank2 healer
DPS (tied to a DPS group)

All other groups had 1 tank healer, 1 group healer, 1 decurser.

We had tank2 and his healer take the first port and head down with his healer. This allowed that tank to taunt Sathovarr almost immediately (as has been noted here, it's best to wait until after human Kalecgos has been knocked down). As the first demon tank, I used free action pots to avoid the stuns to limit damage spikes and hold aggro better. You will still be knocked down, but avoiding the stun helps a lot. With any two tank strat, losing aggro can be a killer.

I also made sure my taunt was available as soon as I went up top so I could taunt off the dragon tank immediately so he could catch any portal that was still up. Then he and his healer would cycle down.

The only contingency we had to deal with was tying a DPS group to tank1's healer if he got one of the first 3 portals and having another tank healer call out that he was taking on the role of tank1 healer and staying up top.

You have to have good dps, human kalecgos will lose some health each rotation because there will be some time when there is no tank downstairs. We killed him with human kalecgos still at 15%.

The major advantage of this strat in my opinion is that the tanks should always have two healers whenever they are in the demon realm. If your taunt is not quick enough or gets resisted and tank1 misses the 4th portal, there will be times when he is down with only his designated healer. We put our strongest two healers in these roles and they were able to keep the tanks up with little problem.

Hope this helps.

 

• Feist-Mok

We seem to have decided to find new and exciting ways to wipe on Kalecgos. Recently, some mages, and their replacements seem to be decursing too early. Problem is, I can't seem to find any way to figure out who is decursing so early. Is there any addon or combat log parsing tool that can help me get some idea of who needs some extra help?

 

Gofa

You don't wipe if you decurse too early. It's just that the mage's personal dps goes down a little bit, but Kalecgos isn't a dps check.

To answer your question: You can see in your combat log who decursed you. So it should be possible to find it out just by looking at your combatlog. There will be an entry the moment you get the curse and there is one when + who decursed you. But again - I don't understand what's the problem with decursing too early other than losing some dps. To be honest, I would really appreciate it if our mages would decurse too early, it's a lot better than decursing too late.