7 minutes is probably close to the upper limit of sustainability for this fight. I'd suggest dropping a tank for another dps as I'd imagine at any point in the fight you have 1-2 tanks doing nothing.

I dont think so. We're doing the 3 tank rotation with tanks going down on 1/3/5, and then taking Kalecgos after they come back to the regular realm.

We do all of this too, down to the letter.


I think my issue at this point is that I cannot tell if we're just a bit short on healing and tank gear, where it makes the transitions/high stacked arcane debuffs/only two healers in the portal realm situations very tight and deadly. Or, are we doing something slightly wrong that could help us push further.

On what we thought was our first kill we killed the Dragon a while before Sathrokkar, I was down at the bottom healing and as I left Sath was on 1% and Kalecgos 48%. 5s later everyone was ported up and cheers, no body and kalecgos re spawned 20s later. I believe that there is a maximum duration the Dragon can be banished before the Humanoid is gibbed.

Lots of people have responded to me, so i'll try to clear things up.

The issue is what happens after group 3 gets ported back. From that point you will only have 2 healers left inside for 20 seconds. At that point they also get ported out, more or less simultaneously with the new portal spawning for group 1 healers to enter. While they run to the portal, click it, get into position and start healing, there is no one at all healing the demon tank. After they start healing that tank, they will still only be two people, having to deal with very high damage on tank combined with shadow bolt volley and curse ticks.

If you are lucky enough with slow 25-30 second portals, sure, the strategy can work. If you get 15-20 second portals, you will wipe pretty much every time. As i said in my previous post, it's not impossible to kill him with that flawed strategy. The fight is more or less zergable, you can have people use cooldowns and consumables at the critical times, you can keep soulstoning and combat ressing tanks and other people who get stuck inside with too few healers, but it's just simply a bad strategy to start with.

Any good strategy will leave healers(and decursers) so enter the 5th portal as well. The optimal one could be something like 2-1-2-1-2 strategy with 8 healers... We go with 3-0-3-0-3 (with 1 tank and at least one decurser entering with each group) since it's simpler. This ensures a much more even distribution of healers between the inside and the outside, there is never less than 3 healers standing still and healing at either place.

You do realise that a 3-0-3-0-3 strategy will be open to the exact same "problem" as a 2-2-2-2-0 strategy? With really unlucky portal spawns you risk having 0 healers downstairs whenever you put a "0" in the rotation. It's just so unlikely that it's not really an issue.

What's more, a 3-0-3-0-3 rotation is guaranteed to only have 3 healers upstairs at one point, healing 3 groups and the tank. That's potentially fishy.

If you use a fixed group strategy, I maintain my view that 2-2-2-2-1 (with a paladin taking the 5th portal alone or with MT1) is the rotation that leaves you the least open to RNG issues.

This is the exact same groupings I came up with for my guild - we've not got a kill yet (though to be fair, we only killed Illidan 11 hours before 2.4 patch day), but we've gotten almost to the enrage. It seems like a very capable and resilient strategy, with very minimal chance for 'We got RNGed!' moments - we just need to improve our execution slightly and he'll be down.

This post might be better for the WWS thread but before we go there I just want to make sure that the overlying strat we are using is sound and that there is nothing we are missing.

Just to go over it briefly, we are using a 2/2/2/2/1 strat and even a 2/2/2/2/0 at times based on who's online. Each of the 4 groups are self-contained having 3 dps and 2 healers with at least one of them being a decurser. Here's a parse from our Tuesday attempts for reference:

Wow Web Stats

Initially we thought the main problem was that our tanks were dying with the demon and therefore the Human would die or we would just wipe from attrition. At this point though we've consistently been keeping up both tanks and you'll see in the parse linked above we're getting all the way to the point where the Human would die before we would get the demon and dragon down.

We don't have a lot of people on the bench right now to say the least so what you see in the parse is about all we have give or take 1 or 2 people. After Tuesday night we went back last night and decided to use a two tank rotation to add in a DPS, the net result being that once again we would live until the Human died and the fight reset with basically the whole raid alive.

So like I said in the initial comments, is there anything obvious that I am missing here or is there anything anybody sees that might help in us getting this finished off? I appreciate any help that can be rendered.

This sounds like a good rotation to try. However if the paladin and the druid get one of the early portals you might end up only with two healers at the dragon, which happens in the usual 2/2/2/2/1 as well if the lone healer gets the port, but you might also end up with the one-healer melee group being the last in which case the healing will definitely not be enough. Is there a particular reason for you to put two healers in Grp 1? Healing the demon is not that intensive really if you have all your raid members clump up in the middle.

What worked for us was having a holy paladin in Grp 1 just mirror the first main tank. MT goes to tank the demon, he goes after him. MT comes back, he's there to help heal him. If he gets one of the early portals, no problem, he'll just stay with the dragon longer next time using divine shield to dispel the arcane buffet.

I figure most problems and wipes happen when people from Grp 1 get ported because that messes the ordinarily simple rotation up most people can understand. I remember people talked about spreading out the tanks into their own groups and just letting the rotation go with the flow, but it does not seem that this strategy works very well? No-one seems to use it at least.

Our guild uses a 2/2/2/2/1 strategy and we do it this way:

Groups 2, 3, 4, 5 (ie. raid groups) each contain 2 healers and 3 dps, with at least one person being a decurser.
Group 1 contains 3 tanks, a 'floating' paladin healer, and 1 other person - this other person is normally a healer for the melee group (group2), and we stack the melee group for optimum dps. Thus, the melee group is 6 people. In each group, 1 healer is designated an MT healer, the other a raid healer.

Each portal, either one group goes, OR the floating paladin goes. Preferably the Paladin wont be targetted until the 5th portal, so we are sending something like: g2, g3, g4, g5, paladin, through the first five protals. If the Paladin is targetted, then he and he alone goes through, except for a tank if it's a tank rotation portal. We do *not* send another group in with the paladin. this ensures that we always have 2 MT healers in the dragon realm. The main issue is if the Paladin happens to get the 1st portal, in which case he is in the demon realm with no decurser, and he just has to keep himself up.

The tanks rotate through portals 1, 3, 5, etc. If the 2nd tank gets the 2nd portal, then we have to go to 1, 2, 4...

This means that after the 3rd portal, we will always have 2 MT healers left in the Dragon realm, and the first group will portal back before the 4th portal. We will *probably* have only 1 raid healer, since it'll be group + paladin, but the paladin bubbles straight after the 3rd portal so there's only about half the raid damage as if we had 2 full groups out. If the paladin already got ported, then we have 2 full groups out, so arcane buffet damage is higher, but then we've got two raid healers who can hopefully cope.

We find that this strategy (essentially a 5-group rotation with only 4 groups + a paladin) is very resilient to RNG, very simple to understand, and the only reason we haven't killed him yet is that our raid healers just don't spam enough (something we're trying to drill into their skulls right now).

We actually had similar problems Moogul (raid healing slacking) but we solved this problem by simply hugging the demon and sitting in the centre of the room if you had the spectral debuff.

This allowed CoH and chain heal to be much more effective.

We already do this, it's healing in the dragon realm that's the problem. Still, we're very close to a kill now (which isn't too bad, considering we got our first Illidan kill the evening before the patch day, so we're not as geared as some people).

One of the worst bits is people taking a high tick of Arcane buffet, then getting targetted for a portal before being shadowbolted instantly on entering the shadow realm - pretty much the worst luck possible.

Something I hadn't seen mentioned in this thread is how incredibly effective Arcane resist is against the buffet. Trinket + one piece of enchanted crafted Arcane Resist means you'll find yourself frequently going into a portal with 2-4 buffets instead of 8.

For a lot of people, the cloak + 15 AR enchant is great, or the soulcloth gloves with an AR armor kit. Two peices of gear replaced doesn't much hinder your damage for the enrage either, especially considering the incredibly huge amounts of Healer mana it saves.

Yes, this is something I've considered (but not tested) after our last raid - the trinket at least seems worth it, assuming a group is in the real world for 1 minute each rotation (it'll actually be a bit longer) and that the buffet happens every 8 seconds, you're looking at 8 buffets, with the last one hitting for 4kish. Even one resist (out of 8) is 4k damage saved per person. We're already telling everyone to bring their [Violet Badge]s next time, I'm not sure if we'll go as far as getting other AR gear though.

We tested it, and one priest with badge + arcanoweave boots + MOTW was frequently entering his portal with one stack when the rest of his group was entering with 6-8. It's extrordinarily effective.

AR is so damn cheap there's no real reason not to.

Anecdotal evidence aside, since the debuff must be binary every 4.867 AR grants 1% chance to resist it. Unless I'm mistaken, I just pulled that off the top of my head but I think it's right. So boots+trinket+motw is roughly 21.5% chance to resist. Being hit only once out of 8 stacks is extremely lucky, unless resists somehow work totally differently in this fight then they have always worked before.

Yeah, you'll really have to show some WWS for that. We had some people wear a bit of AR, and especially the trinket at least seems useful to mitigate dmg a bit. However, we didn't see much increase in resist uptime from equipping one or two pieces of AR. Even when we had someone go in 200 AR they only resisted 50% or so.

Arcane resist is very effective in this fight because arcane buffet is a level 60 spell. It can be easily resisted with minimal resistance gear. Even wearing 1-2 pieces will result in a 50% resist rate, it's a good deal more effective than people give it credit for.

I'm not saying you should put it on every member of the raid, but low HP classes may want to sac a trinket and back/ring slot for 2 pieces. You will resist the majority of the arcane buffet damage as well as reduce the damage taken if you are hit by a portal spawn (I cannot confirm this, I recall the damage being arcane and thus affected by the debuff, but I could be completely wrong).

Yah... this wasn't posted in the thread before at all. Anyway, the quadratic nature of the buffet damage means 1% resist is more than 1% less damage. The trinket is the best ratio of budget spent to budget available for the slot, so right off the bat, it's going to be the best for that job.

Do you have a WWS to support this? The only raider we've had remotely come close to a 50% resist rate was wearing 200AR. Our raiders in only the Kara trinket were resisting 0-3 buffets each attempt.

Out of curiosity, has anyone tried using a three group strategy? 9-8-8. I've been toying around with the idea, but 9 people in the first portal may be difficult / impossible. Assuming that the portal has a 15 second duration with a 2 second cooldown, is the maximum number of people that can enter 8? or 9? Basically, is the 2 second cooldown in effect after Person 1 is ported at zero seconds, or can someone click the portal immediately after the initial spawn?

Thanks for any responses. I'm trying to work through some ideas before our next attempt

We initially tried it with 3 groups, but yeah, factoring in lag, travel time to the portal, and everything else that's going on, we always had issues with people missing the portal with a 3 group strat. I think 7 people in 1 portal is probably the upper limit of what's realistically feasible.

Looks like we'll finally have a couple nights to start working on Kalecgos this week - just a couple of questions.

Is it confirmed that totems are the cause of the missed portals (other than standing too close to the bushes)? Also - is the cooldown on the portal spawns fairly consistent or does it generally happen within that 5 second window (20-25s)? It seems as though if it is closer to 20 each time there will be a slight delay before the first team is eligible for their 2nd portal and when the cooldown is up, but if it is closer to 25s then the portals will spawn regularly throughout.

We plan on using the 2-2-2-2-1 and I'm just a little worried about healing in the Demon realm if the healer/tank that take portal 5 get left alone before team 1 gets back up.