Just make sure the 1 is a Paladin so he can BoP the tank if they get stuck as the only 2 people in the shadow realm.

7 is the most people you can reliably get into a portal. 8 is possible 90% of the time if people click it fast and are close to it, 9 is really rough and it's like 50/50 when it spawns on top of a melee group and everyone there instantly smash clicks it.

Totems does not cause missing portals to the best of my knowledge. We've usually got 4 shamans in the raid, so the odds of the first portal hitting a totem is 16:24 (the MT is not eligible) and we've yet to have a Kalecgos pull where the first portal didn't spawn within 30 seconds. This is of course still only anecdotal, but I'm pretty sure it'd be more than a vague rumor if I was wrong.

As for the consistency, I checked our logs and portals seems to be totally random once the cooldown is gone. We've had portals spawn anywhere between 20 to 29 seconds of the previous one and with no real pattern.

I don't think its totems, but I'm fairly sure its hunter pets. Its purely anecdotal, however we have a group with 2 hunters in it. That group was ported last 9/10 times, often very late with high debuff stacks. Once we told them to put the pets away during dragon, they started getting ported with normal randomness. Has anyone else seen similar issues with large hunter groups?

K yeah this is just flat out wrong, everything in wow (when its working properly) is based off the caster's level, never the spell's level.

Whether it's working correctly or not, there have certainly been magic effects with a caster level that is different from the level of the mob or player that casts them, and this makes them easier or harder to resist (remember the bug where rogue poisons were treated as the level of the weapon and thus almost impossible to dispel?). It is therefore not unreasonable to speculate that something similar may be happening in Kalecgos. (Haven't had my own raid try AR so can't contribute to evidence pro or against.)

The arcane buffet does seem to be easily fully resisted. For instance I sit at 131 arcane resistance for this fight (Mage Armor, Chromatic Wonder flask, Violet eye trinket and MotW) and looking at the WWS of our kill last night I was at 25% miss rate for that fight (didn't get hit by any portals which I think are arcane damage?).

I believe this is due to the binary nature of the spell.

According to my experience you resist appr. 25% of all Arcane Buffets once you reach the first resistance level (73). This is possible with the trinket in combination with MotW.

This is extremely helpful considering that each stack that you resist subtracts 500 damage from all following buffets. Example - resist the first 2 buffets and - over the following 8 buffets you will need 8000 less healing.

Regarding totems/pets bugging portals out, I have a theory. If the totems/pets are on the edges/hedges around the map, they may be targeted, and a result they may evade bug the boss and its mechanics. In our raid we have many totems and many pets, but we have had no portal spawning issues whatsoever. We've made it clear that no one in the raid should be anywhere near the edges of the map.

If you are particularly worried or believe that you are experiencing an issue related to this, I would suggest having all of your Shamans use Totemic Call every time they are transferred to and from the portal world. This will ensure that their totems aren't "stuck" (even though it appears, according to the Blizzard UI, that the totems are unsummoned during every transfer) in the other map. Totemic Call only takes one global cooldown.

As for pets, I have no idea.

The problem with the 2/2/2/2/0 rotation is that it's usually actually a 2/2/2/2/0/0 rotation, while the 3/0/3/0/3 rotation is a 3/0/3/0/3/0 rotation. with the latter one you are guaranteed to only have 3 healers at some times, but with the former you are guaranteed to only have 2 for long periods, and risk actually having 0.

I'll admit the 2/2/2/2/1(/0) rotation probably works good enough to nuke the boss down if tanks uses cooldowns at appropriate times.

we plan to go Kalec with a 4 Portal Rota an a Healadin in the non-portalgroup, to boost the kalecgos mt heal above around the 4th portal. which problems can occur if he is portet, or 2 of the non-portal group in a row and how can the pally get surely into a grp after he uses shield?

We did a trash clear yesterday and when we got there we finally had a suitable team on and had an hour worth of attempts on him. I must say it's easily one of the most fun fights I've met in TBC. We aren't quite sure if we are geared/undergeared for this fight seeing as we only killed illidan twice and archi once (so yea we are probably a bit undergeared). We go with a 4team rotation with 3 tanks and just go groupwise having setup 2 healers 3 dps in each group where 1 of the 5 is a decurser (3 mages, 1 druid). We got down to 50%/50% yesterday and our problem solely lay inn healing arrangements. Demontank died, people fighting dragon died to arcane buffet (I guess the stacking is resistable, the damage seems to be physical?). Our biggest problem really lay in sorting the healing when portals rotated and general raidhealing (we only had 2 restoshamans yesterday aswell ).

I am though confident (well probably :P) that though I guess we are undergeared we have the means to kill him just not sure if it'll be today or in a reset or two :P

Yes parry will reset his swing iirc

Demon tank deaths:
Get your tanks to shout on voice when they are taunting the Demon so that healers know about it. We do this for both Demon and Dragon. There's nowhere to hide on this fight for healers - they all need to be conversant with using "target of target" to quickly switch to healing the correct tank.
Kalecgos is actually pretty good at tanking Demon. Tell your first portal tank not to grab aggro before he has at least two healers with him. After this, the incoming tank should wait until the existing tank has been ported back to Dragon and Sathrovarr goes back to hitting Kalecgos before he trinkets/taunts. If Kalecgos is doing ok for HP, the tank should also wait until Sathrovarr does his Strike on Kalecgos then taunt immediately after. As this Strike animation can be tricky to spot, while learning the fight get all tanks to pop a Free Action Potion immediately before taunting - they will still take the Strike damage but won't be stunned and will have a chance to dodge/block/parry the two 5k hits he does afterwards.

If you do this you will find tank deaths a lot less common for Demon world.

Yes I instructed them to do this and they did. It seems in retrospect that our main problem with healers was the one we've had for a year, they get to focused on "one assignment" and try to find any hole/easy way out so they don't have to spamheal multiple targets or similar and can just heal relaxed.

Will try this tonight if we get the raid going =)

After our first kill, which I believe was a rather lucky one, we've had considerable difficulty in repeating the kill. The main cause of this is the tank dying by the hand of the Demon when he is there alone with the Paladin (2-2-2-2-1). I'm not sure if our Paladin has been using BoP when needed, but I will be sure to mention that. Apart from this, is there any other way to prevent him dying?

One of my thoughts was to have the tank in the 5th portal not taunt after he gets ported, is this viable or will the human Kalecgos take too much damage in that space of time? Also, I've heard how sometimes it is difficult to keep aggro off the human, would it be feasible for the tank to taunt when he gets ported, but not build any threat, so that when the 4th portal group's healers disappear from the realm, the aggro will sooner or later go back to the human Kalec, meaning 20~sec of damage on him rather than the tank?

I've heard our tanks talk about our feral druid takes less spiky damage from the Demon than our warriors, would it be more appropriate to have the feral take the 5th portal rather than our warrior (all have the same level of gear, pretty much full T6/BT gear)?

It's not a case of "sooner or later". If you taunt and don't attack the Demon then Kalecgos will have aggro back in no time at all. It's one of those mechanics that works for you both ways; it's tougher to keep aggro as a tank, but also almost impossible for dps to pull aggro on the Demon - dps can go batshit in there and they'll never get him - especially after the first portal party.

@Dustwhisper:

Yes, Blizzard have this habit of finding weak-spots in your raid makeup. This fight is a prime example of making sure that your "usual" MT healers arent the only ones capable of doing a decent job, just about everyone needs to be capable of tank healing and raid healing equally.

I have a question for people who are using a bit of arcane resist. Since the portal is described as an arcane school spell (Spectral Blast - Spells - World of Warcraft) do you see portals themselves being resisted entirely along with the arcane buffet damage?

And as a response to tanks dieing in the demon realm your tanks have to know what healers are down there, how many of them are actually assigned to heal them and how long they will have till they get ported. Deadly Boss Mods has a nice list that shows timers for each individual down in the demon realm so if i notice that my only healer is going to be ported shortly I MUST stop building threat possibly pop a trinket and hope that human kalecgos gets agro. So in the end it just comes down to awareness and communication between your tanks and healers to know when to tank and when to try and drop agro. Thats at least what I do and I manage to stay alive every attempt, if you tanks are undergeared you may want to drop agro if there are fewer than two healers down below but it will put more pressure on your dps.

I didn't mean DPS, I meant for reducing damage on the tank taking the 5th portal - using taunt to keep the demon off human Kalecgos as much as possible, but not building threat so that when group 4's healers have returned to Dragon realm, human Kalecgos will pull aggro from the tank meaning it would be easier to keep the tank up whilst there's only 1 healer there.

@Trunkz, cheers for the tip, will be trying it out tonight.

For what its worth and for those that are not aware. Decursive has been updated to show a counter on the box when someone gets a debuff, so you know how long it has been on them.

Forgive me, but its a long time since I've used decursive (more or less since I installed Grid). Does it work for non-dispellable debuffs such as Brutallus Burn/Slash?

My guild insists on tanking Kalecgos in the centre of the room , where is the easiest place to tank him? The far end and sideways seems the obvious ideal location to me. Needless to say lots of finger pointing from arcane splashes has happened so far ..

Where should tank him at and why?