Xelopheris

We tank him on the far side of the room and turned, so that he is perpendicular to the platform.

 

Nicarras

I have not personally been to the Brut fight yet on a toon that decurses. Grid still shows all the debuffs with the grid debuff mod like usual. Pretty sure that Decursive only shows debuffs you can remove, not all debuffs...at least at default settings.

I usually have Grid showing debuffs raidwide, and Decursive showing me the ones I can remove (when I'm on my priest/shaman).

 

Tacitus

(Imp.) VE is so overpowered for this fight. We finally took him down (yay) and while the report isn't completely accurate because of the transitions not letting you pick up the log, we still had 4 (!) shadowpriests in top 10 healers and we sported 8 normal healers: Wow Web Stats

Brotherhood, Peace, Unity

Welcome back, Comrade

 

Footspeedy

For tank positioning we put him perpendicular to the platform(far side) also. Our pulling method makes it really easy mode, we start with a druid tank on Kalcegos and have him and a resto ruid stealth around to the back side of the room, he unstealths into bear and Kalcegos is instantly on him and positioned near perfeclty in the 5~ seconds it takes the raid to run in for positions. I highly recommend this positioning because you have a clear view on everything(PORTALS) in the fight, which helps tremendously.

 

Carnivean

I highly recommend for guilds that have killed Illidan recently to use AR. They are so damn chep and if everyone uses one or two pieces on a slot where their are undergeared, you can get somewhere along the lines of 150 - 200 AR easily.

Here is the WWS Log of me using exactly 200 AR: Cirdancalime - WWS
Canubis is using ~170 AR: Canubis - WWS

 

Nuveena

We have been doing this fight with a 2+2+2+3 healer portal rotation so far. Admittedly, without any deeper analysis of the consequences beyond the basic observations that using 3 groups is nearly impossible, due to the hardship of having 9 people squeezed into a single portal. As well as the fact that using 5 'full' groups means the 5th group is unable to survive the stacking debuff. Tonight I sat down and read through this thread, and for the first time encounterd the 2+2+2+2+1 idea. This idea threw me into a 4h session with excel and some quick probability analysis.

Now, I'm by no means fully convinced my results are fully valid. I have for instance not done any deeper thinking on the randomness in timing between portals. I simply assumed they happen every 25s to make the analysis simpler to perform. But I wanted to throw some of the conclusions out here, as they may be of some interest.

First of all, by splitting into 4 groups, it would seem you run into a situation where you have 2-3 'critical' tank swaps on the dragon during the fight. You can avoid them on the demon, thanks to the human form Kalecgos being a spare tank. These take place as the last group is about to enter their portal and the first group is re-emerging. At these points in time, two tanks have to trade aggro very rapidly (as many posts in the thread touches on). This is an obvious risk factor. But, the most serious problem is that you only have 1 MT healer just before the swap and right after it. This has also been brought up previously in the discussion, and is obviously the reason why people have come up with the 2+2+2+2+1 setup, which neatly eliminates the problem.


Now, the reason for this post is this; The conclusion I'm reaching here is that the fight is in fact intended to rotate around 5 separate (full) groups. The portal rotations end up a lot neater if you did indeed have this sort of setup. And it would be simplicity itself to sort out the teleports. If a member of your 5 man group is teleported, you teleport as well. By adding a 5th tank and decurser you can also fully eliminate all of the critical moments in the fight where swaps and hand offs have to take place within a very short timespan.

However, the downsides are also obvious. A "normal" group of 5 people could simply not survive being the last group to teleport, due to the arcane aoe damage. You would also end up bringing in a lot more healing and tanking than you would like, thus lowering your DPS output, which would probably turn out to be a problem during the enrage. But this leads to a couple of questions:

1) Could you survive with 5 full groups using medium arcane resistance (perhaps some 150-200 AR)?
2) How badly would it affect you chances to manage the enrage stage of the fight if your whole raid group is wearing several AR pieces? And furthermore, with 10 healers and 5 tanks, could you finish the last 10%'s in time?
3) Perhaps the gear upgrades achieved from farming the Sunwell will over time lead to a rotation of 5 groups becoming more feasible, but the margins are too tight right now?

I'm personally leaning against trying the fight with 5 'full' groups at this point in time, even though it would nicely handle the portal rotation. But if the answer to my third question is "no", and if my basic assumption is correct (that the fight is designed for a rotation of 5 groups) then it leads me to the conclusion that the arcane damage aoe is tuned too high at the moment, unless this fight is supposed to be done in medium to heavy arcane resistance gear. And finally, if the answer to my second question is "you can't survive the enrage like that", then it would point a finger at the enrage mechanism being too strong as it currently stands.


I'm sorry for the somewhat long winded post, but the facts seem to so strongly support a 5-part rotation on the fight, that the problems with the aoe / alternatively the enrage appear quite puzzling to me. However, I'm not saying the fight is undoable and should be "nerfed".

 

Kissmyaxe

Let me see if I understood right, you're trying the fight with 4 tanks now? That seams excessive so even mentioning 5 tanks seams ludacris.

The fight works fine with 4 ports groups and the odd 5th portal and I can only see it getting easier with better gear. Basically your tanks will survive easier, your healers will be able to output more HPS and your DPS will make the fight shorter.

To be honest we didn't put too much math and spreadsheet analysis in it, we told tanks (we use 3) to get 1st and 3rd portal and healers were spread 2(3) in each grp and they followed their groups when ported. There are moments where only 2 healers are with a certain tank, a "tank healer" and a "raid healer", but those moments are not longer than 5-8 seconds and as long as tanks and healers are aware of it it's fine.

We opted to have everyone stacking in the middle after they get ported up, and only spread when the portal exhaustion is about to wear off. Same thing for Demon phase, we stack up on the melee. This makes raid healing trivial, since 1 shaman with ChH or a priest with CoH can pretty much heal up all 2-3 groups that are bunched up at a time.

As for the enrage, you should focus on killing the demon first at all costs, which leads to no portals spawning, meaning you can have everyone stacked up in the middle making raid healing a 2-3 people job even at high stacks of arcane debuff thus leaving 5-7 healers on the tank on Kalecgos.

 

Viv

Nuveena - apart from the high arcane debuff stacking, one serious issue you will have with 5 groups will be the lopsided distribution of the raid between arcane and shadow worlds. The average raid member will be spending considerably more time in the arcane world than in the shadow world.
That will compound the headstart that the dps on the dragon inevitably gets in the first ~50 seconds of the fight - and most likely mean that you'll have to hold the dps on the dragon for a significant amount of time while you're trying to get the demon into the teens.
Too much (arcane) pain, not enough gain methinks

 

Nuveena

The number of tanks doesn't necessarily have to be the same as the numbers of groups, but it would make it somewhat neater for portals to have 5 in the scenario I'm theorizing about. But you could do it just as well with 3 tanks.

However, the whole point of using 5 groups is that it actually evens out the distribution of people between the two realms. Where the standard setup of 4 groups tends to oscillate between having 3, 2 then 1 group with the dragon and then swing back to 2, and again 3 groups *, a setup with 5 groups will have a mostly constant 2.5 groups in each realm, and never less than 2 groups. The oscillations become 2=>3=>2=>3 on each side (mirrored on the other side). Naturally, the first 50s of the fight has an uneven distribution of people, whatever scenario you use. And this is the whole basis why I'm making the tentative statement that the fight appears to be designed for 5 groups, not 4. And it is also the basis for the 2+2+2+2+1 healer rotation.

* - With 4 groups, you end up with a group being alone in one of the realms 45% of the fight time.

 

Wizeowel

I don't believe the fight was designed for any particular number of groups. One limitation is that it's rather tricky to get 8 people through a portal, which makes 3 group rotation unlikely. The other limitation is that, in 5+ group rotation, the arcane buff gets stacked very high, making it only viable if the whole raid is wearing some pieces of AR. This is one reason why most guilds are tending to use some variation of 4 group rotation, along with the happy coincidence that 4 groups fits the timers nicely. Furthermore, given the need to dps the demon as much as possible, you make things harder on your group by having some people waiting 2 minutes before being able to go to the demon realm.

The problem you describe with there often being one group on their own is not in itself a problem. The difficulty comes at tank transitions when there are few healers, or when healers have just returned from demon realm and are disoriented. This is why it's handy to have a floating healer who hangs around to help healing the 4th group and the returning 1st group. Since this is not an insurmountable problem, and the solution is evident, there's no reason to claim that the encounter 'was designed' for 5-groups. Especially when you consider that having the raid all wear medium AR is more of a fudge than to have a holy paladin as floating healer just bubble himself after 7 stacks of arcane debuff.

 

aadric

We're taking another shot at him tonight (which will make the 4th week now I guess). Last week I felt like we had everything down... right up until Kalecgos decided not to open a portal leaving too few healers in the phantom zone. This seemed to happen on every solid attempt. We stay away from the bushes but haven't yet tried removing totems/pets. At this point I feel like we're fighting bugs rather than fighting Kalecgos. We use a 2/2/2/2/1 rotation and haven't tried any AR yet (but plan on using Kara trinkets tonight).

 

Yenadar

Thank you for these WWSs.

Question:
Who else was wearing any AR? Most the raid? Only those 2? No clue?
If I exclude the 4 warriors from consideration, since they were only there ~50% each, the range of buffet gains was 73 to 131. The 2 noted above are at 74 and 84 buffets, and 32% and 29% resist rates respectively, which is clearly a drop that is worth considering. Just curious if the others low on the count were wearing AR or just spent way more time in the shadow realm, and if the ones high on the counts simply spent more time in the arcane realm.

 

tkz01

We've been doing this fight for about 3 solid nights now using the 2/2/2/3 (sometimes, 2/2/2/2/1) strat. The biggest problem we are having is MT's dieing in demon. I'm well aware the demon outputs some nasty damage, but it always seems to be between rotations (4th portal) that either our demon or dragon tank die b/c healers are worried about making thier portals outside or are disoriented while being ported outside.

Is it really a matter of 'press your heal button harder?' I'm pretty convinced its that easy, but any tips from successful healers on this fight that I could pass along to our healers would be beneficial. -- tanks are chugging iron shields like candy

Our healing setup looks something like: 3 shaman / 2 druid / 3(2) priests / 1(2) paladins

As another note, when i've watched videos on this fight (granted its from guilds that have killed illidan for numerous months) but when i see thier raid frames, everyone is ~90% at all times(of full hp), or when they get hit thier brought back so fast before the next arcane buffet hits. Our raid frames like to settle everyone bouncing from 60-80% and it takes awhile for people to be brought to full or not at all (resulting in uneeded deaths). Is this another case of healers failing (hate to say it like that..but) or could this be attribiated to a gear issue --- only 1 shaman is in 4pc while others are 2-3 and a pally in 1pc t6.

I apologize for the long drawn out questions, but any help would be appreciated.

 

Jarlyn

We use 2 priests and 2 shamans for raid healing. The priests should be timing their PoHs to land immediately after Arcane Buffet goes off. Same thing with the shamans, although since Chain Heal won't heal 5 people instantly, we put the shadow priests with the shamans to help smooth out Buffet damage until the second Chain lands.

For tank healing, have your tanks wait until Corrupting Strike hits Kalecgos, then taunt. I'm imagining that the spike damage from the Strike is probably when your tanks are dying, in which case have them try and avoid it. If that isn't the case, then yes, it's a healing problem.

 

Lucit

If Kalecgos decides to be cute with the portal timing, there can be times when you'll end up with one (or even zero) healers down below with the tank. Tanks should try to be conscious of how many healers they have - when tanking the dragon, it helps to save cooldowns for times when you're light on healing; for the demon, you simply need to anticipate the healer shortage and intentionally lose aggro to Kalecgos.

 

◊ zeidrich

If your demon tank is dying, have your demon tank be more cautious. Don't generate a lot of threat, allow Kalecgos to pull aggro back occasionally. Do not taunt unless you're absolutely sure that healers are available.

What we frequently do is, when a tank ports down to the demon, he lets the current tank get ported back up (so that the demon goes back to kalec) before taunting. That way if people are slow getting back down in that portal, they can choose to just let him tank until things are steady.

The burst on the dragon isn't high, and things are only risky if the dragon tank has very high arcane stacks, or there are no healers in dragonland. Typically the way that the portals work, there's a larger risk of having too few healers in demonville than dragonland in my experience. Most tank deaths in our experience came from the demon, but human Kalec is a beast, you can let him tank a lot.

 

aadric

Based on the resistance formula at wowwiki and the WWS parses I've seen (both here and my own) it does not appear that the arcane buffet is a level 60 spell. Indeed I'm seeing lower resist percentages than I would expect from a level 73 spell. Granted this is an incredibly small sample size.

 

Carnivean

No we were definately not the only one using AR. Everyone was told to atleast equip the trinket (the tanks could decide themselves), but I dont know the amount of AR they were using, but a lot of people were atleast using Flask of Chromatic Wonders + AR + MoTW, which equals to 70 Ar or more.

 

fizbannis

So after a few half-nights of attempts we can't seem to get over the hump of the first rotation. Our dragon tank, not demon, dies after the 3rd team heads through their portal. We use a 2-2-2-2-1 healer strategy. When the 3rd team goes through there are 2 dedicated tank healers and 1 raid healer left up there but the tank dies every time. Are there any suggestions on healing through this point?

Also - how does the demon's shadow bolt volley deal work? Is it a frontal cone based on target - hence spreading out reduces damage? Or will it always hit the same number of people regardless meaning stacking up is better to assist in raid heals?

Thanks.

 

Clandestine

The Shadow Bolt Volley is a conical random secondary targeting system based ability. I'm not sure if it has a maximum amount of targets it can hit, but you can definitely clump up very well for chain heal and circle of healing. Just have your raid be in a 270 degree or so arc around the side of Sathrovarr which your tank is not on, in order to limit shadow bolts on your tank. By having the entire raid clump in melee range while keeping a decent spread in terms of degrees around Sathrovarr, you will keep the majority of the raid in easy range of AoE heals, while limiting each shadow bolt volley to as few people as possible.

 

◊ Penguin

No. It's going to hit 3 targets, regardless of direction. Going through many, many logs of the fight, the only time it doesn't hit 3 is when the very first group is going down.

There's not some hidden "but he tries really hard" variable built into the game. -Slake

I always love the "it doesn't fit my style of play" line. There are only two styles of play; Correct, and Incorrect. The only people that ever use this line are people with the incorrect style of play. -Sebudai

 

Velrakt

The 4th portal period is the hardest and I would recommend doing either a 2-2-2-3 rotation or a 2-2-2-2. In my experiences allowing a single person to get a 5th portal really messes things up and it works best if the portal cooldown is sitting there waiting for the 1st port group's debuff to wear off. Once it wears off then bam that group is instantly being ported back up instead of having to wait for the portal cooldown.

Dealing with tank deaths around the 3rd and 4th portal really just amounts to healer skill and the order in which people take the first portal. The first off tank should hit the first portal first if possible followed immediately by both healers and then the dps. This allows the tank to get back to the dragon phase asap and taunt off the current dragon tank. It also ensures that 2 more healers are back asap to start healing the new dragon tank. The 4th port group main tank healer needs to spam the heck out of the tank and make sure that other healers have been ported back before he takes his portal and the grp healer needs to make sure everyone lives to get into that portal. Once you get this part of the fight mastered using a 4 port rotation the fight is easy mode until enrage. Everyone just takes portals when their debuff allows it after that and as long as nobody misses portals it's gg. The only time there are healing issues at that point are if healers miss their portal

 

fizbannis

Thanks, this is what I thought but many people were whispering me about it during the raid.

The reason we decided to try the 2-2-2-2-1 instead of 2-2-2-3 is the fear of the first 2 healers not getting back before the last 3 healers have to take the port. I'm just afraid that if I tell the DPS of the first team to wait for their healers to get through first that it will ultimately wind up with someone missing the portal, especially if its the melee group first (we have our melee group with 2 healers as one team, so if they get ported first we have 8 people trying to get through because of the tank).

I think what was getting us was healing the raid damage while the first portal rotation was getting set up. Our main dragon tank was dying with 3 healers left in that realm, two assigned to MT heal, and 1 assigned to raid heal. After talking to them it seemed that the raid healer needed a little help and one of the MT healers swapped off and that was causing issues.

 

Velrakt

Why would you have 8 people needing to get in the first portal? It should be 6 people in the first portal or maximum of 7 in unlucky circumstances which gives plenty of time to wait a a couple seconds for tank and healers to get in first. When we made this change it was the difference between killing the boss and wiping but every crew is different.

2nd portal is 7 people

3rd portal is 6 people

4th portal is 6 people.

 

fizbannis

Each team has DPS w/ a decurser, and 2 healers. We decided to keep our melee group together so the reason it would be 8 is 5 dps + 2 healers + 1 tank... this only happens if they get ported first or third. We've gotten everyone through the portal just fine, its just a matter of not being able to do it in a certain order. I'm counting the person that gets ported..so technically 7 people need to click the portal.