Hello,
I have a question for anyone who has killed the twins. My guild just started on twins last week using the pillar strat and we are going to get some serious attempts in this week. Is this fight doable with 2 COH priests and 2 shaman raid healing or is too difficult? I know more healers will make the fight easier but we usually end up with either 2 COH priests and 2 shaman or 3 shaman and 1 COH on. It was a little too early to judge from last weeks attempts because shadowfury got in the raid.

We bring 11 healers. 5 resto shamans, 3 paladins, 1 druid, and 2 priests. (I think this is accurate)

If any DPS dies they need to be rezzed immediately or we miss the enrage. I recommend your shamans do R4 CH up top constantly and add the flame debuff to your grid. That way you can R5 CH when the stacks get high. When you jump down its a race, and you better be spamming! I went OOM this week with 15 seconds left before the kill, and was forced to spam R1 CH (still 2000+ first hit).. Basically, bring a lot of healers.

Hiyo. After first killing Kalecgos 3 months ago (4th of May), followed by Brutallus 3 weeks later (26th of May), my guild really struggled to get Felmyst down. After 4 weeks on the fight we started seeing some results, and 2 weeks later we finally managed to witness enough >5% wipes to pull a kill from our ass (7th of August).

In an attempt to break this trend, I'd like to see us spending less time on really trivial concepts, (run away from the beam, tee-hee!)

I've read all of the posts in this thread and discovered a conflict of opinion. My immediate understanding was that killing the Shadow Twin first was the way to go (in terms of difficulty), is this still the case? Is this purely because the elimination of Conflagrate & Shadow Images(ninjas, heh) in phase 2, making it "easy mode" once the first Twin is down? I'm sure my understanding of the fight will "click" once we've had some attempts on it, and I intend on downloading every possible kill video I can get my hands on, but I just want to be sure that I'm persuing the ideal objective when there could be a better alternative out there.

Also; slightly unrelated - the trash before twins. Is there anything particularly concerning here? All I've heard is mentions of a "gauntlet" and how the trash clear is a complete pain in the ass.

Anyway, thanks in advance for any confirmation/advice.
I'm really hoping to progress in Sunwell a little bit faster than one boss per month.

edit: I'm fully aware of the whole "do not come here and ask for strats when you haven't seen the fight yet" line, that's not what I'm looking to achieve. I'm just trying to determine whether the "reverse strat" is in favour or not.

A tip for anyone that is having trouble healing this fight, a 4 resto shaman/one shadow priest group chaining heroisms through phase one (assuming shadow first, fire second) works wonders. Makes all of our kills insanely easy to kill when there are 4 resto shamans with 1.5 second chain heals.

We save our BLusts for the dps, chaining them on the hunter group, as the other dps complain rather alot about threat issues. The way we managed to do it (had our first kill yesterday, pillar humping) is haste gear on all. It really makes a huge difference, and we get to avoid "wasting" BLusts on healers.
Our healing setup was 3 resto shamans, 3 CoH, 1 spirit priest (brought him for the buff) flashing people in danger. Raid HP was stable for the most part, with 2 deaths on phase 1, one of which was the result of melee lemingness.

I found that the most difficult thing to overcome was the healer panic at the amounts of dmg. Make sure your healers understand every ability, make sure they understand the massive dmg is not chaos, is not a flawed tactic, it's just part of the fight.

I don't think CoH should be used often for this fight unless the priest is healing melee group. Our priests use a combination of Flash Heal, PoM and Binding Heal.

Also, I agree that the healing requirement for the raid isn't that high. It's more about healing coordination and getting used to the damage pattern. That said bringing more healers (~11) for first kill is still recommended.

In regard to trash, since no one has answered your question on that, there is a gauntlet immediately after the Brutallus/Felmyst area, followed by 5 normal pulls. Both are easy, nearly all the mobs are sheepable, just have tanks and mages pick targets quickly, kill stuff and move on. Its not the traditional gauntlet we're used to where mobs respawn quickly (Broodlord/RoS/Fankriss etc/Heigan), rather the gauntlet part comes from a continues respawn of imps that blow up when they get to you, and melee mobs that need to be picked up and killed. If you want a more detailed write up PM me.

I think the biggest benefit of the Shadow first strat, as others have said, is you basically only have to learn one phase, rather than two. Once you can kill the Shadow twin without losing anyone, you should win on that pull.

From a tanks perspective, precision on where you keep Sacrolash standing is the hardest part of the fight to get. Once you realize where to put her and can keep her there, you've mastered your part of the fight.

It's pretty bad to think of the gauntlet as that. It is not the typical ZA/Suppression Room type of gauntlet. There are only 2 mobs that spawn throughout the gauntlet - Exploding imps, which come down pretty quickly (I'd say once every 10 seconds) and blow up as soon as they get to someone - and Shadowsong Deathbringers (one spawning every 90 seconds or so). We had a brutal time finding information on the "gauntlet" and wiped a couple of times... Then we realized that there isn't a hurry - it's not a gauntlet - and it became trivial.

The pulls in the "gauntlet" are on a 2-hour respawn, OR they will respawn once no one in the gauntlet area is alive (unsure of exact mechanic). Basically, if you kill the first pack, it's not going to respawn until you wipe or 2 hours later. In fact, you should have time to drink and rez between trash packs as the imps don't put you into combat (The Deathbringers, however, will as soon as they spawn).

We've brought 3 mages, though it'd be easily do-able with 2. Just make sure they're quick on the sheeps as everything runs very fast, including the Deathbringers. We have a feral druid stand up front and soak up imps and tank deathbringers. I (a prot warrior) pull the trash packs behind the raid where they are killed. Then I'll go and start taunting Deathbringers off our druid and pulling them back again to the raid. Rinse and repeat. Most mobs have some stupid abilities. There's a stealthed assassin at the top of each ramp that can gib a healer or two. Shadowsword Vanquishers have a bad cleave for non-tanks (but are disarmable). Shadowsword Manafiends are kinda like the 1st boss in heroic mgt, except instead of draining mana from the crystals, they'll drain it from your healers in insta-spells. They can hurt if not tanked away from the raid or burned through quickly. Shadowsword Lifebringers just drain life and dump life. The one to really look out for, however, are Shadowsword Soulbinders. In the "gauntlet", they only come in packs of 1. They have an AoE mind-control that must be dispelled (not interruptable).


This is spot-on. As soon as we got her tanked in the right position, I think the raid got shadowfury once. We found that it was very important that the shadow-ninja things run up the LEFT side of the room as you look at the twins. If they move up the right, they're almost always going to hit the raid.

An easy way to counter this ability is to move away from them. While they cast their mindcontroll, they don't melee nor do they move. Just tell your melee dps and your tanks to run away from them and they won't get mindcontrolled, since the radius of the aoe mindcontroll is rather small.

Very true. When I first explained this fight to my guild I basically told the DPS (who werent already familiar with it) only three things:

1 - Stand next to the pillar over there.
2 - Run out Conflags to here.
3 - Never go above third on Sacrolash's threat table

Theres nothing else DPS really needs to know (aside from use healthstones/pots/iceblock to stay alive) - so it really is a very trivial fight to explain to new people. It should be much easier for DPS to focus on just those three things. In a Alythess first strat people would actually need to be more intimately aware of what boss abilities are and how they interact. In sac first. for most of the raid, you literally just "Stand here, run out conflag... and dps" in phase 1 and simply "Stand here and DPS" in phase 2.

Thanks a ton for the advice. We had our first shot at twins lastnight and plowed through the trash with no dramas. After everything I've heard about "the ledge boss", I naively thought, "Hah. We won't have that problem. Surely there's no-one that stupid in my guild?"

2 hours later we'd only had 2 attempts on them due to idiots falling off the freaking ledge all the time. Sigh! On the first attempt, the raid was slaughtered, and on the second attempt, the Warlock died because no-one purged or spellstole the buff.

The people upstairs copped a Shadow Nova and a conflag. (The person who was Conflag'd didn't even try to start running until she had been hit by the conflag). The fact that they copped a Shadow Nova means that I need to tank the Shadow Twin further out of LoS, yes? I'm pretty much below the ranged at the pole parallel to them. (We use a single camp against the inside of the pole) I think I just need a bit more time on the fight to get a feel for it. Hopefully idiots stop falling off the ledge every 2 minutes.

In fact you can say there are two kinds of nova :
->sacrolash nova, the raid need to take it to reset fire debuff
->an AoE stun by sacrolash adds, it is like a melee proc, you do not want to be hit by them but can't avoid them.

As i don't think you can't get both Nova and Conflag at ~ the same time, i supposed you were it by the AoE stun.

The add stun is Shadowfury Its not a proc based attack - the adds spawned will either be melee adds or shadowfury adds. And they can be avoided with correct positioning - by forcing the adds to take such a long path to the raid such that they despawn before they use their shadowfury.

a bit off topic, but we've been killing the twins for a couple monts now, in reverse order. We've seen an unusually high amount of mail/plate shoulders, with an unusually low amount of cloth shoulders (only 1 cloth dps shoulder so far). Someone in my guild had theorized that the drop rates on certain items vary between the two, depending on which you kill first, similar to the bug bosses in aq40.

I haven't heard/seen any speculation on this, but are there any guilds that have been killing the twins in reverse for awhile that have seen a good amount of cloth shoulders (healing or dps) drop? I have a feeling it's just random, and the idea of favored loot is pure speculation, but who knows.

No.



Erm, could anyone shed some light on what is the minimum ammount of healers, and their gear, needed for a twins first kill? We've had ~2 healers go inactive since killing Felmyst ~4 weeks ago and have only ended up going to wipe on the twins for 2-3 nights.

Our typical # of healers online atm for raids is 2 Shamans, 3 Priests, 2 Druids and 2 Paladins. Usually 1-2 of these are undergeared (have no sunwell loot and missing some BT loot)

After wiping for 2 full nights with such a set-up making no progress at all (random people dying), im wondering what's the problem, we need more practice/understanding on the fight or do we simply not have enough healing power?

Btw, the reason i'm asking this and not looking at a guide is that they usually tell you what's recommended, not a bare minimum, plus i've known them to be far wrong in the past (5 tanks for al'ar, why?)

It's hard to give gear guidelines as it is so individual. If you can't field enough healers, let an enhancement or elemental shaman respec to resto, or a feral druid if he doesn't need to tank, or a shadow priest, etc. The fight is not a DPS check. It doesn't matter if they have halfway decent gear or not, it's all about surviving the burst damage. The regular healers will do the job fine, they only need support to negate the bursts.

We often do Twins with 9 healers now, but our firstkill was with 11 and we won with more than 1 minute left on the enrage timer. This is not a DPS fight. Let healing capable classes respec for healing and you're good to go. You can also bring alts if you want. If they don't have healing gear, let them wear +stamina gear.

Has anyone tried tanking Alythess with Nether Protection (and a /cancelaura macro)? I've successfully tanked Capernian in this manner, but a loose Fireball to a random person from Capernian is much less deadly than Blaze on the entire raid.

I've tanked always tanked her without NP for the past couple months, but NP would be nice to have for some encounters (M'uru).


edit: It also seems that CancelPlayerBuff() is not protected and does not require a hardware event, so a simple mod could be written to remove NP instantly everytime it is gained (with only a slight server-client delay). I'm not sure how low the error rate would be, but I might give it a shot this week if no one else has tried this.

You can't afford 100g, a Portal: Shattrath and a Ritual of Summoning each week? Seriously.. just respec. Druids, Shaman and especially Paladins need to do it all the time in this instance. We have one of our warlocks sit out for "gauntlet" trash to respec so its barely even a time loss.

I can afford it just fine and have no problem doing it, it would just save the hassle, which would be nice. If cancelling the aura allows you to do it just fine, then why not?

Anyway, I didn't have the time to write the mod this week - hopefully will for next week.

You don't really need a mod for it, just make a macro saying:

/cast Searing Pain
/cancelaura Nether Protection

and then you just keep spamming Searing Pain. I have never used it myself but I see no reason why it wouldn't work.

Erm, there's a very clear flaw with that. The only thing that matters is if the aura is up at the start of the cast - if it is, then Alythess will turn and cast on someone else, and won't change targets if you remove the aura.

As the aura procs whenever you are hit by a spell, and she immediately starts casting again, the odds are your healer core is going to get blaze flung at them very early on in the fight.

I wouldn't risk something so easily avoidable. We have a paladin that is prot for Kalecgos trash, goes holy for Kalecgos, stays holy for Brut then respecs prot for Felmyst then respecs Holy for Twins and back to prot for M'uru. It's just part of Sunwell.