nataku

Our progress on Kil'jaeden has slowed (not consistently hitting 55%, despite some heroisms at 86%) and I just wanted to verify some things that I have control of when assigning positions and assignments.

How would you position your range dps given that you have 3 warlocks (we've been floating between a warlock soul flay tank and a feral druid soul flay tank depending on who we hava available), 2 mages, 2 shadow priests, 1 elemental shaman and 2 hunters in the raid to maximize their ability to dps Shield Orbs?

Currently, I usually assign the mages and one spriest to be in the NE section of the room, the warlocks/spriest2/ele shaman in the N, and the 2 hunters usually in the NW which I thought should be good coverage. The classes with longer range are on the edge and the warlocks should get a lot of time with Orbs from both directions.

Also, what would be considered too much Shield Orb damage on the raid? For many of our attempts that hit the third darkness, the Orbs have been dealing 300k-350k damage.

The other thing I wanted to make sure was that my healing assignment was ok.
2 Resto Druids - Blooms on Soul Flay tank, Rejuv or bloom people who have Fire Bloom, Blooms on Reflection tank if he's tanking
1 Priest - Raid healing, helping with Reflection Tank (and the fury warrior off tank on the first reflection to be killed) and Soul Flay tank with instants during collapses/spreads
2 Shamans - Assign both of them 2.5 groups worth of people to watch primarily to top off their life totals.
Paladin 1 - Watch Soul Flay Tank, otherwise raid
Paldin 2 - Heal raid when no reflections are up, otherwise heal Primary Sinister Reflection tank.

Should I assign my healing any different other than this check down style of assignment?

 

• Shifft

We have our hunters on the far left side of the raid so they are the first ones to get shield orbs. The rest of the casters are kind of around the middle and hit orbs that get past the hunters. You don't assign people sections of the room, they just DPS orbs whenever they are in range.

As for healing assignments, we didn't really do healing assignments for KJ. We just kind of have everyone heal people in range except for one paladin who is assigned to the soul flay tank, and one priest or paladin who heals the reflection tank when they're up. We told one of the priests to watch hunters especially too since we only have myself and a druid for healers on that side of the raid and we get destroyed by orbs since they can only hit our side at the start.

 

Volsh

I'd like to ask for some advice as far as healing assignments go also. Free for all raid healing works great on a fight like Felmyst where everyone is in range of everyone, but it looks like it can be problematic on KJ.

We use the following healing line up:
1 Paladin
1 Druid
2 Shamans
2 CoH Priests
1 DS Priest

Any advice on who to have healing what?

We use Fusion's positioning diagram mostly as shown here. Which slots would you put the 7healers into?

 

Natural

Suggestions for managing healing:

-Your shaman should be near their groups. There is a lot of raid healing on this fight and you need to maximize the effectiveness of COH as well as totems.

-Your healers should be positioned based on their class. Paladins should be close to the bubble (8/9) because they cannot heal while moving, priests are next closest (7/10) because they can heal while moving but have no snare removal. Druids are last (6/11) because they have instants and they can shape-shift out of snare.

-Priests should be split around the raid and given groups to focus their COH spam. Make sure they know who the center person is in each group so that the COH hits all 5 group members. Our priests (7/10) each focus on their two closest range groups plus the melee.

- It doesn't hurt to arrange your group makeup for healing efficiency. We have groups 1/2 (ranged) left side, (3) melee, and (4/5) ranged right side. This lets the healers focus on 1/2/3 or 3/4/5 depending on their location.

-I would recommend having the DS priest respec holy for COH. Get a level 70 priest alt to log in and buff you between each attempt. You should do the same for paladin buffs if necessary

-The priests and the druids should definitely be raid healing. Their focus should be to HOT people with fire bloom and top of the rest of the raid as much as possible. Single target healing (Paladins, shaman) should focus on the soul flay tank and the Sinister reflection tank. Obviously a lifebloom stack should be on the soul flay tank.

- Make sure to throw hots onto the soul-flay tank at the end of each bubble. With healers moving during the transition it is really the only time the soul-flay tank have a chance of dying.

-Finally, make sure your paladins know which ranged DPS on their side has the longest travel time to the bubble. It doesn't hurt to have paladins BoF those players on a regular basis.

 

Brandox

I am in charge of handling the dragon for my guild. During Phase 3, when the orb has become ready, do most guilds stack for haste or are you waiting for breaths until the first bomb? In my experience, if the orb is one of the further ones, I do not have sufficient time to get to the dragon, double blink back and get off the breaths before the first flame darts. My question is, is it absolutely necessary to stack for breaths before the first darkness?

 

Natural

No it is not absolutely necessary. We stack melee for the first haste and hunters for the revitalize/second haste before the first bubble.

For us, getting past the 85->55 and 55->25 DPS timers is more dependent on shield orb & Sinister reflection killing efficiency than anything else.

 

Ondskaben

I'm a little at a loss at the stay-at-the-edge-of-the-shield part. We are fairly new to KJ with only a few nights on him so far and until now reaching 58%. But from our understanding so far it is possible to move out of the shield the moment you recieve the Shield of the Blue buff (with the shield animation only indicating the area in which you can get the buff applied rather than a safe zone). If you breath pre-shield it means once darkness lands people are already more or less spread out again.

Is there something i'm missing here?

 

Raiste

So we've had a couple of nights on him now. Focusing on just living and getting the timing correct on breaths / shields etc at the moment. One question I had as a healer was what is the exact mechanic of flame darts? The incoming damage from it seems to be so variable. Sometimes only a few people get hit, sometimes the whole raid seems to take a significant amount of damage. Sometimes I only get hit once, sometimes three times very quickly. Is there a specific mechanic to what if anything affects this?

 

Volsh

If you don't have haste breath buff on you, flame darts will hit you and also hit everyone around you.

If you have haste breath buff, it should just hit you and not spread to anybody else.

 

Ondskaben

I'm going to reply to my own question a few posts up:

Well, moving out of the shield as soon as you have Shield of the Blue works. But its quirky. Sometimes its perfect and keeps its duration as timed by the controller giving you great extra time to spread out, sometimes the buff fades preemptively. So we ended up with the same shield/edge thingy as well.

The occasional shield bugs are annoying though. We had several instances of people being in the shield in more than good time, strafe around a bit and such but just not receive the buff (at all) while the rest of the raid did. This with using the between 3 and 4 secs left on darkness as suggested earlier to avoid the fade-darkness-refresh bug that occasionally happens.

 

Clandestine

When Kil'Jaeden casts Flame Darts, it launches a certain number of projectiles into the raid (I think it was either 20 or 25, I counted it once while we were learning the fight). These projectiles hit random players in the raid, taking about 1-2 seconds for all of the missiles to land. Each Flame Dart does 1700-1800 damage, and snares the player by 50% for 15 seconds (Breath: Haste causes you to be immune to the snare, but being breathed on after the fact does not remove the snare. Shield of the Blue removes the snare as well.). The Flame Darts hit random players in the raid. I've seen up to 3 hit one player at a time, not sure if there is a limit on this. In addition, if two players are within 5 yards of each other when a Flame Dart hits one, there is a splash damage of 500. The splash does not snare. So yes, sometimes fewer people will be hit during a Flame Dart cast, but the total damage will be roughly the same per cast, as long as people are spread out.

 

Bach

So we are getting consistent p4 (55%) attempts but i'm not convinced that we are doing our Hasting properly. We have tried the stack when orbs become active but that is only good if the orbs are just behind the raid.

I know someone above replied that there is no need for the raid to stack to get hasted. But is there a way for the Dragon controller to haste/rejuve the whole raid before the first darkness or not? Or is it only certain classes that can get it? Any tips to control the dragon more effectively would be appreciated.

 

Gofa

Yes, it is possible. We use 2 mages as dragon controllers and just before the orbs become active, we go between two of them so that each mage can cover one side (depending which orb becomes active). Just react fast and remember that the dragon's blink doesn't have a cooldown.

If you use a protection warrior and a mage for the dragons, tell someone to stand on top of the orbs so that your warrior can intervene them.

 

• Intermission

Also keep in mind that you can kill him without collapsing for haste breaths. Many guilds just throw a Haste breath on the melee (who temporarily clump up), and I suppose anyone else that happens to be quite close to the melee collapse point. There is no massive rush to make it before Fireblooms/Darts with this method either, as it wont mean a raid wipe. The melee can easily CloS or spread back out.

Then of course make sure you do Haste/Revite breaths before/after each Shield of the Blue. (after bubble for first dragon, before bubble for second).

 

Volsh

When we first tried collapsing for breath right as orbs spawned before the first darkness - it failed because the dragon would constantly get there 2-3 seconds too late if it was the far orb that spawned.

Once I realized that the dragon can go through KJ and I don't have to go around him, we have had flawless collapses for first breath and it helps a lot with negating fire darts/fire bloom damage from revitalize, as well as haste is an obvious buff to the raid.

 

Skulli

We do pre-shield breath as well. Shortly after the shadow spikes end, the orbs go active and we gather for breath.
At the 25% shadow spike we dont that though to avoid meteors.
Sometimes (rarely) we get fireblooms or darts on us, which can cause a wipe.

 

Bach

We are now hitting 25% mark and are hoping for the kill before patch 3.0

Some questions regarding p4 and p5. For p4, should we get the raid to spread out more because of Armageddon? Usually the center has some healers nearby and in order to avoid any armageddon to be at the stack point, there must be some readjustment?

For p5, how do you handle 2 dragons on the co-ordination of the breaths and shields? We were thinking of doing the 2 shields side by side for the left and right wing.

Any last minute tips and advice much appreciated

 

Skulli

P5 is relative easy, just make 2 shields in the center to generate a big shield.
Try to avoid on the gathering spots though, only move to it when he casts the darkness or you might get meteors right on the camp.

Not sure if many are doing it in p5, but we offtank our adds and just nuke KJ.
Its easier with some classes than others though.

 

Natural

It's been mentioned many times in this thread but in P5 you should probably be utilizing the breaths with the second dragon. You have two dragons under control, so one of them does the bubble and the other one does the breaths. You switch jobs every 2 bubbles so that there is no risk of a bubble not being there in time.

I wouldn't worry about increasing the size of the bubble zone. Even though the timers are accelerated, he ends up casting the bomb so often that you really don't see many armageddons in P5.

I would highly recommend against off-tanking the adds in P5. There is plenty of time to kill KJ and there is really no rush. The last thing you want is for your sinister reflection tank to die in P5 and wipe your raid. Kill the adds. Once you do there is no single point of failure in your raid... even the soul-flay tank could die in P5 and you should be able to recover.

 

KamPa

You could always kill 2 adds and leave 2 alive - that shouldn't take long enough to make him last for 1 more shield. Or, make it dependant on their type - Warriors can be dangerous to entire raid with their WWs and Mages hit quite hard, so those are a priority. Most other aren't terribly dangerous, maybe Paladin with their stuns - but with double shields, there's more place for tank to stand anyway. Between faster shields, which remove Blooms, constant Revitalize and no Shield Orbs, you can easily have 2 or more dedicated Sinister tank healers.

 

PsiVen

It really depends on the type of reflections -- specifically how easily they can be killed, and how dangerous they are. From our experiences I would break it down like so:

Warriors - Kill all 4. WW is very dangerous.
Mages and Warlocks - Kill at least 2. Risk of tank death is high, but positioning can be problematic for the DPS to get them all.
Paladins - Kill at least 2. Stuns on everyone collapsing are extremely annoying and cause spikes on the tank.
Druids - Kill 2. They spam moonfire, the tankadin can cleanse them all with 2 up.
Rogues, Hunters, Priests, and Shamans - OT. Their melee damage isn't too spiky and their abilities are easily dealt with.

Killing 4 shouldn't mean that you lack the DPS to beat the 5th Darkness, but if there's any confusion after the first 2 die, the safe call would be to zerg KJ.

I am curious, has anyone confirmed it possible to get reflections on the players controlling dragons? We've been a shield early several times lately and I've noticed that our only mage hasn't been hit with it in a long time.

 

KamPa

Isn't the player basically removed from combat? After all, when you wipe, KJ will despawn on orb controller. Same with DoTS or all other boss abilities, can't see why reflections would be different.

 

delling

We recently killed Kil'jaeden (3 weeks ago), and I feel we have the fight under enough control now that I should share some tips! Or at least interesting things that we've learnt while we wiped.

We spent a relatively short amount of time killing this boss (about 6 nights), and it was a really refreshing change after bashing our heads against M'uru for 10 weeks. It's still a really hard fight, but at least there's a little more breathing space. And just more VARIETY! The sheer number of abilities and phases make this fight a real bitch to learn.

Also, we highly recommend you read the Fusion strategy, as it's absolutely awesome.

Get your entire raid to read it. Multiple times. Understand every ability.

Anyway...

• Healing - We've only run with 1 shadow priest for a while now (and 2 holy priests), and I noticed a big improvement when I placed the shadow priest with the healers. I'd been placing it with the warlocks, to drop the orbs/images quicker, but when I moved it to the healers... Allowing priests/shaman to flash heal/COH without concern is a huge buff to your raid's survivability. I saw someone above was running 3 paladins -- no... You want priests and druids here. At least 2 of each. Shaman can just about keep up with LHW spam, and CH into clumped melee. Our resto druids often match or top the holy priests (and they're in the MT group...!)
  
  Two shadow priests probably helps here, but it's not a requirement... their healing is not fantastic, but they are pretty good at orbs (MB/SWD/Flay, all perfect for moving targets)
  
  
• DPSing - We've killed this guy with pretty varying setups. 1 hunter/3 hunters, 2 full melee groups/1 melee group. Doesn't seem like it's a problem. We thought we'd need tons of melee DPS, but those hunters are SO powerful with a shaman/druid (who is MTing the boss). Our hunters were placing just behind the warglaive rogues. Positioning on ranged doesn't seem to matter much, as long as orbs are their first priority. Those orbs that go around the back and nuke your melee are horrible -- they have to die quickly. Oh, and mages are really useless here. Bring 1 for the orbs in phase 5 (or all the orbs, if you run just 1 protadin on the images. We have our usual warrior MT tank 1 image, and then do the orbs.)
  
  I would almost say that bringing enhancement shaman/retridins/dps warriors is a bit of a gimp here. Their inability to drop fire bloom is bad. Assuming you have 2-3 rogues, melee space is pretty limited... 2 resto shaman in the melee/hunter group is probably good enough for this fight. This boss wants a BALANCED RAID! OMG! 2 or 3 of every class!
  
  
• Pre-shield breaths - Having the melee clump a few seconds after the dragon orbs is a Good Idea. The casters can collapse behind the melee for revitalise. Then the dragon can go and haste the warlocks/hunters on the left/right. Many guilds do a total raid collapse on the dragon orb spawn -- I think it's worth doing, if it's one of the two close orbs. You have to be watching that Fire Bloom cast bar...!
  
  
• /focus the boss! - Learn the names and effects of every boss ability. Then /focus the boss. Make your focus frame large. Watch the boss's cast bar. Knowing when he's casting fire bloom is such a huge bonus, as a healer. Knowing when exactly he will cast his Ultimate is fantastic. Knowing that you can move to the shield spot 3 seconds early, because he's casting Soul Flay -- priceless! You can be a lot more 'risky' if you know what the boss is likely to do next. You know when you can stack on other people, and when you have to hide in a corner.
  
  
• Phase 4 and 5 - the trick here seems to be communication. Have someone dedicated to spotting meteors in the middle area, and near the main tank. It's common to have a meteor at the front of the shield, as melee are often slow to collapse. You could also have meteors left/right, if people are waiting to come in with bloom. The best way we found is to simply run out the back of the shield, and back to your original spots. The number of times we had melee run straight into a meteor after a shield was depressing. The damage on the raid, in phase 4, after the shield drops -- from orbs, darts, blooms... It's insane. This is by far the hardest part of the fight. Fingers on healthstones! No doubling up on blooms! And keep the DPS up... urgh. It's horrible. I think this is where hunters really start to shine -- their orb DPS increases, and they can lay some serious damage on KJ while moving around.
  
  Someone mentioned keeping the shield spot clear, because of meteors -- simply flare it. I normally stand in the middle. I move to the left and stack on another priest, and just leave a flare at the spot. Make sure it's kept clear.

Think that's about it...

Really, just stress that everyone in the raid reads Fusion's guide, and learns each of KJ's abilities. Then he should be fairly easy Or at least lack much of a learning curve -- just survive meteors... and voila!

 

Bach

I'd like to ask some of you regarding p4 and p5 Armageddon.

Is there anyway at all to reduce Armageddon inside the shield? I dont understand why we can have up to 3 Armageddons inside the shield happening. What can we do aside from spread out more for P4? We seem to be losing people from Armageddon in shields far too often. Is it the timing of the stack or perhaps the dragon needs to reposition the shield

 

Skulli

Keep your gather spot free and dont move until he is casting darkness (he wont cast armageddons while casting).
Think in p5 he can do meteors while casting but you have 2 shields then.