Illundai

Kil'jaeden is a huge source of RNG and frustrating wipes, I'll give you that. But hard to repeat, not so very much if everyone plays properly.
I've noticed that we seem to get queued casts (Darkness -> Flame Dart -> Firebloom) whenever our DPS is low throughout the whole fight, that includes phase 1-2 (Adds / KJ 'phase 1'). I know it doesn't make sense, but everytime we push it to the maximum throughout the whole fight, we seem to be fine. If we have to hold because someone disconnected in phase 1, then we get these obscene queued casts and other instawipe stuff. I remember a few weeks ago he wiped us by simply casting Darkness, with a meteor spawning on top of us in the shield, followed by a Flame Dart (we buff haste after the shield at that point, so no one had the haste buff except a few) and then a Fire Bloom. That's insane. You would require more than 100% perfect play and focus from your guild to survive, which is fine to an extent, but not like this. Especially since straight after he always seems to spawn his Shadow Orbs, screwing you over.

Anyway, I disgress - the RNG in the fight is random, but like I said, I have noticed that it only seems to occur when we are slow on DPS, has anyone seen it happen even if you're really fast? I know that if you're fast you obviously have less chances of RNG occuring, but it was just really noticable for me. Sometimes we get him to 85% in less than a minute, followed by 56% after the second shield, and so on. Then it never has happened. It just seems odd. Perhaps the timr for Flame Dart already runs in phase 2 and depending on your timing of when you get him to phase 3 it will or will not screw you over? It all sounds so farfetched, but after realising that his initial Soulflay targetting was on the person who took the most shadow damage in phase 1, I would not be surprised.

As for tips go, this is a serious damage race really. On a fight like this you really need to have your groups synergising a lot. You should obviously have the maximum amount of damage increasing debuffs too, you hardly have a choice. Post 55% is the hard part, in my opinion. The race from 55% -> 25% is when most of our fuckups occur. The damage you start seeing on your raid is insane. On one of our attempts last week we had about 2k dps on all of our melee for about 10 seconds. Amazing amount of healing required to keep that up, it was nearly impossible. We had Flame Dart explosion (we stack 2 per spot for melee), Firebloom on every melee member and Shadow Orbs nuking the hell out of us. That will happen and you need to prepare your raid for it. It's imperative at that point everyone realises they need to use their class abilities to the max to survive. Sometimes it's not survivable, sometimes it is. That's just how it's gonna be, don't get demotivated over it, that's just how the fight works.

Anyway, to continue. It's a DPS race therefor you should have the optimal groups. That includes a hunter group with a feral and a shaman. That includes a melee group with at least an Enhance Shaman, preferably a Ret Paladin as well. I was very strict on consumables during our learning process. Whilst I was leading I made sure every single melee and every hunter used Demonslaying Elixirs. It's unreal how good that Elixir is. I'd say for a first kill they're imperative. If you chug one down at 85% you only need to use the second one at just about 25%. So it won't get overly expensive. Although, when both us and Inner Sanctum were practicing Kil'jaeden, Ghost Mushrooms were going for just about 250g a stack. So I suggest farming them in Dire Maul or so.
Also a Blood Frenzy Warrior and Expose Weakness Hunter will help greatly. As will 3 Warlocks. For the melee, if you're not standing at his face like I am, then he will parry very little attacks. He's almost constantly casting, so he has very little time to do so. I find switching out my [Shard of Contempt] for [Dragonspine Trophy] wields best results. That's personal flavour, though I guess.

The best piece of advice I can give is probably to not be too demotivated by the RNG wipes and be strict about people dying due to not getting in the Shield in time or dying to Armageddon. Those are not acceptable. Be on the ball with it and make sure the people that die from it realise that you're serious about it. The only time I've died from an Armaggedon was when the tank got knocked back and he turned to me and did his knockback on me as well, tossing me straight into one. That can happen so be ready for it . Furthermore, we decided on a Feral Druid tank, we didn't really think much about using something else. They're in mostly DPS gear when they tank it, barely reach 20k HP I believe. They output 1000 dps whilst tanking and do just about 2k TPS, whilst buffing our hunter group. Obviously though, Warlock tanks work. I just don't really see the advantage on this one. We have a Prot Paladin picking up the Reflections, it was just the logical choice for us, they're the kings of AE tanking after all. Again, personal flavour.

Oh and by the way, getting sub 25% with 25 people alive is almost certainly a kill. It was kind of disappointing, but it gets significantly easier at 25%.

 

Melador

I'd also recommend putting healing druids (and your better/more aware players in general) at the further locations from your collapse/shield location. You don't want people who notice things a bit late (oops there's a darkness that's just cast and I'm still 40 yards away!).

Druids can also shapeshift to clear the darts debuff and with an innervate/pots I don't usually need the mana breath, so I stay clear and concentrate on healing while the other healers are on the move. And if I'm a bit late noticing darkness about to cast I have a sprint available to me too. I do need to remember which collapses I need to do, and which I can ignore, but that's pretty easy with something like Bigwigs timers.

 

Sqaarg

I have no experience with the fight, and the info I know is from wowwiki.com (yes, I know), and it states that at 25% Kil'jaeden uses his abilities without a cooldown, I can't see how it would get any easier, enlighten me please

 

Illundai

Wowwiki is wrong. He doesn't lose cooldowns, I believe he just halves them. It's probably about 10-15sec per Darkness, or something very short at least.
The thing is, he stops summoning Shadow Orbs, they are the main reason people take the humonguous amount of damage. Removing those is a lot less stress on the healers. Second is the fact you get as many dragons to your disposal as you like (or well, 4) this makes it so that everyone has 100% uptime on the buff, it also means you don't have to pre-shield collide to get the haste buff, it's not necessary. All in all, it becomes significantly easier. The damage requirement at that point is a joke, considering you'll get him to at least 17-18% before his little "Uhh, what have you done??" speech is over. You have 8 shields to finish him off, thats a little more than 2 minutes. If you can't meet that dps requirement with 25 people alive at that point, I can't grasp how you kill M'uru or get him to 25% in the first place.

 

• Emn

If only it were true. We had so many sub 10% wipes because of shields or people dieing to meteors. I know that's not the encounters fault, but makes for one hell of a disappointing mood.

One thing I did want to know was, did any guilds use Amplify or Dampen Magic? It was something we didn't discuss up until Sunday when we finally decided to give it ago. From what we saw, the only spell that was affected from Amplify was the Legion Lighting (the mana burn part wasn't, just the damage) so we decided to leave that on.

I'd noticed in a lot of videos that they had neither, any specific reason for that?

 

◊ Praetorian

Amplify is great.

We only bring one mage, and one mage Amp'ing the whole raid is a pain though.

 

Panzzzer

we use a feral druid aswell and paladin/protwarrior for the adds. its a bit hard with the dps on that setup but can be done. we use on all 3 tanks 2x elixir combo, that means 1 agi + arthas gift. the proc gives u additional dps on the 4 sinisteradds/kiljaeden and u dont lose any significant improvement.

demonslaying was just mentioned before, and ofc since brutalus/felmyst/entropius its obvious to use that here aswell.

Kelthuzad trinket is still up to date imo, i switched from dst/madness to shard (because the parries) and 150AP kel trinket. i think its a quite good combo and i keep it as arms and fury (both tested and my favorite)

EDIT: my preposter mentioned amplify magic, did u test it properly? means firebloom/meteor/orb/dart does not get any benefit from it. and what bout soulflay?

 

imre

My toughts about this fight since i only watched the diffrent videos is the diffrent approach the guilds use to go about this encounter , but i wonder what would be the best to use of these two ways of performing it.

my suggestions would be going 2 tanks and a warlock soaking the soul flay with the +healing they benefit from demon armour, and a Prot paladin + feral for tanking reflections and pref. the feral in a hunter grp. Druid would be mostly there to help the paladin keep the adds stacked up and then picking up the mobs one by one and marking them for the dps to focus on that target and melting it down. Also to avoid the loose mobs that might occur on spawns.

in this i only see the benefit of using this option and single targeting down the mobs. Im not that great on numbers with seeds and such but that would probably help. Also you could by replacing the prot pala with a prot warrior still having him single out/mark the mob that the dps would be killing and then have him controll the orbs by being able to intervene close to the orb that is ready to be used. However by switching out the paladin you loose either your third or fourth blessing that can be vital for the raid if your not running a retri paladin and also you would be loosing a great aoe tanker on the reflections. I think by switching out the druid with the warrior you loose leader of the pack if you are sporting the feral in the hunter grp.

So a Basic setup of this would be:

Group 1:

Resto Shaman
Resto Druid
Shadowpriest
Tanking Paladin / Prot warrior
Holy Priest

Group 2:

Survival hunter
Beast mastery hunter
Beast mastery hunter
Enhancement shaman
Feral Druid

Group 3:

Mutilate Rogue
Combat Rogue
Combat Rogue
Arms Warrior/Retri paladin
Enhancement Shaman

Group 4:

Destro Lock
Destro Lock
Destro Lock
Elemental Shaman
Mage

Group 5:

Resto Shaman
Shadowpriest
Holy Paladin
Holy Paladin
Resto Druid

Leaving : 2 tanks 7 healers 16 dps
and 4 heroisms that should be switched into the dps groups.

Am i on the right course of thinking or?

edit so by reading the benefits of using a single tankfor reflections this would still be a viable setup or?

i suspect also that a set position for all in the group would be most beneficial.

something like clicky clicky

 

Geckothan

From what I've seen, using a single protection paladin to tank all of the reflections, moving them next to the boss and spamming seeds on the boss (so they detonate pretty much instantly) with about 15 seconds left on shadow spikes is the way to go. It doesn't work with mage/warlock reflections (though now they're interruptible it could be possible to move them to the boss I guess), but on all other reflections it's very effective, with 3-4 warlocks, they tend to go down before the dragon is up.

Additionally, from what I've seen, using a warlock to soak up soul flays isn't really ideal, and in my honest opinion a feral druid or protection warrior is a better choice. It might seem a bit silly using classes that are primarily designed to mitigate physical damage to soak up spell damage (though old versions of Solarian come to mind), but there are a number of reasons this works better:

• They have a larger hp pool - While we were learning the fight I remember seeing our warlock tank die a number of times. This will be a far smaller risk with a feral druid/protection warrior for obvious reasons.
• They'll be less of a waste of space - At least with our tactic, unless we put the extra tank on say, an orb, they'd be next to useless beyond phase 1. Sure, you could have them help with reflections, but with a good protection paladin already assigned to them, that'd be incredibly wasteful. Even if they were assigned to an orb, the way we do things, there'd still only be a 1 in 4 chance they'd get to use their orb in phase 3 and phase 4, so again, the chances are they'd be useless most of the fight.
• Less threat issues AoE'ing reflections - With a warlock tanking, that particular warlock would have to cancel salvation, meaning they'd either have to avoid AoE'ing reflections altogether or hold back whilst doing so, which is a bit of a waste.
• Better mitigation (warrior specific) - I shouldn't have to explain this, but your clue is "defensive stance". Not only does a protection warrior have more hp than a warlock as I've previously mentioned, they also take less damage than a warlock while soaking making the risk of tank deaths even lower.

Thus far, we haven't actually tried using a protection warrior on the boss (we've used a feral druid on all of our kills as our main protection warrior plays his paladin here and tanks the reflections), but my points still stand. Once we started using a feral druid on the boss and a protection paladin solotanking the reflections, we started making major progress.

As for RNG, no-win situations, yes there are a few, but most of them are totally false and are just a result of bad play. I've seen people get fire bloom directly after packing for the initial breath after a dragon orb is activated or directly after a bomb many times and half the raid would get instagibbed, while some people would just call that an RNG wipe and let it go the fact is situations like those are easily avoidable and can easily be out-played. Every time that particular situation has occured, I've been back at my normal spot with my breaths before the fire blooms have even started ticking. Keep that in mind when it happens to your raid, don't take "it's RNG" as an excuse. Sure there are some legitimate "RNG wipes" (though the most common one won't be happening anymore now the patch has hit), but the majority of them are just the result of bad play.

 

Foofer

I think a feral druid is ideal for MT'ing this. A warrior can match a druid in threat, but they wind up sacrificing a ton of HP to do so (same reason I'd feel uncomfortable with a warlock tanking).
We've moved all reflections to within seed range of KJ, casters included. The tank just needs to run to the opposite side . Maybe this only works because we have a warrior spell reflecting while getting them into position, though. Most of the time, the caster adds wind up within blade flurry/cleave/whirlwind range of one of our melee while running them back too.

 

Presarc

We use a warlock tank, and it works out because he's doing just as much damage as the other warlocks (albeit only on Kil'Jaeden, but it helps with 55%-25% timer especially), and we don't waste a spot on tanks other than 1 prot paladin.

 

• Emn

That's how we did it. Melee moved around to on top of the pets, Mages and Warlocks also moved forward. Everyone else was able to stay in their current position. The only other class that seemed to cause some issues moving the reflections back towards KJ was Hunters, but with 2.3.2 released this shouldn't be an issue anymore.

Being the MT healer, I would love for the tank to have more HP. Seeing as we use a DPS Warrior to tank him (purely for melee buffs) he only has 13-14K health. Whilst at some times he did just get rolled by the damage, it was really only a problem when I needed to move, be it dodging meteors or collapsing.

 

Geckothan

How are you handling phase 1 with a single tank? I'm sure I'm missing something here, but the prospect of having 2 hands on a single tank doesn't sound very safe. At present we have a DPS warrior put on a 1h/shield and tank the first hand while our protection paladin tanks the second and our feral tanks the third. I can just picture the tank and his healers getting absolutely obliterated by shadow bolt volleys.

 

Presarc

DPS Warrior with a shield on, Prot Paladin on another, Druid on third. Sometimes we bring a second prot paladin just for better add control. In that case, obviously the second prot paladin is on the third add.

 

• Emn

Prot Paladin, DPS Warrior + Shield, Shaman + Shield. The Shaman's add gets stunned down to 20%, and normally DPS can kill it before anything to painful hits the Shaman.

 

dssurge

So we finally killed this fucker last night pre-"nerf" (more of a fix) and it's probably the funnest fight in all of Sunwell when the fight turns out as intended.

We came back tonight with about an hours worth of tries for a second kill just to get RNG fucked on our add spawns. Casters and Paladin all night, it was a wash. No DR on HoJ spamming Paladin is like twisting the knife. Sure FAPs help a ton, but when you get Paladin/Paladin back to back it's still on CD (we've been destroying the 85 to 55% check by 15-20 seconds). Couple that with getting them on the second or third spawn wave it's it's over. We simply can't keep the add tank up with a full time Shaman and Paladin healer, even with a SP chain dispelling. If either of the healers is targeted with Meteor it's over. This is probably the only complaint I have about the entire encounter anymore.

Fuck. Paladin. Reflections.

On our kill we had Paladin -> Hunter -> Druid which was fairly doable, but getting Paladin post-55% is retarded.


On another subject, when we were learning the fight last night we stumbled upon the realization that Resilience on the MT actually reduces the damage taken from Soul Flay. Assuming you could acquire and gem up a full set of PvP gear for a Feral Druid you would have a pretty ideal tank. Survivability of a Warrior + Thread/Damage of a feral. Go figure.

 

• Morsexy

I've had two "shield errors" on our attempts, both times using intervene. One time with exactly 2 seconds left I intervened in ( I was in defensive stance with firebloom on from <5 seconds to bomb) and I died even though my combat log showed "shield of the blue" -> "lifebloom tick" - >"bomb" and another during a shield hit in that murky 4.5 to 5.0 seconds left until bomb I intervened in and was the only person left alive.

I think the easiest safeguard for when he fireblooms during the collapse is to have an agreed upon shield point, like 4 seconds, and you just have to trust the orb controller to put it up and start moving in from the outer edge around that time.

 

Monique

An additional benefit with using a feral tank is that they can shift out of the mind flay snare to get back in position after a knockback, reducing dps/tps time lost. I've also learnt to use Barkskin when KJ casts the lightning to further reduce the mind flay damage for a short while.

 

◊ Praetorian

On a separate 2.4.3-related note, Darkness->Darts is still very much possible. We had a raidwide instagib immediately following our first Darkness of our very first pull tonight.

 

◊ Kyth

Confirmed, although it was a later darkness and a later shield so we didn't wipe from it.

Officer of <Fusion>
http://www.stratfu.com/ - StratFu: Strategies, Guides, Movies, and Tips for Wrath Raiding

 

Madlax

A few notes:
We're doing this fight hard mode - druid maintank and 1 warrior tank taking care of all reflections.
This works out pretty fine together with a hunter(ok, we actually did it without hunters aswell once)
First target gets skull, 2nd gets cross and we just single em down.

We usually have 1 hunter, 1-2 mages, 2 spriests, 2-3 locks, 1 elem shaman standing at the spawnpoints of the orbs, immediatly focusing them down when they spawn.
The 1st orb spawning ~3 o clock isn't of high importance as everyone can shoot it.
The 2nd orb spawning at ~9 o clock neither.
The 3rd orb is the one we usually shoot down quick cause it tends to fly around else.

Other than that we usually burn through him(as you can see on Conspiracy wwsscoreboard time)


The hard part of this fight was to make all our Karazhan raiding alt scrubs understand that circles of fire on the ground are NOT Flame Wreath. After that it was quite easy in fact.

 

Illundai

I actually feel Paladin reflections are one of the easier ones. We run 7 healers and we just make our sole paladin healer chaindispel the stun, whilst a Druid & Priest keep him up. If we run double Druid instead of 3 Priests, then both Druids keep him up. It's no problem at all.

 

Malm

We use a prot warrior and a feral druid to take care of Sinister Reflections. We use the prot warrior to tank 2 of the Decivers in the start and the Feral tanking the initial target for killing. The feral charge in and taunt one of the decivers off and drag it out of shadow bolt range, after his first Deciver dies, while the raid kill the warriors Deciver.

It's never been a real problem, although in the occasions the warrior hit 10 stacks of volley, it gets a bit hairy if the Decivers are shooting synchronized shadow bolts. We use all our available hot classes to counter the burst damage on the warrior tank.


I've been thinking of changing it around so we kill the warriors 2 Decivers in the beginning to avoid the 10 stacking. But doubt we'll do it since what we are currently doing is working fine.

 

Aurelius

That seems rather risky, no? If you get a string of bad avoidance & shadow bolt volleys then that tank is going to be taking an insane amount of damage. Although, to be honest it seems a lot better than our current "evasion tanking" strategy...which has caused us quite a few wipes. We use two tanks for the encounter (no point in using more than that) - a feral druid to tank KJ and a protection paladin to tank the reflections.

 

Illundai

Just use a fury warrior to tank the first add. Slap on a shield and there you go. Okay you can get unlucky and if the Hand gets a crit off you're pretty much gonna have a wipe, but it's better than using 3 tanks at least.