As Emnity said above, we use Prot paladin, Dps warrior (who tanks KJ) and the Enhance shaman for P1 tanking.

The shaman uses debuffs/buffs so that he cannot be one shot, even on a crit: PvP weapon/shield, Shammy-Rage, Fort Elixir (works with Demon-Slaying, so he gets the benefit over the whole fight), Ironshield, CoW, etc. When he is impossible to be one shot, and a bunch of healers spamming him (including shamans and a priest for Inspiration), its never been a risk.

And it allows for only 1 tank in the raid, the prot paladin for reflections.


edit: So yeah, I was just saying that its better to make sure your tanks cant get one shot, rather than relying on 90% avoidance and a 10% chance to die.

Or you could simply use a Warrior in DPS Gear with a shield and teach your rogues how to have some good consecutive stunning and your warrior how to chain forced aggro styles so it sticks to the warrior when the stun has little breaks.

Rogue1 Cheapshot (builds cp to 5)
on running out
Rogue2 Cheapshot (builds cp to 5)

Interweave Paladin Hammer, Taunt, Mocking Blow etc as you like.

It really isn't as risky as it sounds. I don't know if it's superstition or game mechanics but they seem to shadow bolt way less often when the only one in range of the bolts is the tank (my guess is the former). Regardless, I'm rarely getting stacked above 6-8 before one of the two decivers are being pulled off me.

To help with the damage I disarm as soon as I get them into position and stun the one not being pulled off me when the feral druid charge in to taunt.

Our dps warrior is already tanking the second-to-be-killed mob, so the next down the chain was the shaman. And yes there is a stun rotation, but he can still get a melee hit off post-20%. (and during resists/fuckups/autoattacks that slip out)

To the guilds that are using a DPS Warrior to tank KJ, is the warrior in berserker stance? When Soulflay became 100% threat based we used a Ret Paladin with Imp Righteous Fury (6% less damage taken) to tank KJ, but we found that it was too difficult to keep him alive with only 10-11k hp. Is your dps warrior in defensive stance or some stamina gear?

Also how are you doing the pickup with only 1 Protection Paladin? Do you rely on Misdirects to cover the areas that the paladin can't cover?

Currently we use a Feral Druid and a Protection Paladin for the fight. The druid tanks Soulflay and during the Shadow Spike assists the paladin in tanking the adds. This works well, but even then there are sometimes that picking up the reflections doesn't go perfectly.

We use feral druid on KJ and prot paladin on Adds (with MD onto him).

Honestly, the paladin uses a [Swiftness Potion] if the add spawn in at a super far location but since the raid is in a semi-circle and he is positioned well within that, getting to the adds isn't a problem usually. And RD's long range helps if things go awry.

This is what we do.

Start the fight in Battle with a shield on as the DPS Warr, if you get crit you die. Don't waste time trying to save it. Have a Pally stun it, Mocking blow as the stun expires, have it get KS'd (3-4 point is fine) and as it approaches 25% swap defensive and disarm + taunt. If you can't kill it in the 15 some odd seconds it's stuck to the Warrior, you're doing it wrong.


We've tried having rogues evasion and tried a Shaman + shield technique, but they both failed gloriously.

I tank the first Hand as DPS, all you really need to do is shield block the first hit, after that assuming you're using PVP items in every weapon slot + the healer PVP buff, you're fine coupled with rogue stuns.

I don't know if you'd want to change your strat, but if you breath pre-shield rather than post shield it solves a number of problems, including post-shield darts and most post-shield blooms.

I think ours switches stance depending on whats going on, but he also has a flask of fortitude on, giving him around 14k health. We also allow him to build threat for the first 3 orbs that are cast before anyone else.

This is the bit where it really depends on how far you have decided to spread out your raid. We use the northern part of the room (or the right as you run in). From there everyone is spread out roughly 8 yards, so we use a little less then half the room. We have the melee run around from their positions and sit on top of the pets, Mages and Warlocks move up to KJ. Just from that there is 14-15 people already sitting in one area, the Pally just stands in the middle of the room and has a macro that targets the sinister reflections and casts Avengers Shield on them, then also runs over and judgments the 4th that doesn't get hit, and slowly moves them back towards KJ. 1 Hunter also multishot MD's every time, just as an added precaution.

edit: my maths did some crazy post formatting, so I wrapped it in code tag.

Assuming somehow a healer landed a 6k effective heal the very instant after Consecrate activated the mobs, it still would not pull aggro. Considering all the melee and all the mages/locks are within 10 yards of the paladin, thats around half the raid that can be picked up without any risk at all. Then the adds that spawn from the far healers/hunters can just be Avengers Shielded + MD + JoR + Paladin Taunt.

Just make sure you dont have anything that will make the reflections activate before the paladin runs to them and consecrates, or before he throws his shield. IE no ret paladin consecrate, no rogue blade flurry, no fire elementals, no multishot, no tab-targeting for shield orbs (/tar shield orb), no being retarded, etc.

I still have yet to find a good reason to make a Prot Warrior tank him, I just don't see the benefit from it? If you run a triple hunter group - like most guilds do now, I presume, if not they should start because it's incredibly powerful - you want a feral regardless. The problem is the Feral will be extremely limited in his use since he won't be able to DPS KJ properly as Shred won't be usable most of the time.
Sure it's doable, but if you have a dual warglaives chasing the tank's threat I have doubts that a Prot Warrior without Revenge or Shield Slam (as you're going to want to Dual Wield, I presume) will be able to keep ahead of threat. Perhaps it's doable, but a Feral Druid in full DPS gear does about 2500 TPS steady whilst doing 1000 DPS. I'm not quite sure what a Warrior can do, but on our first kill our Dual Warglaive Warrior was 5k threat behind on the Druid by execute spamming with Recklessness.

Anyway, to my point. I'm still convinced Feral + Pala is the optimal combo for this fight; the only times we've used a Prot Warrior was to do the Dragoncontrolling, but we use a mage for that now. Sure they take less damage, but we usually use 2 Resto Druids and if they both roll full HoTs on him it doesnt matter if its 9000 per Soulflay or 8500, it's gonna heal it up regardless. And a Prot Paladin can pick up all the adds by himself just fine, so I don't see the need to run a Prot Warrior for that either.

For the guilds that use a Protection Warrior, do you run a Feral druid too? I'd love to see your raidsetups, since our Prot Warriors are wanting to tank him and I'm not really in favor, since it will be a logistic nightmare for me to setup the raid around a tanking warrior.

Anyway, about the fight. We killed him yesterday again, but we wiped at least twice due to what was said to be 'fixed'. The first time since we started this fight that I saw him do it twice in one fight. Darkness -> Darts two times in a row, it was horrible. Funny how the first one didn't wipe us (we buff after the shield on the first one) but the second did (we buff before here).
I noticed him parrying & dodging a lot less than last week, but that's probably Onyxia Deep Breaths more; it was kinda weird though, considering I'm standing right infront of him so I get the most parries.

We actually use a feral, a protadin and a prot warrior. The prot warrior helps the protadin with reflections, and the feral wears full DPS gear in bear form and just beasts KJ the entire fight. The warrior also is the main dragon controller, and we only use one hunter, but 2 melee groups.

A protection warrior in DPS gear will do great damage and threat. Our DPS can't come close to catching up and they do not hold back in phase 1. My stats from a near-kill shot (we finally got him last night, WWS not up)
- 2460 TPS (Link)
- 1436 DPS (Link)
- 16% damage mitigation from defensive stance
- Improved Solarian's battle shout for melee
- Maintains sunder armor
- 16k HP buffed with 4% DOT damage reduction from pvp gear
- Last stand & shield wall lifesavers
- Eats the majority of knockbacks instead of rogues

If your numbers are correct, it sounds like a feral will put out similar TPS but less DPS. From this point it's just a matter of buffs/debuffs. Do you need your tank to provide LOTP/FF or Bshout/Sunder?

Additionally, I would suggest placing the tank in the center of your raid and have nobody standing behind him. This serves two purposes:
1) When the tank is knocked back, he will not share/eat fire bloom
2) If you make this "empty" spot the designated shield orb safe zone, you are unlikely to have Armageddon landing there during the bombs

After the shadow spikes are over you can also have your melee clump up and use Bladeflury/Cleave/Whirlwind/Sweeping strikes to help burn down the adds while keeping KJ as their main target. They can stay in for about 10 seconds before dodging out to avoid flame dart or fire bloom.

I really like warlock tanking KJ. He has a very negative attitude towards me. Always punting me with firebloom into people... that bastard
Most fun fight to heal ever!

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What are people running healing wise for this? This fight seems designed for a priest to heal. I don't think anyone can even compare in healing tools to handle the bursts that come after the 1st shield when all the timers align.

Well, they are less durable. They will have less hp, take more damage (compared to warrior D stance), and no emergency cooldowns. They do receive more healing but die more easily in any healing gap. While it may have been our fault, we had a warlock tank die on quite a few attempts in our early learning. Once we switched to a defensive warrior tanking they noted that it was easier to deal with and they could focus more on the raid.

Also, since the warlock does not have blessing of salvation they will more threat-limited on sinister reflections (unless you buff/remove BoS). Depending on your raid makeup this can be important. Another important point is that a melee tank will eat the vast majority of the knockbacks. If you use a warlock tank, your top melee DPS are going to get knocked around instead. This lets the melee DPS do more and makes the "melee tank" DPS appear artificially lower.

The DPS requirements for the phase transitions may seem hard at first, but when the fight is learned and people stay alive and get the haste buff it is not too bad. At that point we decided that tank survivability and raid healing was more important than the DPS.

We've made it almost the 55% stage so far, still lacking a bit on DPS to get there before the third Darkness occurs.

My question is about resto shamans. Chain heal here seems to be a bad idea, since most people are spread out too far to make good use of it along with its cast time. Of course, it would be a good idea on the melee that are clumped up, but as far as the ranged groups it seems to me that lesser healing wave would be better to keep people up through the burst damage. Our shamans REFUSE to use anything but chain heal. They all says its too mana efficient to not use and won't use anything else except for it. Its pretty annoying. So I'm wondering how other shamans who heal this fight go about healing?

A lot of guilds do it differently. You can watch a lot of videos and see the shamans exclusively spamming LHW, and a lot of shamans also exclusively use chain heal. Ours use a mix, but usually about 80% chain heal. Chain heal is really strong below 55% when meteors start. The reason for that being that usually, the people that get low, are low because they are clumping. Someone gets firebloom, then a meteor spawns on them, then they move over and hit like 3 people with their firebloom to avoid the meteor. You chain heal that person and it can bounce to anyone they're hitting with their bloom.

All in all though, the damage on this fight is really based on how good your raid is at dealing with the damage. I think on our most recent kill the overall damage taken throughout the fight was about half of what it was on our first kill. You just have to keep practicing until people learn how to deal with every situation. It's not as much about the healers as it is about everyone else doing their best about avoiding damage.

An important thing that really helped our guild was telling people to stand on top of someone else in 55-25 if you have to move. When you think to yourself "spread out" when you have firebloom, and you get a meteor on yourself, your natural instinct is probably going to be to put yourself equidistant from about 5 players, and as a result hit them all with firebloom, which is obviously very bad. The best thing you can do when you get a firebloom and you have to move is go stand directly on top of the person next to you, that way you are only hitting one other person with it, instead of 2/3/4+. Plus, this person can then move away from you, and now you have a safe spot where you are hitting nobody.

They're correct. Chain heal is still the best mana/heal spell Shamans have. Added bonus of course if its jumping between targets. If you're on the verge of hitting P4, then theirs a pretty good chance that chain heal will start to jump around because of the amount of movement required to dodge meteors/collapse throughout the rest of the fight.

E: Great minds think alike

Yeah, I can see how when meteors being CH would increase in value, but right now where my guild is in the fight there is hardly any clumping except for melee (and for shields/haste buff of course). On most attempts we have people die early to firebloom/darts/shadowbolts/etc. and it makes me angry seeing them die with a "CH was inc" excuse from a shaman. I understand CH is a good spell and all that, but to refuse to use any other spell completely is bad IMO.

Thanks for the insight.

Couple of things that can help out with the early phases:

- Make sure people have made macros to target the orbs! They can be targeted before they are visible, which makes a huge difference to raid healing.
- This part is dependent on how you're healing line up looks, and what classes you have doing what. For our first kill we used 2 Druids and 1 Priest. Each target that got fire bloom would get 2 x rejuv + renew, which was more then enough to keep them alive. Shamans concentrated on the people who were taking damage from other things. Just something to think about if people are dying just to fire bloom.
- Darts are iffy. You know they're coming, just have to work on keeping everyone at a reasonable level of health. Healthstones/fire pots/battlemasters trinkets help out alot.