Like every other ability Kil'Jaeden has available, he has to 'choose' to use Armageddon. Like every other fight where the boss has to 'choose' to use his abilities, this can lead to some wide variation in the actual frequency of the abilities. Judging by the video, they are perhaps getting a lighter load of Armageddon than could be called strictly average (particularly in the 55-25% phase, in fact, while you were claiming it was the 25-0% phase), however, it is nowhere near your claims that they were bugging or exploiting the fight:

Why would you go to the time of making a video of an encounter and then upload it to youtube, with its 64x40 resolution or whatever. It is not worth my sanity to watch your video.

This entire discussion is thoroughly pointless. You think they are exploiting the fight because their WWS shows a low number of hits, when it becomes immediately evident watching their video that this is not the case. Why are you still arguing that they are getting a different version of the fight than anyone else?

Kil'Jaeden uses his abilities when he feels like using them. Sometimes he will Flame Dart or Fire Bloom immediately after a Darkness. Sometimes he will meteor you more frequently. Sometimes you will wipe to an unfortunate combination of abilities. Run back, buff up, and do it again.

Wait wait, you MOVED AWAY from the fire? That's cheating!

So how tough is Kil'Jaeden really in terms of a DPS check. We are learning phase 3 and tried a warrior tank (2000-2200 tps) and now a druid tank (missing some dps kit 1500-1700 tps). After some of the replies in here about there tanks with 2500 tps I immediatly got worried. But the tanks in our guild showed me this wws of a recent sk-gaming kill: WWS Loading... Sammyjankis produced 1376 tps who is using a druid tank apparantly in full tanking gear and 8 healers and they killed him just fine. Was I just panicking and arent the dps requirements nearly as bad as I was led to believe, cause I dont really notice any dpsers on Kil'Jaeden doing exceptional dps, and its still a kill.

Can any of you guys help me with what we really need? Do we need a tank doing 2k+ tps? And if tps/dps output of the tank is less important are we better of with a prot or a feral.

edit: I just checked the wws from SK, apparantly theyre Soul Flay tank acts as both Soul Flay and Reflection tank, thats something I havent heard before. Any other guilds that are doing this?

In regards to threat, it honestly doesnt matter. You have p2 to build threat for the rest of the fight if your tanks threat is low. Our tanks threat is good (Blood Frenzy warrior, dual wielding, MS, tactical mastery, KJ specific spec), but we still wait until 3 shield orbs spawn in p2 before the melee/mages/locks attack KJ. The hunters and SP's usually have him at around 87% by then, ready for the rest of the dps to go nuts for p3.

If you find yourself having threat issues later on in the fight, just wait for another couple shield orbs before you begin the race (p3). Id focus on getting more dps out of your tank, either by the tank's spec and gear, or by the amount of tanks you use.

Twins room would be a far better kiting location, and much more similar to Vael's room :P

Aside from the dragon thing.

If you have all 5 shamans in the raid earth shock at the same time it interrupts his abilities. The trick is counting down with vent lag so that they all hit at EXACTLY the same time (oh and they each need to use different ranks). Get this down and you can avoid meteors, darkness, and even firebloom or flame darts. Wish we could stop soul flay but haven't managed to get around that yet.

I've never done KJ, and never will, and really am not raiding anymore.

But I know enough to endorse this strategy with 3 thumbs up.

We use 8 healers and put out some of the highest dps so far on KJ and our feral tank sucks and barely does 1300 tps. We don't wait around for anything so people should probably learn to manage their cds better if they are ripping. I can only remember a rogue ripping a few times (citing vanish as being broken on KJ) and occasionally a hunter who is watching tv while smashing macro.

If you were using a warrior before and that was fine for your raid makeup wise and stuff you should use it because he does more threat (I know I just said it shouldn't matter) plus he has imp def stance, last stand and shield wall. Not sure what phase3 is (I felt that phase3 was the last 25%) but if you mean 85%-55%-25% burn then it is a pretty big dps check because there are shield orbs and reflections with some movement involved. I would certainly say the hardest part about the fight is having the dps to meet the timers. That's where we struggled the most and vacillated between 7 and 8 healers which is something you may want to consider if you can't ever seem to meet the requirements. Your physical dps really need to be using demonslaying on every attempt or you're just making it harder for yourself.

Just remember that the hardest part of the fight is going to be 40%-25% and a lot of guilds (including mine) blow most lusts during the 55% shadow spike. Then, after your last shield KJ has to be at at least 31% and then you'll prolly need a double lust on melee or you won't make it. Then you would have to assess why your dps sucks; threat, reflections/orbs too slow, missing hastes, not potting, bad makeup etc.

Did any of you notice the bug / "exploit" ( hard to reproduce intentionally ) where you get all four shield orbs active from p1 ?
It happens if the raid wipes at ~24-25%, meaning that Kalec has empowered the orbs but the raid is dead ( usually because he is casting a 3rd darkness, but dots still trigger p5 ) and KJ despawns shortly thereafter, however, the orbs remain empowered for the next try. It has happend to us quite a lot when we were learning the fight and dps just wasn't quite enough for the transition p4->p5.
When we first noticed it, collective "lols" were in order, but we decided to play the fight the way it was intended to be played and did not use a Dragon earlier then we were supposed to.

It happens when you wipe on transition. Specifically right when he finishes casting shadow spikes. It's pretty easy to reproduce if you really try to.

Here is a a video of the bug in action from last night. This particular attempt was a wipe prior to Darkness since our back-up MT was dead but everyone in the raid, except myself and a warlock, went to camp at the shield.

You'll notice the shield is applied 1.9 seconds before Darkness is finished casting and about 2 or 3 people get the Shield of the Blue buff shortly thereafter (everyone else received it when the shield was applied). As KJ is doing the actual damage from Darkness the buff clears from everyone except three people and then is instantly reapplied. But everyone dies in this split second.

The Shield of the Blue buff itself is on a four second timer, so it should not have to refresh itself until it "expires". However, this would not happen until two seconds after Darkness finished since the shield went up two seconds prior to KJ finishing the Darkness cast. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to who gets to the keep the buff and who it mysteriously disappears from as KJ is exploding out the damage.

KJ_Bug.wmv - FileFront.com (I suggest downloading it so you can see the raid frames)

And you still don't get it? We don't exploit or bug KJ, you got trolled.
Quit trying to deface us here because you don't like us, if you don't understand RNG you don't need to be here wasting peoples' time.

For the guilds running only 2 tanks (Feral KJ tank, Prot Pally adds), what do you use that extra raid slot for? Do you bump up to 8 healers, or bring 16 DPS? I'm pondering the idea of not bringing our Prot Warrior, but since we use him as our second "dragon driver" it would seem that any extra DPS we pick up would be forced to take over as "dragon driver" thus mitigating most of the benefit. At the moment, it would seem to be more practical to just have our Prot Warrior respec to some MS+Blood Frenzy+Dual Wield+Tactical Mastery build, so that he can at least do somewhat decent DPS and contribute a nice debuff while not offtanking or "dragon driving."

We've found the best non-tank Dragon controllers to be Mages. We take 8 Healers and our Feral/Prot Warrior + Prot Pally, and have a Mage be the second controller. On nights where our Prot Warrior can't make it, we simply take 2 Mages over 1.

Seems like it would be better to just not use the Prot Warrior and bring an Arms Slam/blood frenzy warrior (or have the warrior respec). A DPS warrior can tank the initial add just fine with proper taunt-chaining/stuns.

We run with 2 tanks and bump up to 8 healers. Our mage controls dragons, so we end up with about 14.5 DPS (he still gets to DPS for all of shadow spikes). I control the second dragon post-25% as a resto shaman, since there's less raid damage going out at that point.

e: We use a rogue to tank the first add, evasion + chain stuns with everyone nuking it, we haven't wiped to the rogue dying in a long while.

Currently we are having plans to go in to kil'jaeden running 8 healers and 3 tanks (1 prot warrior assisting on reflections and 2nd controller, 1 feral tanking kj & 1 prot paladin for the reflections). I wanted to know if there is any guild out there that uses a similar setup and can verify its even possible with only 14 dps (1 mage is dragon controller aswell so not a full 14)

Strongly agree with Natural. To add, we tried exactly the same three-tank system and had almost a month of essentially constant failure. After replacing the protection warrior, we had the KJ kill in three more raid nights.

We use 3 tanks (feral, prot war, pally), 7 healers, but also 2 melee groups
If you use 3 tanks you must have good dps on KJ, which means melee stacking, but also have enough ranged to handle orbs. For our first kill we had 4 rogues and 2 enh shamans which made the 55-25 fairly easy dps wise even with 3 tanks. The prot war also provided battleshout. We still use 3 tanks and 2 melee groups today.

I know our kill 2 weeks ago had so few meteors (two from 25% to dead) it was really abnormal as we normally get a large amount as opposed to that, needless to say it was an insanely quick and clean kill. However as for a bug or an exploit I really doubt there is either.

I've also experienced the issue of being in the shield some time before darkness, running around inside it, and dying, however this was on a Tauren Shaman, never on my own char, my Draenei.

How do you space your melee with that many in the raid? I would think that would be somewhat problematic with fire blooms. Also do you use a feral or a lock to tank KJ? With a feral that's 11 people fighting for spots in melee range.

We are currently using 8 melee - 2 Enh, 2 Rogue, 2 dps warriors (MS + fury), 1 ret paladin and the feral tank who tanks reflections when they're up

The rogues already have to stand on top of each other and cloak off fire blooms, the melee is spread out completely around KJ. I'd be interested to hear how people manage to fit that many melee in there or more and dealing with the fire bloom, do you have melee that get it run out?

Other than that, do melee ever dps the reflections, or is it just ranged that should take care of them. How long should they take to die usually, and should they be killed right away or just sometime before next ones come up?

Our feral tanks KJ. We have our feral, prot war, and prot pally all stand on the same spot (they move for reflections) Then we have the 7 remaining melee (3 rog 2 dps war 2 enh shaman) spread out 10 yd from each other around the circle. His hit box is big enough so the rest of the melee can be out of fire bloom range of each other. With this setup, the melee does not have to move for blooms, and meteors is easily avoided by melee. The rogues and fury war do 2400+ dps each and the other 3 hits around 2k, so 55-25 is fairly easy. As for multiple blooms on tanks, pom usually takes care of that, plus they have a large hp pool.

I am usually the rogue thats standing directly opposite the collapse spot, but with cloak vanish improved sprint and watching the timers, its never been a problem missing the shield.