The biggest limitation we ran into is actually getting our melee their buffs. With unleashed rage being only 20 yards, you really need 2 enh shamans to make it work. Otherwise a few of your melee is going to be missing out on the extra ap.
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe." -Albert Einstein
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)
We use three tanks and eight healers as outlined in our guide. However, our prot warrior is the primary controller with a mage and/or resto druid helping out only at later stages. Usually the prot paladin can handle reflections alone, the warrior assists, debuffs and zips around the room intervening etc (he's also an engineer) to get to orbs quickly. I'm not sure why you'd want a mage as primary controller if you've got a prot warrior in the raid.
We use three tanks and eight healers as outlined in our guide. However, our prot warrior is the primary controller with a mage and/or resto druid helping out only at later stages. Usually the prot paladin can handle reflections alone, the warrior assists, debuffs and zips around the room intervening etc (he's also an engineer) to get to orbs quickly. I'm not sure why you'd want a mage as primary controller if you've got a prot warrior in the raid.
I'm pretty sure the idea of going with 8 healers and 3 tanks comes from IS But I think it was overlooked that you dont use a dps'er to control orbs. The reason why we are using a mage + a warrior for controlling is because we collapse right after the orb got activated and we would otherwise often not make it, I dont believe our warrior has engineering neither.
The reason why we are using a mage + a warrior for controlling is because we collapse right after the orb got activated and we would otherwise often not make it, I dont believe our warrior has engineering neither.
No point collapsing if it stops the controller getting to the dragon Don't collapse blindly, ensure the controller can get to the orb - if you're relying on intervenes for this it's common sense for someone to stay near the orb. Communication on voice helps a lot here.
If you simply can't cope with a prot warrior controller then you need to rebalance the raid, using up a DPSer as a controller from the get-go when you have a tank wasting a slot is just inefficient.
Engineering isn't a must-have but it does help if you get the faraway orbs. How is your raid positioned? If you're spread so that one orb is inefficiently far away then that won't help. If you're positioned correctly then you should always be able to get there, have your controller co-ordinate with your outlying members etc.
We just started KJ last week, we're getting to P4 fairly consistently now, but one problem we're having is handling priest Sinister Reflections. What we've been doing is having a shaman or other priest nearby spam dispel/purge on a single DPS target to remove the Renews, and single target them down. Obviously it's taking a lot longer than just AOE, and I was wondering if there's an easier way to handle Priest reflections so that they die faster. It's usually 3 warlocks and 1 mage on AOE, and we're doing the same with single target on Priests. Should we just continue with what we're doing, or have more ranged DPS in range help with single target... or maybe something completely different?
Quintessa - We have either 3 or 4 ranged dps on it, depending on who we have around at the time. If you're using a feral tank, they can prepare to switch over and help burst the priests as they get low, or assign another dps of some kind to help on single-target spawns.
Something else that we do, though, is have our Prot Warrior on the adds Shield Slam the first renew off, and have a Shadow Priest pick up a second if it appears. I'm not sure what kind of setup you have, but you might want to ask a Shadow Priest to put a SW:P on each add as it's focused for Misery, as well.
Quintessa - We have either 3 or 4 ranged dps on it, depending on who we have around at the time. If you're using a feral tank, they can prepare to switch over and help burst the priests as they get low, or assign another dps of some kind to help on single-target spawns.
Something else that we do, though, is have our Prot Warrior on the adds Shield Slam the first renew off, and have a Shadow Priest pick up a second if it appears. I'm not sure what kind of setup you have, but you might want to ask a Shadow Priest to put a SW:P on each add as it's focused for Misery, as well.
We use a prot pally on the reflections (no feral druid in the guild ... ) and our normal prot warrior dual wield dps tanks KJ, so we can't utilize those tips. I think what we'll end up doing is just have more ranged dps near the adds help out with them. But from the tone of your post I'm assuming we should just expect to take longer to kill priest adds than the other classes?
If you're not going to be AOEing a given set of adds, a general rule is that reflections should be positioned such that as many ranged DPS are in range of them as possible. All ranged DPS should have the priority of : Orbs --> Reflections --> K'J.
So yes, all your ranged DPS should be assisting the same mob and DPSing them down one by one with someone assigned to purging the current assist(usually a nearby spriest). Your enhance shaman should also be watching K'J for renews since the priests can cast renew on K'J himself. If every ranged DPS is truly assisting on the same mob, those reflections will die fast enough for the raid to still meet the DPS benchmark on K'J.
We have the same locks/prot paladin killing them as always, but when it's a priest call our Shadow Priest tab dots and tab dispels them. Your priest will get a feel for it. The frequency of their renew depends on how low the target is, or so it seems.
So basically, they'll spawn and AoE will begin killing them as usual, but with the priest dots in too (nice for shadow weaving/misery for SoC also). The priest goes from tab dotting to tab dispelling when the renews start at about 50% of their life. The enhancement shaman takes care of the renews on KJ. KJ wont get any renews if it's the 85% reflections, but he will get some on 55% once he is taken down a bit, and he will get a hell of a lot at a 25% call. Purge spam will never let one tick however.
When we get a set of priest adds we simply tell everyone to focus on them. I drag them to our usual spot (close to KJ, middle of the raid) and get about 8 seconds of consecration in before I call for aoe. At that point locks start seeding, warriors/rogues pop their SS/BF, hunters, mages, elemental shamans and shadowpriest all singletarget them down. Only our ret pala and enhancement shaman stay on KJ to keep up judgements and to purge any renews. Between arcane shots from hunters, purge from the elemental shaman, dispells from the shadowpriests and spellsteals from the mages it's very unlikely any renew stays up for more than a few seconds.
For us the key seemed to be to just get them down as fast as possible. The longer they're up the more renews they start casting, the more they heal, the longer they stay up and then eventually a new set of orbs spawn, ranged dps has to switch to kill them and it just keeps dragging on forever.
The biggest limitation we ran into is actually getting our melee their buffs. With unleashed rage being only 20 yards, you really need 2 enh shamans to make it work. Otherwise a few of your melee is going to be missing out on the extra ap.
Our melee group is 3 rogues, 1 warrior, and 1 enhance. The rogues and enhance stand on top of each other, the warrior spreads to the left with the tank to the right of the cluster. If the shaman gets fire bloom, he takes the warrior's spot and the warrior spreads more to the left. If the rogues get a fire bloom and no cloak, they'll either take the position of the shaman earlier or stand on the tank.
The dragon can obviously just breathe once and hit all of the melee so there's some additional benefits to doing this. It can also be a big hassle if you can't trust your melee to be quick on the spot.
We have the same locks/prot paladin killing them as always, but when it's a priest call our Shadow Priest tab dots and tab dispels them. Your priest will get a feel for it. The frequency of their renew depends on how low the target is, or so it seems.
So basically, they'll spawn and AoE will begin killing them as usual, but with the priest dots in too (nice for shadow weaving/misery for SoC also). The priest goes from tab dotting to tab dispelling when the renews start at about 50% of their life. The enhancement shaman takes care of the renews on KJ. KJ wont get any renews if it's the 85% reflections, but he will get some on 55% once he is taken down a bit, and he will get a hell of a lot at a 25% call. Purge spam will never let one tick however.
This is what we ended up doing and it worked extremely well for us. With the spriest tab dotting and dispelling (I believe also he was using mass dispels on the adds at 50% and 25%) the priest reflections went down extremely fast, and actually seemed easier than shaman or rogue adds.
Having a load of frustrating P4/P5 wipes recently - a few 1-4% wipes here. I think our dragon strategy in P5 is all wrong since we invariably lose 2-3 people at each shield because of an armageddon landing 0.2s after the shield goes. Atm, we have 2 dragons active in P5 and 1 shields, the other uses its breath. Short of just "shield later" and run out earlier, does anyone have some advice to avoid losing people like this - because it's getting very un-fun.
Having a load of frustrating P4/P5 wipes recently - a few 1-4% wipes here. I think our dragon strategy in P5 is all wrong since we invariably lose 2-3 people at each shield because of an armageddon landing 0.2s after the shield goes. Atm, we have 2 dragons active in P5 and 1 shields, the other uses its breath. Short of just "shield later" and run out earlier, does anyone have some advice to avoid losing people like this - because it's getting very un-fun.
We have one dragon shield as usual and use the second dragons best judgment as to whether he will use a shield after the first runs out. If meteors are looking to land as soon as your first shield is going to run out, just use a second shield straight after. In our kill this week we did this on every darkness in p5 just to play it safe, meaning we are out of dragons after 4 darknesses. With 25 (or near enough) alive, you should be able to kill it before the 5th. If it looks like you won't, just single shield the last one to extend the fight another 15 seconds.
Our melee group is 3 rogues, 1 warrior, and 1 enhance. The rogues and enhance stand on top of each other, the warrior spreads to the left with the tank to the right of the cluster. If the shaman gets fire bloom, he takes the warrior's spot and the warrior spreads more to the left. If the rogues get a fire bloom and no cloak, they'll either take the position of the shaman earlier or stand on the tank.
The dragon can obviously just breathe once and hit all of the melee so there's some additional benefits to doing this. It can also be a big hassle if you can't trust your melee to be quick on the spot.
We run one melee group (Fury, Ret, Enh, Rogue, Rogue). We have the enhancement shaman (me) stand 20 yards to the left of the tank. Ret and Rogue stand on top of each other 10 yards to my right, Fury and Rogue 10 yards to my left. If one of the 4 flanking me get bloomed, they run on top of me or 10 yards farther away, depending on whether or not I have bloom. It's worked well for us so far.
We run one melee group (Fury, Ret, Enh, Rogue, Rogue). We have the enhancement shaman stand 20 yards to the left of the tank. Ret and Rogue stand on top of each other 10 yards to my right, Fury and Rogue 10 yards to my left. If one of the 4 flanking me get bloomed, they run on top of me or 10 yards farther away, depending on whether or not I have bloom. It's worked well for us so far.
Unleashed Rage has a 20 yard range. So does Battle Shout. Your DPS Warrior and Enhancement Shaman need to be in the melee spots directly to the left and right of the tank if you are having your melee use that kind of formation, if you want all of the melee to get the buffs.
Unleashed Rage has a 20 yard range. So does Battle Shout. Your DPS Warrior and Enhancement Shaman need to be in the melee spots directly to the left and right of the tank if you are having your melee use that kind of formation, if you want all of the melee to get the buffs.
The tank is not in our group. Nobody is more than 20 yards from anyone else in the melee group.
You said that your Enhancement Shaman stands 20 yards to the left of the tank, and your Fury Warrior and a Rogue stand 10 yards to the right of the tank. 20 yards in one direction + 10 yards in the opposite direction = 30 yards apart. Fire Bloom has a 10 yard radius, so each group is definitely positioned at least 10 yards away from each other. Obviously, because Kil'Jaeden's hit box is circular, even if there are four points which are 11 yards distant from each other along the circumference of the circle, the distance between, for instance, Points A and D (which in this example are the two most distant points along the circle's circumference, with two equidistant points in between them) is not necessarily 33 yards distant. However, they will definitely be more than 20 yards apart.
That is probably an overly complicated way of saying: you can only fit all five melee in one group into that kind of positioning if the DPS Warrior and Enhancement Shaman are standing on top of each other on the side of the tank which has an additional melee 10 yards further, or, alternatively, if the DPS warrior moves to a central location every time he battle shouts.
You said that your Enhancement Shaman stands 20 yards to the left of the tank, and your Fury Warrior and a Rogue stand 10 yards to the right of the tank. 20 yards in one direction + 10 yards in the opposite direction = 30 yards apart. Fire Bloom has a 10 yard radius, so each group is definitely positioned at least 10 yards away from each other. Obviously, because Kil'Jaeden's hit box is circular, even if there are four points which are 11 yards distant from each other along the circumference of the circle, the distance between, for instance, Points A and D (which in this example are the two most distant points along the circle's circumference, with two equidistant points in between them) is not necessarily 33 yards distant. However, they will definitely be more than 20 yards apart.
That is probably an overly complicated way of saying: you can only fit all five melee in one group into that kind of positioning if the DPS Warrior and Enhancement Shaman are standing on top of each other on the side of the tank which has an additional melee 10 yards further, or, alternatively, if the DPS warrior moves to a central location every time he battle shouts.
If you re-read what he said.. he's doing it just fine. Remember, this is the enhancement shaman's perspective.
Originally Posted by Krish
We run one melee group (Fury, Ret, Enh, Rogue, Rogue). We have the enhancement shaman stand 20 yards to the left of the tank. Ret and Rogue stand on top of each other 10 yards to my right, Fury and Rogue 10 yards to my left.
One of our hunters is complaining about pets getting hit with blooms, and none of the common positions seem to really address a "safe slot" for pets to be where they don't get hit by adjacent melee bloom.
What do people do to address this, especially those with triple hunters? I saw in the Inner Sanctum video, they somehow got all the pets to go all the way right up to KJ, and appeared to be out of bloom range.
Chain heal and COH tend to keep mine up, but if it dips below 50% I pull him back to me or put him on passive somewhere around KJ where he won't get hit.
Tank is not in the melee group for shouts/UR. Krish has a working strat for melee positioning.
Ah yeah, my mistake. I was confused by the wording, and because we went through a positioning problem with our melee buffs it was easy to misread in such a way as to make it sound like he was as well.
One of our hunters is complaining about pets getting hit with blooms, and none of the common positions seem to really address a "safe slot" for pets to be where they don't get hit by adjacent melee bloom.
What do people do to address this, especially those with triple hunters? I saw in the Inner Sanctum video, they somehow got all the pets to go all the way right up to KJ, and appeared to be out of bloom range.
Our KJ positioning diagram has "pets" as one of the melee slots. We make that slot the position that is in a direct line between the collapse point and KJ. We raid with 4 hunters and 4 melee (plus tank), so it's pretty important for us to give pets their own special place.
Our pets are stacked on the Arms Warrior as there is no one else near him and its a 1 in 5 chance each Firebloom that he'll get hit by it. This means on average the pets are fine 80% of the time. The 20% of the time that they are getting hit the hunters will just pull them back if they're in danger of dying and arent getting CH/CoH bounces. The Arms Warr is in the same group as the hunters (as he seems to do ~1800dps regardless of group - don't ask, we cant figure it out either) so the pets are getting CoH at that point too normally.
So far I think we've had 1 or 2 pet deaths, and its generall because hunters are sleeping.
07/30/08, 6:12 PM
But I think it was overlooked that you dont use a dps'er to control orbs. The reason why we are using a mage + a warrior for controlling is because we collapse right after the orb got activated and we would otherwise often not make it, I dont believe our warrior has engineering neither.
