After 2 weeks of attempts ( 4 nights ), my guild is still stuck on the same old problems:

1. firebloom/flame darts right before the call for clumping on darkness.

2. or the opposite, ie. those 2 abilities right after darkness when we are in the midst of spreading out.

Any advice on how to deal with these scenarios? Every time these happen, we will inevitably lose 3-5 people and it just crumbles from that point onwards.

We tried to tweak positioning, assign the people with fireblooms a spot behind the dragon to run to and not aoe the raid while clumping, try to time the clumping timing so that the abilities will not coincide etc. and sometimes the flame darts will just come and screw us over. Its just not working

Do you clump for breaths when the dragon orb first comes up? If you get a haste breath at this point, the buff should be up enough to prevent the movement impairment effect of darts before the following darkness. Also helps to call out the darkness timer to get people moving ahead of time. Blessing of Freedom also helps. If you get fire bloom during a clump that player simply has to be aware and move away from the group. We have all bloom victims wait where they're standing while the rest clump up, then have them move into the bubble a few seconds before explosion.

As for darts after an explosion, assuming your dragon hasted the pile, this shouldn't be too devastating; COH/chain heals come to mind if needed, along with Revitalize if you were able to get that off. Can't say much for blooms right after as I haven't seen them that often, but at this point your raid should be getting pretty good with moving back into position, facilitated again by haste breath.

During the encounter, there's a knock-back if you try and walk too close to KJ. Does anyone know if this knock-back still occurs during the actual casting of Darkness of a Thousand Souls or if the knock-back applies to the dragon as well the other raid members?

Yes, I can confirm that the knock-back still happens during the casting of Darkness of a Thousand Souls on raid members at least.

Yea, we did some testing of this tonight. He knocks players back, but the dragon is not affected by it. I had this crazy idea where you could place the shield in the very center of the room on top of KJ and have everyone walk forward after being spread out circularly around him, but the shield is only slightly bigger than the knock-back radius. It should be hard to get 25 people to do it perfectly every time.

It wouldn't really benefit you much to do it if you could. Being forced to centralize your raid so much really benefits the healing as you can place healers in range of the entire raid quite easily. An interesting idea however.

You shouldn't be using any Bloodlusts before 55%. You'll want them for the 55->25% burn. We're just using a single controller as far as I know. We only haste the entire raid on the first orb if it's near side.

You need two controllers to ensure the haste condition that you want.

It's not a bad idea to use bloodlusts/heroisms to artificially force phase transitions while learning just so you can leg up sustaining the fight longer and maximizing learning time across the various phases. Otherwise, the 55->25 stretch will eventually be your target region for lusting as it is the most difficult DPS check.

While learning, we burned every bloodlust at 85%. After we got to under 55% couple of times, we started to use 1 bloodlust in melee group at 85% and use the rest at 55% (warlocks, hunters, second on melee). The DPS checks are easy as long as everyone is alive. We only have melee stack for 1 breath and hunters for another. Of course, after the shield we all try to get both of the breaths and usually melee + closest ranged can get another breath before the second shield.

Having tried KJ now for 3 evenings and getting him down to ~30%, we have kind of troubles with the Shield Orbs.

We have 3 Warlocks at one side of our raid and Hunters at the other side, responsible for killing the orbs at whatever side they spawn.

Now we have a "dps-loss" through the fact that the "orb-killers" use a macro to target them and shoot at them. But they claim that its hard for them to see if the orb is in range or not and therefore target sometimes orbs they cant shoot at.

They say the only way to see if the orbs are in range would be if they change camera-optic to check "the sky", but then not being able to see if a meteor will drop on them.

Is there a macro which targets the orb only if its in range or how you folks solve that problem?

The 3 of us locks are spread out so at least one of us is in range of an orb. We also have most ranged DPS them as well. I only really use the macro when I'm running back into position to throw a quick CoA (they almost always come immediately after a bomb). Back in position I just select them manually since I'm at the back and have a pretty good view of everything. I've thought about using something like /targetnearestenemy as part of my macro, but I figured it'd be less effective since KJ or images could be potential targets.

As for dealing with armageddons, KJ targets you shortly before casting it, so I'll check the ground around me to see if I have to move or not if I have my camera tilted up.

We use 2 controllers, but breaths aren't guaranteed for every orb that becomes available. With the way we're positioned there's a "far orb" where the dragon simply won't have time to make it to the group spot before darts/blooms so only the melee group up for breaths and everyone else spreads back out. The dragon then goes around breathing on the rest. Blessing of Freedom is used for bomb collapse if anyone needs it.

Bloodlusts/heroisms are used at the 55% mark for added DPS since our ranged will also be preoccupied with 3 orbs, not to mention moving out of armageddons. Breaths are pretty key for getting through 85->55.

We had this problem until it was pointed out to the controller of the far orb that there is no cooldown on the dragon's blink. Unless you are collapsing along a far wall, it should be no more than 2 blinks to get to the collapse spot. We use 2 mages for controllers and have them positioned in between the 2 orbs they are responsible for so that they just blink to whichever orb was activated, then blink the dragon to the collapse spot for breaths.

The duration of shadow spike + associated animations/speech is longer than the cooldown of the abilities. So no matter what time he is pushed over, they would have all reset and are usable at his disposal. In actual fact, he waits till around 10-11 seconds after Dragon Orc activation before using Darts/Bloom anyway, which I believe is well after they would normally happen if he simply used his cooldowns from the previous phase.

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In regards to Beo's post (shield orbs):

We all just use a /tar shield orb macro, and it works nicely. When they first spawn, one of the orbs is always in range of somebody. When the orb that each person has targeted dies, they hit the macro again to check if any else are up. If they are, and in range, they kill it. If they arent in range, then it's in range of somebody else who is already killing it, so you just go to KJ.

The only variation to the rule is for the ranged dps'ers on the outskirts of the semi-circle. These guys can make the effort to chase any orbs that might have managed to escape and are now wrapping around the melee. However, this is very rare. EG: Orbs spawning right before collapse combined with people being shit.

The positioning of the ranged dps'ers is probably more important. We have an arc of 4 hunters that begin at one end of the semi-circle and end around half way (with the shaman in the middle and one row in front for totems). The locks are then positioned similarly on the other side, and the mages are also near the locks, but closer to melee range. Not having the outskirts be ranged dps is not optimal, and not having them somewhat spread out is also not optimal (the spreading out results in more variety of orbs that are picked up in the first /tar shield orb press, which results in more efficient orb dps due to less wasted mid-air casts when others are still alive).

I imagine a macro like this would not work:

/tar shield orb
/cast Shadowbolt
/cast Shadowbolt [target=focus] (with focus being KJ)

As the second line would produce the out of range error, which counts as your "one-event-per-press" for the macro? Similar to how the following macro doesnt work:

/cast Riposte
/cast Sinister Strike

We experienced the same. We enter p3 (<85%) with around 10s on the bloom timer and we almost never get bloom/dart after the collapse. But this should only be a problem when you breath after the collapse.

I was wondering how most guilds did this as well. I saw that SK clumped the whole raid as soon as the orb was activated for a breath then spread back out really quick. Other guilds stayed spread though and only collapsed for darkness. What do you think is best?

Usually only melee should collapse, as ranged damagedealer lose a lot of damage while moving from and to the collapse spot. Also, you are likely to get a lot more problematic fire blooms or flame darts because of being clumped up so often. You really want to minimize those incidents.

The advantage to grouping when an orb is first available is that KJ isn't casting blooms or darts before it (he's channeling those bolts) and doesn't start to till well after so grouping should be easy. That's where the second advantage is: with haste on the raid, everyone's immune to the slow effect of darts, making a darkness collapse much easier. But like Hand mentioned, it depends on the number of controllers and where your collapse point is.

The DPS gain from breaths outweighs the loss of moving to collapse, not to mention your healers and yourself are getting back mana through Revitalize which in itself is a DPS boost.

If you're spaced well (read: tightly) there's minimal time and effort to collapse for a breath. That said, it's always a risk to some degree and the timing may not work out. The way we position, there are two close orbs and two far orbs. If a close orb goes active, the whole raid will cluster. If a far one goes active, melee only. As with all clustering on this fight, people need to be moving out the SECOND they get whatever buff they need. I am usually running already by the time the breath buff appears on my screen. It's been said before, but the most crucial part of this fight is getting everyone to the point where they ALWAYS know where their exact spot is, no matter what. I can get from the cluster spot to my personal spot in under 3 seconds every time, regardless of where my camera's pointed or whether I'm finding heal targets or anything. The same is true for everybody by the time they kill KJ. Get your raid to that point and the whole operation becomes much easier.

The clumping up when dragon orb is ready is highly effective because

a) KJ won't use any aoe abilities for about 10-12 seconds so there's little risk to my point.
b) Raid can quickly clump and chainheal
c) Haste/Revitalize on whole raid prior to first shield makes sure everoyone can reach it in time.

However, for this tactic to work you require 2 dragon orb controllers (preferably mages). The dragon orb controllers will position themselves in the middle of the far and close orb on both sides, whenever an orb gets ready the mages will then blink wherever it spawned and then continue to blink with the dragon itself to the raid. The breath acts as a spray effect so you can effectively run through the dragon and still get the breath (even if you weren't there at the point when it was casted as long as the spray animation is still there).

This tactic has never ever caused any problems, the breath was always before the flame dart/flame bloom.



Also lately we've been facing a new problem, about 50% of the time right after the Darkness Kil'Jaeden seems to use his firebloom or flamedart immediately wiping the whole raid in seconds.

Ya, we do the same, it's definitely worth it for us. We use a mage controller for the far two orbs, and a prot warrior for the close two (with a hunter at the orb he's not near, and him with an intercept macro for the hunter.) The prot warrior was previously busy tanking one of the images (since we don't AE them, we have our prot grab one, and the feral grab the other three.)

It's not a DPS loss for ranged to collapse if they're getting revit + haste out of it. Not to mention the dps time you save since the ranged won't be snared with darts when collapsing for the shield later.



Your raid should be already on the edges of the shield before darkness explodes, and then moving out the minute it's safe. There's no reason for people to hang around clumped up, it's just asking for problems.

You have to be grouped up on the front half of the circle if you want to haste post shield, which causes problems when darts or blooms come after shield. You could spread out inside the circle if you haste pre shield, but then you'd have to collapse earlier and the same thing could happen if he darts/blooms before darkness.

The only way I see of completely getting rid of such problems is if you just don't haste your entire raid while collapsing for darkness, which for a guild working on the boss probably isn't an option.

Except it's far easier to react pre-shield because they land during collapse, while you're moving, rather than when everyone is stationary. It's definitely taken practice, but we now don't lose even a single person when we get blooms *right* before he starts to channel darkness.

We always haste before shield and have found it far more stable. You have to do it before the second shield anyways, might as well do it all the time and be good at it was our logic.