Kalegos is essentially free loot for clearing the trash to him
I think your glasses are rose tinted. Kalecgos was a non-trivial boss for many guilds, fresh out of BT, working on his original form.
Now if you personally are in a guild that dominated this fight with ease from the start - I applaud your skill - But he was most definetely NOT 'free loot' for many guilds.
Kalegos is essentially free loot for clearing the trash to him. Most guilds get him in their first couple of nights.
Maybe it's just me, but your definition of "free loot" seems very different from average raider. He is - well, was - definately a step above Black Temple bosses, with tons of raid damage, big spikes on tanks, strict rotation requirement(add resists for more fun), some randomness with the portals and decent DPS race for fresh Illidan killers. "Free loot" is something like 4 Hyjal bosses being easier than their trash. But to say defeating Kalecgos is easier than killing few groups of fully CCable humanoids is "bit" far fetched.
"After the 2% try one of our healers asked a so stupid question clearly showing that she had 0 clue of how the encounter works and of the Boss abilities."
This proves nothing, plenty of people don't know boss abilities in detail - and really, why should they? As long as they understand the parts that concern them, it doesn't matter. It was always like that with raiding.
You'll note I said most guilds get him in their first couple of nights. In terms of Sunwell content, that's free loot. Compare Kalegos difficulty to Muru, or Brutallus, or Sacrolash Second Twins (the way most guilds including us initially killed them). He's not a challenge.
In the context of the post I was replying to, I think my assertion that Kalegos isn't the tough part of SWP therefore he can't and shouldn't draw conclusions from it is accurate.
I don't agree that most guilds got him in their first couple of nights, but the point is moot. Pre-3.0 Kalecgos is harder than anything that's in there now, and honestly I would expect most guilds that were doing well at Kalecgos attempts to have KJ down by WotLK if they have the motivation to keep raiding.
Was Sunwell really that hard?
I m RL of a pure Funguild atm and we had Kalcegos to 2% on 3rd week of raiding SW with about 9 ours per week of raiding.
We got many players who barly can get more then 50% of class potential out.
After the 2% try one of our healers asked a so stupid question clearly showing that she had 0 clue of how the encounter works and of the Boss abilities.
I somehow cant believe that guilds with focused Raiders really got such heavy problems downing such a Boss.
If your guild can't kill Kalecgos in 27 hours of Sunwell raiding then you shouldn't be trying to call out raiders many levels above yourself. Kalecgos was not hard.
Kalecgos was harder than anything before him on the progression chart. Obviously if you've gone on to twins/muru, he's relatively simple compared to those bosses ahead of him. That's normal and to be expected. It's a fallacy to call him easy for guilds that had him as the progression boss. I agree with the above poster, if you were working on boss N (pre 3.02), then boss N+1 = free loot (post 3.02)
Kalecgos wasn't conceptually hard but the jump in difficulty from Illidan to Kalec, then Kalec to Brut, and Brut to Twins is a pretty steep and linear slope. Obviously a KJ guild isn't going to concede that Kalecgos is a hard encounter and to even ask a raider from such a guild about the difficulty of the first couple of SW bosses is about as insightful as asking a wealthy man his opinion on state welfare, but for the majority of casual raiding guilds that fell apart at kalecgos or about two bosses later, the reality is quite different. The fact that even most hardcore raiders will admit that Sunwell as an instance was a difficulty level that far exceeded anything else in TBC lends credit to the fact that all encounters in the instance are punishing to a degree.
I also don't think blizzard devs were disappointed with the difficulty of sunwell itself, but rather with the instance's demands in relation to all the other content available. At least thats the feeling I got when they said they wouldn't do something that 'insane' again. My feeling walking away from blizzcon was that there would be more sunwell type fights that rewarded execution and coordination, but that the difficulty would scale at a reasonable rate rather then exponentially.
That being said, there seems to be quite a few people upset with how hard the instance was nerfed, if not here, then in other forums. My question to that extent is why? If you hadn't killed KJ by this point, a month before expac, then you've long lost the race for prestige. Finish the instance in tutorial mode and still be proud in your guild's ability to survive attrition, keep raiding, and advance that far into sunwell anyway. What you've learned up to this point is going to most likely translate into success in WoTLK raiding should you chose to stick with this hobby.
That being said, there seems to be quite a few people upset with how hard the instance was nerfed, if not here, then in other forums. My question to that extent is why? If you hadn't killed KJ by this point, a month before expac, then you've long lost the race for prestige. Finish the instance in tutorial mode and still be proud in your guild's ability to survive attrition, keep raiding, and advance that far into sunwell anyway. What you've learned up to this point is going to most likely translate into success in WoTLK raiding should you chose to stick with this hobby.
The primary reason I'm upset (we made 2/6 Sunwell before nerf) was simply that it would have been nice to have another month of challenging content. Removing the challenge from raiding makes me disinclined to raid. That being said, it's likely our guild would have had significant issues with Felmyst pre-patch, and that may have been our final raid boss attempted at all. This way it's likely we can at least see KJ before the expansion.
Still, all things being equal I would much rather have come back after the expansion and played around with Sunwell at 80 instead of having it nerfed while I was 70.
Kalecgos wasn't conceptually hard but the jump in difficulty from Illidan to Kalec, then Kalec to Brut, and Brut to Twins is a pretty steep and linear slope. Obviously a KJ guild isn't going to concede that Kalecgos is a hard encounter and to even ask a raider from such a guild about the difficulty of the first couple of SW bosses is about as insightful as asking a wealthy man his opinion on state welfare, but for the majority of casual raiding guilds that fell apart at kalecgos or about two bosses later, the reality is quite different. The fact that even most hardcore raiders will admit that Sunwell as an instance was a difficulty level that far exceeded anything else in TBC lends credit to the fact that all encounters in the instance are punishing to a degree.
Kalecgoes wasn't hard in terms of needing raid stacking, or gear, or tons of consumable use, and the strategy required wasn't hard, no. However, he challenges the raid to stay alive more than Archimonde did, and is a stress test of the quality of your healers individually - with times of only having one raid healer and one tank healer in a given realm potentially, and definite variance in terms of both the number of healers helping with a given role and which healers those were, any healers that couldn't adapt or weren't strong players stuck out majorly, as did anyone who was tunnel-visioned about their role. Now, other than the part of having to adapt to working with rapidly changing sets of healers, those are all common raid elements, that certainly are needed later in Sunwell, and help in any raid - so no, it's not hard. However, testing multiple abilities of your raid team more than any previous TBC fight had carries the potential for a LOT of drama as you have to deal with either convincing people they need to get better at what they're doing, or replace them. On top of this, having a fight that, like Archimonde, strikes me as a fight that unless you really overgear/overconsumable it, has the potential for wiping a raid long after they've learned the fight if they have new people or just aren't doing wonderfully as the first boss of a raid instance strikes me as a bit strange, and likely to produce more headaches during clears to get to whatever boss you're trying to progress on.
Seriously, I am still trying to figure out what was hard about Brutallus. The fight itself is abysmally simple. You have two tanks that need to swap off and that is probably the most complicated thing. The rest of the fight is arranging three groups and having a single person with burn run out.
I think Kalecgos is much harder than Brutallus. Kalecgos has group movement. And healers definately need to be more on their toes on Kalecgos. And lets not even talk about how simple melee is on Brutallus, especially rogues with cloak.
Brutallus could not be killed pre-patch without having killed Illidan/Archimonde a certain number of times (approximately 10) or having a lot of leatherworkers to cut that number (say down to 6ish with sufficient LWs). It also required very high healer execution because you simply could not get by with a substandard healer in your 7 healer / 2 shadow priest config. Or if you went 8 healers, you needed even more Illidan/Archimonde kills for gear.
That's what made it "hard". Kalecgos required a lot less gear. But it required significantly more coordination probably. I mean any guiild that could get people in the portals could surely get people to the burn healers and have a stomp/slash/taunt rotation on Brut.
Brutallus could not be killed pre-patch without having killed Illidan/Archimonde a certain number of times (approximately 10) or having a lot of leatherworkers to cut that number (say down to 6ish with sufficient LWs). It also required very high healer execution because you simply could not get by with a substandard healer in your 7 healer / 2 shadow priest config. Or if you went 8 healers, you needed even more Illidan/Archimonde kills for gear.
That's what made it "hard". Kalecgos required a lot less gear. But it required significantly more coordination probably. I mean any guiild that could get people in the portals could surely get people to the burn healers and have a stomp/slash/taunt rotation on Brut.
The Juggernaut rerolls would disagree with you. Was Brutallus a dps check? Yes, but you certainly didn't need three+ months of Illidan farming to kill him.
Originally Posted by Sebudai
Addons aren't a crutch, they're tools to be abused by skilled players to increase performance. Like a carpenter using a hammer, a fisherman using a lure, or Xi using curse words.
Brutallus could not be killed pre-patch without having killed Illidan/Archimonde a certain number of times (approximately 10) or having a lot of leatherworkers to cut that number (say down to 6ish with sufficient LWs).
I disagree. We killed Brutallus 20 days after Illidan hit the floor with characters that were in badge / raid / pvp gear and every character being less than three months old. This was with 5 or so LW's in the raid.
To me the major flaw with SWP is that it's only going for quality with no quantity. This may seem bizarre for alot of you to hear, but if you compare with Naxx f.ex, you could wipe on a boss in 1 wing alot and then when some people get fed up you can try a new boss in another wing for some "relaxation". In SWP you simply had very well tuned bosses, but for many guilds it took 1+ weeks to kill them one at a time and this put too much strain and stress on more casual guilds.
edit: To put it short; Many people NEED filler bosses they can kill for some fast and easy loot to not get burned out.
What annoyed me: dependance on particular classes. We had problems few times because one of our Muru tanks couldnt come, or few shamans / priests on Felmyst and Twins.
The Juggernaut rerolls would disagree with you. Was Brutallus a dps check? Yes, but you certainly didn't need three+ months of Illidan farming to kill him.
Which I never said you did. /shrug.... 10 kills is basically 2 months and a little since there are nearly 9 weeks every 2 months.
And apparently, the post below yours indicates that a very skilled guild could make do with somewhat less gear than my numbers indicated, still...
These outliers don't change the fact that most guilds needed a lot more gear than that to do it or that absent a certain quantity of gear to meet the dps requirement, Brutallus was impossible. Kalecgos by contrast was not impossible without people who could average 1900dps.
Kalecgos is not free lot BECAUSE of the trash. It took us 4 evenings to kill him and a lot of that time was spent clearing trash, with little time left figuring out what was happening during the fight.
If you already KNOW what's happening during the fight and you can prepare with outside resources, then it becomes an boss easier to handle.
By the way there's a big difference between a boss being free loot and a boss being easier than M'uru or Twins. Maybe not for guild that has completed Sunwell, but for everyone else.
You're defining a hard boss by quoting M'uru, other players may define a hard boss by quoting Kalecgos. Difficulty is relative to where you are at as a guild.
Which I never said you did. /shrug.... 10 kills is basically 2 months and a little since there are nearly 9 weeks every 2 months.
And apparently, the post below yours indicates that a very skilled guild could make do with somewhat less gear than my numbers indicated, still...
These outliers don't change the fact that most guilds needed a lot more gear than that to do it or that absent a certain quantity of gear to meet the dps requirement, Brutallus was impossible. Kalecgos by contrast was not impossible without people who could average 1900dps.
The DPS requirements for this fight were overrated in my opinion. It all depends on how much you wanted to kill him. If you really wanted him dead you'd pull money out of the guild bank and get everyone to level up leatherworking for drums. Recruit enough shamans to overstack them (5-6, which is only about 1 more shaman than you'd normally run with), and rotate your bloodlusts through the caster groups when their cooldowns were up. Having a tank with enough avoidance (and certain items like the magister's terrace trinket and pocketwatch) was a much bigger deal than the dps threshold. You could raid stack your way out of most of the dps gear requirements, which means you don't need to farm gear to me. We didn't do any stacking or mass-leatherworking and it took us about 2 weeks to kill him, mostly because our healers weren't comfortable with the amount of damage the tanks were taking. They thought our strategy was wrong and didn't really perform the way they needed to. The only reason we'd hit the enrage timer was because a dps would die. If they didn't die, we were almost always on pace for a kill. The issue for us was our offtanks getting gibbed during stomp.
Brut was the hardest fight for us in Sunwell (aside from M'uru who we didn't kill pre-nerf). Every other boss took us about 35-40 attempts to kill. It took us several weeks sometimes to kill a boss because our raid comp wasn't right or we were missing key people (prot paladins were troublesome, as were priests, we always had lots of shaman), but it wouldn't take very many attempts.
I went through at least 15 different offtanks on Brut kills over the past several months. I have no idea how many healers we've had to recruit over the past several months, but it's probably close to double that number. I've had 4 different prot paladins on M'uru. You can't have that much turn-over and not expect it to impact performance. What made people quit? A whole host of different things, there's probably a different story for every single person. Most of the reasons really have nothing to do with the zone. The issue was that the zone requires you to have people geared up and experienced once you get to M'uru. If you don't have that, you won't kill him. The first 4 bosses are manageable with guild turn-over, I really don't think pre-nerf M'uru was. At least, that definitely wasn't the case for us.
I don't agree with people who are saying Kalecgos was a "huge step up from BT". It really wasn't for about half your raid. Tanking in BT was more complex than most fights in Sunwell were. BT may have been more forgiving, but Sunwell was easier to do "right". The only semi-complicated fights for a tank in Sunwell are the twins (positioning a boss who likes to circle-strafe you) and M'uru (either you have to handle adds like you learned in shattered halls or you're picking up void sentinels). Kalecgos, Brut, and Felmyst are basically tank and spanks as long as you swap in the right gear. Raid damage on Kalecgos was not anymore strenuous than P2 Illidan or illidari council. What made it complicated was that there was more going on. The healers had to heal and watch for portals, your druids had to watch for curses if you were short mages, etc.. When that happens, it's up to the leadership of your raid to simplify things and make it easier for the 25 people to digest. Kalecgos was slightly more complicated for your raid leader to organize (you had to figure out how portal rotations would plot out), but the individual jobs were relatively simple.
I think we can all agree that Kalecgos is harder than Illidan, but the reasons for it are debatable and different for each guild.
Not everything in raiding is clear-cut fact. A lot of difficulty or simplicity comes from guild and player dynamics. Some guilds, believe it or not, have a tough time on Brutallus but find Kalec simple and easy. Some have no problem with Kalec himself, but get stuck on the trash. Some of the above difficulties are more rare than others.
What annoyed me: dependance on particular classes. We had problems few times because one of our Muru tanks couldnt come, or few shamans / priests on Felmyst and Twins.
This. Felmyst is a fight I shall hate for eternity simply because of the stupid dependence on Priests to make the fight work. Have less than 3 Priests? Nope, can't do it. Why? One ability. Astounding raid design there. </rant>
Felmyst is a fight I shall hate for eternity simply because of the stupid dependence on Priests to make the fight work. Have less than 3 Priests? Nope, can't do it. Why? One ability. Astounding raid design there.
You can do felmyst with 2 priests if they spec to focused power to reduce their mass dispel cast time to 0.5s.
This. Felmyst is a fight I shall hate for eternity simply because of the stupid dependence on Priests to make the fight work. Have less than 3 Priests? Nope, can't do it. Why? One ability. Astounding raid design there. </rant>
That is an ignorant view point. For starters, if you only have two priests, nothing is stopping you from getting a raider to log onto a priest alt just for Mass Dispel duty. If you cant manage to find a single level 70 priest in your entire guild/alt/mates list, I'd be surprised.
If somehow you could not grab someones alt for whatever reason, using 2 priests does not make the fight impossible. I'm sure you have a prot paladin, the two priests, plus possibly a ret paladin. Between 2x 10 dispels from MD's, you only need to dispel 5-9 (depending on hunter pets) people with 3+ dispellers. Not a tough task considering everyone knows exactly when its going to happen. And that's assuming your holy paladin(s) stay on the tank and dont help dispelling.
I disagree. We killed Brutallus 20 days after Illidan hit the floor with characters that were in badge / raid / pvp gear and every character being less than three months old. This was with 5 or so LW's in the raid.
Keep in mind that the first guilds fighting Brutallus hadn't badge items, nor ranged oil, less pvp stuff, etc...
In a game where there are so many ways to get some valuable stuff, fighting a boss 4 months after his release makes a huge difference.
I don't agree with people who are saying Kalecgos was a "huge step up from BT". It really wasn't for about half your raid. Tanking in BT was more complex than most fights in Sunwell were. BT may have been more forgiving, but Sunwell was easier to do "right". The only semi-complicated fights for a tank in Sunwell are the twins (positioning a boss who likes to circle-strafe you) and M'uru (either you have to handle adds like you learned in shattered halls or you're picking up void sentinels). Kalecgos, Brut, and Felmyst are basically tank and spanks as long as you swap in the right gear. Raid damage on Kalecgos was not anymore strenuous than P2 Illidan or illidari council. What made it complicated was that there was more going on. The healers had to heal and watch for portals, your druids had to watch for curses if you were short mages, etc.. When that happens, it's up to the leadership of your raid to simplify things and make it easier for the 25 people to digest. Kalecgos was slightly more complicated for your raid leader to organize (you had to figure out how portal rotations would plot out), but the individual jobs were relatively simple.
The one major way I saw healing on Kalecgos as more strenuous than on anything in BT is the aspect of working with a random subset of the other healers sharing the role of tank/raid healing, with what people are helping you rotating throughout an attempt, and being different rotations each attempt. Add that to the fact that these rotations vary the size of these sets of healers as well as who's in them, and your healers have roles that are basically forced to be much more uniform and close to their assignments than on any other fight - on Illidari Council for instance, even without explicit communication I suspect that if you had 2-3 people tending to eat a lot of AoE damage that fight, that among your raid healers some of them would start tending to heal specific people when multiple people were being bad at dodging AoEs if you spent a number of attempts on the fight with the same set of healers.
When assigning roles as a raid leader you pretty much tend to be going on the assumption that raid damage is fully randomly targeted, people get out of AoEs in approximately the same amount of time, etc, and assign healers to heal certain groups, or assign X general raid healers, etc, usually intending that the raid healers will be responding to any randomized raid damage on the fly. This gets further complicated by the fact that your raid healers tend to throw heals at people that need them that aren't within their personal responsibility if the people within that responsibility are all healed up, and none of this can be accounted for all that well in static healing assignments beyond assigning people to roles they and/or their class do well in. On Kalecgos, detailed assignments past tank or raid healing are near impossible, and your healers have to deal with a slightly different way of learning to heal a fight - while dealing with portals.
This pretty much leaves the tanks as your only raiders that Kalecgos isn't an increase in difficulty before - MT and OT on Illidan are both much more involved tanking roles for certain. Admittedly, the above observations have to be qualified as coming from the perspective of a tank/raid leader, not a healer, but the portals coordination certainly added difficulty to the healing from what I saw, making the amount of healing needed less of an accurate measure of the difficulty for healers than it is on most fights.
The one major way I saw healing on Kalecgos as more strenuous than on anything in BT is the aspect of working with a random subset of the other healers sharing the role of tank/raid healing, with what people are helping you rotating throughout an attempt, and being different rotations each attempt. Add that to the fact that these rotations vary the size of these sets of healers as well as who's in them, and your healers have roles that are basically forced to be much more uniform and close to their assignments than on any other fight - on Illidari Council for instance, even without explicit communication I suspect that if you had 2-3 people tending to eat a lot of AoE damage that fight, that among your raid healers some of them would start tending to heal specific people when multiple people were being bad at dodging AoEs if you spent a number of attempts on the fight with the same set of healers.
When assigning roles as a raid leader you pretty much tend to be going on the assumption that raid damage is fully randomly targeted, people get out of AoEs in approximately the same amount of time, etc, and assign healers to heal certain groups, or assign X general raid healers, etc, usually intending that the raid healers will be responding to any randomized raid damage on the fly. This gets further complicated by the fact that your raid healers tend to throw heals at people that need them that aren't within their personal responsibility if the people within that responsibility are all healed up, and none of this can be accounted for all that well in static healing assignments beyond assigning people to roles they and/or their class do well in. On Kalecgos, detailed assignments past tank or raid healing are near impossible, and your healers have to deal with a slightly different way of learning to heal a fight - while dealing with portals.
This pretty much leaves the tanks as your only raiders that Kalecgos isn't an increase in difficulty before - MT and OT on Illidan are both much more involved tanking roles for certain. Admittedly, the above observations have to be qualified as coming from the perspective of a tank/raid leader, not a healer, but the portals coordination certainly added difficulty to the healing from what I saw, making the amount of healing needed less of an accurate measure of the difficulty for healers than it is on most fights.
Actually this was fairly easy to counter by using groups with healers each in them, within each group you discuss who is going to heal the tank in the demon/dragon phase, and who will take care of the group in that phase. Of course you cross-heal a group with high-stacking debuffs a bit, but priority would always be on your own group, being responsible for keeping your group alive. Being a priest I usually got grouped with a pala, having me group heal on dragon and tank heal on demon.
The real "problem" in my opinion was people missing portals, often caused by tanks getting ported (as they are not a the group positions in our strat) and then having the announced group get to that portal in time. I'm sure other people also remember spam-clicking that portal and just not getting in. A DPS missing a portal wouldn't wipe you by the way, a healer missing one sure could.
Another problem was being the 5th group to get ported, taking the last 5k+ tick in dragon phase and getting insta-gibbed by shadow damage in demon phase. Although this was pretty rare, I noticed a few people dieing to this every now and then, especially if they also had a curse running.
10/17/08, 3:56 AM
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