ICC Crimson Hall-Blood Princes - Page 2

Lokthra · 01/20/10, 8:52 PM

Originally Posted by Shockandawe

We got them to 1% as best tonight, teh only reason we didnt have a kill was because Keleseth meeled our warlock which one shotted him on about 20%, so when Keleseth got empowered it wiped us. Does anyone know the reason for Keleseth to just run up to the range tank and meele?
We had this happen on other attempts too. Sometimes it was in the middle of the fight and sometimes in the start. To avoid him going strait for the ranged tank in the begining we used Blessing of Protection on him so he wouldnt be meeled. It seemed to work fine, but we still had teh incident were Keleseth would just stop casting and decide to run to the ranged tank and meele him.
Anyone else experienced this?

We had something similar happen in 10 man. One time quickly after the pull, our shadowpriest was hit by 2 shadow bolts and then a melee. The other was while the spriest (our ranged tank) was moving to pick up nuclei. The priest stopped after getting the nucleus, but Keleseth did not stop moving, instead running up and critting him for 70k.
I would venture a guess that it is all about movement, as both of our melee gibs occurred on occasions where Keleseth should have stopped moving, but did not. One possibility to fix this would be to have people assigned to pick up the nuclei and bring them to the ranged tank, who will then attack it once to get aggro. This removes all movement for Keleseth except the pull, and possibly a flame orb. Can't say I have tried it yet, but probably will when we get a chance.

Iluminati · 01/21/10, 12:30 AM

Caster mobs melee-ing is not a new phenomenon. If you are in melee range while the boss is not casting, there is a good chance they will melee one time before starting their next spell. This used to happen on Eredar twins as well. Just never be in melee range, ever.

Using a discipline priest and a holy paladin, we successfully used a two tank strat for 10 man. Our prot pally picked up Keleseth and Nuclei while our prot warrior picked up the other two. With perfect/very good execution (good movement on shock nova, no kinetic bomb explosions) it was doable. Tanks spiked quite severely on occasion usually following a shock blast forcing healers to move, etc. or when nuclei were not co-operating. Honestly I would not recommend a this unless your tanks are in very good gear (ours were in all 251+) and your healers are spot on.

LiteSabre · 01/21/10, 12:32 AM

If they absolutely have to, melee can hit the kinetic bomb and force it back into the air by jumping and spamming skills/white hits.

The nuclei seem to latch onto the last person to hit them with a high aggro pulse that makes it pretty much impossible to tear aggro off with healing. Unfortunately this also means that any stray aoe can pull them off the Keleseth tank with equal ease. We had good results with our lock tank staying in a relatively confined area and building aggro, and having one of our mages run around and grab nucleus aggro with ice lance and kite them back so our lock could pick them up without having to potentially move into Keleseth's melee range. Time will tell if hard mode dps demands make this unfeasible.

Bullshot · 01/21/10, 3:08 AM

There were certain occasions in our attempts last night when a Kinetic Bomb would despawn after one minute but still explode and knock everyone back. We have currently chalked it down to it having a dot on it at the time of despawn which led to the explosion in mid-air. Anyone else run into this phenomenon or have ideas about why it happens?

Kuku · 01/21/10, 4:19 AM

Honestly, you're bringing three tanks for many of the fights in here, you should use them all on this fight. Ranged tanking just leads to gibs and wipes.

I tanked Keleseth with my paladin today. After generating some initial threat, I spent a considerable amount of time collecting Dark Nuclei and spamming Hammer of Wrath on Keleseth.

If a dark nucleus is not attached (targeting) another player, any offensive action should get it on you. For that purpose, I used Hand of Reckoning. The Nuclei were immune to it, but they aggro'd me nonetheless.

If a dark nucleus is currently attached to another player, you must damage it. I used exorcism and avenger's shield to great effect. Melee range abilities also worked, obviously.

After generating initial threat, it becomes a game of picking up new nuclei. If you have a comfortable amount of nuclei on you (3), you should continue generating threat during non-invocation periods. Again, Hammer of Wrath is excellent for this purpose, but every tank has little tricks to help them with various components of tanking Keleseth.

Nuclei will often aggro onto other players, likely due to AOE. They sometimes aggro onto healers, which may or may not be related to the current health of the nucleus. I will not speculate further. Regardless, you must either grab them back or collect new nuclei. Collecting new nuclei is preferable as they tend to stick to you a lot longer.

Ranged tanking works, but I would strongly suggest not doing so.

Zynth · 01/21/10, 6:26 AM

Originally Posted by Kuku

Honestly, you're bringing three tanks...

I think it would depend on what kind of tanks your guild has to fill the slots. Or rather I should say, if you don't have a Prot Paladin, it may not be worth the effort to tank Keleseth, not to say it wouldn't be possible. A Paladin already has a large arsenal of abilities as the previous post has highlighted, the key fact of which, is that they can be used at range.

A warrior would be damn near impossible to efficiently tank with out running the risk of a (melee + emp. lance + anything else) combo. The damage is already very spiky across the board, adding regular melee swings would not be recommended. In addition warriors have the worst ranged capabilities.

Druids fair slightly better than warriors with savage defense to reduce the melee portion of incoming damage and feral faerie fire to tag nuceli. It could work, but whether or not it's more efficient to do so is yet to be determined.

DKs are probably the only other traditional tank that are equipped to handle it. Melee/Dot in-between casts, DnD, and DC to tag nuceli. A DK probably wouldn't even need to be tank spec'd.

The key factors in choosing a traditional tank for Keleseth will be who your raid has available and the individual skill level of the persons in question.

Inaiwae · 01/21/10, 7:34 AM

I can confirm that on 10man we had 3 kinetic bombs up at a time.

Jayde · 01/21/10, 8:41 AM

Originally Posted by Iluminati

Caster mobs melee-ing is not a new phenomenon. If you are in melee range while the boss is not casting, there is a good chance they will melee one time before starting their next spell. This used to happen on Eredar twins as well. Just never be in melee range, ever.

Actually, the issue seems to be a bit inverse of this.

The issue Shock was describing was that of when the Warlock got knocked back, he was out of range for the Shadow Lances--so naturally the boss started running toward him. The problem was the boss is not stop, he just continued running up to him and smacked him in the face with an 80k crit. :P

It does seem a bit iffy is there is no surefire way to prevent this, as the Warlock could end up being knocked back at any time by a randomly targeted Shock Blast.

I'd be inclined to try with 3 'normal' tanks instead unless there is some more reliable way to prevent him meleeing, since a melee vs. cloth is pretty much an instant death.

Haakhon · 01/21/10, 8:55 AM

Originally Posted by Juno

The tuning on the 10man version seems way off. There were so many kinetic bombs spawning that in such a big room with so few people and depending on group makeup where you might not have much ranged at all it just seemed pretty unfeasible. Sometimes there could be up to 3 orbs in different locations in the room. The damage seemed really big too. We wiped for 2 hours about and it was really hard to get any headway with how much damage went off. We tried 1 warlock tank, few tries we had a prot pala substituting but the melee hits and keeping nuclei on him was pretty hard. And then 2 other tanks and 3 healers, so 3 tanks and 3 healers, which left us with 1 ranged dps or 2 if the warlock wasn't tanking. We didn't try any 2 tank tactic due to the sheer melee damage, but that's definitely something we'd try next time.

This fight is very well tuned for 10 man. We are a 10 man only guild and we did it without any big problem. The first night we did try the Blood Princes is to learn the mechanic and see what happen we did about 8-9 try and the next day we did kill them.

What we learn form those try is the Keleseth tank die every pull for nothing and we ask him to go buy the PvP set gear gemmed with Stamina and at the end our Shadow priest got like 33k raid buff so we solve on big problem. Secondly we position Valanar on the east side of the room and Taldaram near the entrance. We did that positionning so the healer can stand near the middle to reach everyone for healing but more important is that the Keleseth tank can move everywhere to grab the nucleid without worry.

We did the 3 tank ( 2 melee Warr/Paly and 1 ranged Shadow Priest), 3 healer 1 on the ranged tank a Druid, Paly on the 2 melee tank with a beacon and the other one was focussing on the raid dmg and 3 dps for the boss and for the Kenetic bomb we assign one ranged dps to focus all the time and it was a Frost mage with is pet and if a third bomd did appear and was near the door we ask the other ranged dps or a tank to push it in the air.

As you can see on the image below we didnt have big dps on the boss only 3 and fight was about 6m long.

http://img260.imageshack.us/img260/4371/princedead.jpg

This fight is not about dps is a fight that you need to get a good positionning and coordination that all.

Redcape · 01/21/10, 9:06 AM

I would concur with the 10 man version being challenging, but not overtuned. My guild is 10 man strict and we beat it after about 8 pulls or so. We had a few big challenges:

1. Our DK tank had no AP reduction debuff. When his target was getting meleed by a Ret paladin it was no problem, but once the Ret swapped away that boss started swinging for 18-20k and just ended up blowing up the DK. We fixed this by tanking both melee bosses on top of each other so we could share the demo roar/Vindication debuffs and keep them under control.

2. Valanar positioning was challenging for the nuclei tank (shadowpriest). We had to make sure Valanar was in a spot where the melee had a consistent route to get away while not blocking off half the zone when he cast Empowered Shock Vortex. The strategy that ended up working best was to park Valanar about 15 yards from a wall so the melee had just enough room to run to the wall, split up and not hit each other.

3. Kinetic Orbs were a real challenge, particularly when there were 3. After the 3 tanks and healers there just aren't a lot of bodies left to go around so we had one person covering the whole room. The Kinetic Orb hunter had a brutal time trying to stay out of Shock Vortexes and still get to every Kinetic Orb in time. In 25s this seems like it would be much less of a problem since you can have a number of ranged handling Orbs in a particular chunk of the room and still dpsing a lot.

Taldaram's Sparks cone seems like it would be best dealt with by putting him in the middle of the room. This way his cone should be hitting 1/6 of the raid or so, whereas when he is tanked in a corner it will often hit almost everyone.

Lanthon · 01/21/10, 9:14 AM

After tanking this encounter in 25 last night and reading the posts here, the abilities and strategies are more clear. I have therefore updated the OP. A normal tank is preferable on Keleseth, mainly due to the nature of the dark nuclei shadow reduction buff. By the way, I'd appreciate it if a math-type would check my numbers in the OP. A normal tank has no issues gathering nuclei and even meleeing Keleseth for threat (a cooldown is advised here, however).

Ironically, this fight seems easier in 25 man, due to the flexibility in healing and the ease of handling Kinetic Bomb.

ciopo · 01/21/10, 9:30 AM

Originally Posted by Lanthon

Prince Keleseth will cast a stronger version of his shadow bolt. By the time these start hitting, the ranged tank should have at least 3-4 dark nuclei on him. Because the shadow damage reduction is multiplicative, and not additive, the ranged tank should try to keep 4 nuclei on him. There is very little benefit to having more than 4, though more should be added before current nuclei die.

1 Nuclei: 35% shadow reduction
2 Nuclei: 47.25%
3 Nuclei: 51.55%
4 Nuclei: 52.05%

Wouldn't it be a combined reduction of 1-(0.65^N), where N is the number of nuclei?

1 Nuclei: 35% reduction
2 Nuclei: 58% reduction approximated
3 Nuclei: 73% reduction approximated
4 Nuclei: 82% reduction approximated

If, as you suggest, 4 nuclei was only 52% damage reduction, the empowered shadow lance would do around 45-50k damage, which is inconsistent with the damage our warlock was taking.

Cartesian · 01/21/10, 9:33 AM

Something's really wonky with your math regarding the Nuclei damage reduction.

1 Nuclei - tank takes 65% damage
2 Nuclei - tank takes (0.65^2)*100% = 42.25% damage
3 Nuclei - tank takes (0.65^3)*100% = 25.46% damage
4 Nuclei - tank takes (0.65^4)*100% = 17.85% damage
5 Nuclei - tank takes (0.65^5)*100% = 11.60% damage
I'm not sure if it's possible to have more than 5 due to their short lifespans.

I wouldn't go as far as to say that the fight prefers 3 tanks, after all the mechanics are largely the same in 10man where it's unlikely you have 3 tanks and pretty much have to use a dps to tank Keleseth. I feel that the benefit of the larger health pool of a traditional tank is pretty much neutralized by generally weaker ranged abilities for nuclei pulling and the larger amounts of damage he takes from having to go to melee for threat generation.

Vanadi · 01/21/10, 9:44 AM

Searing totems are quite effective in keeping the Kinetic Bombs flying if they aren't near a boss. The duration of a searing totem is just as long as the Kinetic Bomb lasts. Shadowpriest's are quite effective as tanks on this fight as they can dispersion when Keleseth empowerers to buy the healers a bit more time.

Lilbitters · 01/21/10, 9:55 AM

We found the best method in 10 man to be:

1 tank holding Valanar and Taldram in a corner (we used the door up to Lana'thel on the right)
1 DPS holding Keleseth near the middle of the room (obviously though he'd move to pick up Nuclei)

We had our second tank spec DPS and used 3 healers (resto Druid, resto Shaman, Disc Priest).

Had 1 hunter cover all the Kinetic Orbs, it was relatively easy and some boss DPS time was still definitely manageable.

Our kill was just under 3 minutes and was drastically easier than when we tried 3 tanks because it allowed the 2 healers to focus on the 2 tanks and the druid could toss around Rejuv on the raid when needed.

Wall positioning also worked well because having the mobs stacked allowed faster target switching.