As for a DPS warrior in Karazhan, I OTed in there up to Aran attempts as 0/46/15. You tank fine for trash and can do decent DPS. A melee DPS with over 10k life can be nice.

1. On huntsman, I offtank.
2. On Moroes, I offtank.
3. On Maiden, I am top DPS because the consecrate feeds me rage and breaks the stun.
4. On R/J Opera Event, I tank Julianne and debuff Romulo
5. On Curator, I DPS without salve and take most of the hateful bolts. I can't go full out though.
6. On Aran, I'm DPS. We're still working on our strat, but melee DPS requires much less manuevering this fight. I can survive the arcane explosion should I feel the need.
7. On the Chess Event, I grabbed a knight and killed the king.
8. On Illhoof, I just killed things.

I use pretty crappy gear at the moment. I have to use consumables to up my crit back to 30%. I do think, in a week or two, I can significantly upgrade my DPS at a rate most other classes can't match.

It took us quite a few tries on Aran before we realized that we could just stand still during flame wreath. We've made it through Polymorph quite a number of times but always with some people down. Our DPS just isn't high enough. I watched some videos and most guilds have him standing still in the middle almost all the time. On our attempts, Aran is all over the place. He only warps back to the center for his abilities. I think it's him following mages after a CS, but it kills the melee DPS when he goes and stands inside the blizzard or moves away from us while we are wreathed.

You're interrupting him too much if he's running around like that.

Edit:
I don't mind the trash (except for those goddamned mana leeches in the library -- fuck them). The flaw with the instance is the runback after wipes on the later bosses. Why did they repeat this mistake from AQ? AQ at least provided mounts! With Prince being as buggy as he is, we're paranoid about attempting reasonable wipe recovery (leashing him, etc.) because it can bug him out. Running back after Prince wipes is like running back to Twin Emps without an epic mount, every time you wipe. It's ridiculous. One of the gatekeepers should teleport you to the chessboard or Aran's room once those encounters have been beaten.

Our Aran group was:
Mag
Mag
Dru
Pld
Pri
War (definace + fury build)
War (prot)
Lock
Hunt
Rog

At first Aran was Poly+Pyroing us at 20%hp or so, we were wiping due to this. We took the druid off healing and put him on kittycat dps and we started destroying Aran. We killed him with something like 50% mana, it was an insane change. 2 healers was definately enough healing. A warlock is pretty much necessity, and I suggest having a warrior tank one of the elementals while they dps/interupt (better than a healer having agro and getting smoked).

Huh, odd. With a group of:
Warrior (Prot)
Druid (Feral)
Rogue (Mutilate)
Hunter
Shaman (Enhancement)
Warlock (Affliction)
Mage (Arcane/Frost)
Priest (heal)
Priest (heal)
Shaman (heal)

Aran always did the poly/pyro prior to summoning elementals. Typically at around 45-50% or so. If we were going a bit faster, we just stopped DPS at 43% and waited for it, then resumed burning.

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Mostly unrelated... for groups that have been doing Kara so far, what kind of consumables have you been using, if any? I don't think we've used anything other than mana/health pots at any point in my group, and I'm wondering whether that's the norm, or whether assessments of encounter difficulty I'm hearing reflect more significant consumable usage.

So far up to netherspike we have used only manapots mostly, maybe a few hp pots here and there and mt has been using +armor pots, the new +550 AR or so pot + the old +2k armor pot that was used so much in naxx.

I forgot to check but I think we dint even flask the tanks, though we did flask 1 mage and 1 warlock on our first curator kill I believe since we needed the extra dps boost, but that was more of a raid composition thing.

The 3rd healer going to dps was huge for us, as I posted. The affliction warlock was flasked, otherwise no one had anything special (adepts, easy food - etc). Did use stoneshield / ac / flask on Malch just to make him a little easier (gg enrage bug). I personally open every fight with a destruction pot, and by the time I would need to mana pot the timer is back up. We were seriously getting destroyed until the druid went to feral (he was feral spec, but healing). After he went to dps we one shot it with zero deaths, so the race was our biggest problem. He didn't even poly/pyro that attempt, it was great.

I really figured you had to get him down (or mostly) before a pyro/poly, 40-50% seems way early. I actually assumed you needed (or wanted) to kill him before the pyro, it's a lot of damage. We did interrupt every single nuke (or near it) however, and probably why he died with so much mana (was around 50 or 60%). We came to the conclusion to allow him to arcane missile unless it's on the priest, because he blows the mana for that spell when he starts casting. Everything else got interrupted, but we didn't have an interrupt rotation (that would make it a bit smoother honestly). I guess if you have more healing you can just heal through it more often, but we opted for the less healing/more dps/more interrupts road and it worked great for us.

We let him fireball, since it's the least dangerous spell (AM does the most damage, and Frostbolt can slow someone from getting out of the way of a Blizzard or something).

He only does it once. He drinks mana potions if his mana gets low thereafter. For us, having it happen while elementals were around was generally bad. Kind of like Kel'Thuzad and letting him mind control before you bring him under 40%, to make the transition easier, since dealing with both at once is bad. Everyone with a healthstone ready to go in response to the pyro (and a health pot if needed) made it more or less a nonissue.

What kind of stats should I be shooting for to tank Kara effectively? Right now I have replaced only 5 to 6 pieces of my T2/2.5 tank gear and at 68 I am sitting at 9500hps, 460-470 defense, and 10k+ ac. I have to say I am still a little confused on what the pinnacle of my stats are suppose to be post-TBC at 70.

We let him AM because we look at it from the point of how can we make his mana bar last the longest since he has already spent the mana let him keep doing it while interupting Fireball and Frostbolt. Its also a fight where I heal instead of DPS so 6 DPS and 4 Healers.


We have potted up the MT more than prolly necesssary for most the fights to rush through things a little faster but else than that on players the normal stuff. Except when it comes to Nightbane where we've been going all out. Nightbane is basically a whole step above the rest the instance (expect to get him tomorrow or Thursday).

Have a single person click the book. When a second (or more) clicks the book it bugs the event. Everyone will get credit for the single person clicking it as well.

the only real problem with aran is if he polys while elementals are up = gg. We killed him yesterday with prot war prot war pally priest priest shadow priest rogue lock mage mage just as he was polying us. With pummel/kick macros we kept him locked down well and surprisingly both of the prot warriors did respectable dps with dual wielding + devastate spam.

A certain paladin spell trivializes maiden by the way.

Maiden is trivalized already by the fight itself, how can you trivalize it more? Or can they HoJ her >_>

Yes, our prot tank was commenting how surprisingly effective devastate was for pure DPS on Aran.

And yes, BoS makes Maiden even sillier. So does a tree druid. Can't Repentance a tree.

BoS is overpowered. ;)

Heh. We were just having a druid DPSing and jumping out to heal during repentance, which was never a problem. BoS and tree are funny, though.

Yeah, thats pretty much what our group did, we had 2 druids (non-trees) alternating forms every repentance and a paladin doing the BoS thing.

Oh can she not repentance a tree/feral form :-p I was wondering why I never got hit by it (never really cared that much). I'm DPSing all out on that fight never healing once. I mean I don't think the HP of any of the players including the tank goes below 50%.

I just yelled about five different expletives.

We wiped twice on Maiden last night getting the timing right so our druid could shift into cat and avoid the Repentance, and now it takes a Horde player to tell me the most bleedingly obvious thing I should have thought of from the beginning.

That's always the case. There's always been raid upgrades for everyone, however, dps classes namely (and healers somewhat) were able to get by without taking their upgrades, while tanks pretty much had to for progression's sake. I'm not saying dps / healers skipping their upgrades is a good thing, I'm saying it's what some people did. I recall seeing some Naxx early kills with paladins in full Judgement, while others were running around with 1k healing in pre-Naxx gear. I guess some warriors were in full Wrath then as well, but the ones that took AQ upgrades were much ahead of the curve for sure.

Problem is, I am finding it hard to give up on the wrath 5 set bonus (20% chance of 5? less rage for next offensive ability). At the moment only things I have repped are my cloak, BP, 1h, neck, and feet. Out of those slots my cloak and feet consist of aq40 gear. All I am left with is my waist and shield from aq40, the rest is BWL gear. I dont know if I am clinging onto my old gear and using the proc set bonus as an excuse or I just havent really found anything worthwhile.

The only notable exception is a netherstorm quest that gives me bracers with +40 stam/ +10 agi w/def +hit. It scares me though to lose that set bonus, as in a lot of instances I am having to really focus on getting agro on mobs (multiple), and needing 5 less rage at times can be a huge boon. In this case where 5 manning is almost as important as 10/25 man, I think having to consider your agro abilities is almost as important as considering your tank abilities. Dunno, I could be totally off.