I'll have to keep this in mind. We had some unfortunate things happen when he decided to take a second stroll around the park.

We finally squeaked out our first kill last night, but had many similar issues (pretty much all involving the landing phase). We've got the flying phase down pretty solidly and made it through probably 8 or 9 of them with no deaths before we killed him due to the randomness of the landing. I would think him using abilities as he lands or swoops down is unintended, but you can deal with most of it. Divine shield was usually enough to take care of the worse combos like Charred Earth + breath, but Charred + breath + quick fear was pretty much a guaranteed wipe.

If you have your entire group stand towards the middle/outside of the balcony (but away from the tank), it seemed to alleviate alot of the 'swoop down, kill 1 healer, swoop down, kill a 2nd healer, then stick to tank' situations. If you stand against the mountain, it seems to make him behave more irregularly and can swoop down a couple times and kill 1 or 2 healers before actually landing and even intervene doesn't work a lot of times. We just had our tank(s) stand in range of our whole group stacked up spamming their mob assist/intervene macro. It took care of MOST of the healer deaths on landing. We still sometimes had him do weird stuff from time to time like target a healer as he lands, switch to another healer who didn't do anything at all, 1shot them, then stick to the tank.

We didn't have a fear ward this week, but last week we did, and it's pretty huge. We had multiple deaths due to tank switching to berserker + getting crushed while shield block was down as a result or a bad fear on the landing while the MT was spamming aggro abilities and got screwed by the global cooldown. It's certainly doable though.

And he does go down, suss the air phase and the fight is a doddle

There are a few things you can do to make sure it sticks to the tank when landing. Basic stuff like not doing any healing when he is swooping down to land, using misdirect and having the warrior bandage someone on low hp to generate healing threat.

Doing all of the above allowed for a pretty smooth first kill for us tonight.

I think there are videos out there that show only 3 spawning at a time. Could be my imagination. LR I believe.

How were you able to control the Smoking Blast mechanics? We've tried pretty much everything to get it to our plate wearer but it keeps crapping on our priests first and 4K dps is too much w/out like flasks and chain BoPs.

We've tried:
Paladin Righteous Fury to get aggro to Paladin, this includes spamming heals as well as doing exorcisms on Nightbane
Misdirection when he takes off to the tank
Misdirection after the rain to the tank
Misdirection to the paladin on liftoff / after rain ends

Nothing has gotten him to smoking blast someone consistently. I know you all want to keep your secrets for w/e reason, but there's got to be some kind of hint to this gimmick.

Is it just me or is the fear considerably more annoying to stance dance than other fears. It seems a lot faster than, well, any other fear a raid boss has done.

Yep i noticed the same which made me kinda edgy on the threat so i didn't screw up the dance with a global cooldown, but you have to be shit hot when your horde ^^

As Horde, bringing in a just-hit-70 Paladin turned our first night's attempts on their head. Our strat with a Paladin trivialized damage influx by 10 fold. The addition was insane how clear it was we would get a kill in a handful of pulls, where we were pulling teeth without a "BWL gear" Pal.

Now we're only hoping to get Fear Ward for the random landing and instant fear.

The landing and fear can be counter-acted by a aware warrior thats looking for it to happen, i personally put a couple of sheild slams to his face and a couple of sunders back on and then prepared for the fear

To what I got, you have about 2 seconds from the moment the ground starts to shake to when he fears. I think most other fears you get 3-4 seconds. Your tank(s) really need to be on the ball, or he might go chasing after a mage (or hunter)

Dont forget when he lands he resets agro. So, if you have your OT pop zerker rage the second he lands, and start building along side of your MT, you should be fine if he fears off the bat.

Well from what I've seen the fear is 1.5 seconds to cast, I'm pretty sure most of the dragon Bellowing Roars are 2-3 seconds. The problem is this, if I am on global cooldown my stance will not switch instantly, and even then stance switching isn't really "instant", so by the time my stance actually switches I have about a tenth of a second before it will activate, and while my reflexes are fairly fast (I can stance dance other fears, interrupt mostly anything), thats a small margin for error. I've had many times where I gear berserker rage off about 0.2 seconds after it happens and I can recover agro through a shield slam shortly after before he runs towards a warlock/mage/whoever. Alternatively if I am not on global cooldown, its considerably easier to catch, of course since dps classes actually do real damage now compared to say, the BWL days, I can't spend much time not on global cooldown just keeping my agro high. On top of that the fear is totally random, beyond 30 seconds. I've had fears go off at 33 seconds and as long as 65 seconds between fears, so I can't preemptively burn berserker rage in order to prevent fear, I have to get it in that little window.

Obviously with fear ward this is a lot easier so my current solutions are : find a priest with fear ward (which we have 0 70 dwarf or draenai priests), make sure everyone takes fear which is riskier if he crushing blows me during the fear (which is likely because it seems like almost every hit which is not blocked is a crushing blow), tremor totem is not reliable at all, or the aforementioned "don't do anything which is on the global cooldown" which, obviously, if its a long time between fears then more time passes where someone can reach my threat level. Or maybe its really a non issue and I'm just terrible, I just figured I'd ask if any other warriors have difficulty dancing this fear.

No the problem is the insta fear at start of subsequent phase 1's can begin mid air and it gives no ground shaking or warning, so you won't even know its coming to break it - of course this was the observation by the other tank who dealt with this problem, so maybe he's blind. You can have an offtank as brilliance mentioned, but the fight benefits from not having it in the first place. But whatever, this fight is a bit more gimmicky than it should be, and it is certainly buggy.

I'm fairly sure that stance switching is unaffected by global cooldown.

But I must agree, it feels like the fear is comming 0,5 sec faster than other bellowing roar warning.

Ok my new annoyance with Nightbane is crushing blows, and nothing at all you can do about them because Cleave wastes shield block charges, and he seems to have about a 70% chance to crushing blow if you don't block. Thats nice.

Make sure your shamans know that Tremor pulses immediately when you drop it, so they can usually break fears nearly instantly by redropping the totem. It obviously doesn't work on Onyxia or Magmadar type encounters where fear range is 40+ yards, but it sounds like it could work here. The boss *will* turn for a split second while you're feared though.

The one thing that threw me is sometimes as he takes a step when he turns to breath someone on the side, and that step then shakes the ground so i change to zerk stance to only realise he's just moving so then get back in defensive, only for him to then decide he does want to fear so i'm trying once again to switch back to zerk and pop a rage, this isn't a encounter is a stress test for all (horde) warriors

we had our first attempt at nightbane. during the air phase:
2 mages do one nova a few second after another one as soon as the skeletons out. however the nova breaks off very soon and range dps would not be able to finish them off in time then we wipe very fast with smoking blast and immolation.
after a few wipes we tried 2 tanks pull aggro+aoe or healspam aoe dps but our casters and healers die in a flash.
Could someone give any specific suggestions on nightbane air phase please especilly to the skeleton.

Yea I get thrown off when the screen shakes when he does that sometimes, but mostly I watch for the spell name being cast, I have a little cast bar going next to his portrait to see he is casting it.

I totally fat fingered the dancing on the kill, we got to his last 25% with 1 healer dead but most people were lom. I have tons of annoyances with this fight but I think on our last night of attempts we learned a lot about controlling phase 2 which "trivializes" it. I found it more thrilling than our KT kill oddly enough, and I just got flat lucky on not getting crushing blowed over and over with shield block down.

You registered to post this poor excuse of a post?

This is the textual equivalent of a finger painted picture a child would make. Kindly put some more thought into your next post, else it may well be your last.

I think this trivializing factor is what istist's group is missing. My question is, is there any indication as to whether this is the intended approach? I suppose since 2.07 introduced some Karazhan changes we will find out in the coming days. It simply seems too good to be intended that one tiny thing can turn phase 2 from near impossible, into such a cakewalk (relatively speaking; the aggro mechanics are still an exciting although frustrating challenge).

I think we have all discovered the same "technique" and are all wondering if it intended or not, my personal philosophy is use it till it don't work no more, and we will but if it ends up turning out that its not meant to be I guess our group is going to turn into a very frost mage heavy group