How do you handle the P1 -> P2 transitions with any kind of consistency? We've been using invuln pots to get it off clothies onto the paladin but this is going to go away and I'd like to know a more reliable way to do it. Force people to take a bit of the charred earth so they have some health down and then have a paladin heal those people up as he's flying into the air? And it seems to stick to a target until that target is dead correct?

That might work. Although it's easier to just pop righteous fury and then hit Nightbane with some damage spells and begin to chain heal yourself.

I know I got a few of the blasts on my warrior after putting up commanding shout for my group before anyone took damage. It seemed to be a reliable way to get 1-2 on me as it worked at least 5-6 times in a row, but then it ceased working for a few attempts and I realized it was just lucky timing of my shout's threat, as small as it is, that got me hit the other times.

Paladin with Righteous Fury up spam healing seems to get it for us every time.

Also, we have our priests wear as much reasonable stam/armor gear as they can. If you're really having trouble with your cloth dying, have them stoneshield/ironshield and/or major defense pot.

When the Rain of Bones debuff is cast on a player, it begins to 'tick' frequently (Something like every half second). Each 'tick' spawns a new skeleton. After many, many tests and trials, I can confidently say the maximum number of ticks (and skeletons) if the debuff is left full duration is five.

The distance between other players has no affect on the skeleton spawns in anyway and is, in my opinion, just a wowwiki-generated caution carried over from beta/early runs, as a way to avoid extra AE damage from the Rain of Bones physical compenent/skeleton immolation. However, regardless of whether you bunch the entire raid onto one spot or have everyone 10+ yards away from everyone else, if you never remove/interrupt the Rain of Bones debuff, you will get 5 skeletons every time.

That said, yes, BoP will remove the debuff entirely, and thus stop any *future* skeletons/ticks from occuring. It also halts the damage compenent (rain) as well, though of less consequence than skeletons obviously.

We went through a ton of tactics, and this was by far our biggest hurdle to getting this fight down (that is, controlling the healing agro for 'laser beams', as we call them). We tried the Paladin spam thing, but were never able to get it to work consistently for whatever reason (Looking back, I think it was due to our lack of 'buffer healing' available -- we didn't have enough people with a health defecit for the Paladin to heal as P2 started).

We had fairly good success (75% success rate or so) using our MT (Prot Warrior) as the 'healing tank' actually, by downranking our healing when Nightbane approached 1-2% prior to a Phase 2, which left the tank with 5 - 8k HP defecit. He'd then heal himself with a bandage (if no dots were ticking), and as soon as skeletons began to spawn, he'd use a super healing pot and lifegiving gem. About three out of four attempts with this method provided the Warrior with enough healing threat (due to defensive stance, defiance, bloodrage, blocking w/ shield spec., etc.) to get the majority of the laser beams through the entire phase.

That said, it was still hit or miss, and 25% failure rate wasn't good enough for us, so we finally tried a more 'typical' method similar to the Paladin spam method, but with a Druid. We'd have our 4 or 5 DPS classes present all purposely take 2-4k damage at some point prior to a Phase 2 (usually stand in the void zones for a tick or two), then immediately when Phase 2 starts (Nightbane takes off), the Druid would throw HoTs on everyone with some damage, as well as themself and the Warriors/MT, then swap to Bear Form. This worked very reliably, even being Resto specced, and ensured approx. 90% of the laser beams hit the Druid each phase.

From there, it was just a matter of handling dispells, Druid heals, and skeletons.

Good luck!

Finally got him down last night.
Druid tank with 380 def, 20k armor, 18.4k hp without flask or sta food but everything else, 35% dodge (we had a better tank, also druid, but pvp specced - he had 500 def, 24k armor, about 1k more hp but no threat talents). Used imp tclap all fight from our fury warr and I CoWd at the end when healers were pretty much oom.

Raid was 2xferal druids, 2xholy palas, 2xholy priests, hunter, 2xlock, fury warr. One dwarf priest which was kinda nice since druids can't do nothing against fear (forgot fear ward once and he went for our fury warr that was immune ).

Biggest issues in the fight were in his flying phase and the landing. 1. Getting only 1 healer to take the crappy dmg, 2. Getting as few skellies as possible.

We solved 1 by having me down to 4k hp when he flew, 6k holy light right after his deep breath . Still, with all the healing on the skellie tank and the paladin, the dmg switched (seems to simply be a 15 second period where he casts spells every second on highest aggro so he'll play around with it). The kitty druid did a Tranquility when he could, nice healing actually. We thought about limited invul pots but we thought we'd rather skip that one since nobody had shrooms leftover and would have just made us dependant on crappy pots.

The Rain of Bones and skeleton problem ... BoP by assisting Nightbane. I still have no idea how skeletons spawn (number of people it hits/if it does dmg one wave it spawns a skellie) - so this is still a question I'd like to know the answer for since BoPing doesn't feel quite right. We spread out some, then fast BoP and tank took the spawned skellies (on good casts only 1 would spawn, due to distance sometimes would be 3-4, still doable but it hurt).

There was another nice problem, landing. He sometimes went for a healer, stopped over his head, killed then did another circle and kill another healer then land at tank, this even if the healers were pretty far from his landing spot ... survived this with a bit of luck (SSed a priest, CRed)

That's how it worked for us but I'd still like to hear about how to handle the healer killing on landing, seems pretty crappy since tank can't take it, simply doesn't stick to him because it's not landed yet.

Warriors can intervene on the landing. Only issue with this is he doesn't always land, or he may even land and then take off again, leaving intervene on cooldown for the next one. Having 2 warriors is nice for that, but everyone has their own raid makeup.

Yeah, he did 2 turns once, landing on the 3rd and killing 3 players in the process ... but intervene can at least save 1 of them. It's a little help at least.

From what I saw I think it's multiple beam, like autoattack in melee. And he shoots each of them to the highest aggro person.

That's why we used paladin put on of those 100% crit 6k Holy Lights on myself, then he just heals himself ... I can control my life to give enough starting aggro to the paladin (that heal is 0 overheal and I'm pretty safe at 4k hp for a few seconds - the heal lands right after he does his deep breath thing) so he takes the bulk of the dmg. After that he only heals himself.

Weird part, I got some of the hits so it made me think that damage to skellies is counted towards aggro too, might have been that all the healers were dead at that time but not quite sure

Just make sure after he does the emote saying he will deal with you on the ground no one in your raid does anything, no bandaging, no hots, no heals and the MT bandages himself or I found it better to bandage a warlock then when he lands just have a shield slam ready

When our group first started Karazhan, it really seemed like we needed 4 healers in the raid in order to make it through most encounters. As we incrementally geared up and were short healers a few times, we realized that 3 healers on most encounters is significantly easier. It would seem that in most of the Karazhan encounters dps > healing.

After seeing the Prince phase 2, I wouldn't have thought he could be killed with 3 healers. This week we did it with two shaman and a pick-up priest without running into mana problems.

Does anyone bring only three healers to Nightbane in his current state? Does the extra dps take the length of the fight down far enough to offset the lack of a healer?

I have only personally gotten to put a couple hours worth of wiping into him. All of our healers were out of town this weekend, so we missed a shot at him on this reset

Nightbane is a kill where DPS doesn't matter at all. This week I took a group in who hadn't really spent much time on him, had 2 rogues on it, and both ended up dying to cleave as I recall in the first 25%, and we won in 19 minutes 59 seconds because no one else died and no one was really stressing on mana.

I don't know if 3 healers is really doable, preferably you mean like 3 healers, 1 non dedicated healer, or even 2 and 2 really as long as the healers have respectable healing gear a gear swap alone should make them functional enough as a healer for any boss including Nightbane.