Our first Nightbane kill was 2 Paladins, a full Resto Druid, 2 Shadow Priests, 2 Warlocks, 2 Warriors, and one Fire Mage. Healing was never an issue because the Shadow Priests could keep our healers sustained for just about forever. The druid actually was the only death... twice. Thankfully having a pair of soulstones and our ealier attempts have had us soulstoning him made this a non-issue.

However, we were DPS heavy even though no one was using any DPS consumables. Too DPS heavy. Having to actually stop DPS before the thrid air phase to allow for BoP cooldowns to come up was a kick. Now that we know exactly what we can manage getting away with much less DPS isn't an issue at all.

Allaince. No Shaman totem tricks, and no Fear Ward. We stance danced with a backup Warrior to cover lag. Everyone ate the fears incase we got a double miss on the warriors only a resist would cause him to leave our tank. If we can do it without complaints Horde can too!

one thing to clarify about the whole fear ward thing - we realize that not all alliance groups have a dwarf/draenei priest with them. the issue isn't that all alliance have fear ward and horde don't, the problem lies with the fact that fear ward makes the hardest boss in karazhan quite a lot easier when Blizzard had stated earlier that they would be moving away from fear as a significant element in raid fights

Also could have been fixed if they had given blood elf priests fear ward instead of draenei... someone please explain THAT one. :P

I'd say +5% health on all druids and tauren warriors make a lot bigger difference in the long run.

They probably see WotF as the equivalent to Fear Ward on some level, and figured letting one faction have both would be an imbalance.

After seeing how the fight goes now with BoP on the Rain of Bones no wonder people are all talking about the fear. Fear is not a hard part of the fight at all in comparison to the real fight itself in phase 2. I'm not even sure why they gave him fear besides they like seeing "dragons" having fears like 50% of the time (dogs btw seem to have a higher ratio on fears).

The fight is the skeletons and glad they are readdressing the fight for melees more but sad took them so long to getting rid of the BoP exploit.

When we were learning the fight we had prolly 10%-20% of our attempts ruined by someone getting feared through that crack and being in the middle of the building and falling into the stables.

we never had this happen while learning nightbane, but I was in a ramparts group once that wiped on the endboss when the dragon overhead meleed gurgthock while it was flying around

I'm not really sure how it's an exploit any more than removing Moroes's Garotte the same way is an exploit. Using an invuln-physical effect to remove an ability of School Physical is just game mechanics working as intended. It may be an oversight on Blizzard's part not to flag the ability as unaffected by invulns, but that's a different matter. If it was unintended, then the fight is just poorly tuned. My standard Kara group for the past few weeks has one hunter and one warlock and no other ranged DPS (it's not really some crazy skewed group composition, we just have two warriors and two shamans, and no mages, and otherwise an even spread), and a full load of 5-6 skeletons is simply not tenable when the bulk of your DPS has to melee. Every video I've seen of handling the full set of skeletons uses frost nova and primarily ranged DPS while healing is focused on a tank holding them in place. I may be wrong, and we simply weren't good enough, but I can't see how you do that fight without using BoP and with a melee-heavy group.

I think the fact that they're removing the Immolation at the same time that they fix BoP says as much. I'm definitely looking forward to checking the fight out in its 2.0.10 form.

On beta the group I cleared up to Nightbane with never figured out to use BOP to block out Bone Rain. When the guilds started clearing him out on Live quite easily, I thought, "Wow, they must be using tons of consumables!".

Truth was, BOP makes that much of a difference, I guess.

The best our group got to Nightbane was 50% unfortunately. Bone Rain + Immolate simply was too much. I knew of one guild on EU Hellfire that was able to kill Nightbane. I don't know if they also used BOP.

Back then, I thought the fight was clearly untuned. With Immolation gone, I think the fight has taken a good turn for the better. However, them being immune to all but non-holy seems a little overkill to me.

I think the issue came down to Blizzard would like you to be able to remove the damage from Rain of Bones but the problem is the damage and the skeleton spawning was together. Second, they realized not everyone has a balanced a raid mixture (in which case you would only have 1 or 2 melee beyond the MT which is no issue on the fight). Third, it was the fight that probably received the least amount of testing and as far as I know never really had any changes done to it, so its only now getting its retuning done. Where as fights like Curator went through many tunings.