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All information here is copyrighted and cannot be reproduced without permission. Kil'JaedanFrom StratsFuOverviewKil'Jaeden is a very fitting capstone to the Burning Crusade expansion. The fight discourages raid stacking, introduces new mechanics, and has some fun cinematic elements. It does not give much of a safety zone, death comes quickly from errors, and the encounter is tuned tightly. SunwellRadiance is in effect.
Auxiliary PagesSummary The FightKil'Jaeden has three trigger mobs, and then four phases. You will need someone to tank Soul Flay (warlock or a feral are best), 1-2 tanks for the Sinister Reflections, and 2-3 dragon controllers designated. The structure of the fight encourages a very balanced raid: melee and ranged both have uses, and stacking shaman will not get you very far, since chain heal is of limited usefulness and Bloodlust/Heroism does not stack with the dragon's haste buff.
If you rotate your raid by 30 degrees, you will inadvertently make your orb controller's job far harder for no good reason. Phase 0KJ has three trigger mobs: Hand of the Deceiver KJ will become active about 10 seconds after the last one dies, so you have time to get into position. The deceivers have a 35' range Shadow Bolt Volley AE, but are stunnable. This ability also applies a brief stacking debuff that increases shadow damage taken. A tank can time stuns to allow time for the debuff to drop before it stacks too high. Your last tank, and possibly second-to-last, may need help with stuns once theirs are all on cooldown. Note that at 20% health, the Deceivers gain Shadow Infusion and can no longer be stunned, so make sure debuffs are in order before then and that they die very quickly at that point. Unless a mob is being stunned, melee and shadow priests should play cards in the corner and wait until the third one dies. Each deceiver also creates a Felfire Portal and spawns imp from it. These imps behave exactly like the imps on the twins gauntlet, exploding when they reach someone but very low health. After about 30 seconds he will create another one. This results in the first round of portals being somewhat scattered around the room. We use either healers capable of just "tanking" the imp explosions, or a spare melee or two to stand by the scattered portals and kill the imps. Once the deceiver summons a second portal, it's next to the tank who can just kill them as they spawn. Phase 1 (100% - 85%)The first phase introduces you to the basic mechanics of the fight. Fire Bloom, Soul Flay, and Legion Lightning are all cast, and a single shield orb will spawn. At 85% the first set of Sinister Reflections spawn. DPS doesn't matter much for this phase, outside of healer mana from the lightning mana drain, as no timers are dependent on this phase. You should not burn any cooldowns, especially anything 2 or more minutes (i.e. trinkets, dps boosts, etc.). Your goal is to arrive at 85% with every cooldown up and available, ready to nuke. The one exception is healers, who should / can use mana potions early in the fight to keep themselves topped up before entering the real encounter (i.e. 85-25%). Phase 2 (85% - 55%)This phase opens with Shadow Spike being cast right after the Sinister Reflections are created. You get your first dragon orb when Shadow Spike's channel is done. He also adds in the Flame Dart ability, as well as casting Darkness of a Thousand Souls. There are two shield orbs up at once as well. Each dragon can cast only two shields before dying, and you only get one dragon in this phase, so there is a very hard limit on how much DPS you need to do to exit it. As a timeline, you should aim to have KJ at 78% or lower (our first kill he was 77%) at the end of the Shadow Spike. The Shadow Spike phase lasts for 30 seconds (29.5 to be precise), and all melee should be able to nuke with impunity through it. Ranged should (typically) be dpsing the Sinister Reflections that spawn at 85%. If you are using a boss mod, be aware that the timers for Flame Dart and Fire Bloom are inaccurate at the end of the Shadow Spike. You should expect a Dart or Bloom 12-14 seconds after the end of the Spike, like clockwork. Phase 3 (55% - 25%)This is the hardest DPS phase; you will want to cast bloodlust right before it. Typically cast Bloodlust at 56%; your goal is to have the 'lust wear off just before the first Breath:Haste, which occurs 10-12 seconds after the end of the Shadow Spike. The second round of reflections will spawn, and everything proceeds the same way as phase 2 but you also need to deal with meteors and three shield orbs at once. The meteors begin spawning approximately 15 seconds after the end of Shadow Spike, after the first collapse for Breath:Haste. The same time limit exists as in Phase 2: you get one dragon (two shields) and need to have him to 25% before the third Darkness is cast. Your goal should be 45% before the end of Spike, then 37% for the first Shield of the Blue, and 28% for the second shield. Plus or minus 2% is doable, although the lower you get KJ before the second shield, the better: it gets extremely chaotic in the last 5%. Collapses for shields can be times of extremely high raid damage in P3, due to three shield orbs, Flame Dart, and Fire Bloom all at once. Phase 4 (25% - 0%)25% is the "stay cool, it's easy if we don't screw up" phase. Shield orbs stop spawning, but everything else continues. Darkness comes twice as fast. However, all dragon orbs are now active and able to be used, so technically you can have as many as 8 darknesses (although you will find that two dragon shields are sometimes necessary, so the actual number is lower.) The DPS requirement is very low in this phase. Since the timers are screwed for this phase, if you are watching KJ's abilities, he will cast Darkness every four "abilities", i.e. Soul Flay -> Soul Flay -> Legion Lightning -> Soul Flay -> Darkness; rinse, repeat. Typically this consists of 3 Soul Flays and 1 Dart/Bloom/Lightning. He gets an inconsequential buff when Aveena sacrifices herself that increases the holy damage done to him. Abilities ReferenceKJ
Additional Mobs
CompositionThere are many variations on KJ group compositions. The fight encourages a balanced raid and is forgiving to many different setups. TanksYou want three people capable, in some form, of tanking the three deceivers simultaneously at spawn. Since our strat has only two tank-spec'd players, we use a dps warrior on the first deceiver and the melee stunlocks it to keep damage low and remove threat concerns. You will need someone to tank Soul Flay. A feral or warlock are preferred, because they can generate high threat and are easy to heal. You will also need someone to pick up the Sinister Reflections when they spawn. An "extra" tank here can help, whether they just help in the roundup or actually tank one of the reflections.
We found the warlock tank to be a good choice because their TPS is unaffected by knockback (we have our arms warrior click off salv so he eats any knockbacks, since his dps is fairly low and much of his contribution is via debuffs) and they don't consume a "space" around KJ, allowing you to fill up with more high-powered melee dps. Be aware that the highest melee threat target will continuously eat knockbacks, so if you choose to go the warlock route, you will need a second "tank" who eats the hits. There's no real damage associated with it, just irritation. Using a feral druid allows you to combine both roles into one, but requires some additional setup for melee dps to ensure Fire Blooms are not shared. The advantage to a feral Soul Flay tank is if you are using a prot paladin to pick up the images, then the best way to get a feral into your raid to cast Faerie Fire/Mangle and buff your hunters is to have them as Soul Flay tank. The also have a higher base HP pool so can go longer without heals, and they will eat all the knockbacks so no other melee has to take a dps hit. HealersSeven healers is most standard on KJ. Resto shaman are still very good for the fight, but the strict positioning means that chain heal isn't as overpowered as it is on other fights, and the dragon breaths mean that more than a single lust per group isn't useful. CoH is extremely strong on KJ, as are priest heals in general, since there is so much movement and the bulk of the healing burden actually comes during collapse when, in a worst-case scenario, you may have orbs pelting the raid, Fire Bloom hitting people, and Flame Dart landing. Fusion commonly brings 2 CoH priests, 2 holy paladins, 1 resto druid, and 2 resto shaman. All of your healers need extremely good situational awareness: KJ is a high movement fight with very terminal penalties for error and high raid damage on top of everything else. Note that one truly dedicated healer is needed for the Soul Flay tank, and one quasi-dedicated healer for the Sinister Reflection tank(s). We use a priest (with a druid assist) for the Soul Flay tank (due to both having heals they can cast while moving) and a paladin for the Sinister, but any class can do. With a warlock, you can't afford to let more than 3 seconds go by without a heal, as the environmental damage is severe, and leaving your tank at 5k HP is a dangerous thing to do, so the warlock healer needs to be free to use vent to ask for assistance if he has to move a long distance (e.g. very bad meteors.) Note that if you use a feral druid as your Soul Flay tank their additional HP pool allows for more efficient heals, but you will likely still want the druid assist in terms of keeping HoT's up especially for 55% and below. DPSMelee will be the backbone of your KJ damage, but they also are limited in spots on the fight due to the limited space around KJ himself (and within range of your healers). Your rogues can stack on each other, but everyone else needs to be 10 feet apart. We have found that we can bring 2 enhancement shaman, 1 ret paladin, 1 arms warrior, and 3 rogues to the fight without issues. Your ranged are also important, since they will be killing the orbs (low health but a high raid damage potential) and killing the images. Hunters do especially well on the fight because they don't need as many raid debuffs to do their peak damage, so the target switching doesn't affect their DPS as much. Warlocks are useful if you use an AE strategy (we do not.) Normally our warlocks raid as fire, however we all keep a fire/shadow hybrid tree (ISB but no cataclysm) so we can do shadow on KJ: scorch isn't up reliably enough, even with two mages in the raid, since one is a dragon controller. Also, shadow works better with a lot of target switching since you don't need to get an immolate up first. Group Composition NotesAll of your mages and locks will need a shadow priest due to the mana drain from Legion Lightning and the high raid damage. You may need to bring a third shadow priest if your healers cannot manage their mana, although we only bring 2 spriests and 7 healers. You need to stack one solid melee group and a second with a mix of melee and hunters, both with a shaman and in range of totems. The fight is very flexible to raid composition, but just for an example, a typical group setup for Fusion is:
Unique MechanicsSinister Reflections
Focus firing and dispells are the only way you can deal with priest images. Your enhancement shaman needs to be almost chain-purging KJ if he is getting renews. PowerAuras is very helpful: configure it to show a graphic when your target is hostile and has renew up. Shadow priests or elemental shaman need to be dispelling/purging the current image kill target, and all the ranged need to focus fire them down one by one and not split dps.
They whirlwind -- the raid needs to move out of their way when they are being moved.
These are especially dangerous sub-55% when they can stun a tank trying to move into a shield. Paladins need to be ready with cleanses for the tank in these situations. Free Action Potion will also work.
These can have a very high initial burst dps if you have only a single tank on them, since they do a coordinated nuke when they become active. Mages are arguably the most deadly image, since warlocks spend a lot of their time casting weak CoA's on the raid (don't spend time dispelling these on anyone except perhaps the Soul Flay tank, as they will spam them frequently.)
They cast moonfire on the raid. As with the CoA from the warlocks, don't worry about dispelling it, they'll just spam it again.
They will wingclip the tank, so use BoFreedom/Free Action Potion as necessary.
Earthshock casters within 20'. It may be an option to move, depending on your strategy and position.
We choose to kill all images at 25%, but it's certainly an option to simply offtank them. We kill them because it means there's no chance of the image tank dying at 5% and them ripping through the raid and wiping us (this has happened when we were too slow to kill them.) Dragon Orb Controller There are four dragon abilities:
TankingSinister ReflectionsThe most important thing is the initial pickup. Have your tanks both take central positions when you're nearing a boundary when reflections spawn (85%, 55%, 25%.) The reflections will not aggro immediately unless they are hit, so either intercept or run in before using any aggro abilities. Assuming you are using two tanks, one of whom is also a dragon controller, the dragon controller needs to end up with only one mob on him, and the DPS need to focus fire down that mob so it's dead before Shadow Spike is done. The second tank needs to be building threat on the next kill target and mark it ahead of time so the dps can move smoothly from target to target and kill them all quickly. Split DPS can be very bad here, especially if the images are priests (they cast a vicious renew.) Someone needs to be standing near the further of the two orbs that the warrior is responsible for to act as an intervene target in case that orb becomes active. We prefer this strategy because it is consistent and safer: you do a bit less DPS to KJ himself, but you aren't moving in and out and risking Flame Dart/Fire Bloom damage and all images are treated the same. You also aren't trying to find space near KJ for another person and risking shadow spike damage on two people, blooms, etc. Your heal burden on the tank also lessens in terms of severity as the images die one by one rather than staying high until they all die simultaneously.
Move the images on top of KJ and have the warlocks (other than the tanking lock) seed them until they're dead. While it may seem like a good idea to add off-target melee dps such as blade flurry, you drastically increase the risk of spike deaths due to the proximity of KJ and the very short travel time on Shadow Spike. Typically there is enough room for one additional person in the AE clump, and your DPS warrior shines here with sweeping strikes and whirlwinds (watch the aggro.) Do not bother focus firing anything in this case, since it just reduces the efficiency of the AE. Locks cast SoC, and the only other damage on them outside of off-target abilities such as chain lightning / multishots are priests dotting them to get Shadow Weaving and Misery on the mobs. If you really want to, you can have all mages and locks collapse ahead of the image spawn percentages (86%, 56%, 26%) to guarantee that the images are near KJ. This may or may not be a worth it, however, due to the extra movement and lost DPS time, but there's no loss for everyone to move in for the 86% mark (outside of people with Fire Bloom) since you're not on a timer yet and there's nothing else going on. The downside to the AE strategy is that the movement is a DPS/healing loss, as well as more risky with blooms or Flame Dart being cast right before images/Shadow Spike. Orbs spawning right then can also be a problem, since you lose dps time on them. The upside is slightly more efficient DPS (probably on the order of a couple of percents on KJ.) You do not need to stack warlocks to make this strat succeed, 2-3 is plenty. Soul FlaySee KJTanking for more detailed tanking information. Someone needs to tank soul flay, preferably a warlock or a feral. We prefer a warlock because our feral is doing images. The most important thing for the soul flay tank to do is not die. They have to reliably get into every shield, dodge all the meteors, and keep their threat up. If you use a warlock tank for soulflay, one of your melee will still be eating knockbacks. We force this onto our arms warrior by having him click off salv and the rogues using vanish partway through the fight. HealingOne thing to watch out for is during Shadow Spike, it's very easy to slack off on healing because if the spikes are hitting different people it isn't intense, however all healers need to stay alert because 2+ spikes on a row on the same person will be deadly. Orbs can also be extremely deadly if they move around the back of the raid. Melee can get gunned down very quickly if you get bad orb timings, or the ranged slack. PriestCoH is very strong on KJ since it's instant and the times you need the most healing are while moving, when the raid is coming together or spreading apart (and thus in range for CoH.) It's also very useful for topping off the raid while in the shield. Depending on your grid setup, CoH might even be able to hit 3 at once in some groups, but for the stationary part of the fight, renew, Flash, and Greater Heal are all very strong. On collapse, spam CoH coming into collapse to get everyone topped off. then hit PoM and as many renews as you can afford before the shield ends to minimize the raid dmg that occurs after every shield. As you run out of shield to your position, spam CoH again to top off the raid while they're still in CoH range. Like other healers, it's extremely important you get back to position quickly so you can top off those running back, particularly if a bloom or darts hit right as the raid is spreading out. Never miss a cooldown for Prayer of Mending, and keep renew on any Fire Bloom targets in range. Our priests receive Revitilization breaths frequently so can often handle the decreased effeciency of spamming FH -- hasted FH is extremely strong for KJ, especially for Bloom healing. Your shadowfiend has typical boss returns if you can keep him alive, often returning 60-80% of your mana pool. A great spot to use the 'fiend is during Shadow Spike, as it is almost impossible for him to die -- the 55% Spike is a perfect time to get topped up on mana. If you are fine at that point, save it for 25% when you will have just finished the most intensive part of the fight. Binding Heal is your friend for KJ. Enough said. ShamanAlthough Chain Heal doesn't bounce when people are spread out, it still is useful because of its mana efficiency while you are first getting used to the fight, for healing melee (although CoH is arguably more useful with its larger range), and for healing during collapses. Lesser Healing Wave is also an excellent choice when timed well, because it delivers more health (albeit with more mana.) If you have a shadow priest, you can really abuse Lesser Healing Wave. Chain heal is amazing during collapses, this is where you really get to shine as a shaman. Another great target for a shaman to watch out for is an add tank that has to run through the raid with Fire Bloom, bouncing chain heals off of them will heal both the tank, and the people they are nuking. PaladinsThe first 20-25% (P1 and start of P2) or so is mainly FoL to conserve mana, once haste is applied HL on the raid is spammed. Make sure to spot tanks and freedom/dispell people slowed before shield. Also make sure to toss a Holy Shock on people as you move in and out of shield. As the fight progresses HL becomes your main heal and you should be almost be hasted the entire fight from 50% on. Hasted Holy Lights are incredibly powerful, particularly on such a spread-out fight with such heavy unpredictable raid damage. When collapsed, be topping people off with flashes and be ready to run to your spot. You don't have the advantage of hots or instant casts, so you need to move quickly in and out. You can move out of your spot during a shield and be at the edge, ready to dash out the moment it's safe. 2-3 seconds after Darkness of Thousand souls, orbs often spawn and raid damage spikes up. Save holy shock for moving OUT of the shields to keep yourself or someone close up should they dip too low due to bad darts, not getting topped off in the shield, fire bloom, etc. Resists the urge to bubble your Fire Bloom off early in the fight. Save if for when you have Fire Bloom and need to get in the shield and start healing immediately. That way the raid isn't out a healer when it needs one most. Between 55% and 25% is a likely time for this to happen. The paladin may be dedicated to the Sinister Reflection tanks because they can be ready with BoFreedom should the tank get hit with HoJ or Flame Dart while trying to make it into the shield. Just like the Soul Flay healer, the reflection healer needs to call out anytime the reflection tank gets hit with Shadow Spike. There is a huge gib potential with adds up due to the damage and reduced healing. If you have two Holy Paladins in the raid you try to pick a side to raid heal and spam accordingly. DruidsKeep a 3-stack LB and Rejuv up on your Soul Flay tank at all times. If using a warlock, attempt to keep Regrowth up as well as another possible Swiftmend target: if the tank spikes, you're responsible for topping him or her up fast, while the main healer follows behind with a big heal. Aside from Soul Flay tanks, use your heals on the Sinister Reflection tanks, and anyone around you taking damage from Fire Bloom. Immediately after expansion (post Shield) is a great time to toss off individual Lifeblooms to top up people who took minimal damage and who don't have Fire Bloom. The main raid healers will be watching for Bloom, and your HoTs should tick fully. The Breath:Haste, like Bloodlust, will give you more GCDs. Do not be afraid to shift out of any snares when collapsing, and use your Dash wisely to save your life. Healing the soulflay tankPriests are very strong at this due to the versatility of their healing spells: having PoM, PW:S and Renew available make them stronger than paladins or shamans for the task. Healing the soulflay tank isn't a particularly hard job, but any time there is movement involved with Soul Flay still going off, it can get extremely tricky. You should collapse slightly early for Shield of the Blue if you can (or for Breath:Haste immediately following Shadow Spike), so you are actually in the collapse position when Soul Flay resumes. You really don't want to be running in the middle of a 3 x 3000 damage string on your tank, if at all possible. Be alert for the soul flay tank eating a late shadow spike: 10 seconds of MS means you need to up-rank immediately to balance out the reduction in healing. Calling out for backup here is wise, as there are no Fire Blooms for the first 10 seconds after Shadow Spike, so there should be 5 healers available to help you.
Again, if you are healing a Warlock tank, save PoM for the collapse and use PW:S/PoM as the Shield of the Blue goes up. This will ensure that not only will your warlock be at 100% after the 2500 damage from Darkness goes off, but also has (typically) a PoM waiting to eat the first tick of Soul Flay. Be aware that you have to move from the Shield back to your assigned position, and during that time the warlock will be taking 3 ticks @ 3000 damage each. Those have to be healed, so think about ways to get back to your position faster, and use your instants to heal on the run. Ranged DPSReflectionsFollow the tank assist calls. There isn't time for split dps, and overaggro can equal death. The warlock soul flay tank will not be helping with reflections. OrbsOrbs are your number one priority outside of sheer survival. It's more important that you make sure an orb dies than maximizing your DPS. Dots are especially key in taking down orbs once there are 2-3 orbs up at once: an orb that escapes and goes around the back side will do a lot of damage before it comes back in range, but dots can kill it. The worst orb situation possible is that orbs spawn while the raid is collapsing for a shield. In that case, dot them while running if you can, and dot any in range when you are standing on the shield. The exception to the above is a survival hunter: if you have one, he should remain on KJ to provide constant debuffs for your melee. If you are running with two shadow priests, one should be helping with the reflections since Misery is a nice dps boost at a low cost and Shadoweaving helps your shadow warlocks. (all our locks go shadow for KJ due to scorch being up only intermittently even when we run with two mages.) Even if sinister reflections are still up, all ranged must immediately switch to orb-killing when they spawn. The warlock tank will be killing orbs when three are up, and helping on "bad timing" spawns of double orbs (e.g. on a collapse.) Outside of that it's trivial for even just several ranged to handle the orbs without any of them escaping around the back as long as those players are actually making sure they kill the orbs. Melee DPSYour only goal is to burn KJ down without dying. Make sure you remain 8-10 yards apart: Shadow Spike and Fire Bloom are both killers. Rogues can group up and cloak Blooms or spikes. However, once the clump gets hit by a spike, they need to spread out (even if that means some don't dps KJ for a bit) because two spikes in a row on 2-3 people is very difficult to heal. We use a melee as the focus for the collapse. If that melee has Fire Bloom, he has to be very quick at moving out so he doesn't bloom the entire raid. KJ spends most of his time casting, and parry-gibs can't happen (since his main attack is a spell), so don't worry about trying to be behind him. Miscellaneous TipsHave KJ as your FocusOne of the biggest tricks we found was having everyone, even healers, have KJ as their target or their /focus and have the *cast bar* for their target/focus *big* and very visible. To get into the shield you need to be watching for the cast time, not the graphic. To catch a late Fire Bloom during a shield collapse, you react faster if you see his cast and you don't wait for the graphic or "oh dear people seem to be dying, perhaps I have fire bloom." Knowing that darts is casting. Knowing he just started a Soul Flay so nothing bad will happen for three seconds. etc. This may involve rearranging your UI so you can have a big, clear cast bar for your focus target (or your target) but it's worth it. This can also be a critical boon to a feral tank, as it allows you to cast Faerie Fire on KJ without having to actually select him, something that can be very troublesome with the amount of mobs potentially targettable. A simple /cast Faerie Fire(Feral) [target=focus] will accomplish a rather dramatic increase to your physical DPS. How to handle Fire BloomWhen you're not moving the answer is easy: be 8-10 yards away from everyone else. The proximity alert box in Bigwigs is very reliable here. During collapses, people with bloom need to quickly get out of the main thoroughfare routes and head for the back of the dragon. Melee need to do the same, or be somewhere else that is (a) close to the shield and (b) not within 8-10 yards of someone else. If your collapse point is a person, that person has an extra-critical duty to get away quickly if they get bloom, you cannot expect the rest of the raid to accomodate you. Remember that once the shield goes down, all incoming damage is reduced by 95%. So at 4 seconds left on his channel you can expect to be able to be under the shield and near the raid without risking the raid. Don't wait so long to get into the shield that you die due to Darkness. Watch his cast bar, not the shield graphic, to know when to move into the raid. I heard it's better to cast breaths after you shield rather than beforeHere's our take on the matter:
Overall, pre-shield breaths produced a more stable, consistent fight for us. It's not just hasted DPS. Hasted healing, and revitalized healers, have a lot more health per second that they can throw around, negating some of any potential additional damage (and I actually think there's less overall raid damage when you breath pre-shield.) The haste breath means that you're protected from almost all possible darts as well, making movement easier (can be key sub-55% with meteors.) By breathing after the shield and claiming it's safer, you completely ignore the fact that after a shield everyone is stationary. That was the same lesson as on Felmyst: moving people react more quickly to changing situations, it's easier to handle late blooms (pre-shield) than early blooms (post-shield.) Not to mention, there's a clear set of rules you follow when you get a late bloom as you're collapsing, and it's clear by the timers if you're in risk of one, so you can call it out on vent ("watch, may be blooms"). People with blooms move to the back of the dragon and end up quickly away from the raid. If there's an early bloom and you're doing post-shield breaths, what do you do? People stay clumped for a *long* time between reaction time plus running out. Not only that but the bloom timer is pretty much always up, you don't know if he's going to do it or not, so it's not nearly as clear when to be alert. Finally, guilds who have never done breaths pre-shield don't understand the huge value of having your raid already moving out of the shield area right as darkness lands, especially when you're sub-55% with meteors. As a last, but fairly important note: the difference in when you have to move between the two tactics is about 2-3 seconds max. So the additional "risk window" of clumping pre-shield is very low. The sequence is "Breath, breath, shield", starting at ~6-7 seconds (you never wait for people to be there -- if someone is straggling, they don't get a breath.) It's not like everyone is hanging out there for 10-15 seconds. People keep dying to imagesIt's absolutely critical that the very second images spawn, the person they spawned on moves away from them immediately, no matter who they are. Images will remain inactive for a bit, but if nothing directly aggros them then they will prox aggro when they activate. It's important that the closest person to all of them is a tank. It's also critical that no one use any sort of AE abilities when images are close to spawning. No consecrate, whirlwind, bladeflurry, multishot, etc. Otherwise they will activate the second damage hits any of them, and wreak havoc because your tanks are not in place yet. How to use BloodlustBloodlust needs some slightly careful handling on this fight: Bloodlust can overwrite Breath:Haste. However Breath:Haste cannot overwrite bloodlust. This means it's vitally important to be careful how and when you use Bloodlust. While learning, you can use Bloodlust to get through a phase and get experience in the next phase. We found it extremely useful, for example, to get ourselves practice in the 55% phase while we were still working out the tactics for the fight. Once you are experienced at the fight however, you will want to use it at 55%. Due to the stacking issues, however, it's important that your shaman do not cast it too late. We have our shaman go on raid leader call at 56% and that ensures that lust will have expired by the time the dragon is casting haste on the raid again. (If your raid DPS is good, you may have as much as 10-15 seconds left on Breath:Haste at this point. That's fine, the important thing is to have lust up early enough so it is expired by the time the breath gets cast again.) How to use Fire Elementals effectivelyIdeally all Shaman should drop their Fire Elementals at 55% as soon as the Sinister Reflections come out: the AE of the fire elementals is useful to help get the reflections down (or worst case, they damage KJ.) However if the Sinister reflections are warriors, save all Fire Elementals until 25% when the last set of Reflections pop out. Warriors cast whirlwind and will kill the elementals. We just keep losing a lot of peopleIf you can't pin down why, and you just have random deaths, it's probably either:
Orbs keep killing peopleYour ranged absolutely need to be held accountable for their damage on Shield Orbs. Use Recount in-game or WWS after the fact to see how much damage is being done by each person (warlock tank excluded for the first half of the fight): WWS Link (scroll down to "Dmg. In"). Alternatively, look at this WWS page, which breaks down the damage by percentages done. Orbs are the top priority, even if Sinister Reflections are up (even if you have an AE strat and reflections are up.) DoT are extremely effective on orbs, since they continue ticking even after the orb moves out of range. If your mages are at the far edges, they can move into range to take out the orbs as they come around, if one managed to make it past the raid with some health yet. It's very very likely that if you have orbs "escaping" around the back that you have people who aren't pulling their weight on the orbs (e.g. spriests might be ignoring instructions to do because "well they die so fast anyways, it barely ticks.") Positioning is very rarely an excuse: due to how the orbs move, they pass in front of everyone's position. No one's DPS is more important than killing orbs. How to get under the shieldSometimes, but very rarely, there can be a bug where you are under the shield for 2-3 seconds but you still die to Darkness. However, and this is important, this is a very very rare bug. 99% of "it was a bug!" shield deaths are due to poor play. Strafing back and forth can help ensure that your position gets updated server-side if you are a bit late ducking in. Don't jump in, since the server doesn't update your position until you land. It takes half a second or so for the shield to register on you, so you can appear to be in the shield but not gain the buff until after Darkness is cast. This is why everyone needs to be in the shield multiple seconds early. It's critical to watch his *cast bar timer*, and not the shield graphic, to know when to move in towards the raid if you have bloom: move in so you are with the raid at 4 seconds remaining on his cast, since that is when the shield will go up and your fire bloom won't hurt others. If you are watching the graphic you are almost guaranteed to be late and will die reasonably often. Pictures are worth a thousand words, so here's a video of how to get under the shield. In this case our dragon controller screwed up, the shield didn't go up until 1-2 seconds before darkness. That doesn't matter: you still go under the shield at 3-4 seconds remaining. Had I waited for the shield graphic, I'd have died. Instead I lived. Download a full quality version (1600x1024, ~9mb) or watch the embedded version here. Meteor tipsRemember multiple meteors can fall in quick succession. Don't be "that guy" who runs in quickly after one meteor drops only to die to the next one. The dragon controllers need to be very smart in P3 and P4 about where they drop the shields. Don't put one up where a meteor is falling shortly, move a few feet to the right. Keep up vent chatter about where meteors are during the shield, so people don't run out of the shield and die immediately to a meteor on their way back home. When moving for a meteor move right on top of someone else. Never stand between two people: if you get Fire Bloom, then you bloom those folks you're in between rather than just blooming one person. Get in the habit of maintaining the grid positions even if it means doubling up. If you and the person you are standing on have Fire Bloom, move one more space and stand on someone without it. LivingRemember you are responsible for your life, not the healers. Have "healthstone races" to see who can use the most healthstones over the course of the night (but don't be foolish and waste them, they're lifesavers.) DPS and healers may want to use Super Rejuvenation Potion and save their pot timer for when they need a heal and get mana at the same time. WWS Samples
Videos
DiscussionFeel free to visit to talk about the fight or post questions: http://www.fusion-guild.org/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=30 Loot
Patch History2.4.3 (7 July 2008)
2.4.2?
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