[Gangrene]

As a guild we have finally started our first attempts at Kael in TK (guild has only been formed for 2 months) and I was wondering how long it takes on average (how many attempts etc) to get him down. We first started on Sunday and initially had trouble at the phase 2/3 change - On tuesday night we had managed to get to phase 4 with only Axe left but wiped due to the remaining adds and poor use of the weapon buffs. Would you say this is pretty standard regarding progress??

Gangrene - Guild Leader and Main Tank , Zero Tolerance - Horde, Al'Akir

[phaze]

Varies depending on guild. Best thing is to see how well you're improving on the main points of the fight:

Clean P1: slap people who can't kite Thaladred, they need to learn it in P1 first. Make sure everyone behaves when positioning Capernian.

Fast weapon kills in P2: good target is only axe/shield alive entering P3, with whole raid alive as well.

Keeping control in P3: advisors aren't running loose, people kiting Thaladred properly. Good target is at least 2 advisors down before P4; 3 is better. Minimal deaths in raid.

Good transition to P4: tank picks up Kael cleanly, everyone ready for Flamestrikes/Phoenixes/MC's, tank not getting splattered by Shock Barrier / Pyro combo.

Staying alive in P5: don't die.


From your post, it seems your raid has improved quite well in your attempts. Keep improving like that, and you'll have a victory soon.

[Clifford]

We got him down on our fourth night and raid for approx. 4 hours per night. Vashj took us about the same. Not sure if that helps ...

[Kayella]

You're doing pretty good in my view

It took us ages. Vashj was no problem, but with Kael'Thas, we had six nights on him before he died. Any number of silly little mistakes or misconceptions or small changes in tactics can make a difference.

And the trash respawn timer is tick tick ticking all the time, with a reclear seriously eating into raid time and your concentration.

Keep at it, but have breaks from him too. Too many consecutive nights or weeks on one boss will drive your raid team to despair.

[byechee]

I think the most important milestone in the Kael fight is the killing of the first phoenix egg. If your entire raid (or most of it) is alive and that phoenix doesn't respawn, you win. If it's a mess getting to that point there are still other issues to resolve. But problems (if any) after that point are easy to fix.

[lorelye]

We cleared Al'ar & spent the whole week on it, to try Ciderhelm's "Time Management":

Tues: 1.5 hours
Weds: 3 hours (including trash)
Thurs: 3 hours
Fri: low attendance so we hit VR & Solarian
Sun: 4.5 hours
Mon (yesterday): Dead on first try

Halfway through Sunday I made a new rule: bonus 100g to person with the most up-time for the night. I don't know if it mattered, but nobody died after that in phase 1-3. I imagine our guild is not typical (more than a few of our players astonish me regularly), but I think that doing the nights all in a row helped too. Thanks once again Ciderhelm for great advice.

If he hadn't died, I think I would have insisted on going back to Hyjal/BT for a week before going again, so people don't get crazy bored. We were 4/5 4/9 there before doing Kael'thas.

[Amthua]

I would say 3-4 nights now, is probably what it should take. I cannot stress enough how important it is to kill kael'thas for a progression standpoint, as it teaches your raiders important elements that they will undoubtably put forth later in progression (T6+).

We did Kael a while ago, and at the time we were geared in SSC/Kara/Blues. The biggest issue on Kael, is simply control. If you can control phase changes, meaning, very little weapons up going into phase 3, and almost all, or all the advisors down going into phase 4, a kill will come quickly.

With the changes in gear, ZA, and 2 new badge vendors, as well as the ability to get 3 set tokens off every T5 boss, as well as a minimum of 3 items, gearing a raid to beable to have the DPS, healing and tanking stats to kill kael'thas is a lot easier than it was, say 6 months ago.

But with all of that being said, your players ultimately will be the ones that decide how long it takes. If you repeatedly have people dying to thaldred in P3, or not paying attention to where conflags are hitting, or can't stay out of flamestrikes or avoid a slow phoenix, etc etc, the time to down kael will be a lot longer.

I'd put the fight at 3-4 nights, regardless because of it being a 5 phase fight, which requires precise execution.

[Soupa]

Someone mentioned " Up most time gets 100G "

We did something similar, but raid wide. First raid group to get the kill gets MASSIVE DKP bonus. I think it was 5 times the normal "First time boss kill bonus". We also offered the whole raid to /roll on Items from the Gbank that we were "saving".

Kael was down in three nights after that, and Vashj was down in 2. This was of course, after spending at least 4 - 5 solid nights at least, a piece on them.

These two fights, were really the hardest of TBC and created quite a hurdle for MANY MANY guilds. Once thru there , people almost laugh at the simplicity of Hyjal 4/5 and BT 3/9. Don't take that laughter as offense, they really are easy and KT and Vashj REALLY are that much harder than those in Hyjal and BT.

GL and press on. The raidwide ring benefits are a really nice perk.

Soupa-Fly

[Minya]

hum..

I can't really say how hard Kael'thas is right now (because of nerfs in terms of itemization with badges-gear, BT/HS-loot and balancing) but we took about two weeks to get him down pre-nerf, 3-4days a week, 4hours a day.

[bosephus]

Took us 12 attempts over three nights for our first kill. Only three people in our raid had ever successfully killed him outside of our guild, so most of us were learning for the first time. Personally, I thought Vashj was a harder encounter.

And to echo Soupa's point, we were already 4/5 Hyjal and 4/9 BT...Kael and Vashj are much more difficult than those eight bosses. At our gear level already, with those drops and the badge loot, you could tell we over geared the encounter. For the learning attempts I went through the Nightmare Seeds, Major Fire Protection Pots, Last Stand and Shield Wall in order to survive the Pyroblasts, but on our first kill, I didn't have to use any of them. We even got Kael's shield to drop on the first pyroblast cast once because the raid's burst dps was so high.

A DPS warrior fraps'd our first kill and put it to music...so fun to watch again.