Help with akil'zon storm

[faitas]

Hello guys,

after one of the worse nights raiding in zul'aman I feel very disappointed by some actions of my guildmates. Blaming each other, screaming and cursing the whole night because of wipes was not what I expected from them =(

Anyway, I'm here to ask for some help with the electrical storm from akil'zon.

We downed him the first time we went but it seems to be impossible now, and I don't know what else to do.

We use the strategy to collapse into one guy 3-5 seconds before the storm goes out. The first we did this we killed him easily. On the past three days we tried though, it has consumed our efforts into just wiping one time after the other as if the fight was changed so we couldn't do this anymore.


We tried changing the strat to stay in a circle around the boss and just run when the storm is out, but after a couple of wipes almost no one agreed that was a good idea, since one or two always died in the way.


I've also watched some movies of the fight and the most common strategy seems to be to collapse into one person just before the storm. It seems a good one but sometimes the storm delays a little and we start to take too much damage for the healers to handle and again we die.


Any tips, suggestion, help appreciated =)

[Mayhoon]

Getting through those storm phases certainly seems to be the key to the fight and it is indeed frustraiting when someone doesnt do what they're supposed to do, and inevitably wipes the raid. Now, we've only downed him twice out of the three times we've made attempts on him but we do the same thing, a few notes that we keep in mind that seem to make the whole fight smoother are:

Always collapse onto the tank; the storm is a channeled effect so no, he's not going to get hit, but the point is that Akil'zon wont move. What's important here is that melee DPS wont have to move either and can continue to burn the boss. Additionally it keeps the fight less chaotic since Akil'zon will just resume wailing on the tank after the storm ends without running to him.

Distance is also a factor. We usually stay right on the edge of the square 'platform' where Akil'zon starts and is tanked. This is less distance to cover when ranged folks need to collapse in on the tank, of course when heading back out the ranged people still need to stay spread out but it still shouldnt be an issue.

Lastly, ignore the birds when spread out then AoE when you collapse. Reason being is that when everyone is spread out so are the birds. They require much more focus fire to burn down that way which is better to be on the boss. When everyone collapses to the tank (and therefore the boss) the birds will be clusterd much better and are dealt with all the easier by the AoE. The additional bonus here is that any AoE is also going to hit the boss as well.

Apart from that, timing seems to be the key. Have one person with a boss mod call out when to collapse in onto the tank. 3-4 seconds before the timers are our seems to be a decent sweet spot. Once people get comfortable with it however, you can probably run with tighter numbers around 2 seconds for less travel time.

Hopefully this helps, he's rather easy when everything is done right... but then, isnt every boss? :P

[Norskolld]

The biggest problem we had with downing Akil'Zon was timing the collapse on the tank right, we found the raid timers were out a little and sometimes the whole raid would cop a couple of nasty chain lightnings dropping everyone and straining the healers.
Our way of overcoming this was to have a few people kill all ingame audio except their ambience. You can clearly hear the rain starting and can then make the call to collapse over TS/Vent. Once we had this method sorted we downed him first try.

[hbombs]

man o man i dont think my raid will ever try the collapse method i like the suggestion to turn off all sounds but ambience i might give that a go. i also like the AOE the birds and melee still burn down the boss during the storm. its a long fight and it seems like that extra dps will help.

[faitas]

Thanks guys

[Derrick]

having done this fight several times with different strats and helped coordinate both our ZA groups, i find the optimal approach to be a mix of the 2 mentioned: collapsing and waiting. i position everyone on one side of the boss in a grid with MT facing him outwards. trying to collapse right on the cooldown can be death if he decides not to use the storm for several seconds. i believe ive seen as many as 3 static discharges before he finally uses the storm.

a common misconception is that the static discharge is a chain lightning. it is not. it is a targetted AoE. therefore being within 10 yards of the target will get u hit, but you wont chain it to someone thats within 10 yards of you. so instead of a full collapse, i do a 'crunch', tightening up the group slightly when the cooldown is up. especially the back row (ranged dps) comes forward a few steps, since he will almost certainly target one of them. yes you may get some extra damage from the discharges, but not an unhealable amount. and the run will be shorter and easily survivable if everyone is reasonably quick. the MT has the farthest to run, but is least at risk. its not too hard. ive had brand new people there and not had too much trouble since doing it like this.

[faitas]

the ambience sound was much more accurate, thanks for the tip norskolld

we also used your strat derrick, it worked better
start getting closer when the storm is about to come and when it doesn't do much damage

thanks again =)
the plate for dps war dropped
no good for anyone lol

another piece for my future dps set