Kael stuff

[demog]

Okay, my guild have had two kael'thas (wipe-)nights now, and i'd like to see if i can get some feedback on the tactic we've converged towards.

I find it kinda frustrating as it doesn't appear to me that we have "bottled" phase 2 and 3 yet. I don't mind wiping a lot, as long as i'm sure the tactic we've come up with is the right one and it's all just a matter of execution.

Here's what we do when phase 2 starts at the moment:

MT (me, warrior) picks up the axe-add and drags it behind kael.
OT1 (warrior) picks up the sword-add and the shield-add and places them in the front of kael, to the left.
OT2 (feral druid) picks up the dagger-add and drags it to same spot as OT1, while also keeping aggro on staff.
OT3 (dps warrior) picks up the mace-add and drags it away from the rest, in front of the platform.
Hunter tanks the bow to the far right.

AOE starts on sword/shield/dagger/staff. I carefully drag the axe near so it is hit by AOE too, but none but me takes damage from the whirlwind.

All remaining DPS nukes down the mace so healers can loot it as soon as possible.

Then single-target DPS nuke down: First staff, then dagger, then sword, then shield, then the bow, and finally the axe.

Phase 3 usually gets very close when dps is halfway through the shield, at which point i taunt it off OT1 who goes to get ready to tank the second advisor (and OT2 goes for the final advisor). Several times the sword was still alive and OT2 had to drag it to his phase 3 tanking spot.

So, i'm tanking axe and shield, waiting for ranged to kill the shield. When it is dead, i loot it, and move away so a mage can loot a shield too, and bring it to OT2.

When axe is dead i receives a dagger from the same mage, and i go stab the staring dude in the back to keep up the debuf.

Our kill order for phase 3 is: Melee goes on advisor number 2 followed by the engineer, while ranged goes on the staring dude followed by the astromancer (who is tanked by a single warlock with the staff buf).

We have only managed to get the first two advisors down before phase 4 starts (and i'm usually killed pretty fast because i lack healing (and the mace buf)).

Our setup:

Tanks: 2x prot warriors, 1x feral druid, 1x dps warrior
Healers: 8
DPS: 2x dps warriors, 2x rogues, 1x enha shaman, rest ranged
For AOE we have 3-4 mages and 2 warlocks.

Ppl are primarily rerollers who started kara in the beginning of the year, and 25-mans in the end of january. Gear generally suffers a bit from the fact that we haven't farmed SSC and TK much - but luckily we got a lot of free gear in patch 2.3 So imo, the gear shouldn't be a problem at all (as opposed to what many of my guildies claim).

So, any comments?
- Should we change how we handle the weapon adds?
- Should we try with less healers and more DPS?
- Should we try with less melee DPS and more ranged?
- Should we farm SSC some more? (atm we get 3/4 TK in one night, followed by as much of SSC as possible before raid end time... which is one or two bosses... We raid 4 times per week, so that'll leave 3 nights for kael)
- How many weapons are acceptable to have alive in phase 3?
- How many advisors are acceptable to have alive in phase 4?

WWS logs can be found here, if anyone is interested :P

Wow Web Stats

[Notalda]

- Should we change how we handle the weapon adds?
- Should we try with less healers and more DPS?
- Should we try with less melee DPS and more ranged?
- Should we farm SSC some more? (atm we get 3/4 TK in one night, followed by as much of SSC as possible before raid end time... which is one or two bosses... We raid 4 times per week, so that'll leave 3 nights for kael)
- How many weapons are acceptable to have alive in phase 3?
- How many advisors are acceptable to have alive in phase 4?

I would bring the weapons closer, so melee can blade flurry / cleave / whirlwind, that helps quite a bit. Also, replacing one healer with a DPS will certainly help in phase 2 & 3.

On our first kill, we had 2 weapons up (sword + shield) when phase 3 started, but back then we only had two mages and a warlock in the raid for AoE, so we didn't AoE at all. Since we started bringing 2-3 warlocks and 3-4 mages, we usually have 20-40 seconds before phase 3.

Again, on our first kill, we had two advisors up when phase 4 started (capernian and the engineer), nowadays we have none, or the engineer below 5%.

On our latest kill, with 5-6 new people, we had the shield up when phase 3 began, on about 5%, and the engineer when phase 4 started, around 8% HP.

As for healing, we usually have one healer on each of the advisor tanks (if they get focused by Thaladred, they notify the other healers who are on raid healing, and one of them takes over), so 4 of our 7 healers are usually free. By the time phase 4 starts, Thaladred and Sanguinar will be dead, which will grant the main tank 5 healers, which is plenty.

If you have trouble getting heals, tell your healers to be ready and at the appropriate place when phase 4 starts.

[demog]

I would bring the weapons closer, so melee can blade flurry / cleave / whirlwind, that helps quite a bit.

What (single-target DPS) kill order of the weapons would you suggest? Atm we kill the mace away from the rest first, because the healers complained they had a hard time looting it when the corpse wasn't clear. I assume they should just stop QQ'ing and L2click?

Next time i'll suggest trying with the mace together with the rest. I can imagine we lose a lot of sweeping strikes/cleave/etc dps when it's not near the rest.

Also, replacing one healer with a DPS will certainly help in phase 2 & 3.

Kay, we'll aim for 7 healers in total then. (although i think on half the tries we already did it that way).

As for healing, we usually have one healer on each of the advisor tanks (if they get focused by Thaladred, they notify the other healers who are on raid healing, and one of them takes over), so 4 of our 7 healers are usually free.

What do you do if any of the tanks get gazed at?

By the time phase 4 starts, Thaladred and Sanguinar will be dead, which will grant the main tank 5 healers, which is plenty.

If you have trouble getting heals, tell your healers to be ready and at the appropriate place when phase 4 starts.

Kay, thanks for the advices.

I guess it's mostly a matter of optimizing the dps (which generally gets better for each try) then.

[Wrath]

Yap Kael is all about optimizing your dmg output and even more important, that every player has to know his job 100%

-

Our Weapon Killorder was:

1. ) Staff & Bow first - bye all ranged DD´s

-Rest of the weapons were pulled together on one spot (we took kaels left side)

2.) The Mace was focused @ 15% the mace gets pulled out of the ae zone and is easy lootable.

-meanwhile the bombers startet to ae - Wl´s & shadows dot everything

3.) the daggers
4.) sword
5.) melees finish off the shield
6.) we left the axe offtanked by our feral and just throw every dot available on it... usually dies after 20 secs in phase 3


Of course this is just an example, worked very good in our raid, but i guess every single group has to figure out the best suiting weapon strat for them, by their own.

-

When one of the tanks gets Thaladreds gaze - we just announce that thorugh vent, they just get some extra heals and kite their targets till the gaze is gone.

[Groundchuck]

We do the following for P2:
4 "tanks"
6 healer
bunch of dps

Tank 1: Prot warrior with some FR for Master Engineer, and Phoenixes
Tank 2: Prot warrior, Sanguinar tank, MT for kael (me)
Tank 3: Bear/Pally who will help on birds.
Tank 4: Bear in cat gear who will dps later.


Tank 1 tanks the daggers and helps dps stun the staff.
Tank 2 tanks the mace and taunts the sword when mace dies.
Tank 3 tanks the Sword/Shield (usually a pally or bear)
Tank 4 runs away and tanks the Axe


We single target in the following order:
staff>mace>daggers>sword>shield>axe/bow

We have 2 hunters only on the bow, they get it down by the time we drop the sword.

Locks DOT up the shield (we usually run with 4 locks)

When the mace gets to about 10% I pull it out of the clump to make it easy for healers to grab. We do this with all weapons.

When the mace dies I go over and taunt the sword. When the sword dies I get in position to tank Sanguinar.

During Phase three we keep one lock on the axe/shield to make sure they get down and the shield tank loots me a shield and trades it to me. (if it hasn't dropped before P3)

In Phase 3 I use a combination of stancedance/fearward to break Sanguinar fears until I get a shield.


*********
GENERAL COMMENTS:

We learned the fight with 6 healers. That should be totally doable and I highly recommend it. If your healers are weak go up to 7, but 8 is too many.

We found that single target dps in P2 is much easier for us, but you have to be really good at assisting.

5 meele should be fine.

Something that helps in P3 is to have a hunter dps sanguinar for the debuff and have a rogue on Thaladread for the dagger debuff. Helps P3 dps a TON!


When P3 starts having shield/axe alive is no big deal. The rest should be dead.

When P4 starts you pretty much need all advisors dead, but finishing up Master Engineer can be ok. You want people fairly close together so that you can easily dispell MCs and be close to phoenix eggs.


Hope that helps.

[Notalda]

What (single-target DPS) kill order of the weapons would you suggest? Atm we kill the mace away from the rest first, because the healers complained they had a hard time looting it when the corpse wasn't clear. I assume they should just stop QQ'ing and L2click?

Bow -> Staff (ranged), Mace > Daggers > Sword > Shield (melee + ranged once they're done with bow & staff), Axe (ranged only).

About looting, yeah, it's hard at times. A workaround is to pull the weapon away when it's on like 5%, so it can be looted quickly and painlessly, but have it in the bunch for the other 95%.

What do you do if any of the tanks get gazed at?

Depends on where Thaladred is. If he's at Kael, and gazes on the Sanguinar or Capernian tank, they just stay there (or maybe move a little bit, just to make sure). If he gazes on the engineer tank, that tank runs away dragging the engineer behind. Someone with a staff (we use a mage to cover Kael + Sanguinar) must run along, so the person won't loose the staff buff.

We generally try not to kite Thaladred too close to Capernian, so the Capernian tank can happily stay put even if he gets focused.

Another option is to quickly BoP said tank, who then dispells that immediately. Of course, you have to notify the raid before that, so any melee can run away and avoid getting one-shotted between BoP landing on the tank and the tank dispelling it.

Thaladred will switch to following the person highest on threat when his target becomes immune. Thus, whoever is highest on his threat list better be at the other end of the room.

[maddfez]

We went with an aoe strategy with the single target dps FF stuff down. A mage / warlock can put out well over 2k dps AoEing compared to say 1k dps single targetting...it's well worth it to work AoE into your setup.

We focus fired the staff with a rogue / dps warrior "tanking" it while aggro was built else where. We then AoE'ed down the mace, dagger, sword, shield, and axe...axe brought in from the 'back' and melee in from the 'front' of the aoe pile. Three single target dps burned down the bow.

The melee and single target ranged dps not on the bow went mace --> dagger --> sword --> shield / axe. When a weapon was low it was moved out of the aoe pile to make looting easier....this is especially key with the mace.


We finished all the weapons off before any dps went on the advisors. Melee killed Telonicus, ranged killed Thaldred while I put the dagger debuff on him. Then both groups killed Sanguinar. Cap was left alive unless we were waiting for Kael...which didn't happen until later kills.

Phase four, control the MCs and the birds / eggs...just have your MT plan on eating the pyroblasts. This simplifies things greatly while learning.

Phase five...have your tank stay 30+ yards away, counterspell Kael and let Kael run to your tank...we had a guild on our server that was stuck on kael for an extra week because their MT couldn't figure that out.

[demog]

Thanks a lot, some very useful tips and tricks.

I'm not fond of changing tactics too radically, i'd prefer to make small changes each attempt instead.

So first of all i'll try to group up all the weapons under the AOE, and have a weapon that is about to die, dragged out.

I hope that will allow us to get some good tries of phase 3 with 25 man up :P

Also the hunter-on-Sanguinar trick seem very nice.

[Methadone]

3 tanks, 6-7 healers, 4-5 aoe should be ok.

Tank 1 (prot warr/pala) on Sang > mace + swords > sang > KT
Tank 2 (prot warr/pala) on eng > daggers + bulwark > eng > pheonix's
Tank 3 (feral druid) as dps > axe > KT or Pheonix's if needed.
Warlock on capernian

Seperate the bow to the right, tanked by a hunter. Seperate the staff to the left "tanked" by melee, and seperate the axe behind KT tanked by the druid (in range of aoe if you want). Drag the rest together.

1. Ranged on the bow, melee on the staff.
2. Melee + ranged non aoe classes focus the mace, aoe on the rest.
3. Drag the mace out at 5% so healers can get it, keep interupting its heals.
4. Assist down the rest keeping up aoe.

Usually the bulwark and axe are left, if tank 1 needs to run to sanguinar while the shield is still up, a dps needs to loot the shield and trade it to him.

Hunter + melee on sanguinar, rogue/warrior with dagger and ranged on thaladred.

If a tank gets gazed, you can tank thaladred, he doesn't hit too hard. Shieldwall if needed. Melee need to MOVE though, they will get 1 shot if thala gazes them after the sang tank.

Ranged on capernian, melee on engineer.

Get the mace buff and staff buff on the MT as soon as Sang dies. Assign a lock to dps just KT alone + 1 interupter (rogue/warrior). Get the lock to dps from the platform so the staff buffs all melee on engineer.

Even if 4-5 die, should be fairly smooth kill if you can keep the pheonix's under control.

Good luck

[Derrick]

there are so many ways to handle the specifics of the fight. it depends on your group make-up what works best for you. however in general, it sounds like you are not getting the dagger debuff up on thaladred right away in phase 3. this makes a huge difference in my experience. getting thal down quick is what makes and breaks the fight since he is the highest risk element in the entire fight. if you do not have a free tank for this, a rogue can apply it very carefully in between gaze cooldowns.

[brain9h]

My guild is stuck on Kael for 5 weeks now, we do him 3 times a week, but we only clear the thrash once. So, we met him in 15 nights so far. We have all the tactics understood to perfection but people keep dying in phase 3.

Sometimes is someone crucial that dies and leads to a kick wipe, other times its DPS who dies, which leads us to a delayed wipe. Our best mark was 2 minutes into the 4th phase with him down to 73%.

So, bottom line, perfect execution means a lot. Wish me luck this week!

[Clifford]

Was interested in reading this as I am due to start Kael soon. We got LadyV down on our third week of trying (but only one night per week on her due to a limited raid schedule) and will kill her once more to give more people the chance. Luckily it only takes us just over 2 hours to clear to Kael, which is a lot better than the 4 hours to clear to LadyV.

Best of luck - I look forward to the fight as well as it seems very different to LadyV being entirely scripted.

[maddfez]

My guild is stuck on Kael for 5 weeks now, we do him 3 times a week, but we only clear the thrash once. So, we met him in 15 nights so far. We have all the tactics understood to perfection but people keep dying in phase 3.

Sometimes is someone crucial that dies and leads to a kick wipe, other times its DPS who dies, which leads us to a delayed wipe. Our best mark was 2 minutes into the 4th phase with him down to 73%.

So, bottom line, perfect execution means a lot. Wish me luck this week!

Good luck!

That being said, I'm confused as to how to help you guys. The "kick wipes" you're mentioning....your MT should be able to handle the pyroblasts entirely on his own (assuming you're using a warrior not a pally). Shield one, eat the second one (fire protection potion / nightmare seed / whatever), and shield bash the third after Kaels shield drops. Otherwise...sure the fireballs on the MT are high dps, but it's not the end of the world if some get through as the rest of your phase four healing is not that bad.

For phase four, your priorities should be: 1) CCing / dispelling MC'ed folks, 2) Phoenix eggs, 3) Kael.

You need to figure out how to keep the MCs from breaking your raid...for us, we took windfury away from our melee and emphasized that every CC'er and potential dispeller needed to help. Once we got that through to our rogues / warriors / mages / etc the MCs became pretty clean. Sheep something, doesn't matter which one of them, and have your OTs and rogues running to dispel folks.

For the birds / eggs, just get them OT'ed to the side and have your OT be very vocal getting everyone ready to kill the egg once the phoenix hits 20%. All ranged dps should take the egg out...should die pretty fast.



If you're having problems in phase three, Thaldred is the entire key. Keep playing with the positioning of the other three adds if you need to in order to find a good kiting area for him. DPS needs to be high...but needs to be careful. You really cannot afford to be losing people here. We eventually put all three of the other adds in the 'southern' half of the room and kited Thaldred in the middle and northern portions of the room. Once we stopped losing people to him and were able to get him down with ~1 minute left in the phase the fight came together quickly.

Good luck, and feel free to PM me if you have other questions.

[demog]

For the birds / eggs, just get them OT'ed to the side and have your OT be very vocal getting everyone ready to kill the egg once the phoenix hits 20%. All ranged dps should take the egg out...should die pretty fast.

I have yet to see any eggs or pyroblasts in phase 4, so i don't really know what to expect.

You suggest that the birds shouldn't be attacked at all, and just let them kill themselves? As far as i've read, the bird spawns 20 seconds before the pyroblast sequence - and as far as i've read, it takes exactly 20 seconds for the bird to kill itself from hellfire? If that's the case it will result in kael being shielded/pyroblasting always at the same time as an egg needs nukin'?

Or is the timing more random that the guide i've been reading suggests? :P

Anyway, cleared most of our farm content yesterday, so tonight we'll have our first full kael night out of 3 this reset. I hope to see some progress :P

[Notalda]

We never ever attacked the birds (except for whoever was tanking them), and they always died before or after pyro, so handling the eggs wasn't a problem ever.

And even if one egg spawns at pyro, the phoenix tank can just tank two of them for the time being, and kill two eggs next time (most likely, you'll finish one egg before the other spawn, so you won't get overrun).

Eggs are the least of your worries, MC & flame strikes (and the gas clouds in phase 5) are your most dangerous enemies in my experience

[demog]

We never ever attacked the birds (except for whoever was tanking them), and they always died before or after pyro, so handling the eggs wasn't a problem ever.

Cool. What do you think about fire resistance on the bird tank? Our plan is to go for bufs only and hope it's good enough.

Eggs are the least of your worries, MC & flame strikes (and the gas clouds in phase 5) are your most dangerous enemies in my experience

Right. So to summarize phase 4 for the dps'ers point of view:

Priority #1: Something appears to be burning under your feet? GTFO!
Priority #2a: Tickle MC'ed ppl with your dagger if you got one.
Priority #2b: Sheep MC'ed ppl if you're a mage.
Priority #3: Nuke barrier if it's up, interrupt pyros.
Priority #4: Nuke eggs if any are around.
Priority #5: Nuke kael.

Sounds pretty simple. If everyone pays attention and don't fall asleep on the keyboard, it shouldn't cause that much problems (not many random elements, it appear to me).

I got my bags full of fire pots and nightmare seeds, so i should be able to eat quite a lot of pyroblasts, provided that healers are fast at filling up the wholes they make in me.

[Notalda]

Cool. What do you think about fire resistance on the bird tank? Our plan is to go for bufs only and hope it's good enough.

It is enough. On our first tries, I used 100-150 FR (that was the top I could achieve while still maintaining crit immunity), but after a few tries, I forgot to re-equip my FR gear, and just did it with my normal tank gear.

The phoenix tank can avoid most of the damage, by simply running around kiting the bird after he gained aggro and built some threat. You don't have to stand still and tank it while it hellfires, as long as you make sure the birds end up reasonably close to Kael, so the people can destroy the egg quickly.

Priority #1: Something appears to be burning under your feet? GTFO!
Priority #2a: Tickle MC'ed ppl with your dagger if you got one.
Priority #2b: Sheep MC'ed ppl if you're a mage.
Priority #3: Nuke barrier if it's up, interrupt pyros.
Priority #4: Nuke eggs if any are around.
Priority #5: Nuke kael.

Yes, that's phase 4, basically

Fearing/stunning MCed people also helps (conc. blow, hammer of justice, blind, that kind of stuff). Instant spells and effects that don't break on damage (howl of terror, physic scream, conc. blow, hammer of justice) are the best, as those prevent the MCed people from harming the raid quicker than a sheep or fear.

On the other hand, sheep heals them if they weren't on full hp.

Sounds pretty simple. If everyone pays attention and don't fall asleep on the keyboard, it shouldn't cause that much problems (not many random elements, it appear to me).

Phase 4 & 5 are quite easy, compared to 2 & 3. Especially if you have most of the raid alive.

I got my bags full of fire pots and nightmare seeds, so i should be able to eat quite a lot of pyroblasts, provided that healers are fast at filling up the wholes they make in me.

Good luck!

[Trual]

I agree with Derrick's post.

On Kael, I (Kael MT) tanks the shield and none of the p1 adds. So I grab a dagger, shield at least. Then I'm the Thal debuffer for P3. Doing this makes sure that no matter if our dps is slow on the other adds, the Kael tank will always be there and ready to pick him up.

Oh yeah. Our first kill target is the staff, and its tanked by a rogue. DPS warrior on the axe, I'm on shield/daggers at first, OT1 (warrior) on the mace, and OT2 (paladin/druid) on the sword. Kill order is staff->mace-> sword->(bow should be dead here)->shield->axe.

OT1 pulls the daggers off of me so that he can drag them out of the AE before they die.

[demog]

53% now

Weapons are pretty much consistently no problem, phase 3 goes a million times better as well. A shame we was cursed with DCs the last hour of the raid, so we didn't get any good tries after the 53% attempt (where had the entire raid alive when phase 4 started, but we wiped because this fat orc tank didn't run out of flamestrike in time :P)

The main improvement was all weapons except bow got aoe'd, and we had a fury warrior taunt the weap on low hp and dragged it out to die in an open area.

The thing in phase 3 that made the difference was where we killed thaledred. Earlier we killed him in the middle of the room, but in the end we killed him by the west wall, just north of the door. It gave the slowpoke ppl more time to react when phase 3 started.

Uh, and also the fact that we get the dagger debuff on thaledred fast, and the bow debuff on sanquinar fast. That's a huge dps boost. (Don't really need the bow debuff on thaledred as everyone attacking him is doing non-physical damage anyway)

One thing i noticed with thaledred: When he's about to change target and stops, he appears to attack anyone in melee range. Can that really be true?

Phase 4 was a bit messy though, but ok, we haven't had much time to practice it. We also only had one rogue and one offtank with daggers removing MCs. Our two slacking dps warriors haven't leveled their dagger skill :<

Anyway, really really fun fight. Hope we get him down this reset.

[brain9h]

Which is better for the start of P3, melee on Sanguinar or melee on Telonicus. We're doing Telonicus since no fear == no dps loss and no running fearing into Thaladred.