Wintergrasp Koralon

[Ciderhelm]

The UI seen in this video is Aliena's UI

Hello and welcome to the TankSpot Vault of Archavon raid guide! My name is Aliena and in this video I'll explain the strategy we use for the 25-man version of Koralon the Flame Watcher, the newest addition to the Wintergrasp raid instance.
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Just like Archavon and Emalon, Koralon will only be available to fight if your faction is currently in control of Wintergrasp and will despawn ten minutes before a new battle for Wintergrasp.

While Koralon does not have a hard enrage timer, he gains a stacking buff from the time you engage him called Burning Fury. This increases the damage he deals by 5% every 20 seconds and acts as soft enrage timer.

Approximately every 30 seconds after engaging the fight, Koralon uses an ability called Meteor Fists. This gives him a buff for 15 seconds that makes him deal additional 100% to 125% fire weapon damage and, like many meteor abilities, splits the damage taken evenly across targets within 10 yards. To avoid having your tank get one-shot, you can choose to either split the damage with an off-tank or have your melee stay close to your tank to spread the damage evenly. Alternatively, if you're low on tanks, you could set up a cooldown rotation. You will also need a good mix of AoE healers for this encounter.

After Meteor Fists, Koralon tends to use Burning Breath, which is an AoE whirl ability that inflicts 5500 fire damage to every raid member per second for three seconds - so with 0 stacks of Burning Fury you have 16.5k raidwide damage incoming over 3 seconds. As Burning Fury stacks up, this may get tougher to heal through. Discipline priest bubbles are very useful here to avoid spike damage deaths. Also make sure your raid is mostly grouped up so people can easily be reached by AoE heals.

Lastly, Koralon will occasionally target a raid member with Flaming Cinder. Basically, he'll whirl a ball of fire at someone that turns into a little flame patch at their feet. The initial Flaming Cinder hit deals around 5500 damage in the 25 man version and then 4.5k damage every second to anyone standing within 4 yards of it. The ancient rule of "it's probably a bad idea to stand in fire on the ground for long" applies.

Melee seem to be frequent targets of Flaming Cinder, so loosely kiting him once there are many patches is advised. Tank and raid damage in this fight is fairly heavy, but the soft enrage will prevent you from taking too many healers, so this fight is a clear DPS race.

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[Anio]

Good video and very nice strategy explanation!

[vine]

We just facerolled through with on 25 with zero strategy discussion, it's a really easy encounter. Easier than Emalon.

"Don't stand in the fire"
???
PROFIT!

[Brucimus]

what kind of drops? He didnt drop any T9 does he?

[Foolish]

He dropped two level 232 Tier 9 gloves on 10-man when I did it. Others got level 226 pvp or 226 Tier 8.5 items.

[Kazeyonoma]

He drops the 2nd tier of tier 9 (trophy + emblem purchasable) in 25 man, as well as relentless Gladiator gear.

[dirt]

We did him on 10man as soon as our realm came online. I must agree, compared to Emalon, he's a real push over. Just avoid the fire and your golden. No one in our 10man even got close to dying. Maybe 25man will be harder, but I doubt it.

[Satrina]

I am pretty sure that Meteor Fists only splits damage between Koralon's current aggro target and a single target within 10 yards of that person. That's what the combat logs in our group showed at least. I'm not yet sure if it's random or closest.

[Ion]

So it's not a meteor mechanic so much as it is a saber lash mechanic? In any case you can just have two tanks take it, right?

[Aliena]

Hmm yeah from looking at it it looks like you may be right, it just picked a random melee in my footage to use as cushion. Wonder if that's health or threat dependent. And yes, ideally you want two tanks. We just tend to laze our way through things.

[Satrina]

Almost certain it's not depending on threat. I'll be running it again in the next day or so again with guild mains so I'll be able to have people arranged as I want to, to see what's up.

Also, I forgot to confirm for sure, but I believe Meteor Fist is fire damage so you can use anyone with decently high health as the split.

[Kazeyonoma]

you can test it with just a few players also by going into VoA and grabbing the fire adds in his chamber, they cast meteor fists as well.

[klor]

Aliena... I have a suggestion for you. :P

Tell that hunter in the first few seconds of the movie that fire is bad haha.

[Satrina]

Appears to be simple proximity for meteor fists. We had one person standing on me and another 5 yards behind and the one right on me took the damage every time.

[then00b]

didn't think about it the first time in, but don't stand in the middle, the fire is practically invisible, but it does show a debuff if you're in it

[Muffin Man]

As a note his hitbox is so large that if there's a soaker, he'd better be standing in front with the tank.

We single tanked it with a dps DK to soak. He dps-ed from the back like a good dps and I ate every meteor fist solo. Was manageable on 10 man with the healer going a little worried the first time. Then we chained cooldowns on the next 3 for the kill.

[Fetzie]

Did the encounter last night on 25 man. I am fairly sure I was the sole target of meteor fist, at least no-one else seemed to take a large amount of damage when they landed. It dealt between 36 and 40k damage to me, if this was after the damage split melee should have been falling like flies. Loot was T9 (245) and relentless gladiator (1 armor and 1 ring), along with a couple of emblems of triumph.

[Mcfobos]

Aliena... i'll dream about your voice... echo dream

/cheers

[klor]

they nerfed whirling breath on koralon or so it seemed. I only noticed 2 ticks instead of the typical 3-4 :-/

[Chamenas]

So what sort of unbuffed hp should a 25 man tank be going in with? After the nerf to DK health, I went down to 30k hp and have just finally made it back up to 32k, but I cannot seem to stay alive during the fight, even though I save my cooldowns for molten fists. I personally think it's the healing, but I'm biased. So I'm trying to determine what I could be doing better first.