Icecrown Blood Princes

[Quinafoi]

The list of valid targets seems to be generated at the start of his cast, however, you don't know what that target is until the cast completes. A target that was at range that ran into melee could have been a valid target when the target selection occured. This happens a lot if there is a vortex near the boss knocking people away causing melee targets to become valid targets of the ability.

Think of it like the empowered shock vortex. If he begins to cast it while you are running to him from switching targets, you likely turn around and run away to spread out. Same logic. If the fireball is already being cast you shouldn't run into melee but be prepared to run away.

[Tygragaris]

Hmm, you could be right... it's possible I may have been knocked away by a shock vortex and got slammed with the fireball when I got back into melee range. Seems like a very unlikely, but very possible scenario. I'll keep a close eye on it next time around (tomorrow night) and see if we run into that same thing.

Thanks for the info!

[bucksdude7]

My group set up is

Tanks:
Prot Pally
Feral Druid


Ranged:
Hunter
Mage
Spriest

Melee:
Ret pally
Warrior

Heals:Resto Druid
Holy Priest
Pally

Im planning on having the pally tank the shadow boss(kelseth) and the druid on the other two....

Now can i get an estimate on how much DMG the druid will take tanking 2 bosses?

[Tygragaris]

Now can i get an estimate on how much DMG the druid will take tanking 2 bosses?

When we killed them last week, I was tanking (as a warrior) both Taldaram and Valanar. The damage seemed to be very spiky and unpredictable, and our healers seemed to complain a lot about the damage I was taking. Our healer makeup consisted of two druids and a shaman however, so single target heals weren't our strong point. With a pally healer in the group, I imagine it won't be too much trouble for him to keep both tanks alive while the other two handle group heals and your priest doing tank spot heals as required. Your druid tank should, however, be ready to use cooldowns at a moment's notice, and obviously keep the two bosses relatively in the middle of the room so all the healers can reach him.

[Maèl]

The two melee princes can dish out quite a lot of damage. Your best bet is to assign the shaman on the Keleseth tank and have one durid only heal you. The third druid is on raid duty and helps during empowers.

I have found that NOT using any styles on the two melee princes reduces the damage I take. It could be coincidence and I have no WWS to back it up but my first guess would be parry haste since I'm very low on expertise(I am totally unsure about this, can somebody please confirm?). You can build threat on the princes even when they are not empowered. So using T-Clap and SW when they are off CD should be more than sufficient. Also remember to keep demo shout up. When those two are not empowered you will be the only one attacking them. So any passive AP reduction they may have had on them will be gone soon.

The other suggestion I would have for you as a warrior tank is to use your defensive cooldowns while Keleseth is empowered. Believe me, healers are running scared when he is up. They all have seen instant gibs of the Kel tank so you can expect that even tho you have a clear assignment, all of them will keep an eye on him. Nothing the two melee princes throw at you should be threatening. But you may have to use SW when the healers are falling behind.
It is a good idea to use shield block and last stand while Kel is active. Save shield wall for when it is really needed.

Kel makes EVERY healer nervous.

[Sky_Paladin]

My raid is having issues with Kinetic Orbs dropping outside of the combat area and wiping the raid. This has happened on hard mode 10 and 25 only, never on normal mode. Specifically, we believe they are dropping in the corridors behind the sealed doors, judging from the spray of fire coming from outside the room. In our last attempt previously, every single orb dropped outside of the room.

We originally believed this was because our strategy was to tank the two melee bosses by the wall, however this week we experienced the same trouble while tanking them in the center of the room.

Does anybody else have this issue, and is there a solution?

[ulyssez]

to mael, parry haste is only active on lady deathwhisper and sindragosa out of the bosses in icc, it is not active vs blood prince.

to skypaladin, having kinetic orbs hit happens to everyone. I'd have to agree that it sometimes seems like they're falling outside of the room. You just have to be ready to deal with 1 or 2 falling orbs. Raid members should be conscious of their debuff stacks and use healthstones if low and pallies can use aura mastery or div sac after a kinetic ball hits to help recover.

[Quinafoi]

Does anybody else have this issue, and is there a solution?

It is a bug in the encounter and there is nothing you can do to resolve it. Both Dark Nuclei and Kinetic Orbs can spawn behind the doors and it seems to be irrelevent of your positioning or the positioning of the bosses. Until such time as Blizzard corrects it themselves it is simply a flaw in the encounter design that you will have to overcome by executing the parts of the fight you can control as cleanly as possable so that the random chance of this bug occuring is recoverable. This is an execution fight, make sure your raiders understand this first and foremost. It is not a race to kill the bosses but rather a test to handle the mechanics of the encounter appropriately.

[Travelsize]

I am having issues seeing shock vortex once I have a few orbs on me. Anyone have any ideas how to stop this?


The general trend seems to be, at some point during the kel empower, I get a shock vortex dropped on me I can't see and there is a wipe shortly afterwards, since the orbs apparently take a couple seconds to re-channel if you move suddenly.

[Shodowz]

I am having issues seeing shock vortex once I have a few orbs on me. Anyone have any ideas how to stop this?


The general trend seems to be, at some point during the kel empower, I get a shock vortex dropped on me I can't see and there is a wipe shortly afterwards, since the orbs apparently take a couple seconds to re-channel if you move suddenly.

Best way i handle the orbs while tanking Kel is to keep moving, your not doing bugger all except ensuring u have 3+ orbs on you once you have gotten this your not doing to much else, Keep moving and monitor your DBM/DXE timer for when Shock Vortex is coming (Pre-empt that its coming for you), i haven't had a problem with not seeing shock vortex, Make sure your using the max distance camera angle and i almost view the room from a birds eye view - not quiet.

Good luck

[Ajire]

My guild finally downed 10 man Blood Princes last week. What follows is my observations.

We had 2 tanks (Warrior and Paladin), two healers (Disc Priest and Paladin), 4 ranged dps (Mage, Druid, Hunter and Shaman) and 2 melee (Paladin and Rogue). We had our Warrior tank handle both Taldaram and Valanar while our paladin tank handled Keleseth.

The primary issue we had with this encounter soon turned out to be keeping our Keleseth tank alive through his Empowerments, which of course was because he did not have enough stacks of Shadow Resonance during empowerments. We identified the causes to be 1) Great difficulty in picking up additional Dark Nuclei due to obstruction of vision and 2) Dark Nuclei got killed too quick due to collateral AoE damage, primarily from the paladin's Divine Storm and Consecration.

To deal with this, we made dps'ing Keleseth during his empowerments a lower priority and instead focused on getting Dark Nuclei to our tank: Having our hunter Miss-direct them truly worked wonders, but all players was asked to help by picking up Dark Nuclei and moving them to an easy-to-grab spot for our tank. We also banned the use of any abilities that potentially caused collateral damage around Keleseth.

These corrections enabled our tank to survive the Empowerments and we successfully completed the encounter.

[Quinafoi]

The Dark Nuclei can not be hit by any AoE mechanic other than a "nearest target" mechanic such as a cleave. Abilities such as consecrate will not hit Dark Nuclei. Dark Nuclei naturally kill themselves over time, other than their gradual self destruction and the initial ability used to pull them, they should not be taking any damage at all. For instance, Typhoon, the single largest directional cone attack any player class can do, can not hit a Dark Nuclei. They are invalid targets for the ability. Smart targeting AoE mechanics such as chain lightning and Starfall can not hit them. Channeled AoE abilities such as Blizzard, Rain of Fire, Volley, and Hurricane can not hit them. Ground based AoE mechanics such as Death and Decay and Consecrate can not hit them. The only multi-target abilities that can hit Dark Nuclei are cleaves because their function resolves targeting differently.

So your statements about AoEs hitting and killing the Dark Nuclei are false. They were either dying naturally and you or your tank did not realize this happens or someone was dealing direct damage to them such as the tank attempting to maintain aggro on something they didn't have to.

Just avoid cleave abilities and you will be fine.

[Travelsize]

Downed a couple nights later fyi. Running away like a madman if necessary and avoiding everyone else with my eyes glued to the timer for knockbacks, plus our ranged dps getting the hang of juggling the orbs proved successful.

Also it turns out our DPS dk does have a cleaving attack, so I made doubly sure I wasn't even in the same ZIP code as him if I could help it. If there's one thing from cata that would have been useful here it's the CD reduction on heroic throw.

We've been knocking these bosses down like bowling pins recently, I know the buff is up to 30% and all but I'm more inclined to call it a ton of our really good, experienced raiders are suddenly available, going from maybe 1 night/logging on occasionally every week or 2 to raid available 3-4 days a week. We went from having to scrounge for raid-experienced dps and bringing new 80s into progression content to having full groups of veteran BC and pre-BC raiders on and ready to go at raid time, and went from banging our heads against the wall that was putricide and struggling to maintain 7/12 to being 11/12 in about 3 weeks (we raid 10 man only). I'm a big believer in the power of raid attendance.

I'm also not a big believer in the power of recruiting (with the exception of one shammy who was awesome), we tried a big recruiting drive and we got a bunch of terrible people who couldn't raid and weren't willing to listen OR wipe, and lasted a week at most.

[obiwayne]

What would be the best way to handle this fight without a Warlock to tank Keleseth? It's looking like our group composition is going to be something like:

* 1x DK
* 2x Pally Tanks
* 1x Retpally
* 1x Hunter
* 2x Druids (one Resto, one Boomkin)
* 1x Shaman
* 2x Mages

Should one of the tanks take Keleseth and one take Valanar and Taldaram? Or is there a better way when you don't have a 'lock?

[Quinafoi]

What would be the best way to handle this fight without a Warlock to tank Keleseth?

There is only one key in determining tanking for Keleseth and that is effective health against shadow magic. While a warlock has more damage reduction from spells available to them, a conventional tank will have a significantly larger health pool. Most raids now just use a normal tank on Keleseth. The problem with that however is the tank needs to round up the Dark Nuclei. That aspect of the role is trivialized for a ranged DPS. Using a conventional tank on the boss will require significantly more movement in order to round up the Dark Nuclei. It's a balancing act between generating threat on the boss and gathering the Dark Nuclei.

On ten man, many raids will have a single tank for Keleseth, and the stronger tank (higher physical effective health) tanking both of the others. In 25 man you can afford an actual tank for all three.

[Trancid]

(Wall of text incoming. Scroll to the bottom for my questions. This entire post applies to the 10 man normal version of the blood princes.)

The guild my guild pugs with (8 of theirs, 2 of ours) is having quite some difficulties trying to get this boss encounter finished successfully. The main problem is the ranged boss, and we've already tried several different ranged classes and melee tanks to tackle him. It just seems that the person who is actually tanking that boss, doesn't have enough orbs on him/her during the time when he shoots empowered dark lances.
In the last 10 attempts, done last Wednesday, our raid setup was as follows:
Two paladin tanks (one with healer off-spec), 1 warlock, 2 healing druids (one with tanking off-spec), 1 boomkin, a hunter, two shadow priests (with both disc off-spec) and me as a paladin healer (with a tanking off spec). The two ways that were having the most success were using 1 paladin on the ranged boss and the other paladin on the two melee bosses, and the second way was having 3 paladin tanks and a priest switching to disc. (Yes, I know, insane...) In both cases, the paladin that tanked Keleseth died during the empowered phase of him. From what I could tell, he didn't have enough orbs channeling to him. The best of the attempts was that we downed the bosses to roughly 30% health left with roughly 3 minutes until the berserk is supposed to hit.

The seemingly official way, using a warlock tank on Keleseth, had two downsides for us. First being the warlock of course being one-shotted by the empowered shadow lance. The second was a bit more surprising. I outaggroed the warlock tank a few times as a healer, and no, I didn't have righteous fury enabled. I also occasionally got the nuclei channeling to me while I did not attack anything. It was even so at one point that the warlock tank died, Keleseth focused on me, and I was actually able to tank him for a bit due to the nuclei on me, until one of the tanks taunted it off of me, he got one shotted by the empowered lance and we eventually wiped.

Due to that last part, I joked that I could perhaps tank Keleseth. But now I'm considering if I should actually do this, and that is where I need the advice from all you wise folks.

Questions:
If the dark nuclei are not attacked by anyone, will they automatically flow to the healer with the highest threat and channel to that healer? And if that is the case, would it be feasible for a healer to tank Keleseth?
And last, if I would go to tank Keleseth as a paladin healer, should I enable Righteous Fury then as well, to generate some extra threat so that the DPSers can attack him when he is empowered, or would I probably then steal aggro from the main tanks who are attacking the melee bosses?

I know, it's a weird suggestion to have a healer tank a boss, but since we fail to do it in the other ways, I'm willing to give it a go. However, I prefer to know if it has any chance of succeeding, or that I will simply cause a high repair bill for the entire raid?

Thanks in advance for any input.

[Callandor]

If the dark nuclei are not attacked by anyone, will they automatically flow to the healer with the highest threat and channel to that healer? Yes.

And if that is the case, would it be feasible for a healer to tank Keleseth? I don't think so though I guess its possible. In my experience even a spam healing Holy Paladin with Righteous Fury on doesn't do comparable threat to DPS nuking something, let alone moving around the room to pick up orbs as well, since orbs will likely float to other healers too.

And last, if I would go to tank Keleseth as a paladin healer, should I enable Righteous Fury then as well, to generate some extra threat so that the DPSers can attack him when he is empowered, or would I probably then steal aggro from the main tanks who are attacking the melee bosses? You most likely would'nt overagrro the other two bosses, I'd be very surprised.

Really I'd say healers are the last role you should pick to tank Keleseth. Any form of tank, DK or ranged would be preferable.

[Martie]

Nah, if they aren't attacked they just float in place. They don't use threat, they follow whoever attacked them last.

[Callandor]

They definitely go to healers after a long enough time of inactivity. Though of course they do stick to whoever hit them last aye.

[Skaggi]

Your main problem is the warlock. He's just using the wrong spells if at any point a healer starts getting aggro. Warlocks use searing pain for that and it worked for Illidan and works now. Misdirect and tricks doesn't hurt either during empowered phases.

Cheers!
Skaggi

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