Kael tonight

[Muq]

Of course I've never killed the guy, but I've played this game long enough to know what I'm tanking about, so bear with me..

The weapons were going to down slow obviously. The last attempt the casters/ranged picked it up alot, so much so that when we got to the mace it was near 95%, now of course that could of been the melee falling behind but anyways dps all in all on that phase is way to slow. I've studied my butt off to get into a raid to kill this guy so that I wouldnt slow anyone down.

My idea from what I've seen on alot of strats is to aoe down the weapons. Theres just 2-3 things you have to make happen.

1) The bow gets "tanked" by the ranged/casters, and killed first and foremost. They stand in such a position so that it does not multishot the raid. Its is of the utmost importance that the ranged/caster on this job get into position as quickly as possible so they can nuke the ever living hell out of the bow, kill it before it teleports somewhere, probably ontop of the raid.
2) The rest of the weapons, save the axe, gets tanked all ontop of eachother. By the time the bow is down the tanks should have good aggro on the weapons, and aoe commences. Classes with no aoe.. spriests and melee depending on their cooldowns, need to be focused on the staff then the shield (staff for sure, then I think the shield is next because it takes longer to kill).
3) The axe is tanked off to the side by a seperate tank. It must be tanked close enough to get hit by the aoe, but not close enough to hit anyone with its WW. Once a total of 3 weapons are down (bow, staff, shield?), FF dpsing might be quicker than aoeing.

What do you think.

[MVB]

$.02 from the perspective of someone who led raids from 100%-0% on the original learning curve and all of that ... Since this is in pubs, I'll warn it may be blunt, b/c I'm like that yatta yatta, all the best of intentions

DPS was slow; this was both as a result of the kill order / method, and the emphasis on details, but mostly a result of poor tanking / pick-up, at least from the melee side of things. Any time I did even close to the damage I was capable of (like, 2 hits and a bloodthirst), I'd pull threat and either have to howl it and break off for the tank to pick it back up, or I'd get ganked. The initial thought might be "watch your goddamned aggro rawr rawr," but trust me that I was ... no offense to the pally tank last night, he was very low on TPS on daggers.

Target changing is slow, and some DPS were aoe'ing I think. AOE is incredibly inefficient and downright foolish on Kael. Single target roll through is faster, more efficient, and perfectly effective. The reason for this is that not only do you have to keep a series of mobile weapons and one dangerous weapon near enough to all benefit from the aoe, by the time you do it you're only hitting 3-4 of them per aoe (which isn't very many), and in last night's raid we only had 2 mages and 2 locks to boot. It's much slower to have people figure out which target to hit with seeds or aoe drops, and repeatedly do it, than it is to simply tell every one of each class to "target this, pound it, target this pound it, target this pound it, ok gg." The math is ENTIRELY out of place here, simplicity yields speed, speed is what's required.

Realistically, the last weapon should be dying by the time the adds pop, at the latest. I would recommend: Ranged: Bow, Staff, Helpmace, Axe, Helpshield, Melee: Daggers, Mace, Sword, Helpshield (melee can dmg the shield perfectly fine with chain heal help if they are careful and not 'tarded, and when the ranged finish Axe melee can run over to Sanguinar while ranged finish shield if it's taking too long). Shield is the hardest to kill, and so should be killed last. Axe first is generally a better approach, my $.02, esp. since the pally tank will be free either way once shield dies, but the axe tank will also be tanking Telonicus. If you kill the axe first, the pally has just the shield either way, but the Telonicus tank isn't getting DP'ed.

Clarification of order, repetition of order during the fight by someone assigned to say "ok now this," getting people to add /tar macros to find the next target in the big maelstrom that phase 2/3 is, etc. can all help.

Phase 1 was occasionally sloppy ... it helps to have everyone kite him as a group around the circle, meandering his health down and conserving mana, and then naturally wind up in the corner after kiting him around the floor symbols counter-clockwise. It's a good way to avoid the frequent random Thaladred death and unpredictable positioning had last night. You can "wing" him, but it's a bad way to start a fight that requires a lot of precision later.

Phase 2 I would strongly encourage the warrior tank go straight after mace, and have staff misdirected to him. Saime needs to interrupt the mace heals, and that needs it be it. When mace dies, he goes over to Sanguinar. He may have been trying to do this anyway, but it was not well explained. All I saw (and I may have missed some things) was "Krang I'll pick up what I can, you get the rest." Krang probably should have been given explicit instructions to blast all threat possible into Daggers, probably needed a daggers misdirect or two, and just needed to consepickup the sword/shield, really. Mikhael never needed this "stuff" for the most part, but he did the fight a lot and was, well, Mikhael. Krang didn't have as much experience, and probably could have been given a little more specific, detailed help and a little less "suck less, dood!" This may have been going on in a separate tank channel, if so that's cool. My impression of both the OT's was they were more green as tanks, and needed more specific instruction. I didn't notice any of them suck less when told to "suck less."

Kael's an incredibly easy fight if people are given very explicit instructions. Example: Instead of "tank these three," tell a person the order to snag them, and assign a misdirect.

Melee hits incredibly hard on weapons, and we weren't able to. There needs to be more care taken to ensure that we are able, by having the proper tank on them. A pally tank is not required, obviously, but I know we had limited choices. It's not like anyone was "bad."

Long story short, better tanking and also better tanking DIRECTIONS (one wipe was caused b/c Anochelm was vaguely told by someone over vent to "let it come to you," and so not really knowing the fight he stood far away from Telonicus after only shield slamming it, thinking he was going to "come to him." Nub, maybe, but was he all that wrong to listen to one of the raid leaders - or even not since he doesn't know us all? For all he knew, the fight mechanic was just that); better dps, especially dps time on target ... lots of people took way too long to start beating on the first and subsequent weapons, laughably so.

Finally, assign someone to be the talker in raid. It's a complicated fight with lots of things to do, none of which are hard *AT ALL.* Having a barker who is pushing people to move onto each subsequent activity is very helpful. Waiting until there are 30s left to finish 4 weapons is at best posthumous. Mace should die with 1:30 left, with just sword/shield/axe left up. At 1:40 if the mace isn't dead yet there should already be someone making noise about it.

[Krang]

Hi, Krang here - yes that was my first Kael fight. Since then, my usual raid group started learning Kael and we downed him last night. It's a fun fight if you know what you're doing. My job was as follows: P1 soak conflags for Capernian, P2 AoE tank the weapons (now I have a macro for the blades and my TPS worked out well - we ended up getting all of the weapons down before P3), P3 conflags again, random JoWs when I could, P4 I tanked the phoenixes in some FR gear just to make life easier, P5 more of the same. If we're not doing Kael in a certain week and you need a prot pally, I'll be happy to help. Otherwise my warlock Change is available too.