[25/10] Blood Prince Council

[Tetsuro]

Just want to confirm this. Simply having a pet auto attack an orb will keep it afloat? We have a hunter and a warlock in raid, if this is the case, would make our lives much easier if we could just send them on the orbs and focus more on DPSing the boss.

Also, (for the 2 tank strategy) wanted to know with a warrior and pally tank, could the warrior possibly do the Keleseth tanking? I think I slightly outgear him, and want to make it as easy as possible. This fight has been a roadblock for us thus far.

Pets do keep orbs in the air 100% of the time, one thing you need to watch for, is if an orb despawns and respawns in the same place, the pet will come back and the Warlock/Hunter/Deathknight may not notice before it is too late.

also I've seen all tank classes tank keleseth at one point or another, I'd just have whichever one of you who feels most comfortable with it tanking it.

[balloonknot]

One thing to check is that your not confusing people not moving away from a shock vortex in time with a kinetic bomb hitting the ground. We find there are only ever 3 kinetic bombs up at the time on 10 man (a 4th spawns but 1 despawns almost immediately after)

We had some trouble in the first few attempts confusing a kinetic bomb landing with a shock vortex going off near a group of people, its very easy to confuse it it happens to the tank/melee pack. A swirling, sparkling graphic appears like 10 seconds before the shock vortex goes active to allow you to avoid it.

[PsiVen]

We just did this on hardmode 10-man last night, and it was a nice challenge but not much of a gear check. It's mostly reaction time checks, as Kinetic Orbs drop like rocks and you have to get there quickly. Without disciplined positioning it will be a nasty healer check too, but I think with 3 healers it was quite stable and only an issue of reacting fast enough. Empowered Shock requires that you plant in a spread formation to minimize Prison stacks, Empowered Fireball requires not only that you react quickly but that you kite through people that are used to being spread out, and the shadow guy's damage requires raid members to help out with ferrying the orbs across without actually moving much. Fortunately the shadow tank has the most freedom of anyone in the raid as they will take very little damage from Prison with a few orbs on them.

[Arianne]

So you dealt with flame orb mostly by having the person kiting it move it through people? How many melee did you have? Did you have a melee following the orb?

We had pretty much every other aspect of the fight down, but we'd end up losing people when our melee (2) had to move away from the mobs when a shock vortex spawned during an empowered flame orb cast. :\

[Flex]

I'm the RL of a 10 man guild where we're attempting this. We got them down last week in 14 tries and this week we stonewalled on them.

The biggest issue we're running into is our warlock tank not producing enough threat on Keleseth which will cause two or three of our DPS to die quite quickly. If he spends too long building threat orbs will die off, spend too much time getting orbs threat gets lacking.

We do have a hunter and rogue in the group and they MD and tricks the lock on the pull. Would have them just focus on Keleseth for the first cycle using MD and Tricks on the warlock be the best way to help with that? Any other suggestion for getting threat on Keleseth faster?

[Belloc]

If your tanks are geared enough, don't even bother using a ranged tank. One tank can hold the two melee mobs, the other tank holds Keleseth.

If you're not comfortable with that, then... don't even worry about putting DPS on Keleseth. The enrage timer is generous enough that you can simply skip the first empowered Keleseth phase. It's boring, but it's safe.

Also, make sure your hunter knows to use explosive shot when misdirecting the warlock.

[Flex]

If your tanks are geared enough, don't even bother using a ranged tank. One tank can hold the two melee mobs, the other tank holds Keleseth.

If you're not comfortable with that, then... don't even worry about putting DPS on Keleseth. The enrage timer is generous enough that you can simply skip the first empowered Keleseth phase. It's boring, but it's safe.

We tried one tank on the two melee and one on Keleseth, healers didn't like that as much, but that was just a few times on the first night of tries and with a different healer set up. Next week we'll be lessening the DPS on Keleseth phases to minimize the chance of aggro stealing.

Explosive? do you mean Kill Shot?

[Belloc]

Yes, sorry, I did mean Kill Shot.

Don't be afraid to give the previously mentioned tanking strategy another try.

[Baelik]

Startegy of using one tank for both melee bosses will depend heavily on the gearing and tanking philosophies of the tank in question. Ideally you want the tank with highest EH to do it keeping in mind that the damage is mostly physical.

We had trouble with one of our tanks who tried to take both bosses on. Later she had to leave and we were able to down the fight with 9 in 6:40 mins with Baelik as the MT in his Stamina set. (I forgot to switch to armor )

Again, this is very generous on the enrage timer/DPS requirement. You could even skip DPSing Keleseth when he is empowered and you'd still find it easy to get these guys down if you can get that far. This fight, like Heigan in Naxx, is all bout dancing to survive. But its more of salsa than a waltz.

[Belloc]

Again, this is very generous on the enrage timer/DPS requirement. You could even skip DPSing Keleseth when he is empowered and you'd still find it easy to get these guys down if you can get that far. This fight, like Heigan in Naxx, is all bout dancing to survive. But its more of salsa than a waltz.

This is exactly what we did on heroic-10 to avoid having to deal with Shadow Prison, or whatever. We simply didn't have any DPS Keleseth, except for at the very end when he was the final target at about 7%.

[Flex]

Startegy of using one tank for both melee bosses will depend heavily on the gearing and tanking philosophies of the tank in question. Ideally you want the tank with highest EH to do it keeping in mind that the damage is mostly physical.

I'm fairly well off gear wise for being 10 man, lack of tank drops means mostly 264 badge/crafted gear so I set at 42K unbuffed/50K buffed and 70% Character sheet armor reduction with Devo/Wild. The warrior OT even suggested swapping to his hunter to have an extra range for Bomb control and steady misdirects.

[Draslin]

Last night our guild tried the two tank strat for this fight, using one of our pally tanks on Keleseth and myself picking up the other two (both pallies are similarly geared, I had a slight edge with 55k health raid buffed due to lucky trinket drops in ToC25).

We burned bloodlust on incoming, i instructed my dps to try as hard as they could to pull threat off me and burn hard hard hard.

It took a couple of tries to get the strat down and for the tank to pick up orbs. We had one wipe due to too many people focusing on the kinetic bombs. After I assigned one hunter to keeping them afloat, we rocked it and flawless victory was ours.

My recommendation is for BOTH tanks to pop mitigation cooldowns while keleseth is empowered. Reducing the demand on healers (we use a disc priest/resto shaman setup) is critical to keeping both tanks up when the shadowbolts are hitting for OMGWTFBBQ damage.

Had a great run with our usual "harder-core" 10 group. One shot everything up to blood princes (cleared plagueworks and the first 4) with no deaths, then made it past our first kill on them. Blood Queen is going to take some tweaking - seems like a VERY hard fight to two heal, but we'll get it down.

Thanks for the tips here, much appreciated!

Draslin / House Darkforge / Garrosh

[Baelik]

When Keleseth is empowered raid damage is significantly less. All the fancy dance moves are not needed. So mitigation cooldowns are not required. I would say it is better to save cooldowns for the moments when someone knocks your healer out of range with Shock Vortex or Kinetic Bomb

Edit: You shouldn't be getting hit for tons as the Keleseth tank if you have enough orbs. The encounter is doable with a non-tank health pool tanking Keleseth. Just don't get a shaman to do it

[Arianne]

We've been having issues lately where the empowered orb cast will target a ranged person and then blow up on the melee. We have 10+ people at range and this has happened even when a non-priest or non-mage was targeted (ie: it shouldn't be an interaction with fade or mirror images). Has anyone else experienced this or have advice on how to avoid it?

[ydraw]

2-tanking this and not DPSing Keleseth is how we have been doing this fight since it came out in both normal and hard mode.

I tank both melee, our druid tank takes Keleseth (Faerie Fire is great for picking up nucleii), and we just ignore Keleseth when he is empowered since the druid rarely has enough threat to allow DPS.

On Hardmode we also ignored Keleseth to minimise shadow prison damage. It takes a while but the fight isn't a DPS race of any kid.