Illidan Stormrage

[fiorina]

I really don't see the 15 minute beserk staying as it is now. The fact that there are some 20 odd parses on WWS in which the raid put out enough dps to kill him in 15 minutes pre melee haste nerf really makes me wonder how feasible this is.

It's doable but hard, we will see today(lol at Shahraz). You can't compare with previous kills too much, because for example we always emphasized "take it easy, there is no enrage, it's about control, not damage", people have to adjust positioning/tactic a bit.
It's an Illidan afterall, it should be very hard.

[Io.Draco]

I am tanking adds just fine. There is a lot of bollocks on bosskillers
First you need just 365 FR. Flames don't crush. They crit indeed but crits are partially resistable. Due to heavy continuous damage, paladin is awesome tank from mitigation point of view because AD is almost always kicked in. Our threat is kinda crap compared to druid due to non-blockable attacks, looking forward to see how 15 minute timer will be handled.

Our shield block work on shear. But his dmg is too spiky for my taste and I am very unlucky with Tier6 drops so far so warriors are tanking him (but just due to better gear and Last stand/SW). Actually pala would be a good tank there once geared appropriately, he is a fast hiting dual-wielder, no worries about aggro

Ill never belive another godamn word on bosskillers

Hope you get your tier 6 drops and tank him

[Neuron]

Illidan is very tankable for a paladin. His adds are much harder for a paladin than a warrior or druid.

As far as shear, it is only applied on an umitigated hit. If you dodge, are missed, or parry the shear, nothing happens. If you block the shear, you take damage but still don't get the debuff. Since your uncrushable with holy shield and will, if you don't avoid the attack, block it, you are guaranteed not get shear (barring the tiny amount of time while holy shield is not down).

Also, I didn't check, but he might be "demonoid" which means you can use exorcism and produce much higher threat.

There is also several points in the fight where you need snap aggro, making avenger's shield really stand out. There are several aggro resets where Illidan is just standing there ready to attack someone, and even a hunter's misdirect does not always solve this.

[Cakes]

Looks like he's being hotfixed to 25 minutes anyway, which seems more than reasonable.

[PsiVen]

Illidan is a demon, so exorcism will make paladin threat pretty solid here. That's not much of an advantage though tbh, as the entire fight is about control over DPS and the 15-min enrage timer was a mistake.

What may turn out to be an advantage is that warriors can't afford to Shield Block lest they get Sheared, whereas we should be able to guarantee HS up 100% of the time. GCD shouldn't be an issue as Shear itself has a cast time, but the lagtime of 10s duration / 10s cooldown might show up. Any idea if DS/BoP prevents Shear from landing? According to Thottbot the debuff can't be removed by invulns.

We're most likely going to see Illidan in the next couple weeks with 2 prot warriors and myself. Guess we'll find out then who's best suited to what job. Personally I hope I don't end up tanking flames, because I'd need quite a few heroics to improve my FR gear from about 230 resist :/

[fiorina]

Hope you get your tier 6 drops and tank him :)

To be honest I am not so "pushy" about tanking him. Tanking Illidan is all about hiting block button and move a bit from Flame patch once in a while. Repeat 30 times. Indeed it's a prestigious and yada-yada but...

Tanking Flames of Azzinoth is much more harder job, I would say hardest tanking ingame, especially as your threat as paladin is limited due to being unable to block. If you can tank Flames, you can tank everything(excluding gimmick fights) and people will never ever ask stupid questions such as "can paladin tank lol?" + if you do it right every week you will get great respect from guild as all hard stuff about Illidan is in phase 2.

[Worldie]

We're still far from him, but what i see about Illidan is *Dual Wield + Demon*, so i really hope someday to tank him for Guild Progression. But it's still far, no hurry until Kael is down for us.
Even if i don't really *like* maintanking since its just a HS smash job, but its on the "to be done" list

[Rhî]

No guild will use a paladin for Illidan as MT, because of Phase 5. Maiev is too stupid to place traps at useable spots in 50% of the time and then you need your not-existing 'Oh Shit'-Buttons. Who is using a tank, who doesn't have Last Stand and Shieldwall?

This is another encounter designed around warrior-tanking. T6 is full of this kind of encounters.

Sure it's possible to tank Illidan as Paladin, but nor reasonable. And definitely a far, far inferior option.

But I love the 'Zigzag'-Phase. Destruction Potion combined with AW and the party starts!

[Lansky]

No guild will use a paladin for Illidan as MT, because of Phase 5. Maiev is too stupid to place traps at useable spots in 50% of the time and then you need your not-existing 'Oh Shit'-Buttons. Who is using a tank, who doesn't have Last Stand and Shieldwall?

This is another encounter designed around warrior-tanking. T6 is full of this kind of encounters.

Sure it's possible to tank Illidan as Paladin, but nor reasonable. And definitely a far, far inferior option.

But I love the 'Zigzag'-Phase. Destruction Potion combined with AW and the party starts!

Huh?

While I won't argue that an "oh shit" button would be a lovely thing our currnt tank (Tauren Warrior) does not always have CD's available for enrages and gets healed through them with little issue. Not to mention popping an avoidance trinket is all he normally does anyway. I can see some downsides to using a paladin tank, as well as some upsides. I'm not seeing a "far, far inferior" comparison.

[Rhî]

No guild will use a paladin for Illidan as MT, because of Phase 5. Maiev is too stupid to place traps at useable spots in 50% of the time and then you need your not-existing 'Oh Shit'-Buttons. Who is using a tank, who doesn't have Last Stand and Shieldwall?

This is another encounter designed around warrior-tanking. T6 is full of this kind of encounters.

Sure it's possible to tank Illidan as Paladin, but nor reasonable. And definitely a far, far inferior option.

But I love the 'Zigzag'-Phase. Destruction Potion combined with AW and the party starts!

Huh?

While I won't argue that an "oh shit" button would be a lovely thing our currnt tank (Tauren Warrior) does not always have CD's available for enrages and gets healed through them with little issue. Not to mention popping an avoidance trinket is all he normally does anyway. I can see some downsides to using a paladin tank, as well as some upsides. I'm not seeing a "far, far inferior" comparison.

He has more HP than you (Base-HP and Ranged Slot), better Avoidance/Mitigation (Base&Item-Agility, Ranged Slot, Def-Stance Vs. Righteous Fury), better Blockrating (HS: 35% Vs. SB: 75%; Shear don't miss-issue), Last Stand and Shieldwall (both generally every P5 Try ready).

You cant seriously call that minor disadvantages.

[Worldie]

We can discuss about HP in 2.3, i won't be surprised seeing Paladins with that level of gear with more HP than a warrior.
Holy shield is way superior than Shield Block for Shear, since a war must pop Shield Block exactly before Shear else it will probably be eaten by Illidan's attacks, while instead a paladin can just keep Holy Shield up everytime and probably not even noticing the Shears. Don't even try to say "its harder to get the avoidance", i already have 120% avoidance with HS without even Libram of Repentance, and my gear is only t5 level, if i had t6 i would have much more according to my Tankpoints.
The only things i can understand is the absence of SW and LS, but we counter this with higher threat generation and passive oshit button if we get under 7-8k HP, and i doubt Illidan hits for 12k melee in order to leapfrog Ardent Defender. This without mentioning that if for some reason we get Sheared, we can dispel it, a warrior will never be able to do that, will just have to SW and pray.

This without mentioning that a tankadin would be way more effective on Illidan than on the Elementals, considering how our threat works, while the warriors and druids are way way better for them.

[Rhî]

Illidan is dead. I tanked him the entire time. This was our guild first kill of him, so this was not a case of severely out-gearing the encounter or having the boss on farm already. I'm not sure if this is a "world first" but I can say it was not easy. I think we took a few years off of the lives of our healers during that fight...

However, it became abundantly clear during the final phases of the fight that Warriors are simply better tanks for MT situations like this.
- 6% reduction vs 10% reduction means he hits for ~1k more on average, but top-end damage means he can hit for 9k, 5k, 9k in a matter of 1.5seconds on a protpally where a warrior would only take 8k, 4k, 8k - in split-seconds like that, 3k damage can be the difference of "insta-gib" and "barely making it." This becomes even more apparent during Phase 5 when he Enrages and begins hitting for 11k/8k even faster...
- The 1500hp difference between Warriors and Protpallies makes the above "insta-gib" factor even more likely to occur - if the healers are already not winding up heals and loading you up with full HoTs, you're gonna get splattered.
- The fact that Protpallies have no Last Stand or Shield Wall to help with Enrage or similar abilities means that your healers have to be balls-to-the-wall 100% of the time, and an unlucky streak (which WILL happen) simply will be too much for even successive-9k-heals to overcome.
- Holy Shield sucks for MT purposes as it is now - it is impossible to remain uncrushable reliably with it on boss fights because of the .5-1sec lag-time between it falling off and the cooldown allowing you to put it back on... as opposed to Shield block that has 1sec longer duration than the cooldown.

So either you gotta be really lucky or much more geared than a Warrior at the same level to begin to reach for the upper-echelon MT spots. It's unfortunate, but until we start getting some more "oh shit" buttons and more passive damage mitigation we won't be able to stand toe-to-toe with Warriors - the HP buff in 2.3 helps get near them, but it isn't going to be enough to compensate for the other deficiencies.

Another note:
I hit the buff cap during the fight regularly, and I often found my flasks getting pushed off because of all the HoTs and buffs I received during the fight. I'm not sure if this is a problem specific to Protpallies (since we have Righteous Defense up, another buff in the slot) but I'm fairly sure it caused a wipe once or twice when my max health suddenly dropped due to Fort/MotW and Flask falling off.

written by Gromweld aka Teckbot

Source: http://elitistjerks.com/521957-post71.html

His summary is no surprise for me. In fact, he is telling the same story as i did here.

[Atreidies]

we counter this with higher threat generation and passive oshit button if we get under 7-8k HP, and i doubt Illidan hits for 12k melee in order to leapfrog Ardent Defender.

Refer to this link for proof of a hit from Illidan for 14,307 on our MT in Defensive Stance with Imp. Devo aura + full raid buffs + Ironshield Potion active, cannot confirm Inspiration or the shaman equivalent.

http://img86.imageshack.us/img86/9442/illidanhitug3.jpg

This without mentioning that if for some reason we get Sheared, we can dispel it, a warrior will never be able to do that, will just have to SW and pray.

You cannot 'dispel' Shear by simply casting Divine Shield or BoP, it stays on you just like Burning Adrenaline from Vael, Marks from Kaz'rogal, etc. We don't get a free ticket out of this, while you see it as a plus for us, it's just another reason that a Warrior is more suited to this task. While a Warrior may have to sit and wait for Shear to cast and can make human error, we have a .5-1 second lag depending on your server inbetween Holy Shield casts making us vulnerable to the same mechanic just without an oh-shit button.

This without mentioning that a tankadin would be way more effective on Illidan than on the Elementals, considering how our threat works, while the warriors and druids are way way better for them.

A Paladin is significantly more effective as a tank for a Flame of Azzinoth than a warrior as we have various methods of pushing our threat output much higher through consumables from Flasks/Elixirs to Wizard Oil and Destruction Pots, all taking into account that the Flames are Demons and are therefore susceptible to Exorcism where a Protection Warrior has Shield Slam and his minor amount of Block Value he's squeezed in on the pieces of gear he's wearing that aren't Fire Resist. Against a Druid our threat is not significantly better here unless you do use things like a Destruction Potion to open up on the Flame, and worst case scenario we DO have an Oh-Shit button to survive an Eye-Beam, DS + Taunt will save your ass and your raid's.

[Worldie]

I disagree on the threat, we already loose a significant part of the threat on tanking elementals, and our mitigation is lower than the one of warriors. While we ofc can do it and some of us do it, actually we still have to gain the threat through consumables. For how the elementals work, we may even tank them with a 2h and have same threat (this ignoring weapon stats, obviously). However i didn't know they were demons, so i suppose the Exorcism could counter the loss of Holy Shield.

For the 14k hit, well, also a warrior would get oneshotted by it if it happens when he's not full, so it's not really inherent to the discussion. However, a 14k hit would be reduced to 9800, if for some reason we had a PW:Shield, we would survive that hit with 8k HP, a warrior won't.

[Rhî]

I see it week for week:

My threat at a Flame > Warrior threat at the other Flame.

Popping up AW and using a Destruction Potion are a huge boost!

What are we losing? Some threat from Holy Shield... Thats not much, maybe 10% from total threat.

A Warrior is far more gimped at them.

Who cares that we get some more damage? We always get more damage, at Illidan, too.

And AD is great with all these 500-1000 DoT-Ticks every second, while moving out of a flamepatch.