Kalecgos
Our first Kalecgos kill was a few weeks ago, but it wasn’t until this week that I got it on video.
As the first boss in Sunwell Plateau, there’s a notable difference between the difficulty here as compared to, say, Illidan. It seems reasonable that a guild who can kill Illidan would not be immediately ready to kill Kalecgos; it took us maybe a month or so between our first Illidan kill and our first Kalecgos kill.
The dance on this particular encounter is somewhat complicated, and fairly unique (at least in my experience). Basically, the fight is split up into two fights that are carried out simultaneously. The first, in the “normal world” is carried out in the place you walk into when the fight begins – a circular area that contains a big blue dragon named Kalecgos. He does normal dragon stuff (tail whip, frost breath), and is himself not much of a problem, although he does hit decently hard, so the tank healers can’t slack. The second fight is in the “demon world”, which is a physically separate place containing – you guessed it – a demon! Both the demon and Kalecgos must be killed within a very short time of each other. The demon world also contains an NPC that can ‘tank’ the demon, but not for very long – if he dies, the encounter ends and you lose.
The difficulty of this fight is centered around how players move between the normal and demon worlds. At specific intervals, a random raid member is teleported from the normal to the demon world. A portal appears in the normal world where the player was standing, and the appearance of the portal causes pretty significant aoe damage (spread out!). The portal allows travel to the demon world, but it only lasts a short time *and has a global cooldown*. This means that players can only go through the portal at a specific rate, limiting the number of people who can theoretically get through any given portal to about 5. Once in the demon world, players have a fixed amount of time before they are automatically ported back down to the normal world.
In the normal world, players get a stacking debuff that increases arcane damage taken and also deals arcane damage. The fight is long enough that it could easily stack high enough to one-shot any player. The debuff is cleared by going into the demon world, meaning that all players must continuously move between the demon and normal worlds to prevent being killed by the arcane damage. When returning to the normal world from the demon world, players get a ‘debuff’ that prevents them from being teleported back to the demon world until it expires (like 30 – 45 seconds or so).
The raid should be divided into logical groups that move together (between worlds). The goal is to make sure that you have a tank with enough healers in both worlds at all times. Obviously right at the beginning of the fight, the demon is alone with the ‘human’ NPC which ‘tanks’ the demon; this provides enough time to get a tank + healers up to the demon world. DPS should be more or less split, but keep in mind that DPS to the dragon will start before DPS to the demon, and so more cooldowns should be used in the demon world than in the normal world.
Some challenges of this fight:
- Distributing the raid’s healing / dps / tanking resources properly across the logical groups
- Coordinating movement through the portals among members of one’s logical group. This is probably the hardest aspect of this fight. In most cases, you should enter the portal any time someone in your logical group gets ported, but there are exceptions in the case of ‘floating’ healers or tanks. See your raid leader for details :) Missing your portal is very bad, and often results in a wipe. The effects of missing a portal aren’t immediately lethal; instead, it throws off the movement rotation that is the key to this whole fight, and so eventually things like stacking debuffs or imbalanced resources will take their toll.
- Making sure that logical group members are close enough to each other that they don’t have to run far to reach a portal, but not too close to hit other players with the AoE damage caused by being ported. The AoE damage is arcane, so the stacking arcane debuff means you can easily die to portal damage.
- Coordinating the taunting of the demon to the next tank when the current demon tank is about to return to the normal world. This is not hard to do, just have to make sure there is another tank up there to do it. This means that three tanks are required for this encounter (remember that one would also be tanking the dragon)
- Coordinating the taunting of the dragon to a new tank (typically the one who just got back from the demon world) before the current dragon tank needs to head up to the demon world
- Coordinating the DPS distribution between the demon and the dragon – not terribly hard, just have to pay attention and communicate the health of both throughout the fight.
The damage intake is not hard to deal with as long as the movement rotation is proper. The demon has a phase where he hits his tank really hard, lasts maybe 10 seconds. In the demon world, there is no penalty for clumping, and so everybody should pile up near the tank to maximize chain heal efficiency. In the dragon world, you must stay spread out to eliminate portal damage, so proximity-based heals are less effective (read: chain heal). As a cherry on top, there are curses that go out to random raid members, such as:
- a stacking shadow damage DoT. When decursed, it jumps to another player. This means it’s usually advisable to leave this curse on a player until it’s ticking high enough to really hurt (or else you waste too much time decursing)
- “wild magic”, which does things like increase healing effects, increasing threat generation, or increasing cast times (by 2x!). maybe there’s an increase damage version also, but I don’t remember seeing it.
In this particular kill video, you may note that I was targeted by the portal almost every single time, which sure beats trying to find and then run through a portal :) In general, it was a solid kill, with minimal deaths – some of the deaths came right at the end when two healers both got the increased casting time curse.
Last night, we had the second boss, Brutallus, down to 8% when we hit the enrage timer (6 minutes). Prior to last night, we hadn’t gotten past maybe 65 or 70%, and never got anywhere near the enrage timer. The difference? We got the healing figured out, so tanks stopped dropping dead all the time. More on that later!