Kor'kron Dark Shaman Heroic Guide

[theburned]

That's interesting. I suppose this would be a good idea if you lack a healer at haromn with good personal cooldowns (shammy I guess).
Otherwise just have one healer there. The debuff on the tank won't really be noticeable.

It isn't mentioned as the only time foul stream gets on a healer is right after the debuff falls off, and you are in no way guaranteed that wont happen with a 5th person, and in most cases it isn't lethal at all, the only time it is, is when one of you panics and fails to do their job.

Also we ran with a warlock on the haromm group, with soul link, soul leech, eternal resolve (10% damage reduction), and other stuff for healing, and he took around 25 million damage total, with the debuff and falling ash, and healed 3m himself, the rest was by me and the tanks. could've handled more damage, but felt entierly safe, and was our first one shot on that boss.

[Deleted]

can anyone tell me what the cd is on falling ash once it hits the 50% mark? i know it has like a 15 sec landing from the time the icon appears. Im just trying to get a better judge of how i can handle the cds for it for each group. Also the kardris foul geyser, that still is only channeled onto the tank tanking him at that time correct?

It's approximately 30 secs, although i'm not sure the exact value. Unless iron prison overlaps with it the kardis group shouldn't have an issue with it. It's much more likely to kill either of the healers in the Haroum group, the tanks won't be in danger from it.

Yes the foul geyser is only on the tank tanking him, let the range kill the adds though.

[Deleted]

[22:37:35.522] Wavebinder Kardris casts Iron Prison
[22:38:08.056] Wavebinder Kardris casts Iron Prison
[22:38:39.803] Wavebinder Kardris casts Iron Prison

[22:39:43.583] Wavebinder Kardris casts Foul Geysir on xy
[22:40:16.150] Wavebinder Kardris casts Foul Geysir on xy
[22:40:49.115] Wavebinder Kardris casts Foul Geysir on xy

[22:41:00.469] Wavebinder Kardris casts Falling Ash
[22:41:33.025] Wavebinder Kardris casts Falling Ash
[22:42:05.579] Wavebinder Kardris casts Falling Ash
[22:42:38.134] Wavebinder Kardris casts Falling Ash

I guess all abilities have a ~30s CD.

[Saiyoran]

We are now approaching 70 pulls on this boss with the following comp:

Haromm:
Blood Dk
Prot Pally
H Pally
R Shaman
(sometimes) SPriest

Kardris:
Prot Warrior (me)
R Druid
Ele Shaman
Lock
Mage
(sometimes) Spriest

We rotated the priest both top and bottom to try both ways but neither got us any more consistent results.

We have gotten numerous sub 10% wipes (though most of them were with a trial disc priest instead of our paladin, she is not with the guild any more), but tonight we never passed 20% in 3 hours of raiding. I just don't understand how you can keep people from dying when Falling Ash and Prison expiration are within 2 or 3 seconds of each other. Sometimes we will get lucky and there will be a 5 or 6 second gap in between them, those are usually our better pulls, but often she casts Falling Ash when there are 17 or 18 seconds left on prisons, and then continues to do so for the rest of the fight. Our holy paladin can not solo heal bottom group, she runs out of mana about 30% into the fight for whatever reason.

Our spriest has a disc spec
We have another spriest that also has a disc spec, but he can't be asked to look up the fight apparently
We have another mage
I have a MW Monk alt (560 ilvl) that has a 545 BrM spec.
The spriest has a rogue alt (560ish ilvl)

Any suggestions as to a better setup/strat/comp would be appreciated.

[Fluttershy]

For starters it's 10x easier if the spriest just goes to kardris, that way every single foul stream will be casted on tanks instead of the healers/spriest.

As for prison/ash , they are time based so don't push him to like 50% or whatever if iron prison has 35-25 seconds remaining.

[Saiyoran]

Was looking into the disc/BrM on bottom kiting adds strategy, and had a question. Does Stagger passively mitigate damage from Iron Prison? A quick reply would be really awesome so I know whether trying on my monk is worth it or not, thanks in advance.

[Kakera]

you need to not write novels for guides. the players you write these guides for are usually bad or casual, and in both cases im sure they dont want to read a book on a fight. besides, you over complicate simple fights way too much. rather than explaining all of this, you usually find all of it out in a pull or two which is much faster and more productive. if you want people to take your guides seriously you should condense them and focus on key tips or tricks to make the encounter easier, rather than diagram the entire layout of the freaking room

Infracted;

[Deja Thoris]

you need to not write novels for guides. the players you write these guides for are usually bad or casual, and in both cases im sure they dont want to read a book on a fight. besides, you over complicate simple fights way too much. rather than explaining all of this, you usually find all of it out in a pull or two which is much faster and more productive. if you want people to take your guides seriously you should condense them and focus on key tips or tricks to make the encounter easier, rather than diagram the entire layout of the freaking room

I quite like his guides, I must be bad and casual! Just because you're from the era where anything more than 30 unabbreviated characters is too much for your attention span doesn't mean it doesn't have its place.

[Zabuzan]

If you don't like them, don't bother with them. Plenty of less hardcore guilds are using these guides - I regularly get PMs for people asking for additional questions. The fact that further discussion goes on in these threads on alternate strategy ideas or additional points of note suggests there is plenty of content to talk about it. These are the same guides we use in my own guild and describe strategies used for our first kills, don't see why they might not help other people as well. Just as people as casual, doesn't mean they might not like to go in feeling as prepared as possible.

These aren't for everyone - and evidently not for you.

Your comment adds no value at all to the guide or following discussion, so you could also have saved yourself some time and saved me time as I can't help but reply to narrow minded comments like your own.

Fully aware it's not up everyone's street - and if you don't agree with the content it's fine, but coming in and slagging it off is a bit lame to be honest.

What progress do you consider casual by the way Kakera?

Agree it's not for everyone, but I get far more people asking for more information or thanking me than comments like your own, so I'm pretty sure there is a greater need for it than the equivalent dislike for reading and detailed content some people don't benefit from. Experience of the fight is obviously going to be better than pre reading, but going into a new phase or fight for the first time with a knowledge of the general strategy so you know what to expect, will allow you to stay alive longer and make progress on a given encounter that little bit faster.

Some of the most bleeding edge guilds in the game as it currently stands make their own guides like this, but they don't share them with other people. My own guild is semi-hardcore and I'm always looking for content like this - the guide was also initially posted when relatively few guilds had killed the encounter.... relatively few guilds (even amongst raiding guilds) still have in the grand scheme of things.

Thanks for the back up Deja!

Just to summarise another length post in case the number of words tires you out Kakera, I don't ask people to read these, they can seek them out if they want them. If you don't want them, then why try and belittle what I'm doing? Save yourself the poorly punctuated and entirely lower case comment - go and irritate someone else

[wombats23]

Was looking into the disc/BrM on bottom kiting adds strategy, and had a question. Does Stagger passively mitigate damage from Iron Prison? A quick reply would be really awesome so I know whether trying on my monk is worth it or not, thanks in advance.

yes, stagger will mitigate iron prison.

if you do end up doing this strat, always be 1 step in front of your brewmaster. if slimes are being summoned and you're not in front of your brewmaster, you risk being sandwiched by tornados, toxic storms and the slimes spawning. iirc, a slime spawning on top of you is a 1 shot as a clothie.

also, depending on when you split the two bosses and your iron prison rng, you'll be in for either spikier damage or more constant damage on your brewmaster. you'll have two possible scenarios, both dependent on who gets targeted by iron prison:

1: either both your disc and brewmaster or neither of the two will have iron prison.
what ends up happening is at some point, both of them will get iron prison at once and 30 seconds later, the boss will try to cast iron prison again but there will be no targets in range that can be affected by it. this'll end up with the boss chain casting it to no effect until either she decides to cast something else (in which case she'll cast that move and then go back to spamming iron prison), or your debuffs will wear off and then you'll be immediately applied with another iron prison, after which she'll just proceed as normal until she casts iron prison again.

this is imho the harder variant to go against. the danger is from something you probably didn't even notice the boss did: the froststorm bolt. the bolt has a travel time so your brewmaster might end up being gibbed from the boss casting a bolt after casting prison and then running up to catch your brewmaster and then instantly casting another bolt + melee. if you're caught off guard by this, you'll fall behind and potentially be in trouble if you can't stand still to cast because of a storm, tornado, or incoming slimes. if a fallen ash happens to occur at the same time, you're pretty screwed unless you noticed it and PS'd your brewmaster.

2: only one of either the disc or the brewmaster has iron prison as the split.
this is what i consider the easier variant because damage will always be constant and repeat in a very predictable pattern. there's really no tricks or tips to this but i believe this results in more damage overall so mana can actually become an issue if you were like my guild and used an spriest in a disc spec with low spirit (9k~) for this fight.


that said, even though i consider the 1st variant harder, i prefer facing the 1st variant over the 2nd variant since this lets the disc and brewmaster devote the majority of their attention to placing storms and dodging tornados.

[Saiyoran]

Thanks for all the tips.

In the end, we tried it today using that strategy only with a disc priest and a warrior tank since my BrM alt is still pretty undergeared.

It was a total faceroll. I highly recommend this strategy to anyone that has a disc priest (any tank can kite, it turns out). We did 70 pulls the normal 5/5 split way, with no good results really. We killed the boss using the 8/2 split in 4 attempts. One of them was only a wipe because the disc priest dced. Another was our resto druid up top lagging from his stream running, which he then turned off and had no more issues.

Basically, Spell Reflect and Mass Reflect make an Iron Prison/Froststorm Bolt combo trivial, you can always save one reflect for when prison falls off. DPS on average was about 5-10% higher with this strategy from everyone (except me, the tank, since almost all my damage was add damage and skada wasnt trackign reflected damage) due to very little and very predictable movement.

You guys argued against this strat for problems it creates with instagibs, but we had literally ZERO issues with the bottom group, not even close. Makes the fight a complete joke.

How you kite the slimes: You dont. They move slower than your run speed. The priest gets aggro sometimes, hes just runs away. There's nothing to heal except ash damage and the occasional bolt so he doesnt need to be standing still and healing much. I just ran around in circles like a retard for the whole fight pressing reflect and occasionally thunderclapping/bladestorming the adds since the range on those AoEs is bigger than the range on slime AoE.

Edit: Just wanted to suggest maybe mentioning this strategy somewhere? It really saved us a lot of headache and my whole raid team was super excited since we were stuck on this boss for 3 weeks straight until we got this strategy. If you have a disc priest, theres no reason not to try this. For Falling Ash after berserk we did Devo > Devo > Healing Tide/Personals. Simple as that.

[Zabuzan]

You can also do the 8/2 strat with a Holy Paladin Those cheeky old absorb shields.

I'll see about adding in a separate section on the 8/2 split strat at some point, it definitely sounds simple to me - would love to see a video with a PoV from each side though... don't suppose you have any? Assume not as your rdruid had to stop streaming, so will have to have a look tonight.

This week, we changed from the 4/6 3tank 3 heal strat we usually use (as described in the guide) to a 5/5 2 heal strat with a Warlock in the Haromm group, ended up being even easier than the 3 heal strat because Warlocks take so little damage and the other DPS up top with Haromm was a Warrior who gets mad rage from the Toxic Mist DoT.

I think for the average team, the 8/2 split sounds like the way to go though - just be interested to see the top groups positioning to be honest Will recommend that our second team gives it a go. Would you say the 8/2 split makes the fight easy enough that it'd be worth them skipping Galakras and Juggernaut after the get Sha HC next week to go for a quick Shamans kill, or is it still more challenging than the previous 2 bosses even with the split you've suggested.

(Note - also saw a strat a Chinese guild used where they had a Blood DK solo Kardris up top, kiting slimes up and down the hill, whilst the other 9 players stayed on Haromm down at the bottom and nuked, which we are probably going to try next reset, though our Blood DK is a little less geared so may give it a go with a Prot Paladin EF ftw!)

[Saiyoran]

I also heard about Blood DK soloing (our Blood DK said he could probably do it so we may try next week or the week after once we get all the people that sat this week their kill). While our druid did have to stop streaming, he did get the one pull where he lagged and died from said stream (supposedly :P). Though it is not a kill pull, it is the exact same positioning they used for the kill pull and the attempt was long enough to get a pretty good idea of how they did it. Unfortunately no PoV of bottom, but as the tank down there I can say there really wasnt anything special. I just ran around. Didn't plan tornado positions, didn't try to spawn adds in any particular way. I just made sure I was in range of the priest and ran away from shit.

Here is the stream of the one pull we have, skip to 5 minutes in. Our vent chatter is pretty obnoxious so may want to mute haha.
http://www.twitch.tv/masterhorus/b/481960139

Also the druid was boomkin, since we had a paladin and shaman in and wanted purity, but both healers said it wasn't really necessary (and the druid and shaman had healed the 5/5 split just fine when they were on top with no purity's anyway).

Edit: Just saw the question you asked. Galakras is probably around the same difficulty as Shamans with this strat. Juggernaut is probably harder, might want to skip it unless you just have really really solid heals (we still wipe on Juggernaut once or twice every week to people getting gibbed by stupid stuff, so I would say its definitely worth skipping). Just my opinion of course, your bottom tank may find kiting adds tough (I was using heroic leap or nitro boosts to make sure I was almost always out of range instantly after I thunderclapped the group, may put others at a disadvantage without those but shouldn't make it all that much harder).

Double Edit: http://www.twitch.tv/masterhorus/b/481674581 some attempts the original way we were doing it. As you can see, EVERYONE was dying. A lot.

FINAL EDIT I PROMISE: Would you suggest Malkorok or Spoils for our attempts next week (we've already full cleared the rest on normal this week)? We should manage the first 8 on Tuesday and half of Wednesday leaving us about 4-5 hours progression time for a boss next week.

[Nebs]

Great guide, per usual. I think this probably stems from the fact that I never paid much attention to Haromm's abilities as a DPS throughout normal, but I don't understand why Foul Stream will not target healers if there is one or more DPS with the Haromm group. Does it mainly target DPS, and only healers when no DPS are around? Can the tanks get targeted with it? We'll be using a 3 tank 3 heal strategy with the following composition:

Protection Warrior
Blood DK
Guardian Druid (typically a Boomkin, so lower ilvl)

Mistweaver
Resto Druid
Disc Priest

Mage
Hunter
Rogue
Feral Druid

If we were doing a standard split, I'd assume the wise group composition would be a 6/4 split with the Blood DK/Guardian, Resto/MW, Rogue/Feral on Haromm, with the Prot, Disc, Hunter and Mage on the bottom with Kardris.

Also, it seems that we have a great composition for the 8/2 split you guys are currently discussing. If I'm understanding correctly, the responsibilities of the bottom group (Prot/Disc) include the Disc shielding for the prison, the Prot slowing/kiting the slimes, and calling out Falling Ash so the other group can prepare. How does the Froststorm Bolt factor into it in terms of using Spell Reflect? Does the Prot just save his SR for when the bolt coincides with the prison expiring? Very curious to hear more about the 8/2 split as it sounds like a promising strategy and less of a learning curve than the 6/4 we would probably go with, thanks!

[Saiyoran]

Protection Warrior
Blood DK
Guardian Druid (typically a Boomkin, so lower ilvl)

Mistweaver
Resto Druid
Disc Priest

Mage
Hunter
Rogue
Feral Druid

Also, it seems that we have a great composition for the 8/2 split you guys are currently discussing. If I'm understanding correctly, the responsibilities of the bottom group (Prot/Disc) include the Disc shielding for the prison, the Prot slowing/kiting the slimes, and calling out Falling Ash so the other group can prepare. How does the Froststorm Bolt factor into it in terms of using Spell Reflect? Does the Prot just save his SR for when the bolt coincides with the prison expiring? Very curious to hear more about the 8/2 split as it sounds like a promising strategy and less of a learning curve than the 6/4 we would probably go with, thanks!

Your comp does look pretty good for 8/2. You have the responsibilities of the bottom group correct. Spell Reflect just use every time it is up for a Froststorm Bolt. Have the warrior take Mass Spell Reflect and only use that for when Iron Prison is about to expire and you need to reflect a bolt. I posted a link to a pull for the top group strategy a few posts up.

Good luck!

[Goil]

Here's a video of our recent kill using the 8/2 strat Disc priest POV down the bottom. Only took 12 attempts in total. I was tanking down the bottom with the priest and had no real plan after the first 30%. Got jibbed by an Iron Prison near the end and one of the top tanks came down to finish them off.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9ZY5_OBdeM

[Zabuzan]

Interesting, thanks.

[Deleted]

Also killed within ~10 attempts (first pull was at 15% hp left) with the 8/2 strat. 3 tanks(3rd tank dk with 540 tank gear), 3 healer(Disc, Shaman, Holy Paladin).
On our kill I( Blood DK) was at Kadris with our holy pala. At 15% our Paladin died and let me alone. It is solo healable as a blood dk even without big cooldowns, not easy but it works.

We found some bugs with the 8/2 strat:
- Kadris spams Iron Prison sometimes for 10 seconds without moving.
- Our upper 8 man group couldn't move Haromm at the end of the fight because we was stucked half inside a wall, so no one could melee him.
- If you're in the 2 man group you don't get bloodlust/timewarp, someone needs to run down from the other group and pop it.

I used Saiyoran twitch stream he posted to show our guildies how to place the tombs&foul stream, thx for this & your awesome guide Zabuzan!

[Cantor]

We also used the 8/2 split for our first pulls on this and found it worked wonders – it's flexible enough that it doesn't rely on certain tanks or healers, which is ideal. We put about 2 hours into this last night (12 pulls or so) and would have scored a kill on our 10th but ended up with a Hunter dying at around 10% and getting a 0.8% wipe.

We don't have a H Paladin, and our Disc Priest struggles with movement sometimes, so we ended up with a Brewmaster Monk and Resto Druid on Kardriss (always had Barkskin and/or Ironbark available for Prison, coupled with Guard shields from the Monk's statue), who both said it was very easy; on Haromm we were using 2 Guardians, a Disc Priest and Resto Shaman, a Hunter, Spriest, Retadin and Boomkin with no problems whatsoever (yeah, 4 Druids in a 10-man). I'm a massive fan of this way of doing things, and like I said, it seems very flexible. We managed to get the Tombs and Walls stacked up close enough that we barely had to move at all (if the tank moves into the previous wall while the ability is casting you can get 2 or 3 stacked on top of each other, but it may need a strong cooldown if you get your timing wrong).

Edit: came back and two-shot this tonight.

[Anzen]

I like this guide! Can see this being really useful for any guild coming to progress it since this is one of the harder bosses in SoO.

10/10