Heroic Kil’Jaeden

Heroic Kil'Jaeden Fidelity

We killed Kil’Jaeden on the 151st attempt. The One Hundred and Fifty First attempt. For reference (spoiler alert: haven’t written that post yet) we killed Heroic Fallen Avatar in 17 attempts. Should an end boss really be almost an order of magnitude harder than the previous boss? I’m not sure that’s good balance… we’d love to hear your take in the comments.

For our kill, we had all of our active core members there, for a total of 17 raiders with an average item level of 926.1. For those super concerned early on (I think that’s all of us?) about the enrage timer, we came in at 9:21, a good 39 seconds before the enrage timer. With a group of 17, we had 4 healers, which made the ratio of healing to DPS required pretty comfortable, and even allowed for some heroic healing to recover from a missed Armageddon soak. A huge thanks to Kal (Hydona) in particular for kicking butt as an elemental Shaman for the fight instead of his first love, healing, to give us some extra AOE oomph and great damage.

After 87 attempts, we hadn’t gotten the second transition phase. We had gotten close, with a couple of sub 45% attempts… but after 88 attempts, we got there, in 7 minutes. It looked like the enrage timer was going to be tight.

With two tanks, we had Esta (Brewmaster) soak all the big red swirls in phase one. That left, Bioderm (Mage), Dazzler (Mage), Wickedsfoe (Ret Paladin) and Mef (Hunter) to soak the remaining 4 in phase 2. It made a big difference when at various points, 4 out of 5 soakers might be away for a night… but on our kill, we had everyone there! On one such night, the notion of even attempting Heroic Kil’Jaeden was laughable, so we wondered if normal might be a little easier. Easier it was, with every conceivable spec jumping into a big swirl, delighted that even the most meagre cooldowns would provide the protection they required.

At one point, we ran three tanks, with Wickedsfoe (Paladin) to soak and tank the tank add. Having the redundancy, and simplicity of strategy saw us get through to phase 3 a number of times, but in the end wasn’t required to get the kill.

At 134 pulls, it was more frustrating than I’d like to admit that we had yet another maintenance shutdown in peak Oceanic raid times. However, things were coming together, despite the almost mind numbing, soul crushing miss of another Armageddon swirl being our most consistent downfall.

Some of our challenges during the fight:

DPS into adds. We solved this pretty quickly, with focused DPS and people being sensitive to how many shamans we were rocking and changing up gear and talents. For phase two, our often ignored strategy was to stack the first set of adds, and nuke them with heroism, and split one add off from then on to reduce the urgency to kill them before their stacks became overwhelming (particularly while dealing with other mechanics).

People getting knocked off the platform. Before the fight even started, Ash would often fall off the translucent platform just getting to the boss, and his exclamations over discord never failed to lighten the mood and cheer us up. We had some people get knocked off when the singularity was in the centre, but that got tightened up quickly. Then some people got knocked off when dealing with other mechanics or just being absent minded during the fight. Finally, I failed spectacularly a few times with heroic leap.

Armageddon. Where to start? The RNG on where they spawn, and the amount of time you get to respond can be pretty cruel. Aside from that, soaking the big swirl went pretty well. The little ones were a nightmare. I saw someone with a giant green triangle on their head standing right in the middle of a swirl (it was you Mef, nice job) only to have a fellow raider run head long at him, and belligerently stand there while they both got a stack of the dot from soaking. We had some missed from quite understandable indecisiveness, where a raider seemed to say, “After you.” “No, I insist, after you.” “Oops, never mind dear chap, we’re all dead.” We had people over reluctant to soak twice in a row (the dot stacks, refreshes and really hurts), and people that seemed to have a death wish. With perseverance, and some quick communication we improved and improved until only the worst RNG or brain fart would see us miss. On the night of our kill I saw some heroic sprints and amazing heroic leaps (yeah, that’s right) forsome amazing coverage.

Tank deaths. Kil’Jaeden hits pretty damn hard (unmitigated will 2 shot a tank), but also requires significant active mitigation / cooldowns for Felclaws. There were times when I was certain I had Felclaws covered, but still went splat.

The second interim phase didn’t bother us too much, and it was nice to hang out with Illidan. Wicked, Dazzler, and Bio did a great job kiting the fire ball in the last phase… and once people get their head around the Obelisks, it was a matter of getting to the phase healthy and not losing people early that lead to our kill.

Comments (2)

  1. 09:28, September 5, 2017Esta  / Reply

    Desu also stepped up with the soaks on Armageddon Hail.

  2. 22:04, September 5, 2017Mef  / Reply

    Great to have our full squad present for the first kill too! Nobody missed out so all is well in house Fidelity! (Plus now there’s no pressure to kill him again) :P

Leave a Reply

Allowed Tags - You may use these HTML tags and attributes in your comment.

<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong> <img src="" alt="">

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Pingbacks (0)

› No pingbacks yet.