Fathomlord Karathress

Evac101

Took down the farter twice since Monday now (Morogrim) so we're off to Karathress this weekend. on a casual viewing of the various videos/srategies he seems to be an easier fight then Leotheras (very similar to Maulgar in that the pull is the most important part) - is this an accurate view? Additionally, any advice on this fight regarding add management?

nix

Its kinda like the maulger fight, however the pull isnt as important to execute as in the maulger fight. You just need to tank them a good distance away from each other.

Put your highest HP/Def tank on the shammy (feral druid works best) and have 3 strong healers spamming heals on the tank. Also its advised to make a macro for the fire totem he drops as it must be nuked down asap Shammy needs to go down first.

Have a warrior tank and rogue on the priest to interupt heals with a priest healing that group. The priest is the last one to go down before you move onto kara.

Have a warrior tanking the hunter and have that warrior pick up the hunters pet when he calls for it. I also advise having an affliction lock dpsing the hunter for the whole fight so the hunter uses his mana draining stings on the lock instead of your healers. You dont want your healers getting mana drained too much. (The hunter is the second to go down after the shammy) Also have your healers spamming heals when he uses his beast within thingy as he hits HARd during this.

So its Shammy > Hunter > Priest > Kara

Keep in mind each time you down one of the adds kara will take one of their abilities. When the shammy is killed kara takes his fire totem, you wont have dps on kara during the first few mins so the tank needs to kite karatresh between two points so the heals dont get owned by the totem. The totem is the only thing you need to worry about as far as i know. I'm not sure what ability he gets when the hunter dies, and i presume he just gains the priests healing abilities when she goes down. So its just a matter of having them interupted. One the priest, shammy and hunter are dead everybody in the raid will be on kara and its smooth sailing from here. Have the totems killed asap and heals interupted.

Good luck in the fight, its not too hard. Its just one of them fights that starts off hard and gets easier as the fight goes on. Its a much easier fight compared to morogrim. And the leo fight still pisses me off =(

Ivan

Have you killed Karathress before? Some odd strategy recommendations and you seem a little unsure of some of the fundamentals of the fight...

For us, at least, its Hunter > Shammy > Priest > Kara

Hunter goes down pretty fast and the pet too. I'd normally tank the Hunter (prot paladin) and its very easy to keep aggro on both.

Shammy is tough as nails. He's the week link on the fight, if you can get past the shammy its usually plain sailing.

You need your highest defense and highest hp tank here, but ideally an uncrushable one to boot. Generally I'd go for a warrior with a mixture of avoidance and hp. This is a real gear check fight so a druid might make it easier, but he may quite easily get 3 shot before the healers can do anything as 3 crushings in the space of 1.6 seconds and a totem will kill him unless he has insane hps or some lucky heals.

The priest has a 100 yard heal that is not affected by line of sight so needs to be interrupted. She also has a 10 yard melee stun which can allow her to heal if you have only a warrior and a rogue interrupting her. Generally we would go with a shaman and a warrior interrupting her. Preferably an elemental one if you have it. Failing that, I think a lock works pretty well too.

Karathress himself isnt too bad, until he gets the spitfire totem and then he can be almost as dangerous as the shaman. His shadowvolley and some unfortunate spamfire timing can result in a healer dying fairly quickly and easily, so a druid and a paladin are ideal here, or 2 paladins depending on how good your druid healers are. Obviously both healers dont start on Karathress' tank.

When the hunter dies, Karathress gains the beast within too, though I think it is a static affect as its been quite a while since I did him last. In either case, it increases Karathress' normal damage quite a bit so you need to move the hunter healer onto the Karathress tank after the hunter dies.

Ultimately, the fight is all about the pull, the positioning, the tanks and the healing. Its very intensive for most people, requires good raid co-ordination and I'd say its one of the hardest fights in SSC but worse, Vashj is just as bad

Good luck with it and be prepared to wipe

nix

Yes ive killed Kara alot.. more than i would have liked to kill him IM SICK TO DEATH OF SSC !, i dont sort tactics so thats why it may seem a bit hazey in parts of my strats. And only the hunter tactics im unsure of..

And weve always done it Shammy > Hunter > Priest > Kara, just for the simple fact that the shammy can near one shot the tank as you've stated above, and once the shammies down this free's up 3 healers to spread out amongst the rest of the raid.

Ivan wrote: »

Ultimately, the fight is all about the pull, the positioning, the tanks and the healing. Its very intensive for most people, requires good raid co-ordination and I'd say its one of the hardest fights in SSC but worse, Vashj is just as bad

Good luck with it and be prepared to wipe

It an easy fight imo, we got him down on our first evening on him. We even skipped around morogrim as the randomness of the graves just pissed us off and at the time we didnt have a prot pally so our tactics were even more random in terms of picking up the adds. We got Kara down within 5-6 tries, which made us happy

Dustaz

we always kill the shammy first as well, i think most guilds do it that way.

Also, i found Kara one of the easiest bosses in SSC. We 3 shot him on first night of attempts, the only boss in ssc that went down that quick.

Different guilds have different strenthgs and weaknesses (3 weeks on archimonde ) so maybe yours just had a block on him.

Evac101

Thanks for the helpful replies folks, we hit him on Sunday night and, once we got our tank rotation correct, took him down (on our third try I think). We went with a Warrior on the Hunter/Pet, feral druid (our usual MT) on the Shaman, warrior on the Priest and me (protection paladin) on Karathress himself. Our original plan was that the teddy would tank the Shaman and then come steal Karathress from me, we forgot that the windfury attacks inherited from the Shaman would push my block generated threat through the roof No problems healing me through it in the end (21k hp raid buffed helps) and Karathress surrendered his legs to me as tribute

Dubhthamlacht

Dustaz wrote: »

we always kill the shammy first as well, i think most guilds do it that way.

Also, i found Kara one of the easiest bosses in SSC. We 3 shot him on first night of attempts, the only boss in ssc that went down that quick.

Different guilds have different strenthgs and weaknesses (3 weeks on archimonde ) so maybe yours just had a block on him.

yeah guilds struggle on different bosses. my guild took 6 weeks on Kael'thas and then we eventually killed Archimonde in 2 raids. go figure.

Fathomlord is an easy enough fight. Stick a shaman into the Tidalvass tank's group for groundng totem. Works wonders absorbing the shaman's frostshock and eases healing significantly.

Evac101

Nice ^^ As it happens we're fortunate enough to have a wealth of good Resto Shaman in the guild so this shouldn't be too hard to arrange

A nifty trick we found last night for killing Al'ar (finally, the bird goes down!) was to ignore the adds in Phase 2 pretty much. We had a paladin tank all the adds while DPS just focused on Al'ar itself. Hunter's misdirected onto the paladin and the spare warrior tanks from Phase 1 (the one (s) with the debuff at the time) would drag any spares into the paladins consecrate. All the adds despawn when Al'ar dies so there's not even any issues with dealing with them at the end.

rainbow kirby

We killed Al'ar for the first time last night using a similar strategy, though at the start of phase 2 we try to pick off some of the birds if we can because each little birdie killed drops the big birdie's health some. We don't kill them all together, just focus down 1 at a time to keep the explosion damage healable. (20k HP fully raid buffed, mostly in badge and Kara gear, no T5 and only 1 pc T4)

5/6 SSC 3/4 TK now, time to force everything down in SSC tonight for Vashj attempts tomorrow