Kel'thuzad Down

It's been a while since my last post, mostly due to RL issues (work pressure) keeping me busy. However my guild has continued to progress in 10man-Naxx and I'm happy I was there for most raids since it was a lot of fun.

So finally 2 nights ago we got to Kel'thuzad and started attempts on him, at first we wiped some due to not understanding tactics 100% and later due to some player errors. However we kept perfecting our execution and getting better until we got him to 9% in the last try. However it was very late and people were getting tired so we called it. Then last evening we went on him again, wiped once to "warm up" and finally got him down in the 2nd try :)

Kel'thuzad is an interesting fight and one where you really feel every player has to play perfectly in order to succeed. Of course the better your gear is the less that is important but for our gear level it felt that way.

Phase 1 is deceptively easy, just nuke the incoming adds fast enough. On all attempts we always had some adds, mostly the banshee-type, still alive when Kel'thuzad was released at start of Phase 2, but those were quickly nuked down by the ranged. So basically phase 1 is about DPS and control and not very challanging. Our main tactic there was to assign one ranged to cover ~1/3rd of the circle (we had 3 ranged) and each tank covering 1/2 of the circle. So tanks would pickup Abominations as they came in from their half (with 2 melee helping with DPS on those) while ranged would shoot skeletons and banshees before they got to the circle. Healers can also help with DPS here as there is usually very light damage on tanks.

However once phase 2 started the fun really began. First every player needed to watch his/her positioning - the 10 yard spacing between players is absolutly vital in this fight, not something "nice to have". Kel'thuzad's Frost Blast was the main challange for healers but for all players it was important to watch out for the Shadow Fissures and we even wiped a few times due to tanks not moving out from those. Even tanks get 1-shot by those :(

Phase 3 is again a healer challange as now you need to heal 2 tanks, one of whom takes increasingly more damage. So another challange is for the DPS to really nuke this phase and get Kel'thuzad down as fast as possible before it becomes impossible for the healers to keep the 2 tanks up. In addition Kel'thuzad keeps doing his abilities from phase 2, including Frost Blast, so healing is pretty tough at this point. Yet it is vital to keep up DPS as well since a dead DPS = longer phase 3 = more chance of wipe.

Our takedown fight was by no means perfect but enough few individual mistakes were made to make the fight doable.

Our guild challanges are now to down Malygos 10man and continue farming Naxx 10 since we by no means have all the fights down, some bosses we still need more practise on and will probably fight. Many people are still missing T7 gear and other possible gear improvements from drops.