We’ll consider your advice about that.

What’s more interesting to me is the concept of a 20-yard targetting range on his whirlwind. Is this something anyone else has observed or can disprove? I could see this fight becoming reasonably easy if that’s true, aside from the melee issues. However, other strategies just seem to recommend trying to keep at least 25 yards away from him, but don’t say why. I’d assume it’s because he won’t reach you before changing targets.

For Leo you’re really gimping yourself with every melee DPS you take. They simply aren’t able to do enough DPS to him in his elf form to make a huge difference, which greatly hinders your ability to take him down after 15% before your warlock tank dies. When still getting used to the fight it’s a good idea to only bring a (small) handful of melee and a ton of ranged DPS. Then, avoiding whirlwinds is a breeze!

Kara is where you gear your self for high end raiding. As you get to higher end stuff you will start to replace some of that gear but probably not all of it. Go and look at some of the guys in the BT guilds, and you will still see a few pieces of Kara gear here and there. Some of it is that good for specific classes. Also look at what instances come before SSC. Other than Kara it is Gruul’s, Mag and possibly ZA. Due to the shear number of people in raid and the number of boss drops, your not going to get a whole lot of loot from Gruul’s or Mag. You would have to run both of them for months to gear your entire raid. I wouldn’t suggest that you skip them completely but I would say don’t wait until they are on farm to try some SSC and TK bosses.

Here is a little over view of some of the bosses you should try.

HKM – The hardest part about this fight is the pull. As long and you have a mage with a good stam set and a get the mobs in good spots of the pull it is fairly easy. You will probably wipe a few times but I have known several guilds that have killed him on the first night of attempts.

Gruuls – This can be a difficult fight and requires a lot of heads up play by your entire raid. The main issue here is dealing with the groundslam and shatters. I perfere the free flowing way of avoiding your fellow players to the assigned spots method but its up to you.

Mag – This is a hard fight. Harder than some of the fights in SSC and TK in my opinion. It requires high dps and cordination. The biggest problem in my opinion is getting the first five adds down quickly. If you don’t, you have infernals running all over the place and Mag to deal with. If you can get the first 3 or 4 down before Mag is release you shouldn’t many problems. It will probably just take a few times to learn how to click the cubes.

VR – Easy fight. Just requires heads up play by your ranged DPS, and it gives you T5 Shoulders.

Lurker – This fight is a caster DPS dream. No threat. It requires a lot of coordination and can be mana intensive in the beginning due to its length, but there is no reason why a Kara geared guild can’t do it.

Anyway, good luck on all of this. I am right back there with you after my guild recently fell apart. We are back to gruuls and mag and such.

Let me add to all who commented about Lurker that the fight is easy provided all remember the one important mantra – “jump in the water!” Just keep singing it on Vent/TS in your best “Show me the money” impersonation and people will get the idea ;)

The other thing is that the marks of the illidari are nice but don’t count on having a flask for every raid member, at least not initially when clearing only up to Lurker. Have people bring their own flasks for that extra ummph :)

About friends, yeah it’s amazing what a fun combination a friend and past content are :) Last night I took my level 70 hunter and a friend who is also a 70 hunter into LBRS – wanted the gem from the first boss for the UBRS key, already had the other 2 gems.

Just us 2 hunters, I wasn’t sure we could do it but we cleared every pack of mobs rather easily and the boss too went down without a problem. Fun times :)

You & yer friends go show them fishies what’s what, BBBBBBBBB!

I regard the Lurker fight as a dance. With the right footwork, he’s easy. It’s actually one of my favourite fights – makes me feel a bit Zen :)

With the acid geyser on the big bog lord dudes… in our raid we tried to get the person targetted to run to the tank. However, some people are just clueless, and I found that (while DPSing) as soon as the acid geyser ability started, if *I* ran to the tank, I was guaranteed not to get hit (facepalm!). That guild fell apart, took down Lurker/VR, but never got past – and no surprise why.

I don’t see any reason why you guys aren’t doing Gruul’s yet. Just make sure all your DPS are doing over 500 DPS, preferably 600 or more, and you’re sweet. Considering I have DPS alts that hit that easy without even touching Kara, I don’t see any reason your DPS can’t since they’ve farmed Kara and have equivalent or nicer crafted gear.

Another way of doing the Underbog Colossus that we found works out very well is to have everyone on one side on the circular platforms and the person who gets tragetted runs through the melee to the other side so the only people getting hit are that person and the tank.

Now, for some recommendation for Leo. The first thing you need to know is that the range on whirlwind is approximatly 20 yards. If you are outside of this, Leo will not come towards you. Now knowing that, the way we set this fight up is that the melee went up to the platform where Leo started off when the timer for the cooldown was over. the range classes go to the right and left walls when the whirlwind starts. Have a shaman put a searing totem down at the feet of the tank, so that when the whirl is over Leo will come back to him (He attacks the very first thing that hits him after the whirl).

For the split, keep the demon form on the lower platform and the elf form on the top. The strat here is the same. Melee gets out at the timer cooldown and the rest when the whirl starts. Here everyone runs to one of the 3 walls.

About the Lurker: It’s also important to keep the DPS members out of his whirls. Make sure they back out a second or two before a whirl is scheduled to happen, after every time he stops spouting, and after every time he emerges from the water. 3500+ damage to everybody in melee range up to four times per phase can quickly add up if they don’t know when to run out.

We handle the adds during the Lurker fight a little oddly. We CC the archers on the platforms and kill the Guardians first, just because the casting time of Polymorph means the Guardians have a good chance to hitting some poor priest standing in the wrong place, and the archers are far less dangerous if they get loose for a few seconds. We use 3 tanks and the melee/ranged DPS focus on their nearest Guardians. Once each dies, most of the melee (except the MT and OT) head out to the islands to help with the archers. This requires that the fishes be dead, of course, so the whole trip makes them take no more than 2000-3000 damage, which -once- per phase isn’t bad.

Thanks for your recommendation about encircling those giants. We hates them, we do.

Lately we’ve been working on Leotheras. Karathress is far from being on farm (though we understand the fight, mostly), but Leo is easier to get to, so we’re working on both at once.

He’s horrible. We can’t seem to keep everybody out of the whirlwinds, and we have such a hard time doing any damage while he’s in elf form. Melee has to keep running very far away, leaving only 6-8 seconds of time for dps. I don’t know what the ranged people are doing, but they get hit by whirlwinds too frequently despite trying to get away, which also reduces their dps during whirlwinds.

That all is not a severe problem, as we can HANDLE it, until phase 3. At 15%, he splits into elf and demon forms, and while the warlock keeps ahold of the demon form just fine, we’re supposed to kill the elf, and that’s just maddedning. The fight just became a DPS race (to kill him before the debuff stacks too high on the warlock), but we barely have any time to damage him because he keeps whirlwinding, sending us melee scattering and the ranged cowering. ARGH!