Talon King Ikiss / Shirrak basic movement help

Hey all,

I must have tried these two bosses about 20 times with my 66-67 team and I only dropped Shirrak once (the first time) but haven't been able to since. My problem is, of course, all about moving my team to either get away from Shirrak and his targeted ray, or around a pillar to break los for Ikiss's arcane explosion. I've read a lot on here about boss strats, watched heroic videos, read the wiki articles on these two bosses, and i understand what i'm supposed to do. the problem is... i just can't seem to execute properly.

my team for this is:

druid tank
pally healer
mage/lock/hunter dps

when i need to move my team, i have a /follow macro for the MT and a separate one for the healer (which i made just for these fights) for when i want everyone to take off while i tank the boss somewhere else. but in both cases, by the time my team has responded to the /follow command, turned, and started running, it's just too late. only the first 1 or 2 make it out of the damage radius. i've tried turning on aspect of the pack right before i do this and that didn't work either (although i didn't get dazed like i thought i would, which was nice). i've tried spreading out from the start and individually moving people, but Shirrak pulls everyone to him, at which point i jam my 'spread out' key and hope for the best. the fight basically falls apart after that b/c the team spreads out so slowly (stepping backward especially) and i need to get to healing (b/c of the casting debuff, the heals take twice as long and at some point, i need to stop spreading out and start healing).

Two things: if i had a priest instead of a pally for healing, i don't think i'd have this problem. this isn't my main team, where i do use a priest, and i can basically group heal through anything so far. but i want a lvl 80 pally and i have another team with a pally tank so i wanted to use a druid tank for variety and blah blah blah... this is my team. how do people group heal with pallys? secondly, the one time i did kill shirrak, i let the whole team die except the pally and druid and just slowly moved and gnawed away at him. if just two of my team do better than all five, this is clearly PEBKAC.

i would love any insight into moving around during boss battles. i know people set strafing keys for when something randomly opens up near the team and you want to quickly move out of it, and i do that. but for these fights where i need to run out of distance or break los, any help on how you do it quicker would make my day. i've also tried using the click-to-move, putting everyone on follow on the healer, and quickly right-clicking on that screen somewhere off in the distance but .. same results in the end. i figure if i can't handle these guys here, how the heck am i going to handle actually tough stuff?

thanks for any help and sorry for the long post,
s

Ikiss is a pretty slow cast, and he does it at like every 25% of his health and he blinks right before casting it, so you can be ready for it pretty easily. Just fight him right next to the pillar so you just have to pop around the corner.

Shirrak is a nightmare, he's the only boss I've not managed to beat at the right level through the whole of TBC and WOTLK so far (at 73 now). I tried lots of different strategies but with ele shamans as dps I just couldn't do it. I ended up going back at 70 and downing him with fire eles and shocks.

Ikiss however is pretty straight forward. Have everyone follow your tank throughout so you are all bunched on the boss and tank him by one of the pillars, as soon as he emotes and starts casting run around the other side of the pillar. You have plenty of time to do this, I usually had a second to wait before the spell went off. Return to him, rinse, repeat. You'll have to deal with the aoe explosion he does straight after but this is fairly light damage. Only other thing to do is keep dispelling polymorph to keep your dps up.

on shirrak i started with treants, dotted him up, then bunched on him and ran away
when he set a bomb.

Im using DK-druid-druid so i had plenty of insta hots, would not have been able to do it otherwise.



Ikiss, as ppl have said, bunch on him and tank near a pillar.

worst thing on that one for me was if he sheeped a healer they would get caught by the aoe as i cant dispel.

I have stacked stamina on my druids which helps avoiding insta deaths and generally gives me time to heal up again.

Shirrak is easy if you play form casters viw not form tank. I have druid tank , mage, lock, hunter priest. all folow on some ranges beside tank on stairs. When he throw bomb i run away.