Karazhan 5box + 5: Strategy & Comments

[aetherg]

I took my pally + 4x shams on their first Kara run this weekend with some guildies. We did a full clear in just under 5 hours (3.5 Saturday up to Aran + 1.5 Sunday), with one wipe on Nightbane, when I accidentally DIed the tank (/facepalm), and one wipe on Netherspite when I overestimated my pally's pathetic HPs and didn't dance in and out of the red beam enough. Here are some per-boss strats and general tips that I got out of the experience:

Group Makeup

G1: Aeara (pally), Aebra (elem), Aecra (elem), Aedra (resto), Aeera (elem)
G2: Prot Warrior (Kara/ZA/Badge gear), Druid (Full T5), Priest (Full T5), Mage (Full T5), Fury Warrior (partial T5) swapping out with Warlock (partial T5)

Attumen

1. Pally tanks the horse, let the prot warrior pick up Attumen and Mounted Attumen
2. Free loot

Moroes

1. Priest shackles the first add. Pally picks up Moroes and the weakest-hitting add, prot warrior grabs the hardest-hitting add and builds second threat on Moroes. The fury warrior tanks & kills the last add (usually the shadow priestess).
2. Kill the first add, then the one one the pally, then the one on the prot warrior. Very healing intensive at this point.
3. After the first gouge, the prot warrior should have threat for much of the fight, while the pally keeps up JoW and uses SoV & Exorcism to stay at second threat.

Maiden of Virtue

1. Spread your shammies in a big + in front of Maiden. They MUST be far enough apart to avoid chaining Holy Wrath.
2. Let the warrior tank, while the other 4 members of the group stand in between pillars around the back half of the room.
3. Keep up grounding totems, and you never have to worry about Holy Fire.
4. Pally puts on healing gear and helps heal & cleanse G2. Put up Blessing of Sacrifice on the tank so you can heal during Repentance.

Opera (Wizard of Oz)

Grounding totem absorbs the ice tomb used by the trash mobs before Opera, making them trivial.

1. Warrior tanks Roar, and grabs Toto when he spawns
2. Mage uses fire attacks to keep straw man stunned
3. Pally grabs Tin Man, shammies immediately do 4x Frost Shock to slow him. Kite him around the room
4. Burn down Dorothy, then Toto, then Straw Man, then Roar, then Tin man
5. Spread out when fighting the witch; dps her down while keeping up judgements with the pally

Nightbane

1. Bring good healers, because you're going to be noobing this one up
2. Prot warrior tanks Nightbane, pally simply helps keep judgements up and heal (in tank gear)
3. Position shammies 20 yards from Nightbane, against the outer wall of the terrace
4. Keep 4x staggered tremor totems down at all times; after a fear, you may need to reposition slightly so the shammies face Nightbane again
5. Keep your camera turned over your shoulder, so you can see when Charred Earth appears, and use the keyboard to move your shammies left or right.
6. When he flies into the air, have everyone group on the shammies. Put earth shield on the pally. When rain of bones starts, hit consecrate, your follow macro, and run out of the rain of bones area. Pally will need heals.
7. Spread your shammies out, keep pulling the adds a few steps further, and dps them down.
8. Get back in position and remember to drop your tremor totems again.

Curator

1. Position shammies in a line, spread out. It's important to use a line rather than a + or X, because with those formations, if a spark decides to go for one of the back shammies, the front ones won't be able to DPS.
2. Warrior tanks Curator, pally stays second on threat to take arcane bolts
3. Nuke down the sparks with LB & Frost Shock
4. On Evocate, pop heroism and go all out

Illhoof

1. Pally stands in between the red portals and picks up all imps using SoR, Exorcism, Consecration and (in emergencies) Holy Wrath. Use Righteous Defense on healers if necessary. Don't use Avenging Wrath, since you will need your Divine Shield ready in case you get chained. Use Sanctuary and a mage's Dampen Magic.
2. Warrior tanks Illhoof and also Kil'rek (pally can probably do Kil'rek, with decent gear)
3. Position shammies in front of the green sacrifice circle
4. Burst down Kil'rek, then focus on Illhoof
5. Make a "/target demon chain" macro; when he chains someone, hit the macro quickly, then begin casting LB & Frost Shock on the chains with all shammies. If one of your shammies got chained, move them back into position quickly after it's done.

Shade of Aran

1. You MUST react quickly to the arcane explosion. Run a couple of steps, hit your follow macro to align the shammies in your direction, then press & hold a key bound to 'forward' on all the alts. You must use keyboard movement; the time it takes the shammies to begin following is too long, and they won't get out quickly enough. I learned this the hard way (twice), and the other people in the group had to carry the fight.
2. Try to be 10 yards away from him for flame wreath, otherwise you will spend the entire time silenced
3. When escaping the blizzard, it again helps to align the shammies, then use the keyboard to move them forward, so they escape quicker. Frost resist aura can be helpful.
4. Keep grounding totems down while the adds are up

Netherspite

1. Position shammies anywhere, as long as they are spread out
2. Warrior takes the first red beam, pally takes the first green beam. They swap with every new beam phase. The red beam tank dances in and out to keep themselves healed. If it's the pally's turn in red, they might have to drink a mana pot due to the effects of the green beam.
3. Keep your camera pointed at the shammies, so you can move them out of void zones quickly
4. Heal your shammies using chain heal (make sure the other healers know you're going to do this)
5. When he banishes, run to the back of the room out of range of nether breath (the range on it is not that big; there is plenty of room). Heal up and regen some mana, get ready to run back in.

Prince

1. Tank, spank, and pray you don't get unlucky infernals.
2. Make sure your shammies are at max range, so as not to get hit by the nova
3. Pally switches to healing gear, keeps up judgements and helps heal the tank
4. Save heroism for phases 2 & 3, and fire elementals for phase 3
5. Drink mana pots every cooldown, or you will run out of mana.

General Comments

1. Your healers will not be happy about how hard they have to work, because you will almost certainly noob up the healing (Aedra was at less than 1/4th the healing of our druid). Make sure to really focus on healing as a priority. Set up your targets & macros to make it as easy as possible to heal the tank. For next week (assuming they're willing to go again!) I'm planning to assign my F1-F10 keys to members of the raid, so that I can quickly /stopcasting and heal a specific person, without interrupting DPS on the other 3 shammies.

2. Bring lots of consumables, especially mana potions, to make up for the gear gap.

3. Stress-test your macros in advance. Make sure you don't have any leftover junk; I realized partway through Nightbane that my follow macro was clearing my girls' targets. This was never an issue in 5-mans, when I rarely use a burn-down target, but in a 10-man zone it was a problem.

4. Although things will get hectic, don't mash your keys too hard (if you're using software like Keyclone). On Illhoof, when repositioning an alt who got Chained, I got into the infamous 'permanent key-down' state that caused all my shammies to run off in different directions against walls. It took a while to fully recover from that.

[Vyndree]

Maiden of Virtue

1. Spread your shammies in a big + in front of Maiden. They MUST be far enough apart to avoid chaining Holy Wrath.
2. Let the warrior tank, while the other 4 members of the group stand in between pillars around the back half of the room.
3. Keep up grounding totems, and you never have to worry about Holy Fire.
4. Pally puts on healing gear and helps heal & cleanse G2. Put up Blessing of Sacrifice on the tank so you can heal during Repentance.

Suvega and I found that lining them up against the wall, then pushing the forward arrow key to make them all walk right up to the edge of Maiden's circle worked perfectly.


What were your specs, btw? Resto / Ele / Ele / Ele / Prot Pally? Or 4 ele shammies? Healing is by far the hardest part of Kara, especially if you're running 2 healers instead of 3 -- I was curious if you had a resto shammy that was the pally's dedicated healer while your non-boxing healer handled your second tank + everyone else.

BTW, add your comments to the wiki

[Gurblash]

Holy crap... /golfclap

Good info Good job on your badge/loots run.

[raz]

On Aran playing all 5 of my shammies I had our Pally make a macro to instantly dispel the slow on my "main" so that he could get them all moving fast. Without this you definitely have to move them all forward via individual movement (or broadcast) to avoid the explosion.

[aetherg]

Yeah, Aedra is resto, though I did a terrible job at healing. Healing myself when I was tanking was fine, healing my group on Netherspite with chain heal was fine, and on Prince I even did a decent job of helping heal the warrior tank during P2.

But aside from that, my macro setup was way too cumbersome to do anything; I don't think I landed a single heal on any other member of the group. I'm going to spend this week coming up with a better setup; I think the easiest thing will be to bind F2-F10 to macros that do a /stopcasting, then cast R4 CH on the 'raidX' targets. That will probably be the fastest way to get at least some healing out.

Dispelling the slow on my main is a good idea; I need to try that next time. I wasn't expecting that fight to be hard, but it's surprisingly annoying.

[Olibri]

I was multi-boxing Kara yesterday as well and struggled on Shade. That Arcane Explosion is a bitch. I just put them on auto-run and they made it out on time. As a previous poster said, cleansing them is the way to go. Just setup a macro to cleanse them all while they are running straight forward and you will definitely get out in plenty of time.

On Netherspite, when he banishes, I see no reason to run out. Just keep DPSing. Your gear would have to be pretty bad for him to kill anyone from the breath. Also, put your pally on shadow resist aura.

From what I've seen of Kara, the biggest issue is really reaction time. If that becomes a problem, you might consider giving yourself more stam to make up for it. For example, I would invariable leave someone in the charred earth on Nightbane for a while, sometimes until someone yelled at me to move .

[aetherg]

He won't one-shot from the breath, but it does enough damage to take out ~75% of their HP. The knockback (as I remember it from when we used to stay in) is pretty huge, which might make gathering them up again tricky.

[Olibri]

The knock-back is backwards and seems to be a fixed distance. Whether they are together or spread out you should be able to run directly forward to get back into whatever range you need. Also, if you have the SR aura I imagine it should do a lot less damage. In any case, if you run out when he banishes you will significantly lengthen the duration of the encounter.

Also, after the knockback but before the portals you have quite a bit of time to get into whatever position you need. He will go back to the prior red beam tank until the new red beam appears.

[Gallo]

This is a GREAT write up for multiboxers doing Kara. If we had a "PvE Strategy" forum, this should be a sticky. Should we have a forum like that? I know that quite a few of a regular posters are getting close to 70 with their teams... it might be useful.

[Majestic_Clown]

This is a GREAT write up for multiboxers doing Kara. If we had a "PvE Strategy" forum, this should be a sticky. Should we have a forum like that? I know that quite a few of a regular posters are getting close to 70 with their teams... it might be useful.

That's what the wiki is for :whistling: