By popular request by a couple of hunters, here’s the macro I use to save valuable time on the Kael’thas fight to equip the Netherstrand Longbow and the Nether Spikes

/run SetAutoLootDefault(1)
/equip Netherstrand Longbow
/use Netherstrand Longbow
/use Bundle of Nether Spikes
/equip Nether Spike
/run SetAutoLootDefault(nil)

You’ll need to click the macro a number of times to make it work, which is a good thing because it makes Bots harder to write, but it does save a lot of fiddling about with paperdolls, backpacks and so forth.

A hunters contribution to the Kael’thas fight.

Looking at Google’s stats, there is a great deal of interest in hunter tactics and strategies for some of the mid – end stage raid bosses. I’ve spent more hours than I care to remember in the company of Kael’thas Sunstrider, so here’s the Kael’thas fight from a Hunter’s perspective.

The Hunter class’s biggest contribution to this fight is Misdirection. Getting a misdirect fired on the correct tank on the correct mob at exactly the correct time is crucial to this fight running smoothly. The 2 minute cooldown being what it is, you will need a minimum of two hunters in the raid to pull it off successfully. Afterlife tend to take 3 hunters to Kael’thas, which lets the raid continue in case one of us pushes our i.f.a.i.l. button and dies.

I won’t go into too much detail on this fight because it’s complex and repeated adequately across the whole internet, but here are the key things for hunters to get right on this fight.

Misdirects in order of priority:

1) Warlock tanking Capernian in Phase 1

The 3rd of Kael’thas’ advisors, Capernian, is tanked at the back of the room by a warlock in appropriate gear. Capernian has a number of fire-based abilities that you do not want her to use on anybody the than the warlock and a conflag-eating tank.

You typically have between 1 and 3 seconds between Capernian becoming active and her casting her first fireball. There is some debate over whether you should let her cast this first fireball or not and whether it has an effect on her positioning in relation to her tank. My preference is for her not to cast it because it lets the hunter show they’re paying sufficient attention to stop it.

The object of this exercise is to get Capernian to run from Kael’s side to the back of the room near her Warlock without stopping to incinerate the raid on her way past.

It’s simple enough to do, make sure your misdirection is cast on the warlock before she becomes active, make sure you are the nearest member of the raid to her so you get the initial aggro from a body pull, then get an insta cast shot like arcane or distracting shot fired the instant she becomes an enemy target. Land the remaining two misdirected shots on her as she’s running past. I use a steady and an auto.

2) Warlock tanking Capernian in Phase 3

When you have all of Kael’thas’ advisors back up in phase 3, you will need to make sure that Capernian goes straight for her Warlock tank again, not whoever happens to be standing nearest to her when she fell. If all goes well in phase 1, she’ll be downed near the back wall so the warlock will be able to body pull her, but that gives scope for the healer to yoink early aggro.

Depending on your raid’s dps, this typically means that you have to really leg it down the room from looting your Netherstrand Longbow, spamming your ‘gief legendaries now’ macro as you go. You can head back up to Kael to finish off the weapons after doing your misdirection. Or stay in the middle and lend your dps to Thaladred the Darkener.

3) Pheonixes and tank in Phase 4 and 5

You want to minimise the amount of time the phoenixes run around the raid doing their aoe during phase 4 and, to a lesser extent, phase 5. You get a new phoenix every minute, so you’ll need at least two of you on a rotation misdirecting the newly spawned phoenixes to the designated fireproof tank. I find that a focus target misdirect macro saves valuable clicks here.

4) Spare weapons to offtanks

In phase 2, the weapons will be tanked by certain tanks in the raid. Typically two tanks will take two weapons apiece. The weapons with a higher dps priority will be targeted by the tank, but to avoid the 2nd weapon running amok in the raid, you will have to make sure you misdirect them to the appropriate tank. For Afterlife, that means the Shield and the Staff.

5) Other targets.

You should not need to misdirect Sanquinar or Telonicus to their tanks, although it doesn’t harm to do so. Afterlife do misdirect Sanquinar to their MT because we generally dps him so hard he’s dead by the time he’s in position, so the tank needs a bit of help with the initial aggro.

Other hunter priorities:

a) Tank the bow

The Netherstrand Longbow is a simple ranged tank for the hunter. Make sure that nothing gets on its threat list in melee range or the bow will blink around the room at random. This is typically unhelpful. The bow has a nasty multishot ability that you don’t want firing into the raid, so try to turn the bow away from the raid towards the wall. Remember to remove salvation so you keep on top of the bow’s threat list. A Marksman or Survival hunter is best at this because their shots do more damage than a Beastmaster.

If you’re feeling cunning, you can send your pet into the bow’s melee range when it’s on about 4% health so it blinks to your position for ease of looting.

b) Dps the bow

Sic your pet on something that’s relatively harmless like the Sword or the Dagger and dps the bow like you mean it. The sooner you get it down, the sooner you get your legendary bow and ammo and can start laying down your damage boosting debuff onto the remaining targets.

c) Dps the axe

The axe is typically the last weapon to go down. Afterlife use a bear to tank it near to Kaelthas, well out of range of toons stumbling into its whirlwind and use 2 of the hunters to single-target dps it down after Thaladred is killed in phase 3. If Thaladred is off down the wrong end of the room, don’t waste time on target by following him, change targets and hit something else.

d) Jumpshot

If you haven’t learnt how to do damage whilst moving, this is the fight for you to learn. You could do a lot worse than starting with BRK’s jumpshot videos.

Whether it’s running up and down the room or staying ahead of Thaladred without running into Capernian’s conflag range or avoid the lightning bolts in phase 5, being able to do non-zero dps whilst moving is invalable. This is the typical jump shot for serpent sting and arcane shot. If you’re marks, then Silencing Shot is good for several hundred damage too.

e) Drums

If you’re a leatherworker, don’t forget to use your Drums as often as possible. Most of the guilds I know have a bongo rotation going to make sure their groups are hasted as often as possible.

f) Mind Control curing

The Afterlife hunters try to loot the dagger to help cure mind controlled people in Phase 4. Spamming wingclip does much less damage than a fury warrior or a rogue so doesn’t have the side effect of ganking the person you’re trying to cure. Don’t forget freezing trap and scatter / silencing shot too.

g) Stay alive.

Hunters are remarkably self sufficient creatures. Don’t forget to bandage when you get blasted in phases 4 and 5, your raid healers are going to be exceedingly busy so do what you can to make it easier. Remember healthstones / dark runes / etc .. You have two 2 minute cooldowns and only 1 is used by potions.

Do not stand in the flame patches. Everytime you do, your raid leader dies a little more inside.

If it’s a wipe after you’ve looted the bow, it’s possible to get another set of legendary arrows conjured before you feign death in the corner. Do not get noticed feigning death as some juvenile members of the raid may try to get you killed by standing on you whilst they’re wiping.

It’s a fun fight, although it goes on a big long for my preferences. Any questions, just drop a comment.

Enjoy!

A new boss reduced to a splat of pixels at the feet of Afterlife. Feelings of sweet triumph don’t get much better than this. Kael’thas Sunstrider, Lord of the Blood Elves and master of The Eye of Tempest Keep, and the hardest boss fight I’ve ever seen in WoW is now officially pining for the fjords.

Looking at our trophy cabinet, our last First Boss Kill was Lady Vashj last November so I’ve been getting withdrawal symptoms from the adrenaline-fuelled, zomg-we’ve-crashed-the-teamspeak-server-with-all-the-wooting, team triumphs.

Tamzin’s video guide is easily the best guide to the fight and tactics and is time well spent downloading and watching it.

I thought I did a reasonable job of going all out dps on the closing stages of that fight, but it seems that a hunter doing 924 dps mostly without a pet just does not cut the mustard these days, creeping in a dismal 11th on the damage dealt charts. The full log of the final counter are available on wowwebstats.

The fight itself is easily the most complicated that Blizzard have devised (and I’ve encountered) so far, split up into 5 stages. The overall encounter lasts about 15 minutes, not dissimilar in length to the Al’ar fight but oh, such a long way from the heady days of the 3 stages of Onyxia. The fight essentially boils down to:

a) Fight 4 different mini-bosses one after the other
b) Fight 6 weapon-shaped mini-bosses all at the same time
c) Before you’ve finished the weapons-shaped mini-bosses, the first 4 mini-bosses all have to be fought at the same time, whilst also making sure you loot the weapon-shaped mini-bosses to give you new toys which you must use the abilities of to survive the coming fight.
d) Before you’ve finished off all that lot, the actual boss enters the fray and starts spawning pheonixes, chain lightninging the raid and pyroblasting the tanks.
e) When you get the boss down to 50%, he pauses for a brew, blows the roof off his own palace then you carry on with all that, but gravity becoming more or less optional.

That’s a bit of an oversimplification, as it doesn’t mention the numerical minimums required to finish the fight, things like fireproof warlocks, ‘enough’ dps in the raid, tanks able to take 25k pyroblasts and still cope with normal hits from the boss. It’s a long fight, that requires that pretty much nobody dies, although apparently a corpse makes for a steady camera position for frapsing and that nobody makes any positional mistakes or has a 2 second lag spike at just the wrong moment.

And positioning. It’s all about the positioning.

We had 1 wipe last night because the warlock was about 6 inches too close to Capernian at the start of phase 3 because they weren’t used to having their hunter actually getting their misdirection off in time to count (you’ve got something like 0.5 to 1.5 seconds to get initial aggro onto the warlock before Capernian conflags the nearest toon, typically the hunter trying to misdirect to the lock…).

A number of embarrasing wipes ensued because of variations on:
- 2 of the minibosses from phase 1 died too close together on the floor
- the person kiting Thaladred (it changes every 15 seconds) got too close to Capernian or gets knocked back into Sanguinar during phase 3
- the warlock tanking Capernian managed to get conflagged for no apparent reason so lost aggro and toons in the raid started getting fireballed because they failed to stop dps in time
- the hunter ranged tanking the netherstrand bow stands such that the bow multishots the hunters healer
- a shadowpriest fails to avoid sending their shadowfiend into melee with the netherstrand bow which then teleports all around the room at random
- people not getting out of the way of the big flaming bird things in phase 4
- people not getting out of the way of the big flaming explosion patch things in phase 4
- meleers getting carried away and killing the toons who get mindcontrolled in phases 4 and 5 rather than just dispelling the mind control
- toons getting within 10′ of the ground during the wrong part of the ‘halp no gravities’ phase

etc. etc. etc. etc.

Still, this was our 5th evening of serious raiding on Kael’thas, took us 50ish attempts from getting wtfpwned on the initial pull to having a really clean kill. There was MUCH rejoicing.

Of course with both Kael’thas and Lady Vashj down we managed to have 19 toons attuned to Hyjal Summit, where we got thoroughly spanked by the 4th wave of undead things. Apparently having everybody bouncing like loons after Kael’thas was no barrier to some serious pewpewing, although the best quote of the evening had to be:

Somebody who was paying attention: “Lots of green glowy undeads incoming”
Raid Leader: “Shackle it!”
Priests: “Which one?”
Raid Leader: *looks up* “err, all of it?”

Onwards and upwards