Karazhan - The Curator

[Shadowwolf]

Video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sy59cqiuFRc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sy59cqiuFRc

Suggested Strategy:

Placement

You’ll want your DPS classes towards Curator on his sides. A good rule of thumb is to put the a Warlock and Mage on either side of Curator, a Hunter and another ranged DPS class midway and the healers spread out furthest away from the Curator.

[attachimg=1]

The Encounter

The Curator is a big gear check; he will summon a Flare every 10 seconds that drains some of his mana. The Flares spam chain lightning for arcane damage (around 700 a tick) to anyone within range and all dps should be focused on killing these adds. The flares are not governed by normal agro rules. When they spawn they will random target a person in the raid and fly towards that person until within melee range. Once a flare has reached his destination, it will then be susceptible to conventional agro.

The Curator will summon these Flares until he is out of mana, at that point he will go into a weakened state taking 250% damage from all attacks until his mana is full. When Curator goes into a mana regeneration state your raid should kill all available Flares and quickly focus on DPS on Curator until he regenerates his mana.

This will repeat until his health is down to 10%, at 10% he will enrage, a few things will change. He is now unable to summon his Flares; he casts Hateful Bolts much quicker and takes 250% damage from all attacks.

All raid members should be kept above 4000 health at all times, when an add spawns all DPS should be on them or we will quickly get overran by them. When he goes into his weakened state or enrages everyone.

KEYNOTES

When the Curator goes into Mana regeneration state, have your priests use their Shadow Fiends. This should fully rejuvenate your priest’s mana pool if done properly.

The easiest thing for melee DPS while killing the Flares is to allow the Flare to go to his destination and then dps the Flare down in place rather then repositioning it. The only exception is the tank, we do not want a Flare on top of the tank for more than a few seconds.

Warlocks should keep Dots on the Curator. Though the raid does not normally DPS Curator down while the Flares are alive, Warlocks can take off a chunk of the Curator’s health without lowering the DPS on the Flares. For this reason, a Warlock may do well with having at least 100 Arcane Resistance for the fight because the Hateful bolts will always hit the second person on the agro list which will generally be a Warlock.

As far as healing assignments go, a Paladin or Shaman makes a great healer for the melee that kill Flares. You want high heals to maintain the melee dps’s health rather then HoT’s from a Druid.

Suggested Roles:

Main Tank / Off Tank
Maintain agro The Curator

Melee DPS
DPS adds, during weakened or enraged states DPS The Curator

Ranged DPS
DPS adds, during weakened or enraged states DPS The Curator

Healing Classes
Heals on MT, keep everyone in raid above 4000 health

Rewards:

[wowitem]Forest Wind Shoulderpads[/wowitem]
[wowitem]Staff of Infinite Mysteries[/wowitem]
[wowitem]Garona's Signet Ring[/wowitem]
[wowitem]Dragon-Quake Shoulderguards[/wowitem]
[wowitem]Wrynn Dynasty Greaves[/wowitem]
[wowitem]Pauldrons of the Solace-Giver[/wowitem]

[wowitem]Gloves of the Fallen Hero[/wowitem] (T4 Turnin)
[wowitem]Gloves of the Fallen Defender[/wowitem] (T4 Turnin)
[wowitem]Gloves of the Fallen Champion[/wowitem] (T4 Turnin)

[Air]

I found out he is leashed. So if it looks like a wipe, we could have someone run outside the room, and down the stairs and it will reset the encounter.

I've been looking over the arcane resist gear.  Theres a 3 piece set for cloth, mail and leather, and then a 4 piece set for plate.  I also found these:

[wowitem]Syrannis' Mystic Sheen[/wowitem] (+12 arcane resist) +5 resist to all or +15 arcane resist enchant
Commander Sarannis - Botanica

[wowitem]Pendant of the Null Rune[/wowitem] (+30 arcane) -
2 felsteel bar, 8 primal mana, 1 mercurial adamantite

[wowitem]Ring of Arcane Shielding[/wowitem] (+30 arcane)
2 eternium bar, 8 primal mana

[wowitem]Violet Badge[/wowitem] (Quest reward) (+45 arcane) (Trinket)
*finish the quest for karazhan and this is the reward.

There's also the +8 arcane armor kits that can be put on hands, legs, boots, and chest.

[Lynette]

I've been reading up on this encounter and it appears there are lots of different strategies floating around out there. 

One that caught my eye was having a lock or two spam searing pain on the flares the entire fight - might be an option for us to try.

I also found that, as a rogue, I spent way too much time chasing the flares (they are much faster than me and everyone is spread out) and not enough time damaging something.  If the group is spread out to limit the number of folks involved in the chain lightning, then I suggest rogues should stay on the boss the whole time.

[Tolwen]

I was talking with someone that has done Curator and he said that if the locks can put the imp curse of doom or something like that it can do around ((80k or 8k dmg)) ( sorry not sure ) while he's out of mana.
And yea as Lyn said most of the time is wasted for melee classes while running around.

[Twist]

Yeah when I use amp curse trinket and CoD it hits for 8k, but I didn't try to time it where it went off at the time where he is weak... that would be a lot of damage.  I'll try that next time

[Kothnok]

The Flares spam chain lightning for nature damage...

Nature Damage?  Is that correct?  If so, why are we focussing on only Arcane Resist for the boss' bolts?  Should we also be improving our Nature Resist too?  Maybe 50 or 60ish?

*shrug* just thinking out loud

[Buzan]

For arcane damage I heard the person that really needs it the most is the one that's the second highest on the Curator's aggro list. That true ?

[Shadowwolf]

Technically everyone needs some, he shoots an arcane bolt at anyone in the raid with the highest HP, so at any time that could be anyone. At one round last night I was. Mainly the MT and the people chasing down the adds need the highest arcane resist because it makes it that much easier on the healers since the adds dont do melee damage. The MT needs a decent amount also because the adds spawn near the curator and hit the MT, and at one point Gut got an add on him and I had to heal like made pooled with the curators wailing on him as well as that damn add.

[Lynette]

After our latest encounter with The Curator tonight, I'm convinced our gear is good enough now to beat this guy.  So I decided to ping a friend of mine in a small guild which has been about level or slightly ahead of us for months (in terms of progression).  They have Curator on farm status now, so I got him to pass along their strategy to me, which I will post here for us to discuss. 

1.  Try to have high crit when dpsing the flares - for this they recommend having moonkin aura
2.  Placement - form a big C around him with priests nearest him on either side
3.  Warlocks cast Curse of Doom on him @ 59 seconds til evocation (I didn't quite understand this, but I'm not a lock)
4.  Tank switches to dps form when evocation begins then switches back to tank form with a few seconds left before evocation wears off
5.  Have 2 dedicated dps on the final flare cast before evocation - preferably a fire mage as one
6.  They run this with no pallies and 3 priests (1 is shadow)

[Shadowwolf]

Doom does about 4k shadow damage after 60 sec, so if it hits during his evocation, itll be about 8k dmg =) thats not counting spell dmg boost.

[Arcdelad]

I dont think that the MT needs AR gear...I looked at my combat log over and over again to be sure, but I was not getting any arcane damage from the curator...also I was cogniscent to not use any AOE type attacks like swipe, so that I would have even less of a chance of drawing one of those orbs of arcane death...

He hit me on the low end 700 and on the high end 2800...which certainly isnt bad at all...there are heroic instance bosses that hit a lot harder than that that we beat all the time...

If i were to put on AR gear I would lose armor, STA, dodge, and defense, and the curator would be hitting me with his melee damage a lot more...

I think AR gear for anyone touching the add will help, but I think for the MT it would only hurt us...shadow was healing me and running OOM last night, so if the curator hit me for even more I would imagine it would only make it that much harder for me to be healed...

[voctovian]

Couple of thoughts

I dont think anyone except the "soaker" needs any AR.  This is a DPS fight... gimping DPS in favor of AR will perhaps help given insufficient healing, but if the adds get burned fast, the healing load is not too bad.

Melee DPS is tricky... they need to run to hit the adds.  They all will get hit with chain lightnings.  Ideally you should not have more than three. 

This is one time when you dont need to worry about aggro.  Nobody should have blessing of salvation. 

However, high health is a big asset here.  I would suggest a minimum 8k-8.5k health buffed

There should only be a single tank on the boss.  Any OT should go with DPS gear and fight adds. 

Once the last add is spawned, the evocation (and boss vulnerability) will start.  All but one or two of the DPS should switch to the boss while the remaining 1-2 DPS burn down the add. 

Warlock COD is crazy.. I saw one hit for 18k, shadowbolts for 8k.  I think that Bigwigs (or littleWigs) will warn you when evocation will happen in 70sec to give locks time to cast COD.  Shadow priests can go crazy... the health and mana regen during evocation (because of extemely high DPS) will keep mana topped up.  You definitely want to have VT and VE on the boss during evocation.  I would be careful about SW:D, if you get a 4-6k crit, you might be watching from the floor

It is a very long fight... you can easily burn 4-5 potions per attempt.     Be sure to bring lots.  It is helpful to quaff a potion (mana especially) as soon as it would be useful.. if you wait until you are oom, you will be be oom long before you can take another potion.

[Kaidelina]

Spoke with a couple of people about Curator yesterday.  Couple of things i thought i would share.

First of all, there should only be the main tank on Curator.  If there is a Lock available, he/she can do one of two things.  He can dps solely on Curator, or he can keep dots up on curator and help with dps of the flares.  This will mean that the lock will be the 'soaker' of Curator's arcane shot meaning he needs to have high arcane resistance.  I was told that no one else really needs any AR since it hurts dps.

The Flares have to be DPS'd down ASAP to minimize damage from the chain lightning.  There never should be more than one flare up at any one time. If there is, it is a good indication that it will be a wipe

Another thing, there should never be a flare on the Tank.  Causes waay to much damage and almost impossible to heal through.  If a flare comes out and aggro's to the tank, need to get it off him ASAP.  I"m not too sure if this is what was causing Arc to take so much damage in yesterday's attempt.

COD should be placed up at i min before evocation.  Again, not being a lock, i don't understand this timing but that was what i was told.

When evocation happens, the suggestion was to immediately switch the rogue to dpsing curator.  All other dps to take down remaining flare(s) and then to DPS hard on curator. 

[Shadowwolf]

Yea, our biggest issue is the adds, tanking and doing damage to the curator seems to be no problem considering within 1 evocation, we got him down to 60%, problem was after that we had about 6 adds all going around kicking everyone to the ground.

Adds spawn every 10 sec or so, so you basically have that long to dps down 15k of hp on them as thats what they have. Ive seen a lot of recommendations for ranged to basically hit it 6-7 times and move to the next add spawn but the first should be dead by then.

Whats killing the healing is the length of time the adds are up. The longer they are up, the more healing has to take place as the more damage the group is taking, and we usually had no less than 2 adds up at any time which was painful. Plus I think positioning of the adds is key, there was quite a lot of times last night the add was tanked right by me and while im trying to heal Arc I had to heal myself a lot because I was taking heavy damage and it was slowing down my casting.

[Lynette]

Looking at the picture above and hearing that others use a "C" formation, I'd like to see us try this placement.  Meelee dps spend too much time running around trying to hit the flares if everyone is spread far apart.  If we are gathered in a semi circle, we can place a meelee dps on the top and bottom portions of the C in order to grab aggro fast and minimize time spent running around.