For other bosses in Ulduar, check the Ulduar Healing Strategy Page.
Kologarn is the sentinel that stands in the way between your raid group and the rest of Ulduear. He is a challenging boss for guilds that are new to raiding. Like Deconstructor, victory lies in the ultimate ability of individual players.
Abilities
Eyebeams: Two ways to handle this. Run out the door or run circles on the right side of the platform. More on this later.
Stone grip: He’s going to pluck three players into the palm of his hand and attempt to squeeze them to death until they get broken out. The only way to break players out is by DPSing the arm. Once it takes 380000 damage, the players are released.
Execution
DPS priority is going to approach the boss in this order: Right arm, Elementals, torso. When any arm is destroyed, the torso loses the same amount of health.
It’s best to call out right arm health at 5% intervals starting from 20 so your tanks know when to switch. After the right arm falls, elementals will spawn.
Two tanks are needed to hold Kologarn’s attention. He’s got a Gluth-like debuff that requires two tanks to taunt off each other. Otherwise, the debuff becomes flat-out unbearable.
Dodging eye beams
When you get focused by twin green beams, you have around 2 seconds to start hustling before you get rocked. There are two ways to handle avoiding them:
Out the door
Make a beeline for the door and down the stairs. The upside is that it presents minimal risk to the players in your raid group. The down side is if the player is too slow, they might die due to line of sight issues. As healers, we don’t have to worry about this.
Laps on the right side
Have beam-focused players run circles along the right side of the room. The pros and cons are the exact inverse of the bailing-out-the-door method. Focused players are well within the range of healers. But poor kiting can lead to multiple casualties.
Whatever solution you choose, drill it in the heads of the rest of the raid to immediately get out of the green. The beams are extremely hard to miss. Keep your head up.
The Elemental Tank
It’s happened before. I’ve seen the off tank gain aggro of all ads and get focused by beams at the exact same time. As a tank, he’ll live for a few extra seconds but not anymore after that. Use whatever saves you can on him to help lessen the blow. Pain Suppression, Guardian Spirit and Blessing of Sacrifice work admirably.
Healing strategy
Around 6-7, healers is a good number to start with. This can drop with more gear and experience. Expect an enormous amount of raid damage being doled out. His left arm sweeps the entire raid for around 15000+. Pick two of your strongest tank healers and assign them to the main tank (this will vary as they’re taunting off each other). Be sure to have Kologarn’s target up so you can see which tank he’s presently on.
If you have access to two Resto Shamans, they can anchor the Stone Grips quite easily.
Healer items
Ironmender OH (Priests, Druids)
Gloves of the Pythonic Guardian Gloves (Paladin)
Robes of the Umbral Brute Chest (Priests)
Unfaltering Armguards Wrists (Paladin)
The other strategy (http://outdps.com/2009/05/15/hunting-kologarn/) is to keep everyone off the closest brick to the wall, and make sure that as soon as they eyes track someone, they can run to said wall (unimpeded) and kite it back and forth.
Why would you call an article “Healing Ulduar: Kologarn”, when its 80% regurgitated boss abilities and things you could find on WoWWiki, and has all of five lines on “healing strategy”, that just says to use the same amount of healers as everything else?
Yakras last blog post..Exit Strategy, Followup
@Yakra: Because it only has abilities relevant to healers. Every strategy you read everywhere is going to more or less be the same as what you read elsewhere. What’s different here is I only pick out what healers actually need to know. They don’t need to know about taunts. And they don’t need to know about actually DPSing arms (although it’s good to have an idea of how much time it takes to break people out). And I personally know a lot of people who struggle with eye beams.
And I didn’t even mention anything about the ledge boss.
The tank debuff is no longer a factor in the 10-man version (blizz nerfed it). You only need 2 tanks on him in the 25-man.
Then at least get the abilities right/complete.
His tank debuff isn’t “gluth-like”. Gluth’s Mortal wound is a -10% healing received; it won’t cause a tank to take more damage / get one shot. Kologarn’s debuff, Crunch Armor, is -25% armor. That drastically increases the amount of damage they take, and scales gigantically. Reduced healing and increased damage are incredibly different debuffs.
His stone grip’s damage is worth mentioning, if this is suppose to be a healer focused overview (It’s 5500/second on Heroic). He also one shots people that aren’t freed in time, via Squeezed Lifeless – something worth noting, if people are dying suddenly.
And regarding assignments: Elementals never should be up the same time as the right arm, so the stone grip healers and the rubble healers can be the same people. If they’re shamans, all the better to catch melee that are hit by the rubble’s stone nova with chain heal.
Yakras last blog post..Exit Strategy, Followup
@Yakra: What’s gluth like is the tank switches that’s required on 25. The rest of your suggestions have been noted and will be updated in a few.
This fight is really easy once you understand that the only way anyone could ever die is:
1. The tanks failing at taunting off of each other. (high avoidance tanks are good here, he doesn’t use overhead smash that much and with a nice avoidance streak the debuff will fall off the tank again)
2. Being too slow on keeping the gripped people topped off so the oblivion kills them. Just be proactive and don’t let them get low.
3. People falling off the ledge, it happens lol.
Also one thing to keep in mind is that the arm shares a hitbox with the body, so have your melee stand right in front of the chest, with the tanks, this presents less risk of them getting add aggro as well as ensuring they are never targetted by nor in the way of eyebeams.
People that fail at eyebeams should just be replaced, you have an absolute eternity to move and kite the beam. People that fail at this will just become a liability further into Ulduar.
Oh and as for squeezed lifeless, if you can beat XT you should easily have enough DPS to ensure this never happens. If it does, someone is hitting the wrong target.
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Something I’d like to see is some advice on how to deal with Mimiron phase 2 as disc, that fight makes me want to spec holy. 🙁
@Tarqon: That is coming.
We had a bit of an unorthodox method to him last week. We were very melee heavy and didn’t want to get stuck in an all to similar mess on 1 healer gets gripped and another gets hit with eyebeams – this pretty much lead to a wipe every time it happened. So we stacked everyone except our hunter right up on him – we found out he only targets people out of melee range with his eyes. The hunter was the only one who got hit with the beams and it worked really well. Something to consider if you have some uncoordinated people.
btw, if you can’t conclude it from the numbers, this was on 10man.
sounds like yak is the one coughing up stuff he read on wiki or bosskillers.
thanks for the feedback man. really the number help alot and did fil out the artical. the douchebag way you filled them in, could leave some work.
we could go more into healer assignments, making sure that the priests are split up in between party assignments and not flash healing or POH healing over the same targets….
but yeah,…
matt pretty much originally covered the fight. I didn’t know the stairwell trick personally, I just made sure my raiders did a 180 mouse turn. “keyboard with me and you’ll be gone in a flash” and head to that left arm. aka right side. thats the biggest problem I’ve had there was morons dragging the eyebeams over people already a bit low. making sure the assignments are clear and that people can immediatly 180 = win. your tanks need to do their thing and communicate, but if they aren’t mouthbreathers it shouldn’t be too hard.
I will add a note from a Holy Priest’s perspective. I’ve always been assigned to the Grip/Rubble Tank. When there’s a chance people are gripped, it’s best of one of your healers keeps an instant available for emergencies. If he decides to grip someone already low on health, the damage will kill them long before the autokill. My CoH is usually working on topping up people after Oblivion, but I always save my PoM for the gripped people. Also, you really want an instant available because you might be the target of an eyebeam and be running around. On an unrelated note, as with most things, it’s important to have groups stay relatively close to each other for PoH effectiveness. PoH is a fantastic response to Oblivion, but if DumbLock is on the other side of the platform from the rest of his group, he’s not going to get healing he might otherwise need.
Do not trust DBM on this fight, it will tell you that the beams are on you if you are touching them but are not targeted by Kolo. Since the idea is the person with beams should be the one to run, rely only on the emote on your screen.
.-= Patrick´s last blog ..Games to know: Half-Life (FPS) =-.