Climbing the ranks: Kilrogg

The #1 way to rank on Kilrogg: timing. This fight illustrates how lining up certain buffs and abilities can dramatically increase your DPS. Of course, so can a buff that gives you 200% (Undying Resolve) — but when every top ranked person has that buff, you need something else to gain the edge. The best way to do that: time up your buffs and kill the boss at a very specific time.

First, let’s do a quick recap of this fight. Kilrogg spawns three green circles on the ground to send you to the Vision of Death. The first Vision of Death phase shows up at about 1:10, the second at about 2:30 and the third at about 4:10. Three people stand in those visions and then fight adds to get a 20-stack of the Undying Resolve Buff, which lasts 1 minute. The buffed players can only go in every other Vision of Death to get the buff. Each stack increases your DPS by 10% for a total of 200% with a 20-stack. Obviously, you need to be one of those 3 people in order to rank.

The top ranks on Heroic Kilrogg are as follows:

• Mythic geared players: 325k–400k DPS, with two people crushing it at 460k DPS!
• Heroic Warforged geared players: 200k–250k DPS (714 average iLevel)
• Heroic geared players: 160k–200k DPS (708 average iLevel)
• I included the 4-piece set bonus and Tier 18 trinkets when looking at ranking on Ask Mr. Robot.

I find the gap between the Heroic and Heroic Warforged players interesting. With about 6 item levels, DPS goes up 40–50k. I bet you can’t wait for those Valor upgrades now, right?

So how do you reach these insane DPS numbers? Everything you do, and everything your team does, should revolve around that first DPS player’s Undying Resolve buff. And unless your team is Mythic-geared and fighting Heroic Kilrogg, you should get two Undying Resolve buffs. Let’s take a look at a timeline before further analysis.

Mythic geared teams take down Heroic Kilrogg in 2 minutes and 40 seconds. As you can see, that’s right when the first Undying Resolve buff ends. It also gets you the max uptime on Heroism and some of your other buffs. Some of the top ranks for Heroic geared players end the fight between 3:30 and 4:00. That’s actually not optimal. Having your team purposefully wait to kill the boss until 5:10 is ideal because the buffed player gets a second full-duration Undying Resolve buff. A lot of the top Heroic geared players rank with kills at 5:10 for this reason.

The two boss kill ‘breakpoints’ of 2:40 and 5:10 have quite a few advantages. First, the uptime on the Undying Resolve buff for both of them is about 40%, whereas it’s only 20-25% for times in between that. With a 200% increase to DPS, losing 15-20% of that uptime will significantly lower your damage.

The legendary ring has a 120 second cooldown. That means you can use it at the very start of the fight, and again in the middle of the first Undying Resolve buff. Then it cools down just in time to use it a third time, during the first player’s second Undying Resolve buff at 4:10.

A lot of other buffs can time up nicely with your Undying Resolve buff, so be sure to review your cooldowns and plan out your timing.

Arcane Mage breakdown

Arcane Mages hold a lot of the top ranks for this boss, so I chatted with Cøntrol, who holds one of the top ranks for his 720 gear level (WCL). While that’s higher than a Heroic geared player (which I try to focus on in these articles), I still picked him for a couple of reasons. His team averages a 708 gear level, showing that a Heroic geared team could possibly kill the boss by 2:40 like his team did. Secondly, when patch 6.2.3 hits and we all upgrade our gear, we’ll be closer to this 720 gear level as Heroic raiders.

He told me that their team didn’t purposefully try to end the fight at 2:40, it just happened that way, one of the reasons he was able to rank so high.

He uses Rune of Power since you don’t have to move much other than for Death Throes. This spell places a ring on the ground, increasing your damage when you stand inside it. Cøntrol places it down at the start of the fight, and immediately returns to it when exiting the Vision of Death phase. In fact, he suggests blinking to it to cut down on wasted time.

Alternatively, he suggests, you can stand in melee the entire fight so you don’t need to move directly after the Vision of Death phase. But he didn’t do that on this particular pull, elaborating that when you’re melee heavy, you run the risk of Death Throes landing in the melee group if you don’t have enough range to deal with that mechanic.

Maximizing your burn phase when you have the Undying Resolve buff is another big focus, of course. Cøntrol suggests making sure that you have a few things when leaving the Vision of Death phase: four stacks of Arcane Power, the Prismatic Crystal off cooldown, and Heroism. Then when you come out of the Vision of Death with the Undying Resolve buff, “drop the crystal on the boss, pop Arcane Power and Heroism, then lay into the boss.” And lastly, hope that your Prophecy of Fear trinket procs too.

I have one last piece of advice for everyone. I talked to quite a few of the top ranked players. While they were definitely trying to rank, it wasn’t a full team-wide effort. The top ranks got lucky that their teams had optimal kill times. So if you actually focus on the timing, you will have quite an advantage!

But don’t forget to have fun! Trade off who gets sent into the Vision of Death so everyone gets a turn to increase their damage by 200%! Each player is on your team for a reason, so throw everyone a bone and let them get buffed once or twice. If you don’t know how to select people, do what @Imshortwtf’s team does: everyone races to it and the first ones go in.

Your Ranking Officer,

Zoopercat