Friday, September 24, 2010

The Lich King

... Also known as Prince Arthas Menethil.

Our first attempts came this week, and our progress was up and down, to say the least.  The good news is that we got through the first phase and transition, and got to see the defiles and val'kyr a few times.  The bad news is that we did not continually progress, and of our ~10 attempts the 4th or 5th was our best attempt.

The only oddity in our strategy was that I stayed in my bear spec and gear, to be able to have a 3rd tank available for certain parts of the fight.  Most notably, it allows us to have 2 tanks available to handle raging spirits during the transition back to fighting the Lich King, allowing our MT to focus solely on getting back to the right spot with Arthas rather than having to worry about a Raging Spirit at the same time.

Although I'm not 100% certain it's necessary and I suspect we will not use that angle when we make our successful run, I do think it is extremely helpful while we are learning the fight, because it slightly increases our success rate in that transition.  The downside is that it cripples my DPS during the portions that I'm trying to cat form, with me beating out only the tanks at that point.

We had a LOT of trouble, the times we got to see defiles and Val'kyr, with both proper handling of defiles AND DPS getting the Val'kyr down.  Unfortunately we only got to see that a time or two.  We had some odd wipes in the first phase and during transition and although we were getting better again at the end we had lost our momentum and then ran out of time.

We are resetting next week, to allow, especially for our less-well-geared members, a chance at some more gear and a heaping load of badges, as well as getting us 8 more Sanctification tokens.

I should probably write something other than our raid updates eh?

What can I say it's a convenient topic.

6 comments:

  1. If you have two spirits up during the transition, that tells me you need more DPS... as a feral druid, would it be possible for you to just go cat spec and gear, and taunt off the lowest-health of the two adds while the MT is running in to pick up LK, for just those few seconds before it dies? If you have Survival instincts specced, you can pop it with barkskin to help buffer until the add dies.

    Trust me, the longer the DPS takes to kill anything in that fight, the harder it is on the healers! :(

    Good luck on the fight, though, regardless!

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  2. My team had lots of trouble with the lich king too. This strategy page helped because of the detailed description of positioning for defiles and valkyrs. http://rhida.ch/2010/04/12/the-dethroning/
    Good luck with the attempts!

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  3. @Kae: A couple times, we actually didn't have two spirits up and I almost didn't know what to do! :) I've been considering the merits of a plan similar to what you suggested. I do indeed have SI specced in my cat spec and combine that with FR, Barkskin, and 4pT10 bonus and I can probably survive for a respectable amount of time that way. I think the main reason we were doing it the way we were was to ensure a smooth transition while still learning the fight - I would suspect as we get better with that I'll be going full DPS.

    @Antony - Thanks for the resource!

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  4. Hey,

    GL with LK. We have just started on him too!
    It seems that its harder to do than you think it is and so very easy to make simple mistakes. The hardest part of the transition is making sure that you move as early as poss so that you can get yourself and the spirits in the right place asap.

    Practice makes perfect!

    /salute

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  5. Ah, good luck with the LK, it's an awesome fight! I still have no idea how we did it, it was probably just a random fluke. I'm no tactician and feel free to dismiss this as me not knowing what I'm talking about (which is likely) but I can't but feel that DPS is sort of important on the fight (particularly getting the raging spirits down quickly) and, err, more tank is probably less helpful than more DPS. I guess the thing to look at (and again, what the fuck do I know) is why the raging spirits aren't going down fast enough - are people not concentrating fire, or are they getting distracted by random adds? I feel like a complete dick, I've downed the LK exactly once, and it was last night, and I spent most of the fight not having a clue so I have no idea why I think I can give you any sort of advice.

    Therefore I stfu, wish you the best of luck and I look forward to cheering along with your progress.

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  6. Tam:

    Hey, after we had a few more attempts this week I'm beginning to agree with you, but I'm not our raid leader.

    Don't sell yourself short; anybody with any kind of experience successfully killing this man can give us advice all they want, until we actually kill him.

    :)

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