Blood Queen Lana’thel 10 Down

 

Blood Queen dropped this week, resulting in the second wing of ICC cleared.  Success in this fight can be summed up in these words:

 

Don’t Panic

 

There are effectively three ways to wipe:

 

1.) Messing up bites.  This can be fixed by having a bite order planned out and adhered to, and having back ups in place if something goes wrong.  Don’t deviate from it, because other people are relying on you to pick a specific person, not whoever is closest.

 

2.) Death due to Swarming Shadows or Pact of the Darkfallen.  This can be fixed by always having a good idea of where you would go if you get the debuffs.  Don’t wait until “OH MY GOD I’M ON FIRE!” before you actually plan where you are going, you should have a good idea at any time, just in case it does happen. 

 

3.)  Death during Bloodbolt Whirl.  Just handle the air phase calmly and it removes the issues here.  Spread out, cover yourselves and survive, and then go back to your spots; don’t rush and take it easy.

 

Only one wing left to go, we’ll see how that turns out next week.  Good Job on the kill.

Again, I lack a picture, because I fail at taking screen captures…

 

However, 25 Heroic Twins went down last night, with our less than stellar attendance of 24 (After our mighty 23 the night before).  Seriously, I don’t quite get it, 258 Heroic gear is better than ICC 10, and comparable to ICC 25 due to the extra sockets, yet people don’t want it enough to show, but show up for ICC as though Tirion Fordring was giving out free shots of heroin as you zone in. 

 

The fight was a good healer test, as initially, some healers suggested going with 7, and others said that healing through a Vortex would be impossible, only to have both of those camps proved wrong (It was killed with 6, and yes, we healed through it with no deaths).  Also, I can never understand our DPS, how on one attempt you can fail to break a shield with Bloodlust, and on the next you break it without…

 

The biggest lesson learned from Twins…  Aura Mastery is awesome.

 

Also, as I mentioned above with attendance, we are recruiting again; though this will likely be preaching to the choir as I doubt many people are looking at our site that aren’t already either applying or are already a member…

This weeks first night of 25m in the new wing of ICC has lead to the Blood Princes down. 





For the news, instead of posting a 3 corpse collage of the Princes we lined up for our mug shots.  One dead Prince in the bottom right did provide a cameo, however.

Last week, we got our first views of Professor Putricide, the last boss in the Plagueworks wing of Icecrown Citadel.  We only did some initial playing with him; due to bad planning with the 10 mans resulting in only one group making it to him and that being late in the evening, and some trial attempts get the mechanics in order for 25 man.

 

Last night, our first 10 man went in, managed to one shot all the other bosses and so had a ton of time to work on him.  Several attempts later, and he was dead, we were not, and a new check is marked on the right side of this website to show the whole 10 people who look at this site what we’ve managed to kill…

 

We actually took pictures this time, honest, finally posted below!

 

A few things learned on this boss…

 

There is a lot going on.  And everyone in your raid has to be aware of all of them constantly. 

 

The two most important things in the fight:  Make sure everyone survives till phase 3, and that the Phase 2/Phase 3 transition isn’t screwed up.  The latter is deceptively tricky when you are first figuring it out and was by far the hardest part to learn.

 

In phase 3 he hits MUCH harder than he did in the previous phases, and much faster too.  Healers need to be on top of that because a dead tank heals him 10% of his health, and with how the mechanics of the phase work, it is essentially a wipe.

 

The fight, once learned, is very repeatable, similar to how Mimiron or Yogg worked.  You need to take each of his abilities, and how to counter it separately and make sure you integrate them together into a whirlwind of not standing in shit.

 

After a wipe remember to cast Righteous Fury before you pull, not after he starts killing melee. 

 

Good Job on the kill.

 

A picture is worth a thousand words... Rotface 25m DOWN



This brings us to 6/12 in 25m and 10m ICC after the new release of content, leaving...



more fun and horror still to come...

Again, another reminder that taking screen shots of dead bosses is hard…  I clearly need to just have one of our DPSers bind screen capture to one of their basic attacks to either ensure we always have an image of dead bosses.

 

After going into ToGC to clear the bosses we had killed previously (Northrend Beasts, Jaraxxus, Faction Champions) I am again reminded how complacent we can become with easy encounters, and that when we actually go to new content that has a challenge to it instead of being the faceroller, we become stomped, and we started with what would be an early trend of stupid wipes.  I have however, discovered the cure to this, in that if I bet gold against my guild, my guild will come together spectacularly in an effort to spite me out of my gold, and merely to prove me wrong…

 

Well, I’ll take them working together however I can get it…

 

We went back into ICC 25 though, and now that several groups have experience with Festergut and know the fundamentals of the encounter we gave it a quick shot.  A spectacular wipe (And by spectacular, I was truly impressed at how efficient the wipe went) because “Being more than 10 yards away from each other” is still a challenging and intuitive mechanic, and then a little more spreading out a little less bad and he went down with about 15 seconds left on enrage.

 

Rotface is still eluding us, but we’re getting closer.  Sub 10% wipes are frustrating (And sub 3% wipes are heartbreaking), and I think that the answer might be less healing, more DPS.  I expect him down shortly and then some more time for Horror and Fun with Professor Putricide.

Spent part of this week working on the 10 man fights and went in and downed both Festergut and Rotface.

Festergut on 10 seems appropriately placed, the mechanics are very simple and the DPS check is appropriate for those with full 232.  Our 10 man, which overgeared it thanks to ToGC 10 gear and a little TogC 25 stuff had no issue with it and beat it with over a full minute left on the first attempt.  This was with 3 healers and 5 DPS.

Rotface however, is another story altogether.  Currently Rotface has been nerfed once already with a HP nerf in the amount of close to 15%. The reason for this was a bug in his timing. Both versions (25 and 10) use the 25 man versions rate of casting Mutating Infection.  This may not SEEM like much, until you math it out and actually look at your raids ratios.  As it stands, after 144 seconds, Rotface will cast a new Mutating Infection every 8 seconds, and after 176 seconds, it will be every 6 seconds.  This means, in less than 3 minutes, every six seconds someone new will have Mutating Infection, has to stop what they are doing run out of the raid, get cleansed/or wait for it to fade and run back in.  On 25 man, this entire process takes up less than 4% of your raid, because there are 24 viable targets for it to pick; also, all of the roles have redundancy in that if two of the same role have it at the same time, there are still others to handle their duties.  In 10 man, this is not the case, as 10% of your raid is affected every 6 seconds.  This involves periods where two DPS are being chained with the debuff resulting in almost complete DPS loss (Melee) or lowered DPS due to movement (Ranged) or god forbid 2 of your 3 healers being sent out crippling your healing for a few vital seconds.  The HP nerf was added to help disguise this problem, however, even with it, the amount of Raid DPS needed to overcome the issue not only far outstrips what is needed for Festergut, but also eclipses the DPS requirements for the Slime/Gas in the Professor Putricide encounter.  I expect further adjustments to this encounter in the very near future, as I am uncertain how a guild in full 232 gear that SHOULD be experiencing the encounter at its tuned level will be able to complete it with consistency.

In other news, Professor Putricide is an awesome encounter so far, and I look forward to seeing more of it.  Good Job on the kills and lets keep up the work.

After listening to Varian Wrynn yell the titular line over and over as we learned 25 Heroic Faction Champions, we managed to get a kill yesterday.

In learning it, I came to a few realizations:

Faction Champions, despite appearing as a PVP encounter is very much a PVE encounter.  The entire success or failure of the encounter depends on your strategy and it's implementation.  Unlike most PVE fights though, the Fire you shouldn't stand in chases you around, with a big sword, and wants to stick it somewhere very uncomfortable (That is NOT the back of a Volkswagen)...  Once you figure out a strategy, the rest starts to fall into place, and something as small as reversing a kill order can make hair pulling wipes turn into successful kills.

The fight seriously tests individual accountability.  It is impossible to micromanage every single crowd control ability, short cool down, long cool down, and even movement of various players, and as such it is often left for players to be able to handle themselves.  Remembering to HoP that healer being chased by the Rogue, or to Hex the Warrior chasing down your warlock is this encounters version of "Stop Standing in the God Damn Void Zones!"

Unlike many other fights, where the challenge can ramp up in further parts of the encounter, or are generally challenging throughout the fight, Faction Champions have this odd inverse in that the longer the fight goes the better your chances of success.  When the first three die and you realize 22 of your raiders are still up and you have Battle Rezes to burn, you realize that as long as you keep it up, there is no real way you can lose.

Good Job to everyone in finishing this off.  Twins and the three new Icecrown Bosses coming up, so we still have plenty to do!

Also, another week of picture fail, though it is Faction Champions and there really is no corpse to take a screen shot of...