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The Lich King Is Dead, Long Live the Lich King

Damn.
Wow.

Arthas Menethil, leader of the Scourge, scourge of Azeroth, bearer and victim of Frostmourne, is dead.

It was a long and harrowing journey, although it was worth than the attempt counter makes it seem. Looking at our World of Logs reports, I count 92 wipes on him. I missed 19 of those(one long Sunday) due to family obligations, but I still felt the effort.

No, what made the journey difficult was some decisions we made earlier, as a guild, that in retrospect were poor ones. We used to keep a bigger waitlist, but our policies were making the people on the waitlist pretty unhappy with how much they had to sit, so we trimmed it down. Unfortunately, when some people decided to quit, or had computer issues, or got frustrated and made less of an effort to show up to raids, it hurt us.

We killed Sindragosa on Wednesday, March 3rd, and made a few quick pulls of the Lich King(4), just to get an idea. But burnout continued from our earlier failures to kill Sindragosa, and so on Sunday, we failed to have enough people to fight Arthas, and didn't raid.

Next week, it took us Tuesday and Wednesday to clear ICC 11/12 - we had only killed Sindragosa once, and we had some new people, so there was still some learning to be done. We prepared to face Arthas for 4.5 hours on Sunday... and only 23 people showed up. We decided to do some attempts anyway - phase 1 is really quite trivial so it can be done undermanned fairly easily, and we wanted to get some practice in on phase 2. We knew we didn't have the DPS for Valkyries, but wanted to get some practice in and not waste the evening.

The next week we finally got some real time in. We were much better at clearing ICC 11/12 this time, so we had 8 attempts on Wednesday and a whopping 22 pulls on Sunday. It was frustrating to spend so many pulls, but it was useful. We were trying a defile strategy that had worked for our 10 man groups, but we just didn't have the consistent reflexes to pull it off in 25 man - having to move within .5 seconds of a cast starting was just not going to work often enough for us to have people stand on top of each other up until the cast of Defile. If you've seen Paragon's Hard mode kill, you've seen them do it, and my hat is off to them for their consistency on that.

Next week we did ICC 11/12 in one night, which is as it should be, so all of that was going well for us, but Wednesday we just didn't have the people for Lich King, but luckily enough people showed up on Sunday. Some of our diligent raiders had suggested using discipline priests, because of the interaction between shields and infest, and lo and behold, it worked like a charm. I wasn't there that night, but from my understanding, we unfortunately stuck to the exact same defile strategy as before. The shields helped by buying time on the defiles, so it would have appeared as if people were getting better, but it just wasn't working.

Luckily, our raiders were still discussing the fight on the forum, and I decided to try another suggestion they had had.. So on Tuesday, March 30, we extended the raid lockout and spent 2 hours on him. The new strategy - having everyone spread out with 2s left on defile, worked great. It cost us some DPS on the Valkyr, and mistakes were still made sometimes on defile, but this felt very workable.
It had been nearly 4 weeks since we first pulled Arthas, but we finally saw phase 3. We just had to figure out how to deal with all the healing there - the Frostmourne target kept dying. Near the end of the night, we reset our lock and started clearing. We finished the clear the next day and did a few more pulls. Things were still looking good, we just didn't have the consistency in phase 2 to really practice phase 3.

Unfortunately, despite that progress, we failed to get enough people to raid either that Sunday or the next. Things were looking grim.

We did continue to get time on Tuesday and Wednesday, so we looked up a bunch of suggestions for phase 3. Some guilds suggested using Army of the Dead on the vile spirits. We tried that, but it didn't work for us - again, we had little time to actually practice phase 3 due to our continued inconsistency in phase 2, so it was hard to get time to identify problems.

We tried AoEing the spirits down with a clumped up strategy. That almost worked - the first wave died well, but things went south after that, and the fact that it was hard to practice kept biting us.

A couple of raiders decided they had had enough (for various reasons, not all of them related to the Lich King), and stopped raiding. I began to get worried that we wouldn't have the people to kill him - and I didn't want to have to stop, recruit people, gear everyone up again, and learn him again.

So we put out a request to all our casuals and ex-raiders with Lich King experience from either 25 man or 10 man. In particular, I hoped to get an extra prot pally with experience soaking the spirits in phase 3. I had heard good things about it, but we were worried about whether the damage would be too high in 25 man. But looking at Paragon's post, we figured if it works for them in hard mode, it should work for us in normal. So, with a paladin who had practice doing it, and the hope that it would work, we tried it.

Things still looked grim last night. Several people posted they couldn't make it, including one of our tanks. Luckily, several of those people DID make it, and one of our DPS specced over to healing, and we were able to work on him.

No lie, it was tough going. We made 11 pulls on him last night, counting the kill, and only got to phase 3 twice. For the first hour and a half, healing was bad - some of our healers were inexperienced, and it was the off-spec for our paladin healer. I was wondering whether we'd even get to try the soak strategy.

But then we had an awesome pull. Everything went smoothly in phase 2. The best phase 2 we had all night (including our kill). We got to phase 3, we got behind the frost trap, our soaker killed all the spirits and we began to feel that this might be the kill.

It wasn't, of course, but the failure was easy. On the next wave of spirits we had gotten a little too hasty, and we ended up with a defile in the worst possible place and had to wipe. Not a big deal, it told us the soaking strategy would work and made us confident that if we got to phase 3 again, it would be a kill.

And it was.

It didn't start out ideally. On the phase 1->2 transition, one of our hunters disconnected right before Quake, so she fell off into the abyss - nothing anyone could do. Our phase 2 was a bit slower due to the missing DPS, and we had an extra spirit (wounded, but still dangerous) going into phase 3. But the soaking worked. And we shifted position, and it worked again. And we just kept doing it.

And then we almost wiped at 15%. And it would have been my fault. I got sucked down into Frostmourne and started burning the spirit. Now, I'm a survival hunter, not a marksmanship hunter, so I don't have an interrupt. I was aware of that, so I'd done some research. Apparently, I was supposed to be able to interrupt the channel with distracting shot. So I saw the channel, fire a distracting shot and... nothing happened - he continued to burn the friendly NPC. I didn't have any cooldowns, and had spent my speed pot earlier (stupid, stupid, stupid), so I just did everything I could. I watched the NPCs life bar tick away on target-of-target until I couldn't even see that he had any life there. I was prepared to FD and hope Peerless could take just 1 hit, and then he died, and I got ported up.

The Lich King was at 13% at this point, and new spirits were spawning, but... screw them. BURN HIM!!!!!!

I started frapsing - I had wanted to fraps the entire fight but mysteriously my fraps performance had tanked at the start of this pull - it was good every other pull, many of which I had recorded, until now... But I figured I'd record all the delicious RP. So he goes from 13->10% and, well, everyone knows SOMETHING happens but I won't spoil what it is, and I get a windows popup telling me Fraps is out of disk space. It had filled up my C drive - my performance tanked because Windows didn't have space for a swap file. It was bad enough I couldn't get it to tab back to WoW for about 30 seconds.

So I missed the RP. In the end, despite avoiding all the videos so as not to see spoilers, I had to go to a video to see the RP I had actually earned. And I failed to record our kill.

I did learn a few things though:
1. If your raiders tell you they hate the waitlist, the solution is not to reduce it too much, it's to find a better way to manage it.
2. Sunday raids need a bigger break in the middle - something we should have learned from Anub, but apparently didn't.
3. We should have tried to do some official *practice* on 10 mans - learning what tricks would work in phase 3. Our initial 10 man report was that Army of the Dead didn't work there either, but I get the feeling they were way more consistent on getting to phase 3 than we were, so it would have been easier to work out kinks there.

This has been a long post - so I'll just leave you with a screenshot.

The Lich King Awaits

In contrast to Blood Queen, Sindragosa wasn't that bad. Last week was our first week to seriously work on her. On Wednesday, after we killed Blood Queen, we gave her 6 pulls (we had technically done 2 pulls several weeks prior - but they were unflasked just to get a look at her). People kept dying to the Blistering Cold and our tomb strategy was confusing people so we decided to clean those up.

So we got everyone to enchant their boots with run speed (something we had strongly suggested before) and we changed our tomb strategy to do all the tombs in the center of the room, so we didn't waste so much time moving around. We didn't get a kill, but we were clearly doing better - our best attempt was 11%. So that was about twenty attempts on Sunday.

Tonight we went back and kicked her ass. We still had the working tomb strategy from Sunday, but people were more familiar with it, and not tired like at the end of Sunday night, so on our first pull we had a good feeling about the night. We were still having a lot of problems with people dying in the sub-35% phase, but a strategy changed fixed that. With all of our DPS, we weren't in any danger of missing berserk, so instead of having some DPS break their buffet stack on one tomb and the other DPS break it on the next, we told all DPS to break stacks on every tomb, but told the ranged to not hit the tombs at all - we didn't want them dying too quickly.

The first pull like that didn't quite work - people weren't used to it and so it failed, but it was working much better for the healers. We tried it again, and sweet, sweet victory.

So, on to the screenshot. You can see I'm dead for the kill, but as you can see from the screenshot - I'm not alone.

Blood Queen Bites the Dust

Blood Queen is finally down. And it took us only 3 pulls(this week). It's been a long painful road to get here though. On the first week, we put her off until Sunday so the 10-man groups could try her. They reported she was pretty easy, but of course it's much easier to spread out in 10 man, and with 25-man gear, she's not much of a DPS race. On Sunday, we had 10 attempts left (after spending 5 killing Putricide), so we decided to hit ToGC first to warm up. Unfortunately, when we got done there, we couldn't get an instance ID for ICC, so we had to flush the first 10 attempts away.

The next week we came back with another 10 attempts, and learned a bunch about the encounter, including verifying (as far as we can tell), that we have to stop wearing those shiny trinkets from Saurfang. We didn't really get close, but hey, it was our first week.

The next week after that, Sindragosa got unlocked, but we spent our time on Wednesday doing Blood Queen pulls (about 17 of them I think - it took us 3 to kill Putricide). The air phase was still a problem for us - we only had 1 attempt where everyone survived to the end - with an agonizing 2% wipe.

Every week after that we'd have at least one, maybe more sub 2% wipes - always because somebody would get MC'd at the end instead of biting someone else, and losing 1 person (plus whomever they killed) would get us.

But last week did make 1 big positive change. I had been loathe to do it, but we finally just started assigning positions for the air phase. That increased our survivability a lot - still a few kinks to work out - but cleaned it up.

Unfortunately, that continued our 2% wipe problems (including one 400k wipe) because of the MCs - but tonight everyone seemed to understand what the problems were, and over the 3 attempts tonight, there was not a single MC. Everyone either bit the right person, or in an emergency, bit an acceptable substitute rather than get MC'd. Our first pull failed (700k) due to a death, and our second pull failed early to healer death, but everyone was on the ball and despite having some DPS die on the second air phase, she died with a few seconds to spare.

So awesome job everyone.

In lieu of our traditional "Stand around the body", I'll be providing the actual kill shot. The good part is you get to see the moment she dies. The bad part is my ugly UI.

Great news everybody!

Just an ordinary boss fight. But watch out! This is no ordinary boss fight! You've only got 10 attempts per week, and he's actually pretty difficult. But now he's dead - it took us 18 attempts total, last week and this one.

The first week was learning how he worked, everyone sort of getting used to things. Finally, we thought we had it all under control... and then we found out he had an enrage timer. So clearly our "control fight" method wasn't working. Plus, people were dying anyway so it's not like our control was all that hot.

This week, we cleared to him on Tuesday, and did Trial of the Grand Crusader on Wednesday - earning a Tribute to Mad Skill (congratulations everyone! No wipes on pre-Anub bosses, and Anub killed in time to earn the chest). Both of our 10 man groups, now familiar with the fight, killed Putricide and we were ready to kill him tonight.

We still had some troubles with people learning the fight, but the very first pull got him to P3, so we knew we had it. We had a 5% wipe, and a 2% wipe... and finally, agonizingly, a kill. Great job everyone involved on any of our 25 man or 10 man attempts.

Anub'Arak down. Then resurrected by the Lich King. Now down again!

After something like 180 attempts (when you list the number like that it's amazing we were willing to keep trying it) we got Anub'Arak down. It took us a lot longer to do this than expected, not just in number of attempts, but in number of weeks. 180 attempts sounds like something you could do in 4 weeks, right? 45 attempts per week (below our average for getting to Anub'arak) x 4 weeks = 180.

Well, such are the perils of a 3-day-a-week raiding guild, and a boss with very tight raid roster requirements. Barring a few pulls, we always went with 4 paladins, and we really only had one tank who could handle the adds, and we needed the misdirects etc, so we had to call off a number of attempts on him because we just didn't have the group.

That's the bad news of it. The good news is that we were clearly getting better, especially at the end - I have no doubt we can repeat that. We actually had a heartbreaking 130k HP wipe about 3 attempts before the kill. 130k. That's 1 second of raid DPS on the boss with the whole raid up. Literally our DPS. But of course we didn't have the whole raid up, or it wouldn't have been a wipe.

We had a 3% or something wipe after that, and we'd had successive wipes at 10%, 9%, 8%, earlier, so we were sure to get it. And we got it. And damn did it feel good.

Congratulations OOT, to those who were there for the kill, to those who contributed all that learning time but couldn't make it, and to those who sat patiently on the waitlist, providing a safety net if someone dropped and moral support as we did all those attempts.

It was a very Merry Christmas indeed.



And then, to make it clear that that's not a picture of a normal mode kill:

Madness takes its toll

Ladies and Gentlemen, Yogg-Saron is no more. Earlier tonight the brave men and women of the Order of Thrones brought that bastard down, ending his threat forever. It certainly took us a while, we killed Vezax on May 10th, 5 weeks ago, but Yogg caused us a lot of problems. Until last Sunday we couldn't get cleanly into Phase 2, and without that, everything was kind of doomed. But even though raiders were getting frustrated with our constant wiping due to phase 1 (since even if we died in phase 2, it was due to phase 1), we perservered, and last Sunday, July 6th, at the end of the night we could repeatably get to 30%. But 4.5 hours of raiding is a lot, so people were tired and our attempts got worse for a bit at the end of the night there.

Rested and ready to rock, we came back on Wednesday and got him to about 6% on 2 pulls, doing phase 2 in 3 brain phases both times. On one we learned that he has a *very* hard enrage. It's not a Brutallus enrage where you attempt to burn the last few percent of his life off. No, he burns all 100% of your life off, really quickly. And the other wipe at 6% was just a tank death.

But tonight, tonight we came back and we were ready. We were a bit disappointed that the hotfix went in before we could get a kill, not because we thought we needed it to get a kill (none of the changes would have turned those 6% wipes to kills, those were all p3 execution issues), but just for bragging rights. We warmed up with a few pulls to get portals sorted out and remind people of what we were doing, and then we kicked his ass.

It was a pretty clean first kill, we only had 2 deaths(1 in Phase 1, and 1 in Phase 3) and It was a very clean p3. We had just over 6 minutes and he was losing 5% of his life every minute, so we were good to go. At 1 minute left, the melee group heroism debuff had worn off, and we turned to face him and heroism... and he promptly fell over. Awesome job guys. And to everyone who was there Wednesday and couldn't make Sunday - you saw everything, you did everything we need to kill him, kudos to you, and kudos to everyone else who helped us learn.



Time for some hard modes.