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.
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.
posted by Harwin at 10:00 PM
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