The king is dead!!! There are not enough exclamation points that I can use to describe the shouts of joy as Arthas used Frostmourne’s power to kill all of us at 10%. It was deafening.
We had pretty much given up on winning this fight in the 3.x world. I’m very happy that we got back on track and focused on him again. Patch 4.0.1 was a very big help, of course. Our DPS were now strong enough to get us to phase 1.5 without needing heroism and with only 5 of them, leaving an extra spot for a third healer.
I will not try to describe this night as Vidyala at Manalicious already did a great job of it. I’ll mainly focus on what we tried and what worked out in the end. The group that worked on H LK and finally killed him was the following:
Tanks
- Vosskah – Warrior
- Noodlestein – Paladin (Was Retribution for some attempts in the past few weeks)
- Meraxis – Paladin (Was not there for the kill but was the tank on our first attempt hitting phase 3 the week before)
Melee DPS
- Draos – Cat druid
Ranged DPS
- Millya – Fire Mage
- Fsob – Arcane Mage
- Shaen – Elemental Shaman
- Dirtface – Warlock
- Kayla – Hunter (Was hit by the midterm boss in the last 2-3 weeks but was with the group on many nights)
Healers
- Panerai – Disc Priest
- Zierlyn – Holy Priest
- Ullariend – Tree Druid
- Alawyn – Tree Druid (Was not available in the last few weeks)
- Ambriel – Holy Paladin (Was not available in the last few weeks)
Phase 1.
Phase 1 was very frustrating for us. We used the approach of starting the fight at the bottom of the stairs and then moving in three parallel lines towards the back.
- Left line: Healers and ranged DPS;
- Middle Line: Horrors and their tank;
- Right line: Melee dps, Arthas and his tank.
Shadow Traps
- This was our first issue. It took a bit of time for the ranged dps and healers (usually about 7 people) to learn to move together in a line and avoid the trap zones.
Plague
- Everyone had to move very fast to the horror group. The ranged dps had to learn to not even finish casting, just run immediately. Panerai was in charge of dispelling the diseases.
Horrors
- Actually, the problem was mostly how they managed to kill the tank too easily. While the previous two items were learned fairly fast by the group, we were often victim of the RNG boss on the Horrors where two would enrage at the same time and kill their tank. Our original setup, prior to 4.0.1 was to have a pally tank the horrors and the warrior tank Arthas. The reasoning came from our original normal LK kills where the pallies simply had an easier time with the AoE aggro. In order to address the horror issue, we reversed the roles. The warrior with its wide array of stuns was better suited for the horrors. The other trick up our sleeve now was my Vigilance. By putting Vigilance on the other tank, I now have access to unlimited taunts which now makes the warrior extremely good at picking the ghouls off of the LK tank and bringing them into the middle for disease spreading.
- Even with a warrior’s stuns, we were still getting into trouble when the second horror was spawning. Panerai (Disc Priest) decided to use a cooldown as soon as they were both on Vosskah. I kept my shockwave available until his Guardian spirit faded and then stunned the horrors and the ghouls. If both were still up then, I would use shield wall.
- Ullariend (Tree Druid) would Soothe the horrors when he could spare the GCD.
In phase 1.5, I would bring my posse to the right of the group while the paladin tank would catch the spirits.
Once we managed to consistently get through phase 1, it only took us a couple of hours to learn the rest of the fight. We had seen phase 2 a few times and phase 3 once, but not often enough to learn them.
Phase 2.
It is very similar to the original fight apart from everything hitting harder and the need to only DPS the val’kyrs until they hit 50% health.
What we did is the paladin continued tanking Arthas and brought him to the middle. I tanked the remaining Raging Spirit until it had done its conal attack and then joined the rest of the group (Intervene, of course. Why not do it in style?) for the first val’kyr.
The target priority for the DPS in this phase is: Val’kyr (when carrying someone), remaining Raging Spirit from phase 1.5, and then Arthas. As in the normal fight, spread out for defiles, group up for val’kyrs and the LK tank must communicate with the healers to properly use cooldowns and deal with the Soul Reaper.
Once the Raging Spirits were down, as a warrior, my priority became to keep stuns and hamstring on the val’kyrs.
We thought about having me use intervene on the paladin tank and used it once but it was not necessary.
Once we neared 45%, we waited for a valkyr to come down and the whole group followed it towards the edge, dpsing it to 50%. We popped heroism in phase 2.5. Only one spirit remained starting phase 3.
Phase 3.
This phase is quite different than on normal. We used a strat that Noodle had gotten from Production Company (Moonrunner US, this links to their Guild Leader’s blog) in this phase.
The killing priorities for the DPS were the following: Vile Spirits coming down, Raging Spirits from phase 2.5, Arthas.
Inside Frostmourne
- We put a star on a tank. His job was to navigate the group in between the explosions. The whole group would stack on him with the ranged dps attacking the Wicked Spirits on the run. It took us a couple of attempts and then it became very easy this way.
Outside and facing the Vile Spirits
- We would group on one side of the platform with Arthas.
- The spirits he would summon would be regrouped on that one side. We would move the raid to the other end of the platform except for the OT.
- As the spirits are coming down, the OT would stay in the middle of the platform and put up shield wall to soak up the damage.
I was so happy, I forgot to dps the ending!
That was my last objective for Wrath of the Lich King. It was well worth the hard work and the wait.
Next, we’ll do this fight again for those who weren’t there for the kill but were instrumental in getting us there. As for my next topics, Wrath is now behind me and I will turn my attention fully onto Cataclysm.
I’m surprised to hear you ran so light on melee as well!
Comparatively, we’ve been running with a warrior and death knight tank – we’d use the DK as our main tank, with our warrior setting Vigilance on him and then taunting every single ghoul over to him; so it’s nice to see that a guild doing the Heroic version of Arthas still saw this as a viable strategy.
Why, exactly, do you only have to dps the Valkyr to 50% in heroic? Do they have more health/drop the player at that point? What other tricks did you use to stun/slow?
Phase 3 sounds like it turns into an entirely different beast, too…
Regardless, thank you for this! It’s nice to have this kind of break down for the fight!
BT used to be quite a bit more melee heavy. What we did is through normal attrition, we kept replacing melee dps with ranged after we saw fights like Saurfang and Heroic Blood Prince Council. Come Cataclysm though, it seems we might be a bit different with a 3 to 4 ratio and we’ll see how it goes.
When I tanked on my DK, I would be the one on the Horrors simply because I could put my Death and Decay under my Warrior and grab all the ghouls from the start. But you’re right, the warrior can do it easily now with Vigilance, just like the heroic mode.
The Val’kyrs drop the player when they hit 50%. They then fly up and range dps the group. Since they leave when we push phase 2.5, we always ignore them and focus on the Lich King. For the stuns, there’s a lot. There’s of course Concussion Blow and Shockwave. There’s hamstring (battle stance) to slow them down although our Arcane Mage is most often the one handling the slow. I’ve also used my charge to stun it for a few seconds. One time when I was quite desperate, I used intervene on a guildie and intercept back. It did stun it but that time it was not enough as many DPS were down. So yes, it works but it’s really scraping the bottom of the trick bag at this point.
And you’re welcome! I love this kind of analysis.
Congratulations to you all, this is a well-deserved victory.
Gratz, Voss! I was hoping you’d post about this too!
Gratz to you and the BT team!!
Awesome sauce, gz to all who participated and nice post on it
Congrats to you and the crew on the kill.
I don’t know if Roksi already shared them, but a couple of further tips:
Roksi taunts the valks after they drop people when they fly upwards, this causes all of their ranged damage to be directed at her and almost trivializes its effect on the raid.
The other thing that we discovered that really acted as a breakthrough for us in phase 1 is that the Large adds will actually die faster if the add tank only keeps 1-2 ghouls on them along with the large adds. This causes the first large add to die shortly after the point the second one spawns, and the second add usually dies about the time time the second raging spirit spawns. Even when it doesn’t go completely the way that it is supposed to, we found that the large adds die significantly faster at the cost of carrying over a bunch of ghouls into phase2 (but at this point their biggest function is keeping vengeance maxxed out on me, so that’s not an entirely bad thing)
Thanks!
No, the only thing we borrowed from you guys was the moving from one side of the platform to the other in phase 3.
I disagree with you for the Horrors. I prefer to keep all of the ghouls on me. The difference in time to death for the horrors is minimal (Our last one always dies pretty much at the same time as the second spirit spawns too) but it keeps the ghouls neatly packed on me, leaving the LK tank free to get the first spirit without a trail of ghouls on him. I also do not want to carry ghouls with the group to phase 2. In phase 2, I want the remaining Raging Spirit to go down fast (easily before the second Val’Kyr) and have the DPS focus on LK.
Fact is, H LK is not a more complicated fight really than the normal version. It just has a few quirks that each group will need to adapt to depending on their own strengths and weaknesses. For us, we’ve found that a quick cooldown on the Horror tank was sufficient to achieve a very clean Phase 1.
I think the difference between our approach is also that you guys spent a lot of weeks on this fight prior to 4.0.1. Before the patch, groups more often than not needed to go with 2 healers so anything that lessens the damage (like the taunting of the Val’kyr, getting the horrors down asap) was needed. We only seriously returned to work on this fight after the patch came and he went down in a few nights. Our differences in strategy reflect that.