Heroic Lich King 25 is the hardest fight in this expansion. It’s not even close. I’m not going to try to compare its difficulty to the level 60 and 70 endgame, but suffice to say that the people who are peering over their rose-tinted glasses and complaining that the game is too easy these days should probably give this encounter a whirl. There are still challenges to be found, and hard ones at that.

If your only experience with the fight is watching kill movies then it probably looks simple enough. It’s just stabbing the Lich King for a bit, occasionally stabbing something else or running away from some black stuff on the ground, and finally watching an RP cutscene after whittling him down to the “kill” at 10%. Right? Actually, it’s a bit more complicated than that. It’s close to 20 minutes of near-perfect execution by 25 people, execution that is built brick-by-brick as you master one mechanic only to get whipped by the next.

Arthas hits like a truck so the first step is dealing with his tank damage. Then your whole raid has to learn how to dodge shadow traps and getting the plague to the shambling horror. Your disc priests need to figure out how to shield the entire raid for every infest and your hunters have to find a way to dispel every shambling horror enrage.

In the transition phases the damage dealers have to find the balance between dps’ing aggressively enough to take down the raging spirits quickly but not enough to snatch aggro and get gibbed. You also have to make sure you kill all the ice spheres before they reach the raid and bounce people off the platform.

Then there’s phase 2 and this is the real cock-block of the encounter. Here you have to figure out a way to handle both major mechanics; the val’kyrs, which forces everyone to stack on top of each other, and the defiles, for which you would much rather be spread out. The stacking is necessary to make the valkyrs follow the same path so that you can hit them all with cleave and AoE damage and then you have to have a specific 3-stun rotation on every valkyr in order to slow them down long enough to get them to 50% health and make them drop their target on the platform rather than off it. This sounds easier than it is given that stuns are on strict diminishing returns and a single random stun can mess things up, and the fact that you can easily find yourselves in trouble if the val’kyr targets happen to be your infest-shielding priests or your designated stunners.

Then there’s defile. Oh, defile. How thine cruel nature dost vex me. Bearing a passing resemblance to a BP oil spill, it’s a black blob of ick that spawns under a random raid member and then keeps expanding in diameter if anyone is standing in it. On heroic mode it is very unforgiving and you can’t really overcome one dropped on top of the raid.

Once you actually start to master phase 2 and its defiles, though, the battle is won for all intents and purposes. You still have to learn how to dodge explosions in the Frostmourne room after the Lich King attempts to harvest your souls, how to soak the vile spirits, and let’s not forget that you still have to deal with defiles although they are easier to manage without the val’kyr spawns. But as long as your raid dps is good enough to beat Lich King’s enrage timer, the last phase is a formality compared to the preceding phase.

Now, having said all that, here is our first successful attempt at making all this look easy, lovingly captured and presented by Jinjiro.

THC LK 25 heroic first kill HD stream [ PoV: Jinjiro, rogue ]

(If you’re wondering why it ends so abruptly and doesn’t show the RP stuff and 10% victory lap nuke, it’s because Jin ran out of hard drive space while frapsing which made his computer crash right at the start of the RP bit. ^^)

This kill was not cheaply gained. The cost was great and the currency was blood, sweat, tears and time. Lots of time. Summer isn’t a great time for raid progress as holidays and other activites take priority and this fact combined with some core raiders taking breaks slowed our march to victory. But it could not stop it.

*wipes away proud guild leader tear*

Well done and congratulations, THC. You deserved it.

Blood, sweat, tears and a well-deserved Lich King 25 heroic kill at 23:57 on the last attempt of the night. Game over, man, game over!

Kill movie will be up once Jinjiro gets around to editing it.

I’d write more but it will have to wait because right now I’m going to rest on my laurels. I’ll let Ricky Gervais elaborate:

Taking the road less traveled is often held up as something positive. It’s not. It’s annoying, is what it is. Who do those people think they are? They think they know better than the rest of us? Get back in line, damnit! Conform! Conform!

We have one of those idiots in our guild. Apteryx. He’s a warlock but instead of studying spreadsheets trying to min-max 1 more dps more from his spell rotation, he hangs out in the tank channel. He doesn’t have a tank alt. He has no tank experience. He’s just there, constantly weighing in on tank strategies during raids or volunteering to tank every raid encounter known to man. A typical exchange:

Raid leader: Hmm, we lack a tank for the adds.
Apteryx: I can tank them, no problem!

Raid leader: So who’s tanking this boss?
Apteryx: I can tank him, no problem!

Raid leader: Roses are red.
Apteryx: I’ll tank them, no problem.

Anyway, last Thursday we cleared TotC 25-man heroic and then started somnambulating our way through the normal version when Apteryx volunteered to tank. Again. Our resolve beaten to a pulp by the drudgery of farm content, we thought…fuck it, let’s just let him tank. So we let him maintank Lord Jaraxxus, one of the Twin Valkyrs and Anub’arak. Sadly – from a conformist perspective – the road less traveled turned out to be covered in fragrant rose petals, paved from pure gold and home to the world’s largest collection of chocolate bunnies. We had no wipes, no tank deaths, no nothing. It was as smooth as honey dipped in butter.

Damn it. Now there’ll be no shutting him up.

P.S. Obviously, all of us had a lot of fun, not just Apteryx. :) Check out the Anub’arak movie from the PoV of Apteryx, warlock tank, at WarcraftMovies, FileFront and YouTube. Enjoy!

P.P.S. I had a look at the raid log and during the Anub’arak fight, Apteryx took  12846 damage per second and received 14329 healing per second. For comparison’s sake, our “real” tank took 8348 damage per second during the heroic version of Anub’arak the same reset. Who said normal was easymode?

Phase 3 of Anub’arak is one of those fights where if things go bad, they go bad quickly. You lose a tank, you lose a healer, you miss an interrupt; it all leads to a wipe and fast. Couple that with mechanics dictating that everyone in the raid must be kept at low health combined with damage spikes on random raid members, and you have a recipe for a situation that’s not sustainable indefinitely.

Getting to phase 3 can be done smoothly every time, but once you push past that 30% barrier, it’s a race against inevitable doom.

So there we are last night, confident we can finally conquer Anub’arak 25 heroic if everyone executes correctly, a confidence borne from the previous raid night where a late change in tactics had yielded improved results and a 4% wipe. However, we only have 20 attempts remaining on the reset and we squander some early ones due to some mistakes in positioning.

There’s 15 attempts remaining when we hit phase 3 with a purpose and things remain stable as Anub’arak hits 20%, 15%, 10%… and then things start falling apart. For a few heartpounding moments it looks like things are going to end badly, but then…but then there is Vredens.

The ballad of Vredens, immortal hero of the horde

Ahh, Vredens. There’s something you should know about Vredens. He has a reputation for dying rather easily. If I was to create a Vredens joke it would go something like this:

“A priest, a rabbi and a troll mage walk into a bar. One of the bar patrons coughs and the troll mage drops dead from swine flu.”

The superstitious among us have taken to saying that we won’t be able to kill a progress boss until a troll sacrifice has been made. Then there’s the singular event that cemented Vredens’ position as a guild punch line; the time he “ruined” a Naxxramas 10 undying run by dying to a Sapphiron breath with Ice Block off cooldown. Ever since that happened, he’s had to suffer his share of good-natured jabs and pokes.

Now that you know the background, fast forward to where we left off against Anub’arak. The raid is dying quickly, people are dropping left and right. The bug’s health is dropping too, but slowly. Agonizingly slowly. Memories of our previous 4% wipe flash before our collective eyes. Oh no. We’re gonna wipe on two percent. We’re gonna wipe on one percent?! The sinking feeling in our stomachs builds and builds, but Anub’arak is still there. Please don’t despawn, please don’t despawn! He is not despawning. Someone is still alive? And there is Vredens. Pulling off the pro move to end all pro moves, ensconced in his block of ice, denying Anub’arak’s life leech with steely resolve and watching as the raid dots finish the bug off. They should’ve sent a poet.

After that there is only the sweet release of the achievement banner popping up and nerdscreams. Lots of nerdscreams.

The Hungering Cold. World #366 Anub’arak kill. Fuck yeah!

Here are some nice videos of the kill put together by some of our members. Warning: contains nerds on vent.

Stoke, DPS death knight PoV [ YouTube HD stream ]
Caedrel, DPS death knight PoV [ YouTube HD stream | Megaupload download ]
Braggha, Captain Blockman PoV [ FileFront download ]

We’ve been too busy killing stuff in-game to actually come here and write about it, but it’s time to give a little update after a very productive week so far. On the first raid day of the reset we did nothing less than save the world! (of Warcraft) as we transformed into 25 flies in Algalon‘s ointment and got our first kill of the big-boy version. Well, I guess you can’t call it a kill, we simply fought him with such tenacity as to make him  go all introverted and reflect on his actions and hand us a reply-code to call off the Volgons coming to make a highway through our planet.

After that was done we cleared normal Coliseum in 45 minutes or so and then proceeded to one-shot the first three bosses on heroic difficulty, leaving 50 brand-spankin’ shiny tries for the Twin Valkyrs on the following raid day.

Fast forward to that day and we quickly went through some of those 50 available attempts as we had to fend off a series of problems, from tanks being on shitty connections or not being there at all in order to celebrate dodgy holidays, to people playing Pacman (poorly) and gobbling up orbs when they shouldn’t be. Fortunately I was able to contain my mounting rage by punching local wildlife and once we busted out Eye of the Tiger on vent, we got immediate results in the form of a 3.3% try followed by a kill.

Anyway, all’s well that ends well, and now it’s time to go mess around with big brain bugs. Stay tuned.

[Edit] Here’s a high-def YouTube video of our Algalon kill courtesy of that How To Paladin guy our death knight Stoke. Enjoy!

…and it sort of was. It’s not every day you get two 25-man hard-modes done for the first time in the same raid. Yesterday we did. After getting to within 27k of a Steelbreaker kill on Thursday and then having to abandon further tries after we lost a healer to a French thunder storm, we came back on Sunday and got it done. Then we went on to face Hodir and decided to give the hard-mode our first serious attempts and got it done within a couple of hours.

For Heroic: I Choose You, Steelbreaker we killed Runemaster Molgeim first and Stormcaller Brundir second. For the final burn on Steelbreaker we had everyone clumped up in melee range except hunters who were at range to (be able to dps and) soak Static Disruptions.

For Heroic: I Could Say That This Cache Was Rare our tactic’s key points were: 1) Keep melee on Hodir at all times, 2) have ranged break out the mage NPCs after flash freezes and then letting those mage NPCs break out the other NPCs, and 3) have a couple of survival hunters chasing Toasty Fires to keep stacking the Singed debuff on Hodir. I’ve uploaded a video of our kill to Filefront, go check it out in HD quality (my latency jumped up to 600 for this try so you’ll notice a couple of lag spikes, sorry about that).

Going back to the title of this post; I’d like to commend everyone in the raid and say that it wasn’t a rare raid from the perspective of performance, attitude and focus. I’m proud to say that we’ve become accustomed to everyone performing well and always being up for wiping again and again on a hard-mode until we get it done. You’re all awesome.

I’ll end this post by mentioning that some of us have also been fooling around in 10-man Ulduar. We’ve gotten the Glory of the Ulduar Raider meta-achievement done to secure some drakes and unlocking Algalon. If you’d like a closer look, here’s a couple of videos to sink your teeth into:

Yogg-Saron +1: One Light in the Darkness
PoV: Tagor, boomkin playing resto spec [ YouTube HD ]

Assembly of Iron hard-mode: I Choose You, Steelbreaker, solo-tanked
PoV: Jomotei, survival hunter [ YouTube HD ]

Meow.

The interlopers that we are, we dared to interfere with his sport. And he paid the price.

That’s right, we got Thorim hard-mode done recently. It was an exciting kill, both tanks died before Thorim was freed of Yogg-Saron’s influence and the last couple of percent of health were taken off while he was chasing dpsers around.

We followed that up by one-shotting Three Lights in the Darkness, which despite not being that much harder than a regular Yogg kill appears to be a realm first. Maybe other guilds are skipping it in favour of practicing one or two lights. Whatever the reason, it bumped us up to realm #2 on wowprogress.com for the time being, which is a nice little acknowledgement of everyone’s effort and good work and the fact that we’re able to keep progressing despite the usual summer dip in activity.

Looking forward, we’re currently trying to make a dent in Steelbreaker. We had a few attempts this week and got him to around 30% a couple of times. Our dps seemed sufficient to burn him down in time provided we can avoid non-tank deaths so hopefully we can get it done soon.

Meep meep.

“When Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept for there were no more worlds to conquer.”

Yes, as the above quote illustrates, we finished off the hardest encounter in the game this week; the 10-man version of Sartharion with all 3 drakes up. It was the last world left for us to conquer in current PvE content. The part about weeping is a blatant lie, though, as we’re actually very excited about this development.

After a few long wipe nights while we were learning what tactic and setup was working for us, we actually killed him on the first attempt of the evening in question. It wasn’t a perfectly smooth kill, as we lost two dpsers inside the portal after Vesperon died, but the group was able to adapt and finish him off, even if it was painfully slow due to being down to two fully spec’d dpsers.

In the end, the setup we found worked best for our group was based on control rather than dps. We had 3 tanks, 3 healers and 4 dps and simply healed through the Twilight Torment phase, not taking any portals until all three drakes were dead. Here’s a full list of the setup along with two videos of the kill, from the points of view of our add tank and boomkin.

Anubelle, protection paladin
Apteryx, warlock (Voidwalker tank)
Braggha, protection warrior [ watch PoV video ]

Argha, restoration shaman
Kaylani, holy priest
Ostalia, holy paladin

Jomotei, survival hunter
Lynessa, shadow priest
Molgon, mage
Tagor, balance druid [ watch PoV video ]

While all the basic content is now done, we still have some stuff to do until Ulduar rolls around, including working on completing the Glory of the Raider and Heroic: Glory of the Raider achievements.

I’m one of those people who thinks it’s fun to farm old artifacts from outdated content. My fellow guild leader Anubelle is another. We’ve been farming stuff like the Zul’Gurub mounts and the bindings in Molten Core for a while now.

Between us we have both a tiger (Anubelle) and a raptor (Jomotei), but we haven’t had much luck with mounts since that magical reset all those weeks ago when those two dropped in the same run. However, in order to increase our odds, and given our jump from level 70 to 80, we’ve recently expanded our expeditions to include Sethekk Halls for the Raven Lord mount and Magister’s Terrace for the big white chicken.

Well, given that I’m now writing a blog post, you’re probably suspecting that something dropped. It’s either that or a whine about an unmatched streak of frustration. You know what, maybe it can be both! Yes, I will start off with a whine.

We started tonight’s mount runs with a trip to Zul’Gurub. No tigers or raptors dropped. In fact, the only thing that dropped was me when I stopped by the Gurubashi arena while Anubelle was getting some coffee to wake up. I managed to kill some alliance death knight trying to make off with the chest only to be immediately ambushed myself by a horde rogue, a friend of the guild, who had been lurking in the shadows. Grr, fucking Gunir.

So there I am a short while later, arriving at Auchindoun, slightly peeved but ready to fight my way deep inside Sethekk Halls for another chance at that pretty raven mount. But what’s this? Anubelle has become bored while waiting for me to move both my hunter and my druid alt here (more on that later) and has tabbed out to watch YouTube videos of nerdraging WoW players.

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No new kills to report, but then we’ve already killed all the creatures that are out there to be killed. The only thing that remains is to kill a bunch of them at the same time (Sartharion with all 3 drakes up) and I’m confident that will come as soon as we can field a balanced raid with tanks that don’t disconnect every 10 seconds.

*cough*

Still, we’re steadily progressing in terms of performance, and during tonight’s raid we set some new guild benchmarks. First of all, we cleared both (heroic) Naxxramas and (heroic) Malygos in one night, putting together a very smooth run. We did have one wipe but only because a certain maintank started having hot flashes or something and decided to submit to Thaddius because people were failing the Heroic: Shocking! achievement. That elf will not go quietly into the night.

Another benchmark was set on Patchwerk as we killed him in 2 minutes 35 seconds, which ranks as a top 500 performance on Wow Web Stats (455/42705). It was a very nice improvement, especially considering we did not use haste pots or similar consumables or had stacked the raid with dps.

The Malygos kill to round off the night was a fast one as well and set a new benchmark for us as he died in 7 minutes 31 seconds. There’s still some distance to the Heroic: You Don’t Have An Eternity achievement, but still a very nice effort considering we were just clearing farm content and not going for any speed records.

The night was capped off in style as Alexstrasza left behind an Azure drake for us, which I think has only happened once before on our fair realm. Molgon was able to haxx a roll of 99, so congratulations to him. And just for the record; the next time you meet him, no, he’s not just happy to see you, that’s his newfound giant e-peen making that bulge in his robe.

All in all, a very enjoyable evening, and it’s nice to see our recruitment efforts paying off. We’ve come a long way already and come the next major content patch we look forward to proving in Ulduar that we’re one of the best guilds on the server. We certainly have the most bloodthirsty mages. And the hottest elves. And the furriest beartanks. And the shamans most likely to be ganked by zombies.