Yeah, you read it right! We actually did it, killed the last boss in the game, The Lich King himself.
It's really hard to find the proper words to describe my feelings at the moment, but mostly feels like 1000 tons taken off my shoulders.
We were really struggling in last few months, had a slow progress, mostly because we were unable to have stable raids going. Main reason for that is that people were getting tired and bored, and motivation was dropping rapidly. Frustration was growing like a cancer, people started to behave strangely, and it was not looking promising.
So what do great men do when things go wrong and bad? Well don’t know what they do, but I know what we did! Once again, we tightened our lines, took out the little passion we had left for this game, recruited some more people, and at the end we decided that killing the Lich King is our top priority before summer, and started to act in that direction. We had to make one painful decision, which was not totally fair to all the people in the guild, and that is to extend the raid lockout in order to have as many tries on LK as we can.
And once again it proved that practice is all that matters. We had some small experience from one kill on 10 men, so we basically knew what to expect – but you cannot really compare fights on 10 and 25 men – 25 men proved to be much more difficult to master.
Phase one is relatively easy, and after some tweaking with tanking positioning, we were doing relatively good, with only problem coming with people falling asleep and not moving with debuff on time. Same story goes for first midphase, it’s not that hard, and it wasn’t much of a problem.
Phase two is the hardest phase in this fight, and we were ready to spend lots of days on mastering it. At the end, we adopted the spreading before defile, and gathering on Valkyres tactic, with huge usage of Team Speak. Luckily, we had Ste aka Gypo, who sacrificed his healing (wasn’t really noticed I must add!) and Bladi, to guide us on TS, by watching timers for all people in the raid. At the end, Ste decided, encouraged by his class leader, that we are good enough, and that we don’t need his guidance any more. That gave us few more wipes in that phase, but with some other people stepping in, we managed to overcome it, and started to enter second midphase.
Few times we were caught unprepaired for it, and wiped miserably after spending 10 minutes on really promising attempts. So, once again TS came to the rescue, and one more problem was solved.
At that point, we felt that kill was near, because phase 2 is really the most difficult phase of this fight, and we were getting really good at it. Well, our feelings were wrong, and few quick wipes in phase 3 woke us up. After looking at our strategy again, we realized that tactic was OK, but people’s reaction were sloppy, and that we must be patient and let the time and practice do the trick again.
Last night wasn’t looking promising, since we didn’t have our main paladin healer in the raid, and we know that if he is not healing the tanks just for a second, they will die, we will wipe etc. But, we respeced one retri pala who never healed in any raid before to holy, and decided to go and have some more tries.
After some bad attempts, mostly because we couldn’t read timers properly, we reached the phase 3 for the first time of the night, just to wipe after some 30 seconds because raid was decimated by first wave of Vyle Spirits, coupled with people dying with Soul Harvest on them. It was clear we need more and more practice in phase 3.
After some more explaining about not stacking up and kiting when needed, we gave it one more try. First phase and midphase went good, but then we lost one person on the very first Valkyre spawn in the phase two. We decided to just continue, in hope to reach phase 3 and have some more practice. And we did, reasonably easy, everything went smooth, transition was good, and we reached phase 3 with all people alive. And again, we had the same problems – we were losing people quickly, but it looked bit more promising, and it proved by us passing the previous best attempt we had – 29%. Tanks were doing really good job with moving, allowing us to have more time for Vyle spirits, but that didn’t help us much – we were having only 10 people alive at 20% mark, 2 of them being healers, coupled with 2 tanks – which means we had 6 dps alive. But we didn’t want to give up, we kept pushing, and slowly his health was dropping down, and it looked like a miracle was about to happen. And it did, we were able to keep 2 tanks and majority of the dps alive, and we reached the famous 10%! At that point LK killed us all, then noob paladin who was frozen the whole fight decided it was about time he do something, he ressed us and entrapped LK, giving us the opportunity to unleash our anger at him and nuke him down from 10 to 0 percent!
Once again, big thanks to all the people in the guild – both to the old members who sticked around all these years, and still had the strength to do one more final push, and to the new members who showed for wipe nights despite the raid lockout extending.
It's really hard to find the proper words to describe my feelings at the moment, but mostly feels like 1000 tons taken off my shoulders.
We were really struggling in last few months, had a slow progress, mostly because we were unable to have stable raids going. Main reason for that is that people were getting tired and bored, and motivation was dropping rapidly. Frustration was growing like a cancer, people started to behave strangely, and it was not looking promising.
So what do great men do when things go wrong and bad? Well don’t know what they do, but I know what we did! Once again, we tightened our lines, took out the little passion we had left for this game, recruited some more people, and at the end we decided that killing the Lich King is our top priority before summer, and started to act in that direction. We had to make one painful decision, which was not totally fair to all the people in the guild, and that is to extend the raid lockout in order to have as many tries on LK as we can.
And once again it proved that practice is all that matters. We had some small experience from one kill on 10 men, so we basically knew what to expect – but you cannot really compare fights on 10 and 25 men – 25 men proved to be much more difficult to master.
Phase one is relatively easy, and after some tweaking with tanking positioning, we were doing relatively good, with only problem coming with people falling asleep and not moving with debuff on time. Same story goes for first midphase, it’s not that hard, and it wasn’t much of a problem.
Phase two is the hardest phase in this fight, and we were ready to spend lots of days on mastering it. At the end, we adopted the spreading before defile, and gathering on Valkyres tactic, with huge usage of Team Speak. Luckily, we had Ste aka Gypo, who sacrificed his healing (wasn’t really noticed I must add!) and Bladi, to guide us on TS, by watching timers for all people in the raid. At the end, Ste decided, encouraged by his class leader, that we are good enough, and that we don’t need his guidance any more. That gave us few more wipes in that phase, but with some other people stepping in, we managed to overcome it, and started to enter second midphase.
Few times we were caught unprepaired for it, and wiped miserably after spending 10 minutes on really promising attempts. So, once again TS came to the rescue, and one more problem was solved.
At that point, we felt that kill was near, because phase 2 is really the most difficult phase of this fight, and we were getting really good at it. Well, our feelings were wrong, and few quick wipes in phase 3 woke us up. After looking at our strategy again, we realized that tactic was OK, but people’s reaction were sloppy, and that we must be patient and let the time and practice do the trick again.
Last night wasn’t looking promising, since we didn’t have our main paladin healer in the raid, and we know that if he is not healing the tanks just for a second, they will die, we will wipe etc. But, we respeced one retri pala who never healed in any raid before to holy, and decided to go and have some more tries.
After some bad attempts, mostly because we couldn’t read timers properly, we reached the phase 3 for the first time of the night, just to wipe after some 30 seconds because raid was decimated by first wave of Vyle Spirits, coupled with people dying with Soul Harvest on them. It was clear we need more and more practice in phase 3.
After some more explaining about not stacking up and kiting when needed, we gave it one more try. First phase and midphase went good, but then we lost one person on the very first Valkyre spawn in the phase two. We decided to just continue, in hope to reach phase 3 and have some more practice. And we did, reasonably easy, everything went smooth, transition was good, and we reached phase 3 with all people alive. And again, we had the same problems – we were losing people quickly, but it looked bit more promising, and it proved by us passing the previous best attempt we had – 29%. Tanks were doing really good job with moving, allowing us to have more time for Vyle spirits, but that didn’t help us much – we were having only 10 people alive at 20% mark, 2 of them being healers, coupled with 2 tanks – which means we had 6 dps alive. But we didn’t want to give up, we kept pushing, and slowly his health was dropping down, and it looked like a miracle was about to happen. And it did, we were able to keep 2 tanks and majority of the dps alive, and we reached the famous 10%! At that point LK killed us all, then noob paladin who was frozen the whole fight decided it was about time he do something, he ressed us and entrapped LK, giving us the opportunity to unleash our anger at him and nuke him down from 10 to 0 percent!
Once again, big thanks to all the people in the guild – both to the old members who sticked around all these years, and still had the strength to do one more final push, and to the new members who showed for wipe nights despite the raid lockout extending.
Last night we added one more to the kill list, that being the bone dragon, Sindragosa.
Fight has 2 phases, phase one being relatively easy, and phase two being the chaotic, therefore hard one.
Now, keep in mind that it's Hybrids we are talking about, there so such thing as easy, relatively easy etc, we make all the simple things be hard.
Phase one has two sub phases, ground and air one.
In ground phase there are 2 things to worry about - 1st being a debuff, diferent for melee and ranged/healers, but it esentially does the same thing - damages you when you do damage or cast. So, all you have to do is not to let it stack too much, and you are pretty safe. Other thing, which caused much more trouble, is her AoE magentic pull, after which you have only couple of seconds to run to the safe distance. We've seen all sort of failings on this one, blaming lag, not working mouse, bugs, etc. But with more practice, people got used to it, and we kept our loses to the minimum on that ability. Also, there's her frost AoE aura, which damages the whole raid, but it's not a big problem in this phase at least.
In air phase, she picks five random raid members, and after some seconds, turn them into iceblocks, which you must use to LoS her AoE breath. Also, you must kill all iceblocks once she lands, in order to free captured people. Best case scenario is to bring all five iceblocks to low health, then once she lands, just finish them. The only problem in this phase was finding the correct spots for placing the iceblocks, not to be to far or to close to the rest of the raid, because everyone standing near person marked for iceblock, will get iceblocked himself. But, surprisingly, we established correct positions without many troubles, and with some help of macro for positioning, we really mastered this phase (HyS dictionary - mastered: make a mistake every 20 minutes, not often).
Phase two starts at 35%, and is esentialy the combination of ground and air subphases of the phase one. She will stay grounded, keeping the abilities from
ground phase, but there are two more things to deal with - one being the stacking debuff she applies to the whole raid, and other being the iceblock again. She randomly picks someone from raid every 15 seconds or so, mark for iceblock, after that persons has roughly 5 seconds to go away from the raid and plant an iceblock safely. Iceblocks are used for getting rid of that new debuff, which increases magical damage taken, so you have to go behind iceblock, wait for debuff to expire, then kill the iceblock. After some expirementing (read whiping), we concluded that having to designated spots, one at the line of her head, other at the line of her tail, for dropping iceblocks is what works best for us. Of course, theory is one thing, in practice we dealt with all kind of problems, from people not knowing what's left and what's right, we even used tried using flares (the smoke!), people were still failing, we changed the colors of the flare, but still were failing. My guess is that people were just panicking, having to worry about themselves, not to stack too much debuffs, and keeping track of debuffs and watching CD timers for abilities is too much stress! So, it was just a matter of waiting for people to actually get used to it, and at the end, somehow, still a mistery to me, with 10 people alive for the last 2 millions of her health, we succeded.
Normally, I would say good job everyone, but I won't, because i believe we will have a lot more trouble on this one.
Anyway, this means we have cleared all the wings in the ICC prior to the Lich King himself, and we decided to go and try him, giving me an oportunity for a nice
screenshot, and a hope that people, for once, will actualy be prepaired for the last boss in the game, the one which concludes this expansion.
Fight has 2 phases, phase one being relatively easy, and phase two being the chaotic, therefore hard one.
Now, keep in mind that it's Hybrids we are talking about, there so such thing as easy, relatively easy etc, we make all the simple things be hard.
Phase one has two sub phases, ground and air one.
In ground phase there are 2 things to worry about - 1st being a debuff, diferent for melee and ranged/healers, but it esentially does the same thing - damages you when you do damage or cast. So, all you have to do is not to let it stack too much, and you are pretty safe. Other thing, which caused much more trouble, is her AoE magentic pull, after which you have only couple of seconds to run to the safe distance. We've seen all sort of failings on this one, blaming lag, not working mouse, bugs, etc. But with more practice, people got used to it, and we kept our loses to the minimum on that ability. Also, there's her frost AoE aura, which damages the whole raid, but it's not a big problem in this phase at least.
In air phase, she picks five random raid members, and after some seconds, turn them into iceblocks, which you must use to LoS her AoE breath. Also, you must kill all iceblocks once she lands, in order to free captured people. Best case scenario is to bring all five iceblocks to low health, then once she lands, just finish them. The only problem in this phase was finding the correct spots for placing the iceblocks, not to be to far or to close to the rest of the raid, because everyone standing near person marked for iceblock, will get iceblocked himself. But, surprisingly, we established correct positions without many troubles, and with some help of macro for positioning, we really mastered this phase (HyS dictionary - mastered: make a mistake every 20 minutes, not often).
Phase two starts at 35%, and is esentialy the combination of ground and air subphases of the phase one. She will stay grounded, keeping the abilities from
ground phase, but there are two more things to deal with - one being the stacking debuff she applies to the whole raid, and other being the iceblock again. She randomly picks someone from raid every 15 seconds or so, mark for iceblock, after that persons has roughly 5 seconds to go away from the raid and plant an iceblock safely. Iceblocks are used for getting rid of that new debuff, which increases magical damage taken, so you have to go behind iceblock, wait for debuff to expire, then kill the iceblock. After some expirementing (read whiping), we concluded that having to designated spots, one at the line of her head, other at the line of her tail, for dropping iceblocks is what works best for us. Of course, theory is one thing, in practice we dealt with all kind of problems, from people not knowing what's left and what's right, we even used tried using flares (the smoke!), people were still failing, we changed the colors of the flare, but still were failing. My guess is that people were just panicking, having to worry about themselves, not to stack too much debuffs, and keeping track of debuffs and watching CD timers for abilities is too much stress! So, it was just a matter of waiting for people to actually get used to it, and at the end, somehow, still a mistery to me, with 10 people alive for the last 2 millions of her health, we succeded.
Normally, I would say good job everyone, but I won't, because i believe we will have a lot more trouble on this one.
Anyway, this means we have cleared all the wings in the ICC prior to the Lich King himself, and we decided to go and try him, giving me an oportunity for a nice
screenshot, and a hope that people, for once, will actualy be prepaired for the last boss in the game, the one which concludes this expansion.
Usually I don't bother posting news from 10 men raids, making exceptions only if something extraordinary happens.
Well something extraordinary did happen last week, and that is the killing of the Lich King himself.
With focus being set on 25 men raids, we really didn't tackle the 10 men raid with full force - mostly because finding a 10 people active whole week (weekends included), willing to spend some extra time after 25 men raids was next to impossible.
But after some time, when most of people got all the gear they wanted/needed from frost badges, situation was changing, a good old will for trying and killing new bosses prevailed, and each week there was a 10 men raid that was reaching, and trying (whiping) the Lich King.
So, it's fair to say, this kill was a guild effort, with people joining and passing spots after some bosses, unluckily we just couldn't bring some of the really active people on the actual kill, but that doesn't make their contribution less important.
Fight itself has epic proportions, because it lasts for really long, giving a time for 2 bloodlusts and countless mana tides/innervates etc. :), but also it's pretty much non-forgiving fight, if anyone makes a mistake, it's almost certain that whipe will happen.
And at the end, it proved that practice is all that matters, after we managed to stay awake for 10+ mins, we got him easily.
Well something extraordinary did happen last week, and that is the killing of the Lich King himself.
With focus being set on 25 men raids, we really didn't tackle the 10 men raid with full force - mostly because finding a 10 people active whole week (weekends included), willing to spend some extra time after 25 men raids was next to impossible.
But after some time, when most of people got all the gear they wanted/needed from frost badges, situation was changing, a good old will for trying and killing new bosses prevailed, and each week there was a 10 men raid that was reaching, and trying (whiping) the Lich King.
So, it's fair to say, this kill was a guild effort, with people joining and passing spots after some bosses, unluckily we just couldn't bring some of the really active people on the actual kill, but that doesn't make their contribution less important.
Fight itself has epic proportions, because it lasts for really long, giving a time for 2 bloodlusts and countless mana tides/innervates etc. :), but also it's pretty much non-forgiving fight, if anyone makes a mistake, it's almost certain that whipe will happen.
And at the end, it proved that practice is all that matters, after we managed to stay awake for 10+ mins, we got him easily.
Yes, we have cleared the 3rd wing in ICC, killing the last boss in The Crimson Hall, Blood-Queen Lana'thel.
And yes, we killed it few weeks ago, and in my usual fast pace news updating manner (not), I am posting news with small delay.
Fight itself is based around raid survivability, and heavy dps in the process. There are two phases of the fight, which repeats after some time, ground and air phase.
In ground phase, there are several abilities to deal with. Starting with AoE damaging aura, which is not a big deal, and can be healed comfortably. There is also a debuff casted on the random person in the raid, called Swarming Shadow, causing shadow damage and leaving a shadow trail behind the targeted person. It's also easy to take care of, by moving to the edge of the room and kiting. Another ability is Pact of the Darkfallen, which links three raid members with red beam, dealing damage to them and nearby friendly targets, untill linked targets move to at least 5 yds from each other. And finally, there is ability called Vampiric Bite, casted on high threat non-tanking target, which makes you do double damage without making aggro, but there is a catch, after 50 secs or so, you have to bite someone else, or you will end up being mind controlled for the rest of the fight (or until being killed).
In air phase, she does an AoE fear, which can be dispelled, and doing massive AoE, which multiplies if you have friendly targets near you. This phase last very short, and usually starts in worst possible moment, when you have to bite someone to spread the damage buff.
So, as you already know from previous post, we had "some" trouble with spreading and biting, but with more practice, things started to look really promising. After some tweaks with range positions, and having melee hug the wall after fear, we started to survive air phase with full numbers, and it was just a matter of time when will she go down. And on march 22nd, we managed to get all three shamans in the raid, distributed them in 3 groups, and were praying that tremor totem will tick on time for a change! And it did, coupled with perfect timing on bloodlust from Ghee - I will have to stop here, and with tears dropping from my eyes, cause I am so proud of him, it took only 3 years since bloodlust was given to shamans, and he popped it in right moment for once. :D
And yes, we killed it few weeks ago, and in my usual fast pace news updating manner (not), I am posting news with small delay.
Fight itself is based around raid survivability, and heavy dps in the process. There are two phases of the fight, which repeats after some time, ground and air phase.
In ground phase, there are several abilities to deal with. Starting with AoE damaging aura, which is not a big deal, and can be healed comfortably. There is also a debuff casted on the random person in the raid, called Swarming Shadow, causing shadow damage and leaving a shadow trail behind the targeted person. It's also easy to take care of, by moving to the edge of the room and kiting. Another ability is Pact of the Darkfallen, which links three raid members with red beam, dealing damage to them and nearby friendly targets, untill linked targets move to at least 5 yds from each other. And finally, there is ability called Vampiric Bite, casted on high threat non-tanking target, which makes you do double damage without making aggro, but there is a catch, after 50 secs or so, you have to bite someone else, or you will end up being mind controlled for the rest of the fight (or until being killed).
In air phase, she does an AoE fear, which can be dispelled, and doing massive AoE, which multiplies if you have friendly targets near you. This phase last very short, and usually starts in worst possible moment, when you have to bite someone to spread the damage buff.
So, as you already know from previous post, we had "some" trouble with spreading and biting, but with more practice, things started to look really promising. After some tweaks with range positions, and having melee hug the wall after fear, we started to survive air phase with full numbers, and it was just a matter of time when will she go down. And on march 22nd, we managed to get all three shamans in the raid, distributed them in 3 groups, and were praying that tremor totem will tick on time for a change! And it did, coupled with perfect timing on bloodlust from Ghee - I will have to stop here, and with tears dropping from my eyes, cause I am so proud of him, it took only 3 years since bloodlust was given to shamans, and he popped it in right moment for once. :D
