We finally got around to killing the Lich King in our 10-man team. One of the disadvantages of not doing 25-man dungeons and not recruiting beyond your 10 people is that people don’t show for some raids and eventually gear is going to catch up to you on things. We would have had it a month ago but our second highest DPS had to go away on a business trip for two weeks and then I had to go to a wedding for two weeks in a different province.
Before I left on vacation the buff was at 20% and our raid was below a 5,000 gear score level. After the 5% buff our average gear score rose to 5,200 gear score. We had 2 hours of attempts on Lich King behind us to perfect phase 1 and get to see what phase 2 is like. The key to phase 2 is positioning. You want your defiles to be placed along the edges (preferably north and south edges) of the map and you want everyone positioned slightly closer to where no defiles are in the path that the Valkrie would drop you. Once we got down phase 2, phase 3 was easy. I was happy I got to be Soul Harvested and got to do that part of the fight, he only harvested three people so only those three really get the kind of instant action you need to take on downing the ad killing the king.
All in all it took us a total of four attempts to kill him, one attempt was a wipe in phase 1 to a certain demo lock (oh hi) pulling aggro on the Lich King and getting everyone cleaved. The kill was kind of unsatisfying. I come from a background of hardcore Sunwell raiding where a kill comes from endless hours of dying to stupid random elements and single player fails. In our kill four people failed hard and we had to use two battle rezes and an ankh to get the kill. It’s as if all the stars aligned.
I’m happy that we’re still a little bit ahead of the curve. The average casual guild still does not have Lich King down on 10-man but I suspect that’ll change very soon. The buff was designed so skilled players could beat Lich King. The end of this buff is a 50% increase. Almost all the bosses were pretty fun and the dungeon was well designed. The only fight that really wasn’t that fun was Rotface. It didn’t have any dynamic elements in it that made it feel like you were doing elite stuff, nor did you have the opportunity to perform high on meters.
Yep, hard modes for us, then I guess we’re done until Cata.
TheGameGuru.Me 