ICC Crimson Hall-Blood Princes
 

The first encounter in this wing is an execution check with a very cyclical nature. The purpose of this thread is to explore the mechanics for the many abilities present and to discuss optimal ways to address them. While many guilds have downed this encounter with few major issues, proper understanding is crucial.

In 25 man, it appears that three normal tanks are optimal. In 10 man, use your typical MT and OT, assigning the MT to the two physical princes and your OT to Keleseth. Six healers make 25 fairly easy, and with no hard or soft enrage, this seems the safe route. Five healers should be completely doable. In 10 man, three healers feels warranted, though 2 can be used with adequate gear/experience.

The normal and empowered abilities of this encounter are well-documented. There are a few mechanics which are not quite clear, which I will touch on below.

Tank Positioning

In 10 man, it is recommended that you tank Valanar and Taladram on top of one another with the same tank, to keep Vindication/Demo Roar/Demo Shout up and significantly reduce tank damage (thanks Redcape). Positioning is flexible and some report success at the top of the stairs or against a wall. Keleseth is mobile, and will follow his tank.

In 25 man, it is recommended that you tank Valanar and Taladram separately, due to Shock Blast. Assigning a tank to Taladram who can reduce AP will significantly decrease tank damage. Again, Keleseth will remain mobile.

Empowered Abilities

Prince Valanar will empower first, and Empowered Shock Vortex seems to be the hardest mechanic to learn. Ideally, all healers and ranged will be over 30 yards from Valanar and can avoid this entirely. Melee should be assigned to run in different directions, to ensure they are all 13 yards apart after the 4.5 second cast. Keep in mind the Keleseth tank will be running around collecting nuclei and may be hit by this ability.

Prince Taldaram will empower second and cast a stronger version of his flame sphere. In 10 man, this hit everyone within 15 yards of the target for 20-25,000 damage. We simply shielded the target and ignored it. In 25 man, it is beneficial to run away from the sphere, since it is more likely that there are others within 15 yards of the target.

Prince Keleseth will cast a stronger version of his shadow bolt. By the time these start hitting, the ranged tank should have at least 3-4 dark nuclei on him. The shadow damage reduction is multiplicative, using the formula 1-(0.65^N) where N is the number of nuclei (see Ciopo's post on page 2). This gives a reduction of:
1 Nuclei: 35% shadow reduction
2 Nuclei: 58%
3 Nuclei: 73%
4 Nuclei: 82%
5 Nuclei: 88%
6 Nuclei: 94%

The tank can expect to consistently keep 4-5 nuclei.

Other Annoying Abilities

Prince Valanar will cast Kinetic Bomb, which must be periodically dpsed to keep it floating. Some have reported a bug where it might be possible to launch it high enough to aggro Blood Queen Lana'thel. Three bombs can be active at a time, in both 10 and 25 man, and bombs can spawn anywhere in the room. Dps should be assigned to monitor areas of the room. Frost mages and hunters seem to be best at this. With 3 bombs, 2 dpsers are occupied nearly full-time. This unfairly affects 10 man.

Prince Taldaram will cast Glittering Sparks periodically. A random target will be chosen and those nearby will be affected. The damage from this ability is significant, and the movement speed debuff makes it hard to spread out for Empowered Shock Vortex. However, this ability can be dispelled/cleansed, and should be quickly.

Mechanics to Address

1. Nuclei aggro: It appears that nuclei will latch on to the target that last hit it. The are immune to AoE, but can be affected by abilities which hit multiple targets (multi-shot, chain lightning, etc). See Adana's research on page 2. It is possible to take a nuclei to your Keleseth tank and have him pull it off.

2. Keleseth tanking: Currently, concensus favors a normal tank. The increased health pool is very advantageous. Warlock or other caster tanks are certainly viable, particularly since the hotfix removing Keleseth's ability to melee.

3. Kinetic Bomb: This must be kept in the air, due to high raid damage and a wide-ranging knockback. It is not clear if they despawn on landing, but this is not believed to be the case. Up to 3 can exist at any given time, even in 10 man.

I'd like to add from my own experience that using Tricks to MD one of the princes with "1" health didn't seem to work correctly.

We hadn't planned on doing the council last night but had a little extra time so we pulled them twice just to see. In our 10man attempts we used a single tank for the two melee princes. The plan was for the tank to tag both and I would then force the prince that was not the primary target onto him using TotT before begging DPS (similarly to what we did for single tanking twin valks in TOGC10). We made sure to have our tank tag the prince first to put himself on the aggro table that way there shouldn't be any problems. After tagging the prince, the prince started to run towards the tank, at which point I began TotT and DPS on him. He promptly turned and killed me.

The Nuclei can switch targets. I picked up the ones on the opposite side of the room from our Warlock and he was able to have them move to him, but they seemed to take longer to pull off than regular mobs.

I noticed last night that as soon as I hit one (The Nuclei) i had alot of threat, people would bring other to me and I could pull them off with a single dot. I'd assume that they focus whoever last did damage to them. This was a problem when a druid pulled on with a dot and it switched back to him after one tick.

We made a couple of attempts in our last 30 minutes of raiding last night and we had similar aggro issues.

We assigned a warrior tank to each of the princes along with a warlock ranged tank. When the warriors charged in, the second warrior would immediately lose threat on the prince with just 1 HP. MD & TotT didn't seem to help at all.

For the Dark Nuclei, I can totally believe that it fixates on whoever did damage last. We made one attempt with me (warrior) tanking the Shadow Prince (Keleseth) and it turns out the Dark Nuclei are immune to Taunt (at least, warrior's taunt which does no damage) so I called for misdirect and the nuclei immediately turns and latches onto the hunter. I'll admit that after two times of this I thought bad things of our hunter, but if they don't have an aggro table but instead just fixate on last person to do damage to them, that would make sense. (Don't know if it's true, but it fits our observations).

There is no need for a ranged tank in 10 man -- just have one tank pick up Taladram and Valanar and your other tank pick up Keleseth and collect nuclei. Sure, you could have a warlock or other ranged class do it, but this is just a two tank fight, and it makes healing much more forgiving (letting you effectively bring more dps -- one gained from not using three healers, and one gained from not having a third tank).

Kinetic Bombs
 

The amount of boost a kinetic bomb gets from a hit appears to be independent of damage done. So a faster spammable spell will get you more lift-per-unit-time than a slower but more damaging spell.

For example, Arcane Barrage doesn't seem to push the bomb up any higher than Ice Lance per cast, but Ice Lance is spammable on GCD.

Also, a water elemental can keep a Kinetic Bomb up indefinitely (if it stays alive). Presumably an imp could do the job too.

Was your group successful with this strat? We played around with various tanking approaches last night and were testing to see if what you described was feasible, and our conclusion is that it probably is not wise to do this. We wiped a bit due to trying to drop a healer/tank because we were in a bit of dis-belief that a 10 man encounter would "encourage" 3 tanks 3 healers. The princes melee damage is about 15-20K per swing, which so the tank would take 30K+ damage per "swing", pretty much meaning said tank dies in under 4 seconds . One healer can't heal 50K damage in 4 seconds consistently, last I checked, especially if your healer needs to move for any reason.

Once we finally decided to go 3 tanks 3 heals, we pretty much had the fight down, but stopped due to how late it was. We also got the impression that the fight was harder on 10 than it is on 25, which is something I'll find out for myself later this week.

Yes, we were successful with a mildly peculiar healing setup (two druids):

World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

Admittedly gear definitely carries you quite a distance on this, but we found our range tank (a mage) died too easily on the pull or with any lapse in healing (which can happen due to movement requirements). Once we switched to just two tanking the fight, it was 1-2 pulls to a kill.

Be careful using pets - this was the cause of the bug that caused Lana'thel to pull early wasting an attempt.

In addition, be wary of some things using pets. First, it is possible to have more than 1 bomb up at once, so you can't simply have 1 Warlock using an Imp and expecting to have the bombs taken care of. Second, the pets have travel time to get in range. Third, while Hunter pets can hit the bombs for a while, after they reach a certain height, they will go out of range, and the pet will switch to the next closest target.

In 25 man we saw a max of 4 bombs up at once, and they appear to spawn randomly around the room. Myself and another hunter split the room up North/South and were in charge of keeping the orbs up. With 2 bombs you could do some damage to the current prince, but with 3 it became a full time job just to keep them up.

I've seen 3 up at the same time in 10-man. Usually I get the first hit and boost it with ice lance spam then leave the WE on it to maintain while I handle bombs in a different sector.

I'm thinking it might make sense to have four quadrants and a ranged DPS in each to handle whatever bombs show up in their quadrant. But in 10-man that's 3 tanks, 3 healers, 4 ranged DPS.... Maybe just 2 quadrants in 10-man.

We got them to 1% as best tonight, teh only reason we didnt have a kill was because Keleseth meeled our warlock which one shotted him on about 20%, so when Keleseth got empowered it wiped us. Does anyone know the reason for Keleseth to just run up to the range tank and meele?
We had this happen on other attempts too. Sometimes it was in the middle of the fight and sometimes in the start. To avoid him going strait for the ranged tank in the begining we used Blessing of Protection on him so he wouldnt be meeled. It seemed to work fine, but we still had teh incident were Keleseth would just stop casting and decide to run to the ranged tank and meele him.
Anyone else experienced this?

The tuning on the 10man version seems way off. There were so many kinetic bombs spawning that in such a big room with so few people and depending on group makeup where you might not have much ranged at all it just seemed pretty unfeasible. Sometimes there could be up to 3 orbs in different locations in the room. The damage seemed really big too. We wiped for 2 hours about and it was really hard to get any headway with how much damage went off. We tried 1 warlock tank, few tries we had a prot pala substituting but the melee hits and keeping nuclei on him was pretty hard. And then 2 other tanks and 3 healers, so 3 tanks and 3 healers, which left us with 1 ranged dps or 2 if the warlock wasn't tanking. We didn't try any 2 tank tactic due to the sheer melee damage, but that's definitely something we'd try next time.