ICC - The Lich King (normal)
 

Hey everyone,

I figured now would be a good time to start a thread on the Lich King encounter and discuss strategies together.

My guild used up all its tries on the Lich King on this first week, without reaching the "Vile Spirits" phase once.
The best we did was kill two spawns of Val'kyrs before we were outnumbered by the Val'kyrs, or raped by oversized Defiles.

For the first phase, we decided to have the offtank take every add (ghouls+horrors) and use basically zero AE damage, except for DK's using Pestilence to get the damage multipliers on all the adds. Rogues would misdirect the ghouls and the offtank would taunt the horror.

This worked for us pretty well and we reached the second phase every time with no casualty and without being delayed DPS-wise on the first Raging Spirit (all the previous adds were dead from the "bouncing" disease at that point).

In phase 2, we had no problem taking down the first two Raging Spirits but the third gave us a few headaches : it spawns "too late" and the Lich King starts almost right after to shatter the ice border of the room. We finally decided we'd have our offtank run to the middle of the room (and even a little further, towards the Frozen Throne) and everyone else would follow him to not get hit by the frontal AE from the Spirit.

I get the feeling that we don't deal with this part of the encounter in the most clever manner : it takes forever to kill that last Raging Spirit due to all the movement involved, sometimes we even had that Spirit offtanked so long that we had to switch to DPSing the Val'kyrs, then return to finish it off. We even had a quite funny try where our offtank was caught by one of the Val'kyrs while he still had that last Spirit on him.

On the subject of the Val'kyrs, we tried several ways to assign the DPS to each Val'kyr, and we ended up splitting the raid in 3 DPS groups ("those 5 guys will kill the most northen Val'kyr, those 5 will kill the one to the left, those 5 the one to the right") and we were able to save all 3 "victims" a few times, so I guess that would work in the long run. We had 2 Death Knights respeced for Desecration and pretty much spamming Chains of Ice (I know they can't be slowed more than 50% but it just made the whole thing feel safer), and we asked our hunters to not use the slowing AE trap to not make it harder for everyone to see the Defile void zones.

What cost us our most promising tries was people not reacting fast enough to Defile, or not being able to handle the Val'kyrs crossing a Defile. I guess we paid our lack of experience on the fight (none of our 10-men groups reached the Lich King).

Anyway, I'm curious about how people deal with what they think are the keypoints of the fight, for us, it clearly was the phase 2 -> phase 3 transition.

We had only 3 pulls in 25-man, but our 10-man group was able to get to the P5 transition reliably. The P4->5 transition causes the same havoc as 2->3, except that we seem to end up with more than one spirit up to deal with; I don't know if it's because the adds spawn faster or we just happened to fall behind. Unless we're missing something it seems intended that you will have to reposition with one spirit alive and then burn it down before the Valkyrs spawn. I agree that these two transitions seem to be the sticking points.

I do feel like we've mastered P1, and it's identical between 10/25 modes. No DPS whatsoever was needed on the adds; it was enough to rely on the plague to clean up the 2 Horrors that spawned while we focused on the Lich King.


[Edit] After killing LK10 and spending a full night on LK25, I'm confident in saying that the hard components of the two are entirely different:

In 10-man, the transitions are a big issue. After P2, you're guaranteed to have one spirit up and your DPS may have to divert its attention to a valkyr before killing it. After P4, you will probably have two spirits up and your ranged DPS will be almost immediately forced to deal with vile spirits. This leads to the start of P5 being very rough, with healers quickly OOM if the raging spirits aren't taken care of promptly. We decided that even though it's possible to Heroism at the start and end of the fight, it was much more beneficial to use it at the start of P5 to burn the spirits down as soon as possible.

In 25-man, Raging Spirits die relatively quickly but the 3x Valkyr and Defiles combine for the biggest hurdle. It's natural to clump up for the valkyr and spread out for Defile, but their syncing forces good planning and rapid target selection to deal with the valkyr while spread enough for a bad Defile to not swallow the raid before anyone can react.

Some observations from our 10 man tonight.

Infest can be totally negated (or very nearly) by using power word shield on the raid. At most we only ever had 1-2 raid members in need of topping because our disc prevented all the damage, trivialising this mechanic.

If handled properly, you never need to dps the adds ever. We had our pally tank bouncing diseases the whole time, and even if we had extras during the transition, it wasn't a problem - our paladin tank just dragged the adds far away, and he kept bouncing diseases till everything was dead (this is contrary to the tankspot video which says this is a wipe situation if you have a lot of adds up during transition - it is NOT.) In the meantime our warrior just picked up the spirits, with our pally picking up the LK when he stopped using his aoe.

Having a raging spirit alive when the Valkyr come in P2 isn't really an issue. Just switch to the valks and switch back after. In P3 it is even less of an issue. We had 1 and a half spirits in phase 3 and you can just leave melee on it whilst ranged take care of the Vile Spirits. We found the best use of Bloodlust was during the 2>3 transition to stay on top of the Raging spirits. As for moving them we simply had the OT arc slightly to one side so he could move them around like that without hitting anyone. The fight is just about control. So long as your DPS on the Valkyr's/Vile Spirit's is enough to not have people die to them, you can take your time on LK.

25man
We have been working on phase 2 for 2 evenings now, but we have a problem with the defile and valkyr markings/killing. We are using the tactic where raid stacks after the first transition phase, wait for valkyrs to spawn and the spread out a little (while dpsing the valkyrs) to prepare for the defile.

Me personally, I am using both BW and DBM but I tend to follow BW more. So it's easy to call it on VT with "stack up", "spread out" etc.

Is this the best way to deal with it? We find that we manage to dps down the first valkyr wave, but the second is pure chaos and I feel like we are missing something here.

Another problem we have is the marking of the valkyr, is there an addon that can insta mark the 3 valkyrs based on pre assigned raid icons or something? Another thought I am having is, is there a way of "manipulating" the path the valkyrs fly? Like if raid is more to the left on the platform, will they all go to the left? Feels like on a lot of kill videos, they seem to be flying pretty close to each other, but for us, they are flying in completely different directions.

I would be more than happy to get some advice, by reply on by private PM.

The valkyrs seem to always choose the shortest possible path to the abyss. Have your raid (not the tanks) stick together in one point near (but not exactly at) the center to control their pathing. But we also have problems with the valkyrs especially when defile and valkyrs are happening almost at the same time (2nd valkyr wave) people get dropped into the abyss.

How exactly do you prevent a tank from being grabbed? I was grabbed by a valkyr when tanking a spirit. Considering it shifted me OUT of bear form that was a very quick death since the spirit still melee'd me too. Do you need to be on Arthas' threat list?

If the Valkyr do select the closest players to the edge, all you need to do to prevent that is to not be one of the three farthest from the center (or the farthest in 10). I can't say that I've confirmed this behavior though.

It doesn't matter if you're 2nd on threat, you can still be picked up. In fact, they check a few seconds before they grab you, so if you taunt the boss at the wrong time your MT is a valid target, similar to the ice tombs on Sindragosa.

You misread what he wrote. They choose the shortest path after picking a random player. You can't guarantee that they will pick anyone, but yes you can gaurantee the path they take. Just have the raid clumped up a few yards off of the center of the room.

We're pretty much hitting a wall with Defiles. Currently we're having the raid grouped up and we instruct defile targets to run in direction A, and the rest of the raid to move the opposite after the defile is cast. The cast time is just too short it seems to make that truly effective, though I believe paragon did just that in their kill video. We have never had the sharpest of reflexes so I would kill for an alternative.

For those having issues with marks and assigning teams; I just have my numpad assigned to distribute marks to my targets. My job is to mark them once they land. It's not instant but it really doesn't have to be. Killing the valks has not been a problem for us. Counting on people to react properly to a defile right when valks are landing, or to regroup into a good central position for valks following a defile is killing us.

We've been putting in a considerate amount of tries on Lich King 10man and were confident to kill him this evening. However, what kept us from doing so were the spirits in the last phase.

Our comp consists of the following:

Bear Tank
Warrior Tank
Unholy DK
Retribution Paladin
Enhancer Shaman
MM Hunter
Affliction Warlock
Holy Paladin
Resto Druid
Resto Shaman

We also have a Disc/Holy Priest in our repertoire who was not available but will be for future attempts.
If someone would like to take a look at some logs: World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

As you can see, our main problem is the lack of two things: Ranged DPS and Shields.
We are able to cruise along just fine until the last phase, but our 2 Ranged DPS are only able to down 1 spirit each, which still leaves up 6 who come down to wreak havoc among the raid. We tried AoEing them, but they are unable to kill them soon enough, leaving us just with the single target option. The combination of 6 more or less simultaneous spirits crashing into us paired with the other AoE-effects just overwhelms us, even though our tanks and plate-melees do their best to taunt mobs onto them instead of having them rip healers.
Without luck (i.e. nothing else happening at the same time) we are not able to get through a bombardement without deaths. When a ranged DPS gets sucked into Frostmourne, it gets even tighter.

Does anybody have any suggestions on how to handle this issue? My thought was to at least get in the Disc Priest to ease away the burst from the spirits. Another option of course would be to bring in another bombing ranged class (the priest could spec Shadow), but all in all we would prefer to be able to down him with our standard two ranged. Is there a viable, repeatable tactic for doing so? Any helpful comments or tips would be very much appreciated.

I understand the path selection, but I was proposing that they also selected the farthest players out. Looking at our attempts tonight in detail I can confirm that this is not the case, so I don't know how you would guarantee that the OT not get snagged. It's worth noting that the Valkyr don't actually spawn all at once, they do so sequentially, about 1-2 seconds apart. Spawn, spawn, spawn, swoop, swoop, swoop. You can do your marks and targeting based on the order they come out, even though you can't mark them until they do so.

We've been having success with spreading out rapidly right before a Defile goes out, because we had a similar experience with the 1.5 second cast time not being fast enough to expect people to separate cleanly. Even with the valkyr/defile lining up there's a good 4 seconds to fan out after the valkyr swooping.

We had the burden of only having 2 ranged in our kill group today, we had a spriest and a hunter. What we did was we had each ranged try to burn 2-3 of em before they come down. We didn't even bother with aoe'ing them. When they started to come down, we had everyone spread out, and we let them explode in a controlled manner while everyone else kited theirs. One explosion at a time in a certain area. We had no deaths to it on our kill, and it seems to be a good strat for 10 man.

How much +hit do I need to remove the possiblity of cleanse resists? I figure I can just get a weapon setup with enough and then swap out at the end of phase if the total is low enough.

Which healing setup did you have? Especially important, was a Disc Priest in there?

Edit:
Since this just came to my mind, would it be possible to misdirect some of the spirits to a tank? We use a single tank for the King, which essentially leaves one tank with nothing to do but taunting a few spirits. Lets say we misdirect 3-4 spirits to him, which he would survive with cooldowns and would greatly ease the stress on the healers.
Does anybody know how the threat mechanics of the spirits work? Do they have a normal aggro table right when spawning (in which case misdirecting would be possible) or do they just gain threat on someone when they start to come down (in this way misdirecting wouldn't make sense)?

The solution for that is splitting your entire ranged dps/healer players into two camps and they stand on south/north of the Lich King while melee hugs him, just before Valkyrs land you hug up and as soon as they land you trap/shockwave then disperse back into your camps on north/south, realistically there is always reaction time in between Valkyrs landing and defile , the first priority should be going back to your spots and/or spreading out properly, make sure the guy who gets the defile goes to the middle and not to the path of the Valkyrs, after they are dead you move to the other side of the platform and keep doing this until 40%.