Very fun fight. It's obvious how insane it would've been pre-2.1, and doing it now makes Method's kills look all the more impressive. It's definitely properly tuned now though (although the entire fight really is phase 2) -- harder than the other fights in the instance, and more complex on a raidwide-coordination level, but it's not on a whole different tier. Just a shame it took 4 months to get there. If the past few days are any indication, though, I think that most of us can manage to put the initial SSC implementation behind us if the fun continues. Hope it will.

Nonsense. Those lines are in perfect order!

Gratz!

I miss the flexing though, but I guess no one else can fill in Kaubel's hooves.

Earth was shattered and that knocked us out of alignment.

Gratz :>

Did you have a lot of experience with the encounter before the nerf/fix? if so, wouldnt you agree that they might have tuned her down just a wee bit too much?

Phase 3 is now stupidly easy.

However on a side note, the Kael'thas fight as I've seen it so far is extremely enjoyable. Plays out a little more like old Vashj did with a slow start and a build up of difficulty throughout the entire fight.

Phase 3 as it stands now is just a check to see if you did Phase 2 right. If you limp through Phase 2 with 3 adds up, 6 people dead, etc., when the transiiton happens, you're going to wipe. But I think Phase 2 is tricky enough that it justifies its place in the zone. Learning Vashj felt a lot like learning C'Thun, which is I suppose is correct for the middle tier of raid content.

If you get to phase 3 with your raid intact, you'd have to do something very very bad in order to wipe.

And re: the Annariu's question, Manly's estimate may be a little off -- we spent one full night there pre-2.1 and decided that we'd need consumables to keep up with the DPS threshold for phase 2, and given Nihilum's comments about phase 3, we opted not to dump pots into learning attempts that would just hit a brick wall. Wednesday we spent maybe 2-3 hours trying different approaches to phase 2, and then came back yesterday for a quick kill.

Grats on your kill EJ. Onward and upward.

As ridiculous as the Mind Control was in Pre-2.1 Lady Vashj, they should have added a more interesting element to Phase 3. I also wish they would have put more emphasis on the 'hot potato' aspect of Phase 2, with the Tainted Cores. Perhaps, if you held onto a Tainted Core for more than 5 seconds, it despawns or you die, or something... Okay, maybe that was a bad idea, but although the Tainted Core was fresh and innovative, it was too simple and forgiving to make this a legendary fight.

Yeah, the Tainted Core bit is really just for flavor as it stands now, though I think phase 2 is really well-tuned and doesn't need anything to complicate it further.

Phase 3 is dumb. I'm not really sure why Vashj has a berserk. I'd remove the berserk and add another element to the fight, personally, but at this point I think they don't want to majorly redesign fights that are already on the live servers.

Phase 2 is very fun though.

I think adding a toned-down version of the mind control might make sense. I seem to remember it being more or less her defining ability in TFT

They could have left her MC in and just removed the damage multiplier it granted.

Vashj doesn't have a berserk - she never did for us - and never does on the videos when she goes past the enrage timer... I believe it is the BATS that enrage - very noticeable after 4 minutes. We killed her the 2nd time we ever saw phase 3. We pushed to get phase 2 flawless basically... our kill strategy stays ahead of the adds, and really optimizes the players - rather than having the wrong classes run all over the damn place like morons.

Ah, very true. Still, it's basically a time limit -- it's not possible to survive very long once you hit that point.

A lot of the videos you see out there are from guilds that learned phase 2 before 2.1. Before 2.1, the Elite cleave was a true 360 degrees and destroyed any melee. So melee DPS couldn't kill Elites OR Striders. It dictated the strat. Those guilds in 2.1 just went with what they already knew.

The best part about that screenshot is the presence of Chocula's gladiator's shorts. Strut your stuff big guy, sexay.

Congratulations, I can't wait to catch up and do the fight for myself.