I've been in the room and I had no problem just burning the mob down, I don't really see it being a problem unless you enter the room with little to no mana.

When I first did this first, I would dps from max range, because there were reports that you could out range it. Even with hawkeye this was never the case. However, I noticed that when I was pulled in, I would be the last person to be pulled in due to the range. Hence I would be landing as everyone else was running out of the AOE she was casting. This resulted in me having less time to get out of the AOE effect. Therefore on this fight I have resorted to standing relatively close to her. When pulled in dropping an explosive trap, disengage, spin, and run.

This seems like a consequence of reacting slowly to the vacuum effect. I drop straight down about half the distance from max range and easily run back to my original position just as people start running out.

I haven't been picked up by a Valkyr yet so I can't share any experience with that but I did have a few things I noticed from our Arthas 25 attempts last night.

First, if you haven't noticed or aren't working on the fight yet, the Shambling Horrors do have a cast bar on their tranqable enrage. Provided you have a mod that gives you your focused target's cast bar, you can easily make a macro to tranq your focus target, the horror, without need to have an active buff frame on it or be actively targetting it. My guild has the hunters dpsing the horrors the whole time they're up so obviously making a focus macro for the tranq is of little use to me but it might help some other people. The enrage can also be interrupted but it may start spamming the cast until it's successful so be mindful of that should it happen. Lastly, they're targettable and attackable before they finish climbing out of the ground and their threat table appears to be effected by those attacks so as soon as you can target it, you can go ahead and let loose on your MD shots.

I'd like to hear some other people's experiences on this part. If I go through my RF/Readiness rotation literally as Arthas engages at the start of the fight, my CD's are coming up again towards the end of the first Remorseless Winter. I'm then saving them for the first set of Valkyr. Has anyone else noticed this (I'm sure it does vary based on your guild's dps in P1) and have you found saving the CD's for the valkyr to be a worthwhile idea?

Lastly, for the valkyr, my guild has the hunters laying traps during the transition out of the first Remorseless Winter but I don't think that I've seen the trap actually triggered yet. Has anyone done this and seen it pop and be effective? It makes sense that it would work but I think there's also a good deal of chance in terms of guessing the right spot to plant the trap.

Traps only appear to trigger off Arthas himself, or possibly when the Valkyrs are first swooping down to pick people up - I haven't seen traps trigger when a Valkyr flies over one with the person in the air already. The traps triggered before or as they pick someone up do snare them though if they're in the area of effect.

As for tranqs on the shambling horrors, I just DPS the boss, and mouseover tranq whenever I see a horror turn red, or do the animation (similar to a warrior casting bloodrage, roars and gets a little red mask icon in front of its head) for frenzy. Only time it gets a bit tricky is when 2 horrors are up and overlapping.

Does it mean that your raid assigned other ranged DPS for downing the shamblers? Or purely rely on the bouncing damage of the necrotic plague? For some reason, my raid assigned the hunters on the shamblers (to DPS them, not just tranq). I'm just wondering if there's any good reason for that besides making sure that our tranqs connect faster.

AFAIK on normal mode at least, there's no reason for anyone to DPS anything other than Arthas in P1 - the disease will kill every single mob that spawns that phase - you might have some ghouls up at the end of it that you aoe down at the start of P2, but shambling horrors will die to disease before or shortly after p2 begins. Diverting DPS to them just prolongs the phases and increases the risk of getting a 3rd horror spawn.

For shambling horrors I much prefer the use of a mouseover Tranquilizing Shot macro to a focus macro. This way if we botch our Necrotic Plagues and there's two up I can tranq whichever one happens to enrage just by waving my mouse over them.

I don't save my Readiness/RF for Valkyrs because the first set is never a problem. The second set is the troublesome one because Defile always comes immediately after the Val'kyrs pick their targets. As far as traps go, a single DPS warrior can keep them permanently slowed with Piercing Howl, so I normally don't drop a trap. If you playe with full spell detail on, you'll know why.

The macro I use for LK is

/tar shambling
/cast Tranquilizing Shot
/targetlasttarget

You're going to want to pop your cd's as they come off cooldown, as they line up nicely for the remorseless winter phases which are the only real DPS burn phases in the fight. You don't need DPS cooldowns for valkyr at all with proper positioning, they die before reaching halfway to the edge.

Those off you who have tanked the Blood Price (Keleseth); I would like you guys to tell me how did you have your pet set on a kinetic bomb? and did you do this in 10man?

For what it's worth, one very handy way my guild and I found to do Dreamwalker was to simply have me solo the Zombies; I would kite them away from the raid and between me and my pet they would die without hurting anyone (except my pet, but a mend pet fixes that problem). Think of where they spawn as 2 points with the door as the 3 points of a elongated V. Start with a few shots to get agro, concussive shot to slow, trap was dropped before they show up so they path over it. Generally able to slow them down and kill them before they finished crossing the trap. If they aren't dead by then (unlucky string of no crits), your concussive shot will be up again to let you finish him off. Jump shotting helps too when you have to run a bit.

Also, deterrence prevents you from taking the explosive DoT they leave on players.

10-man.

I did it in 10-man just by using a simple macro :
/tar Kinetic
/petattack
/targetlasttarget

Make sure to put your pet on passive before the fight though. This helps in two ways :
- When put on a defensive, pet AI tends to force the pet to attack the source of the damage done to the hunter, even when told beforehand to attack a different target. With defensive on, your pet will lose its Kinetic Bomb target and attack Keleseth instead, even when using that macro. I noticed this first back then when tasked to tank Mimiron's aerial unit while trying to sic my pet on Assault bots.
- When its current Kinetic Bomb target despawns, it will be easier for you to notice and to immediately send it to another bomb, because it will run back to your side, instead of running away attacking random targets.

Even in 25, where we have locks/DKs to tank Keleseth, the DPSing hunters still send their pets to the Kinetic bombs. This takes away any burden of having ranged DPS dedicated to juggle the bombs.

Regularly having at least 2 hunters in the raid (25-man), we can usually call our tranq targets through vent. Having a good nameplate addon (that enlarges and enhances blizzard's simple tooltip and nameplate interface) helps a lot. Started using this back then when on tranq duty on Sarth 3d. However, if someone else have a better way to do this, I'd like to know also.

I'm not 100% sure (only been inside once, and we haven't got the kill yet) but I think I interrupted the Soul Rip with Silencing Shot. Together with DPS CD popping (used RF, but not Cotw or Haste pot) I managed to tackle the miniphase successfully. I don't think having to blow RF is a burden though, it's not that you'll need it for Vile Spirits.

/clearfocus
/cleartarget
/petpassive
/targetexact Kinetic Bomb
/focus [harm,exists,nodead]
/targetlasttarget [@focus,noexists]
/stopmacro [@focus,noexists]
/script SetRaidTarget("target", 6)
/petattack [@focus,harm,exists]
/cast Dash
/targetlasttarget

Or a slightly different version doesn't change focus.

/stopmacro [@pettarget,exists]
/cleartarget
/targetexact Kinetic Bomb
/petattack [harm]
/cast [harm] Dash
/script SetRaidTarget("target", 6)
/targetlasttarget

Much more practical macro posted by prime311 above, But IIRC, the Setraidtarget part requires you to have an assist.

I see people quoting this as gospel, but there is no way this is true. Does anyone feel like anywhere near 7% of their Tranq Shots fail? Is there any evidence that the miss rate is even close to that? I had 1 fail out about 120 cast over the last few days while doing Lich King. It definitely still does fail but I'd be surprised if the failure rate is even as high 1%.

For the Shambling Horrors, we simply have Hunter A cover all enrages on the first spawn, and hunter B cover all enrages on the second spawn. There is no reliable way for 1 hunter to cover both spawns, so for 10 man we still have 1 hunter cover spawn A, while the Horror tank chains stuns on the second spawn when it enrages.

The best way to me seems to simply be:
#showtooltip Tranquilizing Shot
/cast [mod:shift, @focus] Tranquilizing Shot; Tranquilizing Shot


I have mine set to R and just spam Tranq when I see my focus (using AZcastbar) begin to cast enrage for the quickest possible dispel. They seem to happen about every 15-20 seconds.

The problem we ran into using macros like:
/target Shambling Horror
/cast Tranquilizing Shot
/target The Lich King

was that if both hunters are spaming the macro when they see the enrage castbar, they will both use the Tranq cooldown, however only 1 dispel would go off for whichever hunter was closest due to travel time, essentially just wasting one hunter's GCD. I had noticed this on several occasions in our initial attempts when reviewing the dispels credited throughout the fight and after talking with the other hunter. We both used our CD for tranq almost every time on some pulls and one of us would have 8 dispels and the other 2.

Yes, even a melee pet can keep a single kinetic bomb by itself. However, I haven't been in a situation where the kinetic bomb spawns above a non-empowered vortex, and as such I can't attest whether the pet will be knockbacked.

From what I have seen, pets are completely unaffected by the knockbacks in this encounter.

I have sent my pet clear across the room before to pick up a new orb while I took over his since I couldn't get across the room due to knockbacks.

I’ve found a real raid saver with the kinetic bombs, which I am assigned to full time, is a Wind Serpent. For non-BM hunters this pet will be the best option. They are the only non-exotic pets that have a ranged attack that is not a DoT, which the bombs are immune to.

With it specked for Dive, Boar’s Speed, 2/2 Mobility, and the 20 yard range. Its able to get across the other side of the room to that bomb that’s just about to hit the ground much faster then I could ever hope to.

If your guilds having trouble with the bombs on 25man like we were give it a go, we found it made a real difference.

Back and forth and forth and back I've gone on this fight to find a good methodology with Tranq'ing Shambling Horrors and trying to find a good way to macro the crap and this what I have now:


Tranq Method:

Horrors are tranq'd by all hunters. If a 2nd spawns then 1 Hunter is assigned to tranqing the 2nd while the others(if there are others) Tranq the original. This way if a Tranq fails then the add still gets Tranq'd, or if you miss the cast bar and are waiting on GCD to Tranq then one of the Hunters will probably get it sooner. Tranq macro combining the best of both worlds:

#showtooltip Tranquilizing Shot
/cast [@focus,harm,nodead] Tranquilizing Shot;[@mouseover,harm,nodead] Tranquilizing Shot;[harm,nodead] Tranquilizing Shot

You guessed it shoots first focus, then mouseover, then target, whichever meets the requirements first.

Normal Lich King Target macro:

/cleartarget
/targetexact Vile Spirit
/targetexact [dead][noexists] Val'kyr Shadowguard
/targetexact [dead][noexists] Raging Spirit
/targetexact [dead][noexists] Shambling Horror
/targetexact [dead][noexists] The Lich King

Additionally you might have an assist macro for Vile Spirits to assist a Warlock in getting their Seed of Corruptions to go off sooner.

Cooldown usage:

Getting to Phase 2 promptly is important so blow everything right away. Ideally you should be getting Rapid Fire back(if MM) right as the transition to 3 begins. I'll use RF then on the first Valks and Readiness/RF on the 2nd valks. After this it gets really hairy on CD usage, but ideally I want all my cooldowns ready to go for phase 5 and Vile Spirits and then burn down to 10%. I don't think cd's are necessary to get yourself out of Frostmourne, but you better make sure you have mana.

Mana and Spec

This fight seems too mana intensive to use Silencing Shot in any but the Val'kyr or Vile Spirit burn phases. I'm opting out of using it entirely. A spec with 2/2 Rapid Recoup I think would be ideal as well. Also a reduced damage 11/53/7 spec would make things easier on your healers, an advantage not to be dismissed. In terms of Viper, the Remorseless Winter transitions into 2 and 4 are a good time to get a few quick ticks in. Phase 3 when you group up prior to any defile or Val'kyr you will probly be in melee range and this is a good time to Viper. Using a Snake Trap and Explosive Trap(for MM) and possibly Frost Trap right before Val'kyrs here would also seem prudent. This isn't a great phase DPS-wise for Hunter, but it should allow you to get to 4 without mana problems. Phase 5 is the worst for mana from what I've seen and this is when I'd be potting. If I need to viper I try to make sure it is right near the end of the vile spirits after most of their damage, if any, has gone out.

So I am going back to my original question now that some off you have posted the macro Thank you for doing that. But still bit puzzled between two post one from MizarAlcor and one from prime311. So MizarAlcor do you put you pet on passive and then just use that macro or would the player have to target the kinetic bomb and then cast the macro?

Although the range attack of the Wind Serpent is nice for doing Kinetic Bombs, it is really unnecessary. Any melee pet does just fine with just dash to move the distance since you shouldn't be waiting to send your pet in at the last minute anyway. The bombs do not have to be attacked from range, just a pet hitting it when it comes into its melee range is more than enough damage to take care of the bomb.