Icecrown: Crimson Hall Cleared

Last Wednesday presented another great raid night for us as we managed to clear through the new Icecrown Citadel Wing: The Crimson Hall!

The Blood Princes fight was quite a lot of fun in my opinion, providing a wide variety of stuff to watch out for (as a non-tank) and do throughout. There was always a sense of danger without being oppressively stressful and I'm excited to see what Heroic mode is like.

Unfortunately, getting The Orb Whisperer was extraordinarily simple and it turns out all our pre-planning and math were unnecessary as it seems near impossible not to achieve this on a successful kill (unless you use a regular tank type on Keleseth and who somehow screws up Nuclei management a great deal). Also, hopefully the Heroic version will offer the non-Keleseth tanks something more to do, as our Tal tank almost never had to move other than to avoid knockback, and would've been bored stiff if not announcing Flame Orb casts in Mumble. Ditto that for myself as the Valanar tank, where I only had to move slightly to avoid knockbacks but otherwise I just yelled at people to watch for Vortex and try to let ranged know where new Kinetic Bomb spawns were.

Still, everyone else has plenty to do so I shouldn't complain -- as mentioned, all in all a very fun fight.

Blood-Queen Lana'thel, as we expected to be the case, proved a fair bit easier opening week than Putricide did on his opening week. Mostly I think this is due to the similar mechanics of previous encounters and so far Lana'thel, more than any other fight yet found in ICC, relies heavily on pre-planning raid positioning. If positioning is managed properly and DPS checks can be met, you'll be set.

Speaking of DPS, I was a little surprised at how tight the DPS check was on this fight because while we obviously did manage to down her, it was only 10-15 seconds before our last wave of Vampires were about to go postal. Then again, with the recently announced changes, it appears Blizzard thought the DPS requirements were a bit high as well.

All in all, I wasn't very impressed by the Lana'thel fight and found Blood Princes and even Putricide before her much more interesting. I think the Bite mechanic could've been used to a much greater and more interesting effect (and perhaps will do so on Heroic, who knows), instead of just upping damage and exponentially increases the "vampire swarm" as the fight continued on. They did include a minor DPS buff given to Lana'thel for each active Vampire, but it would've been a much more interesting fight if her damage output, especially single-target, was bumped up a fair deal based on the number of vampires active -- a leech of power from her swarm, if you will.

Further, the Pact could've been used more interestingly. There's already SO MANY random-target-ticks-short-range-AE-damage effects in raid encounters now that something else would've been more interesting. Perhaps Pact, when cast on someone with Vampire active, would then drain their life and give it to Lana'thel (at a very high ratio of course), causing her to heal if Pact targets were slow on the draw.

The flames effect from Jaraxxus works well here as it encourages strong positioning when used with other aspects, so I can't knock that, but the Blood Mirror effect was also underwhelming. Maybe we fluked, but I did not see a single partial resist on our offtank from the Shadow-based Blood Mirror damage, so what is the point really? Would be much more interesting if a OT were inclined, especially for Heroic, to go in with high Shadow Resistance to help lessen the damage dealt. If it's Shadow-based, rather than Physical-based, only to allow those 25-manners doing their Shadowmourne Quest to equally survive, I have to wonder why they can't be required to have a half-decent tank set available if they're in a Shadowmourne-capable guild?

In any event, minor complaints I suppose and still a fairly short and sweet wing altogether. Looking forward to the final unlock soon!