Fall of the Lich King

Epic.

That's really the best word to describe the feeling of finally dropping The Lich King earlier this evening. While I'm generally not big on lorelol and the like, I thought it was a mighty nice touch that Blizzard decided to add the new cinematic movie to play after Arthas' death, and it was a nice treat to finally view after having to avoid watching it on the internetz for a couple weeks now. I believe this gives us the second World Strict Lich King kill after our buddies over at From Chaos (who truly, truly need a new web page.... seriously guys... srsly).

As for the fight itself, wow! This fight seems tuned to perfection for the intended audience after the slight (~11%) HP reduction on the Raging Spirits. Yes, we can still improve our strategy and performance, but the fight was an epic fourteen and a half minutes, and with a fifteen minute berserk timer breathing down our necks, it seems quite obvious Blizzard did a great job crunching the numbers on this encounter.

Now, I don't want to get into too much of an offtopic rant here (which is probably better served as a personal blog post than a "guild news", but fugg it), however, this somewhat ties into my recent blog post about difficulty in recent encounters. I spend a good chunk of time nearly every day reading post after post from (*gasp*) mid-to-high-end 25-man raiders who can't fathom how "Blizzard could make [The Lich King/Heroics] so easy." Yet look at the numbers, or at least the most accurate data we have available to us as a community, from sites like wowprogress.com. Here are the total number and percentage of 25-man guilds that have killed Lich King-25 Normal:

The Lich King (25): 286 (0.67%)

This is out of a pool of about 43,000 Guilds in their database, and of about 23,000 that actually raid (have cleared the first four bosses). So lets say 286 out of 23,000 raiding Guilds, or about 1.24%. But I'll do ya even one better. Lets look at the same 25-man raiding Guilds, doing 10-man content. Here we have for Saurfang and The Lich King:

Deathbringer Saurfang (10): 36495 (84.94%)
The Lich King (10): 974 (2.27%)

I don't know exactly how Wowprogress does it's cutoffs for what guilds make their database or not, but lets assume the data is fairly accurate. This means that only 972 25-man Guilds, or about 4.22% of the for-sure 25-man raiders who at least get through Saurfang-25, were so far able to kill The Lich King in 10-man. Nevermind that less than a third of these guilds have killed the 25-man version and will go right on bitching about how easy the 10-man Lich King is even though they did it in 25-man gear that completely trivializes the difficult portions of the fight (Phase 2 and the Transitional into Phase 3)!

I'm not completely blind. I realize a good portion of the bitching is likely coming from those top-end 25-man guilds that HAVE downed The Lich King and are into Heroics now. Yet even if that's the case, take a moment to be self-aware and recognize you are on the top end of the spectrum, and the fact of the matter is, the content is challenging at the level it's meant to be. The vast majority of raiders will be working on The Lich King Normal for a quite a few weeks to come, let alone your precious Heroic modes, so be happy with your progress and position rather than trying to push your own idea of what the game should be onto Blizzard and other players.

/rantoff

Back to the fight, I really enjoyed it from start to finish. After our first attempts prior to the recent fixes, we ran into some major problems with the Raging Spirits (and a few other Strict Guilds expressed the same concerns), which were absolutely unkillable in a reasonable timeframe transitioning into Phase 2 and later into Phase 3, leaving a huge DPS burden on what little DPS was able to focus them when not burning Val'kyr or Vile Spirits. Luckily Blizzard noticed the issue and the slight HP reduction was welcome (though the Vile Spirit height change hurt, especially if your raid is melee-heavy -- I pity you if so).

Unfortunately with Valentine's on Sunday, we had to cancel our usual Sunday evening raid (I know, I know, l2hardcorenewbs), which put on the pressure to get The Lich King down in our final Monday-night raid this week. It was pretty hit or miss for a while, as sometimes we'd get a solid Phase 3 going, and the next we'd barely start into Phase 3 and shit would hit the fan... or we'd randomly run into remaining Frost Spheres and suicide off the platform... or we'd assume the other Paladin was going to stun the Val'kyr... or we'd forget Defile was based on his target even if we were the MT... or we'd forget Intervene works from Battle Stance as well as Defensive Stance... or we'd be the fifth guy who can't figure out how to interrupt/stun the bad guy in the Frostmourne room wtfzomgbbq... or...

At any rate, Phase 1 is of course a complete joke now and I can't remember the last time we screwed that up (except when we fuck up our threat at the start, woops), and even Phase 2 now is getting fairly solid as we get used to our positioning and movement. The fact of the matter is, Phase 3 is still a big question mark to me and I think most of us. We did what we were supposed to and had those that could killing Vile Spirits, but even with a fairly balanced raid of 2 melee and 3 ranged DPS, there's no foreseeable way we can keep up with the Vile Spirit spawn rate. In fact, after our kill, our Hunter suggested we might even be better of ignoring them entirely as it seemed futile to bother and instead we had better luck just soaking the damage and healing back up. *shrug*

In any event, it's clear to me if Blizzard wanted to make Heroic Lich King super difficult, I'll make it really easy:

• Phase 1 (Plague) and Phase 3 (Vile Spirits) are both now duplicates of Phase 2 (Val'kyr).
• Transitional Phases are removed entirely.
• 1x Raging Spirit spawns every 45 seconds.

I hate to say it, but the fight truly seems to be: "Can you manage Phase 2 and get into Phase 3 with every add dead and everyone alive?" Perhaps I'm sticking my foot in my mouth, but I can't see Phase 1 & Phase 3 getting much harder with Heroic-level HPs/damage output, whereas Phase 2 will still by the big challenge of positioning, snares, stuns, etc.

Well, I think we're all pretty happy we managed to drop it and are looking forward to trying out the Heroic modes this week!