Heroic Icecrown: Day 17 & Neck-Deep in Vile

It's been a couple weeks since our last Heroic Icecrown update, and obviously we snagged Sindragosa in that time and have been really focusing on Heroic Lich King. After looking over our logs, to this point we've put in exactly 40 attempts on Heroic Lich King so we've already passed our attempt count for Heroic Sindragosa, who prior was leading the pack in man-hours-to-defeat by a large margin over the rest of the zone. The big question for me, is whether Heroic Lich King will bypass the reigning champion of all cockblock encounters known as Alone in the Darkness or whether Yogg will remain the pinnacle achievement of WotLK raiding difficulty?

Still far too early to say for sure, but I'm fairly confident that The Lich King will certainly give the 100+ attempt requirements of Yogg a run for it's money. After a great deal of iteration we're still trying to perfect our strategy for Phase 1, let alone the rest of the fight, and just when we think we have it, the "You Suck At Execution Newbs!"-monster rears his ugly head and wipes us half a dozen times to any manner of retardation. This is one of those rare boss fights where I can safely say every single raid member has fucked up (and thus wiped us) multiple times each. Of course on most stuff, a single mistake (transferring Plague on Putricide a few seconds late, taunting late on Saurfang, exploding the raid on Sindragosa, missing a spore debuff on Festergut, etc.) almost never causes or forces a wipe and can be recovered in one way or another, but the beauty we're seeing from Lich King so far is even during Phase 1, a single mistake causes a wipe quite quickly. Miss judge where Shadow Trap landed? Explode yourself and likely 2+ other people. Run to drop off plague too slowly? Instadeath or lose the plague and wipe later due to low add DPS. Misuse shield/heals on any non-tank Infest targets? Unhealable DoT soon, good luck! Mistime a stun during a double-Shambling spawn enrage without a cooldown? Enjoy that 70k incoming DPS. Miscalculate the final tick of plague damage on that Shambling? Have fun eating an 80k Frenzy hit before ranged DPS can even get off a 1.5 sec GCD to finish the remaining 40k HP!

The cool thing is I really dig all of this and even though it's tough, I'm glad the final boss of the expansion (lolRubySanctumlol) is an assbeater-ninja-pirate-of-doom. My only hatred is the already discussed ad naseum subjects of limited attempts and raid-wide buff, both of which make learning this fight far more aggravating than it needed to be. That said, I suppose it's near common knowledge at this point that the original implementation of Heroic Lich King had about 23% less health than the current incarnation, and was quickly hotfixed by Blizzard, seemingly after seeing how quickly high-end Guilds were progressing through the rest of the Heroic content. After all, an (eventual) 30% HP/Damage/Healing buff negates any balance issues with the zenith of the expansion, so all is well!

I propose that Blizzard could've had much better success with Heroic Lich King by going a Yogg-Saron route and adding raid-activated gradual difficult increases. 4-Light would be Normal without Infest, Plague, or Defile. 3-Light would add Plague. 2-Light would add Infest and Defile. 1-Light would add Shadow Trap & Bolting Val'kyr, and 0-Light would be the current Heroic incarnation (or whatever the crap differences you want to insert instead). Appropriately adjust Lich King/add health pools so even fully-geared raids really had to maximize DPS or stack the raid to pull out a win.

Obviously Blizzard has stated they don't like encounter-activated Heroic Modes and instead want a single binary on/off switch from Normal to Heroic, but if that means a final boss fight gradually goes from un-fucking-impossible upon release (0% buff) to doable for most high-end guilds (10-15%) to downright retarded easy (30%), then I'd much rather go back to the Ulduar-encounter-activated system. Even then, that's not to say you can't combine the two. Heroic flag on? Great, now 4 "helpers" spawn near Fordring you can talk to for help ala Yogg Keepers or whatever. Valithria is one and half the NPCs fighting within ICC that give quests/man the gunship/etc. could be the rest. Whatever it takes, but this raid-wide buff is a fucking copout and while it's fun to yell, "look at my HPlol!" while I play with my balls (that's what tanks do when they look at their HP pool, btw), the fact is the system was clearly designed to allow everyone to see The Lich King that could bind two hotkeys and knows which mouse button is used to target shit.

And lets not even pretend for a single moment that Blizzard's intention is for Jimmy McDeathgrip to only be able to see and kill Normal Lich King with the 30% buff; clearly all but the most Down-syndromey raids will have no problem at all with Heroic Lich King with a boss mod installed telling them when to move. I read posts from a lot of big douchenozzles in self-proclaimed high-end guilds who have yet to kill Heroic Lich King and think they're somehow entitled to do what only the top ~50 players in the WORLD have done thus far after only a handful of weeks. Yet that's all fine and well, but what gets me is they go on to imply that (because they haven't done it yet) there is no way Jimmy McDeathgrip will be able to kill Lich King even with the 30% buff. Need I reminder you assnuggets that you were proclaiming the same bullshit about 1-Light, Freya+3, Algalon, and Heroic Anub? And yet those were trivial for basically any raid that wanted to do it once we were deep into ToC gear (for the Ulduar stuff) and ICC gear (for Heroic Anub)! There are PUGs on my server alone that do Heroic Anub for christ sake. Do you think the HP/DPS/HPS gains from going up a tier or even 2 tiers of gear is even remotely fucking close to a 30% jump?! News flash, it's not.

For example, as a tank (who should gain the largest percentage of STA boosts from ilevel obviously), you want to know how much RAID-BUFFED health I've gained going from near-BiS Ulduar gear to near-BiS Heroic ICC gear? 8,900. At my health levels, that's about 18-19% gain, from TWO FULL TIERS OF GEAR.

So even in the best case scenario, that's still 12% off from what I gain just from zoning in to ICC at the 30% buff point. And of course, that 30% is applied after the extra iLevel gains from the new tier of gear I'm getting out of ICC, so in terms of tier equivalence, each tier of gear is about a 9-10% boost in tank survival, which means the jump from near-BiS Heroic ToC gear to near-BiS Heroic ICC + 30% buff is a 55% survivability increase. I will go from about 50,000 HP at the end of ToC to nearly 78,000 HP at the end of ICC. And of course this is without maximized raid buffs/gear that 25-man players will see, so the % is likely closer to 60% for them.

Wrap your brain around that for a moment. In terms of equivalent iLevel gain, in my above example going from Heroic Ulduar to Heroic ICC gear, we're talking Ulduar ilevels of 219/226, so we'll say an average of 222, up to ICC ilevels of 251/264, so again we'll average this to 258. So the difference between the two is 36 ilevels. Divide that by the 8900 health and we get ~247 HP per ilevel. So my 78,000 at the end of ICC will mean I have gained 28,000 HP over the 245 average ilevel gear of ToC, using our formula that comes out to a relative gain of about 72 ilevels, which means I'm wearing the equivalence of ilevel 318 gear! 318! What kind of asshattery idea was this?! That's like wielding a drastically overpowered version of Shadowmourne in every slot, plus attaching one to each eyelid and an extra to my scrotum for the higher deepz.

The whole point of this tirade is simply that the raid-wide buff will not only allow Jimmy McDeathgrip to kill Normal Lich King, but he'll also be able to kill Heroic Lich King, when Blizzard has stated on multiple occasions that Heroic modes are there "only for those that want a challenge" and thus players should not "expect to have access to the loot" in all cases. Bullllllshit!

Then there's the whole issue of the aforementioned Shadowmourne in combination with the raid-wide buff. I'm already strongly against 25-man only drops, especially legendaries, but to then take this whole raid-wide buff nonsense into account really dampens the spirit. Legendaries are supposed to be hard to get and rare? Well with a 30% power boost, I can't foresee this being out of reach by anyone with a regular raid group and a decent bankroll. Sure the shard limiter will probably make it very hard to do in a PuG (though even then, an up-front announcement will probably still get 24 other guys to come for the easy 264 loot). I cannot even fathom how easy normal-mode ICC will be at the 30% buff marker. Even the most dangerous abilities won't be able to one-shot your mage or enhancement shamans that normally get torn to bits by such things. And of course when your DPS is high enough, it won't matter if you suck at plague bouncing because shit will be dead well before it matters.

Blarg!

Waaaay offtrack, as usual, so back to the topic at hand -- Heroic Lich King is so far quite an interesting fight and I'm looking forward to the next 40 wipes! Also let me be clear that I have no problem with Jimmy McDeathgrip being able to kill the Lich King and all that jazz, but don't talk out of both sides of your mouth when it comes to the intentions of Heroic mode encounters in congruence with the raid-wide buff. Clearly at 30% Jimmy will be able to get everything offered in heroic ICC with a little bit of perseverance, so yay for me and the rest of us schleps who put in the effort to do it when it was hard I guess?

We also had some extra raid time the end of the week and decided to try the Neck-Deep in Vile, which we ended up getting, another Strict World First. Our Mumble Kill and Commentary Guide can be found in our Movies & Guides section for those interested.

As Blizzard seemed to acknowledge by taking it out of the Meta, this was a very poorly designed achievement from a raid-balance standpoint. Perhaps it's not as bad in 25-man due to one or two more ranged or melee one way or the other not mattering as much, but I can't say for sure. What I do know, however, is achievements that require severe class/role stacking to even have a chance at are retarded. Achievements that require severe class/role stacking that are also linked to a toggle-able Normal/Heroic boss with limited attempts are entering the realm of Full Retard.

Once we got our raid stacked as best we could from what classes we have in our normal raids, we were able to finally down it after I'd estimate 12-15 attempts across a couple nights, though there were a number of close calls. All I can say is... ranged snare is your friend.