Wednesday, March 31, 2010

First dance with the Lich King!

So, just yesterday I was fretting on another shaman blog that I feared we had hit a wall with Sindragosa. I don't know if it was the new 10% ICC buff, or just improved raid coordination, but we got her down in just 3 tries last night!

We got to take a peek at the Lich King encounter, which incorporates some unique encounter mechanics, feels dynamic and fun, and has an epic feel to it. I like that his fight seems to incorporate little elements of other WOTLK fights: his Necrotic Plague ability is kind of similar to Rotface's Mutated Infection; healing up a raid after an Infest is similar to healing a target of Lord Jaraxxus's Incinerate Flesh (In fact, I'm thinking of trying to fix up my broken GridStatusRaidDebuff so I can actually make sure the raid is getting Infest taken off).

We got in about 10 attempts last night, and were comfortably getting him into phase 2. Though we're not going to have any more raids this week due to the Easter break, I'm pretty confident that we'll be able to get a hang of those Defiles down, and I'm hoping to see Phase 3 next time I'm in there.

From a resto shaman perspective, I found the healing intense. It's not constant AOE like BQL or Sindragosa, but instead it's sudden bursts of intense raid healing. Maybe it's because it was my first night on the encounter, and maybe I was a little paranoid, and overhealing a bit, but I found myself burning through mana like crazy. I am gonna try to set up my shaman_hep parse for my log to just look at the LK encounter, but as it's such an intense fight, and so much longer than the other ICC encounters, I am thinking I'm going to have to rethink my stat weights and trinket choices for that fight, and I may go back to the mana restore meta gem.

So excited to finally get a crack at this guy!

2 comments:

Mark said...

You'll definitely want to see Infest debuffs in phase 3 since people will tend to be a bit more spread out at times, so it's not a given that incidental AoE healing will top them off as quickly.

I also recommend adding Soul Reaper so you can anticipate the spiky tank damage a bit better in Phases 3 and 5, and Harvest Soul for Phase 5 since that target also takes some decent damage.

Re: mana, I never really have too much of a problem in that fight. I'm pretty positive that P&S procs Water Shield in Phase 2 and 4, so you tend to have decent regen during those phases. For phase 1, I play with Kae and a holy priest (Kuchki) normally, so I tend to mostly focus on the tanks and timing a CH to land right as Infest hits. I'm also on dispel duty so I have quite a bit of time where I'm not actively casting while timing the dispels. Phase 3 can start to get rough on mana, especially if people get some lingering Infests.

Zigi said...

Getting back there tomorrow night after a long Easter break! I hope the UI and meta gem make a difference!