Fall of the Lich King (Normal Mode)

Wednesday: somewhere around 11pm (GMT +2)

 

I woke up probably at the same second Arthas died for the first time in 10-man. Some of our members had stayed up and watched various streams from Sindragosa and Arthas to be prepared better for the next day. The best Sindragosa attempt I personally saw was somewhere around 10%. 

 

We had agreed that if Arthas was dead in 25-man ICC when the servers came up we’d start our raid at 5pm. I was excited this wasn’t the case and we’d start as soon as Lightning’s Blade would come online.

 

We started our raids with the expectation that Lich King was really freaking hard. We scouted the 10-man first on alt groups strengthened with couple of mains but had little success on Arthas because of combination of things going wrong. Not to mention some epic playing on Sindragosa… After both of the 10-man raids had used ~8 tries on Lich King we decided to form 1 main raid which would kill him for sure. The main group had very little difficulty killing the boss and they only wiped a couple of times. One of the wipes was pretty frustrating as the off tank got sucked inside the Frostmourne while still tanking adds. It turned out the spirits can come to the Frostmourne room as well and Lazei got beaten up quite bad.

 

The fight itself has the epic kind of feeling with lots of roleplay and phases. The whole thing lasts around 15 minutes. You start the event by talking to Tirion and after approximately 1 minute of roleplaying, Arthas attacks. Between the more intensive phases the fight has a phase where the whole thing calms down a bit and gives a nice rhythm to the encounter. I also like some of the new mechanics like how Defile works and the fact that if you fail with Val’kyrs the dead people can’t be resurrected. Quite merciless.

 

After killing The Lich King in 10 player mode, we started our 25 player main raid. It went as well as expected and we ended up one-shotting every boss in ICC up to The Lich King.

 

Still thinking that The Lich King would be really really hard in 25 man ICC, we fired up our alt raid and started clearing the instance from the beginning again. Everything went smooth until Blood-Queen where we lost 1 try. We wrapped the raid up at 1am after killing Valithria Dreamwalker and Saved Sindragosa and Lich King for Thursday. We had made 0 Lich King attempts that day and were far behind on progress compared to any other guild who had rushed it to Arthas.

 

Thursday 

 

We started the raid at 17:15 with couple of VoA raids and then proceeded to Sindragosa. We used 1 extra try on her as well and went to meet Arthas with 18 attempts left. It took us several tries to get the tactics down for Defile and Val’kyrs. We also lacked some dps on Val’kyrs and phase 3 and had to give up eventually. Thinking back we could have just switched to main raid after 10 tries and easily got the boss down with both of them.

 

When we logged our mains we were certain the encounter wouldn’t be a problem to our main raid. We had high hopes as we had nailed everything down on previous tries and didn’t think we’d need to waste many attempts – if any. We felt the biggest difference on dps on the Val’kyr phase where we had been struggling on our alts; the Val’kyrs simply melted. The spirits in phase 4 were a lot smaller threat with the better dps and we had the fight under control all the time. We ended up killing Arthas on our main’s first pull.

 

Now all we have left is the darkness before us in the form of hard modes. I have high hopes for the encounters and the team we have in Paragon. We are prepared.