LoDBlog

LoD beat Blood Queen on Sunday night, not without a fair amount of practice.  As I detailed in my previous post, concerning raid reps, we used a 25 man alt run and 10 mans to get practice attempts in.  Those runs gave us a chance to see the mechanics in action and get a lot of our stupid deaths out of the way =P

The ten mans didn’t seem to have a very difficult enrage timer, I know my ten man group didn’t even get our best DPSers bitten.  The 25 DOES have a difficult enrage timer, or at least an unforgiving one.  A single vampire death will most likely cause you to wipe.  You need every person’s dps and you need every person to spread the debuff to the next person.

Our raid comp was

6 healers
2 tanks
17 dps

G1 (melee)-
MT (Feral)
HP blob (Prot Pally)
Ret Paladin
Feral kitty
Fury Warrior

G2 (melee)-
Rogue
Unholy DK
Feral kitty
Fury Warrior
Frost DK

G3 (ranged)-
Ele Shaman
Warlock
Rogue
Hunter
Moonkin

G4 (ranged)-
Mage
Spriest
Warlock
Holy Priest
Hunter

G5 (healers)-
Holy Priest
All Powerful Disc Priest
Tree
Holy Pally
Holy Pally

• Group 1 was positioned on her left leg
• Group 2 was positioned on her right leg
• Group 3 was on the left side of the room at range
• Group 4 was on the right side of the room at range
• Group 5 was mostly healers and positioned in the back middle of the room (cheating forward as needed for range issues)
• We left the CENTER and OUTSIDES of the room clear for links and fire

Bite Order

One big pain in the ass about this encounter is the bite order.  Yes, you can assign a specific bite order and follow it, but that’s too much typing and thinking!  Plus it isn’t very adaptable and might cause confusion if you do subs at any point, or week to week for that matter.  I don’t want to spend 30 minutes setting up this fight every week.

Our solution was quite simple

• 1:  Hunter in G3 gets bitten from being top dmg (this was just how it was happening as our DPS went all out)
• 2:  Hunter bites the ret paladin in G1 so that we have one ranged and one melee to better spread the bites
• 4:  Hunter bites mage in G4.  Ret paladin bites rogue in G2.  This spread the debuff so that each group 1,2,3,4 had one person with the bite.
• 8:  Each person bit someone in their group.  Assigning specifics at this point would be a lot of typing/planning.  Each group now has two DPS with bite and at least two DPS without.
• 16:  Each person bites an unbitten DPSer in their group.  Each group ends with 4 DPSers being bitten.

Here’s what this strategy did for us.

• Spread bites between ranged/melee first
• Spread bites across the room efficiently so that nobody was ever without a suitable bite target near them
• Made bites “planned” but adaptable – meaning that you set your first four and can easily switch them mid-fight if someone unexpected gets the first bite.  After those four nothing unexpected should really happen.
• People eventually planned a bite order within their group for the last two bites, but this was kept in-party.
• It maintained my sanity as a raid leader not having to get complex in our planning
• The first four specific people being planned allowed us to fear ward them

Fear Ward / Fear Breaking 

We were finding that the first air phase often coincided with two people (hunter + ret paladin) needing to bite the next two people (mage + rogue).  Not only was the biter being feared all over the place, but also the bitee was being feared away from the biter.  To make this transition go more smoothly we had fear ward usage on these four people.  If your raid doesn’t have four priests then you can use fear breaking class mechanics to facilitate this.  We also waited to use our fear wards until we were sure that the order went off without a hitch.  If someone unexpected got the first bite we’d simply adapt our fear wards to include that person as well.

This was one of those “hidden” issues that are nestled in encounters which you can’t really see until you’ve done them a few times.  We had no trouble with the second air phase and bite timers.

Other than bite order and fear issues you just need to

• Spread out in P2
• Use class cooldowns and health stones to survive the P2 raid damage
• Run purple fire out of the raid along the sides of the room
• Make sure you’re not standing near fire before a fear
• Run to the CENTER of the room if you get linked – Do not run to the other people, this just causes you to shift back and forth correcting your direction in reaction to what they’re doing.  Just pick a single point on the ground (the square at the center of the circle) and have everyone run to that.  You’ll end up together, promise.  Once you’re there do not move away before the debuff disappears.

• DPS and HEAL REALLY HARD

As a disc priest that meant 9x shield, 1x ProM.  Challenging!  I feel like a druid =(