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[Marco]

I'll restart this thread with some notes on some of the more difficult ICC bosses (normal-mode, 10-man) in various groups I've run with:

Putricide

The big strategy question with this fight is whether to group everyone up on the green slime spawn point and try to kill it while it's picking targets, or group everyone in the south for green slime spawns so that the slime has to travel a long distance while slowed.

TRR tried the "everyone at the spawn point" strategy without much success.  The slime picks targets pretty damn fast, and was blowing up at least three times before dying, with the second explosion typically being deadly.  We had a relatively easy time learning the fight with the more traditional strategy.  Typically our raid composition is four ranged and two melee DPS after dropping to two healers, so that may be a factor.

The things I see going wrong with this fight with the traditional strategy are typically:

* Failure to slow an add as an abom: this is normally not a problem once the abom controller gets some practice, but it can be a problem if the phase 1 -> phase 2 transition happens just after the second experiment picks a target.

* Failure to keep gas cloud targets alive: the gas clouds do a lot of damage at first.  Disc priests are very helpful here.

* Phase 2 to phase 3 with an add up: it can be hard to avoid this with the traditional strategy, as there is very little time between one add spawning and the next one starting to form.  In TRR we found it most realible to stop DPS at 37% (no matter how much it looks like we might be able to push through), wait for a gas cloud, burn it as fast as possible, and then push through to 35%.

* Tank death in phase 3: it's a lot of damage.  Calling out swaps on vent helps.

Blood Princes

I've seen groups do this successfully with three traditional tanks and with two traditional tanks and a warlock.  F+L reportedly did it with one tank on both Taldaram and Valanar, and a second on Keleseth.  The most common problems I've seen are:

* Keleseth tank deaths: this is a matter of getting and keeping enough nuclei.  Using rank 1 DOTs was a big help for me when I do it; I can't believe it took me a month to figure that out.  Moving seems to be okay.

* Healers and their tanks being blown apart by shock vortexes: I think this is mostly a matter of practice and tank gear.

* Kinetic bombs landing: This is a matter of practice, having the right people allocated to kinetic bomb duty, and knowing what tricks you can use to control kinetic bombs.

* Slow DPS: If you allocate three tanks, three healers, and two people to kinetic bombs, there aren't very many people doing DPS, and the fight can drag on a long time.  Try to make sure your DPS have some synergy, and try to minimize the amount of DPS you spend on kinetic bombs.  I've seen good results from either having one pet class handle the bombs (particularly a frost mage), or having two people divide up the room but spend a lot of their time DPSing.

Lana'thel

Initially TRR couldn't keep up with the basic raid damage, and blood pacts would murder us.  We solved that problem by abusing our raid comp; we switched from shaman/priest/priest to pally/druid/priest in our typical lineup, at the cost of some DPS.  Druids with Glyph of Swift Rejuvenation are stupidly good here, and of course blood mirror makes this a classic beacon fight.  We also typically have a shadow priest as the first bite target, for boosted VE.

The air phases were also a bit of a problem for us, but they quickly got better with practice.  It proved necessary to delay the first bite by ten seconds to avoid hunger coming up during an air phase.  Our biggest problem tends to be failing to debug the bite order at the start of the fight, leading to mind controls in the 4->8 vampire transition.  If I manage to get that right, it's often a one-shot.  We're not very good at controlling who gets bitten first, so typically I'll write out the bite order with "X" being bitten first, and leave one of the DPS out of the bite order.  If that left-out DPS is X then everything goes according to plan; otherwise the first bite victim becomes X and the left-out person replaces that person in the bite order.  There are supposedly addons to take care of this.

Valithria

TRR got stuck on this fight for weeks, only getting in a successful attempt this past Wednesday.  Some of the issue was practice, but much of it was trying out bad strats.  What we settled on was two healers going through every portal and rolling cloud stacks, and one staying out and healing the raid.  Paladins and shamans are the first choice for taking portals.  The two portal healers take portals on opposite sides of the room and grab clouds separately, rather than trying to stay together and share clouds.

The outside team needs to keep the fight going for a bit under six minutes, though not all of that time has to be clean and precise.  Our successful try took 5:37.  Acceleration of adds appears to be time-based and not health-based; things get just as hectic around the 5-minute mark whether Valithria is at 9 million or 11 million.  We don't have our outside team kite ghouls; we just tank them and kill them pretty quickly.  Since we have so much ranged DPS, we typically don't ask our melee to help with suppressers; that way we minimize running around time.

[Marco]

Sindragosa
From an overall difficulty perspective, the alternating phases 1 and 2 are not that hard, but phase 3 is pretty rough.  We made good progress in tonight's TRR raid but didn't kill her.  Observations beyond what you can find in a generic strategy guide:

* In phase 1+3, people need to group up for efficient raid healing.  We made ranged and healers stand about ten yards behind melee.

* In phase 2, the first spear lands pretty quickly after the tombs appear.  People have to locate the target as they're running to tombs or they'll be too late getting to the correct side.  Fortunately, the spear mechanic is pretty forgiving if a couple of people get hit.

* The Unchained Magic and Permeating Chill mechanics are fairly forgiving as long as you don't forget about them.  For Unchained Magic, most class immunity effects (like Ice Block) will knock it off, and you only have to stop casting for five seconds to get your stack to detonate.  Permeating Chill often drops on its own.  In phase 3, make sure to be more conservative with those debuffs as they are amplified by Arcane Buffet.

* The timing in phase 3 is very tight.  If everyone swaps to DPSing tombs, the next target will be picked right about as the first tomb dies.  This requires the raid to be disciplined about movement.  The tomb spot has to be pretty close to the tanks so that the melee can get to them quickly.  The next target needs to stand still in the tomb spot (or run to it if not already there) and trust that everyone else will get out of the area, or else the tomb spot will tend to migrate into a bad place.  If the raid is behind on killing the previous tomb, there is no good recovery from that, so the raid needs to be very good with the rhythm of moving in and out and killing tombs.

* In phase 3, the magnetic pull tends to happen while someone is tombed.  Fortunately, she will delay targeting the next tomb victim, so the whole raid can (I think) take advantage of the opportunity to run to the tomb, drop their buffet stack while killing the tomb, and then run to the usual rendezvous point.

* The tomb mechanic is a three-step process: arrow, then splash, then tomb.  Once the splash goes off, you're clear to run towards the target, even though the tomb won't appear for several seconds.

* We split up the raid into two groups, with one tank and one or two healers in each group.  For phase 2, we had a left and right spot for the tombs, and we had group 1 go to the left tomb and group 2 to the right tomb, so that each tomb would have some DPS on it.  For phase 3, we started with group 1 clearing its debuff stack on the first tomb, and then alternated, or at least that was the theory.

[Snique]

F&L did beat Princes 10 normal with 2 tanks.  Warrior for Taldaram/Valanar, protadin for Keleseth.  Once.  We have yet to repeat this.

It might have made a difference that our protadin has a lot of practice doing slime kiting in Rotface.  So he knows how to use his cooldowns on the run, spot openings (or nuclei) and move.

The DPS challenge here was not large, so we went with 3 healers - tree (raid), disc priest (protadin), holy priest (warrior). I think we had about 28 sec on the enrage timer.

[Gerrik]

Bacond Bandits did get some Lich King attempts this week. Mainly Phase 1 and the first Remorseless Winter phase and little time spent in Phase 2.

For Phase 1 we stood near the bottom of the stairs on the outside edge, with the MT standing in front of the OT, and the casters and healers group up on the side of the off tank. When necrotic plague hits someone in the caster group we run to the OT, but cleansing it too early will make the plague jump back into the group.

We found out that the DPS check for the Raging Spirits can be quite high, and most times we'd still have them up once Phase 2 started.

[Marco]

TRR got its first Sindragosa kill this week.

We mostly ganked our phase 3 strategy from Bandits after Ghoselle did a run with them.  Specifically:

* Two alternating tomb positions, to the left and right side of the raid.
* Melee kill tombs.  Range kill Sindragosa.
* Ranged and healers clear stacks on every other tomb (with healers staggered).
* Tanks alternate clearing stacks and swapping aggro.
* After getting pulled in and running out, I would run to the tomb and help kill it since the melee would otherwise tend to get behind.

Random factoid: I was the only caster DPS, and I got Unchained Magic every time it was cast (in over an hour of attempts), leading me to believe that there's a mechanic ensuring that two healers don't get Unchained Magic at the same time if there's anyone else to give it to.

[jsoh]

* Melee kill tombs.  Range kill Sindragosa.

Technically, we sent our two dual-wield melee to kill tombs, leaving the retadin primarily on Sindragosa. Being said retadin, I'd dps every other tomb (to clear the debuff stacks), or any tomb when one of the other melee's got frosted.

My Chilled stacks tended to drop on their own most of the time, whereas thats a reasonably unlikely occurance for the dual wielders, even at 130 FrR.

[Piralyn]

We mostly ganked our phase 3 strategy from Bandits after Ghoselle did a run with them. 

 

[Deren]

We mostly ganked our phase 3 strategy from Bandits after Ghoselle did a run with them.

 

Marco been spying on Bandits ever since BC, now his opreation has grow so large he now has agaents.

[Deren]

Putricide
Abom meleee debuff and Eat green pool do not share a GCD and his melee hit box is large, which means if your if can tank PP close to the outside of the Green pools you can allso cause damage to the boss and debuff him. This can really reduce phase 2 with a high melee group.

[Marco]

Kharvek's 10-man got its first Putricide kill, more or less by the book (without stacking on slimes).  We then did Blood Princes with Edalia tanking both regular bosses, and Adalrik tanking Keleseth.  Edalia's health bounced around a bit, but the biggest problem we had was actually an unexpected one: more than half the time, Taldaram's empowered orbs went to someone standing close by and one-shotted at least one person.  We solved the problem by moving Taldaram+Valanar to the right edge of the stage, instead of having them in the middle, and making sure that people adjusted to max range when Taldaram had the health bar.

We had enough time for one shot on Blood Queen, and had an amazing blind first try which ended in a--literally--500 health wipe.  With just a little more luck or any amount of practice we would have had it.  We went a little late to get in a second try because the first try was so amazing, but weren't able to duplicate it (although it wasn't bad).

[Marco]

Oh, I forgot something about our Putricide kill--it was the first time I've beaten Putricide with three healers.  With a high-DPS group (most of the people do ANR 25-man raiding) and the +5% buff, the slimes were still going down before exploding most of the time, and three healers makes it much easier to keep everyone alive when, say, the gas cloud targets a healer.

[Uan]

Putricide
Abom meleee debuff and Eat green pool do not share a GCD and his melee hit box is large, which means if your if can tank PP close to the outside of the Green pools you can allso cause damage to the boss and debuff him. This can really reduce phase 2 with a high melee group.

This may increase the healing load, however, from the Abom's aura.  If the challenge is healing, rather than dps, it may be better to avoid it.  Then again, these days with "gear" or "three healers" the healing challenge may not be as intense anymore.

[Deren]

This may increase the healing load, however, from the Abom's aura.  If the challenge is healing, rather than dps, it may be better to avoid it.  Then again, these days with "gear" or "three healers" the healing challenge may not be as intense anymore.

Unless there a log showing something else, the range of the aura is the whole room (or anything that strat would be usefull) and hits everyone in the raid.

2 bandits logs
http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/dr6cv1v6amxdo2nl/spell/70402/?s=5527&e=5808
http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/alr7m29j0dxdtnkc/spell/70402/?s=6433&e=6870

Both kills have everyone taking the same amount hits + absorb .. unless they die like seni.

Bandits do have Ly hax and WG take care of the 700 damage ticks like there not there.

[Marco]

TRR had its first night of practice on Lich King.

Phase 1 doesn't seem too bad, but we had to spend a little bit of time working out a strategy and it was still error-prone by the end of the night.  We wound up putting the MT and OT close to each other (but facing the horror away from the MT), diverting raid DPS to the horrors, and AOEing from time to time when Arthas wasn't summoning drudge ghouls or a horror.  Our biggest problem is that it seemed pretty random whether a plague would show up on the horrors or not.  When a big plague did appear, the horror would die very fast, but sometimes it would just ping pong around the drudge ghouls for a long time and we'd barely be able to kill it before the next horror became active.  This was especially problematic when the lich king was close to 70%, as it made it impossible to perform the transition and eventually our MT would die to a huge buff stack on the lich king.  I think the way to make this less random is to keep the number of drudge ghouls limited, which means putting out more AOE damage.

The first transition phase (which most guides call 1.5) wasn't terribly threatening.  We got into phase 2 a fair number of times, but tended to die quickly.  One persistent source of wipes was frost spheres.  They continue spawning for much longer than you'd expect.  We only had one or two tries where we actually got to try DPSing a Val'kyr and handling a couple of defiles.

[Deren]

Bandits Phase 1

We tank in a Triangle. It seem this Triangle can be anywhere. Poeple seem to have differnet placese for it. The OT(me) stands on close to the edge where i dont have to move to going in to Phase 2.  Range/healers stand to off to one side close to the edge and tank melee stands on the other side of the triangle.

We never dps the horror or ghouls(get a lot ot splash anyways), I try to taunt as many ghouls over to me as i can (its a little tricky since i have 0 threat moves and taunts run out doing the time it takes them to walk over). While making sure i get all the Horrors. (I usely have 2) horrors on me at a time.  We usely get the plauge up to 40?.  which start to make quick work of everything.

Phase 2, I just stand there untill the plauge kills everything on me.  then i go tank the 3 raging spire.

Warrors get to be hax for OT for this phase and Pallys a little less so.  Block scales well because of the ghouls and Shock wave and Stun can be using to stop all damage when the Horrors Enrage.