[25H] Blood Queen Lanathel

[Meloree]

Same fight, more damage.

The DPS requirement is not obscene, but it's quite high. You'll basically want to do everything in your power to increase effective raid DPS.

Useful tips include: make sure ranged gets their bites first. Save melee bits for the 4th round. Ranged can DPS in the air. It's not a ton, but it makes a difference.

DG/Shadow Aura Mastery/Divine Hymn every air phase, if possible. It's the hardest part of the healing check. The increasing damage of the aura isn't particularily hard to deal with.

Optimal heroism time is 4:30 to 4:40 on the fight clock. Plan cooldowns accordingly.

Bite targets should, where possible, move to the biter. It is better to have normal-level DPS moving than vampire-level DPS.

As far as bite plan - and this isn't necessarily optimal, it's just the order we chose - we set up ranged in 2 groups (3 and 4). 2 unlucky ranged didn't get to get bitten - the lowest DPS ones. First bite goes to a ranged. That ranged bites a ranged from the opposite group first - so at 1:20 in the fight, there's a vampire in each of groups 3 and 4. The next two rounds of bites happen within group, very easy to manage. For the 4th round of bites, 4 melee were assigned to G3, and 4 assigned to G4. Each melee knew who their biter was, they ran to them, got bitten... win. We put the most-mobile melee (rogues, warriors, engineers) as being bitten by the ranged standing furthest away - determined in advance. This minimized wasted DPS time for melee as much as possible.

[pfunkmort]

we didn't go for anything so intricate in terms of bite order (any of my responses here in these posts are more for comparison - not refutation - as edge is amazing). We usually tried to either have our top rogue bitten first, or have a range outdo him, and him bitten on the first player induced bite - so that we had 1 ranged and 1 melee bitten after that first player bite. That meant that melee wouldn't have to move, until they were all bitten, and ranged could just spam their rotations and bite people near them as well, maxxing their dps. obviously priority was given to high single target dps, with warlocks becoming #1 bite target in ranged on the last bite because of their execute.

all of the things about healing are correct - the burst damage during the fear/bite (on the second player induced bite especially - as it so closely syncs up with the fear) are incredibly critical - as you can NOT afford to lose a bitten dps for fear of not meeting the dps requirement. Also, raid healing becomes a little trickier at the end of the fight, when aoe damage on the raid from her aura increases from everyone bitten (like 6k per person - every 2? seconds) - and some of the healers are at low mana already from spamming the raid over the fight's duration.

Either way, soften the damage from bites, as a healer, make sure no one dies, and watch out for raid damage at the end, popping everything you have during the last 30% burn with hero, and it's actually one of the more forgiving hard modes. But watch out, because most guilds will struggle with this fight, if only because they can't keep everyone alive during the first two or three bite cycles and fears.

from a tank perspective, we tank swapped for CD rotations - I'd tank, pop bubblewall, then trinkets, then DP, and the other tank would taunt, pop his CDs, and then I'd take it back, as I had more armor. Swapping that way isn't really necessary if your healers can keep you two up (the damage mitigated is really spiky, so it's not like bad healers are going to be saved from you doing that - it just means the tanks are a little safer). But, you can get away with less tank damage doing that, and if both of you are being quasi spam healed ANYWAY, it's better than just having a dedicated soak tank, who's letting his CDs rot.

[Talaii]

We actually had a warrior in 4-piece T9 tanking Valithria for most of the fight. This meant Shield Block every 30 seconds - he could do Shield Wall, Last Stand, then trinkets between each consecutive shield block, then I could taunt and Divine protection after his fourth shieldblock. Tanks took noticably less damage doing that, and the ilvl 258 T9 set isn't much worse than the 264 items from ICC/badges.

On the other hand, tank damage isn't the main issue - we were just trying to optimise it, but raid healing/making sure vampires don't die is the challenge, not keeping the tanks alive. She doesn't exactly hit like a wet noodle, but she isn't a major threat to tanks in ToGC/ICC gear.

[Rhiannon]

How many healers did you guys run with out of curiosity? Definitely looked like one where you could drop down to five (was thinking healing priest respec to shadow, another VE), is that unrealistic?

[Avengeance]

6 is a tad safer imo, if you get some unlucky links on a healer or 2.

[Meloree]

We ran 5, but it's certainly possible to meet the dps check with 6.

Our setup was one paladin, one shaman, one priest (holy), and 2 druids. Raid damage and deaths weren't really a problem, I think we killed her on the 3rd or 4th pull. There really isn't anything new to learn for this fight - you just might need to maximize DPS and bite order a little bit more than you're used to.

[Blitzago]

Nothing new to this fight on heroic, atleast I dont think?

We ran 6 healers.

2 Pallies, 2 druids, 1 priest, 1 shammy.

As a prot pally, on pull I would DG cancel for raid wall while healers get into position, doing this on pull, also lets it be up for first blood whirl, when I use it again, and then I use it near the end.

[Brutalus]

Killed this yesterday with 5 healers, 1 paladin, 2 druids, 2 priests. If you have the dps for Festergut, you have the dps for Queen. I DG'd the first air phase, our holydin the DG'd the second. We had a ranged bitten first, who then bit a rogue, and then ranged would bite ranged and melee would bite melee until the queen keeled over. Not overly hard, really.

[Xequecal]

One way to really easily beat this is to just have the entire raid bunch up close together. The bloodbolts will drop the whole raid to about 30% HP, but it's easily healable with everyone grouped up. (glyph of HL, etc) Pact of the Darkfallen just falls off without doing anything, finding people to bite is trivial because everyone is right there. The shadowflame has like a 3 second delay before it starts dropping fire, it's easy to run it out.

[Belloc]

One way to really easily beat this is to just have the entire raid bunch up close together. The bloodbolts will drop the whole raid to about 30% HP, but it's easily healable with everyone grouped up. (glyph of HL, etc) Pact of the Darkfallen just falls off without doing anything, finding people to bite is trivial because everyone is right there. The shadowflame has like a 3 second delay before it starts dropping fire, it's easy to run it out.

Have you actually tried this?

[Laz]

I'm not really too sure about that strat (clumping). Toot toot, failboat captain.

[Belloc]

If you can actually survive the blood bolts, I can see this being a decent strategy... but the problem is actually surviving the blood bolts.

[Laz]

Spreading out and healing is a lot easier IMO. A couple Resto Druids all but trivialize the aura damage leaving the remaining healers to keep up tanks and spot heal.

[Belloc]

Opinions don't matter if you haven't tried the strat being suggested. I want to know if this strat is actually possible.

[cds4850]

Smells like the door strategy for Twin Valks 25hm... it'll never work (until it actually does.)

Assumingly this will be more viable with the increased scaling of the zone buff. Think about the execution of this with 30% increased healthpools, healing, and damage output.

I'm curious to see some updates to this thread in the coming weeks.