Icecrown Lady Deathwhisper

[Nightrida]

A little out of the box thinking for you.

My 25 man is a very ranged heavy raid and the basic strategy seems to rely a decent mix of melee dps and ranged dps. To compensate for this we are experimenting with a very different strategy than what is the standard.

We actually have ranged dps and healers on the far back wall behind the boss spread out between the two pillars on the back wall (not the pillars in front of the boss but on the wall itself). Frost traps are left on the sides of elevator slowing any incoming adds from instantly charging in and killing a healer. Healers all get agro at the start and effectively pull all the mobs over to the boss. Adherants since they are casters will typically stop at the bottom of the stairs to cast at the healers. We have a death knight death grip the one from the left side (the side with 2 fanatics and 1 adherant into a decent spot right next to the boss). The adherants on the right side are burned down by the melee DPS at the bottom of the stairs. The three actual tanks focus solely on picking up the Fanatics and getting them on top of the boss. These adds do not suffer from AoE damage reduction. This is where our odd raid make up actually comes out ahead. Our heavy ranged DPS AoEs the trash right on top of the boss. The waves die before the next one spawns. And we have significantly higher damage being done to the mana shield. Our raid hasn't fully perfected the technique yet, but because of the added AoE damage on the boss phase one will take about 25-33% the time. I should add that not all of the ranged DPS simply AoEs. It is important to still have a few specifically dedicated to single target burning of Fanatics, especially reanimated or deformed. Also because of the frost traps near the elevator, deformed fanatics are simply ping ponged around by tanks taunting and ranged DPS pulling agro until they are dead.

This technique makes it a bit harder to pick up the adds since tanks aren't picking them up immediately, but rather when they get to the stairs so it does require a bit of practice. My raid hasn't killed her yet in 25 man but I suspect this is the technique which will work for us.

*edit* Should also note, spell reflect has no impact on AoE. Because of this even if Adherants are in the AoE our casters don't have to worry about them. It's actually better if they are cause they will die faster.

Looks like this has a very good chance of succession, our guild ran it today, and we got her down to about 30% on second attempt, we only need to get more practice at it and hopefully will have a better success rate, as you said, we had more ranged than melee, so this really helped us, let me know if you have anyother updates on how to tweak it.

[Quinafoi]

Looks like this has a very good chance of succession, our guild ran it today, and we got her down to about 30% on second attempt, we only need to get more practice at it and hopefully will have a better success rate, as you said, we had more ranged than melee, so this really helped us, let me know if you have anyother updates on how to tweak it.

It's just a matter of practice is all, like any other technique. We didn't kill her the first week because we switched strategies half way and only had a couple attempts. The following week though it was a one shot for us. Part of that was one of our regulars that was out the week prior was back which helped a bit, our main tank.

The biggest learning curve will be for the tanks. They have to pick up the adds in a different position, move them instead of just tanking them where they are at, and have to also get their own technique of kiting a deformed fanatic. You can plan it out as much as you like, but some of that just takes practice.

The technique does work though, several raids with heavier ranged compositions instead of a balance or heavy melee have done so using the AoE method.

[hard_jay]

if i do chaos bolt is it hitting her mana shield or her life? since it pass all absorbtion effect

[Panzerr]

if i do chaos bolt is it hitting her mana shield or her life? since it pass all absorbtion effect

Mana Barrier: Envelops the caster in a powerful barrier that continually replenishes any lost health, at the expense of the caster's mana.

As you can read, it's not really an absorb, so chaos bolt won't behave differently than any other damage spell.

[hard_jay]

thank you for the info

[Terra]

We've been having a pretty hard time getting this fight done using the original strat. What I'm going to offer isn't a new concept even on these forums as it was suggested by some others, but I wanted to post our success and what we had to do to get over the hump and drop this boss in 25 man. Our issues were getting out of Phase 1 cleanly and with enough time left on the enrage timer to finish it up. We have the DPS but trying to play the balance game to put just enough DPS on the adds often left 1 group or the other overwhelmed eventually mostly due to bad timing on mind controls. Without further ado, this is what worked for us:



To recap how this was actually executed once the dust cleared.


=========Boss (1)============

Fanatic (2) =========== Adherent (5)

Adherent (3) ========== Fanatic (6)

Fanatic (4) ========== Adherent (7)


======== Random Add (8)========

A = Melee assigned to left side
B = Melee assigned to right side
C = Ranged assigned to left side
D = Ranged assigned to right side
E = Tank assigned to pickup random add

Group B should be stronger than group A
Group C and D should be about equal

A kills 3 then gets on 1
B kills 5 and 7. Then they kill 8 if it's an adherant, otherwise they go to 1.
C kills 2 and 4, then get on 1.
D kills 6 and then make a judgement call. If 8 is a fanatic, kill it. Otherwise, if group C needs help, help them. Otherwise, get on the boss.
E does their best to LoS pull to where 7 is.

If a deformed fanatic spawns: Groups C and D stop what they are doing and kill it.

[Rennadrel]

In 25 man having all DPS on the adds doesn't seem to be effective for my guild. I am not sure why but we can't get past Lady Deathwhisper on 25 man due to not getting enough damage in to take out the mana shield before she goes into berserk. How many melee are recommended for this fight? I would say 5 at most, one on the back and two on either side. The problem I am seeing from my perspective is that people seem to think that we don't have enough time to kill the adds with just melee DPS, however I would honestly be putting all casters on the boss to throw up DoT's and assist with single target spells on the adds while their DoT's tick. Or throw 2 melee on the boss full time and let the other 3 handle the adds that can only be hit by physical damage, it would be enough to kill those guys.

Suggestions on what we should be doing to DPS the boss more due to lack of adds dying.

[Quinafoi]

In 25 man having all DPS on the adds doesn't seem to be effective for my guild. I am not sure why but we can't get past Lady Deathwhisper on 25 man due to not getting enough damage in to take out the mana shield before she goes into berserk. How many melee are recommended for this fight? I would say 5 at most, one on the back and two on either side. The problem I am seeing from my perspective is that people seem to think that we don't have enough time to kill the adds with just melee DPS, however I would honestly be putting all casters on the boss to throw up DoT's and assist with single target spells on the adds while their DoT's tick. Or throw 2 melee on the boss full time and let the other 3 handle the adds that can only be hit by physical damage, it would be enough to kill those guys.

Suggestions on what we should be doing to DPS the boss more due to lack of adds dying.

If your raid composition is heavily ranged DPS, you may want to attempt the AoE strategy. Read the earlier posts in this topic, particularly by myself, I've already described the varying parts of the tactic in multiple posts. Though I suspect now with the nerfs to the encounter you should find it easier on 25 man.

We've done both the AoE strategy and the conventional technique as our raid composition changed from week to week over the holidays.

[Badmonkey.eu]

So I wonder if anybody still has not killed the lady...
Did anyone here already try the full house achievement? We´re going to try this on friday but I didnt find any strat. My suggestion would be to assign want tank to normal tank the adds and later the lady and one tank, preferably me, to tank the different types of adds. I read that if you wanna be successfull you got to tank 1 fanatic, 1 adherent, 1 revived adherent, 1 revived fanatic and a deformed fanatic what should be the only problem.
So my plan is to tank these adds but the deformed fanatic (gotta kite him etc.)
Did you already get these achievement?

[Atromar]

Our guild successfully completed this encounter with a strategy that surprisingly worked very well.

Group Makeup:
Warrior: Tank
Paladin: Tank and Healer
Druid: Healer
Shaman: 2 elemental
Warlock: Destruction
Hunter: Marksmanship
Priest: Shadow
Rogue: Mutilate

We began attempting this encounter with three healers but ran across some problems handling the adds. With this makeup however we blew through the encounter. We only failed the first time by not allowing tanks to grab aggro when her shield dropped.

First Phase:
Both shamans, hunter and rogue were on add duty while shadow priest and warlock focused on boss all times. All spell casters were targeted first each time to minimize any spell reflects. Afterwards priority was given to any mutated adds. Shamans focused down any melee that were resurrected while melee finished off other adds.

By consistently doing this we had a solid 25 seconds of every dps hitting the shield each time in between add spawns. Initially you will probably have about 10-20 seconds in between add spawns but after some practice quickly you achieve about 30 seconds which results in about 25 full seconds of dps on the boss.

The reason this seemed to work so well is no dps was wasted in switching between boss and adds because two physical dps and two casters were focused on the groups at all times. The hunter and rogue blasted through spellcaster shields in seconds while the shamans downed resurrected melee skeletons very quickly.

Overall I would suggest trying this in your group it went very well with two healers.

[Quinafoi]

which results in about 25 full seconds of dps on the boss.

The reason this seemed to work so well is no dps was wasted in switching between boss and adds because two physical dps and two casters were focused on the groups at all times.

No, we didn't not switch to no boss between no add waves.

Huh?

You say you have "25 full seconds of dps on the boss", but four of your DPS is on adds "at all times". Damn, I've seen healers have higher activity on Loatheb than that...

Think what you meant to say is you had enough DPS allocated to the adds to kill them fast enough that you had a lot of extra time to DPS the boss (and you did, you weren't always on adds).

[Desmonae]

My guild is having problems with Lady Deathwhisper. We are finding ourselves overwhelmed by adds by the time we get her mana shield down. We have tried different combinations of melee and caster damage, with little change. What would you say is the minimum dps requirement for this fight per player? I pull up to 5.5k on single boss fights, but I find my dps dropping to 1.5-2k here because I am running around so much. I am in full T9 plus i219-259 other (mostly 232 and higher), as are my guildies. I'm starting to think we're not ready for this, although we can clear anything else! it's rather surprising, and we can't figure out what we're doing wrong. Add: We have all dps on adds then burn mana shield between add spawns. I'm thinking maybe we don't have the dps, but I will try the suggestion below of having people "assigned" to one side or the other, so we don't have to run around so much. thanks to you Surmaaja, for your input. I will try it. <3

[Surmaaja]

Simply assign more people on the adds and not burning the manashield off the boss. In 10mans we all dps down adds first then go for boss, sometimes there's 20-30 seconds untill next wave of adds are coming and thats enough to burn the shield in few waves. In 25 we have assigned certain players on left/right/stairs and just few players constantly on boss.

[Atromar]

No, we didn't not switch to no boss between no add waves.

Huh?

You say you have "25 full seconds of dps on the boss", but four of your DPS is on adds "at all times". Damn, I've seen healers have higher activity on Loatheb than that...

Think what you meant to say is you had enough DPS allocated to the adds to kill them fast enough that you had a lot of extra time to DPS the boss (and you did, you weren't always on adds).

I am sorry it was unclear what I was saying after reading that. What I meant having two spell casters and two physical dps on the adds on each spawn meant that once the adds spawned we had both types of damage to handle any reanimated adds or any spell casters with reflect up. When the adds were dead the four dps would attack the boss for about 25 seconds before they had to be in position for the adds on the other side. Since there were already ranged dps helping with the adds the ranged dps never had to switch from the boss to adds during the time the adds were up. Sorry for the confusion

[longliveario]

We've been having a pretty hard time getting this fight done using the original strat. What I'm going to offer isn't a new concept even on these forums as it was suggested by some others, but I wanted to post our success and what we had to do to get over the hump and drop this boss in 25 man. Our issues were getting out of Phase 1 cleanly and with enough time left on the enrage timer to finish it up. We have the DPS but trying to play the balance game to put just enough DPS on the adds often left 1 group or the other overwhelmed eventually mostly due to bad timing on mind controls. Without further ado, this is what worked for us:



To recap how this was actually executed once the dust cleared.


=========Boss (1)============

Fanatic (2) =========== Adherent (5)

Adherent (3) ========== Fanatic (6)

Fanatic (4) ========== Adherent (7)


======== Random Add (8)========

A = Melee assigned to left side
B = Melee assigned to right side
C = Ranged assigned to left side
D = Ranged assigned to right side
E = Tank assigned to pickup random add

Group B should be stronger than group A
Group C and D should be about equal

A kills 3 then gets on 1
B kills 5 and 7. Then they kill 8 if it's an adherant, otherwise they go to 1.
C kills 2 and 4, then get on 1.
D kills 6 and then make a judgement call. If 8 is a fanatic, kill it. Otherwise, if group C needs help, help them. Otherwise, get on the boss.
E does their best to LoS pull to where 7 is.

If a deformed fanatic spawns: Groups C and D stop what they are doing and kill it.

what component do u suggest for this tactic, I mean how many milee and range? how many people for each group A-B-C-D?

[Tellerbabe]

Aliena said that:" Reanimated adherents are 99% immune to magical damage". However later on in the same video and post she says: "Should a reanimated adherent pop up, have your casters handle it."

This seems a little bit odd...

[Kazeyonoma]

adherent's are casters, and are immune to casting, needs physical dps to kill.
vice versa for the melee cleaving units (their name escapes me)

[swollenpickles]

adherent's are casters, and are immune to casting, needs physical dps to kill.
vice versa for the melee cleaving units (their name escapes me)

I have a question about hunters - in general, but relevant to this fight - what % of their damage is 'physical' and what is 'magical' (or whatever you want to call it)? I'd assume autoshot and steadyshot are 'physical' attacks, but what about arcane shot, serpent sting, chimera etc? What adds should hunters focus on?

If you are in 10 man and have one hunter, are you better off assigning the hunter to the boss full time because of this?

[Urythmic]

Aliena said that:" Reanimated adherents are 99% immune to magical damage". However later on in the same video and post she says: "Should a reanimated adherent pop up, have your casters handle it."

This seems a little bit odd...

Yeah, I was just about to comment on this. The text and narration is exactly backwards. It should say:

"Should a reanimated fanatic pop up, have your casters handle it."

Reanimated Adherent is impervious to magical damage (99% reduction).

Reanimated Fanatic is impervious to physical damage (99% reduction).

A note about this error should be added to the main post.