Icecrown Blood Princes

[Tahriel]

We just did this encounter in 10man this evening.

Our ranged tank was a Hunter, since we could reliably build threat and moving around the room while still being able to keep the threat coming was useful. (That and we didn't have a warlock).

However we seemed to hit a few brick walls, with our hunter having sometimes 5 of the nucleus on him and he still got one shot with a 31k Shadow Lance.

We had this happen on not only the Hunter, but i tried tanking it as a Shadow priest and we had our Elemental Shaman try tanking him once, but we all still got 1 shot. After a couple more tries and a GM turning up and changing us all in to Pirates (That was pretty fun, one of our members reported encounter bugged and a GM tried giving us luck with pirate costumes). We then gave it another attempt and we didn't get unlucky with a one shot.

We ended up doing it, but this is still the first fight in Icecrown we have 3 healed, and even with 3 healers we felt it was quite hectic to heal.

Anyone else notices their ranged tank being one shot by Shadow Lance?

/Tahriel

[Solidor]

I tanked Keleseth as a warlock. I was assigned range tanking so I prepared myself with 2 stamina trinkets (from the brewfest event) and the 3 parts of the Glacial Set (cause it has much much stamina). I had something about 29k unbuffed. In our first try I was wearing my normal stuff, no stamina equipment, I gained the initial aggro with 2-3 Searing Pains and then I started my normal Destro Rotation on him, the first Nucleis was popping up then and I castet CoA on it. I did a mistake in the first try, I was casting the highest level of CoA which can kill these nucleis very fast, and the first Shadow Lances from Keleseth were hitting me hard. We wiped cause one of our healers died. In the second try I equipped all my stamina gear and I activated "show nameplates" so targeting the dark nucleis becomes easier and sometimes you can't target them properly when a healer has aggroed (studid word) them. Everything worked fine here and I gave the healers much more room for healing me, since we had only 2 healers. I think when you have 3 Healers you can overcome equipping any stamina gear or spec, but I don't really think its that much needed, when you gained some stacks of these nucleis you get very very little to no damage. One of the easiest encounters I've seen so far, just get along with the abilities of the princes and their empowered versions and thats it. Our healers really did a great job, so did the rest I think.

Out Setup:
Paladin Tank
Druid Tank
Warlock (Destruction with survivability talents and some gear, but optional)
Arcane Mage
Rogue
Enhancer Shaman
Elemental Shaman
Ret Paladin
Resto Druid
Holy Paladin.

[mav1234]

We found that using a DK tank on Kelseth trivialized tanking him, since even with 2 orbs the empowered bolts didn't hit that hard (it could be that I had the unholy damage reduction, AMZ, and AMS available too. >.>)... Plus, Icy Touch made picking up orbs pretty easy. Threat on him was at times an issue, but I'd let my healers know, and I'd run in and Blood Strike him twice to generate UnholY Runes so that I could Icy Touch more. XD

We also lacked hunters for misdirects, or my threat wouldn't ahve been an issue. Not sure if anyone was even really close to pull off me either.

[Solidor]

We are gonna do 25-man today, and from what I have read so far a DK for Keleseth sounds good too. Gonna try it myself first (Warlock), from reading the comments, the encounter in 25-man is pretty much the same besides more dmg etc. Queen Lana'thel in 10-man wasn't as hard as Putricide, besides Putricide is funnier with all the farting and crazy shit he is talking about!

[Hamburglar]

I just tried this on 10 man and I've never been so frustrated. The damage is the same if not more than 25 and our Keleseth tank was getting randomly nuked. We tried a warlock and he was getting crushed even with 3 nuclei. We then tried a DK with 40k unbuffed and he was getting hit by 20k bolts with 3-4 nuclei on him. 75% of our attempts had Keleseth picked second and there 3 nuclei had not even spawned yet. This would mean 25-35k bolts which killed the lock tank and the healers couldn't keep the DK up.

[gundecker]

I tried this the other night and was tanking the fire prince. I got a question about his abilities...

For glittering sparks, the guide says that ideally, only the tank should be hit by this ability. However, it says that he targets a random player and casts the ability in a frontal cone. Going through my combat logs, several people were hit by the glittering sparks but I wasn't. They thought I might've had a problem holding threat but I was the only one on him until he became empowered. So am I the only one that should be getting hit by them or is it inevitable that someone else in the group is going to take damage from this ability?

Also, I noticed that melee swings on the the fire prince rose from around 3-6k upwards of like 10-15k before becoming empowered. Is there some sort of buff that he gets that increases damage? I don't remember all the details from my combat log but it seemed like the fire prince got a buff, lost it, and then regained it.

[gundecker]

Also, approximately how long does each boss remain empowered for??? Or is there a percentage of their shared health pool, i.e., 10% of health pool reduced and then switch, etc.?

[proudmoore]

The Glittering Sparks appears to act rather like Rotface's Slime Spray - he'll choose a random target (which may, but probably won't, be the tank), and do his Conal attack in their direction, then back to the tank. Particularly when melee is clustered on him, Mass Dispel is your friend.

I'm still a little unclear on why everyone is recommending a caster to tank Keleseth (since I for one welcome a fight that will use all three tanks that seem to be expected in a 25-man). In our attempts last night, we tried both Boomkin and teddy tank, and had much more luck with the teddy. The one issue I can see arriving is AoE effects jumping from the boss to the tank's Nuclei. However, if you're alternating between building threat and gathering Nuclei, it means you have a tank with 50-60k health instead of 25-30 - who can also survive a melee swing if necessary.

Am I missing something?

[Scrilz]

Anyone else have the bood queen join the fight with you. This happened to us two times lastnight. At around 2 mins in the Blood queen would activate and come down and join the fight. Here is the WOL from one of the tries.

World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

[Zikkar]

Anyone else have the bood queen join the fight with you. This happened to us two times lastnight. At around 2 mins in the Blood queen would activate and come down and join the fight. Here is the WOL from one of the tries.

World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

Someone a bit further up mentioned that if you let the "beach ball" go to high in the air it will aggro the Blood Queen and she will pay you an early visit.

[Zikkar]

We just did this encounter in 10man this evening.

Our ranged tank was a Hunter, since we could reliably build threat and moving around the room while still being able to keep the threat coming was useful. (That and we didn't have a warlock).

However we seemed to hit a few brick walls, with our hunter having sometimes 5 of the nucleus on him and he still got one shot with a 31k Shadow Lance.

We had this happen on not only the Hunter, but i tried tanking it as a Shadow priest and we had our Elemental Shaman try tanking him once, but we all still got 1 shot. After a couple more tries and a GM turning up and changing us all in to Pirates (That was pretty fun, one of our members reported encounter bugged and a GM tried giving us luck with pirate costumes). We then gave it another attempt and we didn't get unlucky with a one shot.

We ended up doing it, but this is still the first fight in Icecrown we have 3 healed, and even with 3 healers we felt it was quite hectic to heal.

Anyone else notices their ranged tank being one shot by Shadow Lance?

/Tahriel

It did seem that something was up (read possible randomly bugged) with the shadow lances as our Lock tank would be fine and have 3-4 orbs on him then all of a sudden go down to a massive Shadow Lance in one shot even with 3-4 orbs on him.

[Tahriel]

It did seem that something was up (read possible randomly bugged) with the shadow lances as our Lock tank would be fine and have 3-4 orbs on him then all of a sudden go down to a massive Shadow Lance in one shot even with 3-4 orbs on him.

I'm guessing there may be a bug, the GM that came to the raid last night didn't want to say if the encounter was bugged or not.

In all honesty, i'd expect there to be some Nerfs on the Princes fight. Not that i feel it's a fight that's overly hard, it just seems like its quite a bit tougher than anything we've had yet.

/Tahriel

[Hamburglar]

The most maddening thing is having Keleseth get empowered before or just as a 3rd nucleus spawns and the tank getting one shot.

[Stymie]

The most maddening thing is having Keleseth get empowered before or just as a 3rd nucleus spawns and the tank getting one shot.

We defaulted to having a healer CD go on our Warlock range tank if Keleseth got the second Empower. We had a Disc priest and holy pally available. The second the red orb transfered to Keleseth, we'd just put up Pain Suppression. There is a small delay of 2 seconds or so where the orb is traveling over and connects where you know it'll be Keleseth, but he's not empowered yet. It was just too dicey trying to risk healing through big burst if the Nuclei hadn't spawned just right.

[Timecks]

In 25m we tried the warlock tanking Keleseth a couple times, then someone found a Youtube with the DK tanking him instead. It seemed to go smoother... we tried BL on Keleseth, but ppl were complaining about being threat capped, so we changed it to when DPS was on Taldaram.

In 10m we tried the warlock again, with the DK on Valanar, and me (Pally) on Taldaram. One of the tanks was just getting nuked at the start from bad pulls, and on one pull where the DK died early, I just picked up Valanar and Taldaram and the healers kept me up until other ppl start dying so we wiped it up.

So we switched it up and put the DK back on Keleseth and had me grab Val and Tal from the start. I'd try to keep my back to the East or West so when I would get knocked back I wouldn't fly to the back of the dias, thus OOR of the healers. We ended up losing the raid healer to an empowered flame, so the other two healers were able to keep us up for the kill.

We also had one attempt where the Beach Ball went too high and pulled BQL, costing us 1 attempt on her.

Another note about the Beach Ball, Shadow Priests are horrible at keeping it airborne, MF and all the dots are ignored, so MB and SWDeath, both long cooldowns, were his only options... so the warlock did it instead

[Liquidska]

I figured DoT's would be ignored, I assumed it would only bounce back up from spells that have "boom" to them. Not really sure how to quantify that, any confirmation on Lighting Bolt, Lavablast, Earthshock? Or any other spell that we know doesn't work?

[dcwarcraft]

Killed this today. I'll post some thoughts although some of this was posted before.

1. Swapping targets QUICKLY is essential

2. There will be 3 Kenetic Balls out at one time. We used Physical DPS pets to control them. (Hunter Pet or Warlock Fel Hunter). Allowing one of these to hit the ground is bad so it should be #1 priority when they spawn.

3. We tanked the bosses very close to where they spawn. Healers and Ranged should be on the side of the bosses closest to the door. This allows melee to fan out on the "stage" when the Empowered Shock Vortex goes off. Assign spots for them to run to.

4. We had 3 Hunters, and we used all 3 to MD Prince Keleseth to the Warlock Tank. This gave him plenty of aggro on it at the start and allowed him more freedom to run around and pickup Dark Nucleus as they spawn.

5. Kiting the flame ball helps so run from it.

GOOD LUCK ALL!

[Akeber]

Got a 25 man kill last night. We used a warior tank for Keleseth, the larger health pool of a real tank makes keeping him up easier. The down side of this is threat, your DPS will likely be threat capped when he becomes the kill tarket if the tank is spending all his time running around to pick up the nuclei. Our solution was to have our resto druid run around and pick up a nucleus or two and bring them over to the tank who'd peel them off of him, he had 4+ nuclei on him at all times. We then ended up with the warrior not having to move as much, although he did spend a lot of time at range as the melee damage is significant and unecessary if he has enough of a threat lead.

For healing the two other tanks, we used a pally with beacon on me (Valanar tank) and spamming the druid (Taldaram tank). The paladin ended up parking himself against the wall with the druid to be well out of range of any knock backs that would interrupt healing. Beacon has a 60 yard range so it allowed me to keep Valanar a good distance away.

Lastly, we used two hunter pets on the beach balls. The pet wil just stand under the ball and patiently wait for it to get close to the ground, as soon as it's in melee range the pet hits it and up it goes. It is a little scary watching the balls get so close to the ground, but it works. The only issue that arises is that there are sometimes three out for a very short window of time, make sure your're watching for it. Have your hunters make focus pet attack macros with a raid icon marking script so they know what two are taken care of, the third will be the unmarked one.

In the long term, I can see the benefits of having a ranged tank on Keleseth, like no melee damage, and can more easliy build threat on the move, especially if it's a DOT class. However, for learning the fight, the larger health pool of a "real" tank allowed for a margin of error.

[Lindentree]

Any word on whether Spell Reflect works on Keleneth's shadow bolts?

[Quinafoi]

Any word on whether Spell Reflect works on Keleneth's shadow bolts?

Sorry, no freebie 70k damage.