So our last tries at the LK were pretty bad. Analogue already covered some of the ‘why’ but I want to talk more about the strategies we used, some of the other stuff that has been tried and what we need to do different
For as complicated as the fight is there aren’t actually that many LK strats that work. There is not much to tweak except on a small scale. The bulk of the variability is in phase one. In other phases you are doing so much running around and with things like defile you end up having guidelines more than actual strategies.
The strategies in phase 1 are all about the plague. How you position the adds and what you do with them is all about managing the plague. The whole point of using the adds to manage it is so that you can kill them without using much DPS. You could, in theory, run people with the plague off by themselves and cleanse them but that would mean you have to manually DPS down the big adds later. Why bother when you have this handy plague? So the point of all your plague handling is to have it do what you want (kill adds) with the minimum risk.
For those that are unfamiliar with it the plague is randomly applied to the raid in phase 1. It does 150k damage every 5 seconds. So you cleanse it before it one-shots someone. But then it jumps to the nearest person within 10 yards. If you want to kill the debuff, just be 10 yards from anyone. If you want to use it to kill an add, you have to have an add be the closest thing to the person getting cleansed. We use a simple strategy where the off tank is tanking the adds standing a few yards away from the raid and whoever has the plague runs over to get cleansed near the adds.
Now normally we just have the big guys on the off tank and perhaps a few random small guys. The reasoning is that if it is just the big guy you are certain it gets him. We have tried it with ONLY the big adds on the OT, and that sort of works. And we have tried it with a few extra adds sort of accidently over there, and that works somewhat too.
The variables here are random number generator based. You see every time the plague kills a small add (ghoul) it gains a stack, jumps to the next target, and gives the LK a 2% dps buff. The thinking for some strategies is to only have the big targets there so that the plague does not keep killing ghouls and there for it does not buff the LK. This is a tradeoff though. Because if the plague is not killing ghouls it is not gaining stacks and that means the big guys are going to need some active DPS either during phase 1 or during the transition.
Normally we have some ranged DPS target the big add right before the second one comes up. There are two reasons to actively DPS the big add. You DPS the first one so that it is not alive when the second one is beating on the OT, and you DPS the last one so that you go into the transition with fewer things alive.
After thinking about it and reading a few things I have determined this is a bad plan.
Here is the new plan. The off tank grabs ALL the adds and holds them. No DPS attacks those adds at ANY time. The plague will jump around to the adds and eventually kill them all. There are two risks with this plan one is that two of the big guys will be on the OT and enrage at the same time. That is what cooldowns are for so forget that risk. The second is that the LK will get many stacks of the buff. So? At 2% that is not biggy. The MT, if it is geared well and ours are, should be able to handle it. It only lasts 30 second so it is gone in phase 2.
I am certain this is a better plan because it speeds up phase one and reduces confusion with target switching and what not. Unless we are having a problem with tanks just dropping, and we are not, it simply does not make sense to do it any other way.
That’s what we do!
Also remember that the tranq effect has been shared around a bit, most notably to druids. Makes 2 shamblers a lot easier to deal with than it used to be.
Hmm. I forgot about the 2% buff he gets when something dies from the plague and it moves onwards to another target. But as you mentioned as long as MT is geared and your healers are ready the 2% is not all that bad.
For the Shambling Horrors, if you have a hunter available, tranq shot works wonders on their enrage.
Although, we failed to get him down last night (due to my fail internet connection last night), your new plan is very similar to what we used and the strat my alliance guild used. OT gets all the big guys, and gets as many of the ghouls they can.
Letting the plague do the work makes it easy so DPS can focus on the LK. Even if 1-2 are up in transition, the disease will have enough stacks up to kill them. One thing also is blowing Heroism at the beginning speeds up P1, and with the length of the fight it should be back when you may need it later on.
Our “proper” 10-man strat (the one which doesn’t rely heavily on a 25-man / part heroic geared LK tank) has LK parked on the glyph square near the first spike facing out to the edge, the OT is on the same line, the Shamblings spawn pretty much in front of the OT with the ranged a little further around the platform. The OT taunts in as many of the ghouls as possible and the MT (and melee) avoids using AoE attacks so the ghouls are easily pulled off onto the OT (misdirect & tricks used to move them where they’re available).
As you say, let the plague do it’s thing, in the transition the OT takes his pack off onto the edge and they’re ignored until the shamblings drop with the MT taking the ragings. Ideally the horrors are down by the time the 3rd raging spawns, OT grabs this and kites onto the main section (watch where it’s pointing) and the MT takes LK to the Stupid Paladin who’s forgotten he can bubble.
All damage is on either LK or the ragings in these two phases, we completely ignore the horrors and ghouls, if they need killing (except the few ghouls on the MT at the transition) then something has gone wrong and we’re into wipe country anyway.
Uhh … am I tanking? On the DK, sure, I can take whatever .. heck, I solo tanked through Soul Reaper. But the warrior … I dunno. Guess we’ll have to see. Maybe it’s not so bad, LK doesn’t seem to hit all that hard in phase one, but … I’m squishier than the DK at the moment.
If we can ever get back in there on one of our lockouts :P
It actually makes the most sense for your warrior to tank the adds in phase one so you get infinite taunts but Vigilance-ing my bear.
Even before the new talent trees and 30% buff (We first downed LK on 15% buff) we did it this way. We just let the disease bounce as much as possible and had a few comical moments where the cleanser was a bit too trigger happy and bounced it throughout the raid a few times until someone finally got to run it out :)
The extra damage from LK was a non-issue, and we never at any point had any DPS on any adds, so we had a fast phase 1. The disease we continued to manage throughout the phase transition, with the OT positioned so as to make sure the disease could only bounce among the adds and the OT. I think I had two small ghouls left on one attempt, which I managed to accidentally toss over the edge by only just managing the phase transition in time – sweet!
We’re at the point now where we’ve got him on farm on alts to get alts and friends Kingslayer, with a kill every week, and we’re still doing it this way. The only real difference now is that the tanks care even less about the damage they’re taking.
(We position in a triangle – DPS only just in the circle, to make their phase transition easier, LK about 10 feet away, OT making the third apex of the triangle sort of halfway between.)
We also just eat the enrage on the Shambling Horros – and had to even back on our serious attempts due to no-one who could tranq. Getting the mechanics down seems to be much more important than minimsing tank damage taken for sure.