The Order Rocks ICC: Part 4

We now come, friends, to the piece de resistance, the completions of our goals, that mighty foe whom none could vanquish before, the Lich King: Arthas Menethil. What began with Kil'jaeden's banishment of the elder shaman Ner'zhul to Azeroth, his spirit chained in cursed armor and frozen in a block of unmelting ice, would soon end.


As Arthas stepped from his throne and descended to meet us, Tirion Fordring (who apparently got there first... nice of him to help us along the way) and he traded insults back and forth ending with Arthas, rather genially really, encasing Tirion in a block of ice.


The battle was joined...


We were fairly consistently able to make it through the first phase and the first transitional phase of the fight, figuring out a new thing here and there. The main issues were necrotic plague that must not only be removed from raid members, but as it is removed, must then jump to one of the very powerful undead vrykul in order to tick down its two million health. Oh, and to top it off, it gains stacks, adding 50,000 damage per stack, so it really should be dispelled before it is allowed to tick; and his pain and suffering debuff that deals damage until the target is healed to with 90% of their full health.

I was offtanking and after some initial sudden deaths due to the plague, Colgentleman got quite adept at removing the thing and it didn't give us much more trouble, especially once re realized that stacking it was the key to getting rid of the giant baddies that I otherwise found myself having to kill on my own (which took a while).

And of course, there were...


The predictable...


Deaths...


However, we really all in all did an excellent job of progression raiding, learning a new thing or adapting our strategy each time under the watchful eye of our beloved guild leader, Theactionman. The second phase proved more difficult than the first, but we did mange to do well in spite of a few left over frost orbs blowing people off.


Two main things to watch for here... Defile which is cast on a player and creates a defiled area on the ground. If it deals damage to any player, gets progressively bigger. We had a fun couple wipes where it covered the ENTIRE platform. The second, and possibly even more annoying, were the valkir. These swoop in, pick someone up, and (rather quickly) fly them over to the edge and dump them. Though Colgentleman tried, he could not grab them back from the edge, so we had to resort to ordinary tactics of stunning them and bringing them down. We got better at this, though the danger of having so many melee characters bunched up when he casts Defile made this... problematic at times.


And now friends, we come to the final chapter: the last phase of the fight and the death of the dreaded Lich King... tune in for the last chapter of The Order Rocks ICC!