All that aside, the fight was still challenging despite fielding a stacked comp - it definitely brought back nightmares of firefighter. Stand in the wrong place and 10 minutes of effort can get instantly flushed down the toilet. It's an endurance race straight and simple, about keeping focused for 15 minutes and not panicking.
For any guilds still working on this fight, save yourselves some trouble and get a Prot Paladin MT or a DK MT - tank switching isn't reliable when the OT could be out of position stunning Valkyries, or soaking Vile Spirits, or running out with Defile. An MT that can't handle two back to back Soul Reapers without their own cooldown will lead to alot of "RNG" wipes - except this fight really isn't about RNG. A Prot Warrior is definitely the OT of choice - make sure he's running with safeguard and a glyph of intervene, it'll allow your holy paladin to tunnel one target through Soul Reaper and concentrate on positioning and timing his cooldowns. Vigilance on the MT greatly simplifies Phase 3 as the OT can soak any Vile Spirits that are still up and racing toward the raid. Furthermore, having a comp that lets you Seeds/Living Bomb/Mind Sear AoE the Vile Spirits trivializes this phase immensely (Glyph of Mind Sear is no small detail for this fight).
Phase 2 is hands down the meat of the encounter, it's about about everyone paying attention to the Valkyr and Defile timers, thinking 10 seconds ahead, and watching DBM timers like hawks. This is one of those fights where everyone should be proactively calling things out, not just the raid leader. Admittedly, it took a good night of wipes for everyone in our raid to get the tempo of phase 2...it's frustrating, but at a certain point there was an Ah-Ha moment and phase 2 became very controllable.
For anyone still working on this fight, don't fret if you lose a DPS during phase 2. We lost our arcane mage during the last valkyr due to an "unlucky" defile and still made a stable transition. It does however pay to have some redundancy and stack ranged for a first kill so that losing one range dps in phase 2 doesn't screw you over on the Vile Spirits.
Everyone, great job! Yes, the past month has been a bit frustrating in terms of attendance and all the random disconnects robbing us of a BQL kill (weather, combat log flooding, dying power supplies, etc.) - but oh well, life goes on - hopefully this marks a big turn around for the guild to get back on track. For a month, we've been hampered by a 2 night a week schedule, but seeing that the big RL hump is over - I'm confident we'll see an Arthas 25 kill very soon. Let's keep Focused!
Our Comp:
MT - Prot Paladin, Radeonn
OT - Prot Warrior, Lukelee
De-enrager - Hunter, Lifer
Valkyr Snare - DK, Lastkiss
Vile Spirit AoE - Shadow Priest, Destro Lock; Mherrigin and Pawneddaily
Burst DPS - Arcane Mage, Abilities
Tank Healer - Holy Paladin, Moki
Raid Healer - Resto Shaman, Shamji
Raid/Infest Healer - Disc Priest, Beholdeth
