v3.2
This was going to be my thoughts on the new Twin Val’kyrs boss in Crusader’s Coliseum. However there isn’t really much to say about them. The mechanics I quite like, but its just not hard enough.
First attempt on them we had a bit of confusion about what to do and the first vortex wiped half the raid, the rest of us soldiered on and hit the enrage timer. The most noticable thing about this fight is the lack of damage. You pretty much get killed if your the wrong colour through a vortex and you take a little damage from bumping into marbles of the wrong colour, but the bosses don’t really melee or do any other damage.
Second time around was momentous, not only cause we killed the new boss, but because I DPS’ed in a raid for the first time since Instructor Raz in Naxxramas. Go me! Anyway we cut back to 4 healers and in all honestly we’d probably be ok with two next week. No idea what my DPS was and I think I DPS’ed half of it wearing the wrong colour aura (i.e. I was doing half damage), but hey, it was fun doing something different!
Anyway before those giant loot pinatas we also got our first kill of the Faction Champions. A completely different fight. Quite long, quite intense and quite hard. I’m going to just blurt out what we did in case others find it useful.
Originally we were attempting to CC/interrupt the healers and kill the warrior as he was the most dangerous to the clothies. We managed to kill him a few times, but couldn’t really press on and kill more than one or two others.
I agitated for killing a couple of the healers first, but we instead swapped to killing the shadow priest first as he was dispelling a fair bit of our CC and other useful stuff. Our first attempt doing it this way we killed the shadow priest, then the holy priest, then warrior and rogue and a couple of others. We were on the home straight with only about 3 or 4 left to kill and only about half a dozen of us dead when the instance reset. Everyone was kicked out and respawned at the instance entrance… Needless to say that finding some success after a number of hours wiping we were a bit miffed. But we had a taste for victory. We probably weren’t as miffed as one of the other top horde guilds which had just killed Lord Jarax and were starting to distribute loot…
Next attempt didn’t go that well, but wasn’t a compelete failure. Next attempt and we’re doing well, about four NPCs down with no fatalities on our side and blam! Another instance reset 
This happened once more but we eventually executed well and managed avoid instance resets. Our raid leader looted like a fiend in case we got a reset during loot distribution. Strange thing was we didn’t get any further resets.
For Faction Champions we had a disc priest (me) pretty much dispelling full time. I threw a few heals but mostly dispels. We had a second disc priest mainly healing and throwing a few dispels. Between the two of us we minimised the impact of their CC and pretty much nullified the warlocks DPS. In fact the warlocks pet was more annoying than him. We also managed to dispel their heroism within a few seconds of it going up, which must have helped.
We had one good interrupter (shaman i think) lock down the holy paladin. We had three CC’ers/interrupters on each of the holy priest (who we killed second after the shadow priest) and the resto shaman. This week we had no resto druid, although I think the aggressive mass dispelling would have reduced his impact somewhat. We had a one DK on each of the warrior and NPC DK to slow them down and try to keep them away from the clothies. This mostly worked. We also had someone harass the rogue to try and keep him away from the clothies. Warlocks and holy priests seem to be especially popular targets for them.
We had no tanks as such although our lone warrior was protection spec and helped with interrupts. We also had our shadow priest, assigned to knocking over their totems as best he could.
This is one crazy fight. There is so much going on. I remember the raid leader describing Mimiron’s phases, which used to take like 15 minutes when we were still learning the fight. This is even more crazy than that with so many different assignments and things to watch.
The NPC’s do appear to have an agro table of sorts, but it seems to wipe about every 8 seconds. A number of times i’d have two or three NPC’s attack me only to have them lose interest half a dozen seconds later. This appeared to happen regardless of my current health because in one instance they changed targets when I only had a couple of thousand health left and pretty much one hit from any of them would have killed me.
It is also a long fight. We blood lusted at the start to get the first kill and in at least one of the attempts we got off another blood lust towards the end to help speed killing the last 3 or 4 NPCs. In one fight I noticed Divine Hymn, with its 10 minute CD was off CD towards the end of the fight. So most of your cool downs can be used at least twice in the fight.
Downing the Faction Champions was a relief as we’d heard from a third horde raid guild that the Twins were a joke. As per my intro they were as easy as we’d heard.
So that’s it. I don’t know if this is the best way to do the Faction Champions, but it worked for us.
Good luck and enjoy!
Posted in Blogging 
