How to be useful on Lich King heroic

I consider myself an expert on Lich King heroic. Sure, I’ve only killed him once, but I have wiped on this fight more than any other in the game. After 200+ wipes, you pick up a few things here and there, and I’d like to share that with you guys.

This is not an easy encounter, and as you wipe and try again over and over, you’ll tweak your rotation, your movement and your general style on the fight.

I am going to assume that you know the general tactics for this fight – there is no need for me to go through them cause, after all, the main way to be useful on Lich King is to know what the hell you’re doing!

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The Lich King has fallen

It has taken us probably, what, 2-3 months of hard work, sweat, blood and tears. Mostly tears. And a lot of gold. Also, we spent a lot of hours that we could have used on putting our genetals into other peoples genetals. But it wasn’t all for nothing!

Tonight, after another four hours of wiping, on our very last try for the night, Arthas Menethil, The Lich King, died on heroic 25 man. This week, we finally had several phase three wipes, and after some agonising 20% wipes to the enrage timers, he fell down and took a mouthful of ice to the face!

If you want to see the log from the fight, you can find it here! It should go to show that moonkins aren’t really that useless *wink*

Our guild is the 424th guild to kill him, and our world rank is now 397! That’s not bad, considering we were around rank 398 when we were at 11/12 HC. In any case, we are all very happy about getting him down.

Oh, by the way, regarding Invincible’s Reins

Quick Quip: Spell changes

A new build is on the beta, and with it, a few changes to our spells:

  • Wild Mushroom changed, only 3 mushrooms can be placed at one time (Down from 5).
  • Cyclone cast time increased to 2 sec. Up from 1.5 sec.
  • Faerie Fire now has a 35 yards range, up from 30 yards.
  • Insect Swarm now has a 40 yards range, up from 30 yards.
  • Starfire now has a 40 yards range, up from 30 yards.
  • Entangling Roots now has a 35 yards range, up from 30 yards.
  • Thorns now lasts 20 sec, down from 10 minutes. Damage increased by 1400% (Deals 447 damage instead of 32)
  • Moonfire now has a 40 yards range, up from 30 yards.
  • Wrath now has a 40 yards range, up from 30 yards.
  • Moonkin Form now increases Nature and Arcane spell damage by 10%.
  • Starlight Wrath now reduces cast time by 0.15/0.25/0.5 sec. (Up from 0.1/0.2/0.3 sec)

First off, props to the creative way to make us want to stay in moonkin form. Ah well, we don’t really need anything fancy to do that, the “you get more damage here” sign will do the trick.

A lot of our spells have gotten increased range. In our case, it seems like a generic 40 yard range, but this is not the case for all classes! It would seem like some spells, for all classes, are capped at 30 yards where others have a 40 yard range. This is interesting because it means I can nuke a warlock from 40 yards range, but he would have to walk 10 yards to be close enough to cast a fear. Not a bad way to force people to make the decision between nuking, healing or CCing.

Starligth Wrath was buffed, which makes sense, while Wild Mushroom was nerfed to 3 shrooms at any one time. Lets take a moment to write up a long blog post about Shrooms being nerfed, so that we.. wait, nevermind. We don’t know the amount of damage it does, how it plays into our rotation, what glyphs it will have and so on. I guess we’ll just wait and see instead.

Lastly, a very interesting change to thorns: It is now a defensive spell. Defensive in the way of saying “If you touch me, you’re going to hurt!”. It is a fine way to do some extra damage, especially if you are either AOE grinding, tanking a bunch of mobs, or if you are being ganked by a rogue. It is no longer a weak retribution aura, but an offensive defense spell, which should give us a bit of fun.

- QQ

What’s going to happen to moonkin form?

There hasn’t really been a whole lot of moonkin info in the expansion. At least, not compared to what we see for other classes. Sure, there has been a ton of changes, and most of them are very good changes. A lot of our issues have been addressed, but we are still at a point where I feel that moonkins definitely needs a wee bit more of love.

For a while now, I have had this nagging worry that Blizzard would somehow swing around and pull “a resto” on us, and remove moonkin form from our spellbooks. Or make it a use ability like they are doing with restoration druids. Thankfully, Ghostcrawler mentioned the other day that they stand firm in the belief that balance druids are defined by their moonkin form.

There is a lot of grapejuice going around these days about moonkin form being useless in its current state. One argument is about the buffs it brings. We are already sharing all of our buffs with several other classes. So is everyone else. That it continues in Cataclysm is just fine, that’s really how it should be. Every buff should be covered by many classes – it has been Blizzard’s philosophy since Wrath of the Lich King came out, and people seem to think themselves useless if other people can provide the same buffs as them. For the rest of us, we are brought as another buff insurance and the damage we bring.

Sure, 5% haste is provided by other classes in Cataclysm, and there is merit to that argument. In its current state, it would actually allow us to do whatever we like when it comes to being in moonkin form. It would seem really pointless to have a form if we could simply decide to ditch it when were in a raid group. But that is probably going to change. We will get something that buffs us, like moonkin form buffs our intellect and mana regeneration on the live servers.

What would be fun could be further modifiers to our abilities, or if it had a chance to empower us with “Spirit of the Owlbeast”. How about SotO being a proc that empowers the next ability to increase the damage of the next spell by x% or which will automaticly cast the next spell on every enemy within 15 yards of your target. Imagine the AOE we could whip up with that?

I don’t know what Blizzard will do about moonkin form. I am confident that they will make us something spiffy, something that will keep us in moonkin form. And as for the talents, I’m hoping that they will give us some focus soon, much like the lines of the focus we’ve seen them give paladins and the like.

It’s still beta. Everything will be fine.

Soloing Molten Core

One of my readers, Yagamoth, wrote me the other day, asking if I had any tips for soloing old content such as Molten Core or even Karazan. And I’ll be blunt, I hadn’t really tried to solo anything as a moonkin.

So rather than to shy away, I took it as a challenge and set out to solo Molten Core. And well, the place is cleared now, although not with a bit of trouble. Some bosses were easy, some were hard, some nearly made me give up. And I’ll admit, there was a single boss that I needed some help with.

But I went into Molten Core with my usual PvE gear and spec, armed with a bunch of reagents and 4 stacks of water. I figured I would write down a guide for soloing the bosses as moonkin, and maybe we can tweak it a bit.

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