Well, it’s all come down to this, hasn’t it? Your raid (mostly) mastered Phase 1 and successfully conquered the transition. After several attempts, a miracle happened and you made it past Phase 2. Your raiders overcame their shock at not dying to Defile and pulled out a clean transition.
You are now ready for your final confrontation with the Lich King.
Phase 3: Feeling Spirited
Hopefully bolstered by a good Phase 2, your raid is going to find this phase remarkably easy compared to the last.
Defiles continue to come on a timer, but there are no longer Valks to worry about, so spread out loosely around the circle in the middle of the platform. If you get Defile, try to turn and run behind you and leave it on the edge, but as long as you keep your heads, pretty much any Defile is workable here.
Your tanks should try to keep the Lich King in the center of the room. If a Defile lands there somehow, they’ll need to stay as close to the center as they can without being in the Defile.
There are only two new things to this phase, and they’re pretty easy to handle after you’ve seen them a couple of times:
1. Vile Spirits. The Lich King releases these from his sword into the air above your heads on a timer. They’ll float around for a little while, then start targeting players and rushing at them. If they manage to reach a player, they’ll blow up and do AoE damage to anyone nearby.
Kill as many as you can while they’re still in the air (all ranged should switch from the Lich King to Vile Spirits as soon as they pop), and if you see yourself get targeted (or you see a big ghost beelining for you), run away from it. It’s also very important for melee to run away within a few seconds of Vile Spirits spawning. If one melee gets targeted, the whole group will blow up.
2. Harvest Soul. At this point, the Lich King will stick out his sword and suck one of your players into it (I know, I squealed too). For the amount of time it takes for them to get to the sword, they’ll be taking a crapton of damage, so healers need to be ready to focus on the Harvest Soul target as soon as DBM announces it.
The second part of Harvest Soul is what happens to the person getting sucked in. It’s super important that you do your job in there (but it might take some practice. I failed utterly. More on that in a second).
There are two people inside the Frostmourne besides you: Terenas (yes, KING Terenas) and a spirit warden. Your goal is to help Terenas kill the warden, but even that’s not as simple as it sounds. Throughout the mini-encounter, the warden will channel a debuff onto Terenas. This can be interrupted or it can be cleansed. (This unfortunately l eaves caster druids high and dry unless they switch to bear form, but more on that in a second, too).
- If you are a healer, your job is to keep Terenas alive and cleanse or interrupt the debuff if you can. Keep Terenas alive and he’ll kill the warden for you, as he does more damage if he has more health.
- If you are a dps, your job is to kill the warden as quickly as possible while cleansing or interrupting the debuff.
Note to fellow Moonkin & our tree brothers and sisters: My first time in Frostmourne, I failed miserably. We don’t have a reliable non-shift interrupt and we don’t have any way of cleansing the magic debuff from Terenas. While discussing this, someone suggested that I Bear Form and Bash. It’s not a bad idea, but I was so disoriented being in there the first time, I couldn’t actually execute that very well.
If you’re a Moonkin, my recommendation is to bomb the living crap out of the warden. Get Eclipses rolling, Starfall, Trinkets, Haste Potion–whatever’s available, use it. You want to kill the warden before he kills Terenas, and looking back, I think I could’ve done it easily if I’d just focused on nuking him.
If you’re a resto druid, my personal recommendation is to drop all of your heals on Terenas as much as possible. Keep him at 100% if you can, and he’ll have no problem killing the warden.
That said, Bear > Bash > Enrage or I guess Cat > ??? > Combo Point > Maim still works to interrupt the cast, and if you’re good at shapeshifting on the fly, might be the better option.
Once you kill the warden, you’ll be ported back out to the platform. If you die in there–well, you boost the Lich King’s damage by 10% (this also happens if someone dies while having their soul harvested, so heads up, healers). We were very lucky that my failure came at the end and he was close enough to dying that the 10% buff was easily overcome.
That’s it. Kill Vile Spirits and don’t let them touch you. Heal people with Harvest Soul. Keep Terenas alive (either by killing his attacker or healing him). Don’t stand in Defile, and of course, kill the freakin’ Lich King!
Congratulations, Kingslayers! Enjoy your victory for a few days before you start talking about hard modes. Job well done!
You can watch my first 10-man and our guild’s first 25-man Lich King kill in the links below:
Lich King First (spoiler free) — 10-man
Lich King First (spoiler) — 25-man
Note: If you are not a raid leader, or you care about spoilers, this is where your strat ends. What happens next isn’t any of your concern.
If you ARE a raid leader, or you really don’t care about being spoiled, then read on after the picture.
***SPOILER ALERT***
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When the Lich King hits 10%, he will kill your entire raid. I don’t mean sort of kill them, I mean they’ll all be 100% dead. Make sure your raid knows NOT to release.
You don’t have to tell them why. When you enter Phase 3, just tell them that if they should die at all during this phase, they should not release no matter what.
Also, once he dies, let everyone know that NO ONE is to loot. Seriously.
***MAD CRAZY SPOILER ALERT!!!***
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After he kills you all, he will give an awesomely cool speech about just how incredible you are (and what a great addition you’ll be to his army) and he’ll hold his sword up and start trying to turn you into minions. Then Tirion will bust out of his ice block ninja-turtle style, rez you all at once, and you’ll fight the Lich King as he hangs in midair. Go ahead and pop heroism, and make a big deal about it; this is the fun part! Tell your raid to go crazy on him–this is it!
You’ll finally kill him, get your achievement, and launch into a really cool cut scene (the same one you can watch at the Dalaran fountain as long as someone on your server has already killed him). Once everyone has watched the cut scene, your designated looter can loot the boss and share the spoils. Grats!
Tastes Like Battle Chicken 