Ah, the final raid of Wrath of the Lich King. No, I’m not counting Ruby Sanctum, silly.
Each boss has one achievement tied to it, unlike Ulduar where every boss had hundreds. Makes my job slightly easier.
Lord Marrowgar
A boss I recommend Grimoire of Sacrifice for, in order to avoid being bone spiked. Avoid fire on the ground, use defensives if low on health, and nuke the bastard. It’s a simple, speedy kill.
His achievement is called Boned (fnar!) and it requires that nobody is impaled by a bone spike for longer than 8 seconds. Doing this alone will guarantee success!
Bear in mind that on 25hc, he’ll cast Bone Spike Graveyard on you regardless of whether you’re alone or not. There’s no real way to avoid this, so is he unsoloable? NO! Bone Spike Graveyard has NO EFFECT WHATSOEVER on worgen or goblins. These races can therefore stomp him easily. The rest of us will have to just have our demon kill the spike. Yes, for 25hc use Supremacy, and make sure you tank him yourself, otherwise he’ll Bone Spike you outside of his Bonestorm.
Bone.
Lady Deathwhisper
Ah, she of the annoying voice. This fight is basically Nukapalooza 2014. Blow her up. Your attacks will damage her MANA bar at first, and during this time she will periodically summon adds for you to kill. These adds are largely irrelevant, bar one. If you see a mob called Cult Adherent, kill it to death immediately. If you let them cast Curse of Torpor on you, it makes this fight SO much more difficult, as it increases ability cooldowns by 15 seconds. Abilities that DON’T have a cooldown will have 15 second ones for the duration of the debuff.
Yeah. Bad times.
Once you start hitting her health bar, she won’t summon adds anymore, and she resumes being a simple burn job. Her achievement is called Full House and it requires that 5 different types of cultist are present when she dies. I’d recommend doing this achievement in a small group because fuck Curse of Torpor, but if you really wanna go for it solo, then save your cooldowns for when you have the right number of cultists, then smash the boss to pieces.
In heroic, she’ll summon cultists even in phase 2, and use a spell called Dominate Mind. Yes, a mind control. I’m fairly confident she doesn’t use it on a solitary target, so again Grimoire of Sacrifice is the way forward.
Gunship Battle
*hisssssss*
This is the fight that will give you a couple problems. Before you start the encounter, talk to the goblin and get the rocket pack. Equip it (it’s a shirt) and put the button on your action bar. Talk to Muradin (or whoever the horde person is that begins this encounter) and ride into the sky!
Hop into one of the cannons, and build up heat by using ability 1. Keep an eye on how much heat you are generating (hitting 100 will overheat the cannon and make it temporarily unusable), and when at 90+, use ability 2. This spends all your heat on a super-powered cannon ball!
When the enemy ship appears, start bombing it! Ignore any adds and just focus on blowing the enemy ship up. Eventually, the other boat will summon a mage that freezes your cannons. DO NOT ROCKET OVER YET. When you get frozen out your cannons, wait for 3 adds to be summoned onto your ship, and kill them as they appear. When they’re dead, hop over and nuke the mage, then hop back. Jump back into your cannon and resume bombarding. Repeat this process until the enemy ship dies.
You will most likely wipe a couple times before you succeed here, because even doing this it’s still a little bit RNG. Persistence is the key here.
The achievement is called I’m on a Boat and requires that you don’t hop over to the enemy boat more than once, which means that this is most likely impossible solo. Group time.
Heroic mode gives everything more health, and thus makes this encounter longer and more annoying. Yuck.
Deathbringer Saurfang
Easy fight! Voidlord tanks, you spank. This is literally as easy as it gets, people. Relish it. He summons Blood Beasts every 30 seconds, kill them if they’re a bother.
Heroic mode adds a buff to the blood beasts that triples their damage and slowing enemies close to them by 80%. This makes them more of a threat, so kill them when they spawn. Other than things having more health, this is the only change to the fight.
I’ve Gone and Made a Mess requires that you kill Saurfang before he casts Mark of the Champion a certain number of times (3 on 10m, 5 on 25m). When he reaches 100 Blood Power, he casts it. This just makes this fight a DPS race that’s easily won. I mean, I did it on my prot paladin easy enough, and her damage is TERRIBLE!
Festergut
DPS race! You need to kill him before hitting 10 stacks of Gastric Bloat. You hit 10 stacks, you blow up and die.
Thankfully, this is another tank & spank fight, with all the easiness that implies. On heroic, there’ll be crap pools for you to avoid. Overall though, this fight is easy-peasy.
Flu Shot Shortage requires you to get no more than 2 stacks of Innoculated. If you burn him down quick enough, then congrats.
Rotface
Another easy fight. I recommend tanking this one yourself, so go with Grimoire of Sacrifice. This means you don’t have to worry about oozes, as he won’t use Mutated Infection on anyone tanking him, and you will therefore get Dances With Oozes by default.
Burn him down. Watch your health if you’re GoSaccing this fight, avoid crap on the floor. Heroic mode adds Vile Gas from Festergut. Doesn’t make this any more difficult, to be honest.
Professor Putricide
Good news everyone! Turns out this wing is hilariously easy!
Ah, but it does get interesting on heroic. For normal, just tank and spank. Don’t stand in the crap. Please.
On heroic, instead of being stunned during phase transitions, you have to kill a couple adds he’ll spawn, Volatile Ooze, and Gas Cloud. On 25man you’ll only be able to kill one of these, so ignore the other one. Another addition is Unbound Plague. Just heal through it.
Obviously, the shorter you can make each phase, the better the fight will go, so go full-on nuke here. Terrorguard, Dark Soul, have some embers banked before you engage and blow him up when your fantastic trinkets proc. For the achievement Nausea, Heartburn, Indigestion… you need to not use Regurgitated Ooze when an abomination.
You don’t need to be an abomination for this fight solo. You’re too beautiful. Just nuke and get the achievement by default.
Blood Prince Council
Nuke! AoE! Cleave! Throw everything you have at the one with health. Have your demon tank one/all of them, havoc one you aren’t targeting, and just blow them up. It’s a simple fight, but watch out for your demon! They have a tendency to take a LOT of damage from the princes for some reason.
The Orb Whisperer requires that you take no more than 23k damage in a single hit (25k on 25man) and is largely trivial to achieve.
Heroic adds a debuff called Shadow Prison to the encounter. It causes damage when you move, but staying still for 10 seconds will clear it. Largely trivial again.
Blood-Queen Lana’thel
We’ll start with the achievement, which probably can’t be done solo. Kill Queenie here as a vampire one week, and NOT as a vampire the next. Solo, you’ll always be a vampire, so get some friends to get bitten instead for the latter. This awards Once Bitten, Twice Shy.
This is the definition of a nuke fight. Her attacks do little damage to you so go with Grimoire of Sacrifice and tank her with your face. When she bites you, you get a debuff called Essence of the Blood Queen. This doubles your damage and causes attacks to heal you. From this point, you have 75 seconds to nuke the shit out of her before you get mind controlled and die horribly. Pop cooldowns here. Dark Soul, Doomguard, potions, the lot.
Heroic mode adds nothing of note really bar increased health. Kill her faster!
Valithria Dreamwalker
No. You cannot solo this fight. This is where our mighty journey stops!
Unless you get healer friends to come along and heal the green monstrosity so you can move on. For some reason, the dragon refuses to take healthstones.
In 6.0, they’re making this encounter skippable, because while some classes can solo it, others cannot. Like, ever. No, not even bandages.
Portal Jockey requires that all portals she summons are used. Do yourself a favor, get enough healers (or people with healing offspecs, and get those that CAN’T heal to throw a bandage on her or something), nuke-heal her and get the achievement because she didn’t summon a single portal for anyone to go through in the first place.
Sindragosa
Have your Voidlord for this one again. It’s a relatively simple tank & spank, even on heroic. When she flies into the air, she’ll trap you in an ice tomb. Target it and get your Voidy to attack it to free you. Watch out as she’ll use this quite often as her health gets lower! Make sure you keep Voidy at or close to full health. I recommend Glyph of Demon Training to increase his armor by 10%, and Glyph of Health Funnel to make Health Funnel an instant heal, as well as Soul Link for the passive 3% of damage dealt healed back to you.
Heroic just makes things hit harder. It’s still doable. All You Can Eat requires that you don’t get more than 5 stacks of Mystic Buffet. Frankly, it’s easier to do that one as a group and nuke her down before she even does it 5 times, but if you really want to solo it, go ahead. Go behind pillars to break line of sight so that your stacks fall of, though with the ice tombs I doubt that’s gonna be easy!
The Lich King
I’m not gonna go through the achievements for this one solo, as I doubt they can be done. Been Waiting a Long Time for This requires you to stack Necrotic Plague to 30. This’ll kill you solo, no question.
Phase 1, your pet will tank ol’ Lichy, while you nuke him. Stay above 90% health so that Infest has no effect on you. Nuke Drudge Ghouls and Shambling Horrors. On heroic, make sure that you’re moving constantly out of the Shadow Traps, else you’ll go flying away like Team Rocket. This is the hardest phase to be frank, as there’s so much going on, and the Shadow Traps are REALLY annoying if you’re doing it heroic-style.
Transition 1 (70%), position yourself at the base of the stairs. Kill the Raging Spirits, and especially the Ice Spheres (they will send you flying as well if they touch you). Watch your health, a lot of damage will be coming your way!
Phase 2, you’ll see some Val’kyr flying around. They’ll be a bother as they’ll pick you up and carry you to your doom unless you have aggroed something in the last 45 or so seconds. At the start, you’ll be okay ’cause of the Raging Spirits that were attacking you, but every so often you wanna dismiss your Voidlord, take a hit from Skeletor there, then Flames of Xoroth your pet and Soulshatter to get the aggro back onto him. When FoX’s cooldown is up, dismiss, take a hit, resummon. You won’t have Soulshatter (2 min cooldown, sadly), so ease the DPS a little.
He also casts Defile, which plonks a big area of crap on the ground you need to get out of asap, as it gets bigger each time it deals damage.
Transition 2 (40%) is exactly the same as the first. Kill spirits, kill orbs.
Phase 3, no more Infest! Yay! Kill Vile Spirits that spawn asap. They have low health so Rain of Fire or Fire & Brimstone: Incinerate may suffice here. They explode for about 20k if they get too close. Keep on the move! If he sends you into Frostmourne, then just keep on the move and avoid as much damage as possible. The Val’kyr are still flying around so remember to dismiss your pet, take a hit, then resummon whenever Flames of Xoroth comes off cooldown.
At 10%, you’ve pretty much won. You can survive Fury of Frostmourne through a combination of stupidly high warlock health, Twilight Ward, Unending Resolve, and a Soul Leech shield (though the latter was all it took for me) and continue to kill Lichface as the whole boring RP drags on. You get to this part, the fight is won, unless you do something dumb like walk off the edge of the platform.
Oh look, me doing it on 25 man normal. Maybe one day I’ll do heroic.
And with that, we finish the Lich King raids! But worry not, Cataclysm raids are next! And guess what? Blackwing Descent is hilariously easy on 10n mode.
Here’s Raenah in her other job as a barmaid.
Panda Steve Types Stuff 