Blood-Queen Lana’thel is probably one of the most fun and finely tuned encounters in Icecrown Citadel.  In short, you have 5 minutes and 30 seconds to finish her before she enrages and flattens everyone in the room.  Along the way you’ll also have to deal with an exponentially scaling number of bites that will be the key to success or (repeated) failure.

Sounds easy right?  It actually is, but I can certainly see where it can lead to a lot of frustration.  Even with the zone wide buff starting this week, everyone still needs to execute properly to finish this encounter.  In other words, no one can die at least for now.

Another wing is finished and only a dragon now stands in our way to some quality time with Arthas.

It looks like Blizzard finally put together an encounter where the key focus is on the healers.  How much focus is on the healers?  I think this quote from WoW.com sums it up nicely.

“So while those classes are the ones I would suggest going in, reality says though that you should send in your best players. Yes, send in those players who will do everything in their power to not let those stacks fall off. If they can manage that, then they’re gold.”

That’s not to say that the tanks and DPS are sitting around doing /dance.  There’s still a lot going on outside of the Emerald Dream.  We noticed that the adds do not spawn evenly so having the DPS know when to assist the other side was critical to the success of the encounter.

The faster you can bring the adds down in an orderly fashion, the easier the encounter is.  Every little bit helps.  For example, Nachtung runs up and bandages Valithria at the start.  That’s roughly 2300 less healing that the healers need to do.  Teamwork, that’s what it is all about.

You’ll notice in the screenshot that there a crazy moonkin (Chizzlechest) trying to get on top of the chest.  He did manage to finally get up there.  We would have tried to help him, but he’s already playing a moonkin so it’s probably best just to leave him be.

After the Blizzard post-maintenance lag monster decided to go away for the night, we were able to spend some quality time with the Professor.  A  0.9% wipe the night before galvanized us for tonight.  Dodging slimes, goo, and gas bombs was now second nature.

I even managed to set a personal best of over 12,000+ DPS on the finishing attempt.  OK, I was a giant abomination doing roughly 10,000 damage a swing, but it still counts.

Assuming the Blizzard lag monster does not reappear on Thurs., we should be finishing Valithria Dreamwalker and introducing ourselves to Blood-Queen Lana’thel.

Yes, it certainly has been a while since the last update.  Here’s a quick recap of what we have been up to.

On Aug. 20, 2009, we clear the Faction Champions.  Just like in regular PvP, the protection warrior gets completely ignored and is chain crowd controlled.  Nice…

On Aug. 30, 2009, we cleared the Twin Val’kyr.  Who doesn’t like twins?

On Sept. 3, 2009, we cleared Anub’arak.  He is just as annoying in a raid as he is in the 5-man.  That concluded our run through the Trial of the Crusader.

On Oct. 18, 2009, we completed Yogg + 3 and crafted our first Val’anyr, Hammer of Ancient Kings.  Congratulations to Yann!

While waiting patiently for Patch 3.3, we continued to work on the Trial of the Grand Crusader and completed 3 of the 5 heroic encounters.

Icecrown Citadel has been a blast so far.  The encounters so far have been pretty fun and interesting.  It is also good to see Blizzard return to having hard boss encounters.  The gating on the new encounters and the end wing bosses is a little gimmicky, but I think it is the right approach.  It keeps people looking forward to how the story will unfold.  The gating also puts some emphasis on focusing on execution and strategy instead of brute force attempts until people “get it.”

Currently, we have completed the Lower Spire and through the first bosses of The Plagueworks and The Crimson Hall.  Hopefully, we will have new updates to share in the coming weeks.

It took us a lot longer than expected to get this screenshot.  After months of on and off attempts, we finally made a concerted effort to put a checkmark on this guy.

What really helped was to be able to do the 10-man version of this encounter first.  A group when in with the mindset of beating him and found him to be pushover.  Granted we were in 25-man gear and he had already been nerfed, but it was useful to collect some data on the encounter, which we used to modify our 25-man strategy.

We are disappointed that we did not beat him pre-nerf and pre-Patch 3.2, but he is done and over with now.  We have had more than our fair share of ups and downs these past few months.  With any luck, we are on the upside of the next cycle and looking forward to completing the Coliseum.