The Achievers

Things have been falling into place a bit for my guild and myself, and we've achieved a few milestones.

On my mage alt, after repeated checking at irregular hours, I got the Higher Learning achievement and the pet that goes with it. While I usually am not a big pet fan, I think I might use this in my roleplaying, since it kinda looks like a "mage voidwalker". Yes I look like a warlock in this screenshot, but I'm not.


Our ICC10 team managed to down the Lich King, though yours truly didn't have the time to join them, I can probably tag along on some other run sometime.

Also in the course of last week, our healing lead and beloved co-GM managed to get his last Valanyr fragment, and we went to complete the darn mace for him. This was actually the third time I saw Vezax or so and I was on interrupting duty on it, so that was nice and stressy, but in a suprising twist we managed to get the Shadowdodger achievement as well so it all paid off.

We did Yogg-Saron with three keepers up so the guy would actually have a chance to throw the mace at Yogg rather than stressing about the raid dieing (we were already running kinda low on healers that night).



With Val'anyr crafted and The Lich King's ice cold blood on our hands, we can officially close our WOTLK raiding, almost anyway. When Ruby Sanctum comes out, we'll have to down whatever that dragon was named again, and a 25-man LK kill would be nice, as would protodrakes / frostwyrms, but I don't really see it happen to the major part of our guild.

That being said, as the officer team, we can probably review our WOTLK raiding career now and see what we want to do differently in Cataclysm.

A rogue vs a Lich King

Obviously, this post will 'spoil' the Lich King fight for you, so if you'd rather not know about this fight ... *red flash* you didn't see it.

What this is not

This isn't a strategy guide or such. To know what is happening in the fight, go read a bossguide at the appropriate sites.
This post is meant as an explanation of how Immortalis tries LK10, and how I handle the strategy as a rogue.

Phase 1

In phase one, not a lot is going on that is of concern for a rogue. The only thing we really have to watch out for is the Necrotic Plague.
If you get this debuff, you need to run towards the tank taking care of Shambling Horrors and Drudge Ghouls and wait until your designated cleanser makes the debuff jump to the ghouls (or force it to jump by cloaking it).
Other than that, you just DPS the Lich King as hard as possible, and help out the tank with Tricks.

When the phase ends, the safest spot to run to would be the ranged and healers clump, because your Horror tank might still have the Necrotic Plague and we don't want that to spread.

Phase 2

A short phase follows where you fight some ghost copies of your teammates at the sides of the platform while the ranged shoot at frost orbs. Not a very interesting phase, IMO. Tricks them to your tank and nuke them asap.

Phase 3

In phase three, there's two things that require our attention. First, the defile. Always be aware of your position on the platform - if you should get a defile, you DON'T want it to happen under your raid, you have a few seconds to sprint to the edge and drop the defile out of harm's way.
The other issue are the valkyr, which pick up a random raid member in an attempt to throw him/her off the ledge (not a very cool death but it gets the job done).

The problem, then, is combining the two. Stopping a valkyr from throwing off a raid member is easier said than done when a defile is in your way.
We always try to "control" the path valkyr will take by dividing the circle in the center into two slices of pie, and depending on defiles we position ourselves somewhere when a valkyr is coming.
Collapse onto that point, then spread out again to minimize defile risk. In the screenshot, you can see how we're all on the right side (apart from a naughty shaman who recently got a defile).
The orange arrows are possible paths valkyr will take, and the red arrow shows the danger the shaman is in - if a valkyr were to pick him up, he would be thrown off on the other side, away from all of us - we would not be able to stop the valkyr in time.

Phase 4

Similar short phase to Phase 2, nuke the spirits. They come a bit faster this time and you don't want several of them up when the next phase begins.

Phase 5

In this phase, the sentence "death from above" comes to mind. There's a bunch of spirits coming from above, and the ranged has to kill them. Nuke the Lich King, but beware of death from above. They HURT.

Also, in a suprising twist, the Lich King randomly tries to suck the soul out of people using Frostmourne. If you survive the initial attempt, you end up in Frostmourne, where Arthas' fathers soul is battling yet another spirit. As a rogue, you nuke the spirit and interrupt its cast.



In this shot, the spirit was already dead - I didn't want to risk the fight for a screenshot since we were having a great attempt.

I'm baaaaack

Okay, wow. The last time I posted here, my guild did Ulduar for the first time ... that has been a while, to say the least.

Character progress

What have I been up to ? Well, you can check the armories of my characters, of course, but the TL;DR version is that my guild is 10/12 in ICC25 and working on Lich King in ICC10, and I've had a chance to give him a poke as well.

Personally I'm a big fan of Icecrown Citadel. The atmosphere is Black Temple-flavored grimness all over again, but with the added touch of ice cold blue/cyan. Setting foot on the Frozen Throne gave me a small loregasm... and fights like Saurfang or Festergut are just great to test our DPS potential since, for melee at least, it's pretty much tank 'n spank.

Guild birthday

Immortalis recently celebrated their 1 year anniversary, and we did it by marching through Stormwind and Ironforge, basejumping off the Purple Parlor, and raiding the Horde faction leaders.

Some screenshots here.

Cataclysm spoilers

As with most blogs, I'll add a spoiler tag somewhere to warn you when I'm about to spoil stuff for you.

Minor glyphs and fun

Pewter from The Mental Shaman asks in her post about Cataclysm professions (spoilers, obviously!) what Minor Glyphs should be about. In my opinion, we have a fun minor glyph (Blurred Speed for temporary waterwalking), a few useful ones (Safe Fall and Vanish) and the rest is mostly useless. Now, if we compare our useful minor glyphs with other classes, we could still think of them as 'more fun' - speeding up when vanishing is a pretty unique way of adding value to that skill, while removing a reagent is more of a convience thing.