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.

Not dead yet

No, I'm not dead yet. I just have been very busy, both in real life and in game.
Since this is a WoW blog, I'll concentrate on the in-game stuff, and I'll tell you my story using achievements I gained in these few weeks I've been playing WoW again.

PvP
I felt in the mood for PvP when I got back. As I had said in my previous post, I got me an Eviscerator's set, bought me two Traditional Flensing Knife, respecced Muti/Prep and hit the road.

I got Call to Arms.

The reason I didn't get this earlier is fairly simple: I always forget to pick up the daily.

I joined a raid with the people from Beyond Defeat and hit the Horde capitals, netting me three leaders - I sadly had to leave before we killed the Elf, so no bear for me yet.


After some mucking about in Wintergrasp for some honor and Stone Keeper Shards, I respecced again to a Muti raid spec, minus of course the two talent points I was missing because I was still 78.

PvE
I hit Storm Peaks to do the Sons of Hodir opening questline, because I was told it's pretty awesome, and also started questing in Icecrown a bit.
Both felt extremely slow on my little snowy gryphon (the bad part about switching your alt as your main I guess) but eventually I did hit the big 80.


So then the next task was doing normal instances to gear up for heroics to gear up for raids. I bought my Hateful Glad's Cloak as a filler cloak until I can get a decent one crafted or drop.

My guildies were kind enough (or desperate enough) to invite me to some heroics anyway, despite my DPS being barely that of the tank.

I also was invited to a casual 10-man Naxxramas run because the rogue that was supposed to come had some PC trouble and had been installing WoW for a few hours, but still wasn't there yet. We did Plague and Construct Quarter, and I got the T7.10 chest and some nice shoulders.



I bought a Librarian's Paper Cutter and got it enchanted with Mongoose (no funds for two of those sadly)

Some other day Alliance managed to drug Horde and conquer Wintergrasp somehow, and the guildies formed a PuG to VoA 25. I, of course, was there. Outrolled the only other rogue in the raid (he's better geared anyway) with a 96 and got me the T7.25 pants. (Yay set bonus !)


So yeah, it's been quite a productive week. I gotta get some stuff gemmed, and really gotta get my cooking up, other than that I think I'm good to go to ride along the weekly 25 man Naxx farm runs.

PS: One of the heroics I did was CoT Strat, and yes we did the timed run, and yes I won the drake. Let me tell you, it sucks having that thing in your bags and not being able to use it yet. But at least it'll be there when I quest my 5K epic flying together. No silly gryphons for me !