Double Trouble - The Twin Val'kyr

Last night we were eagerly anticipating the next new boss to be released in the Coliseum, the Twin Val’kyrs.

But before we could play with them, we had to clear the first 3 bosses in Coliseum.

First up was Northrend Beasts. My Raid Leader showed me a little trick that really helped with picking up the Worms after they go underground. When they come back up, it’s a complete aggro wipe. If they come up next to one of your squishiest and you don’t taunt quick enough, you can lose people.

What he showed me was there a little dirt trail you can follow that will show you where the Worm is going to surface at. Following that trail, I was on top of Dreadscale each time he surfaced. I think he might have bugged out, because Dreadscale didn’t enrage when Acidmaw died.

Then we fought Lord Jaraxxus. I was on Sisters and Infernals. The Sisters are a piece of cake; the Infernals are a little tougher. They don’t spawn directly from the volcano, but instead get shot some distance away. Then at some point they roll into a ball and charge away from you. Fortunately, they don’t hit really hard, even on cloth, so if I was slow picking one up, it wasn’t that dangerous.

Next up on the docket was the Faction Champions. Last week, we dominated these guys with a clean one shot. Our success was not to be repeated.

This week our group of opponents was Holy Paladin, Resto Shaman, Hunter, Mage, Death Knight, and Warrior.

We tried our strategy from last week of CC on one healer and burning down the other. We crowd controlled the Paladin and tried to blow up the Shaman. The problem was by the time we blew up the Shaman; their DPS had killed two of our clothies.

We tried a variety of different strategies, but it seemed no matter what we did, we had lost too many people by the time one or two of the Horde was down. We were really struggling to identify which of the enemy mobs was the most dangerous. It seemed like whichever one was left alone would cause major damage to us.

In this fight, CC is using PVP rules, which means your CC is very short and subject to diminishing returns. Each time you reapply the CC, it works for a shorter amount of time, until finally they become immune.

It would have been nice to have had our Warlock in the raid. Those guys have a ton of quick CC, while doing great damage.

We had reached the point where we decided to just save them for Thursday and hope the instance would soft reset and we’d get a different matrix. We opted for one last try.


This is how I remember the fight going. Theirs is at least a 37.5278% chance that I’ve remembered something wrong.

We had gone back to our original strategy of blowing up the Shaman. I put Repentance on the Warrior and opened up with Wings. The fight was so crazy. I was dpsing, and then cleansing someone, then throwing heals on somebody, BoPing (Hand of Protection) a clothie.

The Shaman went down, and we still had our whole team up. We changed our DPS target to the Warrior, but lost one of our Priests.

We got the Warrior down, but had lost a Mage. Then we put the Death Knight down. Our next target was the Mage, but in the process we lost our Death Knight.

The Horde was down to the Hunter and the Holy Paladin. I kept the Hunter pet taunted as much as I could to keep him off our clothies. We managed to kill the Hunter, but his pet stayed. Everyone then switched to the Holy Paladin. Somehow we had done it. We had been completely frustrated, but it was all smiles once they went down.

What impressed me the most was that as we wiped again and again, I never saw or heard the kind of sniping and arguing I’ve seen in other guilds as you start struggling with a boss, especially one you one-shot the week before. There was no finger pointing, no blame game. It was just 10 guys and gals trying to figure out how we could use our collective skills and abilities to beat the boss.

Now we got to try out the Twin Val’kyr. After the test the Faction Champions gave us, we certainly had our game faces on.

When you begin the fight, 4 portals spawn. There’s one Light and one Dark Portal on each side of the room.

We split the raid in two. My team would be fighting the Dark Twin (Darkbane). Ellevis’ team would fighting the Light Twin (Lightbane). My group would need to click the Light portal when we started the fight, and Ellevis’ group would need to click the Dark portal. The portals don’t take you anywhere or phase you. You can see the other team the whole time.

You do extra damage if you are fighting the opposite color, but half damage if you are fighting the same color.

We hadn’t discussed it ahead of time, but I was really happy with the way Ellevis split up the groups. I loved that myself as a Paladin would have the Light essence, and Ellevis, a Death Knight, would have the Dark essence. It just fit. It wouldn’t have been a problem if he had done it the other way around, but I liked the way it worked out.

After clicking the portal, I ran in and threw my shield at Darkbane. I tanked her in-between the two portals.

The next part of the fight is dodgeball. Light and Dark orbs start moving around the room. There are a ton of orbs. You mission is to ‘dodge’ the ones that are opposite to you, and hit the ones that aren’t. They come from all sides and even behind you.
I was epically bad at dodgeball in elementary school. I wasn’t much better last night. Good thing for me that our Shaman could easily out heal the damage of hitting the wrong color.

Lightbane then shielded herself and started to cast Twins Pact. Twins Pact is a huge heal. It’s a got 15 second cast time. You’ve got to DPS through the shield before any interrupt can be attempted. We had all DPS switch to Lightbane, even though the DPS from my team wasn’t going to do a whole lot of damage.

We easily took the shield down in time and got the heal interrupted.

A raid warning came up that Lightbane was powering up Dark Vortex. Basically she spins like a ballerina, and hits everyone in the raid with Dark energy. You have a couple of seconds to react. The Dark team didn’t need to do anything. My team needed to run to the Dark portal on our side of the room and click it to change to Dark. That way the Dark Vortex wouldn’t hurt us. Immediately after the Dark Vortex was over, we switched back to Light.

Then Darkbane repeated the moves that Lightbane had done. I was originally worried about the interrupt. Paladins interrupt is a long cooldown (1 min, 40 seconds talented which I didn’t have), and it’s subject to the Global Cooldown. When the shield went up, I simply stopped by rotation, letting my SoV DoTs and Consecration keep aggro, and waited for the shield to drop. I’m not sure if I got it the interrupt or Ofn (Rogue) did. What matters is she didn’t get the heal off.

Once again, the new boss was a one shot. The damage just isn’t punishing on mistakes. You can be the wrong color for a vortex, get hit by multiple orbs, but the damage is all healable with just two healers. The Twins don’t melee near as hard as any boss in Ulduar.

I’d put our 10 man team up against just about any other 10 man on our realm. These guys are good, and it’s a privilege to be part of this team.

Comments

Ellevis said…
Well you were a little off on the Faction Champions kill :) We killed Warrior -> Shaman -> Hunter ->DK ->Mage -> Pally.

It was a very rewarding fight and I was proud of everyone there. That's a tough group make-up especially when we don't have alot of PvPers in our group.

@ Twin Valkyrs, heh I never even thought about the light / dark when assigning you and I :)
I was a little dissapointed with the new fight. It is really confusing to try to explain but the actual execution is very simple. We had some confusion our first run and lost a few dps but still lasted till the enrage.

Our second attempt went perfectly, every heal interrupted and every vortex switch. Heck we didn't even bother dodging the balls just ran through and blew them all up. Unless they really ramp up the damage in heroic or add some other mechanic I think this will be considered the easiest fight.

We also had a tad more trouble on the champions this time as compared to last week. In the end keeping frost traps on the ground for healers to kite the melee went a long way. We don't have a warlock either and I was on my mage... there were so many dots that sheeping was only useful in interrupting casts.

Ah well next week we will see anuberak hopefully that fight will be a tad more difficult.
Dorgol said…
Did the Champions on 25 last week - took us 5 or 6 tries if I remember correctly. Druid healers are just as OP there as they are in Arena. :)

Looking forward to the Twins as it sounds pretty straight forward.
Anonymous said…
The Twins fight was extremely easy. We two-shotted it (the first attempt you could tell some people simply hadn't paid any attention when we explained the strat) and your observation about the damage not being punishing enough is spot on. I have a feeling that in heroic mode, dodgeball and having the correct aura will be MUCH more important...
Elleiras said…
The Faction Champions gave us a lot of trouble last week, so we changed our strategy this week and one-shot them.

Rather than attempt to kill the healers first (focusing one and CCing the other two), we CC'd the healers for the entire fight and focused the DPS classes. As long as someone interrupts most of the paladin's casts and either purges, spell steals or dispels HoTs from the kill target, the healers aren't that big of a deal.

It could have helped that the Alliance paladin is focused on healing pets for some reason. She didn't heal her teammates -- just the silly felguard! Personally, if I'd been team captain, I'd have kicked her. ;)

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