Okay, lets have some fun!!

The Blood Queen Lanathel is fairly straight-forward fight with only a few mechanics to worry about but, as you might guess, demanding some fairly precise coordination.

Blood Queen has a lot of HP and a mechanic based enrage, making execution key to success. Here's what you need to worry about.

The Easy Stuff:

Twilight Bloodbolt - 10,000 damage to a non-tank target and splashing 10,000 damage on anyone within 6 yards.

Spread out, must be at least 6 yards from everyone else. Melee DPS should split into 2 groups and be on opposite sides of the bosses hit box so limit the number of melee that get splash damage when one is targeted.

Swarming Shadows, is practically identical to the Legion Flame debuff from the Lord Jaraxxus encounter.

Just kite it away, preferably to the edges of the room, and stay out of the purple fire.

Shroud of Sorrow Aura -- This causes up to 4500 damage to everyone in the raid every three seconds, and must be healed through.

Prayer of Shadow Protection or a Shadow Protection Aura help greatly with this, as well as most of her other abilities.

Pact of the Darkfallen links three raid members together with a bright purple beam. While it's active, all three players will be constantly exploding, causing shadow damage to anyone else who is nearby.

In order to cancel Pact of the Darkfallen, the three players must stand directly on top of each other for a brief period of time.

These are all fairly simple abilities. Kite the fire, group up with the people you are linked to (think Yogg link) and otherwise spread out. SP buffs and auras to help the healers with the shadow damage throughout.

The Tricky and Fun Part

Early in the fight, the boss with BITE the highest threat non-tank person in the raid. The bite applies Essence of the Blood Queen, increasing damage done by 100%, negating all threat and healing the dps-er for 10% of all damage done.

It's a very useful buff and, given the enrage, critical to success.

After 1 minute, the debuffed player's action bars will CHANGE and they will have only one ability - to BITE someone else in the raid and pass along the debuff to thme.

If they SUCCEED in doing so, they will both have the buff for another minute when both players will have their bars change and they will each have to bite someone else.

If they FAIL to bite someone within 10 seconds of the action bar change, they will become Mind Controlled, forcing the raid to kill them and loosing the important DPS increase.

Assuming success in passing along the bite, the progression goes like this.

0-1 minute, 1 player buffed for dps
1-2 minutes, 2 players buffed for dps
2-3 minutes, 4 players buffed for dps
3-4 minutes, 8 players buffed for dps
4-5 minutes, 16 players buffed for dps

Obviously, at this point the fight is essentially over. If 6 minutes arrives, the 16 buffed people have only 9 people to without the buff to bite. 7 of them will, therefore, be mind controlled and they fight will be over.

This 6 minute bite problem acts as a fight mechanic enrage.

It is therefore essential to pass the buff around to 16 dps people efficiently, without fail so that by minute 4 the entire DPS contingent of the raid is doing double damage.

Making this more difficult is:

Every 2 minutes the boss will fly into the air and A) FEAR the entire raid and then B) Bloodbolt Volley doing 10k damage to everyone in the raid and an additional 10k for every person within 6 yards of them. Obviously, since the bloodbolt is directly preceded by a FEAR, positioning is terribly difficult.

But it is critical to get properly spread after the fear, before the blood bolt. The healers cannot hope to heal 30k damage on every person because spacing is screwed up.

To Sum Up:
Kite the shadow fires, stay 6 yards away from each other unless you are link, when linked run to the middle of the room until the link drops, then spread again.

If you are bitten, blow all cooldowns and dps your heart until for 60 seconds, then within 10 seconds BITE the person you are assigned to bite (we'll assign in vent on the fly).

Spread out immediately after the fear to mitigate as much damage as possible.

Rinse and repeat.

video here:

This is pre-release from the test realm, but I think its a decent write up with diagrams for positioning. As far as I can tell theres nothing new in the current release of this encounter.

www.stratfu.com/strats/queen-lanathel/b ... e-strategy

Cheers,
Mystaa

To improve raid DPS, can we try having the "Bite-ees" move to the "Biters"? Since the afflicted person is doing the extra damage, allowing them to stay on the boss for maximum time should help with overall dps.

If the call is "X bite Y", just have Y go to X and be ready for some neckin'.

actually, this might be genius. worth a shot at any rate.

http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addo ... queen.aspx

interesting addon for bite assignments

we'll be testing that out tonight. seems like it would make the biting go much more smoothly.

You gotta love the ingenuity of addon developers.

I was doing some thinking and corroborated with a friend over this:

The first bite opportunity we get is the one we have the most control over. Whomever gets it first needs to wait as long as possible to bite your target -- this way the bite timers get pushed back and desynchronized from the fears. A ripple effect of sorts.

It is a super simple solution we need to employ from here on out.

Regarding who gets the first bite, I think it's the highest non-blood linked threat producer apparently ignoring the mages' mirror images threat reducing mechanic. This will allow us to maintain control who gets the bite and when ...which brings me back to something we mentioned before -- hunters do not benefit from the bite as much as someone else who doesn't rely partly on pet damage since the pet doesn't get buffed. So we should bite hunters later than we think we should. I didn't notice if the addon was having biters avoid hunters or not, but if it is working with this idea in mind, then good.

We make this minor bite timing adjustment and it can allow us way more control over the chaos after a fear. We do need to notch up our individual DPS but we are getting there.

Say, GREAT point on the 1st bite timing - at the last possible second would, in fact, push the timer back by just the slightest amount but an amount that might be critical at fear time. MUST DO THIS.

I think you're mistaken about the mechanic of 1st bite - I am OFTEN way above everyone on both threat and dps and overall damage - by 3-5% sometimes - and I'll see someone 3rd to 5th on all those things get the bite. Right now I get it about 65-75% of the time but it doesn't seem to follow a 100% predictable pattern.

As Khru mentioned, there's a mountain speculation but top end theorycrafters and raiders about this on Elitist Jerks and, as yet, there is no consensus on it.

The hunters are typically doing over 8k dps before getting bitten and after subtracting pet damage. On many of the attempts over 9k. I don't think it makes much sense to avoid the hunters (at least our hunters).

But then again, I may be biased.

I don't think the hunters should be left out of the loop, keld was doing about 14-15k if i remember right. Its all in what you do with your bite, mine is not always the best showing but things happen during the fight that you cannot predict and gets your rotation off. We all need to just keep at it and working on getting everyone to dps their best and raise the total damage up that little bit to take her down.

I'm just reminding people to get their PVP trinket. It is only 25 wintergrasp tokens. This is so easy to get. After this many weeks on this boss I can't believe we still have people show up without it. (Unless you have a way out racially. ) The less time you are feared the more time we can spend healing and dpsing. Every second matters.

horse worth beating...for sure. plz do as she said

for only 8K honor (= 4x Wintergrasp Commendation = 120 stone keeper's shards), you can pick up a (class-specific) Medallion of the Alliance in SW.