- Author: Luxrah
- Date: September 29, 2023
- Updated: September 29, 2023
- Expansion: WotLK Classic
The Icecrown Citadel raid testing period on the PTR is almost over, but Blizzard have pushed another hotfix out, this time for phase 3 of the Heroic Lich King encounter. The fix applies to both 10 and 25 player versions of the raid and is intended to prevent players from using a loophole to continue attacking the Lich King when the raid is supposed to be inside Frostmourne.
Apparently players were intentionally dying before Harvest Souls could be cast and then using self-resurrect abilities after the rest of the raid was transported into Frostmourne. This allowed them to stack up some damage on the Lich King while he was inactive. The hotfix causes all damage to the boss and his adds to be dramatically reduced during this inactive period, rendering the strategy moot.
It’s interesting that this strategy didn’t come up when the raid first released in 2009. It’s perhaps a sign of how differently people play now in Wrath Classic, with more of an eye toward min-maxing. Time will tell what other new strategies become popular after the raid releases on October 12th, and whether any of those wind up getting hotfixed as well.
Greetings,
We will soon push a hotfix to the 3.4.3 PTR that contains a small adjustment to the Lich King encounter on both 10 and 25 player heroic modes. This change will cause all damage inflicted to the Lich King, Raging Spirits, and Vile Spirits to be dramatically reduced for the following 45 seconds after the Lich King has cast Harvest Souls to transport the raid into Frostmourne during Phase 3.
A common tactic we are seeing to deal with this part of the phase is to have classes that have the ability to self-resurrect deliberately die before the Harvest Souls cast when the raid group is drawn into Frostmourne, and then accept a resurrection outside of the Frostmourne room to be able to continue to damage the Lich King while he is essentially inactive during this 45 second window. While our adjustment is definitely a change from how the fight behaved in 2009, we do feel that this would have been adjusted back in 2009 if it were more prevalent, as it encourages the stacking of certain classes to potentially trivialize part of the phase.
We plan to have this adjustment deployed to the PTR via hotfix very soon. Thank you for all the data you’ve helped us gather so far in this PTR period, and we look forward to you joining us in the fight against the Lich King when the Icecrown Citadel raid goes live on Oct 12th!
Thank you!
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