90 Protection Guide to Solo Heroic Lich King 25 man

[Choice]

UPDATED 14/4/13 for 5.2

Never thought the day would come where doing something at max level actually gives more credibility. But regardless, here we go.

Sup paladins, this is a written guide for my solo of Heroic Lich King 25. It is intended for Protection paladins, as of right now Ret would have a much harder time attempting to do this, although there are still plenty of ways to underman it.

The video is linked here, the rest of this post will serve as a written guide for those who wish to replicate it. The kill itself is a touch messy but I got over the line.



Why would you want to solo Heroic LK 25?
Invincible, it is an incredibly rare mount which has a surprisingly high drop rate considering how few are around. It is also a meaty challenge at this point.

Why would I want a mount I can’t see?
Good question.

How geared do you need to be?
I completed this with 512 ilevel in 5.1, at the time it was an extremely tight DPS check. With 5.2 the DPS check is significantly reduced via the GC change. I'd suggest not trying this with any less than ~510ish to be sure to kill it.

Do I need consumables? Flasks/Pots etc.
Yes! What I run for the kill can be listed here:
200 Haste Food
8% Stamina Scroll
Strength Potions
Strength Flask

You’ll notice there’s no Kings Drums listed there. Reason being that I feel the 1% Strength as minor as it is makes a massive impact on damage output across the 15 minute encounter. In comparison I do not feel the 3k Mastery was missed since so much damage is mitigated by Sacred Shield to begin with. This is a personal preference, the decision is yours. This route is certainly cheaper.

What trinkets should you use?
Simply put, use the best DPS trinkets you have access to. Strength or Haste trinkets are the best. There are plenty available as of 5.2, try to avoid crit.

What glyphs do you need?
I run the following glyphs, the intention is to maximum single target damage on LK himself. The longer the adds live the more damage you do.
- Alabaster Shield
- Focused Shield
- Divine Protection
- Focused Wrath – Minor glyph

I can’t solo it but want to be able to two or three man it, can you help Choice?
Yes! Many people have done this already but it’s worth mentioning here, Phase 2 can be quite tricky to do since the Valks pick up any player besides the tank. To combat this, in the transition phase ensure that all players have threat on at least one raging spirit each. As a result, the Valks will be unable to pick your mates up. Keep these alive and on everyone for the duration of Phase 2, and everything else is easy. Good luck.

Prologue – Some things worth noting before we begin
Just some basic things I feel are worth mentioning but can’t quite stream line into the guide without keeping it focused. Will include these here.
- Your goal is to put as much of your damage into the boss as possible. Note the glyphs that ensure that almost everything is a single target attack. Between this and the Vengeance provided, killing the adds is not your intention. You want them to live for as long as possible.
- Keeping the Raging Spirits up does present the issue of getting rolled by bad Soul Shrieks. In 5.2 However, with the additional AS usage (particularly from the following point), you have significantly higher SoTR uptime, making the RNG element far more management.
- As of 5.2, many players have killed the boss via brute forcing GC procs, essentially keeping up all mobs to get as many GC procs as possible. This results in a rotation built almost entirely on spamming AS. It can be quite effective but is not completely necessary
- Relevant to the above point, it has been found that leaving Ghouls alive into phase 3 will cause a bug that will kill your character shortly after being ported to the down phase. Avoid this by adding Cons to your rotation either slightly before or doing the second transition.
- I’ve included cut down versions of each phase since I know I can go overboard.

Phase 1 – The Long Road
This phase takes the longest of any phase, roughly 5 minutes. This is the play by play.
- Before the pull make a second set with 2-3 items (not trinkets) removed, worth roughly 15% of your health. I remove my gloves, belt and boots.
- Start the fight in Seal of Truth
- Ensure you’re below 90% for the first Infest, you want to maximise your vengeance in this early portion.
- You’ll be stacking all CD’s to make the infest tick as hard and as long as possible, then when you’re as close to death as you’re comfortable with, LoH to heal back up.
- This is a very clutch few seconds. You want to let the Infest tick at irrelevant amounts without having a CD up.
- Wait until you visibly see your health ticking down to start your CD chain. Start with your DP. Around 4-5 seconds into it use your AD, and once DP has fallen off apply Guardian. Keep in mind the scaling of Infest is rather rapid, by the time you’ll be ready to LoH yourself to reset you’ll be having ticks for around 25% of your health bar through Sacred Shield.
- Throughout this you’ll want to WoG yourself on CD, make sure you wait until you’re sure you won’t be healed above 90%.
- In the video I’ve left this segment at normal speeds so you can see exactly how I did it.
- You should continue running in Seal of Truth until just after the second Infest, at which point you switch. The minor damage of SoT isn’t worth the HoP spent on WoGs and you’ll need to switch out eventually.
- Personally I use my combat potion in this phase with my second Wings. Doing so worked quite well for me and I recommend doing the same.
- Another personal preference, I have disgustingly low uptime on SS and Weakened Blows on this phase (after the SoT Infest opener). Since there’s such little damage I felt the 10 globals spent throughout p1 on retaining WB and SS was better spent else where on single target damage.
In Short: Take lots of damage from Infest at the start, DPS hard.

Transition Phase 1 – A taste of what’s to come
For this phase you’ll want three simple targeting macros, and ideally a focus setting macro
1. /tar The Lich King
2. /tar Ice Sphere
3. /tar Raging Spirit /focus ~ This process is now optional

The most important of these is the Ice Sphere macro, I will assume you’ve bound all three of these.

Once the transition begins, get hard on LK for the first 10 seconds or so, when you see the first raging spirit is up, use your targeting macro (3) to pick it up and set it as focus. Ignore it completely for now and get back on the boss.

When you see the first orb drop, start mashing your macro (2) and be ready to either Judgement or Avenger’s Shield it. With sub 70k hp either will do. I stick with Judgement since it’s less damage than the AS and thus more efficient for maxing LK damage. Luckily for us, you can cast either of these while silenced allowing a completely secure way of preventing orb deaths.

Each spawn should play out in roughly the same way, you see the orb land, hit your second macro, Judge/AS it, hit your LK (1) macro and get back on him.
In Short: Use the macros to swap targets seamlessly, kill Ice Spheres with Judgement/AS, make sure you’ve set the first spirit as your focus to kill off later.

Phase 2 – Defiling your favourite LK phase
- This is simply a burn phase, you’ll have the highest vengeance in this phase and peak your damage. Settle yourself into a defile and go hard. You have three minutes to make this phase end
- Worth noting here that AD and Devotion Aura can both be cast while silenced, perfect CD’s if Infest is railing you during a Soul Shriek .
- Due to the high vengeance but low damage taken, often a 1p WoG able to recover a shitty Infest.
- You may chose to run the final defile out to ensure it’s not in the middle come the second transition phase, which can be by far the most RNG element of the whole fight, as you’ll have all spirits up at that point.
- You cannot bubble in this phase, or else the Valks will pick you up.
In Short: Take as much damage as possible and roll the boss.

Transition Phase 2 – When Soul Shrieks attack
This tactic in particular is trivial now, it's a way to make phase 3 a little safer, but not required. ~ At the beginning of this phase, you want to finally kill off that Raging Spirit that was focused earlier. All three previous spirits will be killed off by consecration during Phase 3, but should be at around 800k health and an easy target.

Beyond that, repeat the process of the previous transition phase, this time being wary of the damage spikes caused by Soul Shriek.

Phase 3 – The Shambling Horrors go berserk, and so will you
- First thing to note, by this phase you don’t need to use the defiles. Between all the adds and Vile Spirits, you will have your hands full and consistently high vengeance.
- The damage is high and I’d recommend playing this phase very defensive, as it stands you’ll need to survive berserk on LK for at least a few seconds, and as you saw in my video despite a really bad second transition I was able to make up 10% damage in the space of 20 seconds or so.
- Any existing Raging Spirits from the first Transition should die off shortly after the first Harvest Soul. Any Shambling Horrors will reset health during one of the next two down phases. I’m unsure as to why, but they aren’t intended to be alive in Phase 3 so it’s likely a bug with the despawning.
- Use Divine Shield and Devotion Aura as methods of soaking Vile Spirits, try to ensure you have CDs incase things go bad elsewhere.
- Try and ensure that you’ll have Holy Avenger up right on enrage, with all the Vengeance you’ll have you want the spam WoGs/SoTRs along with Guardian and LoH. LK’s Soul Reaper is huge post enrage (~600k damage) and goes through bubble. Recommend using LoH as opposed to bubble. Personal experiences say it has a higher success rate.

Outside of all this, hope for some good luck and keen. I hope this was helpful and will be looking to assist with anyone’s queries either here or via PMs.

[Fhi]

Glad to see you managed to fraps it this time. It's pretty impressive!

[Stumpurin]

Thank you for posting this! I've been dusting off my old paladin not so long ago and I was thinking paladins could probably solo this at one point, seeing as DKs can already do it with ease. Definitely gonna try this when I can access some more gear on my paladin alt ;p

[Aceshigh]

Awesome stuff Choice, congratulations! Will be trying this in the near future, looks like an incredible amount of fun.

[Mushedcow]

Nice one, maybe able to finally get around to getting that pesky mount I can't seem to find.

[Valarius]

Nice. I enjoyed the music too, first song in particular is now on my playlists :P

[Sunflora]

Awesome work Choice! Looking forward to being able to do it when 5.2 hits.

[icausewipes]

Grats on the vid.

[RoughJustice]

i'll have to try this once i get some more tank gear next tier.....

question though, do you use a full set of tank gear, aside from trinkets? or atleast anything different than how prot already gem/enchant etc

[Kairoz]

Woah, the video is just impressive

Btw, any tip to solo clear the previous bosses? or do you do it with a group?

Thanks and gz for the kill, Choice!

[celinamuna]

Is it likely that it would be doable in lower ilvl gear if going for the pure haste build ? (ie : no parry/dodge items)

[Choice]

Cheers for the positive responses guys, appreciate it.

i'll have to try this once i get some more tank gear next tier.....

question though, do you use a full set of tank gear, aside from trinkets? or atleast anything different than how prot already gem/enchant etc

For the purposes of this I did max my haste more than I normally would, lost a few good mastery/stam socket bonuses in favour of just pure haste gems. Also ran Dancing Steel, which isn't particularly common I guess. I was considering swapping out small shit like my shoulder enchant for the strength one. Little stuff like that does have an impact.

Woah, the video is just impressive

Btw, any tip to solo clear the previous bosses? or do you do it with a group?

Thanks and gz for the kill, Choice!

Thanks to some changes with the way ICC's lock outs work, it is now possible to clear the instance on 10 man normal then swap to 25 HM for LK. Doing this, nothing is particularly challenging, although bql and dreamwalker do at this point does require a friend. Benefits them as well because they get a lock out they can use as well.

Is it likely that it would be doable in lower ilvl gear if going for the pure haste build ? (ie : no parry/dodge items)

I'm honestly not sure, the strength from gear plays a big role in p1 damage due to the low vengeance. Whether you could easily pick up more haste than I used (~20%) in lower gear levels, can't really say.

[Valarius]

I'm honestly not sure, the strength from gear plays a big role in p1 damage due to the low vengeance. Whether you could easily pick up more haste than I used (~20%) in lower gear levels, can't really say.

I'm sitting at 19.something% in 502. If I swap out the Prot set for Haste offpieces should be able to go over 20%. I'm gonna give it a whirl on Tuesday night after I hand in my final paper for the term so I'll check back in and let you all know how it goes.

[RoughJustice]

For the purposes of this I did max my haste more than I normally would, lost a few good mastery/stam socket bonuses in favour of just pure haste gems. Also ran Dancing Steel, which isn't particularly common I guess. I was considering swapping out small shit like my shoulder enchant for the strength one. Little stuff like that does have an impact.

So for someone whos ms is ret, should i just stay in ret gear? Or a balance between the 2? Im guessing the extra stam and some parry/dodge helps

[Choice]

To my knowledge Haste is a ret paladins top stat, so gear wise you should be able to stick with your best haste pieces and have a good jumping off point. Obviously this tiers BiS trinkets are the same as what I listed as best for prot on this fight, that's another advantage,

[Animma]

Your behaviour of the shambling horrors in p3 doesn't mirror mine. Any time I had them in p3 and I was pulled into frostmourne I would be down there for around 10s or so and then instantly die :/

[moveth]

I ruined the video for myself. I looked at your recount during the beginning and realized the Damage was updating to the beat of the song, then I couldnt pay attention anymore. lol

[Choice]

Can you give some specific details? I don't do anything in particular to prevent any issues, they simply reset health after one or two Harvest Souls.

[Nuckels]

Impressive video, just went and tried it for lols and wiped on 19% due to having no working berserk timer, funtimes.

How come you kill of the raging spirit? I didn't bother with it and frankly came way to close to dieing in p3 to many times, does it make a big difference?

[Benefits]

I've been doing this for the past few weeks for extra chances at the mount. It's a fun way to pass the time and give yourself a challenge. Congrats on your kill and nice video.