Lich King HM : The final stand !

Hello and welcome to the TankSpot Icecrown Citadel Raid Guide! My name is Aliena and in this video I'll cover everything you need to know about the heroic mode 10-man version of the Lich King encounter. I will assume that you're familiar with the normal version of this encounter. If you're not, I suggest first watching our guide to the 10-man normal mode to learn about the Lich King's base abilities.

At the point of this recording, it's pretty much essential to bring two healers to this fight - a disc priest and a holy paladin. You also want two well-geared tanks and 6 DPS. Arthas has upped his health from 17 to 30 million, so you're gonna need good DPS to beat the time limit.

In every phase, Arthas has learned a new trick that'll make you have to adjust your tactics for this fight. The trick he's learned in phase 1 is Shadow Traps - those are the big black circles that you see on the ground. Arthas casts this on a strict timer on a random raid member, and anyone that's still in the area of a shadow trap after it spawns will get knocked off the map and die.


To deal with this, we split our raid in three groups. 1 group is compromised of the Lich King tank and the melee. Group 2 is the Shambling Horror tank and his shambling horrors. Group 3 is the ranged dps and healers.


Since the Lich King has so much health and you can't really afford to have people waste any time DPSing the adds, you have to use Necrotic Plague to your advantage.

Have any Horror that spawns misdirected to your offtank, who should keep the horrors between the ranged and the melee pile. Any necrotic plague is taken BEHIND a currently active shambling horror and then dispeled there. That way, the plague should jump to the horror and damage it significantly as stacks grow and yet the person taking it there will not get hit by shockwave if they stay behind it.


You should have a designated dispeler that is not a healer.

As more and more shadow traps spawn, your raid needs to move away from them, leaving them behind. Make sure all groups are always in range of each other.

By the time you approach 70%, you should be fairly close to a ledge of the room if you keep moving up like we do here.

As Arthas casts Remorseless Winter, your entire raid should be on the ledge as to avoid taking unnecessary ticks of the dot. Make sure everyone immediately faces the same direction and not another person, so that any Raging Spirit that spawns does not immediately soul shriek a raid member.

On the ledge, you want to spread out in at least three groups to avoid stacking Pain and Suffering too high on individual players.


The rest of this phase goes as normal.

When he starts casting Quake again, everyone should meet up in roughly the center area of the platform, cause there's an immediate Infest coming and then a Valkyr.

As disc priest in this fight, it is your job to take care of Infest by yourself. You want every raid member have a fresh power word: shield before every Infest. Save penance in case someone still takes a tick. Infest deals twice as much damage in the heroic version than it does on normal. If your disc priest gets picked up by a Valkyr, have your paladin use aura mastery for the infest.

The new ability gained in this phase actually affects the valkyrs. Instead of killing them to make them drop a player, you dps them to 50%, then they'll fly up into the air and spam an ability called Life Siphon. Any Valkyr should be taunted by a tank when possible so they don't disrupt priest shields on raid members.


Defiles should be dropped towards the starting point of the fight whenever possible. They expand a lot quicker in the hard mode than they do in the normal fight and as such are quite a threat if not handled with care.


You will want to setup a cooldown rotation for Soul Reaper. This greatly depends on your raid setup, but very useful are abilities such as Barkskin, Last Stand, Pain Suppression, Bubblesac, Guardian Spirit,Offtank Intervene and so on. Make sure your raid's communication is spot-on for this, or you'll end up with a very dead tank.

Phase 2 movement is a bit like a dance, really. You want to have your raid members in a central position whenever Lich King summons a Valkyr, so they have a long ways to go to drop the person in question, but you also want to be spread out a bit for Defiles, and you have to dance around wherever someone drops their defile. Knowing where to be at any given time depends on practice and communication. Your tank should be announcing where he's taking the Lich King so the raid knows to follow, and impending defiles and valkyrs should also be called out in vent, mainly just so no one has an excuse to be in the wrong spot.

You should also make sure that your raid has defile and shadow traps on say announce in their boss mod.

As you approach 40%, your raid should move towards an edge of the platform. Again, this is so no one takes unneccessary damage from Remorseless Winter ticks. You want to spread out in the same format as before and pretty much repeat the first ledge phase.

Phase three greets you straight away with Harvest Souls - yes, this is plural for a reason. Your whole raid gets teleported into the throne room and yet another dance begins. Now, in here are two things to look out for. Vile Spirits and bombs that drop shortly after they materialize. You move away from the bombs while killing the spirits. In our case, we all grouped up and moved to a safe spot when a bomb was about to drop on us.


To make sure everyone gets the concept, you should have a leader marked that everyone follows. After a little while of this, you get teleported back to the Lich King and are immediately greeted with a Defile, so be ready for it. Any spirits you did not kill in the throne room will also become active outside on top of the new ones the Lich King will summon. To deal with spirits outside, we used a soaker - the raid moves together to the side of the room furthest away from the spirits while your ranged members should dps whichever spirits they can, and exploding ones should be soaked by the offtank or a paladin in the middle of the room.

There's no more Infest in this phase but soul reaper still happens, so make sure everyone is on top of the cooldown rotation. Harvest Souls, Defile and Vile Spirits are all on a timer, so you should get used to the rotation pretty easily.

As far as healing in the Throne Room goes, your paladin is pretty much out of luck. Disc priest shields and Prayer of Mending as well as any other instants and health stones will be your best bet.

As soon as you hit 10%, the fight is over. Congratulations of beating the final challenge in Icecrown Citadel 10 man!

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