Up the ladder...painfully slow

Long time no write. Not much to write, as I've been doing some sparse achievements, and having fun with LOTRO.

Last night, we *finally* started our wipe fest learning the Lich King fight, in a good mood, after doing 11/12 ICC10 in <4 hours the day before.

Saw a lot of videos, a lot of different strategies for the different phases, and tbh, it seems easy on video, but until everyone sticks to a strategy and knows it, it's not. Really. The reason is simple: 1 mistake = wipe.

Phase 1 is not a dps race, so they say, but it is. The reason is that the LK must come down to 72% very fast, so that ppl can finish the Shambling Horrors at will. And the nuking, imho, shouldn't be done with dpsing them, but simply moving the Necrotic Plague up the stack ladder, by *NOT* dispelling them until the affected person is behind the mob, or that will decrease the effect of the plague. If the plagued mob is one of the ghouls, that's best, as it will be killed and the plague will stack, nearly 1-shotting the horror(s). But for this to work, there can't be many ghouls, as the plague will move between them but there must be at least 1-2, so it can stack before moving to the horror. That means some AoE must be done to speed up the killing of plagued ghouls. Single-targetting the Horrors seems like a total waste of time until the LK is at 71-72%.
Btw, we had our OT and MT spread apart, ie, MT AoE didnt seem to dps the mobs near the OT and vice-versa. On the videos I've seen, MT and OT seemed to be close enough so that the melee dps and MT AoE would damage the mobs around the OT too, although far enough so that the incoming plagued person leaving the plague near the Horror would not cause the jumping of the plague to anyone in the MT area. Have to check that.

We managed to move to the transition with 3 Horrors killed, and most times we actually had to wait 10s before the 3rd horror would spawn so I think it's feasible to have only 2 Horrors and then nuke the LK, a sitting duck at 72%.

Then we have the transition phase, or Phase 1.5.

Theoretically, ppl split in 2 or 3 groups. We did it with 2 groups, 1 group with both tanks and the melee dps and the other with ranged+healers. We had only 1-melee so it was not balanced. I've seen several videos where the person being raging-spirited would move to the tanks for an easier taunt, and to avoid that he silenced other players. We didn't to it that way, we kept dpsing Raging Spirits and the tanks would taunt the Spirits to them.
This *is* a dps race, but it has its problems, because the Spirits silenced our tank (dunno if that should happen), meaning, sunders/taunts delayed, meaning aggroing dps. I myself had that problem once, when the mob was at 52% (weird, ha?). We had one mostly(?) idle ranged (hunter) nuking the 6K hp (?) ice spheres.
So that left 4 dps to kill 3 Raging Spirits in 60 secs (and the 1st one does NOT spawn at t=0, it spawns at t=5 or so, that was my feeling but lets consider t=0)

Each Raging Spirit has 752k, meaning we need 37600 dps to get all 3 down in 60 secs.
Lets assume 4 dps + 0.2 dps for each tank + 0.1 dps (for the sphere dps)

So, requirement is about 8.3k dps for the poor 4 dpsers. That's a bit too much. Of course, if the sphere dps helps, that will help a lot. That might have been one of our probs, as we came out of the transition always with the 3rd Raging Spirit at 90% HP or so, so that was crap.

And now... Phase 2.

Absolutely first thing to do, when going in, do *NOT* go towards any incoming sphere that might have popped up at the last second. Kill it from the edge and *THEN* go in. We never had a problem with that, but..
First thing to do, and we failed several times: *MOVE* to near the middle, and *STACK* while waiting for the Val'kyr.
Second thing to do, do *NOT* dps the LK until the raging spirit is down.
Second thing to do, when the Valkyr shows up (it takes a bit of time to pickup the target), start nuking it, forget about the Spirit, and slow it down.
Third thing to do, start spreading (in my case, teleport out of the middle <= Create a portal near the edge, and that edge better be the way you go when you(lock) are picked up, so you can save yourself from falling by teleporting, which means, Portal must be in range).
IT REMAINS TO BE SEEN WETHER TWO VALKYRS MAY COME UP WITHOUT A DEFILE. CHECK LK CASTS.

We utterly failed at spreading. DMB bars do not help, as it is only a guide. It shouts that "LK is casting Defile". By then you better be moving out of the middle and spreading. It seems easy. Dunno if it is or not, because I never got Defiled. But I saw ppl being defiled in the middle and then, because others were in the vicinity, the pool immediately extended to about 90% of the available area. Brutal !

I think this failure has to do with our dps being a bit low on the Valkyrs, lots of time they send us through the edge, meaning something was wrong. It's weird as we had 4 ranged dpsers. Still.. as we spend too much time with the Valkyrs, our focus waned and .. defeat.

A good solution (so they say) seems to be to have the LK as /focus , so you can see its target bar while you are nuking the Val'kyr.

The best we got in 10 tries was LK at 57% (?).

Not bad.

WTB ICC 10 HC to get a damn decent weapon and trinket....Muradin's Spyglass is cursed for me... 10+ runs and no drop :(