Tanking: Two tanks, ideally one high avoidance and one with high HP. This is because the off-tank will take 100% of the tank’s damage taken as Shadow damage via Blood Mirror. This is a health removal effect, so armour, avoidance, Earth Shield and PoM are ineffective.
Positioning: Ranged should spread at least 6, and preferably 8, yards apart. On 25-man it can help to assign ranged to sectors of the room.
Buffs: Shadow Resistance as usual. Body and Soul may be useful for helping people group together, but is non-essential.
Key Debuffs: Delirious Slash – Bleed on the tank; Blood Mirror; Pact of the Darkfallen; Essence of the Blood Queen
HP: 62,500,000 (18,000,000 on 10-man)
Enrage: 6 minutes
This can be a very healing-intensive fight, with high requirements on positioning and movement. The fight has two alternating phases.
Main Phase – Ground
There are a couple of constant abilities, and some less frequent ones.
The first constant ability is a permanent raid-wide aura called Shroud of Sorrow, dealing 4,500 Shadow damage (3,000 on 10-man) every 3 seconds. In addition, Lana’thel will shoot Twilight Bloodbolts at random players, dealing 13,000 Shadow damage (10,000 on 10-man) to them and anyone within 6 yards. Thus ordinarily the raid should be slightly spread out.
The first special ability is Swarming Shadows. This is cast on a random player and causes them to create a shadow flame patch beneath their feet every second for 6s. This is Legion Flame but more purple, so just run to and then along the wall if you get it, avoiding dumping flames in the middle of the room. Melee should be especially alert to this, so they don’t box in their fellow melee.
The next special ability is Pact of the Darkfallen. This is cast on 3 players (2 on 10-man) linking them together with red beams and dealing 5,000 Shadow damage (3,500 on 10-man) to players within 10 yards every second until the Pact is removed by all the linked players being within 5 yards of each other. When this goes off, those affected will need to quickly run to a point slightly forward of the centre of the floor design, and healers will need to be aware of the increased raid damage, especially if a healer needs to run.
Finally, the big gimmick of the fight: the biting!
After 15 seconds of the fight Lana’thel will Vampiric Bite the player with the most damage done at that point, dealing 15,000 Physical damage (13,000 on 10-man) and granting them Essence of the Blood Queen. This increases the player’s damage and healing done by 100%, heals them for 10% of the damage they deal, and causes them to generate no threat.
The Essence lasts for 60 seconds on 25-man and 75 seconds on 10-man, after which you gain the Frenzied Bloodthirst debuff for 10 seconds. During this time you must run into melee range of someone else, face them and Vampiric Bite them (your normal action bars go away and this ability will be in slot 1) or you will become mind controlled and need to be killed.
Biting someone will refresh your Essence timer to 60 or 75 seconds, and the newly-created Vampyr will also gain the Essence. You cannot bite someone who is already a Vampyr, so your pool of targets becomes pretty small pretty quickly.
An example sequence for 25-man is as follows:
15s – 1 vampyr created
75s – 2nd vampyr created
135s – 3rd and 4th vampyrs created
195s – 5th-8th vampyrs created
255s – 9th-16th vampyrs created
315s – 8 vampyrs have no one to bite and become MC’d. Probably a wipe. (Note the 10s grace due to the length of Bloodthirst).
So we have 5 minutes, 15s to kill her (or slightly more since people will use a few seconds of the Bloodthirst debuff finding and biting someone).
The first person to be bitten should spread the Essence to the opposite grouping as a priority, i.e. a ranged should bite a melee, a melee should run out and bite a ranged. This allows the debuff to subsequently be spread effectively through the two populations. Subsequent bites should simply be cast on the nearest unbitten DPS. Avoid biting the MT as they will cause no threat.
If you prefer, there are addons to assign bite targets based on Skada or a pre-defined ordering, and including the “melee bites ranged first” rule. We use BloodQueen, but I’m quite sure there’s others. Addons are not vital, but can be helpful. The trick is to realise when to just ignore the mod and bite someone anyway.
The last tip is to have the people to be bitten move to the biter. This maximises DPS since people with the Essence will be doing more DPS and should therefore not be required to move.
Phase 2
Lana’thel will do an AoE/raidwide fear called Incite Terror (dispellable, magic) just before going into Phase 2, so tremor totems and other fear breakers should be used. Priests can Fear Ward themselves and then Mass Dispel this if they’re quick; melee are usually good targets for MD, since they’ll have the most adjustment to do.
On 25-man the first Incite Terror can be close to the timer for biting people, so the first two people to become Vampyrs may need to check their position and that of their target early.
After casting Incite Terror, Lana’thel will then hover in the centre of the room for a few seconds and cast Bloodbolt Whirl every 2 seconds for 6 seconds. This casts Bloodbolts on everyone in the raid simultaneously, with the same 6-yard splash as the normal phase. People really, really need to be spread out in this phase, and the damage is pretty heavy (7-8k per Bloodbolt splash) and multiple hits will quickly kill people.
People needing to bite must either bite quickly and run out, or wait until the final Bloodbolt has been cast before biting, or they are likely to kill their target.
After this is done she will return to ground again. The tanks should await her on the stairs, and DPS should be careful not to pull aggro in the mean time; this is so that she can be repositioned on the stairs quickly and efficiently.
Heroic
– Lana’thel has 5 million more health than normal (35% more HP).
– There is no change to the enrage timer.
– Vampiric Bite and Delirious Slash inflict slightly more damage.
– New ability: Presence of the Darkfallen – Shroud of Sorrow deals 5% more damage per Vampyr.
Basically this is identical to normal mode, but with tighter DPS requirements. Although Shroud damage increases over time, most DPS are healing themselves by the time this becomes significant, so the impact is mitigated. It tends to shift the damage from AoE healing to spot-healing.
