Wrath Retrospective: Top 10 DPS Encounters

Almost two years ago, Wrath of the Lich King was released. Since then, many have been raiding four different tiers of content in some capacity or another. However, some of those encounters were sorely lacking. That said, while Wrath had plenty of detractors among the hardcore raiding scene, there were a few gems that shine out as stunning examples of the kind of experience that raiding should be.

Over the next week, I plan to take a trip back to the highlights of Wrath of the Lich King Raiding. I'm dividing it into four categories – one for each of the traditional roles within a raid as well as an overall category. Today, we will be focusing on the role of Damage Dealer.

Without Further Ado...

             …..The Top Ten DPS Fights in Wrath of the Lich King

10) Sartharion, the Onyx Guardian + 3 Drakes (10 or 25man Non-Zerg)

When it was current content, Sarth+3 was the most difficult encounter in the game. Boasting over a dozen major mechanics, four primary dps targets, strict timers by which things had to happen, and more ways to get yourself killed than in any other fight at the time, Sarth was a DPS's proving grounds. Not only did you need to keep yourself alive, but you had to do so efficiently while keeping up a high standard of damage.

9) The Twin Valk'yr (Heroic)

If Sarth was a dps's proving ground, then Twins was a time trial. Instead of nearly a dozen lethal mechanics and strict timetables, the Twins provided a giant punching bag to let loose on. While high dps wasn't a requirement for the generous enrage timer, and the number of mechanics was greatly simplified, the one or two remaining could easily obliterate you.
In addition, Twins contains what is perhaps the hardest target switch in Wrath. On heroic, if a Twin's Pact (50% heal) gets cast without an interrupt, then the fight might as well be over. Most of all, your guild's damage dealers love this fight for it's ability to let a great player shine above and beyond, as the differences become even more pronounced.

8) Professor Putricide (Heroic)

In many fights, the damage dealer is a lone gun. He is given a task, and must preform it to the absolute best of his ability. In the heroic version of Professor Putricide, however, the raid must juggle the significant tasks of normal mode Putricide while passing a debuff in a controlled manner. This, combined with the greatly increased damage output from the normal mode of the fight, make this a battle in which the slightest mistake has grave consequences for all. Any guild without great communication will falter here.

7) Yogg-Saron + 1 Keeper

The God of Death at the end of Ulduar is a fondly remembered fight for many – with not only a health bar but also a debuff called 'Sanity' to manage. For the ranged, this is a priority battle, defeating one task after another before finally peeling away the defenses and fighting the beast itself. For melee, it is the opposite. Their job is to expose the creature to the world, and then stave off the end long enough that the ranged can deal the final blow. For general complexity requiring quick decision making and on-the-fly reactions every situation, this fight allows a great player to strut his stuff.

An addendum is that I am speaking quite specifically about the +1 encounter. While the normal mode is still very well balanced, I believe that the +1 achievement represents the correct difficulty for the heroic mode of a tier-ending boss. While Yogg+0 is technically more difficult, I think that it was put in solely to appease the top of the top tier raiders, and isn't an encounter made even for a minority of raiders – it was designed for a very specific, very exclusive subset that really prohibits it from being one of the best designed encounters in the expansion.

6) Blood Queen Lanathel (Heroic)

While many fights test the ability of a damage dealer to play his class to it's utmost, Lanathel tests them all in the most extreme method we've seen in Wrath. There are periods of extreme damage for cooldowns and mitigation, but the glaring elephant in the room on the fight is the absurdly fast enrage timer. This is a fight that requires every single person in the raid to be playing their class pristinely. Having the tightest enrage timer in the entire expansion, combined with the feel-good buff that the dps receive, Lanathel gets phenomenal marks.

5) Hodir (10 or 25)

Of the four keepers of Ulduar, the one that stood out to me as a clear outlier from a dps perspective was Hodir. With a number of buffs to your dps, each dependent on player contribution (as opposed to Lanathel's, which are primarily reliant on another player), Hodir rewards good play with exceptional numbers. It rewards smart play with survival, and in the end (at least with my groups) we KNEW who the best player was.

4) The Blood Prince Council (Heroic)

If Twin Valk'yr and Sarth both tested a raider's ability to survive, then Princes was the next logical step. With just as many ways to kill you, heroic princes adds in one additional mechanic – economy. Every spare step you take not only wastes valuable dps time, but also critical health. Specialized tasks like Kinetic Bombs and range-tanking Keleseth give the most exceptional players among you additional tasks to complete, while the rest engage in a race-against-survival to kill them before something in the precarious situation goes wrong. An exceptionally well balanced encounter.

3) Valithera Dreamwalker (Heroic)

There's something for everyone here. In a complete reversal of their usual role, dps are tasked with keeping the hordes off of the healers long enough for them to win the fight. With a fight against increasingly quickly spawning adds, each with unique abilities that must be dealt with, this fight has nearly everything at once. Directional abilities, ground based AoE, interrupts, burn targets, proximity AoE, all with a healthy dps requirement just to keep up with the flow of foes – and almost no margin of error because of the healing requirement. In this fight, nothing is prized as much as effective time on target, and without everyone pulling huge numbers as well as doing their best to keep their own health topped off, they will fall long before the green dragon rises.

2) The Lich King (Any mode, any difficulty)

The Lich King takes the cake as the longest fight in the expansion. More than any other fight, phase 3 of this fight will get your blood pumping as you can feel the kill coming, knowing that you're one vile spirit away from death and the enrage timer is ticking closer and closer to you. Slow damage, much like the equally difficult Kael'thas Sunstrider (of Burning Crusade infamy), will set your group hopelessly behind. 
This fight can be summed up as a long series of sprints, broken up by periods of hard jogging. And all the time, there are mechanics that threaten not only your own health, but the well-being of the entire raid. This is, by far, the least forgiving encounter in the game for a damage dealer, as is expected of the final battle of the expansion.

1) Lady Deathwhisper (10 man Heroic Mode)

Make no mistake. While the Lich King may be the least forgiving battle in the expansion, Lady Deathwhisper takes the cake for best encounter – at least from a DPS perspective. 

This encounter tests everything that the previous battles do, and more. Positional requirements, interrupts to prevent the worst of the damage, shifting priorities as she transforms adds, an extremely pesky phase transition, and that's just phase one. Phase two contains positional requirements, interrupts and shifting priorities, but added to it is the kiting of the ghosts, and the lowest threat ceiling in the expansion. In addition, heroic mode adds different priorities based on your class and a mind control that must be crowd-controlled lest he slay your fragile, cloth covered healers (or, more amusingly, before he is brutally murdered by the rest of the jealous dps.) By crippling your tanks in the final phase, they put the dps under even heavier scrutiny. At the end of the day, Deathwhisper tests every single skill that a dps class must posses and more. The only thing missing is a good voice actor.