Blood Queen Lana'thel (10 Player)

[Luskan]

Blood Queen Lana'thel has both a very large health pool and a very restrictive enrage timer. To overcome this, you'll need to make efficient use of her Essence of the Blood Queen debuff. Shortly into the fight, she'll bite the highest non-tank on her threat list, dealing around 12,000 damage and afflicting them with Essence of the Blood Queen. This causes the bitten player to deal 100% increased damage, heal themselves for 10% of their damage, and cause no threat. Ideally, you want your highest melee DPS to be bitten first, as she'll run across the room to bite a ranged player, wasting valuable DPS time.


Essence of the Blood Queen lasts for 60 seconds, at which point it will be replaced with Frenzied Bloodthirst. Once this happens, the player's action bar will be completely emptied except for Vampiric Bite -- the same ability Lana'thel uses. Players affected by Frenzied Bloodthirst have 10 seconds to use that ability to bite another player, thereby passing the Essence on to the other player as well as refreshing their own. This has a cascading effect as the fight continues. Once another 60 seconds are up, both players will then have to bite new targets, leaving 4 players with Essence. Eventually those 4 will have to bite 4 more, leaving 8, and so on.


Should a player with Frenzied Bloodthirst not bite anyone within the 10 second timer, they will be mind controlled and must be killed. This is a very bad thing. Not only do you lose that player's DPS, you have to waste valuable time killing them, and have one less player spreading the Essence debuff. For those reasons, failing even one bite practically guarantees a wipe unless you significantly outgear the DPS requirement.


It's also important to note that everyone has to bite someone different. Aside from the need to spread the Essence to all the DPS you can, the Vampiric Bite ability does not work on someone who has already been bitten. Since it's quite likely, especially in the latter portions of the fight, for two players to choose the same person, it's very helpful to set up a bite order ahead of time. Make sure to prioritize higher DPS players to be bitten earlier. Communication is important as well -- players will need to know where the person they're biting is ahead of time, and if they don't, they need to find out quickly.


The raid's positioning is very important here. All of your ranged DPS and healers will need to be as spread out as possible, preferably at least 6 yards away from each other, with the healers more toward the center of the room to make sure everyone's in range. This is due to Lana'thel's Twilight Bloodbolt ability. She'll randomly cast this on any non-tank, causing around 10,000 damage to the target and anyone too close to them. Limiting this splash damage on ranged classes is important. However, she can target melee with Bloodbolt, resulting in unavoidable splash damage on the rest of the melee. For this reason, we have our melee DPS split into two separate groups, to the left and right of the boss.


Every two minutes, Lana'thel will run to the center of the room, fear everyone for a short period of time, and start casting Bloodbolt Whirl. This is essentially just her normal Bloodbolt ability, cast three times on every member of the raid. Positioning can be even more difficult here -- aside from the fact that the fear just completely scrambled everyone's positioning, all of the melee DPS needs to expand as well. The fear makes it almost impossible to set positioning ahead of time, so everyone just needs to find an open area, using as much of the room as possible. Since everyone is being hit by Bloodbolt simultaneously, two people standing too close to each other will take upward of 20,000 damage instantly.


Healing is extremely tight during this phase, so any hybrid DPS that can't damage her while she's in the air should try to help out on healing. It can also be very helpful to have healers avoid or break the fear with things like fear ward or tremor totem, and let them pick a spot quickly while the rest of the raid works around them.


One final warning regarding the air phase: The timing of the Essence debuff falling off tends to line up very closely with the first fear going out. Quite often, bites will need to go out as she's running to the center of the room. Tanking her as far from the center as possible can give a little extra time to get bites out, as well as making sure the first player with Essence gets their first bite out instantly as well.


There are four other main abilities that will need to be dealt with, though they're fortunately much simpler. Pact of the Darkfallen links three raid members together with a bright purple beam. While it's active, all three players will be constantly exploding, causing shadow damage to anyone else who is nearby. In order to cancel Pact of the Darkfallen, the three players must stand directly on top of each other for a brief period of time. Since latency causes players to appear in different places to each other, we found it best to simply have everyone with Pact go stand on the blue diamond on the floor in the very center of the room until their debuff falls off.


The next ability, Swarming Shadows, is practically identical to the Legion Flame debuff from the Lord Jaraxxus encounter. Just kite it away, preferably to the edges of the room, and stay out of the purple fire.


There's also her Blood Mirror ability. She casts this on the tank, who is then linked to the person standing closest to them. The linked player then takes 100% of the damage the tank does, as unresistable Shadow damage. The simplest way to deal with this is to simply have a second tank stand on top of the first. However, the only thing that really matters is the other player's health pool and damage reduction. If your healers can keep them up, a DPS-specced player with a full set of tanking gear can work as well, while potentially contributing more damage to the fight.


Finally, there's her Shroud of Sorrow aura. This causes up to 4500 damage to everyone in the raid every three seconds, and must be healed through. Prayer of Shadow Protection or a Shadow Protection Aura help greatly with this, as well as most of her other abilties.

- Good luck