Lichborne: Heroic Cataclysm dungeon-delving for death knights
by Daniel Whitcomb 
Oct 5th 2010 at 2:00PM
OK, I'm not usually one to use tired old catchphrases, but forgive me, I'm going to use one right now: You are not prepared. That pretty much sums up Cataclysm heroics, especially as they are now on beta. Chances are, you've grown used to the easy stuff we have in Wrath. Not only are Wrath heroics a little underbalanced, and not only have patches specifically made them easier and faster to run, but at this point, we're running things in tier 9 and 10 gear that were made for people in pre-tier 7 gear, and we're steamrolling them.
All this ends with Cataclysm heroics. I cannot stress this enough. You see that picture up there, at the top of this article? You'll be seeing that a lot. Cataclysm heroics are hard. They are hard enough that the random dungeon finder may end up being something you want to avoid in favor of creating your own group so that you can work together and get the proper balance of crowd control and skill. While some of the difficulty comes because we'll all be in dungeon blues, some of it is because the dungeons are genuinely set up to be harder, with harder-hitting mobs and bosses with mechanics that require you to use utility moves to have a chance of beating them.
With this in mind, I have a few tips for you on getting ready for the new heroics. Trust me, you'll need them, if you don't want to spend all day wiping to the first trash pack in your first random heroic.
Gear up
Your first mission is to gear up. Stuff hits hard; stuff hits fast. That means that as a tank, you want to be geared up to absorb those hits. As a DPSer, you want to be geared up to take down said mobs as quickly as possible, before your healer runs out of mana and your tank runs out of HP. These days, we're used to dinging 80, buying a piece of two of tier 9 if we've been queuing regularly since level 70, and jumping right into some basic heroics decked out in quest and reputation rewards. We can get away with this because most of the people running heroics are in tier 9 and 10 gear and can carry us. This time, that isn't happening. Spend some time in normal dungeons and get geared up. I'd suggest making sure you have item level 333 gear in every single one your slots before you start heading to heroics, especially if you don't have a premade group.
Use your utility
In Wrath heroics, we've gotten pretty lazy. We have so many pretty awesome utility spells that we just sort of shunt off into a secondary bar in favor of mindlessly mashing our DPS or threat abilities. That's not going to cut it in Cataclysm. You will need to use your utility abilities. Here's a few examples of why and how you should be using them:
- Mind Freeze There are going to be caster mobs, and they are going to hurt. Interrupting casters will practically be required to win some battles (more on that later), and since we have no real CC, you'll want to get great at using Mind Freeze if you really want to pull your weight in a group. Use it to interrupt healing spells, use it to interrupt massive damage spells; just learn what it works on, and use it.
- Strangulate There are going to be caster mobs, and they are going to hurt. Silencing, if they aren't immune to it, them can allow your tank (or you, if you are the tank) to pull them in or can stop a particularly horrible spell from going off. Hand of Doom can help here if you have a point or two spare, although it'll generally be more useful in PvP, like Strangulate itself.
- Necrotic Strike If interrupting or silencing aren't possible, Necrotic Strike can also save your bacon. By slowing cast time and absorbing healing, it can allow your group to take down a particularly prolific healing mob a lot more quickly. Keep it handy and be ready to switch it in when you fight a mob that casts a lot of spells quickly, especially healing spells. Since it costs 1 unholy rune, it'll be a lot easier for unholy death knights to use this by just swapping it for Scourge Strike.
- Tanking cooldowns If all you do is run heroics, chances are you long ago shoved cooldowns like Bone Shield, Icebound Fortitude and Vampiric Blood off to the side. That's going to change in Cataclysm. Not just bosses but trash will hit incredibly hard, and healers will no longer have the amazing mana regen and super-efficient, super-powerful heals they have right now. Be prepared to cycle through your tanking cooldowns at any time. DPS, you should be working overtime to avoid aggro, but if you get it anyway, you may want to hit Icebound Fortitude while you wait for the tank to peel the mob back off you, because there's a good chance you'll die without some sort of outside intervention, even in plate. Speaking of which, tanks, you may want to make sure you actually have Dark Command hotkeyed for these instances.
In the current game, we're used to health and mana being mere formalities. Healers and DPS can usually regen mana or top it off in a few seconds between fights, and between spells and talents, they don't seem to run low on mana in the time it takes to kill your average boss or trash mob. As far as DPS health goes, it's no big deal. We can survive a couple of hits if we pull aggro, and it's not like it's a big deal for the healer to throw us a bit of HP without losing control of the situation.
None of this holds true in Cataclysm. Healer mana is once again for the tank, and the tank alone. That means that as a DPSer, you, personally, are more responsible than ever for your survivability. Don't pull aggro. When you do, stop attacking until the tank peels it off. Bring and use bandages and potions. Tanks and DPS alike, eat between pulls if you need to. Above all, remember this truism: Unless you're the tank, the healer's mana is not for you, and you need to mitigate that.
On the tank side of things, as we discussed above, use your cooldowns. Make your healer's job easier so that you can stay alive. In addition, watch your healer's mana and make sure you do not pull until he (and your mana-using DPS) is ready. We sometimes forget how hard it is to deal with a mana pool because we don't have one. In the opening months of Cataclysm, it's more important than ever that we do remember that, because your healers and DPS will likely be spending even more mana as they try to get used to the system. Make sure your healers and magic using DPS have mana before you pull. If you need to, discuss with them what they'd consider a good pulling pace to be. Your healer no longer has the mana regeneration capabilities to chain pull. Don't chain pull without their consent, or you will wipe.
Use kill orders and crowd control
In the Wrath era, we've gotten used to a "pull them all and let God sort it out" mentality. That won't work in Cataclysm. Some stuff hits noticeably harder. Some mobs summon more mobs. Groups of mobs hit hard enough that your healer won't be able to keep up, especially if everyone's fighting separate mobs. Tanks, make a kill order, mark it with symbols, and make sure the DPS follows the orders. If you have crowd controllers in your group, mark stuff for them to crowd control and make sure they do it. DPS, follow your tank's kill order. If your tank doesn't have a kill order, suggest one be established, especially if you're wiping, which you probably will be.
This is also a good time to suggest that you get a lot smarter about when and how you pull. Adds are death right now. Don't be afraid to pull around corners and into niches to avoid adds. Use Strangulate and Death Grip to wrangle casters, and make sure runners don't get away with Chains of Ice or another judicious application of Death Grip. Always be aware of your surroundings.
Know the fights
This point goes hand in hand with the point above. You're going to want to know what trash does what so you know what to kill first and what to crowd control. This goes double on bosses. Bosses won't just be plain old tank-and-spank; they will have unique mechanics, and you will have to learn to work around them. For example, the first boss of heroic Shadowfang Keep casts an AoE spell that brings everyone down to 1 health. Be ready to mitigate or recover health so your healer isn't as taxed getting everyone back up. In addition, said boss will cast heal spells. If you do not interrupt them, you will not win, because he will heal himself back up to full. It's that simple.
Similarly, the first boss of heroic Deadmines will, in his second phase, rise up into the air and summon a rotating wall of flame. If you don't stay out of that wall of flame, you will die. If you don't help burn down the elementals he summons at the same time, your group will die. I can't stress this enough. Know your fights, and adapt.
Adapting is the name of the game
Adapt, adapt, adapt. That's really what all of this advice is about. The new heroics will throw new scenarios at you with new, unforgiving mechanics that hearken back to old raids -- and yes, the old vanilla way of doing things. Be cautious, be careful and have fun. It's a brave new world out there.
We have advice for everything from PUG etiquette and buttons you should push more often to Icecrown loot and gear stat weights. Check out WoW Insider's DK leveling guides, and visit Lichborne every week for more death knight strategies and tips.Filed under: Death Knight, (Death Knight) Lichborne, Cataclysm
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 5)
placebonation Oct 5th 2010 2:11PM
:) Thank for the heads up. :)
mijody1 Oct 5th 2010 2:59PM
Plz plz make make a comprehensive guide to all the cataclysm heroics! Reading things like this is so helpful for us tanks, a quick guide summarizing what all bosses do and what we need to do would be vastly helpful to reference when running into dungeons for the first time :)
Rufio Oct 5th 2010 4:25PM
@mijody. In due time, in due time. We're still in Beta and things change. The vast majority of people won't be tackling these heroics until, what, the end of December or something, so there's no rush. Once the game is released and the content is there for everyone it's almost a guarantee there'll be guides on this site. :-)
Aceman67 Oct 5th 2010 2:12PM
Sounds like we're going to have to earn our keep, brothers and sisters. Suffer well, becuase I think I we'll be doing a lot of it.
EaterOfBirds Oct 5th 2010 7:49PM
amen brother
Golyath Oct 5th 2010 2:16PM
Sounds fun! Finally bringing some actually difficulty back to the game. Then again it will be around a month before everyone is geared and maybe back to easy mode. I hope blizzard truly fixed the lame easiness of the game.
FrankBlack Oct 5th 2010 2:16PM
can't wait
Grim Oct 5th 2010 2:18PM
Yes! Finally, dungeons that are actually, well, heroic! No more easy dungeons Blizzard. Give me instances where I and my squad will have to think and not just mash buttons. Let us use the environment, crowd control, and coordination. Thanks for the article! And keep up the good work Wow.joystiq.com (it just doesn't feel right saying that instead of wow.com)
johnthediver Oct 5th 2010 2:51PM
I think a lot of people forget that early Wrath dungeons were not the cake walk they are today. They may not have been Shattered Halls difficult, but the Storm Peaks instances in particular were tough, as well as UP and DTK when they were cutting edge content.
Golyath Oct 5th 2010 2:56PM
All wrath dungeons have always been easy. Sorry to say but when Wrath was first released and we hit 80 a week after start, we were 4manning heroic dungeons in our guild because we didn't want to pug a 5th. So if you thought wrath dungeons where hard, you never played vanilla or bc.
Dart Matsuraki Oct 5th 2010 3:52PM
@Caligulla
Everyone has their own playstyle I suppose. I've been a tank for all of Wrath and , honestly, I'm bored in heroics.
I personally can't see how Run in > Throw down your class' AoE threat ability > Press random buttons to win can be fun.
I want to be challenged. I want to have to think and to plan. There is nothing more satisfying, as a tank, than seeing a well planned pull come to fruition. And ultimately, I want to feel proud that I can do my job well.
It used to be that if you were a good tank or a good healer, people knew. I want that feeling of accomplishment back. Cataclysm is looking promising in that regard.
Rufio Oct 5th 2010 4:47PM
@ Cagillia Remember at this point it's still conjecture mate. My advice would be to first play them and see how you go, my money says you'll find it just fine and the period between finding it really tough and being geared/skilled enough to tackle it just fine won't be that long at all.
Revrant Oct 6th 2010 2:13PM
Thanks john, people forget, in their ICC 6,200 GS mega-gear, just how hard Heroics used to be.
Azjol-Nerub was torture for a solid two months until tanks and DPS and healers figured out what everything did, before the Dungeon Finder, long before it, I was with premades struggling in Heroic-appropriate gear to get past the first boss.
It was a wipe-fest for those of us not sporting raid gear, if you started out in Sunwell stuff and stayed there, yeah, I imagine Wrath was easy throughout, but there were many challenging instances at the onset. HoL and HoS are even to this day very difficult for me to tank due to all the AoE threat needed(which as a Blood DK I have little of), and none of the raids were "easy" at the onset unless you were already heavily geared.
Getting geared got a lot easier than the content, that's what happened, it was a disparity, and because I can struggle to tank out of normal level 80 dungeon gear and slowly work up to great gear and be nearly unstoppable in a Heroic, I could have forgotten how hard it was at launch.
The dungeons weren't "easy", the gearing progression system was, we out-geared the dungeons, in Soviet Cata, they will out-gear YOU.
R. Oct 5th 2010 4:04PM
I'm nervous about the DK tanking changes but looking forward to it at the same time. Its been too long since we had a real challenge outside of the last two bosses of the current content.
Master Chef Oct 5th 2010 2:22PM
Cata heroics are definitely going to be a challenge and I fear for the worst. There's gonna be that one person in the group that thinks they can still aoe everything down then blame the tank when they die. Though that makes me cringe I welcome the return of smart play and cc that existed in BC.
Ianmis Oct 5th 2010 2:52PM
Of course there will be but there will also be four other people in the group that can laugh at that person. Then ask that one player to not do so and when they don't listen, there will be four other people to kick that person's sorry ass out of group. ;)
Ailuvan Oct 5th 2010 3:03PM
This is why, as a healer when I'm not on my DK, I'll be informing everyone that any DPS that doesn't let the Tank lead and hold aggro, will be dead, and corpse running.
Stilhelm Oct 5th 2010 6:05PM
@Ailuvan:
Exactly. I really can't see why so many people are crying about how tanks will just keep pulling while healers have no mana, dps will just unload AoE and pull aggro like always. They might a few times, but once they've run back to the instance a few times they'll either ragequit over a game that actually requires more than mindlessly pressing buttons or they'll get their act together.
When I heal, if I'm going to finish a pull with low mana, I'll make sure the tank finishes with low health. He can sit and eat while I'm sitting and drinking. Likewise, on my tank and dps, I'll be stocked with bandages and food, and actually using them at the end of a pull rather than yell for heals. I'll be using any available cooldowns to mitigate unavoidable damage (yes, even on my dps, because dead dps don't do very much damage), and trying to avoid the avoidable damage when possible, suggesting creative ways to keep a situation under control, etc.
Then again, I'll probably mostly be running mostly with my guildees for a while, and merely using the LFD tool for transport to the instance.
Malphurion Oct 5th 2010 2:24PM
The fun factor in running 5mans is back!!! Kill order, cc, and strategy have been dead since bc. This is great news.
Sheiko Oct 5th 2010 2:24PM
As a tank, I can't say that I am particularly looking forward to all these incoming changes to dungeons and their heroic counterparts. On the one hand, I welcome the additional challenge that I will have to PERSONALLY adapt to by improving my knowledge of the game and my use of my abilities. However, I cower in fear at the thought of the additional responsibility that is being placed on the OTHER people in my group, namely the dps, as I have little to no faith in most other WoW player's knowledge, capability, or desire to improve either of those things, which is why I rolled a tank in the first place: so that I could control as much of what goes on as humanly possible and increase my chances of success accordingly. With so much of my success now resting in the hands of other people, I fear A LOT more frustration is in my future.