by Allison Robert

With the upcoming Icecrown raid buffs going all the way to 30% damage/healing/health/absorbs eventually, more and more raids are going to find their way to Arthas. Buffs aside, a lot of Arthas’ difficulty lies in execution, and I started jotting down a few notes that I hope might be helpful to other druids likely to attempt the fight. We were fortunate to get both the 10- and 25-man version down, and I got astoundingly lucky on one 10-man attempt with back-to-back selections as a Harvest Soul target while I was running a video capture. I’ve seen a lot of comments online that caster druids aren’t well-suited to dealing with this, and that’s just not true at all.

Sweat the small stuff.

As with other elaborate, multi-phase boss fights, it’s the small stuff that’s going to kill you — over and over again until people get it right. The need to get a lot of “little things” right over a lengthy boss fight (I think our 25-man kill clocked in at around 17-18 minutes) is a big part of the difficulty, and odds are good that you will die to a number of infuriatingly tiny mistakes.

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