How to conquer the Old Kingdom

Its our first attempt at a video, so most of the editing is non existent. 

Recommend watching it full screen by clicking on the icon at the top right corner. Its also played back at 4x speed as otherwise it would be longer than Titanic.

A couple of points: 

1. Notice the 50k spell reflects, warriors make mincemeat out of the spellflingers.
   
2. Eyes in the dark... is dispellable, but still very very annoying.
   
3. With the Prince, the fire balls are very predictable. If hes tanked facing your party (obviously the melee still need to run), all the balls should miss the caster group without them having to move. They come out from left, right and straight behind him and as you can see in the video im in no danger of being hit at all.
   
4. Lots of people say on the forums that he does his Embrace of the Vampyr randomly, its not random. He does it 3 times per kill at around 75/50/25 percent, doesn't matter how slowly you kill him.
   
5. As you can see in the video I survive the embrace with only 19k health (fort, commanding shout, food buff), powerword shield does absorb a chunk of the damage and shadow protection helps mitigate it further. I do however swop in some stamina gear.
   
6. The end boss is a joke. The only "hard" part of the fight is the insanity and of course there only being 2 of you makes it pretty simple. The reason we take so long killing each other is delibrate. I kill Lylia's clone as fast as possible whilst he kites mine around, then I join him in his "insanity" and mana up. The reason we don't do it the other way around is because his clone sunders, which means either I have to tank it (losing out on regen opportunities) or he loses a chunk of armor.

The Party's Over

Or how to 2 man Prince Taldaram on heroic as a holy priest/prot warrior combo.

You need a couple of things:

Patience: Its going to take a while. Our first kill took us 14 minutes and 52 seconds, our second was around 11 minutes something.

Stamina: You need enough health to survive the full Embrace of the Vampyr as its highly unlikely either of you will have enough dps to break it early. I recommend wearing some pvp/high stamina gear. With commanding shout I was sitting at 18,500 ish which with a PW:shield left me around the 2-3k mark after the embrace, perfectly survivable. However, the more health the better.

Tactics: The Prince is a very simple fight, he only has 3 abilities, 2 of which are fight defining and 1 which is marginally annoying when you aren't carrying any Dpsers. 

Embrace of the Vampyr =  the reason why you need lots and lots of stamina. You basically have to rely on the fact that you will resist some of the damage with shadow protection.

Flame Sphere = As usual, fire = bad. Run away from these.

Bloodthirst =  Annoying when your dps is a prot warrior and a holy priest throwing out dots and wanding.

Kiting is the name of the game. On our first kill we went for pulling him to the entrance and back, however today we tried a more simplistic and time saving plan involving just sticking to the space below his platform.

Starting from his platform, at the first fire orbs we headed down the steps, tanked him there for a bit before moving in the centre of the room to avoid the 2nd set of orbs and finally heading towards the steps where we entered his area. Its then a case of repeat, repeat, repeat for the next 10 minutes, interspaced with a few embraces ( we have had 3 embraces each time so far which given the fact we shaved a good few minutes off our kill time leads me to suspect it is percentage linked, not time based).

As the healer you want to always stay a good 30 yards away from the tank, which saves you having to do any emergency running and helps the tank leave in a hurry with intervene if needed. Whilst neither of you should get hit by any orbs, prayer of mending is its usual awesome self for running away.

The Embrace of the Vampyr is random so you can get lucky with your tank getting it every single time as we did today, but as long as you keep both of you at as maximium health as possible and shield whenever you see him start his warning speech there should be no issue there. The embrace is partially resistable so shadow protection should be up, and if its the tank who gets it, start casting a greater heal to land just after the embrace with its 100 percent healing debuff runs out to make sure the Prince's melee attacks don't finish him/her off.

All in all, its a very easy fight. Because you are kiting for a most of it, mana shouldn't be an issue, you get plenty of time outside the five second rule. This is particularly true of the Embrace periods, thats my time to wand or lie there thinking of trashy Vampire movies depending on whether I'm the one on the floor or not.

Result: One easily achieved Achievement.

Molten Core melted

Where once it took 40 heroes, now it takes 2 slightly less heroic types. Techinically Lylia could probably have done it solo since all I did was stand 40 yards away tapping my foot.. prot warriors need more DPS.

Magmadar proved similiarly easy, its hard to believe our MT who happily smashed his way through BWL, AQ40 and Naxx the first time around used to cry like a little girl if we didn't have a dwarf priest in the raid for doggy killing time.

Fun fact: My first ever Rag kill took place on the 6th of Jan 2006. Looks like the place has gone downhill since then.

Dragonslayers

Heroic Nexus

As a direct result of a drink and anger fueled Horde Hunting spree at around 5am on the morning of the 1st we ended up in Coldarra. Since there was a distinct lack of Horde, we were looking for other things to do and the idea of 2 manning at least the first boss in Heroic Nexus was suggested.

It turns out at least 3 (Grand Magus Telestra, Ormorok the Tree-Shaper and Commander Kolurg) are killable with only a tank and healer. Ok it takes a while, around 6 to 10 minutes per boss but there is none of the annoyance factor when your PuG members are dancing on icicles or running into whirlwinds. 

Other places on the list of things to 2 man are Molten Core (although we have to wait for the next patch), ZG (I always wanted a raptor) and the rest of the Nexus.

Weaken the Ramparts

Feeling over confident due to our success 2 manning normal instances we hit Heroic Ramparts last night. I know its not much, but the Lyloid has 6 days played full stop and isnt exactly well geared so we really werent sure if we would manage even the first trash pack. All in all it went far better than we expected with our very first 2 manned heroic badge under our belts. Yes, thats right we nailed the first boss all by ourselves. His anti healing debuff almost did for us thought since my greater heal was doing 700 before I noticed how big the stack was, but thanks to shadowmeld we managed to muddle through. Basically the Lyloid shadowmelded, the boss came onto me and i ran around a bit shielding myself. As soon as the debuff ran out, Lylia bandaged up and got aggro back and we killed him. Im so glad I resisted all those people who tried to make me reroll dwarf priest back in 2005/2006. In fact i cant express how much i love the new shadowmeld.

Murmuring is bad for you

Our 2 man target today was Shadow Lab. I was a tad nervous going in, after all I have bad memories of the 2nd boss.

"Time for fun", cue Mariposa spamming holy nova and burning through all my mana in 2 seconds flat. In fact, I cant help but question if thats why Blizzard gave us Holy Nova as baseline, to give them giggles when we oom ourselves fast on all bosses with mindcontrol abilities.

Note the awesome cower animations in the screenshot

However it turned out just fine, luckily a prot warrior and a holy priest cant kill each other fast at all. We did the first boss with Lylia as arms, but he secretly has this thing for being prot and hearthstoned to respec before the next room.

The 3rd boss proved slightly more challenging. I couldnt sustain enough mana to kill all the spawns and heal. So we had to go for the kite and nuke like mad strategy, which on try number 2 worked fine. Much to my surprise he dropped the hallowed shoulders (surprise because when doing him on my priest I normally get the plate chest my paladin desparately wanted). 

Murmur was afk easy by comparison.

Gnomeling no more

The gnomeling (who techinically is no longer a gnomeling) hit 70 on his warrior a few days ago. We are trying to grab him a few pieces of gear and as much gold as possible before the expansion rolls around. The first items on the list were the undead slaying set, easily 2 mannable and if running around winterspring first thing in the morning pretty much uncontested. 

From there we headed off to the Scarlet Monstary to see how easy the Headless Horseman was for 2 undergeared overconfident idiots. As it turns out, prayer of mending owns and the Headless Horseman is basically a loot pinata. I hardly needed to do any healing at all in the first 2 phases, phase 1 I mainly wanded, phase 2 I just stood close enough to Lylia to make sure the prayer of mending would jump everytime i got conflagated, phase 3 was slightly harder but we were looting before we realised it. From our runs, Lylia got both the horseman's blade (I wish priest's could use swords) and the melee ring. 

Inspired by our success here we moved on to the Shattered Halls, an instance I loathe with a passion, mainly because everytime I run it normally its with aoehappy mages and warlocks who start nuking stuff before the tank has even sneezed on it. This time however it was relaxing and frightening easy, yet again prayer of mending turned out greater than Warchief Kargath Bladefist. Also just goes to show how much they have nerfed everything, obviously the new talents helped but it was a completely different instance to the one we ran almost 2 years ago for the first time.

Our next port of call was Magister's Terrace, where we managed the first 2 bosses with ease. Selin Fireheart we just let him drain mana from the crystals and then used prayer of mending to keep us up (anyone seen a pattern here? :p) and used a similar tactic for Vexallus. Obviously all the instances were on normal, have to start somewhere after all and given our level of gear, easy stuff is good.