C'thun down!

No I have never really killed C'thun before. Actually I had never gotten beyond the Twin Emperors. And to be honest, the feat in killing C'thun lies in successfully killing the twins, they're probably the toughest vanilla raid encounter there is out there.

It all started yesterday, when me and Love decided to go farm some rep in AQ40. Well I don't care much about that, but Love does so I thought I could tag along. We found two DK's in our guild who wanted to tag along as well and off we went. We hadn't really planned to clear the instance, but we ran through it pretty easily. Most of the bosses can be cleared with quite few people, as long as you have some kind of healer with you. We had some problems at Skeram since he mind controls people. And that means you have to control a level 80 player instead of a lowbie skull boss, which actually makes quite a difference. But still, the problems are slight if you have someone ready to do some cc-ing.

Our next hold up turned out to be Viscidus. I new there was something about him that had to do with frost spells being used to kill him. I thought "well that won't be an issue, we have dk's with icy touch!". Apparently that didn't work at all. We got him to 0,1% hp and there he was, refusing to die. I know you have to shatter him, but since we had no frost attack that actually worked, we couldn't do it, and that meant he was unkillable. He had 2 million hp, which took a while to get down with only two proper dpsers, and then in the end we had to reset him anyway... Lame. I read a comment on wowhead stating you had to hit him with a frost attack 200 times before he shattered, and that would've been a whole lot of icy touches. So we thought, screw that.

Some mobs in AQ have a really evil attack. They knock you up in the roof so that you fall really far and take alot of fall damage. The evil about it is that it isn't affected by level or gear in any way. Fall damage is equal to everyone as it only affects percentual hp. I actually died from those silly knocks once... The key is of course to stand underneath some part that makes you not fly so high up in the air. Well we were a little too cocky to think about that at the moment. But there is no way to fight fall damage (except a really fast levitate/slow fall)
And then we eventually got to the Twin Emperors. I had fought them once before on an alt in a haphazardly brought together pug. We didn't make it of course, since the Twins actually require some sort of coordination and tactic. They need to stand at least 60 yards apart at all times as they heal eachother for 30k hp each second if they stand closer than that. That means you basically need two groups split up to fight each boss. The on, Vek'lor, is immune to physical damage and the other, Vek'nilash, is immune to magical damage, so you have to split the raid accordingly. Not only that, but the Twins switch places about once every minute which means the raid have to counter this effect too. That was the old times, so what were us 4 people going to do?

Our initial try was a good one albeit slightly off in the tactic. We did consider their teleporting, but failed to recognize the fact that a physical tank like me (prot warrior) would have absolutely no way to handle Vek'lor aggro (EDIT: They recently changed thunder clap to ranged physical damage instead of magical). That meant each time the teleported Vek'lor would run somewhere else, most likely within reach of his brother and heal to full hp again. We realized that a warrior tank wasn't going to cut it. The best solution would be to have a caster/phys tank at each boss, that could handle both the physical immunity and the magical immunity. Enter the DK tank. We also decided we needed more than one healer, partly because of all the adds (which were easy to handle, but annoyed the poor healer and prevented him from running between tanks efficiently) and partly to avoid him having to run between tanks. We asked yet another guildie who accepted to help us. With her we also got her boyfriend, which was nice since that provided a little extra dps.

Our tactics turned out as follows, and it provided for a very smooth kill. DK + healer in left corner. DK + healer + dps in right corner. Nuke Vek'nilash until teleport, let the tanks handle the switches while dps wait for the teleportation back. We had no casters, otherwise they'd have to nuke on Vek'lor of course. We realized that there was no need to hurry, and therefore no need to run between the bosses for dps. So we killed the adds while we waited for the right boss to teleport back to us so we could commence the nuking again. With this tactic they died quite easily.

And then we got to C'thun. Like I said, I've never seen him in his... polygon flesh before. He wasn't really as impressive as I thought he'd be, the fight was also not as fun as I always thought it be. I had often compared it in my head to the Yogg-Saron encounter, but I know now that Yogg-Saron is more fun. I won't say more difficult, because that matters on your level of course. Being level 80 instead of 60 makes a hell of alot of difference when fighting C'thun after all. And I know people have said that the C'thun fight used to be really hard back then. There are still some things you need to think about if you don't want to wipe, even at level 80.

First of all, the über eyebeam he does in phase 1 still seems to oneshot people. It did to me anyway, with about 25k hp. So don't get caught in that. Secondly, in phase 2, make sure there aren't too many people inside of C'thun at the same time. In fact, if you're all inside at once you'll instantly die. Happened to us too (with the lovely corpse run that follows). Just kill the tentacles as soon as possible (really easy) and stand on the X to be thrown out again. One really annoying thing happens when you're swallowed by C'thun as a warrior though. You're taken out of your stance. It took me a while to realize why my action bars weren't showing any skills. I thought maybe I had accidentally scrolled them away, which happens, but rarely. So I started scrolling, trying to find my skills, which were nowhere to be found of course because I was stanceless. Something which is basically impossible to obtain on your own (I don't actually know of any way, maybe by script). Everytime I was swallowed by C'thun I had to switch back to Battle Stance again. Easy sure, but still annoying.

But it was a really fun run, and with 5-6 level 80's you could easily run through the entire raid without much trouble. To be able to do all the bosses you need someone with some sort of frost attack for Viscidus (shaman is the best option), and two healers for Twins (could manage on one probably, but it makes it alot easier with two).