Doctors of philsophy, two doctors' musing on playing world of warcraft

Faradhim’s quick guide to "trial of champion" August 5, 2009

Patch day wasn’t too bad. Sever came back online around 8:00 PM local eastern time. I logged in around 9:15 PM with no queue and wasted no time gathering a group for the new 5 men dungeon called trial of champions.

A few of my guild mates were happy to oblige and we gathered a group and headed toward the instance. Here is the group composition:

Tank: DK with 80 DPS gear (mix of blue, green and purple from heroic).
Heal: Holy priest (Heroic, badge and Naxx 10 gears).
DPS1: Hunter 1 (Heroic, badge and Naxx 10 gears)
DPS2: Warlock (Naxx 25 gears)
DPS3: Hunter 2 (Heroic, badge gears)[Me]

We decided to do it on normal since none of us have seen the instance. After the second fight the warlock switched to his NAXX 25 geared DK for tanking.

The instance is located inside the coliseum in the Argent tournament ground. There were no summoning stones so everyone had to make their own way down through ice crown. There is no reputation requirement to enter the 5 men instance.

The first battle of the instance is mounted combat similar to those you do for the Argent daily “before the citadels”. You can grab a lance from the weapon rack along the wall after you enter the instance but I think your own Argent lance from the dailies can be used here as well. After everyone mounts up you talked to Jaeran Sunsworn who stands in the center of the jousting court to start your instance. After some prolonged period of speech/cheering/entrance you get down to business and fight 3 groups of mounted champions. There is no heal/tank/DPS assignment for mounted combats and everyone pretty much swarm the enemy knights. A sounded strategy is to have one person tank (close lance combat) an enemy knight while the others take turns charging or shield break the same target. The knights have 189K health which is pretty squishy in jousting terms. The group can take turns to tank but we didn’t have any problem having one person tanking majority of the fights. After the jousting phase is over you need to dismount and combat the grand champions on foot. The only trick here is to remember switching your argent lance back to your normal weapon. We had no issue downing the three rounds of mounted knights and the grand champions on foot. At the end of the fight you are awarded a single level il200 purple.

The second phase starts when the front door opens and Argent Confessor Paletress enters with 3-4 groups of her adds. Adds are composed of a healer and 2 melees. Each group can be pulled separately but will aggro if one gets too close to another. The healer can’t be death gripped or misdirected. A sounded strategy is to have your tank pull back the healer away from the other groups. When she is pulled back far enough everyone can nuke her until he/she goes down. Otherwise the healer will heal the melees. After the adds have been cleared you will face Paletress by herself. The fight has two phases. First phase is straight forward until she gets to 25% health where she will summon an add. When the add appears after a brief stun all DPS should switch to the add. Paletress will regain her lost HP as her add does damage to the party. It is possible to still damage her but her health will replenish much faster than the damage you can do to her. She also uses holy smite on random party member and must be healed through by the healer. This was our hardest fight and we wiped twice before figuring out we need to focus all fire on the add. After you defeat her a chest will appear on the ground and you get another piece of il200 purple (or was it 2?)

The last fight is with the black knight. This is a three phase fight but fairly straight forward. There is a living phase, a skeleton phase and a ghost phase. Through out different phases the black knight spams AOE as well as summons adds that will hit most of the party members. I tried my best to help the healer by laying frost trap in front of her but was dismay to discover most of the adds can only be trapped for a few secs (like heroic). Since this is a healing intensive fight some sort of health potion would help DPS. We lost the healer and 1 DPS at the end of the fight but were able to drop him on our first try. He drops 2 pieces of level il200 purples.

The instance is very short and has excellent rewards for its time. On the order of difficulty I would place it is above regular HoL and on par with easier heroic dungeons. Well geared tank/healer are a must and average DPS of 1500 is advisable.

Gibbie’s Wisdom on Trial of Champion (Added 9/9/09)
All three fights can be significant challenges. The largest unknown is who will be the faction champions. Various strategies exist to take them down, but typically go for the healer first; otherwise you won’t burn down the dps fast enough. I’ve seen strats where you can interrupt the healer, but I’m not skilled enough to tank the other two and interrupt the healer while burning down the dps.

Paletress is simply a healing/dps check. For DK I pop AMS when he does the fear (or lichborn if I’m too late). AMS cooldown is faster than the fear cooldown.

The Black knight has his own challenges, in heroic the exploding ghouls hurt alot. Simply kite them and do not do AOE, and especially do not blow up ghouls on healers. In the third phase as a healer I have someone help me heal, whether a lock with drain life, or DK rune tap/death strike. Usually this third phase is the most intense, and with just some tricks we can get through it.

I find that most PUGs expect everything to be tank and spank, which relies too heavily on the healer and tank. If both are not overgeared and well skilled, typically the elitist dps takes off. As I recall we replaced several 3k-4k dps with guildies doing 1.5k who were willing to learn, and got through it fine.

That’s one thing I do like about our guild, everyone is pretty smart and it doesn’t take many wipes to figure it out.