Strategy Guides - Icecrown Citadel

Blood Princes: Touching vampire spheres is enjoyable.

Information at this point is limited to PTR experience. This guide will be updated with more information when it becomes available.

You fight three vampire princes:

Prince Valanar: The melee prince. Uses Shock Vortex, a white whirlwind on the ground, that does ~6.5k physical damage and knocks people back.

Prince Keleseth: The Shadow Caster. Constantly casts Shadow Lance for around ~10k damage.

Prince Taldaram: The Fire Caster. Casts a Fireball that does ~7k damage.

Each Prince has the ability to become Empowered (Incantation of Blood). While Empowered the other two will give him their health to fuel more powerful versions of their spells.

Valanar's Shock Vortex now becomes a 5-second cast. At the end of the cast the whole raid gets knocked back and takes ~14k physical damage. Additional damage is dealt if people are closer than 8 yards together.

Keleseth's Shadow Lance now hits for 90k shadow damage. Mitigated by shadow orbs.

Taldaram's Fireball now chases a target, losing speed and power as it goes. A direct hit deals upwards of 20k damage, splashing (not shared) to nearby targets.

While Empowered you should be damaging the Prince with a health pool. The others will be at 1 HP and cannot be killed; however threat appears to affect them still.

Dealing with the Empowered Abilities

The easiest ability to deal with is Shock Vortex.  . The ranged part of the raid should spread 8 yards apart when Valanar becomes Empowered. Aura Mastery plus Devotion Aura also helps to mitigate the damage as it is considered physical. Melee run away when the cast begins, you should have plenty of time to get away from everyone else.

The Empowered Fireball from Taldaran is slightly trickier. The mechanics on this are unclear but it appears that he will launch great balls of fire that you need to move out of the way of. These deal quite a bit of fire damage to anything caught in the path.

Lastly the Empowered Shadow Lance deserves a bit more attention.

Around the room there will be Shadow Spheres that spawn shortly after the pull. These can be 'tagged' by casting a damaging ability on them, which will make them stick to your character and cause you to take 35% less shadow damage . You can have multiple spheres on you. Someone else can tag them off you by hitting them, or if you run too far ahead of the orb. The orbs will take damage and die from absorbing the Shadow Lances so new ones must be actively placed on the tank.

The final point of note is the Kinetic Orbs. These appear far up in the air throughout the fight, and fall slowly to the ground, but can be kept up by being damaged, and will expire after 60 seconds if they do not reach the ground. If they do however reach the ground they explode dealing significant raid damage. They can be easily kept up and appear to even be affected by DoTs, making handling these trivial.

Thus the whole fight revolves around dealing with the three Empowered versions of the princes as detailed above, switching targets to the Empowered one and not letting Kinetic Orbs reach the floor.