Twins and others

First, an administrative note: I'm going to be moving on the 7th, and following that, it may take a while before I can play again. I'd like to keep posting, so I'm going to set a once-weekly post schedule for myself. It should be easy to come up with one thing per week to write about even while not playing, starting with a series of guildes for the newly 80 hunter. I'll be on the road this coming Tuesday, though, so I'm going to make the first post now, especially as I've been wanting to make it for a bit now.

I'm actually going to write up a quick guide for the Twin Val'kyr instead of Faction Champions, not least because there's not much to say about the champions fight. DPS the primary kill target, keep an eye on healers and use freezing trap to take pressure off them, use deterrence/FD/disengage to keep yourself alive. That's it.

The twins are actually a really fun fight, though, and I like the design enough that I even made a crude picture:

1. The black and white circles are the dark/light portals, respectively.
2. The triangles are the two Val'kyr.
3. Red diamonds are melee DPS.
4. Blue circles are ranged DPS and healers.

The tanks are, of course, on the opposite side of their targets from the DPS. How it works is your entire raid starts as either one color or the other, it doesn't matter which. Let's say you decide to DPS the dark one first. You'll pick up light essence as soon as the portals spawn, then go down to stand in your position within clicking range of the dark portal. This is so that the second you need to swap portal colors - either to break a shield or avoid a vortex - you can do so instantly.

Every time you swap colors, keep that color until you're forced to change. The twins share a health pool, so there's no advantage to switching targets any more often than you have to. Further, every time you swap colors, you need to run (or disengage!) over to the color that's now your opposite and stand on it. In other words always stand on a portal that's the opposite of your current color. Knowing when to switch is really easy - the game itself tells you in no uncertain terms.

Stacking tightly on each other is important if you want to maximize your DPS. The light/dark orbs that swarm the coliseum regularly give you a buff if you run into one of the same color, but the buff is granted to anyone within a short radius of the orb "splashing". That means that if everyone is stacked up, everyone builds stacks of the buff faster and gets more time spent under the empowered light and empowered darkness buffs. This also means that everyone has to be sharp about avoiding orbs of the opposite color, but they're really not that hard to avoid.

This isn't a particularly difficult encounter, but it is quite a bit of fun, I think. Seeing those nice big numbers is always exciting.