Faction Champions

Did you enjoy the Priestess Delrissa encounter in Magister's Terrace? Then you will absolutely love Faction Champions in the Coliseum.

The encounter is set up as a PvP-like fight against ten random mobs, all having about the same abilities as you might be used to facing in PvP.

There is not much tactics to talk about in this fight. It's more about fast reactions and controlling the mobs as much as possible. Crowd control can be used for some time, but the diminishing returns are ridiculous and the mobs will be immune quite fast (of course their crowd controls have no diminishing returns at all....). Basic advice is to control the melee, interrupt the casters, cleanse/dispel/purge, and burn down the healers as fast as possible.

This is by far the hardest fight so far in the Coliseum. We actually spent an hour wiping before we got the hang of the fight. Our kill order was holy priest, shammy, resto druid, mage, shadow priest, warrior, hunter, death knight, ret paladin, and rogue. We had a death knight kiting the rogue the entire fight, which helped a lot. Our druids were entangling the melee as much as possible, our priests were dispelling shields, our interrupters were interrupting heals, our hunters slowed mobs with traps and killed off totems as soon as possible, and so on. Everybody in the raid has an important task, and it was most likely not the task they usually perform in a raid encounter.

As a tank, I initially felt like a fish out of water. I tried the first couple of attempts as retribution, but realized I did little use actually dpsing. I spent most of my time cleansing and stunning. So I respecced back to protection and figured out my role in the fight:

• Cleanse. There are massive debuffs being thrown around in this fight. Cleansing all kinds of crowd control on my fellow raid members and the worst of the DoTs is very important for survival.
• Interrupt/stun/silence. With a 40 second cooldown on my Hammer of Justice, I couldn't interrupt as well as other classes, but the stun effect (until immune) was very useful. The silence effect on Avenger's Shield also turned out to be very useful.
• Blessing of Protection. Clothies love me.
  
• Taunt. Even though there is no "real" aggro table, it is possible to taunt the melee classes. This saved our clothies more than once. When I saw one of the melee go for the healers or casters, I taunted the mob and got his attention for a few seconds, thus saving the cloth-wearing target from certain death.
  

I performed all of these tasks better as protection. I could keep my mana up longer with Divine Plea plus autottack on random target, I could survive a melee class hitting on me after a taunt. I had a shorter duration on my HoJ. I had my frisbee. And I had twice as much health.

The PvPers in the raid loved the encounter. Some of the non-PvPers were complaining a bit about Blizzard putting a PvP fight in a PvE raid. It was noticable that it took some time for people to get used to the fight. It is not a fight you can plan in advance and execute according to that plan. This fight requires fast reactions, ability to improvise and adapt, and for each player to know how to best use his class in a PvP-like encounter.

After the kill we went to Ulduar, where Flame Leviathan finally, after 17 kills, dropped Titanguard for the first time.