Blood Princes 10-man

This is a Public Service Message:

Blood Princes, the first boss in the blood wing of Icecrown Citadel, is currently buggy in 10-man mode. There have been a torrent of reports of the bugs on the WoW general forums, but no official blue response yet. The bugs boil down to:

• The bosses seem to be doing the same amount of damage in 10-man as in 25. Obviously, this is a problem when your 25-man group has 6-7 healers and your 10-man group has 2-3.
  


• The purple orbs that are supposed to protect your shadow tank from Empowered Shadow Lance are not working as intended. The ESL does around 90k damage unmitigated, but each orb reduces that by roughly half, so with 4 orbs the tank should only take around 11k. I witnessed multiple wipes where a tank with 4 or more took 22k hits, and many others on the forums corroborated this. I verified this both visually and with multiple players' combat logs, on at least 5 different attempts. They aren't working right.
  


• You have a 50/50 chance that the shadow boss will become empowered around the time the 3rd shadow orb spawns, making it impossible to have the 4 orbs that would make him safe and healable without big cooldowns.
  


• Reports of damage done by the Princes vary. It may be different for different raid groups. Some report very low damage, some incredibly high.

It's clear something is wrong with the tuning of the 10-man version. Many 10-man strict guild especially are reporting problems, while 25-man guilds that overgear the instance tended to be able to beat the encounter, but uniformly found it much more difficult in 10-man compared to 25-man, which I'm pretty sure is not intended. Right now these guys are harder on 10-man than the endwing plague boss Putricide, which isn't intended, especially when they are reportedly a pushover in 25-man mode. We are executing the fight perfectly, and managing the other mechanics without a hitch, but every attempt ends with the shadow tank being insta-gibbed, either with 4+ protective orbs, or before 4 orbs could even spawn.

Lending more credence to this bug are the similar fixed bugs with Marrowgar (doing 25-man damage in 10-man) and Putricide (25-man aoe ticking for 10-man amounts). It looks like they simply did it again. Yet another in a chain of bugs that are stifling progress for 10-man-only guilds like mine.

Hopefully Blizzard will stop worrying about the resilience changes long enough to fix this encounter soon.


UPDATE: Well that was quick! Daelo responds:

Blood Prince Council

• Prince Keleseth will no longer melee players. So if you get knocked into Keleseth or happen to move by him, he won't swipe in between his casts and kill a non-tank.
• The first Shadow Resonance should appear earlier in the fight, which will allow the Keleseth tank to have more orbs on him or her if Keleseth is empowered second instead of third. We didn't want which Blood Prince was empowered second to be a major element of the difficulty in the fight.
• We reduced the melee damage for the Princes by 10% for the 10 player difficulty. They were doing less damage than the 25 player before the hotfix, but this change lowers the damage further.
• Empowered Flames will now run out of power after shooting fewer firebolts in the 10 player difficulty. We did not change the initial impact damage.