Trial of Champions (Normal)

Thought I'd start a thread for those of us working on this at normal for now.

I tried and completed it on normal tonight. 3 wipes in total.

Mounted Combat

Used Jimbo's guide for the mounted combat. Pretty trivial with his setup.

Messed up the transition to "on foot" and died. Need to be ready to grab aggro with tank AND make switch to main hand weapon.

3 sets of priest, pally, monk
Highly trivial. They don't aggro until you engage so have time to drink, buff, etc even between the three sets.

3 "Named"
Pretty trivial. Just have to watch you team and tank for the green clouds.

Eadric
Wiped the first time as I wasn't watching priest's health and he did the hammer combo on her. She was under 14k health and died. Also get some AE damage but once you're ready to a) watch the targeted player getting the hammer combo and b) some AE healing this was pretty trivial.

Followed Jimbo's suggestion and flat out ignored the AE effect that makes you wander for 2 seconds and does moderate AE damage. I used my follow button to get guys pointed in the right direction again. Pretty easy.

Black Knight
First phase is indeed trivial. Just have one ghoul add to deal with.

Second phase is more involved. Aggro with tank as many ghouls as possible. AE damage in this phase as I recall so a bit of mindful healing is needed.

Note: SET YOUR TEAM UP SO YOU CAN STRAFE THEM AT THE END. I was too close to the wall the first time and didn't get my team away when the ghouls explode (this happens after you kill the Knight in this phase). Second time I moved them fine and didn't get hit.

Third phase was a struggle for me but I won the second time. I haven't researched enough but there's a fair amount of group damage on your team. I lost 2 of my DPS but downed him with my priest, pally, lock. I'm sure this will get easier.

Summary
Considering I beat it on my first try with only a few wipes, I imagine this will be trivial soon.

Indeed, I received 5 Nax10 level purple drops. I'll be here for a while.

A question for the community: Will you spend time here vs grinding the new emblems in Heroics? Sure seems like 5 purples is hard to beat.

What type of gear did you do this in?

More detailed explanation, assuming 1 paladin and 4 shamans.

needed macro's are:
/follow $leader
/assist $leader
/equip $weapon

Needed buttons are:
pass-through on numbers 1, 2 and 4.

Mounted combat - Preparation
When you enter, hop on a horse and start the event. Next, get your other characters on a horse. The intro is so damn long, you'll have plenty of time. When looking at the big, wooden door on your right, you'll see that to the side there's a pack of 3 horses with 2 of your faction's and one of the other faction. Drag your slaves to the side and park them on top of the middle horse (of your opposing faction) and face them inwards. Make sure they're not completely with their backs up against the wall but one step away.

Mounted combat - 3 Stooges
First off, you get 3 lesser champions per race. They'll wait for you in to middle to be pulled. Run over there with your leader, shieldbreaker one of them and drag them back to your slaves. Hit your Assist-macro and mash button 1 and 4. This will activate Joust and Defence on all your characters and will pummel the stooges. Once one is dead, target a new one, hit Assist again and pummel him too. Rinse and repeat for the last guy and then for the next two batches of 3 Stooges.

Before killing the last stooge of the 3rd wave, run over to a horse at the other side of the colloseum and replace the one from your leader. You don't have to dismount, you can directly mount it and your leader will directly jump on the new horse. Now drag the last stooge back to your slaves, get 3 stacks of defence and kill him.

Mounted combat - 3 Champion stooges
These guys don't wait for you to pull them so make sure you're close to your slaves and all stacked up on defence.
As soon as they come for you, target one and then hit your Assist macro. Now hit 2 to shieldbreaker that target with your leader and slaves. This will destroy all his defences and when the target reaches your slaves, you can start spamming 1 and 4 again to keep on Jousting the target and keeping Defence up. Since you destroyed his shield, your Joust will hit for the full 8000x5 damage.

Once in a while, the Champions will take some distance and charge you. Most likely they will target your leader but even if they hit your slaves, due to 3xDefence, they only take 10% damage. However, the champions aren't complete idiots and they rebuff their defence as well so when they are taking distance for a charge, that's an excellent moment to 5x shieldbreaker them again to reduce their stacks to zero. After a while, you'll kill the first champion. At this point, you target a new one, hit your assist macro again and start over.

Defeated Champions will try to get to a horse and re-enter combat. Even if they do reach a horse, they start at ~20% health but it's better to keep running over them with your leader's horse. This will "trample" them and stun them for several seconds. Try to keep all the defeated champions close to eachother so it's easy to keep running over them back and forth to keep them trampled.

There's a good chance your leader's horse will get beaten up pretty badly. You can wait to either get knocked off so you can run to get a new mount or choose to pick up a fresh mount before you actually get knocked off. I suggest the second option as you can jump from your beaten-up mount directly to a new mount without having to dismount. This eliminates the chance of getting trampled.

Your slaves are directly in between 2 fresh mounts. Should one of them get knocked off they can immediately mount a new one.

Ground combat - Champion stooges
After defeating all 3 mounted Champions and keeping them trampled, all your characters will dismount. This is where you hit your Equip weapon macro since you don't want to be fighting these guys with your lances. Drop all your totems at once which should be easy with the new totem bar and drop-all-totems-at-once abilities. (See your shaman trainer if you don't know what I'm talking about). I recommend having a nature resistance totem and cleansing totem in your forest of totems for reasons I will explain later.

If you kept the 3 Champions close enough, one avenger's shield should be enough to hit them all and grab initial aggro. Which 3 champions you'll be fighting is random each fight. In total you can face off a hunter, shaman, rogue, warrior and mage. It might be wise to burn down the healer first. If you want to, you can pop bloodlust but you'll have to wait ~8 minutes before engaging the second boss. Simply AoE tank all the bosses and use your regular DPS macro's to blow them away.

The shaman does earthshield, chain lightning and a thunderstorm AoE. He also heals using chain heal and LWH.
The warrior hits you and can knock you back (you'll fly backwards twice) so try not to get knocked out of healing range. He also does bladestorm at which point it might be wise to kite him around a bit.
The hunter can do disengage and shoot lightning arrows.
The mage basically shoots fireballs polymorph.
The rogue throws poison vials on the ground which you should move out of. The rogue also stabs your tank and inflicts a poison DoT. This is why I suggested the Nature resistance totem and cleansing totem.
On normal mode, I don't bother getting out of the poison clouds. 4x healing steam with the nature resistance totem just trivializes the damage it does.

Congrats! You've now defeated the first challenge in ToC. Please collect 1 piece of ilvl200 loot.

Second challenge - More stooges
Either Eadric the Pure or Argent Confessor Paletress will be your next challenge but before that, you get 3 mob packs of 3 mobs each.

Each pack consists of 2 dps'ers and a healer. Put your shamans in the middle and pull one pack towards you, burn them down and move on to the next. Directly after killing the third mob pack, the boss will aggro you.

Eadric the pure
Standard tank 'n spank. Has two abilities though that you want to keep in mind but both of them have a huge raidwarning so it's impossible to miss. The hammer will do ~14k damage to a single target. If you dispell the Hammer of Justice before he finishes casting his hammer spell, you can catch the hammer and throw it back at him for 14k holy damage. Using this to kill him is worth an achievement. Second spell is Blinding light in which you need to turn away and not look at him. I do this only on my paladin and just use my follow macro to re-align my shamans.

For the rest, just burn him away and collect 2 pieces for iLvl 200 epics.

Argent confessor Paletress
This one is actually annoying. Burn her down like normal and she'll soon shield herself and heal up to 100%. At this time, she'll summon a mob which is one of the following : Hogger, VanCleef, Mutanus, Herod, Lucifron, Thunderaan, Chromaggus, Hakkar, Vek'nilash, Kalithresh, Malchezaar, Gruul, Vashj, Archimonde, Illidan, Delrissa, M'uru, Ingvar, Cyanigosa, Eck, Onyxia, Heigan, Ignis, Vezax, Algalon.

The summoned mob is a shadow with 3 abilities, a physical damage DoT, a 3 second AoE fear that deals shadow damage and a single target shadow DPS spell that slows attacking/casting speed by 90% for 4 seconds. Shadow protection (either aura or buff) is helpful here.

To counteract the fear, I suggest dropping staggered tremor totems. Once you break fear, just round up your characters and keep DPS'ing the shadow. Keep your grounding totems up to absorb the Argent confessor's holy smite and you'll soon kill the shadow. After this, you can continue DPS'ing the Argent confessor again and defeat her.

Grats! Another 2 pieces of iLvl 200 epic loot!

Third challenge - The black knight
After his grand entrance being spoiled, you'll soon start with phase one. I suggest tanking this with your slaves up against a wall and your tank 20 yards infront of that.

He will summon a ghoul and will try to make it blow up near you. Kill the ghoul before it explodes and you'll be fine. The cleansing totem here will help remove the diseases he applies to your tank which should make your life a bit easier. After killing him, phase two will start.

He ressurects himself and starts casting "army of the dead". Great.. More ghouls that he wants to explode near you. Drop a consecrate on him so that all the ghouls stick to your tank and for extra good measure, follow up with a Holy wrath once all the ghouls have been summoned. This is where I pop my 4 fire elementals and bloodlust and kill all the ghouls. He'll try to explode them but most of them are going to be dead before that happens. Your tank will probably need some healing though, Divine protection might be needed.

Do mind that during phase 2, he will cast desecrate on your slaves which does damage over time. Shadow protection is still useful here.

Last phase, is where the black knight comes back as a ghost and this is simply a DPS race. Your fire elementals should still be alive and you should still have a couple of seconds on your bloodlust. Just nuke him down and loot the last 2 pieces of epics.

My team is generally in mixed purple/blue lvl 200 gear. My mage may have a couple pieces of 200+ gear and is otherwise in full 200 purple (my "solo" toon these days).

Put it this way, I can spend some time in "normal" and still benefit gear-wise.

Cleared normal two nights ago five boxing. Wiped 3 times. Once on first mounted attempt on Champs, once during transition off mounts, final time was during black kinght phase 2 when I got gibbed by the army of the dead.

All in all not too rough on normal. My advice take out the rogue champ fast to get rid of all the poision. Oh and I expected the Taurren to be a warrior... not a shaman.

I think I might try heroic 4 boxing with the first time just to ease into it. Frankly conquest badges are my priority right now so I am working Heroics.

Just a couple of tips that Ive picked up while learning/Farming normal mode today. First one is that once you knock all the champions off their horses you get a few seconds to run outside of the instance before they start pounding/aoe'ing your team. I found that when I tried to quickly equip weapons and tank them I was wiping due to having to much to do quickly picking up the mobs, moving out of aoe's, equiping weapons, dropping totems. I found it much easier just to run out of the instance and get all my guys buffed and prepared. Then re-enter the instance to find the 3 mobs waiting over by the wooden gate.
Second tip is an obvious one, but if your MT is a paladin and he gets knocked off his mount and trampled, dont forget you can Divine Shield out of that and go get a fresh mount.
Last tip is already pretty much said in OP but I thought Id just go through the process that I have in my head to make phase 2 of the Black knight go smoothly. As he res up for phase 2 cast Fire elementals, heroism, then spam chain heal with your healer (If you have one), and spamming your normal dps buttons on Black Knight. Magma totems work here also if your elementals are on cooldown. My record is for phase 2 to last about 5 seconds and phase 3 about the same.
Hope this helps someone :)

P.S. 8 normal clears now and no tank trinket -.- Got 2 shammys the trinket from first boss though so not all bad :D

Okay, Paletress is a pita.

I have a mixed team so one tremor totem and one grounding totem is all I've got. I'm having one hell of a time dealing the damage in this phase. Inevitably the fear hits my team and the lost time getting them back is killing me. Half the time it seems my dps isn't firing because of facing issues. Just set up the interact with target so that might help.

Any other tips on this boss?

EDIT: Okay, beat her finally. Interact with target is very nice versus using follow. Priest needed to do a ton of AE healing. Blew a few cooldowns to do it. Probably just one of those fights you have to "learn". Tips still welcome of course. ;)

Paletress is a whore!

I can't beat her because of the stupid fears and the shadow mob not staying on the tank. If I had 4 grounding totems plus tremors it would be easy. My group is pally 3 mages and a druid. This combo is hell for that boss. Anyone have tips? Also what the hell is interact with target? Never heard of that.

I thought tremors are now sycnhed up, and pulse every 3 seconds... which means way more running around on fear bosses. Like King Dred, he threw me for a loop my first run after the patch. Maybe trinket out of at least one of the fears? I only have seen Eadric. Guess when I have something to look forward to when I go back in.

Just got through it without a single death for the first time. It took about 6 clears to get there though.

I also just realized that the random summoned by paletress keeps aggro on the tank even after the fears. It shouldn't be killing your slaves. The priest does cast on the slaves though.

The interact with unit is a keybind you can set to "use" what you have selected. If you also have the option "click to move" enabled you will automatically face and run towards the unit. There are a few different threads explaining it more in depth. You hit your assist button then the interact button then a movement button to stop moving. Now all your guys are facing the boss.