by Allison Robert
With the upcoming Icecrown raid buffs going all the way to 30% damage/healing/health/absorbs eventually, more and more raids are going to find their way to Arthas. Buffs aside, a lot of Arthas’ difficulty lies in execution, and I started jotting down a few notes that I hope might be helpful to other druids likely to attempt the fight. We were fortunate to get both the 10- and 25-man version down, and I got astoundingly lucky on one 10-man attempt with back-to-back selections as a Harvest Soul target while I was running a video capture. I’ve seen a lot of comments online that caster druids aren’t well-suited to dealing with this, and that’s just not true at all.
Sweat the small stuff.
As with other elaborate, multi-phase boss fights, it’s the small stuff that’s going to kill you — over and over again until people get it right. The need to get a lot of “little things” right over a lengthy boss fight (I think our 25-man kill clocked in at around 17-18 minutes) is a big part of the difficulty, and odds are good that you will die to a number of infuriatingly tiny mistakes.
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by Fox Van Allen
As promised, follow me after the break for the shadow priest’s guide to the Icecrown Plagueworks.
Your Mission: Stay alive. Inoculate yourself and others against Festergut’s raid-wide mega-attack. Pull out all the stops to maximize DPS, cause dude needs to die quick. Marvel at the guest appearance of Koffing above your head.
Festergut, especially in 25-man mode, is a pretty brutal DPS check. This means, of course, that your entire raid could do everything right, and you can still find yourself getting wiped by the enrage timer. To add to the challenge, as a ranged player, you’ll find that there’s a lot of movement involved and your DPS will lag behind the melee classes. Still, shadow priests bring more to a raid than just DPS, and it’s that extra utility that lets us shine here.
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By Matticus
When it comes to the Blood Queen Lana’thel encounter in Icecrown, one of the challenging aspects is to set up vampire bites on players. Some days, the first player that gets bitten by the Queen isn’t always the same one in subsequent attempts.
Well worry no more.
There’s an addon called Blood Queen which manages all that stuff for you. For raid leaders, it becomes a big asset because the process doesn’t have to be micro-managed.
Features
- Auto-assigned bite targets
- Automatic raid icons set
- Takes into account deaths, disconnects, mis-bites and mind control’s
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by Fox Van Allen
The first four battles were designed to be quite accessible to beginning raiders and PUGs, with a relatively low difficulty level as compared to the rest of the content inside. The encounters inside include a cuddly bone dragon monster thing (so cute!), what appears to be the result of Kel’Thuzad after his sex-change operation, a battle involving ROCKETBEARS, and… a lone orc — against the might of the Alliance?
Anyway. Step in, wipe your feet, and let’s earn you that achievement that all those PUG raid leaders demand you have.
LORD MARROWGAR
Your Mission: Stay alive. Burn down spikes. DPS the boss. Give the downed boss cuddles.
One of the easier of the Icecrown Citadel bosses, Lord Marrowgar primarily exists to grease the wheels of progression. Every raid team could use an easy win or two, especially when that easy win comes loaded with 2 Emblems of Frost and a loot table that should make even the most advance raider jealous. Of course, Marrowgar is only easy if you know how to approach the fight. He has two different phases, and your primary goal in each is to stay alive while doing as much damage as you can (though really, in what fight does that not apply?).
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by Michael Gray
The Blood Princes can be a difficult fight for many raids, forcing a ranged DPS to tank and for your entire raid to pitch in with handling adds. The challenge is that the Council is actuallythree different fights that swap phases according to which of the San’layn are empowered at the time.
The three Princes share a single health pool, but it doesn’t show up on all three characters at the same time. Instead, two of the vampires will be at 1 health point at any given time. Try and ignore that, even though you’ll be tempted to blow your nukiest of nukes and finish them off. The two Princes at 1 health point can not be killed or damaged — your raid will have to focus on the vampire that has the full health pool. The Darkfallen Orb is what determines which of the Princes are currently empowered; which also grants them special power boosts. The buff the Princes gain while under the effects of the Orb is titled Invocation of Blood.
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by Matt Low
The professor has a masters degree in potions and a Ph.D in raid wiping. Even the most stalwart of healers will have face a barrage of obstacles that will affect healing ability. This guy is my personal Achilles heel in Icecrown so far. Not more than a few days ago, I went an embarrassing 8 for 8 on Malleable Goo deaths. Talk about my pride being wounded. I’m supposed to be good at dodging stuff that comes flying toward me not running into them or getting drilled in the face by this green exploding goo.
Anyway, keep reading for my awesome mistakes and what I learned from them.
I’m assuming that if you’re reading this, you have a basic understanding of the Professor Putricide encounter. This article is meant mainly for the healers.
Alright, on to phase 1!
Phase 1
Pick two tank healers to cover your tank on Professor Putricide. If one of them gets focused by a green slime or has to kite the orange cloud, at least you’ll have one more for support. In any case, this early phase is a light one and there isn’t a whole lot of healing that needs to be done. You can probably get away with five healers. If your DPS is jaw-droppingly amazing, take 6 with you instead.
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by Allison Robert
Herald of the Titans (requires an Algalon-10 kill under special circumstances) orStarcaller (requires Observed — 10 player)
Herald of the Titans, much like its ToGC-10 counterpart Argent Defender, requires you to kill Algalon in Ulduar-10 without padding the difficulty with gear from higher-level raids. The result is arguably the coolest Algalon-related title apart from Celestial Defender, but it won’t come without a ton of planning and a lot of skill. Starcaller is the same deal, minus the gear requirement.
Algalon-10 continued…
Difficulty: Algalon is a lot easier these days if you’re rocking ToC or ICC gear, but Herald of the Titans requires you to duplicate the conditions in which he was very difficult indeed. Assuming your raid’s already familiar with the Algalon-10 fight (and you should definitely do Starcaller before attempting Herald), you’re going to face two big hurdles: a). making sure nobody in the raid’s accidentally equipped a forbidden item, and b). keeping your tanks alive without the stamina and avoidance buffer afforded by better gear. Once you shed all that delicious tank gear from tiers 9 and 10, you’ll discover what people in tier 8 already knew; Algalon hits like a freight train.
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by Brian Wood
The Crimson Halls of Icecrown Citadel contains the kind of horrors that the Plagueworks could only hint at. The Crimson Halls is where all the emo vampire RPing blood elves went to die… and then came back!
True story, and a complete tangent: a friend of mine, in her 30s, mother of two, recently admitted to me that her shameful, guilty pleasure is reading the Twilight books (which, I gather, are like Anne Rice 90210 for teenagers). She says the books are awful and everything you’d fear, but she can’t stop reading them. Then she saw a Twilight movie was horrified to see — to really see with her own eyes — that these hunky guys of literary lust were like 17 years old. Sure, they were in the books too, but apparently when reading she had unconsciously changed them to a more age-appropriate hunky mental image and suddenly felt very creepy seeing these kids on the screen. It’s one vast landscape of pain, being old.
Do as Your RL Says
As always in these hunter guides, we’re going to assume that you’re familiar with the basic strat and abilities of the encounter. We are focusing on the hunter role, not teaching you the fight from scratch. And of course if your raid leader’s strategy involves anything different than what I’m saying here, always do what your raid leader says. Even if he’s wrong.
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by thecore @ MMOwned
Zul’gurub resets every 3 days. Each mount run takes 30 minutes to a hour.
Chance to get a awesome mount! Easy 30 gold from boss.
Bloodlord Mandokir – NPC – World of Warcraftdrops Swift Razzashi Raptor – Item – World of Warcraft 1% chance.
High Priest Thekal – NPC – World of Warcraft drops Swift Zulian Tiger – Item – World of Warcraft 0.6% chance.
I used the following spec for this to make it a lot easier.
The World of Warcraft Armory
Glyphs: You can really use whatever.
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by Dominic Hobbs
So there you are, raiding your way through Icecrown Citadel, merrily destroying everything in your path with shadow and flame, when all of a sudden your raid leader tells you that you’re tanking the next boss. “That can’t be right – surely” you think to yourself, “I’m still wearing this dress, I don’t have a sword or shield, I don’t feel any more stupid than before – why would I suddenly want to tank anything?”. Well, Blood Prince Council is one of those special fights where a clothie can do the job of a meat-shield. When this is called for, there’s simply no better clothie than a warlock to get the job done. So, step up and lets look at how to do it.
Why bother?
Despite some big-name bosses having had designated ranged tanks, some people still think that it can’t or should never be done. Now, I’m not talking about such fights as Sartharion, where a voidwalker could do the same job as a tank in the same way. Nor am I talking about Instructor Razuvious where shadow priests Mind Control adds to tank the boss. I’m not even talking about fights where ranged classes kite a boss. What I’m talking about is having a caster stand away from a boss, get their aggro and take the damage they deal.
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