by Mathew McCurley

The “other essentials” of the World of Warcraft user interface are DPS and threat meters, raid warnings and cooldowns. We will tackle each individually, hopefully making some nebulous concepts more clear.

DPS and threat meters

The DPS and threat meter has almost become a thing of art in World of Warcraft. What was once an incredibly inaccurate diagnostic tool and an encounter-specific crutch (Vael, KLHThreatmeters) has become something much more, evolving into a true component of the game’s structure.

DPS stands for “damage per second,” but more colloquially it refers to the amount of damage you are capable of doing to an enemy. “Threat” is the primary way of judging who a boss is going to hit. If you’re at the top of the threat meter, the boss will attack you. DPSers need to be careful not to do as much threat as the tank, or else there could be trouble.

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by Matt Low

Sindragosa is easily the most agonizing boss in the entire instance. I personally thought Professor Putricide was bad but once I got to her chamber and started several attempts, my faith in myself was shattered. One of the big frustrations is that a player who is lagging or disconnecting can easily be the cause of a wipe. Sindragosa is not forgiving at all. You’ll find her after you clear out the Nerubian trash room that’s protecting her.

Why she needs a bunch of undead spiders to act as her guardians, I will never know. Don’t forget to activate the teleporter when you run into the area (It’s on the left side when you enter). Once you’ve cleared out the whelps and the two mini-dragons in front, Sindragosa will come charging in. However, you can immediately run back through to the Nerubian trash room to get properly set up since she’ll despawn. She’ll reset allowing everyone to drink up and rebuff if necessary.

Again, this article is aimed directly for healers who might be suffering from various parts of the encounter or are just looking for tips to get by. Start off with six healers and plead with your tanks to pick up some frost resistance gear. It helps a ton against her Frost Breath.

Phase 1

As most dragon encounters go in the game, this happens to be her ground phase. There are a few things to be careful of.

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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 Matt Low

Toravon is the latest boss to appear within the Vault of Archavon, however we’re not quite sure if he is the last of the VoA bosses to be seen in this expansion. The boss is fairly simple conceptually, but don’t take him too lightly. I’ll walk you through what you need to know to get score some sweet tier 10 PvE gear and equivilent PvP gear.

Gear Drops

He drops tier 10 level gloves and legs along with PvP gear (like belt and boots). Unlike his brothers, he drops 3 items on 25 instead of 2. And yes, he does drop Emblems of Frost. Its a fairly simple encounter for an equipped raid group. There aren’t any fires to stay out of or anything. You’ll need 2 tanks and at least 4-5 healers (on 10 man, you can get away with 2).

Tanks

Tanks will need to switch off of each other to shake the Frostbite debuff. It can stack up to 100 times and each application places a DoT which hits for about 1000 every couple of seconds. Your tanks can switch when they feel the debuff is getting high.

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by Matt Low

A great team of healers need a leader who can help them stay focused and give them the right assignments. Without their direction (or at least, someone to coordinate healing actions), it can get pretty messy fast. Being the boss of healers and acting as an intermediary between them and the raid leader or officers can often times be stressing. They’re often the first person people go to after a wipe wondering what happened or who failed and so forth. As a healer though, you can help ease the stress that they experience.

Have a dual spec: In current raids, there’s a degree of variability on the number of healers used in a fight. Want to be valuable? Pick up a DPS and healing spec. Offer to do both depending on what the raid needs. A fight like Valithria could benefit with 7 healers for raids that are just starting out. On the other hand, Festergut needs a reduction in healers in order to match the DPS requirements. You can get away with about 5 on that encounter. Your second spec doesn’t have to be one of a different role either. I myself run holy as one spec and discipline as the other. It’s handy in case I need to mass cast Power Word: Shield against Saurfang and then switch it up later to holy for Valithria.

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by Matt Low

The focus is a feature that came out several years ago. I’d say that there’s still a number of players who don’t have a firm understanding of what it is or just have yet to realize the potential it has. DPS players frequently make use of focus to keep enemies crowd controlled. Think Polymorph or Banish as examples.

What exactly is the focus?

I’m going to pull a definition from WoWWiki as I can’t explain it anymore eloquently:

A focus target is a secondary target system, used to keep track of a second unit other than the currently targeted unit. The focus is a sort of “target memory” meaning that the focus can be set then recalled with simple macro commands. Furthermore, the user interface supplies full real-time updates for the currently stored focus, including health and mana updates and enemy casting bars. Some user interface addons provide a complete unit frame for the focus.

This is incredibly valuable for healers. It opens up a wide array of stuff we can do while healing. For Priests, we can Shackle targets without risking too much (such as in Halls of Reflection). Shamans can then Wind Shock to interrupt mobs without losing healing time (Lord Jaraxxus and his Fel Fireballs anyone?).

Those are just some of the applications that can help in raid settings
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by Euripides of OutDPS

Lady Deathwhisper is the second boss in ICC, and while this fight was recently nerfed, it is still a challenge. Especially on 25 man. Hunters have a few unique roles in it too, so today we’ll go over what it takes to take down Deathwhisper.

The fight

There are two phases in the fight- during one, you have to take out adds and focus down the boss’s mana shield, and as soon as you get the shield down, the adds stop spawning and you can burn the boss down.

Phase one, add management

The ultimate goal of this fight is to take down that mana shield I mentioned. Since all damage done drains it, don’t use viper sting, use serpent sting. Unless you’re about to go onto some adds and you need a convenient mana battery. The DPS on the boss while you’re 100% focused on adds is great, but not better than finishing the adds without going into aspect of the viper.

There are two types of adds that spawn- casters (cult adherents) and melee (cult fanatics). When they first spawn, they are not immune to any types of damage, however the casters will reflect spells back at players. You should always single target casters when you can, allowing your mages and locks to focus on the melee adds.

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via SpicyTuna

“Lord Marrowgar is a unique creature created of skeletons. He is the first boss in the Icecrown Citadel.”

He has one of the coolest boss character models- he is a 4-headed winged skeleton torso, with a big ice ax! As the first boss of Icecrown Citadel, he’ll serve as a gear check for Guilds to see if they are “ready” to tackle this raid instance.

Boss Stats:

• Hit Points – 5,200,000 (10man), 23,740,000 (25man)
• No Enrage Timer

Abilities:

• Saber Lash: Inflicts 200% weapon damage split evenly between the target and its 2 nearest allies.
• Bone Spike Graveyard: Hurls a spike at a random player, impaling all players between the boss and the target on Bone Spikes, inflicting 9,000 direct Physical damage, and additional 10% health as damage every 1 second until the spike is destroyed.
• Coldflame: Inflicts 6,000 (9k on 25man) Frost damage every 1 second for 3 seconds to anyone caught by the moving line of frost.
• Bone Storm: Inflicts 6,000 (12k on 25man) Physical damage every 2 seconds to players caught in the storm.

Recommended Consumables:

• [Flask of the Frost Wyrm]
• Spell Damage food of your choice or Feast

This is a simple fight with a bit of target switching, and a lot of raid awareness. You would want any consumables which may help your DPS.

Frost Mage Overview:

• Pet Friendly: Friendly
• Cooldowns: You may want to save your Ice Blocks, and Cold Snap for when you get trapped in a Bone Storm.

Your Water Elemental won’t be targeted by Bone Spike and is immune to the Coldflame- but he can be damaged by the Bone Storm. You pet will have a 80% damage reduction to AoE damage so you don’t have to worry about moving him around. Just have him keep on attacking.

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by Matt Low

Welcome to the first test of Icecrown. Once you’ve blasted your way past the many patrolling skeletons, you’ll run into this giant floating bundle of bones. You can consider this boss a warmup compared to the rest of the instance. Marrowgar shouldn’t be too taxing on us healers, eh? How hard could he possibly hit anyway?

Well, that largely depends on the rest of your raid adapts. The amount of healing needing to be done depends on how quickly the rest of the raid responds and how much damage they deal.

Same old story, right?

Healing setup

Bring in 2 tank healers and 4 raid healers. All 3 of your tanks will be playing an active role here by absorbing Marrowgar’s Saber Lash. Basically, your tank and 2 nearest raid members will be splitting 200% of Marrowgar’s melee damage between the 3. You may also wish to assign a healer to cover any melee in need of healing.

For positioning, park 2 healers in the center of the room. Place 2 to the left and 2 to the right of Marrowgar’s chamber. Try to cover as much as the raid as possible with the healers. There’s going to be lots of movement required by the raid. If your raid frames support it, having range finders toggled on to see who is or isn’t in range is a big plus.

This worked in the PTR but I’m not sure if any adjustments have been made since. You can park your tank healers directly inside Lord Marrowgar’s hit box so that they don’t have to worry about Coldflame. The streaks of fire only emanate from just outside his hitbox instead of the center of his character. By standing there, they should be safe. On the other hand, it brings them perilously close to Lord Marrowgar. That’s your call to make. It’s not difficult to avoid the Coldflames, to be honest.

If you made it this far in raiding into Wrath, dodging fires should be reflexive in nature by now.

Phase 1

How good are your situational awareness skills? You won’t have to draw on them as much as you did on Illidari Council (which is the superbowl of not standing in fires). Be prepared to strafe and barrel roll your way from his Coldflames. Keep your head up. You might be able to eat one (8000 frost damage every second for 3 seconds) or so throughout the fight. That luxury won’t be there in hard mode so this is a good time to start practicing. (On a side note, I don’t know when hard mode is activating. Arthas needs to be killed before that happens.)

Be sufficiently far away from Marrowgar that you give yourself plenty of advanced warning for Coldflames! However, you need to remain close and tight enough to the rest of the raid to keep them alive.

Periodically, your fellow raiders are going to be hit with something called Bone Spike Graveyard. Those players lose 10% of their health per second until the Bone Spikes are broken by the rest of the crew. The longer that process takes, the more you have to do. When I was affected by Bone Spikes, I wasn’t able to control my character or cast anything. You are at the complete mercy of the other raiders.

It’s possible for Coldflame to affect players stuck on Bone Spike Graveyards as well. Be prepared to blow a cooldown to keep them alive if it comes down to it.
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