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.

Blizzard recently introduced an in-game threat identifier, but it never seemed substantial to me. There just aren’t enough options, and the data output isn’t substantial. Like most of the built-in user interface, it works, but it could be better — and that’s where addons come in.
Why are DPS/threat meters considered an “other necessity?”

If you’re new to the game, you haven’t yet experienced the ins and outs of group content. You will! And after reading this, you’ll be prepared. The basic group setup includes the defensive character who will take the hits (the tank), the healer who keeps everyone happy and healthy (the healer), and other characters whose role is to damage the enemies until they die (the DPS). Threat and DPS meters show you who has the enemy’s threat, let you know how close you are to taking threat away from the tank and onto yourself (we don’t want this), and how much actual damage you are doing. This is a good statistic to know as sort of a diagnostic for whether you’re doing the best you can with what you have.

These types of addons are mostly used in 5-man and raid content. Knowing how the tank is doing on threat is crucial for DPS so that they do not go over the tank’s. Knowing your DPS can’t hurt, as it helps you evaluate your game, like knowing how well your car is running by the sounds it makes.

Recap — DPS and threat meters:

• show DPS and threat during combat of both you and your fellow group/raid members
• allow you to see the damage you do relative to others
• help you make sure you don’t take threat away from the tank

Some examples of DPS and threat meters are:

• Omen threat meters
• Recount DPS meters
• Skada DPS and threat meters

Raid warnings

A large amount of the end-game content in World of Warcraft deals with raiding, grouping up 10 or 25 people together to tackle harder boss challenges. In addition, group content for 5-man dungeons also makes up a large amount of the end game for many players. Raid warning addons are used to alert the player when a boss is going to do an ability of some kind or when the encounter is changing in some dramatic way.
Here’s an example. Let’s say the Lich King is going to cast one of his signature spells, Defile. With a raid warnings addon, you are clued into the timer on his ability, when it can be cast again and what to look out for. Many encounters rely heavily on these notification systems, and having one of these addons is usually mandatory in larger raiding guilds.

Recap — raid warning addons:

• give you warnings and notifications about a boss’ special abilities and timers on those abilities
• allow you to react to the changing circumstances during WoW’s intricate boss encounters in 5-, 10- or 25-man instances and raids
• are usually required by higher-end guilds for their incredible functionality and help in dealing with harder encounters

Some examples of raid warning addons:

• Deadly Boss Mods (DBM)
• BigWigs
• Deus Vox Encounters (DXE)

Cooldowns

Many classes, from warriors to rogues, paladins to druids, and everything in between, have abilities that have time-sensitive cooldowns, or a period of time before the ability can be used again. Addons that track a player’s cooldowns, therefore, have the potential to be very powerful — the more information you have about the time between your abilities, the better you can plan for the immediate future.

Take the warrior’s ability Shield Wall, for example. This ability reduces all damage that the warrior takes by 60% for 12 seconds, on a five-minute cooldown. A warrior engaged in combat with a particular hard-hitting boss has to know when his Shield Wall cooldown is ready to go again, just in case the boss is going to cast an ability he knows might kill him or his healers request the damage reduction while they tend to other issues.
Monitoring your cooldowns effectively can also lead to an increase in DPS. Checking out any of the class columns here at WoW.com can greatly help you in that area. A cooldown monitor can provide some added functionality and help you with your awareness of your own abilities.

Recap — cooldowns:

• A cooldown addon monitors your abilities and the time until they are usable again.
• Cooldown management can lead to better DPS and situational awareness and use of abilities on tricky fights

Some examples of cooldown addons:

• Sexycooldown
• NeedToKnow
• ForteXorcist
• OmniCC — displays cooldowns on the action bars themselves, an excellent resource

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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.

Unchained Magic: It’s an extremely annoying debuff. When you cast spells, you gain an Instability debuff. The more stacks of Instability you have, the more damage you take when the stacks wear off (caused by Backlash). I personally like to go up to about 5-6 before letting it wear off. However, when you’re in the early phases, it’s good to stretch yourself and see how far you are willing to push that limit in case you need to unload some major healing. Try to time a big heal (such as Prayer of Healing or Holy Light) to land just as Instability wears off.

Blistering Cold: Heh, I think ability alone will be a big reason why most raid groups will wipe. She’ll pull everyone directly on top of her with an Icy Grip before she unleashes an AoE nuke that will kill almost anyone standing within the blast radius (except a tank). When she pulls you in, stop what you’re doing and just run away. Ideally, you’ll want to practice running toward the stairs but when starting out, simply focus on getting away from her. I picked up Body and Soul just to run away quicker or to cast it on someone who I’m not sure will make it. It seems possible to resist the Icy Grip, but my results haven’t been consistent. Sometimes I don’t get pulled in but in other cases I do.

Frost Aura: Uh, just keep healing. Everyone in the raid will be taking damage.

Phase 2

This is the air phase. She flies away and becomes out of reach for the raid. She’ll start tossing out Frost Bombs. Players can typically survive one Frost Bomb blast but it’s highly recommended that they use the Ice Tombs to to shield themselves. I like to have my entire raid gather up at the base of the stairs that lead to the main platform. Once the Frost Beacons have hit, the players that have not been marked generally run up the stairs and get far away. When the beaconed players become Ice Tombed, any players that happen to be around them will get hit as well. Run up to and hug the Ice Tombed players. Make sure the blocks are between you and the location of the Frost Bomb that Sindragosa throws out. As healers, if you can chip in DPS on the blocks, I strongly suggest doing so to help accelerate the process in 25 (it might not be necessary in 10s). But make sure players that have been hit by bombs are topped off first.

It’s really easy to see where the next Frost Bombs will hit. Look for the swirling thing on the floor. You have several seconds to hide behind a block before it lands.

Get some heals ready for the players that are emerging from the broken out blocks. I suggest using instant cast spells if they’re in danger of dying. Sindragosa will land after she fires off her 4th bomb. She’ll continue to repeat phase 1 and 2 until she reaches 35%.

Phase 3

And here is the fun phase. Sindragosa doesn’t take off in the air anymore. But she’ll start casting Mystic Buffet on the entire raid. It stacks and steadily increases the amount of magic damage taken by the raid. Don’t worry about unloading massive DPS on the boss. This phase is about your ability to survive and not panic.

We use two specific areas for players that get targeted with a Frost Tomb. Players get away from that player that’s about to get tombed so that the ability isn’t chained. Only one player will be under Frost Tomb. I would assign a raid healer specifically to heal up the player that gets marked. A discipline priest works perfectly. Hit them with a Power Word: Shield and Penance. You want to ensure that the entombed player survives getting hit. Once that player is tombed, run toward it and position it so that the block is between you and Sindragosa. Mystic Buffet will only be applied if you are in line of sight of the boss.

For healing the tank, I have 4 tank healers. 2 of them are on the tank at any given time. The team that heals the tank is the pairing that isn’t hiding behind a Frost Tomb since they’ll have line of sight with the tanks. The ones that are ducking behind tombs switch to maintaining the raid until the Frost Tomb they’re hiding behind gets broken.

Have some tanking and defensive cooldowns ready. Hand of Sacrifice, Pain Suppression, Guardian Spirit and whatever cooldowns the tanks have available should be used before she unleashes a Frost Breath. You might want to consider setting up a pre-determined save order in advance.

Anyway, good luck! Phase 3 is a tough phase for sure and it will take many attempts and frustrations before Sindragosa goes down for good.

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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.

Don’t lose it; that’s just how the fight’s supposed to be.

Use Deus Vox Encounters (DXE) if you’re doing 10-man heroic or either 25-man version.

DXE automatically marks the Val’kyr spawns that make your life oh-so-interesting during phase 2, and you’ll get more than one if you’re doing anything other than the normal 10-man version of the fight. Assigning specific portions of the raid — and more importantly, redundant stuns/snares to each Val’kryr mark (you’ll see the point of doing this once a designated stunner is the one who gets picked up) — makes getting through this phase possible. Have someone make a macro with target assignments worked out beforehand, and iron out potential problems before you pull.

If you’re not used to using DXE, give the raid some time to get it configured — it’s not as fire-and-forget as Deadly Boss Mods or BigWigs.

The Healing Touch glyph and 5/5 Naturalist are your friends.

In an ideal world, a glyphed and specced Healing Touch wouldn’t be the least bit necessary, but there’s a lot of burst damage — particularly on phase 3 — that made me reconsider speccing back out of it. If you’ve gotten to the Lich King encounter, odds are pretty good that you’re at the soft +haste cap (856) without having to spec into Celestial Focus, and that frees up a lot of talents points that allow you to spec into Naturalist without gimping yourself. It’s really the loss of a major glyph slot that you’ll feel more than anything else, so use your best judgment over whether you can afford that.

There are several situations where you’ll need to be prepared for damage requiring quick healing even if you don’t HT:

• Mopping up Infest damage in phase 2: The raid will be in constant motion in phase 2 between handling val’kyrs, stacking up for impending spawns, and dodging Defile. Infest will be hitting during all of this, obligating the heal team to top everyone off while running their collective ass off. While Chain Heal, Prayer of Healing, and Circle of Healing will wreck anything you can do during a fairly stationary phase 1, people will be all over the place in phase 2. I have to admit I prefer Nourish for this damage — using HT a lot for Infest gobbles way too much mana — but HT’s a good way to spot-touch people in far-flung corners of the platform.
• Soul Reaper: Tanks losing huge chunks of health at periodic intervals is guaranteed.
• Getting a fast heal on a player who’s been hit by a Vile Spirit: Theoretically no one should be getting hit by any of these — and as your raid gains experience, the damage they cause will occur less frequently. But odds are good that someone (and particularly melee) will eventually get hit, and that’s a 17-20K hit that you might have the pleasure of trying to heal on multiple targets.
• Getting a heal out quickly on the player targeted for Consuming Shadows: This is the big one. The target of Consuming Shadows takes a massive amount of shadow damage each second, and if you can’t keep them up through 6 seconds of it, Arthas gains a damage buff that will wreck your tank unless you get a big cooldown on them stat. On 25-man, the second Consuming Shadows tick will usually kill a player, so your margin for error is very slim. Getting a lightning-fast 7-10K heal on the player in question is often a lifesaver, and/or a Swiftmend — preferably both.

Don’t panic if you get ported to Frostmourne.

In phase 3, Arthas gains the ability to Harvest Soul, which we’ve just discussed. I should probably add that, if you’re the target, there’s nothing you can do to avoid the damage. You can’t pop Barkskin, and you can’t heal yourself — you are entirely at the mercy of your raid. Assuming you survive, you’ll get ported inside Frostmourne and confront two NPCs — Terenas Menethil, battling for his “life,” and his captor the Spirit Warden. You need to DPS the Warden down before it kills Terenas, or keep healing Terenas (his damage increases as his health rises) and let him kill the Warden. This is made somewhat more complicated by the 8-second Soul Rip debuff that the Warden will attempt to channel twice while you’re in Frostmourne.

I’ve seen some commentary online that the worst possible person to get Harvest Soul in phase 3 is a balance or restoration druid, because we can’t dispel the debuff the Warden channels on Terenas (Soul Rip) and don’t have easy access to stuns.

Bu-hu-hu-hu-huulllllllcookies. You’re a druid — act like one! We’ve got two stuns available through bear and cat form (and a third if you’re a tauren with War Stomp), and there’s no law saying you can’t HoT Terenas up and jump into form to anticipate the channel. Please see handy-dandy instructional video above, wherein Allie got ported twice in a row and managed not to blow it.

If all else fails, just remind yourself in a very soothing tone of voice: “It could be worse. It could be heroic.”

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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.

Frozen Orbs

No, this isn’t the crafting reagent. Toravon will summon up 3 Frozen Orbs (1 on 10 man), and they can hurt if not taken care of. Its like a Whirlwind effect that goes around at random. It’ll nail anyone within 8 yards of it and it needs to be targeted and destroyed. Ranged players can take care of it. But if there are any that spawn near the melee, go ahead and switch over to finish it off. They start off as glowing rings on the ground before the actual orb spawns.

Other abilities

He’ll freeze players and root them to the ground with an ice spell called Freezing Ground. Its a magic and can be dispelled. Make an effort to shake off this debuff especially when there are Frozen Orbs flying around frozen players.

Lastly, watch out for the Whiteout. This ability won’t fix your mistakes exactly or anything, but every time it’s cast it will continue to increase the amount of frost damage your raid takes. You can think of it as a sort of soft enrage.

Quick tips

Frost Resistance aura or a Frost Resistance totem will help mitigate some of the damage coming through. Even if your raid has neither, the encounter is fairly easy enough to get through. Don’t worry, you’re not going to need any frost resist gear.

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World of Warcraft leveling take a huge leap forward with Zygor Guides 2.0, the fastest, most powerful leveling guides in the world.

Leveling has NEVER been this easy! You will be leveling so fast with this, you might think you’re cheating. But you’re not, Joana’s leveling guide mod is 100% legal with Blizzard.

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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.

Stay up to date on all the fights: Do your homework. Understand what is super relevant for healers. On a fight like Blood Princes, you know that the fight mechanic involves keeping the kinetic bombs in the air. If there is one directly on top of you and you notice there aren’t any DPS around, hit it with a quick spell to keep it suspended until someone can head over and help you out with it. Watch some kill videos and read up on the experiences of others to gain some idea of what your raid is about to go through. Who knows? Maybe you’ll see remember something your leaders forgot that happens to be crucial to the fight.

Do as they ask you to do: Don’t second guess your assignments. At least, not initially. On a new encounter, its all about understanding the basic mechanics of the fight. Healers can easily be reassigned if some are better at one then the other. If you’re better suited at some role than someone else, just hold it for now. If your healing lead has a good track record, there’s usually a reason why you’re being given the task. Maybe they just trust you with it or they want to put someone else through the paces. On the flip side, they might be acting like a certain dwarf priest who likes to roll dice to see who gets assigned to what.

Stay positive: Let’s not be negative now. Yes you’ve gone through a few wipes. Raiding isn’t exactly the easiest thing to do in the world for everyone. Before Burning Crusade, encounters often took weeks or sometimes months to learn and get down. The best you can do is stay upbeat. At the very least, keep your reservations to yourself and just do your best. Saying all is lost and this is nothing more than a waste of time isn’t going to help anyone and it doesn’t do much other than undermining authority. If you really can’t bear the wipes, just message your leads and ask them to excuse you for the night.

Speak up about problems: Your healing lead only has two eyes. As they tend to be healers, they’re also intently focused on their job. If you see something that doesn’t look right or if someone is standing in a bad spot or just not doing their job, speak up. Do it in your healing channel (if you have one) or just message them. Maybe it’s intentional. At the same time, be honest with yourself. If you’re having trouble keeping someone alive, there is no shame in asking if anyone else can be spared to help. Not every tank can be healed consistently with just one healer.

Be constructive with feedback: After raids, I like to deconstruct the various boss fights in the guild forums. I try to go over what I liked, and what I think needs to be improved on along with observations. In some cases, I’ll name players if they did something that stood out to me.

Don’t be difficult: Let’s not get into heated discussions or annoy the rest of the raiders. Its best to be loose, relaxed and easy going. Go with the flow and roll with what the raid is doing. If they need a healer to step out in favor of someone else, you don’t exactly have to volunteer (unless you do have something else you’d rather be doing like watching hockey). But if they ask you to, bite your tongue and just do it. Remind them that you stepped out if they ask you to repeatedly.

Constantly check your location: This is a big one for me. Watch where you’re standing and know roughly how far away your healing target is. In the past, I’ve lost my healing assignments because I was one step too slow and simply could not keep up with them. Slowly, I started opening up to them and asking where they would go if they had a set route. This way, I knew in advance where they were going and could stay within range. The message here is to always know where you are in relation to your target. Keep in mind anything that could break line of sight of cause them to stray further away. If you’re out of range, call it out and if there is a healer close by, then can cover until you’re safely within range again.

Avoid getting tunnel visioned: This still happens to me from time to time. I get too focused on one target or whatever it is that I’m doing, and I’m too slow to react to the big gaping void zone that just opened up beneath me. Don’t let this happen to you.

Know your loot: Want to speed up the looting process? Have an idea of what is an upgrade for you and what isn’t. This way, when your raid has just taken down a boss, you won’t have to spend a long time agonizing whether or not this item is good for you or if you want to hold out for a better drop or what have you.

Do what you can to help make life easy for them. Its not exactly a walk in the park to manage and oversee all healing required in a raid.

Looking to make more WoW gold?

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World of Warcraft In-game Leveling Guides

World of Warcraft leveling take a huge leap forward with Zygor Guides 2.0, the fastest, most powerful leveling guides in the world.

Leveling has NEVER been this easy! You will be leveling so fast with this, you might think you’re cheating. But you’re not, Joana’s leveling guide mod is 100% legal with Blizzard.

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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

Some focus commands

/focus – This sets your selected target as your focus. I bound this command to my b key ever since I started using shift + b to open all of them.

/clearfocus – Removes your focus target. It’s blank. Without a focus, your focus macros will skip the focus part.

/target focus – This changes your current target to your focus target.

/target focustarget – Automatically targets the focus target.

Focus addons

Personally, I like to use Pitbull 3 to manage all my unit frame stuff. I’ll demonstrate how I handle the focus stuff.

My personal unit frame is on the far left. My target is on the far right (Decaying Colossus). The target being railed on by the Colossus is the fat bad in the middle. The focus is the smaller bar underneath on the left while the focus target is the one beside it.

Anyway, I’m still tweaking with it trying to decide what information I really need and what I don’t. But that’s the general layout of it. Its in a place that sits square in the middle of my screen where my eyes can trace it easily.

Putting it in practice

Now, let’s apply this in a standard raid situation. As a priest, my healing targets are going to continue to change. I could jump from rogue to mage to myself if it became necessary. I’ve been assigned specifically to heal the raid. A common misconception of being assigned to raid is to heal the raid minus the tanks and that is really wrong! Raid healers heal everyone in the raid. Sometimes tank healers need a boost or maybe they get shut down by some ability which neutralizes them for a few seconds.

A good healer who realizes the tank is in trouble will simply mouseover them and then use a direct heal of their choice until that tank is back in the green.

A great healer who realizes the tank is in trouble simply presses their heal focus target macro. This saves them the trouble of having to find the tank on their frames, mousing over or selecting them, and then dropping a heal. Using a focus macro immediately causes the healer to simply heal the focus target without losing much time at all.

The Jaraxxus scenario.
Lets go back to how a player in a situation such as Bizkit would apply this against Lord Jaraxxus. In this case, since there does not appear to be a shaman who can Purge or a mage who can Spellsteal, the duty of removing Lord Jaraxxus Nether Power buff can only be removed with the aid of a priest.

How can we ensure that Jaraxxus gets his Nether Power removed while minimizing the risk of the tank falling over?

Step 1: Create a macro which targets your focus and dispels them. Be sure to bind it (I like to use e for Dispel, ctrl + e for Mass Dispel and shift + e for Abolish Disease and alt + e for focused dispels. Your macro should look something like this:

/cast [target=focus] Dispel Magic

Step 2: Set Lord Jaraxxus as your focus. Target him, and press your focus key (or type /focus with Lord Jaraxxus selected).

Step 3: Now when Lord J gets powered up, just repeatedly press your new focus macro and it will remove Nether Power. At the same time, you won’t lose your primary healing target. For example, the tank will continue to remain your main target.

Now start focusing! Good luck and happy healing!

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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.

These adds can get reanimated- when they do, casters become virtually immune to magic damage, and melee become virtually immune to physical damage. When this happens, you need to react by first, prioritizing the target, and second, altering your rotation. If a reanimated fanatic shows up, don’t waste cooldowns on aimed shot or steady shot. If a reanimated adherent shows up, don’t waste things like explosive shot or serpent sting. This will gimp us, as hunters. Luckily, assuming all appropriate DPS switches to the right target, you’ll have some classes that do 100% physical or magic damage to help.

The last metamorphosis we need to worry about is when the boss casts dark empowerment, mutating and empowering random adds. Since the empowered casters still reflect spells, you need to focus them first. Once they’re gone, look for mutated melee- they are usually kited because they hit like a truck but move slow.

Now you know the types of adds. On 10 man, they will alternate spawning on the left and right. On 25 man, they spawn on both sides, as well as a random add from the back. As a hunter, your job will probably include misdirecting to help the tanks.

Assuming you’re running some sort of boss mod, you will get a note occasionally saying that you have curse of torpor. When this happens, try to avoid using any abilities you think you’ll need in the next 15 seconds- a mage or someone  will eventually decurse you, but until they do, you get a 15 second cooldown on every single ability you use. Mages also have to prioritize themselves, because if they don’t, they get a 15 second cooldown on decurse, and nobody wants that.

Also, while you’re mopping up adds and trying to DPS the boss between waves, you will notice that periodically, someone near you becomes enormous and red, and often starts attacking you. This is a mind control, and only happens on 25 man. Typically they will get sheeped or hexed, but don’t let that stop you from throwing a freezing arrow at their feet- it’s often a free lock and load if you’re survival

Oh, and of course, there will be massive glowing green void zones for you to not stand in (well, technically death and decays).

Phase two

If you get here, you’re unlikely to wipe. Deathwhisper will start mind-controlling more people on 25 man, and on both 10 and 25, will start summoning untargetable ghosts that will follow someone until they explode. Don’t lead them into the melee, lead them away from the healers, and don’t let them catch you. I find it helpful to angle my camera so I’m looking straight down on my character, and zoom out a bit. If you’re worried that you’ll face away from the boss, remember that steady shot will point you right at her, even if your camera isn’t pointing that way.

Conclusion

This sounds like a much more challenging fight than it is. Especially now that the boss and all the adds have had their health reduced. Still, good execution can take even a lower-gear raid through it.

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“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.

Coldflame

During the fight Lord Marrowgar will spawn blue flames on the ground that will move out towards the raid in a linear path. There will be 4 flames, and they shoot out in an “X” pattern. Pretty simple, don’t stand in the blue flames. They do Frost damage, so have Frost Ward up!

The flame doesn’t follow anyone, it shoots out in a straight line. If you see one going towards you, simply side-step and continue on DPSing. Easy enough, no reason why you should take damage from this.

Bone Spikes

Every so often, he will do the Bone Spike Graveyard, which will target a random person in the raid. That person AND every person between him and the boss will be impaled by a Bone Spike. This means: Spread out, and don’t have anyone standing in front of you, between you and the boss.

Bone Spikes take priority over DPSing the boss. If someone is impaled, free him/her as soon as possible. Faster they are freed, the less damage they take, and the faster that person can go back to DPS/healing. Have a macro set up for quick switching:

/target Bone Spike

If you get impaled, you CANNOT Ice Block out of it. Just hope your raid buddies will free you before you die.

Bone Storm

At some points during the fight, he will begin to spin his ax around in circles, and start whirlwinding randomly around the room. At this point, try to spread out, but stay close enough to one of your healers to stay alive. Run away from Lord Marrowgar if you see him headed your direction. You can DPS if you want, but staying alive is more important.

During the Bone Storm phase, he will also spawn the Coldflames too. So keep a look out for the flames spreading on the floor. If you happen to get trapped by a wall with Marrowgar going all Tasmanian Devil on you, feel free to Ice Block and keep yourself alive.

When he stops his Bone Storm, ALL AGGRO RESETS, so let the main tank pick him back up before you start DPSing again. So pay attention and stop DPS when you see that he is about to stop spinning.

Strategy

DPS boss, kill Bone Spikes as soon as they appear, then hop back onto the boss. This isn’t a DPS race, it is a “pay attention and survive” fight. Dodge flames, run when he whirlwinds, and repeat. Keep Ice Barrier up!

Use Blink to get in range to help kill Bone Spikes, or use it to avoid flames, or to get away from the spinning Marrowgar himself. Keep Frost Ward up during the whirlwind phase just in case you have to run through some flames.

Mage Loots:

• [Cord of the Patronizing Practitioner]
• [Frost Needle]
• [Bone Sentinel's Amulet] (25man)
• [Crushing Coldwraith Belt] (25man)
• [Frozen Bonespike] (25man)
• [Loop of the Endless Labyrinth] (25man)
• [Marrowgar's Frigid Eye] (25man)

A lot of good drop for Mages from the first boss of the instance. The only item that is iffy, is the Frigid Eye because of the mp5 on it. I personally think that ring is better than the Loop of the Endless Labyrinth if you are Hit Capped, but I don’t think I would roll against any healers that want it.

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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.

Phase 2

This is the phase Lord Marrowgar turns into a whirling devil.

Bone Storm causes him to whirl around and chase different players at random. Players hit will be nailed for 6000+ damage every 3 seconds until it wears off. A tank can get away with eating this, but most clothies won’t be able to.

The reason I would split my healers in such a way is so that there will still be healers available. Bone Spike Graveyard is still present in this phase. It can get scary if all the healers are on one side of the room and Bone Spiked players are on the other side. I learned that the hard way. If you see an opportunity, chip in with some damage spells to accelerate the process. Your raid is going to be in a fairly chaotic state.

Not only that, Coldflames are still going to be hounding the raid. So you’re avoiding Marrowgar and fires. Just keep that in mind.

The dangerous part of this phase is when Lord Marrowgar transitions back to phase 1. Why is it dangerous? If your tanks haven’t recovered and they’re not properly centered on the main tank, then the main tank could end up eating a full Sabre Lash. I actually experienced that a few times on subsequent tries. If you notice that there are no other tanks around to eat the lash, get in range and hit the tank with a defensive cooldown and hope he survives long enough.

• Priests: Dwarves might be able to Stoneform off the bleed effect from Bone Storm. I never tried it though. Even if you are raid healing, stay within range of the main tank and immediately hit them with a shield when Lord Marrowgar phases back into his normal stage.
• Paladins: Keep a Divine Shield or Divine Sacrifice ready when your raid needs it. Be prepared to snap to it if several raid members get caught in a Bone Spike with Lord Marrowgar looming near by.
• Shamans: Nothing cool here. Stick with whatever your raid healers ask you to do (which is most likely Chain Healing into the tanks).
• Druids: Anticipate a hit by Lord Marrowgar? Shift into bear to up your survivability.

Debuffs to add

If you use specific addons to monitor debuffs on players, I recommend adding these:

• Bone Spike Graveyard
• Bone Storm

Go through these phases about 3 times each, and your raid should be home free.

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World of Warcraft leveling take a huge leap forward with Zygor Guides 2.0, the fastest, most powerful leveling guides in the world.

Leveling has NEVER been this easy! You will be leveling so fast with this, you might think you’re cheating. But you’re not, Joana’s leveling guide mod is 100% legal with Blizzard.

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All the Bijou’s, colour does not matter. For around 30 minutes i was able to get 20 Bijous, wich sell for 15g a piece in the ah, or if people on your realm dont actualy sell these make em 20g a piece but not more since nobody will buy them. People need these Bijous to raise their rep with the Zanadar Tribe so there will be alot of customers i guarantee it. I sell them sepherately since more people will buy them that way. So that’s like 300g per 30 minutes or 600g a hour for me. If you dont get the idea for what bijous im speaking of
heres a picture Blue Hakkari Bijou – Item – World of Warcraft i randomly linked that picture , doesnt mean you gota farm the blue one speccificly.

Also if you are better geared and have a way to survive through some 95-111k HP mobs id advise you to go in to the Molten Core and start farming trash.
The trash drops Lava Core and Fiery Core – these moneymakers sell for 50g each ,but the drop rate is kinda low so you’ll get like 1 lava or fiery core for every 10 monsters you’ve killed and if lucky you can also get some BoE epics wich i also sell around 30-40g each. These Core’s are also used to gain reputation, with the Thorium Brotherhood or they can also be used to craft classic weapons, legendary materials etc so expect to have alot of costumers again. I grinded for an Hour There and i got 6 Lava Cores and 7 Fiery Cores + some BoE belt (worth 35gold in AH) so that makes is 685g in a hour.

But i also have to mention that its all a matter of luck – you might get a lot of drops or less drops

by pitar99a

Looking to make more WoW gold?

Check out the secret tactics you can use to legally and easily generate up to 427 gold per hour or more in World of Warcraft without using hacks or cheats.

Get ready to make more gold playing WoW than you have ever seen before.

World of Warcraft In-game Leveling Guides

World of Warcraft leveling take a huge leap forward with Zygor Guides 2.0, the fastest, most powerful leveling guides in the world.

Leveling has NEVER been this easy! You will be leveling so fast with this, you might think you’re cheating. But you’re not, Joana’s leveling guide mod is 100% legal with Blizzard.

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