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 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 Mimetir @ WorldofMatticus

Say you’re storming the Citadel on a fairly regular basis, massacring the Lich King’s advance nasties from Lord Marrowgar right up – literally – to Deathbringer Saurfang. You might be progressing through it at your own pace, or you might have it on farm and are running through weekly as a warm-up to pick up gear. Well, either way. Here are some general and some shaman-specific tips from my own experience on how to healing can help your group steamroller the nasties.

Lord Marrowgar:

1. Bone Spike Graveyard: Pain. In. The. There are two things you can do to mitigate its effect on your healing. Firstly, make sure you remind your healing  teammates to watch out for bonespike on each other. For example, if your tank healer is spiked then you need to pick up the slack for him and heal the tanks. Just til he gets back on his feet. Secondly, standing behind Marrowgar as shown in the diagram will help your DPS get you un-spiked as quickly and safely as  possible.

2. Coldflame is not cool. Really. Move out of the fire before it gets to you. Yep, I know it’s a pain and it seems to as soon as a healer has moved there’s more coldflame racing towards you. Standing at range will give you time to see it and move.

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by Xerin @ tentonhammer

Gearing up in World of Warcraft can be a daunting task. If you’re a fresh level 80 then most of the content is locked off to you if you plan on using the dungeon finder and there isn’t a whole lot you can do about getting the ball rolling and the loot flowing in. We’ve recently have gone through the process of taking a brand new level 80 and gearing it up to see exactly how things work now in patch 3.3.

Table of Contents

• Notes for Fresh Level 80s
• Gearing up for Heroics
• Tanks & Healers
• Word of Warning
• Gems & Enchants
• Gearing up for Raiding

Notes for Fresh Level 80s

If you’ve just hit level 80 then you’re going to be hitting a massive wall known as the new gear score checks placed into the dungeon finder. These gear score checks will check the total gear score of your equipped armor and weapons to determine if you’re allowed to queue for an instance or not. This isn’t so much a problem for heroics, but for Trial of the Champion and the Icecrown instances you may find yourself unable to even get the gear necessary to start off your career in PvE.

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by Mem @ tentonhammer

Playing a healer is (in my opinion) probably the toughest job you can do in a raid. Not only are the lives of your fellow party or raid members in your hands, but if you mess up, everyone is going to know it. This guide will hopefully help you prevent those flubs, by going over the basic (and often ignored) information that you will need to mold yourself into an exceptional healer. Be you Shaman, Druid, Priest, or Paladin this guide is for you!

This may seem like silly and unneeded advice, but this basic rule is often ignored or forgotten. In a 5 man party you are obviously expected to heal everyone including yourself, however once you enter a 10 or 25 man raiding situation things become slightly more complicated. Not knowing who you are healing in these larger raid situations can lead to many preventable deaths and/or your entire raid wiping.

For example if you are assigned to heal the main tank and you choose to ignore, or miss your assignment and decide to take it upon yourself to heal the raid instead, there is a very good chance that the tank you were supposed to be healing is going to die. The mob the tank was tanking will go on a rampage and own the faces of at least a few raid members before another tank can pick it up, or if it does not get picked up it will, in the end, wipe your entire raid. Even if the tank manages to stay alive, you are putting extra strain on your other healers who are taking time out of doing their jobs to do yours, which can also lead to deaths amongst the raid.

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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 OutDPS]

This encounter is the glock-block encounter designed to test your guilds’ hunters’ kiting skills, as well as your healers and tanks and everything else. Doing this fight feels like rolling a boulder up a ski jump- that last 3% takes more work than the first 20%. Haven’t kited in a while? Read on for the complete hunter’s guide to the Deathbringer Saurfang encounter!

The Encounter

This fight has a soft enrage timer. Saurfang gains blood power as the fight goes on, and will eventually become unhealable. You’ll notice that he has an energy bar that stacks at the same rate as his blood power buff- when this bar hits 100, he casts a mark of the fallen champion on someone. This is kind of like the opposite of a holy paladin’s beacon; causing his melee attacks to hit the market target as well as the tank. If the marked person dies, they return 5% health to the boss.

Blood power is generated a variety of ways- the ones we need to deal with are through his blood nova and his summoning blood beasts. Blood nova has a 12 yard radius, and will generate blood power for every person in that radius. Blood beasts will generate points for Saurfang every time they hit someone. They can not be AOE’d effectively, and can get a buff called scent of blood when they spawn that slows people around them and makes them basically immune to shadow damage.

The Plan

This fight is about one thing: doing as much DPS on the boss as possible while causing as few stacks of blood power as possible. There are a variety of ways he gets these buffs that we can’t control, however we can control the ones generated by blood beasts and the blood nova.

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