Every week, Raid Rx will help you quarterback your healers to victory! Your host is Matt Low, the grand poobah of World of Matticus and a founder of No Stock UI, a new WoW blog for all things UI, macro, and addon related. Ever wondered what were the hardest fights to heal in the game? Based solely on my opinion and experience, here's a list counting down from number 10 to number 6.

Different raid bosses had different ways to challenge healers. Tanks and DPS players had to worry about their own position, damage output, threat, and other abilities. Healers were focused more on keeping the rest of the raid alive through varying levels of damage and attacks.

This is a multi-part article where I take a look at some of the most tear inducing raid bosses that the game has to offer. This week features number 10 to number 6!

Ghostcrawler has posted an interesting little hint at the next patch (we know of) headed to the game. In response to a discussion about "tanking niches," he talks about Icecrown Citadel over on the forums, and just happens to mention that people might think of tanks as waiting outside until "boss 4, 17 and 31 (yes, IC is that big)." 31 bosses? More like Icecrowded, am I right?

Blackrock Depths is the largest 5-man in the game, if not the largest instance, and it boasts over 40 bosses (that's mostly counting encounters, though -- you wouldn't count The Seven, for example, as seven different bosses), including lots and lots of optional bosses and even a holiday boss. Ulduar, by comparison, has about 14, and Karazhan is about that same size (though that depends on how you count random bosses, like the Opera Event). No matter how you slice it, 31 raid bosses is a ton of bosses to go through -- Icecrown could be a return to a really epic, large-scale instance.

Of course, there will likely be wings involved (Naxxramas' Quarters have worked out pretty well, I think), and with the new changes to raid lockouts, Blizzard no longer needs to squeeze the raiding experience into an average of two or three nights a week (which is what it seemed like they were usually aiming for before). If yours is the kind of guild that likes to clear everything in one night, though, you might want to start freeing up some time now.

Update: GC now says he didn't mean the instance would have 31 bosses, he was just throwing in some ridiculous number to prove a point. Our question: why did he say "yes, IC is that big" if he didn't mean it would be that big?

Here at WoW Insider we don't always agree with each other. Whether it's debating the merits of various tanks on different encounters, the damage difference between pure and hybrid DPS classes, the ideal function of a particular healing class in raids, or the superiority of cake over pie, our back-channel discussion tends to be pretty interesting.

Eliah Hecht's article "25-man gear should not be better than 10-man gear" sparked a lot of great discussion with our readers and, I think, some illuminating poll results as well. The majority of responders believed that giving 10-man and 25-man raids the same loot table would result in a significant drop in popularity for 25-man raiding. Overall, I tend to agree with this, but I also think that Eliah touched on something that speaks to Blizzard's evolving sense of game design, much of which is evident in the transition between late Burning Crusade and Wrath.

I would like to call this the Sunwell effect, or "ingame rationality." To wit: don't incentivize players to behave in a manner contrary to your actual design interests. I believe this played a huge role in the differences between BC and Wrath raiding, and that it underlies why the 25-man loot table has to remain superior to its 10-man counterpart.

Dueg is the first blogger I've seen to suggest this, but I feel like it's an undercurrent that's been going around since the 3.1 release last week (and we'll probably find out more when Guildwatch comes out later tonight). He suggests that Ulduar might be, of all things, a guildbreaker. Now certainly it won't be nearly as much of a roadblock as Karazhan -- not only was that a tough instance, but it was also the first one we came across in Burning Crusade, and guilds who couldn't make it in Kara had no place to turn back to (at least guilds that can't make it in Ulduar can fall back on Naxx farming). But there's no question that Ulduar requires some excellent gear and some serious tactics, and if your guild has people raiding who are missing either one of those, you're going to be hitting your head on the wall quite a bit in there.

That's not to say that it's super hard -- it's not, especially if you know not to stand in the fire and you've got the kind of gear on that lets you conquer the Heroic achievements. A lot of guilds have 25 of those people, and they're doing very well in Ulduar so far. But as Dueg says, Naxx is a casual instance, and Ulduar is not. In Naxx, you can get away with losing a few people, or having a few folks in greens along. In Ulduar, you can't.

It's not the apocalypse for guilds -- most guilds will go back to Naxx if they have trouble in Ulduar, grab a few more epics and tier pieces, and try again later. And some probably won't bother with Ulduar at all -- my casual guild is having fun just taking our time finishing Naxx wing by wing. But Ulduar seems to be where the rubber meets the road with casual raiding. If there's a guild out there who has a few lesser raiders carried along by a few high-level veterans, Ulduar's likely to cause some friction.

Good afternoon all. I want to give a shout out to everyone in Fargo, North Dakota who is dealing with the flood that's going on, in particular everyone who is busy sandbagging. It's big, bad, and full of water. But on the plus side there are now ducks outside of my apartment, and I live two and a half miles from the Red River. But ducks are cool. It's made me want to go fire up Duck Hunt. I may be pawning off The Queue this week to Alex, depending on how bad things get in my area. He's anxious to talk about Mountain Dew I hear.

Palatel asked...

"Any idea on how the leader of a Battleground is determined?"

Karthis, a feral Druid from the Garona-US server, wrote a thought-provoking treatise on the current end-game on his blog a few days ago. Of course, he's hardly the first to declare the current end-game far too easy, but he brings a very interesting angle to the discussion -- namely that of the casual.

He interviews various casual raid guild leaders in his piece. These are guild leaders who, back in Burning Crusade, mostly ran Karazhan and maybe dabbled a bit in Zul'aman. They certainly were far behind the curve. But they had a dedicated core of 10 raiders who got together, faced the challenges, and overcame them. But now, even these casuals are saying that the end-game is just too easy.

One guild leader interviewed is finding that some of their raiders have gotten all the loot they need from Naxxramas and maxed out Northrend Achievements and Reputations, and, for lack of anything to do, are not logging on for days or simply letting their subscriptions lapse altogether, leaving their guild leader to make the painful decision once Ulduar comes to either refuse to give them their raid slots back or kick out their replacements.

A new batch of fre realm transfers have opened up for European servers, which is always a good thing. A lot of these transfers are ones we've seen before though, so hopefully this time around these options will be more successful than they may have been previously. We also have a whole load of transfers opening up to EU-Magtheridon specifically for the Alliance, so they're continuing to try and repair the faction imbalance there. Right now, we're looking at...

• Horde players on EU-Magtheridon may transfer to Haomarush, Tarren Mill, Trollbane, Zenedar, and Silvermoon.
• Alliance players may transfer to EU-Magtheridon from Aerie Peak, Aggramar, Alonsus, Aszune, Azjol-Nerub, Bronze Dragonflight, Bronzebeard, Emerald Dream, Eonar, Khadgar, Kul Tiras, Runetotem, Shadowsong, Silvermoon, and Turalyon.

Check behind the cut below for the rest of the current free character transfers.

I really didn't expect to be writing this. Like others, I was left a bit nonplussed at the seeming ease of early raiding content in Wrath, but the more I thought about it, the more it seemed like an interesting intersection of prudence, circumstances, and quite possibly some residual discomfort on Blizzard's part over how awful early BC raiding was. I don't think that the current "ease" of first-tier raid content in Wrath is a bad thing -- and I also don't expect future content to stay that way.

My guild cleared all of the 25-man raid content in Wrath within two weeks of the expansion's release. Naxxramas was easily the biggest non-surprise. Doing Naxx-25 in the company of people who know the place inside and out is a pretty straightforward and -- dare I say it -- easy process. This is even more true with players who learned the original Naxx at 70, with a much greater margin for error than they would have had at 60. Honestly? Most of the fights haven't changed to the point where you'd have to toss out your previous strategy and start all over again. A raid that saw Naxx at any point between 60 and 70 is effectively an old dog that doesn't have to learn a new trick.

One of the biggest concerns we've heard from players since the expansion launched is that everything is too easy -- not only did the hardcore raiders burn down the PvE endgame content in a matter of days, but upgrades aren't really what they used to be, and anyone with some solid gear that blow through most of the instances without too much trouble. Which begs the question: is Wrath too easy?

No, according to our buddy Ghostcrawler. He says that Blizzard's goal this time around was to avoid the Karazhan mistake from the last expansion, where players butted their heads up against tougher content in the early endgame. GC says that Blizzard certainly knows how to make tougher content, but they'd rather everyone got a turn this time around.

The only question I have left is why they didn't include it all in the same release -- Blizzard seems to be saying that harder content is on the way, but wouldn't it be more prudent to have both easy and hard content in at the same time? As a casual player, I'm thrilled to hear that the endgame is easier -- I'll get to see more of it. But we've got two versions of each endgame instance now -- do they both have to be easy enough to conquer in a few days?

Welcome to Scattered Shots, the weekly Hunter column, now with 100% more Northrend!

So you're on the shore in Northrend by now, one hopes, and maybe you're level 71, still tooling around the starting zones, looking for the right quests to do to get some decent gear for yourselves. Now if you've spent a decent amount of time in Tier 4 or better content, or if you decked yourself out in badge gear, I'll be honest, you may not find too many upgrades here. But for people who started their Hunter a little late or didn't quite clear Karazhan before the expansion, there's some very nice stuff here.

Let's take a look at the quest rewards of Howling Fjord and Borean Tundra and their attached dungeons, and see what they offer:

Ready Check is a weekly column focusing on successful raiding for the serious raider. Hardcore or casual, ZA or Sunwell Plateau, everyone can get in on the action and down some bosses. This week, we sing a swansong to TBC raiding in all its glory.

With less than a week to go before we all start frantically levelling and leaving Outland behind for good, let's not forget the ups and downs raiding during The Burning Crusade has brought us. From Attumen to Kil'jaeden, we've run the gamut of raiding, killing anything from pit lords to corrupted naaru with nary a blink.

We've shed blood and tears over rare drops, wiped countless times until the small hours, decked our alts out in epics and moved servers to find a better guild. We've rerolled, watched ourselves and our raid instances get nerfed, hung out in Shattrath showing off our gear, and gotten to grips with major class changes in the last two weeks. So let's look back...

Should be a great show tomorrow on the podcast, as we welcome two terrific WoW bloggers to the table. In one place together for the first (second? third?) time ever, both Daniel "BigRedKitty" Howell (who has his own very popular, very well-done podcast, by the way, if you haven't heard it yet) and John "BigBearButt" Patricelli will be in attendance. And we'll be talking about, as usual, all the biggest stories from the past week in Warcraft, including how the new Kara boss is going (and almost gone), whether Karazhan itself is too easy these days, and that whole class forums megaton yesterday (that turned out to be a dud, more or less). And we'll cover the end of the zombie event, too, and whether or not it worked the way Blizzard planned it to, or if they cut it short early because of all the griefing.

The show will air live at 3:30pm Eastern (time zone calculator) over on our Ustream page. Lots of people have had questions about how to get the show lately (and of course, it hasn't helped that our feed is going through some growing pains), but all of your questions should be answered in our last podcast post. And we're working on the quality issues, too -- I can assure you that the recording issue has been fixed, so no more tinny voices this week.

But you don't want to wait until the recording anyway -- join us on the Ustream page tomorrow (or just come back to this post -- the stream is embedded after the break), and you can chat with us and other listeners live, as well as vote in polls and participate in a rumored "aftershow" that's been popping up after we're done recording lately. See you tomorrow!