Posts with tag icc

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 WoW blog for all things UI, macro, and addon related.

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.

Modk of Juggernaut has obtained the world's first Shadowmourne! It's the final legendary weapon in the Wrath of the Lich King expansion (at least, that we know of) before Cataclysm is due out. The quest line to earn the weapon is both costly and long. So a big congrats to Modk! I suspect we'll gradually be seeing more and more of these. Who knows how many we'll have by the time the new expansion is released?

If you're curious to see the proc of the weapon in action, check out the video on MMO Champion.

The Icecrown Citadel raid buff has been out for a week now. For the time being, it's only a 5% buff to healing, health, and damage (and let's not forget that it will affect damage absorption spells soon). It'll continue to slowly ramp up as time goes by. I know the question I've asked myself is whether or not we should have the buff active for progression bosses. There doesn't seem to be an achievement or any incentive to take down bosses without it so it becomes more of a question of "Why not?". When we were working on Blood Queen the week before the buff was up, we've had some extremely close shaves where she hit her enrage timer at 6%, then at 2% before we killed her post enrage with 6 players still standing. That 5% damage would've easily given us some extra breathing room. Cutting through trash and taking down the early wings with the buffs up means we can cut through that stuff faster and get to the hard bosses earlier. So I know for me, I'm okay with working on bosses with it up. It's only 5%. Now I just need to figure out where to draw the line.

How about you? Have you been disabling Strength of Wrynn or Hellscream's Warsong for your raids just to say that you can do the bosses without it?

Every week, Shifting Perspectives explores issues affecting druids and those who group with them. This week, we save the world (of Warcraft).

Originally this week's article was going to concern stomping Karazhan from top-to-bottom as a feral/resto druid, and then I got Big Bad Wolf for the opera event. Suffice it to say that the stomping took an abrupt U-turn, and I never got pictures or video of the other Kara fights that I've successfully solo'd on dozens of other occasions (though I grant they were all occasions that did not include humiliating wipes to an overgrown dog). If I weren't in the middle of a time crunch it probably would've been doable, but regrettably I will have to run a feature on how to make 1,000 gold soloing Karazhan on a later date. In the meantime, Alaron's managed to solo Big Bad Wolf successfully, but my main is in the somewhat sticky situation of not being a night elf.

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.

Bornakk has announced a handful of in-game hot fixes on the official forums today. They're pretty much all Icecrown Citadel boss ability nerfs and tweaks, and should fixes a few annoyances with some battles, stretching from Marrowgar to Sindragosa. The full list is after the break.

Here at WoW.com we're on a Daily Quest (which we try to do every day, honest) to bring you interesting, informative and entertaining WoW-related links from around the blogosphere. Is there a story out there we ought to link or a blog we ought to follow? Just leave us a comment and you may see it here tomorrow!

Yesterday's hot discussion topic around the web was news of Cataclysm's upcoming stat changes. And today? There's still a lot of chatter, so let's toss out a few more links:

• Killing 'em Slowly reviews warlock changes.
• Flame Shock looks at the changes from an enhancement shaman perspective.
• The Hunter's Mark is here to give us a hunter's perspective.
• Gray Matter -- as always! -- talks Moonkins.

But there's a new hot topic for today: during this morning's maintenance, Blizzard rolled out buffs for players attempting Icecrown Citadel. Everyone loves buffs, right? Wrong.

• Herding Cats thinks it's too soon.
• Cannot be Tamed wonders how many guilds will make use of it.
• BobTurkey thinks that future ICC kills will leave raiders asking "did we push ourselves enough to do it, or did they just nerf it down to our level?"

If your guild has been struggling throughout the various bosses in Icecrown Citadel, then struggle no more! Icecrown Citadel raid buffs are now live. For the Alliance, it is called Strength of Wrynn and the Horde version of the buff is Hellscream's Warsong. For now, your health, healing done, and damage done are increased by 5%. It looks like it'll eventually cap out and end at 30% but who knows when that will be. All in all, the buffs will definitely help progression raids out. If your raid doesn't need the buffs, you can simply talk to your faction guy and tell him to go away. He'll ask you once just to confirm, but if you are sure, he'll disappear. We've known that the raid wide buffs would appear at some point but not exactly when.

Be sure to check out WoW.com's Icecrown Citadel raid strategy and information page!

Every Monday Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership. He is the author of The Guild Leader's Handbook, available this spring from No Starch Press.

If ever there were a time for guild-leader or raid-leader burnout to set in, we are living in it. We are at the end of perhaps the most challenging six months of raiding content in WoW's history -- not in terms of its difficulty, but in its sheer potential for drama and member loss.

First we had the half-hearted tier that consisted entirely of Trial of the Crusader, a one-room raid that took all of an hour to clear, and Onyxia, a well-loved but well-worn raid boss that was also a quick, and often boring, clear. Keeping raiders motivated during what felt like an endless four months wasn't easy. Many raid leaders were pulling out their hair trying to fill slots.

For the most serious guilds, ToC was an absolute nightmare. Not because the content was itself difficult, but because of the rewards offered for clearing the zone without a single wipe, or even a single player death. Some very good players cracked under this kind of pressure. In a situation where one person's mistake -- not to mention disconnects, lag, or other external factors -- can quickly cause a death or a wipe and cost the entire raid access to loot, offering these achievements seemed to me like Blizzard was going out of their way to cause drama.

Icecrown Citadel was supposed to be our savior, but instead it brought new and unanticipated problems.

Episode 13 of Blizzcast, Blizzard's occassional podcast, came out yesterday. The majority of it is devoted to a StarCraft II beta special, which is beyond the scope of this site, but they did do a WoW Q&A after that (and a Diablo 3 Q&A at the end), between WoW CM Zarhym and Diablo CM Bashiok. The WoW segment was mostly retrospective, discussing what the developers learned from Wrath, with a dash of looking forward to Cataclysm.

Here's a quick summary (you can read the whole transcript, or listen to the podcast, at Blizzard's site):

• ICC is designed such that the final boss in each section is harder than the rest of the section (Putricide, Blood Queen Lana'thel, Sindragosa, and the Lich King).
• The ICC zone-wide buff "won't come in until at least a month after the Lich King has been released," which means we could see it soon, since the Lich King fight opened up February 2nd (although the devs mentioned in the Twitter chat that it's not quite time for the buff yet). It will improve "roughly once a month," and the buff will affect health, damage, and healing (much like the Luck of the Draw buff from random dungeon groups).
• They thought the Illidan encounter in Black Temple, back in BC, was a bit anti-climactic, so they wanted to make sure the end of the Lich King was "super special."
• In answer to "what next after I clear ICC:" ICC hard modes, and to a lesser extent the Ruby Sanctum, which is coming in a future patch. Ruby Sanctum will hold "roughly Lich King level gear," as has been mentioned elsewhere.

That's about it for the WoW content, but if you're interested in SC2 or D3, you may well want to read or listen to the whole thing.

Here at WoW.com we're on a Daily Quest (which we try to do every day, honest) to bring you interesting, informative and entertaining WoW-related links from around the blogosphere. Is there a story out there we ought to link or a blog we ought to follow? Just leave us a comment and you may see it here tomorrow!

Today we're talking healers. You know healers, don't you? The players who tend to stand in the back of a group and do simply terrible DPS? Damage meters aside, if you're not a healer, keeping your healer happy should rank high on yout to-do list, because who else out there is going to pull you from the brink of death over and over again? So while the non-healers in the audience are out buying candy and flowers for the healer in your life, the healers in the audience are going to sit back and look at some recent thoughts on healing from around the net.

• Blessing of Kings discusses healer hubris.
• Holypaladin.net talks about the Flash of Light build for holdydins.
• Tree Bark Jacket covers healing for Sindragosa -- some of it's druid-specfic, but some of it will be useful to anyone attempting Sindragosa.
• Wugan on Flow discusses healing for Professor Putricide for resto shamans. (If you're attempting the Professor and having trouble, you may be interested in reading Raid Rx and Ready Check on the same subject.)
• The Physician's Log covers solo-healing Sarh +3 as a paladin.
• Holyform offers some tips for discipline priests on Festergut.

Here at WoW.com we're on a Daily Quest to bring you interesting, informative and entertaining WoW-related links from around the blogosphere. Is there a story out there we ought to link or a blog we ought to follow? Just leave us a comment and you may see it here tomorrow!

For those of you who may have been living under a rock and haven't heard of Icecrown Citadel, I'll start simple with the basics: Icecrown Citadel is a winged dungeon with both raid and 5-man content. And right now it's the raid everyone's in as they struggle towards a final, epic encounter with the Lich King. I'm not going to round-up everything that's been said about this dungeon -- because then we'd both be here all day -- but offer you a sampling of recent ICC-related articles from around the web.

• I am a Paladin talks about healing for Valithria Dreamwalker. (And if you're looking for more info on Valithria, we have a guide for you, too.)
• Rhidach of Righteous Defense learns the hard way that the Blood Council has a 10 minute enrage timer.
• Larisa at the Pink Pigtail Inn wonders if the hard mode bosses are going down too easily.
• Almost Evil offers first thoughts on Sindragosa.
• Teza at Wowraid has collected a number of ICC hard mode videos for your perusal.
• Spicytuna talks about the Gunship Battle for frost mages.
• OutDPS offers advice for hunters fighting Festergut.
• On WoW.com this week, we covered healing Professor Putricide and taking down the Blood Princes.

For more from the blogosphere on [topic redacted], check back tomorrow for another Daily Quest!

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 WoW blog for all things UI, macro, and addon related.

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.

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 WoW blog for all things UI, macro, and addon related.

Arguably one of the most unique encounters in the entire game, Valithria Dreamwalker is one where the success of the raid rests entirely on the shoulders of healers. After some more practice and attempts, I can pass on several aspects of the fight that I learned onto you.

Over on the EU forums, Slorkuz has clarified a few questions players may have about the new changes coming to normal mode ICC, namely the removal of limited attempts from the final bosses in each wing. While limited attempts will still be in place on heroic mode, they will no longer be in effect on normal mode as of the end of maintenance this morning. To quote:

Q: If you extend your raid lockout this week, will you still lose attempts on Normal after the hotfix?
A: No.

Q: If you run completely out of attempts on Heroic, will the wing bosses and Lich King no longer respawn, even if the difficulty is switched to Normal?
A: YES. So leave an attempt left if you wish to kill them on Normal. We'll try and correct this in a future update.

Q: Why is the counter still visible in Normal?
A: The hotfix being applied just stops the counter decrementing, and nothing more.

In other words, raiders attempting the final bosses of these wings on normal difficulty will still see the counter, it simply won't count down if they wipe. More importantly however is the news that players wishing to attempt bosses on Heroic difficulty will need to leave one attempt up if they want to clear the boss on normal mode.

Far earlier than any of us had expected, Daelo has announced that the normal modes of Professor Putricide, Blood-Queen Lana'thel, Sindragosa, and the Lich King will no longer have limited attempts. The heroic modes of these encounters will still have limited attempts, however. To quote:

After each region's maintenance this week, raids will no longer lose attempts on wipes in Normal mode for Professor Putricide, Blood-Queen Lana'thel, Sindragosa, and the Lich King. There will still be limited attempts in Heroic mode.

We will continue to monitor developments in Icecrown Citadel in the future, especially since the Heroic difficulty has been unlocked by a significant number of raids.

A very interesting development, and I'm curious why they decided to lift the attempts system from normal modes entirely. Is it due to a relatively low number of guilds actually killing these bosses right now, or is there some other reason?