Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas everyone!
I hope you all enjoy the Holidays.

Icecrown Citadel: The Lower Spire Part I

It was finally time to enter Icecrown Citadel, the Lich King's cosy little home. During our visit, we will meet some of the King's friendly house mates, but instead of shaking their hands and small talk about the weather and the financial crisis, we will bash their heads in and rob them of shiny purples. That's the price you have to pay when you chose to hang out with the wrong people.

The first thing everybody does when zoning in is probably to run around and check the Ashen Verdict quartermaster and the armor vendor of your class. Or maybe you are one of those who prefer to /dance with Tirion Fordring while waiting for the rest of the raid to show up.

You can see the first boss of the instance, Lord Marrowgar, all the way from the entrance, but there are some trash to handle before you reach him.

Most of this trash can be aoed down. Things to look out for is that the skeleton casters should be faced away from the raid since they cast an ice spike spell that hits everybody in its way. The big insect mobs web wraps people, which can be annoying. And a couple of BIG skeletons will wake up when people step on hidden traps on the floor. Those big guys need to be tanked faced away from the raid, since they have a nasty cleave. They also have an aoe spell interrupt that especially healers need to be aware of.

It's pretty likely that raids will wipe on this trash once or twice the first time they enter the instance. Don't despair. It's the hardest trash in the entire wing.

Lord Marrowgar

Lord Marrowgar is the first boss in Icecrown Citadel. He's a big boney guy who likes to take a spin on the dance floor. He also impales people.

This is a pretty easy fight. The general rules of raiding apply: Don't stand in fire, don't stand close to a mob that is whirlwinding, and free people who are impaled. We have all done this kind of fight before.

Things to look out for:

• Bone Storm - this is his whirlwind. When he starts whirlwinding, just run away to make the healers' job easier.
• Bone Spike Graveyard - impales people, and damage them for 10% of their health every second for 5 seconds or until the bone spike is killed. Make sure to kill these spikes as soon as possible.
• Coldflame - a line of fire on the floor. Move out of it, please.
• Saber lash - stack the tanks on top of eachother to split the damage of this attack, because it hurts.

Our first experience: It took some time to get the tanks coordinated, and we had a couple of tank deaths due to this. The first week, Marrowgar wasn't tauntable, so a few eager dps got killed as well. When tanks are coordinated, the bone spikes killed fast, and people don't stand in fires, this fight is cake.

Lady Deathwhisper

The second boss in The Lower Spire is Lady Deathwhisper. She has several male admirers who will spawn in the first phase of the fight, when your raid is trying to break down her defenses.

The challenge in this fight is to control the adds. In the first phase she is protected by a mana shield that would make any mage green of envy. This shield needs to be burned down. Seven adds will spawn and needs to be taken care of. During the fight, they might change form, to be more powerful, and also immune to either physical or magical damage. As a tank, make sure to pick up the fanatics before they kill a healer.

Things to look out for in phase 1:

• Death and Decay - it's green and it's big. Don't stand in it.
• Dominate Mind - she mind controls raid members. Make sure to CC them before they kill a healer.
• Empowered Adherents do aoe damage and should be killed fast.
• Deformed Fanatics hurt a lot and should be kited. Do not try to tank these guys.

When her mana shield is destroyed, phase 2 starts.

Things to look out for in phase 2:

• Frostbolt - hurts a lot and needs to be interrupted.
• Vengeful Shades - adds that hunt a player. If the player is reached, the shade will explode and do loads of aoe damage.
• Touch of Insignificance - stacking debuff that reduces threat generation by 20% per stack. Due to this, two tanks need to switch tanking her when the stacks are starting to hurt the current tank's threat.

Our first experience: We wiped many times on this encounter since we didn't handle the adds well enough at the same time as burning down her shield. We hit the enrage timer a couple of times. The tanks (we use three tanks) have their jobs cut out for them, picking up the seven adds before they do damage to the raid. The dps need to be on their top game as well, since the longer it takes to kill the adds, the shorter time is spent on burning down the shield. Also, the longer the adds live, the bigger chance that they will be empowered or deformed.

There are two more encounters in The Lower Spire. I'll get to them in my next post.

Patch 3.3: First Impressions

I was prepared for the worst after hearing stories about crashing servers and immense latencies, but my patch day experience was only spoiled by one disconnect, and I wasn't lagging at all.

The first thing I did was to respec. I moved my three "filler points" in the prot tree from Reckoning and put them in Divine Sacrifice and Divine Guardian. Otherwise my spec stays the same as before.

I managed to do my cooking daily before someone in the guild needed a tank for the new heroics. I hadn't read much about the instances, and didn't know much more than that they were three and that we were supposed to run behind Jaina's skinny behind most of the time. Even though we had a full group, we used the Dungeon Finder feature to be teleported to the instance.

Even though I love the efficiency of being teleported straight to any instance, it kind of takes away the feeling of being part of a "big" world. When you had to fly to every instance, it gave you a feeling that you actually had to travel a distance from your safe haven to get to the place where the vile monsters rip brave adventurers to small pieces. Now you can spend all your time in Dalaran, just waiting for a teleport to the other side of the world (literally), and when you are done, you will be safe back at the inn, with a barmaid willing to please just within arm's reach.

Why would I want a fancy flying mount if I won't be travelling anywhere?

Anyhow, we got the the first instance, went inside, and started pulling. After a couple of groups, I realized that the healer had been AFK since we zoned in, so I took a break and drank some mana tea. Beware of the OOM monster when you tank these instances!

As soon as the healer came back, I pulled a new group, and we wiped. It was a bit surprising to be honest, but shit does happen. After that, we burned through all three instances up to the Lich King himself.

Spoiler alert: The Lich King fight consists of the entire group running away like little girls.

On the last ice wall, I managed to lose our healer to a stray mob, and after that, the Lich King caught up with me and killed me. The rest of the group ran away to safety, and got their heroic achievements, while me and the healer got nada. So I guess I have to run the last instance again just for the achievement...

Even though I didn't lag or disconnect much, there was a VERY annoying thing that screwed up my tanking: All mobs wanted to run through me and fight me from behind. It didn't matter how I pulled, the same thing happened all the time. So I had to constantly move around while tanking, which my rogue and ret pally companions didn't enjoy much. I really hope this is a bug, because it made tanking alot harder and very annoying. I can't even imagine how nasty tanking Anub'arak's adds on heroic will be if they keep running through you and attack you from behind...

After the heroics, I went to the new 25-man raid. I'll get back to that one in a later post.

So far, I'm impressed with the patch. The new dungeons are cool (at least the first time you run them), the Dungeon Finder tool seems nice, and the new raid instance is sexy. My first impression of the patch is that it's much better than the disappointing 3.2 patch. But it's only been one day, so I'll probably soon find something to complain about...

Weekly Raid Rant

Welcome to the Weekly Raid Rant. In this edition, we will look at the raids that my restoration shaman participated in this week.

First off was a PUG trip to Vault of Archavon (25). The good thing was that we one-shotted all the bosses in there. The bad thing was that Koralon only dropped hunter loot, and we didn't bring any hunters. As usual, nobody needed anything from Archavon.

Blizzard really need to split this raid instance into three (or four, after the next patch) individual instances. The people who are geared enough to down Koralon don't need anything from Archavon, and the people who need loot from Archavon don't have good enough gear to down Koralon. This will get even worse when Blizzard adds the fourth boss in here. It's insane to have a raid instance with bosses from four different Tier levels. It's almost like putting Yogg-Saron, Anub'arak, and Arthas in Naxxramas, next to Kel'Thuzad...

The next raid for my brave healer was Trial of the Crusader (25) with the guild's second group. This group consists of alts and players who are not picked in our "main" raid group. For the second week in a row, this group failed to kill Anub'arak. Yes, you read it right: A guild ToC run that fails to kill Anub'arak two weeks in a row.

People played like morons. Not enough dps on snobolds, mistresses, fel infernals, burrowers, scarabs, and valkyrs' shields. No cc or interrupts on Faction Champions. By shear brute force (thanks to several people actually out-gearing the place) we reached Anub'arak with only one wipe. We survived TWO missed stuns on Icehowl, several people getting killed by infernals on Jaraxxus, and a 15 minute long Faction Champions fight. The wipe came at Twin Valkyrs when they managed to heal themselves twice, and we hit the enrage timer.

I've noticed that people are getting sloppier every week when we raid in this group. Instead of improving from doing the fights over and over, people instead start making stupid mistakes and taking stupid risks. As a healer, the only thing you can do is heal your brains out and scream out in agony.

When the raid was called after just one wipe on Anub'arak (since it was obvious it wasn't worth continuing) I needed to use all that adrenaline I pumped into my system, so I went into a PUG Onyxia (25).

This PUG had all a normal Onyxia PUG has: An arms warrior doing 600 dps. A feral druid doing barely 1k dps. Mages that die immediately when the whelps come. Melee that don't run out of fire novas. And two holy paladins that healed LESS than the paladin tank did with his Judgement of Light. After a wipe, we downed the dragon on the second attempt. I ended up doing more than 30% of the total healing in the raid.

The worst healers in PUGs always seem to be paladins these days. Way too often I see paladin healers only spamming Flash of Light and not using Beacon of Light. They end up dead last on the healing meter, even when they are tank healing, and they always do less than 2k hps. Of course there are good paladin healers out there, and they usually blow the other healers away when using their spells in the right way, but they, sadly, seem to be the minority. At least in the PUGs I end up in.

Well, that's the end of this edition of the Weekly Raid Rant. I'm crossing my fingers for a patch release this week. I need new content to rant about.