Introduction from the ED: Prue’s crazy endeavours have featured highly on Emerald Dreamers recently, he has kindly offered to do a running report of his 10 man achievement group for Icecrown Citadel, full of hints, tips and giggles along the way. This first post covers all the ICC boss fights and will elaborate on these and the hard mode achievements over the following weeks!

Seeing as this will be my first blog entry, covering our weekly ICC 10 man run, this one might end up being a pretty long write-up since we are already a few weeks in. The content will mostly be about the individual boss achievements, since these are our main priority, and the upcoming hard modes, coupled with – hopefully – some witty remarks and funny incidents along the way. With insanity tribute runs on farm very early on we have been aching to get some new challenges for our 10 man setup and without having tried any of Icecrown Citadel on the PTR it has so far been a refreshing experience compared to its gap-filling predecessor.

Our ten man raid composition consists mostly of ranged dps – that might be a benefit for most encounters, but I am not one to speculate. Tossing out those huge numbers that will hopefully send those hard modes whimpering we have Aliesha, Ezekal, Taralish, Tokk, Torrquemada, and Xaroz. The mana sponges are Aixler and I, and we are all at the mercy of Kemilai and Farlap keeping us alive. Offspecs leave room for changes when or if needed, so all in all a solid and funny bunch of people.

Well, we have some ground to cover so let’s get started! Lord Marrowgar, the spinning pile of bones and the first road block rushing into the citadel. A relatively straight forward fight and if you are capable of spreading and hugging when needed it should not pose much trouble. If you are looking to do Boned we found it easiest to have the raid bunch up in a group behind Marrowgar so everyone is in immediate range of the bone spikes – it is not terribly important for our setup, but if you are running a melee heavy raid it might enable you to overcome it slightly easier as it minimises the amount of running around needed to reach a spike.

Lady Deathwhisper is a sneaky dealer and killing her with a Full House was one of the more tricky achievements we have done in a while and we got flushed away a few times in the process. Quite a lot of times we ended up letting too many adds spawn because we were missing one or two in the series and just got overrun by aoe shadow crashing adherents. Tweaking the tactic over a couple of pulls (having Tokk get smacked around by deformed fanatics helped – at least on the overall mood) we found that micro managing each set of spawns so we had at least one that we needed every time and killing the rest was the way that worked for us. All of the adds can be cc’ed one way or the other, except the deformed fanatic that needs to be kited, and tanks can swap around on loose targets when debuff stacks need to be cleared. Admittedly Aixler died shortly before the end and I had to tank with five stacks of insignificance, but that is of minor significance!

The Gun Ship, being one of the new and extraordinaire encounters right now (like the chess event in Karazhan – rocket packs on the rear end is funny!), is probably where Aixler dies the most because he wants to rocket jump up and down the sides of the ship during the fight and when they are in motion towards the fight, leaving me to tank everything. Beyond that I believe we only spent two tries on I’m on a Boat, one ridiculous wipe by me because I did not pay attention to Saurfang’s stacks and just going “Hi gusy I am tankin’ dis all up in fais wiv no guns!” and then he one-shot me. Oh well, lesson learned I guess! We did it quite easy afterwards with me and Aixler tanking two rounds of mages and frosted cannons each before jumping back. A healing intensive fight if any, just make sure to jump over as late as possible so the stacks do not overwhelm you and have your healers heal you from the edge of the Alliance boat, unless of course they are too drunk to boot because they, like Mr. W. S. Gilbert, are quartered on the port side.

Now that I’ve got you, let us both revisit the next boss, Deathbringer Saurfang, which up until a few weeks ago has been the last available boss. Our setup is perfect for it with plenty of ranged dps to blast those bloody blob-beasts to kingdom come long before they even knew what hit them, but I can imagine that a melee heavier team will have a hard time avoiding blood rage stacking up too fast and you might end up getting overwhelmed by Mark of the Fallen Champion. Hunter frost traps are a helpful utility if you are aiming to do I’ve Gone and Made a Mess, as is any slowing ability but not the keystone to success. As long as you are good at focusing dps this should hopefully not pose much trouble and you are ready to enter the frosty hacksaw.

Onwards to the more interesting! The Plagueworks, the first addition! Amazingly now without lag on fridays too! We started off with Festergut hoping that the Flu Shot Shortage would not leave us all sick by the end of the evening! Again, having a heavy entourage of ranged dps we had to spread more to avoid Vile Gas coupled with the high amount of aoe damage at the start of the fight dealing a devastating blow early on. We sorted out a rotation on the Gas Spores so everyone would have only the needed maximum of two stacks before Pungent Blight. We wiped a couple of times, slightly overwhelmed by the amount of damage Festergut dishes out with three stacks but came out victorious after only a short time on him.

Rotface was up next and desperately wanting to do Dances with Oozes, in the spirit of dancing with Heigan, we were unsure just how many oozes would spawn and if we needed one, two, or multiple kiters. The fight itself is not overly complicated and shares very similar mechanics with the Grobbulus encounter back in Naxxramas. We figured we might as well try and blow heroism from the early start since if we needed multiple kiters later on we would at least have utilised it to its full potential. Ploughing through cooldowns we ended up at something close to thirty percent before we had to let Tokk take over the second kite. Magnificent, Rotface was plummeting towards his early demise but getting trapped by some bad slime pools led Tokk to also take a huge hit from the ooze he was kiting, going splat just about instantly. Second pull, same deal, just less getting hit by big oozes, Tokk! We were on our way, but some bad communication led to the two big oozes merging at about five percent and we had to wipe it. Third pull was a charm though – and it was all in the hips!

Running up the ramp to Professor Putricide I did not really know what to expect myself, but we came into the room with the general impression that this would be easy enough since many realms had already killed him. *knock knock* Who’s there? It’s the “WRONG!”. Moving Putricide around the room, dodging choking gas vials on the ground, back and forth to get range on the oozes, avoiding malleable goo, and timing transitions so we did not have slime pools growing and loose oozes was one thing. Getting acquainted with the abomination and its mechanics another. And not knowing about the stacking debuff on the tanks a third! With a few people suffering from Nausea, Hurtburn and Indigestion… we decided to leave the achievement for when we get more comfortable with the mechanics of the encounter.

Beyond that it is definitely a greatly tuned fight, but knowing that you only have ten tries to get him dead is always lurking in the back of your head and every pull has you sitting on the edge of your seat, chewing on your paws in excitement and hoping that you do not screw something up. So, after a few nail-biting phase three attempts we could finally let loose a few nerd screams over ventrilo as Putricide ran out of gas on the seventh pull. The second week with access to the Plagueworks we were focused on killing Putricide without using Regurgitation and hopefully be able to squeeze out enough dps to not get blown up too much by the oozes. The green ooze is by far the lesser of two evils and stacking up while avoiding malleable goo will not hurt the raid to a great extend. The orange goo however needs to die very fast or the fixated person needs to kite for a decent amount of time so the raid does not take a huge hit coupled with either of the many forms of aoe or splash damage that might kill you. Speed potions might come in handy and remember that with the lessened focus on slowing adds the abomination can be used more to hack’n’slash away at undesirables. Timing the transitions, especially into phase three, and switching focus to oozes immediately are essential elements if you want this fight to run as smoothly as possible.

The second wing, the Blood Wing introduced two new encounters. The first fight is against the blood princes and bearing the achievement in mind it is mostly about preparation, spreading to minimise aoe damage and understanding the different mechanics when the princes are empowered. If you are running with a heavy melee entourage the empowered vortex cast by Valanar is probably the biggest killer. Overall the damage on the entire raid can be quite high and if you are using one tank to take care of both Valanar and Taldaram it spikes heavily. For us it all boiled down to communicating what was happening where and when. Missing one of the abilities can be very unforgiving so keep your heads in the cool!

Blood Queen Lana’thel being the second and last fight of the Blood Wing is a very fun fight at that. I like the whole idea about getting bitten and going on a mental boodfrenzy, but then again, I loved the Twilight movies as well – so I guess I am just a sucker for that kind of stuff, even if she looks or sounds nothing like Bella. Sidetracking a bit there, sorry. The achievement here is not doable in a single setting and you have to revisit her if you want to be Once Bitten, Twice Shy and you need to coordinate either pre-fight or during who gets bitten and who does not (the former likely the best course of action to avoid confusion and/or panic). First and foremost to beat her you want to spread the bites to the highest dps and if you are in the clear near the end you can spread them to healers or tanks. Initially the damage output on the raid can be quite devastating, so running with three healers may be a good option. I believe we managed to drop her the first week on the third pull and we are still rotating bites every week so every gets bitten and everyone does not (that sounded pretty stupid).

The third and last wing before the Lich King is the Frost Wing, which introduced yet another two encounters. The first being Valithria Dreamwalker, a fight where we found it beneficial to have three healers, at least if you are gunning for the Portal Jockey achievement. We basically had one healer focus the tanks that were handling adds and tossed two through the portals and the rest being picked up by random dps. The soft enrage can overwhelm you quite fast and we spent a few goes balancing it all out and Aliesha sounded a bit stretched out solo healing everybody. Managing the adds and prioritising which are killed first can make or break the fight too.

Onwards to Sindragosa, an upgraded Sapphiron encounter with even more ice tombs, aoe deadliness, managing debuffs, clearing debuffs, running back and forth, and madness – it’s All You Can Eat really! Our main focus when the frost wing was opened was to get to the Lich King, so we have not really spent any time on the achievement for her, although, I do have a few ideas on how to get it done!

Drum roll! *ba-dam-tschh* The Lich King, a very fun and nicely tweaked encounter with lots of different stuff going on and lots of things that can make or break the fight with just a moment’s notice or hesitation. We exhausted our attempts the first week without bringing him to his knees, managing only 42% on our best attempt. There is plenty of spreading around, gathering up, focusing adds, managing debuffs, switching tanks to make your head spin so when we finally hit 10% on our second week and were about to get sucked into the hungering Frostmourne we let out a few nerd screams as Tirion jumped to our aid, shattering the plagued sword and releasing the entrapped spirits. We are very happy to finally have hard modes enabled but we will of course still be focusing on finishing the individual boss achievements that we have not been able to complete thus far. I do not want to spoil too much about the fight – although I reckon most people with interest have already seen the videos somewhere – but this is definitely the most thrilling fight we have seen for a normal mode encounter in a long time. I dread the thought of how difficult this is going to be on hard mode because right now the first few encounters we have tried have all more or less been quite insane in the membrane (Gunship aside, iz dis on hard or E.Z. Moade gusy?!).

That’s it for now – many encounters to cover, so I trimmed them down a bit (also since they are not all fresh memories and I had to dig deep) but I hope the next features can be a bit more elaborative for the individual bosses. Good luck with your endeavours in Icecrown Citadel!

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