Ready Check: Gunship Battle
by Michael Gray 
Jan 10th 2010 at 2:00PM
Easily one of the most creative and distinctive fights in Icecrown Citadel, the Gunship Battle is something many raiders have been looking forward to since BlizzCon 2009. As a little bonus, this fight is also the source of a certain cloak that's white and longer than your average cloak.
Here's the basic story. As you've just managed to lay waste to Lady Deathwhisper, you ride the elevator up to where you'll see the Horde and Alliance doing battle. The fight happens almost identically the same whether you're Horde or Alliance. The only difference is which faction leader you're attacking and which faction leader you're following.
You pick fights with small parties of the enemy faction as you fight your way to get to your gunship. This is the same ship that's been circling Icecrown for all of Wrath, so you'll probably recognize Orgrim's Hammer and Skybreaker. You'll want to be sure to grab a jetpack as soon as you get onboard, and spend a little time shooting around and getting used to the rocket jump. Even if you're not going to be part of the raiding party attacking the enemy ship, the jetpacks are too much fun to completely ignore. Also, as has been mentioned before, these jetpacks gave rise to the infamous Rocket Bear.
Once the encounter starts in earnest, you'll quickly find yourself fighting the enemy in ship-to-ship combat. Let's take a look behind the jump and talk about how this is going to work.
The basic flow of the gunship battle works like this. You'll have a series of guns with which you damage the enemy ship. The enemy will be returning fire, but they also have a plan for how to deal with your guns. A mage will come out and attempt to freeze your guns in ice. In order to prevent that from happening, a group of raiders will use their jetpacks to rocket jump to the opposite ship and kill the mage. At the same time, a portal will open on your ship, with an enemy boarding party trying to lay waste to the rest of your team.
The Gunship Battle is a relatively easy encounter, but your raid will have to operate in three different groups. One group will man your cannons (two people in 10-man, but 4 people in 25-man). The second group will defend the ship's desk from enemy boarders. The last group with rocket jump to attack the enemy mage. While the cannoneers will help with deck defense whenever they can, it's important that your usual defenders anticipate and are ready to act.
The cannon task isn't too difficult, but it's got a trick or two to it. You have two kinds of cannon blasts. The normal Cannon Blast (hotkey number 1) will allow you to do light damage to the enemy ship, but it will also build up Heat. Once you have a hefty amount of Heat, you want to fire an Incinerating Blast (hotkey number 2). Incinerating Blast converts all of your extra Heat into damage. Be careful not to Overheat your guns, as you will not be able to use them for a few seconds if they do so.
Troops will occasionally attempt to swarm your ship. The two important abilities to watch out for are both from the Sergeants, who will hit with Bladestorm and Wounding Strike. Otherwise, the troops aren't all that terrifying. Just grab them and burn them down. They drop from a purple portal in the middle of the deck, so your defending tank should easily be able to pick them up. If your gunners aren't otherwise immediately occupied, they should be helping clear your deck of these boarders. As a fun little thing, all troops in this encounter will ding Experienced, Veteran, and Elite the longer they're left alive.
When the enemy leader (Muradin or Saurfang, depending on your faction) commands it, a mage will walk out onto the enemy deck and cast Below Zero on your guns. The mage won't do anything else, but they will be defended by troops on the ship. Have your DPS and a tank shoot over to the enemy ship and kill that mage. It's important, though, to note that the enemy leader will keep getting stronger and strong as they stack Battle Fury. You need to kill the mage quit and get away, to let the stacking Battle Fury drop off after 20 seconds. Don't bother trying to kill the enemy leader, because it's just not going to happen.
In summary, basically, fire your cannons as much as you can. When the mage comes out and uses Below Zero, go kill the mage. Keep your deck clear of boarders. It sounds easy, but there's a lot going on in the fight, and it can get a little confusing. Troops will shoot at your deck from the enemy ship, and ranged DPS can plink them dead with their free time. Keep an eye out for rune-like circles to appear on your ship, because that means Rocket Artillery is about to land there. You'll be able to live through the Explosion easily enough, but there's no reason to take damage you don't have to.
The gunship battle is clearly one of the most fun fights in Icecrown Citadel. It's an easy fight once you've seen everything going on, which is actually kind of a shame. It's so much fun, I wish it went on a little longer.
Good hunting!
Ready Check is here to provide you all the information and discussion you need to bring your raiding to the next level. Check us out weekly to learn the strategies, bosses, and encounters that make end-game raiding so much fun. Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Ready Check (Raiding)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 3)
videvekartuspaan Jan 10th 2010 2:10PM
there was this popular internet meme, that had something to do with commenting quickly. Shame i forget what it was.....
Arrav Jan 10th 2010 3:46PM
Im on a boat?
kozom Jan 10th 2010 2:16PM
I just cleared this a few nights ago in my first ICC PuG, and I found the tank having a /rw macro announcing when to jump over/back made it much easier for the healers (like me) who jumped over the other side and got a bit tunnel-visioned. Also, we found that putting our lower DPS in the cannons let us burn down the adds faster with our best DPS. All in all, a really fun fight that I absolutely loved.
Also, don't fail like our OT and fall off the ship BEFORE the fight starts while trying out your jetpack ;)
daphantom Jan 10th 2010 3:23PM
hahaha been there done that... i had never missed before but had a different group leader and while he was going over the fight really quickly he said and if you fall off dont worry it will teleport you back on the ship. so being a naturally curious person i jumped off the ship! however for all of you readers the teleporter ONLY WORKS during the fight. as i now know..
Reps Jan 10th 2010 2:17PM
By the time the Below Zero Mage is almost dead, the enemy will be hitting the tank on that ship like a truck. Your tank will need to blow all his cooldowns for the last 20% of the mage.
Additionally, your cannoners should be firing at the far side of the enemy ship. This is because the enemy also has people shooting your ship (riflemen for alliance and axe throwers for horde). If you don't kill them, they will likely take down your ship.
If you try kill the enemy leader, he enrages at around 20% or so and wipes the raid. Don't do it.
Angus Jan 10th 2010 9:55PM
"Saurfang doesn't have a life bar, he has a patience bar. When it reaches 0 he qipes your raid."
I don't know who coined that phrase but it is the funnies thing I have ever seen that is wow related.
WeirdJedi Jan 10th 2010 2:17PM
Too bad everyone is so uptight about who they invite to ICC these days, well at least on my server. It might be awhile for me to see this event. I don't mind too much. We still have another what, 6 months before the next instance comes out?
Reps Jan 10th 2010 2:26PM
By uptight, do you mean they require you to have good gear? On my realm most groups require the equivalent of 5k GS, which really is not difficult to achieve. My hunter has run ToC 25 twice and ToC 10 twice, and all my other gear is from emblems of triumph or the new heroics. His gearscore is just under 5k, and that is with the blue trinket I still have.
I was in the sloppiest PuG I've ever seen last night and we still managed to clear up to Saurfang with just one wipe.
Gear is incredibly easy to get if you try.
agentbuckwald187 Jan 10th 2010 2:56PM
@reps, GS should never, ever, be a requirement for any type of raid or heroic. Granted you don't want people who have a bulk of ilvl 200 in your raids. But, I hate seeing "LFM ToC 25 plz have GS of 5k! PST with ACH!!!".
@weirdjedi, if you really want to get into ICC, try using the recruitment forums on the official site and see who is recruiting. It's a lot easier to get into a guild that's already making progression into ICC than trying to get into a pug that's probably going to fail on LM any way.
Croe Jan 10th 2010 3:21PM
I have noticed a trend that if you're not able to do the fights in the first weeks, you will never get an invite due to everyone insisting on achievements. Gear score doesn't really seem to come into it that much.
Of course, if people actually allowed those who don't have achievements to get them, then there would be more people around who know the fights, and pugs would be a much happier affair.
As wonderful as achievements are, it does seem to be a double edged sword as it penalizes the casual player, or those not in a raiding guild.
Chet Jan 10th 2010 3:24PM
I don't understand how anybody can have a 5k gear score. I've never seen anything higher than 2900 on wow-heroes.
The math doesn't even work out. There are 13 "real" inventory slots (not counting the shirt slot); 5000/13 comes out to an item of itemlevel 385 in each slot. There is no such thing as ilevel 385 gear. I gather that you guys are calculating gear score by some other equation than how we do it on Borean Tundra, can you explain?
agentbuckwald187 Jan 10th 2010 3:36PM
@chet
There is this incredibad addon called gearscore. I don't know how it calculates the score but roughly ilvl 245 in each slot is more or less 5k. People use it to quantify how good a player is ...
Friday_Knight Jan 10th 2010 4:43PM
Gear Score is an excellent addon. It allows you to assess how good someone's gear is at a glance.
Gear Score is not a measure of how good a player is. It is a measure of how high the ilevels of a player's gear are. Gear does not equal skill, but skill without gear means very little too.
Generally to see if a person has the minimum skill to complete an encounter they ask for the achievement as well.
Gear Score is only good for at-a-glance appraisals. It can be abused. I've seen people just put on the highest ilevel gear they have on that's not appropriate for their role (tanking gear on a dps, etc.) to inflate their gear score.
Reps Jan 10th 2010 6:09PM
Good Lord. I mention the word Gearscore and everybody goes flying off the walls downranking comments.
@agentbuckwald187
I would be elated if you could show me one group that has successfully downed the first four bosses if ICC 25 wearing Ulduar level gear.
To say gear should not be a requirement for a raid is simply the most absurd statement I have heard. The only thing more important in raiding than skill is gear. It doesn't matter if you are the best player who has ever had the opportunity to play World of Warcraft. If your gear is not up to par, you will not have a chance at clearing ICC 25. The first boss of the Plaguewerks requires an average of 7.4k dps for all dps classes. If the majority of your gear is not at least ilevel 232, your PuG does not have a chance in hell of clearing the place.
If the majority of a player's gear is from ToC, that player's Gearscore will be around 5k. That is a fact. There is no refuting it. When I say (and this is my exact quote) "most groups require the equivalent of 5k GS", this means that if your gear is not mostly around ToC 10 level, you will not be allowed in.
It is apparent the basic conflict about the Gearcsore addon escapes you, so I will outline it here.
Throughout the history of the WotLK expansion, pugging has been undeniably easier due to the decreased difficulty of raids and Blizzard's new "Content for All" notion. This means that whereas in the Burning Crusade expansion most raids required a well geared, experienced guild to clear content, it is now possible to find PuG that can clear raids with relative ease (note: relative). This has lead players to develop ways of quantifying other players' ability to preform at the needed level in the only way possible: Gear and Achievements. It is simply not possible to screen PuG players beforehand with detailed interviews on their playstyle, or to asses each individual player via training dummy before inviting. This has lead to the production of websites which allow players to quickly identify whether a player meets these requirements (eg Wow-Heroes, Imba, etc). These websites, however, required a player to navigate to pages outside of the game. Around this time somebody had the idea of creating an addon which allowed quick evaluation of a player in ways similar to existing gearcheck websites.
Enter Gearscore.
With this addon, players are much easily able to check to see if a player meets the standards for the raid they are trying to enter. And this addon does a great job at what it is designed to do, which is look at a player's gear, and inform whoever is checking that player whether or not he is suited for the group via a number 1-6000+. The problem with this method of screening players however, has very deep roots. This was a problem in BC. This was a problem in Vanilla. This was a problem in EQ. This has been a problem since the first MMORPG was ever released. The problem is that skill does not equal gear.
People look at the number provided by Gearscore that is associated with that player's gear and say either "Oh, that person has good gear and will do well." Or "Oh, that person has bad gear and will do poorly." And this conclusion is not unfounded. Speaking from a general sense, as a player's gear improves, as does his ability to preform. But there are exceptions. Everybody knows that player who is wearing all purple gear from Ulduar or ToC raids, but somehow manages to pull 3k dps. People might get a little upset that he isn't pulling his own weight, and that other players are "carrying him" through the content. But the effort required to explain to this guy why he is being removed from the raid, and then find another dps to replace him simply is not worth it. And everybody knows that other player. The one who somehow manages to pull 6k dps in nothing but Ulduar level loot. Everybody aspires to be this player, but chances are he is playing on an expensive rig with near-zero latency, and all the time in the world to research his class, and decide if he should put red gem 1 in blue socket 2 or to meet the socket activation requirement. But not everybody can be that person. And people would be angry that they were turned down for ToC 25 because their gear is below what is generally required for substantial dps output, when at the same time they can pull more dps than may of the people in the raid. And that was the first reason people began to dislike gearscore. People would say "Hey, I can do more dps that that nobody you invited to the raid, but I didn't get an invite because Gearscore said I wasn't good enough!" This is the pitfall of this addon, and nearly any system that ranks players based on their gear. And as long as gear is the way in which we judge a player, this outcome will be the same. There is another reason Gearscore has become despised though.
As the current expansion progressed, as did gear inflation. The time the Gearscore addon really caught around patch 3.2. And 3.2 gear was at the level that Blizzard had originally intended to itemize ICC gear for. At point, many people had alts that were dinging 80, and they wished to begin to gear up for raiding. They would see a Naxx 10 run forming up, and would quickly jump on their alt and PST the person recruiting. And then it happened. "No, you can't come on this run. You're not geared enough and we don't want to carry you. You need at least 4k Gearscore". WHAT?? You can't even get 4k Gearscore from Naxx loot!! As people geared up, this pattern extended to higher level raids. "No, you can't come to Ulduar. You don't have the gear for it". But the majority of my gear is FROM Ulduar! How am I incapable of running it? Eventually this pattern moved up to ToC. People became used to running ToC with tanks that had 40k unbuffed health and dps with 5k Gearscore who could pull 6k dps on any given fight, that when they saw somebody who didn't meet this standard, they would laugh at him. "What? You want to tank ToC? But you don't even have 38k unbuffed health and your Gearscore is only 4600. You can't tank this place."
As you can probably guess, people began to get upset. They have plenty of gear for the raid they want to run, yet people are declining to invite them due to their Gearscore. Because of Gearscore, players could no longer run raids they were plenty capable of running. This soon became a common notion. Anybody using Gearscore to evaluate a player should be shunned. Due to the nature of player communication through guild channels, raids, and Trade Chat in general, the idea that Gearscore was not a viabale means of doing anything spread like a wildfire. The consequences of this misconception were dire. Players who did not understand the underlying issue behind misuse of Gearscore began to shun the addon with the same absurd blindness that first caused people to start disliking the addon in the first place.
And now we arrive where we are today. The entire WoW community was already abuzz with the idea that gear and skill are not the same thing. And here comes an addon which allows players to do just that. Now, the players who first advocated correct use of the addon, not using it to absurd extents, are trying desperately to explain to the rest of the community when the addon is OK to use, and when it isn't. But now that the community has in their minds engraved the idea that Gearscore is bad, this is a very difficult point to get across because these players appear like the idiots who used the addon incorrectly in the first place. And who wants to listen to an idiot?
Reps Jan 10th 2010 6:14PM
Please stop up ranking comments which make wild claims about how Gearscore is a useless addon that has no place in the game. Players who understand the core of the issue are on the verge of losing all hope in this community.
agentbuckwald187 Jan 10th 2010 8:15PM
@reps, I didn't say Uld, i said 245. Y'know ... ToC-ish gear. Oh well, I'm glad you use GS better than most nitwits out there. But, the majority of people use it as the end all be all.
Reps Jan 10th 2010 8:59PM
Funny, I didn't include a TL;DR version, yet you seem to have responded to one.
WeirdJedi Jan 11th 2010 3:51AM
Eh, its the same thing every time a raid comes out for Wrath of the Lich King. First half of the first week, people require a high GS (like needing all gear equivalent to the previous raid). Second half of the first week, people require you to have a X-man achievement to join their Y-man raid. Second week, people require you to have one achievement and a high GS. Third week, people require you to have the same X-man achievement for the one you are joining and a high GS. Fourth week onward, people start asking for hard-mode achievements.
When I'm on, I can count 15 level 80 priests on the server. If I use the tool, spam the channels, or join a guild - I usually don't get invited to a raid. If I answer a call, I usually get declined for whatever standard I must meet. I don't mind too much. I just recently saw Black Temple. I'll wait for the next expansion.
*crosses fingers for xrealm LFR*
Kaphik Jan 10th 2010 2:29PM
I'm a Disc priest, the tank healer for our 10 man group, and I'm one of the gunners. When the mage comes out and freezes the cannons, the gunners can do anything anyway. I hope over to the enemy ship, throw a poM, PW:Shield, and a heal or two on our tank, then hop back at about 10% heal for the mage. It's very easy if you have the jetpack in a keybound bar slot.
All in all, the fight is extremely fun. Even though it suddenly doesn't make too much sense in the grand storyline.
N-train Jan 10th 2010 3:08PM
A note to tanks, your opposing faction leader hits HARD and fast. I usually pop a cooldown (or two) whenever I hop over. Also, when you land on a unit with your jetpack, they get an attack speed decrease for a good 12 seconds, often I just jetpack on top of myself to keep the debuff up on Muradin while I'm holding him.
One also needs to be careful because the opposing leader has a nasty cleave and a bleeding ranged attack.