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All of the latest Mists of Pandaria newsGuest Post: 32 tricks for Icecrown Citadel
by Jim Dalton 
Aug 9th 2010 at 8:00PM
Icecrown Citadel has been out for eightmonths now, and with the availability of i264 emblem gear and the 30 percent zone buff, it's become accessible to raiders with a wide range of experience. Some players have downed the bosses 100+ times on various alts, and other players may be just starting out.
Regardless of your experience level, there are always interesting tricks about the fights that people learn over the course of time. Here are 32 of them.
- Warlocks, time your Seed of Corruption to hit as Bone Spike cast ends, and if everyone's stacked correctly in melee range, you'll be top damage on Bone Spikes.
- During Bone Storm casts, tanks should run to be farthest away from center of raid. Some 90 percent of the time, he'll target the farthest person away to move to.
- Any time you have to split your DPS into two groups (whether it's Thaddius or adds on Lady D or Valithria), an easy way to get balance is to go through Recount by damage done and put Nos. 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13 and 15 on damage done on one side and the rest on the other side.
- Spellsteal or Purge the Vampiric Might on fanatics.
- Boomkin rooting for Darnavan works especially well, but note that he's immune to Cyclone.
- Kiting Saurfang on the Gunship Battle is the best method. Tank goes over, hits Saurfang a couple of times and then jumps onto wall behind where the battle-mages stand. When Saurfang gets up on wall, you just jump down to the battle-mages, then back up. Just position your camera so it doesn't keep shifting.
- When kiting Saurfang, melee players who are not in cannons can stay on the away boat, help kill adds there and make fast swaps to battle-mages, while ranged DPS can AoE down adds on the boat from safety.
- Tanks on Deathbringer Saurfang can watch their own debuffs of Rune of Blood; he generally casts the next Rune of Blood within a second of the first one's falling off.
- Almost too obvious, but having a paladin beacon healing on two marks is generally best.
- For val'kyr trash mobs, have everyone stack up very tight on the tank; it's much, much easier to AoE down Severed Essences.
- If you run into a situation where Severed Essences have gotten out of control because too many DPSers have died, kite them over Crok Scourgebane in front of Frostwing Halls entrance. He and his group are usually happy to help (but don't pull the trash in Frostwing Hall.)
- Precious's Ribbon is not tradeable after being looted, so it's generally a good idea to set the loot threshold to green when killing Precious.
- For Festergut, have healers stand with melee, as long as you have at least eight to nine ranged DPSers. Healers can reach everyone from the boss' feet, and they won't get gassed.
- Mages can Ice Block and spriests use Dispersion on Pungent Blight and not have to worry about getting spores.
- DKs can Chains of Ice on the little oozes on Rotface to make it easier to merge them.
- When Professor Putricide casts Vile Gas, rogues should Vanish and mages cast Invisibility to have some extra DPS time while everyone else is gassed.
- Warlocks should use Demonic Circle and mages should use Ice Block on Professor slimes to give DPS more time on adds. Hunters, be aware if you Feign Death on an orange ooze, it will just retarget someone else, possibly a melee who's not expecting it to suddenly turn on him.
- Kill the archmage that's casting Soul Siphon at start of Crimson Halls super-fast, and one DPSer can click the pedestal in the middle for the buff that increases damage and makes all spells instant-cast. (Note: This does not reduce threat at all; every time I get this buff, I die, but it's a lot of fun.)
- Bears and DKs using Icebound Fortitude can't be sapped by tacticians. For any other tank, kill the tacticians last, because tanks can't build threat while sapped.
- On the Blood Prince Council fight, it's sometimes easy when dealing with bombs and avoiding vortices to lose track of which boss is empowered. Look at the three target frames that come up when fight starts to see which has health (he's empowered), and click that frame to target him.
- Putting a pet on Kinetic Bombs is a good idea, especially pets that have a ranged attack.
- Rogues can use Cloak of Shadows to remove Swarming Shadows on Blood Queen.
- Really, really want to get bitten first? If you can swing it without pulling aggro, have the rogues cast Tricks on you at the start. Vampiric Bite appears to always bite the highest-threat target that's not the target or Blood Mirror, ignoring any threat reductions. However, threat increases (such as Tricks or Misdirection) do work.
- On the first bite, wait 'til two to three seconds are left on Frenzied Bloodthirst to bite. This should make it so that vampires don't have to be right beside someone during the Bloodbolt Whirl trying to bite someone.
- For the adds on Valithria, DPS is less important than control, so some things that would be ridiculous on a normal boss fight actually have a benefit -- for instance, spamming Fan of Knives to put out Crippling Poison on suppressors.
- Tanking adds where suppressors do their channeling makes AoE more effective and generally makes it easier for DPS to see Blazing Skeletons when they start running out.
- Rogues can Vanish during Blistering Cold and use Cloak of Shadows to remove stacks of Chilled to the Bone.
- Standing right in middle of Sindragosa will give you just a little more time to run out during Blistering Cold, because you can start running while other people are still in the air being pulled in.
- During Blistering Cold, the tank for Sindragosa can press his movement key to move backwards and forwards very quickly (jittery, almost) so that Sindragosa won't come up on you so far after the Blistering Cold cast.
- You can make a macro for locations of Frost Beacon placement and spam it when air phase starts. This helps a lot when people are still getting used to where to put beacons.
- Warlocks can put their portals up on side of the Lich King's platform so that when the edge falls off, if you get picked up by a Val'kyr, you can teleport back to platform after dropped.
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Reader Comments (Page 7 of 7)
Squeek Aug 10th 2010 9:20AM
These tips make the fights easier. They're not necessary. At all. They make the raid more interesting, more smooth, or just more fun.
The raids of WotLK are designed to be "figure out a way to deal with this laundry list of things the boss can do". If you know your class really well, you will come up with neat tricks along the way that will make dealing with some of those things easier. If you don't, you still have to deal with it, but you'll have to do it the hard way.
Let's take the most recognizable trick in the entirety of Icecrown Citadel. In the final encounter of the raid, facing off against the Lich King himself, you soon realize it is an add-heavy fight and dealing with the adds is almost as important as dealing with the bad dude himself. In the second phase of the fight, the adds are Val'kyr who swoop down and snatch one (three in 25-man) person and start to fly toward the edge of the platform. Your job is to kill the Val'kyr before it can make it all the way to the edge of the platform and throw your raid member into oblivion.
This is basically what Blizzard is telling you: Deal with the above situation. So, you and your raid group come up with a strategy to deal with this. You're going to try to Stun them, so they can't move at all. It turns out they can be stunned, but the stun is subject to diminishing returns, so you have to think about which stuns to use. You can slow them down as well, but they have a buff that prevents them from being slowed past 50%, so you can't just toss a Chains of Ice on them and be done with it. You come to the conclusion that it's going to require a combination of slows and stuns, so you look through your raid group to figure out who has the best tools for this job.
Then after you sort all that out, one of your Warlocks pipes up over Vent and says that he'd like to try using Demonic Circle and just hang out on the edge. If a Val'kyr comes his way, he'll just let it drag him off the edge and simply Teleport back up. Hey, it saves you a lot of hassle and if he falls to his death, it's still a win/win situation as you managed to get rid of your Warlock! So you let him try it. And what do you know, it actually works! You don't have to lose DPS switching targets, so you get to focus more DPS on The Lich King / the other Val'kyr.
This is what this article is about. There are little tips and tricks that are outside of the general strategy of how to handle an encounter that make your raid go just a little smoother. These are hardly necessary to the success of your raid and it's not required out of every player. It's just a little thing you can do that will make your raid leader take notice of how good you are. Like when you're doing Anub'arak HM and one of your idiot DPS pull aggro on a spider, pulling it off the permafrost just as it wants to start burrowing underground and you pull off a clutch Thunderstorm to knock it right back into the ice before it can ruin your precious Tribute to Insanity kill.
As for your followup posts, yes, raiding does turn into a well-oiled machine, but that's AFTER you do it for the first time. There is a lot of planning involved, there are a lot of wipes involved, and there's a lot of thinking involved in successfully executing your first kill on a boss. Once you do it, and assuming you didn't cheese it by utilizing some obscure ability to win or relied on the random-number generator to make it easier for you, you will be able to do it again utilizing the same or a similar strategy. Is there anything wrong with that? A better question is, is there anything not right with that? Why should a fight require specific abilities from specific classes to win? Especially a 10-man fight. Blizzard has designed these fights to be doable as long as you have 1-2 tanks, 2-3 healers, and 5-7 DPS (2-3, 4-7, 15-19 in 25, respectively). It's really that simple.
You asked what the point of Vanish is if Rogues don't *need* to use it. It's a utility spell. If you're really, really good with the timing on it, you can cheat past some mechanics on some fights, like Marks on Saurfang. However, the most common use in raids, at least from my experience, is to drop threat. Same with Feign Death and Invisiblity. These abilities have next to no utility in raids other than to manage threat, but that's the point. The PVP uses of some abilities far outclass the PVE uses, and vice-versa. No class in this game uses the same abilities they do in PVE as they do in PVP. There's some overlap, yes, but it's an entirely different game. For example, I play an Elemental Shaman, and Thunderstorm is kickass in PVP, but it's mostly worthless in PVE. There are a few fun situations I use it for, but for the most part, you'll never see me use my 51-point talent in a raid. If there's nothing to knock back and I don't need the mana (rofl@Elemental needing mana), then there's no use for Thunderstorm. Does that cheapen the ability? Hell no! It's still my favorite ability in the game and I still get a kick out of it every time I use it to do something amazing that nobody else in my raid could have done. Or I can just use it out of spite for not having an AOE when every other caster DPS is sitting back channeling their piddly little Recount winners without any effort whatsoever.
Squeek Aug 10th 2010 9:22AM
Supposed to be a reply to kmarcy1729, which he'll never read now because the comment system decided this post was too amazing to reply to him and it should instead be relegated to page 6.
Sigh...
(cutaia) Aug 10th 2010 12:35PM
I read it, though, and you get a slowclap for it.
manxome Aug 10th 2010 11:29AM
Another nifty trick for Bear Tanks. For the adds leading up to the Val'kyr on the way to Dreamwalker, at the very end 2 former allies spawn as adds and their abilities frequently incapacitating a tank, causing aggro to DPS or a healer.
To avoid this, bear tanks can put on Nature's Grasp ( http://www.wowhead.com/spell=53312 ) and out of melee range once the add is immobilzed. This can work on several and the bear can even shift to caster form in order to reapply the roots via Entangling Roots ( http://www.wowhead.com/spell=53308 ) should the DPS be taking a bit to catch up.
Be careful not to stay in melee range or otherwise damage the rooted targets as damage can cause an early breakage of the roots.
ftw154 Aug 10th 2010 1:06PM
first off, i didnt realize bears could use IBF. o wait they cant.. idiot.
second, so much of this is common sense, if people dont know this stuff already they are just retarded. not to mention that its 8 months old as you mentioned, so 98% of this is completely redundant.
ffs...
crschmidt Aug 10th 2010 1:32PM
You read: "Bears and DKs using IBF".
You interpreted it as "Bears and DKs, using IBF".
The correct interpretation was "Bears, and DKs using IBF".
Your comment was mean-spirited and rude. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.
Jimbo Aug 11th 2010 9:56AM
"first off, i didnt realize bears could use IBF. o wait they cant.. idiot.
second, so much of this is common sense, if people dont know this stuff already they are just retarded. not to mention that its 8 months old as you mentioned, so 98% of this is completely redundant.
ffs..."
As the author I have to ask. What's the 2% you felt wasn't completely redundant?
Jimbo Aug 11th 2010 9:59AM
And yes
The correct interpretation was "Bears, and DKs using IBF".
Maybe I should have said Bears are immune to Blood Sap as well as DK's using IBF.
But then I'd have just had someone else commenting "WTF? How are Bears immune to DK's?"
SINisterWyvern Aug 10th 2010 6:17PM
Warlocks, time your Seed of Corruption to hit as Bone Spike cast ends, and if everyone's stacked correctly in melee range, you'll be top damage on Bone Spikes.
There's a horribly obvious problem with this for Affliction Warlocks running a super crit Corruption w/ the NMIC
Jimbo Aug 11th 2010 9:50AM
Here's a more horribly obvious problem - You're doing less damage to the bone spikes than you could have.
Yes, it may be a personal dps loss to an affliction warlock to cast seed of corruption.
Yes, you might not be #1 on the total dmg done meters.
But you will be top damage done on bone spikes which is more helpful to the raid.
If everyone else is in the raid is doing their job, it probably doesn't matter if a warlock does less damage on the bone spikes. It's probably "ok" if that warlock instead of being the TOP damage done on spikes instead does zero because you can down the boss with just 99% of the dps doing their job. But the affliction warlock is NOT doing the MOST damage POSSIBLE to the bonespikes.
So if you're ok that if a wipe happens and you're the top dps to boss and lowest dmg done on bone spikes, go for it. But as a raid leader, I don't really care about your personal dps. I care about you doing the job you were assigned to do and if you're a dps and you did the least damage to bone spikes then you're part of the problem.
GI_Prophet Aug 10th 2010 6:30PM
As a healer priest I often find that standing in melee is a good strategy (sometimes). Festergut is a good example of this, and in 25 man raids on Saurfang it can get a little crowded so all the priests stand in melee and fade every time the adds spawn. I have never once been hit by an add and I do it every week.
lolikitty Aug 10th 2010 7:29PM
Again for the mages out there during the Putricide encounter : it can be tricky to find the right moment to cast inviz and not be stunned. Try to /focus him, and as soon as you see the "phase 2 imminent" emote, watch him like a hawk, even while you're busy pewpew'ing an ooze : when you see him casting a *red* bar, pop inviz. Not earlier, not later. Especially useful if there's still an ooze running around that needs to be disposed of (if you need to show off and / or refuse to let rogues have all the fun, works too)