Posts with tag icecrown-citadel

The Icecrown Citadel raid buffs, Hellscream's Warsong and Strength of Wrynn, have increased from 10% to 15% today. This is great news for those guilds just on the cusp of downing a boss -- expect to see quite a few new Lich King kills and some more progression in the next day or so.

The buff is going to keep increasing, so expect it to go to 20% in about four weeks.

Enjoy!

Blood Pact is your weekly warlock digest, brought to you by Dominic Hobbs. "The breaking of this one has been taxing. The atrocities that I have committed upon his soul. He has resisted for so long, but he will bow down before his king soon." -- The Lich King

It's been a while since Blood Pact had a foray into Icecrown Citadel, but we can't leave without a look at the king. With the increasing faction buff, more and more people are starting to encounter the final fight of the instance, either for the first time or as a hard mode. I'm not about to try and explain the whole fight; your best bet is to watch our strategy video for that. What I aim to do here is to once again look at the encounter through the filter of our spell book, to see how we can get that little bit more from the fight.

The World of Warcraft is an expansive universe. You're playing the game, you're fighting the bosses, you know the how, but do you know the why? Each week Matthew Rossi and Anne Stickney make sure you Know Your Lore by covering the history of the story behind World of Warcraft.

While the politics of Horde races such as the orcs, blood elves, tauren and trolls span literally thousands of years, and feelings and current beliefs held by both races are deep-seated within that history, not all of the Horde races have such an extensive past. In the case of the Forsaken, the history goes back not thousands of years but approximately six or seven by Blizzard's timeline. A relatively new race, the Forsaken were introduced in World of Warcraft as playable members of the Horde faction, a move which confused some of the player base as the Forsaken were most definitely up to no good. Why would Thrall, who has been presented as a good character, agree to ally with a group that were presented as primarily evil?

This was never directly addressed other than being waved off as an alliance of convenience, but most of the Horde seemed to either distrust or share outright loathing for the Forsaken. While other races started out on good terms with the rest of their Horde brethren, players rolling Forsaken found themselves at neutral standing with all three of the other Horde races available. There are exceptions, however. The Tauren -- particularly Magatha Grimtotem -- seem interested in working with the Forsaken and possibly developing a "cure" for their undead state and aren't quite as unforgiving when it comes to dealing with their undead comrades.

While the relative time of the Forsaken on Azeroth has been short, in the few years of their existence they've managed to accomplish much -- largely due to the efforts of their leader, Lady Sylvanas Windrunner. Sylvanas had quite a history of her own prior to becoming the banshee queen, and it is doubtful that the race would have accomplished anything, much less banded together, without her leadership. I've covered some of the history of the high elves in last week's post, but this week I'm going to look at Sylvanas in a little more detail as the leader and the driving force behind the Forsaken.

Like most raiders, my guildies and I occasionally stare down a raid night where we know several people can't make it. Schedules change, real life beckons and we find ourselves with a raid that's down two to five people and wondering: a.) whether it's worth it to cancel, and b.) at what point you should throw in the towel. For better or worse, the normal/heroic mechanic in Icecrown Citadel has added a new wrinkle to the issue, too.

It's easy to cancel when you know for sure that there's no way it's going to happen (e.g., if you're looking at a half-empty raid, or the heal team has decided to play hooky en masse), but for us the trouble is usually in that ill-defined area between what an undermanned raid can do and what everyone would rather be doing. If you're missing a few DPS for a normal ICC clear, that's not a big deal, particularly if you're using the 10% damage/healing/health buff. However, not having those DPS for heroic attempts (especially for tougher heroic bosses like Sindragosa and Putricide) is basically a death sentence at this point. The question then becomes, is it worth it to clear the content on normal so the night's not a total waste, or do you cancel the raid, bank on better attendance the following night and hold out for a kill that may not even happen?

Raiders rejoice (or despair depending on how you feel about it)! The Icecrown raid wide buff has been increased by an additional 5% to 10%. Anyway, if your raid has been on the brink of taking down some bosses but could not muster enough firepower, then the improved Strength of Wrynn or Hellscream's Warsong could be that extra push you need!

For more information and resources, check out WoW.com's Icecrown Citadel raid strategy and information page!

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.

Every Sunday (and the occasional weekday) Dawn Moore reinvents what "smitelol" means to her shadowy cohort, Fox Van Allen, by busting down a door with penance lasers and raising holy hell to a Tarantino soundtrack. In the column Spiritual Guidance she offers advice to holy and discipline priests on how to wield the holy light, with style.

When I first started raiding, it was in late Burning Crusade. At the time I fancied myself a PvPer, shying away from raids due to attunements, and the long gear climb I'd have to perform in order to catch up with friends doing tier 5 content. Despite this, sometime during tier 6, a friend of mine convinced me to come along to a raid. How he convinced the raid leader though, I can't imagine. I remember standing there in my resilience gear, surrounded by players in their various shiny gear sets, and asking myself over and over, "what am I doing here?" I sheepishly put my talents into the holy tree, and tried to arrange my bars to accommodate the spells I hadn't cast in months. I was out of my element.

And then I saw Baba. She was beautiful.

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.

For the first time this week, the Icecrown Citadel raid saw the addition of the "tugboat" buff known as Hellscream's Warsong and the Strength of Wrynn. Essentially, this buff will provide a 5% increase to raiders' damage, healing, and health. Over time, that percentage increase will eventually reach a 30% buff. For the purposes of this discussion, I'm going to call the buff "the Warsong," because "the Wrynn" just doesn't have the same ring to it.

While I won't make the fallacy of trying to guess what the developers were thinking when they created this raiding buff, the Warsong will definitely have the effect of helping every person who wants to see Arthas die get the chance. That's a fantastic goal, and I think this buff is a pretty good way to do it. But it does have a few challenges.

If you caught our initial post about these Icecrown Citadel buffs going live, you may have caught some of the argument that instantly sprouted in the comments. Is the Warsong tugboat "fair" for guilds that had been working on content previously? Will we be able to tell if a guild completed content using (or ignoring) the buff? Is there additional loot or Emblems of Frost for people who do the Icecrown content without using the buff?

Ultimately, all these questions tend to boil down to pride. Many guilds are now struggling with the question of whether to take advantage of the buff, or whether they should skip it. One can easily consider it a blow to their pride if the cascading buff eventually enables you to conquer content with which you previously struggled. Is it your skill improving, or is it simply the spectre of Warsong hanging over your head?

Take a look behind the jump, and let's talk about the dynamics of the Warsong a little further.

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.