Posts with tag icecrown

Modk of Juggernaut has obtained the world's first Shadowmourne! It's the final legendary weapon in the Wrath of the Lich King expansion (at least, that we know of) before Cataclysm is due out. The quest line to earn the weapon is both costly and long. So a big congrats to Modk! I suspect we'll gradually be seeing more and more of these. Who knows how many we'll have by the time the new expansion is released?

If you're curious to see the proc of the weapon in action, check out the video on MMO Champion.

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.

You'll find the Blood Queen at the top floor above the chamber that has the Blood Princes. She is the head boss in the wing and is one of the few encounters in the instance that drops tier 10 tokens. This will be a high stress encounter for healers as there is so much going on at once.

Piece of cake? Oh you bet. The strain will be on your DPS players to take her down before the enrage. For us healers, we just have to stand on our head and balance raid health for about 5 minutes.

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!

Here at WoW.com we're on a Daily Quest 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!

For those of you who may have been living under a rock and haven't heard of Icecrown Citadel, I'll start simple with the basics: Icecrown Citadel is a winged dungeon with both raid and 5-man content. And right now it's the raid everyone's in as they struggle towards a final, epic encounter with the Lich King. I'm not going to round-up everything that's been said about this dungeon -- because then we'd both be here all day -- but offer you a sampling of recent ICC-related articles from around the web.

• I am a Paladin talks about healing for Valithria Dreamwalker. (And if you're looking for more info on Valithria, we have a guide for you, too.)
• Rhidach of Righteous Defense learns the hard way that the Blood Council has a 10 minute enrage timer.
• Larisa at the Pink Pigtail Inn wonders if the hard mode bosses are going down too easily.
• Almost Evil offers first thoughts on Sindragosa.
• Teza at Wowraid has collected a number of ICC hard mode videos for your perusal.
• Spicytuna talks about the Gunship Battle for frost mages.
• OutDPS offers advice for hunters fighting Festergut.
• On WoW.com this week, we covered healing Professor Putricide and taking down the Blood Princes.

For more from the blogosphere on [topic redacted], check back tomorrow for another Daily Quest!

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.

Arguably one of the most unique encounters in the entire game, Valithria Dreamwalker is one where the success of the raid rests entirely on the shoulders of healers. After some more practice and attempts, I can pass on several aspects of the fight that I learned onto you.

Boubouille over at MMO-Champion uncovered two new recolors of the stock deathcharger mount in Patch 3.3.2; one red one, one blue one. There's a summon spell for one of them, the Crimson Deathcharger, corresponding to the red recolored Crimson Deathcharger creature, and while there isn't a spell for the blue one, the files also contain an Azure Deathcharger creature.

There's little information on where these come from, and judging from the state of the various spells involved, it's likely that they're simply not fully implemented yet. We can speculate, though! BB notes that Blizzard has said that there'll be at least one more patch before 4.0, and these could be a faction- or quest-based reward involving Icecrown or the Ashen Verdict.

I got a little antsy about making the iconic death knight amount available to the general public, if that's even happening, but then my brain turned on and I remembered that the forsaken, human, dwarf, tauren, night elf, blood elf, and troll mounts have been available to other races in one way for a very long time. Of course, no other class can get the paladin charger model, for example, so maybe I'm approaching it all wrong.

Either way. We'll likely see these bony ponies pop up again at a later date, and we'll keep you posted.

GuildOx reports that Paragon, from the European Lightning's Blade realm, has defeated the Lich King and acquired the Frozen Throne achievement. While well-known guild Ensidia had defeated him yesterday on 25-man difficulty, they also employed some dubious techniques to win and later paid the price for it by having their loot and achievements removed.

Paragon, on the other hand, appears to have completed the encounter in an exploit-free manner and, according to MMO-Champion's Boubouille, did it on their first try. Congratulations go out to Paragon on their clean kill. Now let's see some of those heroic achievements!

Icecrown Citadel is just full of news tonight. Hot on the heels of the Lich King's entire loot table being revealed, it appears that the Icecrown raid weeklies are now available. There seem to be five different raid weeklies (here's the list), existing in both 10- and 25-man versions, and they appear to be given by a different questgiver within Icecrown Citadel for each quest.

Tonight Anne, our new lore columnist, did the 25-man version of Securing the Ramparts, and she reports back that the frost giant (a special mob that appears only for the quest) was "friggen HARD" and that although they got it in a couple of tries, a PuG might have trouble. There was an interesting fight mechanic in the form of a disease debuff that must be passed to another player within 30 seconds, or else it kills the target. The original target is now immune for 30 seconds (no tagbacks, I guess).

The giant dropped no loot, but for completing the quest you get Sack of Frosty Treasures, which contains 5 Emblems of Frost, some gold, and a chance for epic gems. Has anyone else had a chance to try the new weeklies yet?

Welcome to Lichborne, wow.com's weekly death knight column. This week, we continue our breakneck tour of the fabulous Ice Crown Citadel, premiere vacation getaway of the dead, rich, and infamous.

Our look at ICC death knight loot continues this week with the Crimson Hall. Prepare for corny twilight jokes to go with your raiding (trust me, I know they're coming, and I will be making many of them). There's only 2 boss battles in this wing, but there's still plenty of loot to discuss. As before, I'd suggest you check out the introduction to the Lower Spire loot guide, as it does include some basic stat rundowns and philosophies that you should keep in mind as you read these guides.

There's also a few wrenches in the gears (but good wrenches, since they involve buffs) for your loot selections as of Patch 3.3.2, which I'd expect will be live by the time you read this. We'll be getting an Ashen Verdict strength ring and a slight stat adjustment on tier 10 tank armor, so keep those in mind as you read. In short, you'll probably be keeping the Ashen Verdict strength ring as one of your main rings, and tier 10 tank gear looks a lot sexier now, at least for physical-based fights.

Rotface probably has the best name in World of Warcraft. Can't you just see a pair of elementary school kids standing out in the playground, yelling at each other? "Well, you're a Rotface!" "Well, you're just a Festergut!" The comparison's pretty apt when you hear Rotface's voice, too. And then that voice gets even better when Professor Putricide yelling, "Good news, everyone! The slime is working again!"

Rotface is the mirror twin of Festergut. I usually raid Festergut first, and then go to visit Rotface. Rotface manages to be both a DPS check and a coordination check in a single fight. This is because Rotface does things to your raid. The longer you let Rotface stack up these things, the more difficult Rotface becomes. It's not necessarily that the damage increases as much as you're increasing the likelihood that something will go wrong. It's therefore best to burn him down as quickly as possible, even while trying to handle the coordination elements of the fight.

Jump behind the cut and let's check out the fight.

Every Sunday Spiritual Guidance offers holy and discipline priests advice on how to wield the holy light and groove to the disco night. Your hostess Dawn Moore will provide the music.

Hey ladies! Hey fellas! You know you're doin' good 'cause they're jealous *Pop-Pop* And they only hate ya 'cause you're a go-getter *Pop-Pop* Pop ya collar - Don't let 'em sweat 'cha! *POP* No clue what I'm talking about? Trust me, it's better that way. Though, if you don't know why I'm talking about popped collars, let me direct you to the picture above. It would seem popped collars are all the rage in Icecrown Citadel. I don't know what Blizzard was thinking with this, especially for priests. If anything, warlocks and mages are the frat boys of WoW. Or paladins. Well, whatever it is, this week I'll be talking about loot drops in Icecrown Citadel.

But first, a story.

By now, those of you that have slowly progressed throughout the initial part of Icecrown have witnessed (or at least triggered) various traps. Some traps seem to show up after your group has cleared out a room or killed certain mobs or met some other condition like the ones before Lord Marrowgar.

But wait, there are more of them!

Dinaer at Forever a Noob demonstrates that there are more traps as you progress through the levels of Icecrown Citadel.

• Spirit alarm: Trip these to bring in the big skeletons. Great for reputation. There are four of these in the two chambers leading up to Lord Marrowgar.
• Mist trap: Not exactly a trap per se, but it can catch the unwitting raider off guard if they run into it. Either have a rogue disable it on the side, or activate the teleporter on the other side and beam in. You'll run into it after you've downed the Deathbringer and zone in behind him.
• Geist trap: You'll find these littered in the hallways of the Plagueworks. Have a tank behind the raid to intercept them as they appear.

I wonder what other traps we'll see in the remaining parts of Icecrown. I can't remember the last instance that had traps on the scale of Icecrown.