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Raid Rx: Healing Lord Marrowgar
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. Welcome to the first test of Icecrown. Once you've blasted your way past the many patrolling skeletons, you'll run into this giant floating bundle of bones. You can consider this boss a warmup compared to the rest of the instance. Marrowgar shouldn't be too taxing on us healers, eh? How hard could he possibly hit anyway? Well, that largely depends on the rest of your raid adapts. The amount of healing needing to be done depends on how quickly the rest of the raid responds and how much damage they deal. Same old story, right?
Scheduled downtime for December 8th, 2009
Looks like we're in for a long maintenance period with a great reward for our patience this week, folks. Blizzard announced their window for this week's scheduled downtime on the official forums, and given its length, we'll be seeing Icecrown tomorrow after all. Maintenance is scheduled to start at 1 AM PST/4 AM EST and end at 11 AM PST/2 PM EST. Given that this is a patch day, it's likely that maintenance will be extended at least once, likely several times, meaning your forays into Icecrown might end up a little later than you expect. Just remember that this is the big one, the one we've been waiting for, and that you can wait a little bit longer. In the meantime, brush up on what's coming with Patch 3.3 in our big ol' guide. Patch 3.3 is the last major patch of Wrath of the Lich King. With the new Icecrown Citadel 5-man dungeons and 10/25-man raid arriving soon, patch 3.3 will deal the final blow to Arthas. WoW.com's Guide to Patch 3.3 will keep you updated with all the latest patch news.
Spiritual Guidance: Patch 3.3 priest gear and changes
Every week (usually), Spiritual Guidance will offer practical insight for priests of the holy profession. Your host is Matt Low, the grand poobah of World of Matticus and a founder of No Stock UI, a UI and addons blog for WoW. With patch 3.3 very close on the horizon, I figured now might be a good time to go over the few changes priests will be seeing. I'm also going to provide a list of possible juicy items for you to look forward to from the Icecrown Citadel raid, the Icecrown dungeons and the Emblem of Frost vendor. After all, you can't look to take down Arthas without sporting some new threads, right?
Ghostcrawler on big heals and health in Cataclysm
Ghostcrawler has spoken up in this thread a little bit about the balance of PvE and PvP play that we'll be seeing in the next expansion. Specifically, he says that they're slowing the pace of PvP play down a little bit: "Health pools will be much larger in Cataclysm and healing will be lower." We'll have more health overall, and healing spells will heal less. That will make a difference in PvE as well -- it'll take more hits for the boss to finish off the tank, so heal size is expected not to matter as much as healing coordination. It won't matter if your tank is up to full health as much as it matters whether or not you can help them survive the next hit. Obviously, this is very early theory for an expansion that's still in development. But what GC is saying is that Blizzard wants healers to strategize a little bit more about which heals they're using rather than depend on big healing to get the job done. Avoidance will matter, he says, because it'll help conserve healer mana. Fights will be more about strategy than overpowering with big heals. Cataclysm's endgame is a long time away, but that's Blizzard's idea for it right now.
The best of WoW.com: November 24 - December 1, 2009
Patch 3.3 is just around the corner in the World of Warcraft, and WoW.com is there as usual: we've got lots of information about what's coming in the new patch, including the new Icecrown raid instance, the cross-realm Dungeon Finder system, new loot and gear, lots of class updates and changes, and of course lots of new achievements and quests. Hit the break below to read ten of our most popular posts from the last week -- whether you're a new player or just coming back for the game's fifth anniversary, we've got something for you.
Know Your Lore: Quel'delar, the Sister Blade
Welcome back to Know Your Lore, WoW.com's column about the story behind the game we all play. A featured questline in Patch 3.3, the story of Quel'delar is available to any player who attains the Battered Hilt, which can drop from any mob in the Icecrown Citadel 5-man dungeons. But what's the story behind this ancient and powerful weapon? Long ago, the night elves and the five Dragonflights worked together with great ceremony to forge a set of incredibly powerful prismatic swords, intended to be the first line of defense against any evil that would challenge the races of Azeroth: Quel'serrar, the High Blade, and Quel'delar, the Sister Blade. Quel'serrar was gifted to the night elves, but ultimately nearly destroyed. For thousands of years it remained partially intact with the Shen'dralar of Eldre'thalas, who anticipated that one day it'd be possible to reforge the blade. Only recently did this occur, with heroes reforging the blade in the flames and black heart of Onyxia, broodmother of the Black Dragonflight. The blade's triumphant return to its full glory brought great joy to the night elves, who thought the blade lost forever. Its sister blade, however, followed a different path. This writeup contains spoilers from the Quel'delar questline and should be avoided if you want to be surprised when Patch 3.3 launches.
The best of WoW.com: November 17-24, 2009
Happy Pilgrim's Bounty, everybody! That's the brand new Thanksgiving holiday going on right now in the World of Warcraft, where you can level up your cooking for cheap, chase turkeys around in-game, and even earn yourself the title of "Pilgrim." You'll find information about Pilgrim's Bounty and everything else in Warcraft over on Joystiq's sister site, WoW.com. Check out the links after the break for much, much more.
Patch 3.3: The heart and souls of Icecrown Citadel
Continuing Blizzard's slow PR trickle of Patch 3.3 news, they just released an interview with Lead World Designer Cory Stockton and Lead Systems Designer Greg Street, a.k.a. Ghostcrawler, about the philosophy behind the design of the Icecrown Citadel raid dungeon. There's a lot of great information in there. Where itemization is concerned, they explain that the multitude of bosses in the instance (especially compared to the ghost town that was Crusader's Coliseum) affords the developers the opportunity to really serve players with specific specs and make sure that each boss has a loot table with an item of interest for every raider in attendance. They also talk at length about some popular concepts they've brought back for the sake of keeping things fun and interesting -- like the return of weapon procs, something we've rarely seen since the vanilla endgame. Ghostcrawler says that the main theme of Icecrown's gear is "Epic. Cool things. Proc'y stuff." Sounds good to me. They also talk about cohesion between the dungeon's art and the gear that drops in it. The compelling look of the instance made it easy to create eye-catching gear to match it, and that's apparently not always easy. The Frozen Halls, the set of three five-man dungeons also releasing with 3.3, will also have gear that shares the same artistic "kit" as the raid, like they wish they had done with Ulduar and its sister five-man dungeons. Other topics touched on include discussion of non-boss items available -- trash epics, for example, or the Ashen Verdict rep gear that'll be available -- and why Crusader's Coliseum was so, what's the word ... boring. In short, blame Icecrown. Personally, I'm willing to make the sacrifice of one fairly uninspired patch period if it means that the end of the entire WarCraft III arc wraps up in a big, glorious, icy fireworks display. So to speak. Check out the full interview for yourself here, along with some new screenshots. Patch 3.3 is the last major patch of Wrath of the Lich King. With the new Icecrown Citadel 5-man dungeons and 10/25-man raid arriving soon, patch 3.3 will deal the final blow to Arthas. WoW.com's Guide to Patch 3.3 will keep you updated with all the latest patch news.
Blizzard releases Bosstiary for the Frozen Halls
Following up on their neat entry for Ulduar, Blizzard has released their newest Bosstiary, this time for The Frozen Halls, the collection of new Icecrown 5-man dungeons coming with Patch 3.3. The site serves as an encyclopedia of information on the many and varied bosses of the Forge of Souls, Pit of Saron, and Halls of Reflection. The Bosstiaries often have information that the dungeons never really give you; for example, who knew that Auriaya was the Titans' librarian? Nobody, that's who. We just wondered why the heck she was wandering around Ulduar with a bunch of cats and a bad attitude. But now you can go into the Frozen Halls and know exactly who you're fighting and why, replete with marks on the map indicating the position of the bosses and the instance entrance. The Forge of Souls sees us freeing the souls of innocents from Arthas' Soul Grinder machines, run by Bronjahm, Godfather of Souls. Guarding the machines and preventing souls from escaping is the Devourer of Souls. The Pit of Saron is Arthas' saronite mining operation; Krick, a leper gnome, oversees the operation from atop his abomination, Ick. Forgemaster Garfrost shapes the saronite into weapons of destruction under Arthas' command, and Scourgelord Tyrannus lords over the pit with his fearsome Scourge powers. The Halls of Reflection are Arthas' private quarters, guarded by his lieutenants in life, Falric and Marwyn. Inside, Arthas himself keeps Frostmourne locked away from those who would try to use it against him. Patch 3.3 is the last major patch of Wrath of the Lich King. With the new Icecrown Citadel 5-man dungeons and 10/25-man raid arriving soon, patch 3.3 will deal the final blow to Arthas. WoW.com's Guide to Patch 3.3 will keep you updated with all the latest patch news.
Patch 3.3: 1400 new PvE items on their way
It seems like every Wrath patch brings with it more items than the last by an order of magnitude. It was eight hundred of 'em for 3.1, between the Argent Tournament and Ulduar, and now Ghostcrawler says that 1400 more PvE items will be packed in every box of Patch 3.3, including our big orange buddy up there. Given the recent interview with Cory Stockton and our man GC, it seems like there's a lot of attention going into itemization for all of the Icecrown gear, and thus it's actually a little surprising that there's so darn much of it. And there's a ton of new kinds of procs, set bonuses, et cetera, building on the "Epic. Cool things. Proc'y stuff." mentality that GC says Icecrown items are all based on. Then again, with what's going down with items in Cataclysm, fourteen hundred new items seem downright mundane in comparison. It must seem that way to Ghostcrawler, too, given that this whole comment off-handedly came out in a post where someone was loudly complaining about an itemization bug on a piece of Icecrown gear. That's casual conversation for ol' Greg. "Yeah, put the finishing touches on 1400 new items today. Figure later I'll get the number of that waitress at Applebee's. Tomorrow I personally reitemize all of the old-world quests for Cataclysm. I'll get up around noon, probably leave work at 3:30 or so." Patch 3.3 is the last major patch of Wrath of the Lich King. With the new Icecrown Citadel 5-man dungeons and 10/25-man raid arriving soon, patch 3.3 will deal the final blow to Arthas. WoW.com's Guide to Patch 3.3 will keep you updated with all the latest patch news.
Insider Trader: Icecrown gold rush
Insider Trader is your inside line on making, selling, buying and using player-made products. With the battle against the Lich King looming closer and closer on the horizon, the crafty craftperson is already getting ready to pepper the local auction house with crafted items. Guilds will need to slap on crafted items to quickly round out behind-the-gear-curve raid members, and the auction house will be the first place they turn to do that. The gear you build and prepare now will be quickly sold when it's time to fight Arthas. More importantly, though, raiders are going to see a whole new tier of gear. That means the items they use to buff their gear is going to need replacing, and the prescient craftperson is going to be ready to meet that need. This conjecture, of course, leads us to question what items we should be preparing for Icecrown Citadel. What items will be of any use to a raider? What will they be willing to cough up good cash to purchase? Which items will be meaningful, and not simply fodder for immediate replacement? Take a look behind the cut to see what we think will be good stuff to sell when the new raid is released.
Guildwatch: "these guilds in which this game is revolved around"
There's a distinct lack of crazy drama on the servers lately, and I think it's not necessarily because the raids are easy (guilds are still hitting hardcore achievements as they should be), but just that there's no guildbreaker raids out there right now. If you can beat ToC, you beat it, and if you can't, you can go back and do Ulduar and heroics, gear yourself up, and move on. I will say this: it seems much easier for a guildleader to avoid drama and issues later in the expansion cycle, when gear is plentiful, rather than right away. That said, there's still lots of good drama, downed, and recruiting news in this week's Guildwatch. Click on to read more, and don't forget to send us your tips (especially drama) via email at guildwatch@wow.com.
Wowhead's new item page now even newer
Wowhead has been a go-to site to track what's going on on the PTR for quite some time, and now there's even more reason to go there. Their improved new items in patch 3.3 page features the following improvements: Categorization by item level, with breakdowns for the five levels of items that are coming at us (219, 232, 251, 264, and 277). You can now filter the new items and search within them. Items are also sortable. And this isn't a new feature, but it bears mentioning, at least if you're a major news geek like me: you can get an RSS feed of the new items added to the Wowhead database. If you wanted to you could probably hook this up to Twitter, or put it on your blog, or whatever. Anyway, if you want to know what items are coming at us along with Icecrown Citadel, I think there's no better place to be. What items are you most excited about?
Icecrown raid access progression
Blizzard has just released a lengthy statement on the way the new Icecrown raid in patch 3.3 will be progressively accessed. Some of the key points: Icecrown Citadel is going to be broken up into four distinct sections: The Lower Spire, Plagueworks, Crimson Hall, and Frostwing Halls. We plan on releasing these four sections of Icecrown Citadel over time and not all immediately when patch 3.3.0 goes live. The first section that opens will include the Lord Marrowgar, Lady Deathwhisper, Icecrown Gunship Battle, and Deathbringer Saurfang encounters. "Several weeks" until the next encounters become available. Players may not attempt any Heroic versions of 10 player encounters until they have defeated the Lich King in a 10 player raid. The same goes for 25 mans. This means no heroic Icecrown until after the Lich King is defeated, which will apparently be, at the earliest, in a couple of months. The four most difficult bosses have a limited number of attempts on them each week. Once those attempts are gone, you have to wait another week to try again. There will be no explicit rewards for defeating the Lich King with a specific number of attempts remaining as there was with Trial of the Grand Crusader. There will also not be an achievement to complete Icecrown Citadel without being defeated by a boss encounter, or letting a raid member die. (i.e. A Tribute to Insanity). In the weeks and months after all twelve encounters are unlocked, additional attempts against the final four boss encounters become available. Over time, after all bosses are defeated, players will begin to get a buff, making defeating bosses easier. This is a jam packed statement from Blizzard on the mechanics of the raid zone, and outlines exactly what your raiding guild will be doing in the weeks and months ahead. If you are going to ever set foot in the Icecrown Citadel raid, you need to know this information. The full statement after the break.
Patch 3.3 PTR: Limited attempts to clear Icecrown
During my time in the upcoming patch 3.3 raid instance Icecrown the other day, I managed to notice something peculiar at the top of the screen. I didn't recall seeing this before anywhere else. You know how in Trial of the Grand Crusader, you only get 50 attempts before the instance is shut down for your raid group? It seems like a similar mechanic is being implemented in here for Icecrown. When I was in it, I noticed we had 3000 of 3000 attempts remaining. I don't think this is the final number. Remember, this is on a test server so the chances are probable that it's just a placeholder figure. Some ideas 150 - 200 attempts: In Trial of the Grand Crusader, we had 50 attempts to use against 5 bosses. Assuming it's going to be a similar ratio of attempts to bosses, I think we'll see a range between 150 - 200 attempts. Heroic mode only: We saw this counter on normal mode. But could it just be for the heroic enabled bosses that count towards the meter? Either that, or it could be that any boss attempts on normal or heroic will count toward it. Rewards and achievements: Lastly, I suspect we'll see some possible item rewards and achievements based on the amount of attempts we have remaining. Right now there aren't any but we could be seeing some added later on. Patch 3.3 is the last major patch of Wrath of the Lich King. With the new Icecrown Citadel 5-man dungeons and 10/25-man raid arriving soon, patch 3.3 will deal the final blow to Arthas. WoW.com's Guide to Patch 3.3 will keep you updated with all the latest patch news.
Patch 3.3 PTR: Queen Lana'thel impressions
I was originally not planning on heading into the patch 3.3 Icecrown testing that was scheduled for Friday on the PTR. Luckily, earlier in the week, I found out my afternoon classes were canceled. Sweet, right? Show time! So on Friday, we fought Queen Lana'thel and she completely mopped the floor with us and used us to clean her chamber. %Gallery-76227%
Patch 3.3: More community members honored with item names
In the vein of Phaelia's Vestments of the Sprouting Seed and the BRK-1000, Blizzard honored several community members with items named after them in Patch 3.3. Ones we've seen so far: Maghia's Misguided Quill - Named after the well-known cosplayer who came to BlizzCon as Alexzstrasza and the Eredar Twins. Toskk's Maximized Wristguards - Named after the player who maintains a popular druid DPS calculator. Aldriana's Gloves of Secrecy - Named after the player who maintains a popular rogue DPS spreadsheet. There are other items in the patch files that look to be named after certain individuals, but I'm admittedly not familiar with everyone ever involved with the WoW community, so I'll leave it to you guys to let me know if I missed someone. I'm always happy when I see items like this in the game. They show that somebody out there is paying attention to the players that are making an impact in the community, and that's good enough for me. Patch 3.3 is the last major patch of Wrath of the Lich King. With the new Icecrown Citadel 5-man dungeons and 10/25-man raid arriving soon, patch 3.3 will deal the final blow to Arthas. WoW.com's Guide to Patch 3.3 will keep you updated with all the latest patch news.
WoW.com is live in the Halls of Reflection!
Like new content? Of course it's more of a rhetorical question -- proven scientific research tells us that everyone likes new content. For those of you not on the PTRs yourself, the WoW.com team is there for you, running the latest Icecrown dungeon, the Halls of Reflection. We're hoping to meet Arthas for a friendly chat over tea -- but we'll see how well that goes. Want to come along for the ride? Join Alex Ziebart, Matt Low, Matthew Rossi, Mike Schramm, and our new-found compatriot Selfish on Ustream. See the live stream after the break -- and if you're trying to avoid spoilers this may not be where you want to be. Patch 3.3 is the last major patch of Wrath of the Lich King. With the new Icecrown Citadel 5-man dungeons and 10/25-man raid arriving soon, patch 3.3 will deal the final blow to Arthas. WoW.com's Guide to Patch 3.3 will keep you updated with all the latest patch news.
Patch 3.3 PTR: Deathbringer Saurfang impressions
I hate this fight with a passion. I really hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate it. Words cannot express the frustration. We're talking keyboard smashing levels here. With regards to the other bosses I've participated in up to this point, this is the only encounter so far where I felt absolutely helpless and at a loss as to what to do. With more time on the other encounters, I'm confident that we would've been able to get those ones down. But Saurfang? Not only did it feel like I was beating my head on a wall repeatedly, we weren't making much head way with the different tactics we were trying. It's like running up an escalator that's going down. Sure you feel like you're working and exerting effort, but you're not going anywhere fast. In an effort to lighten the tone of today's patch 3.3 PTR impressions, I will list some facts that we discovered about Saurfang. Just for fun, of course. %Gallery-76227%
Patch 3.3: Lord Marrowgar and Chill of the Throne impressions
The next wave of Icecrown Citadel testing began today. A new patch 3.3 build was uploaded just hours before testing was scheduled to begin. Tonight, we'd take on Lord Marrowgar and Festergut. Raid loot had been implemented so we were anxious to see what some of the drops would be like. Not only that, today marked the first time Chill of the Throne would be active on the PTRs. Players could tackle the raid content to determine how it felt. My thoughts on Chill of the Throne will come after the break and after I finish my Lord Marrowgar impressions. %Gallery-76227%
