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WoW.com's Guide to Blood Prince Council
The Blood Princes can be a difficult fight for many raids, forcing folks to move, react and adapt throughout the entire fight. The issue with the Blood Princes isn't that the individual parts are so difficult. The challenge is that the Council is actually three different fights that swap phases according to which of the San'layn is empowered at the time. Table of contents Composition General strategy Abilities Tank strategy DPS strategy Healing strategy Other resources
Spiritual Guidance: Bleeding the Blood Queen
On Wednesdays, Fox Van Allen takes control of Spiritual Guidance and spams all sorts of shadowy goodness. Pros: Fox Van Allen is awesome, shadow specced, and not a gnome. Cons: The shadow side of Spiritual Guidance is a limited duration spell, meaning gnome-sympathizer Dawn Moore will take over again later in the week. She's pretty much "everything that's wrong with wow.com," and she doesn't even have a Shadowfiend. Lame. I will not reference Twilight in my intro to The Crimson Halls. I will not reference Twilight in my intro to The Crimson Halls. SPARKLES TEAM JACOB OMG LOVE STORY ROBERT PATTENSON TURKISH MAN I KISS YOU STUPID BASEBALL SCENE ZAAAAAAHHHH!!!! ...Damnit. After a week's delay to try and write something that won't make newbie priests' eyes glaze over, we return to our epic series (so epic, it's colored purple) on Icecrown Citadel. We've already raided the ramparts. We've already busted down Putricide's lab. It's time to go face off against the Blood Princes and Blood Queen. Bring some stakes and holy water, because if you don't, you know they'll only come back to life again. Do you really want to face Prince Keleseth in Cataclysm? That's right, it's the Shadow Priests' guide to The Crimson Halls. Follow me after the break.
Ready Check: Blood Princes
Ready Check is a column focusing on successful raiding for the serious raider. Hardcore or casual, Vault of Archavon or Icecrown Citadel, everyone can get in on the action and down some bosses. In every great raid, there is a council. Black Temple had the Illidari Council. Ulduar has the Iron Council. Icecrown Citadel chimes in to the chorus with the Blood Prince Council. They are three vampires who have been brought back (again) to serve the Lich King under Queen Lana'thel. These three Princes are Keleseth, Taldaram, and Valanar. The Blood Princes can be a difficult fight for many raids, forcing a ranged DPS to tank and for your entire raid to pitch in with handling adds. The challenge is that the Council is actually three different fights that swap phases according to which of the San'layn are empowered at the time. Let's take a look behind the jump and break down the individual pieces of this fight.
Scattered Shots: Hunting the Crimson Halls
Welcome to Scattered Shots, written by Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union and the Hunting Party Podcast. Each week Frostheim uses logic and science mixed with a few mugs of Dwarven Stout to look deep into the Hunter class. The Crimson Halls of Icecrown Citadel contains the kind of horrors that the Plagueworks could only hint at. The Crimson Halls is where all the emo vampire RPing blood elves went to die... and then came back! True story, and a complete tangent: a friend of mine, in her 30s, mother of two, recently admitted to me that her shameful, guilty pleasure is reading the Twilight books (which, I gather, are like Anne Rice 90210 for teenagers). She says the books are awful and everything you'd fear, but she can't stop reading them. Then she saw a Twilight movie was horrified to see -- to really see with her own eyes -- that these hunky guys of literary lust were like 17 years old. Sure, they were in the books too, but apparently when reading she had unconsciously changed them to a more age-appropriate hunky mental image and suddenly felt very creepy seeing these kids on the screen. It's one vast landscape of pain, being old. Join me after the cut as we veer back on topic and take a look at the hunter tips and tricks for the Crimson Halls, from Blood Princes to Blood Queens, including how we can take a break from kiting and become tanks!
Lichborne: Crimson Hall loot for death knights
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.
The Light and How to Swing It: Looting the Crimson Halls
With the Light as his strength, Gregg Reece of The Light and How to Swing It faces down the demons of the Burning Legion, the undead of the Scourge, and helps with the puppet shows at the Argent Ren Faire up in Icecrown. We're continuing our looter's guide to the Icecrown Citadel. This week we're delving into the Crimson Halls. This is the vampire wing of the citadel and they're kicking it up in style. There are the pretty-boy vampires complete with glitter as well as the vampire vixen leading them. If only Buffy Summers were in my guild, this place would be cake. However, she'd probably end up in love with one of the blood princes and then they'd become good guys for a while which makes us start to care about them only to find out that it was all an elaborate ploy to trick the slayer into a ritual to turn the high school into a demonic portal to hell. Wait, I think I've actually seen that one.
Phat Loot Phriday: Cryptmaker
I've had a number of requests for caster DPS staves lately, so I decided to highlight Cryptmaker, which isn't actually a caster DPS staff at all so I have no idea why I chose this particular intro. Rather than dwell on it, let's move on with our lives. Name: Cryptmaker Type: Two-Handed Mace Damage: 848 - 1273 Damage, 294.6 DPS (938 - 1407 Damage, 325.7 DPS) Speed: 3.60 Attributes: 169 Strength 185 Stamina One red socket and one blue socket Improves hit rating by 95 Increases your armor penetration rating by 100
The Queue: Catnap
Welcome back to The Queue, WoW.com's daily Q&A column where the WoW.com team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Mike Sacco be your host today. I am tired, folks. Here is your Queue. D-Back asked... "What happened to AAFL? Is Sacco slacking off now due to his new Editor title and new shammy column? I enjoyed the AAFL articles." Ask a Faction Leader is, for serious, coming back this Tuesday. Vol'Jin will be the titular faction leader. Email your questions to sacco@wow.com, subject line "AAFL".
Icecrown Citadel: Crimson Halls hotfixes
Even though Crimson Halls has been open for about half a week, a series of hot fixes have been applied today. Most of the fixes posted by Bornakk are applied to Blood Queen Lana'thel. I have to admit though, the bug where the Kinetic Bomb could trigger Blood Queen Lana'thel during the Blood Prince Council encounter did make me chuckle. I'm glad that's been resolved as well. Blood Queen Lana'thel will only be available after the Blood Prince Council is defeated. Blood Queen Lana'thel's Essence has a longer duration. Kinetic Bombs no longer aggro Blood Queen Lana'thel during the Blood Princes encounter. Blood Queen Lanathel should no longer cast Vampiric Bite on pets. In addition, Daelo posted another set of fixes for the Blood Princes encounter: Prince Keleseth will no longer melee players. So if you get knocked into Keleseth or happen to move by him, he won't swipe in between his casts and kill a non-tank. The first Shadow Resonance should appear earlier in the fight, which will allow the Keleseth tank to have more orbs on him or her if Keleseth is empowered second instead of third. We didn't want which Blood Prince was empowered second to be a major element of the difficulty in the fight. We reduced the melee damage for the Princes by 10% for the 10 player difficulty. They were doing less damage than the 25 player before the hotfix, but this change lowers the damage further. Empowered Flames will now run out of power after shooting fewer firebolts in the 10 player difficulty. We did not change the initial impact damage. Valnoth states that the Essence duration was lengthened because the developers didn't like the idea of sacrificing a player to get through an encounter. As a healer, I'm inclined to agree. I hate it when I have to stop all heals on a player in order to progress through a counter. It just goes contrary to everything my character stands for.
Reminder: The Crimson Halls open tomorrow
As you heard earlier today, tomorrow morning we're being hit with a maintenance period from 3:00 AM PST until 11:00 AM PST. While we're not expecting a patch tomorrow morning (that's next week), tomorrow's maintenance does herald the opening of another wing of Icecrown Citadel, the Crimson Halls, assuming all goes as planned. The Crimson Halls highlights the San'layn, the undead blood elven lieutenants of the Lich King. We'll be facing off against the Blood Princes Valanar, Keleseth and Taldaram as one cohesive unit as the first 'boss' before facing down the Blood Queen Lana'thel. Knowledge of these encounters is currently extremely limited, but you can check out our impressions of the Blood Queen encounter as it was on the PTR. The opening of a new wing also means we'll be getting 5 more attempts at the major bosses in the zone (Deathbringer Saurfang, Professor Putricide, and the Blood Queen) which brings us to a total of 15.
