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Totem Talk: Cooldown management in ICC part 2
Rich Maloy lives and loves enhancement. Enhance is his main spec, his off spec, and his off-off spec. The other trees are there purely for his amusement. Whatever your shaman's spec, get your questions ready for the Totem Recall shaman roundtable on Raid Warning coming July 13. Send your questions in now to be answered by the top shaman from around Azeroth. Last week we covered the Lower Spire of ICC and how enhancement shaman (or any damage-dealing class, for that matter) can maximize their cooldown usage. This week we'll use the 25% buff and power-clear the rest of the instance. Rotface Regular and Heroic Another fight where Heroism off the start is the best way to go. The oozes come out faster the lower his health gets, so my theory is to get as much damage on target early on. At the end, things are hectic and too much damage is lost as too many people are running around or dead. You can pre-pot here to have another Potion of Speed available to use later on in combat. An early Hero makes cooldown management easy; use at the beginning and then again at every opportunity.
Totem Talk: Cooldown management in the Lower Spire
Axes, maces, lightning, fire, frost, wolves, and best of all, Windfury. It can mean only one thing: enhancement. Rich Maloy lives it and loves it. His main spec is enhance. His off-spec is enhance. He blogs about the life and times of enhance at Big Hit Box, pens the enhance side of Totem Talk, and leads the guild/reality-show Big Crits as the enhancement shaman Stoneybaby. (pic: grats Saltycracker on Big Crits' first Shadowmourne!) This article originally started as an enhancement shaman's guide to cooldown usage in ICC but given that cooldown management is universal to all damage dealers I've expanded the scope of the article. Actually, "expanded the scope" is a bit grandiose; it's more accurate to say I just changed the wording from enhance-specific spells to using the generic 3-min, 2-min and 1-min cooldowns. In some cases I kept the enhancement abilities because they bring other abilities in addition to just straight damage. Here's a quick rundown of our major cooldowns for the unenhanced: 10 min – Bloodlust/Heroism – you know it and love it 10 min – Fire Ele (5 min with glyph) – yeah he's dumb but what do you expect, his brains are on fire 3 min – Berserk & Bloodfury – Troll & Orc racials, respectively 3 min – Feral Spirit – two wolves who do damage and heal you simultaneously. Rad. 2 min – on-use Trinkets – Currently my trinkets are not on-use but I take them into account in case yours are 1 min – Shamanistic Rage with t10 2pc – normally this is a mana-regeneration and damage-reduction spell but with 2pc t10 it increases damage. I still talk about using Bloodlust/Heroism, Fire Ele, and Shammy Rage because they have their own unique aspects to deal with in raid. Namely, BL/Hero helps everyone, the Fire Ele is dumb as hell, and Shammy Rage mitigates damage.
WoW.com's Guide to Professor Putricide
Professor Putricide is the final boss in the Plagueworks. He's kind of the R&D guy for the Lich King's slime armies. If you recall from fighting Rotface, Putricide is the guy who's constantly screaming about what good news it is that the slime is working again. Frankly, I'm mostly motivated to kill the guy to get him to shut up about the slime. Putricide is a movement fight. There are a lot of mechanics that will require your raid to rapidly swap targets (to kill adds) and then not stand in stuff (most of the stuff you'll not be standing in is one variety of slime or another). It's not really much of a coordination fight, per se, because your tanks are probably pretty well-versed in swapping aggro back and forth. However, Putricide is going to put to the test your raid's ability to get on an add quickly. And not stand in stuff. Table of contents Composition General strategy Abilities Tank strategy DPS strategy Healing strategy Other resources
WoW.com's Guide to Precious and Stinky
As you cruise to lay the smackdown on Professor Putricide and company, you will encounter two giant dogs. Yup, they look just like Gluth. These guys don't drop emblems, they don't have heroic modes, but they're difficult enough for many raids that they're worth a quick shout-out. We'll keep this guide short, though -- they're not terribly difficult. They just require a bit of management. Table of Contents Composition General strategy Abilities Tank strategy DPS strategy Healing strategy Other resources
WoW.com's Guide to Valithria Dreamwalker
Valithria Dreamwalker is the easiest fight to DPS. No, really, it's amazing. Unfortunately, your success with Dreamwalker has almost nothing to do with your DPS. The basic premise of the Valithria Dreamwalker encounter is thus: She is being held captive by the bad guys. She's more than capable of getting herself free ... if only she weren't damaged. So your job is to heal her to full. But that's a lot of health, so she opens portals into the Emerald Dream so that your healers can juice up their own healing. Then, they heal her. Meanwhile, the rest of your raid kills a bunch of adds. Table of contents Composition General strategy Tank strategy DPS strategy Healing strategy Other resources
WoW.com's Guide to Blood-Queen Lana'thel
Get bitten. Savor the succulent flavor of your raid friends once every 50 seconds. Do crazy, sick DPS. Oh, and stay alive, 'cause this lady's got a lot of health. The Blood-Queen is a fairly unique encounter. The gimmick here is that Lana'thel will bite one of your raid members seconds after the fight begins. Doing so will turn that player into a vampire. Before too much longer, that person will feed on another, and then that person will need to feed. This horrible pattern of events will continue until everyone's a vampire. Like many other boss fights, Blood-Queen Lana'thel has an attack that can cause you to damage nearby allies. The range for this fight is 6 yards, but doing a range check for 10 yards is a good way to be safe -- there's plenty of room. Because of the need for distance, the best positioning for a caster is somewhere in the outer circle of the room. Table of contents Composition General strategy Abilities Tank strategy DPS strategy Healing strategy Other resources
WoW.com's Guide to the Gunship Battle
Here's the quick summary of the Gunship Battle in Icecrown Citadel. You run onto the boats and grab your backpacks from the goblin. You put that in your shirt slot right away. (If you wait until you're in combat, you'll find yourself unable to put on the vital piece of equipment.) Some of your raid will get inside the guns on deck. And then the people in the guns blow up the enemy boat. A tank on your home ship tanks adds as they appear. When guns get frozen, an "away" team consisting of a tank, a healer and some DPS shoot over to the other ship. The tank tanks the enemy faction boss, the DPS kills the mage and the healer keeps them all alive. Rinse and repeat. Now, we will go into more detail. Table of contents Composition General strategy Abilities Tank strategy DPS strategy Healing strategy Other resources
WoW.com's Guide to Lady Deathwhisper
Lady Deathwhisper is a two-phase fight. When you approach her in her throne room, you'll immediately note that she is standing on a stage. She's surrounded by a big mana shield. In order to get to her, you have to beat down that mana shield. When you get all the way through the shield, she immediately becomes mobile and starts to fight you. Of course, you don't get to remain unmolested when you're trying to storm her castle. As you damage down the mana shields, adds will be summoned on each side of the room. They need to tanked and killed in very specific ways, or else the adds will swam and destroy your raid. Table of contents Composition General strategy Abilities Tank strategy DPS strategy Healing strategy Other resources
WoW.com's Guide to Sindragosa
The second you kill the two ice dragons after Dreamwalker, Sindragosa will immediately fly down into the pit to start the encounter. You don't have real long to set up your raid, so have your buffs, pots and order of operations all well laid out as soon as you approach these dragons. Sindragosa shares a similar feel to fighting Sapphiron back in Naxxramas, which is appropriate since they're both ice skeleton dragon wyrm things. Table of contents Composition General strategy Tank strategy DPS strategy Healing strategy Other resources
WoW.com's Guide to the Lich King
The Lich King is not only the titular character of this expansion, but is the ultimate raid boss in the Icecrown Citadel. Finally, after two years, members of the Horde and Alliance will have the opportunity to settle up their scores with Arthas. Befitting the final boss of the expansion's raiding progress Table of Contents Composition General strategy Abilities Other Resources
WoW.com's Guide to Deathbringer Saurfang
Saurfang is (more or less) a single-phase fight with only a couple of twists. Since Saurfang is a death knight, the encounter is flavored with lots of "close to death knight" abilities. One of these abilities are blood points. The more that Saurfang succeeds at certain abilities, the more he gains blood points. When he has 100 blood points, he gets to do special tricks. We'll go into more detail, but this introduction is a high-level overview. The other thing to keep an eye out for are Blood Beasts. These adds spawn periodically through the fight. They don't hit hard, really. However, each time they do manage to land a blow, Saurfang gets blood points. This is the fastest way for Saurfang to ramp up from "relatively weaksauce batting average" to "hits like a tanker truck on jet fuel." In order to handle Blood Beasts, you need to ranged kite them and focus-fire kill them as quickly as possible. Table of contents Composition General strategy Abilities Tank strategy DPS strategy Healing strategy Other resources
WoW.com's Guides to Icecrown Citadel and The Ruby Sanctum
WoW.com is pleased to announce a new initiative on our site -- raid guides. We've started this endeavor with all the bosses of Icecrown Citadel and The Ruby Sanctum, and will move forward with Cataclysm as the various bosses become available in the beta. Additionally, we'll be updating these guides as necessary when the raids change. WoW.com's new raid guides are intended to make information about raiding faster and easier to find. You will be able to read through choice raid information about each encounter, like general strategies and tank tips. Just as importantly, we'll continue to collect the best available resources across the WoW community to help make sure your raid has everything you need to succeed. Icecrown Citadel Lower Spire Marrowgar Lady Deathwhisper Gunship Battle Deathbringer Saurfang Plagueworks Precious and Stinky Festergut Rotface Professor Putricide Crimson Halls Blood Prince Council Blood-Queen Lana'thel Frozen Halls Valithria Dreamwalker Sindragosa The Lich King Ruby Sanctum Halion
WoW.com's Guide to Festergut
Now that you've conquered the tragic hero-turned-evil Deathbringer Saurfang, the path is clear for you to go into the Plagueworks. This is where some of the slimy, funky, icky creatures serving Arthas keep their truly hideous and nasty creatures. "Slimy" really is the word here, as the whole area just seems ... moist. Table of contents Composition General strategy Abilities Tank strategy DPS strategy Healing strategy Other resources
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
WoW.com's Guide to Marrowgar
If ever there were a boss just begging to be turned into a totally Camaro-awesome tattoo, it's Lord Marrowgar. Like an epic, multi-skulled skeleton made of bone and skulls and spikes, Marrowgar is hands down one of the coolest-looking mobs in the game. While the sophomoric "Dude, he's a bone guy with a bone axe!" revelation has me only a little ashamed, I nonetheless get a certain thrill up my spine each time I see him. Don't let Marrowgar's heroic mode intimidate you. Once you can master the Boned achievement, you are probably ready to handle his heroic mode. Table of contents Composition General strategy Abilities Tank strategy DPS strategy Healing strategy Other resources
WoW.com's Guide to 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. The issue isn't necessarily that the damage increases the longer the fight goes on. The issue is more that the likelihood that something will go wrong increases the longer you have to endure the battle. It's therefore best to burn him down as quickly as possible, even while trying to handle the coordination elements of the fight. Table of contents Composition General strategy Abilities Tank strategy DPS strategy Healing strategy Other resources
