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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 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 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 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
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 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
Spiritual Guidance: Shadow priest tips for killing the Lich King
Every Wednesday, Fox Van Allen locks the well-meaning but misguided Dawn Moore in his basement so he can once again take control of Spiritual Guidance. It's hard work undoing all the "good" that Dawn inflicted on his poor readers the weekend before, but he sure does his best. Hugs and sunshine are out. Plague and pestilence are in. Let's face it: We've all got Cataclysm fever. We've seen the images from the alpha. We've Googled it. We've YouTubed it. We already have the name of our worgen picked out. We want to live it. I'll be damned if this stupid Lich King isn't still in the way, though. We can't move on to Cataclysm until we beat Wrath of the Lich King, right? It'd be like trying to watch American Ninja 4 without seeing the ending to American Ninja 3 -- how in the heck are you going to be able to follow what's going on? So yeah, OK, you could maybe just click the fountain in Dalaran for the epic retelling of the story that Bolvar Fordragon asked never be retold, but we're shadow priests, dammit. We're going to do this thing right: through epic-scale face melting.
Ready Check: AVR is dead -- what did we learn?
Ready Check focuses on successful raiding for the serious raider. Hardcore or casual, Icecrown Citadel or Ulduar, everyone can get in on the action and down some bosses. Blizzard announced last week that the mod known as Augmented Virtual Reality will be broken and non-functional as of the release of patch 3.3.5. We'll get into some of the details here in a second or three, but this officially means that if you're using AVR to work on Icecrown Citadel, you're officially using a mod or method in a way that Blizzard does not intend. It doesn't mean you're exploiting or cheating, necessarily, but it does mean that you're not quite straight-shooting the encounters the way the game is meant to be played. Your mileage may vary on whether you care. If you're not familiar with AVR or AVR Encounters, it's probably fairly important for you to understand the mods for the context of this conversation. AVR, at its base, lets you draw stuff on the screen. These drawings will be seen by everyone else in the raid. Even more importantly, the combination of mods has the ability to draw stuff for you. If you're going to emanate a 10-yard circle of death around you in the next seven seconds, AVR will draw a 10-yard circle around you that everyone can see. Plenty of warning, ample visibility. Why does it matter?
Ready Check: Zen and the art of precognition
Ready Check focuses on successful raiding for the serious raider. Hardcore or casual, Icecrown Citadel or Ulduar, everyone can get in on the action and down some bosses. Your regular host, Mr. Michael Gray, is still trying to fight his way out of Tyler's fever dreams, so Ready Check this week has fallen to me. I had to check in the blackened heart and the mage-hate on the way in, so if you want that stuff, you'll have to read Blood Pact. I toyed with the idea of doing some hardcore theorycrafting post or the like, but instead I want to talk about one of the raiding "soft skills." Hamlet said, "What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form, in moving, how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god!" Today, we look at angelic actions through godlike apprehension.
Raid Rx: The healing lead's check list
Every week, Raid Rx will help you quarterback your healers to victory! Your host is Matt Low, the grand poohbah of World of Matticus and a founder of No Stock UI, a WoW blog for all things UI-, macro- and addon-related. There have been moments in the past when I forgot to hand out crucial instructions. Several of these moments could easily have been the difference between a 2% wipe and a kill on a progression boss. Personally, I feel that I'm under extra pressure compared to other healers because not only do I need to look after my targets, I need to make sure the other healers have the right ones. Not only that, I have to come up with a variety of solutions against different boss attacks or phase changes to ensure things go as smoothly as possible. Too bad it doesn't always happen. Farm bosses that are taken down routinely can sometimes be challenging, especially when I forget to tell someone what to do. Granted, I normally expect healers to already know what their tasks are. What happens if I have new healers or someone in a different role? I need to make sure all the bases are covered.
Ready Check: You're fired, redux
Unfortunately, regular Ready Check author Michael Gray is a bit preoccupied this week. I've been told it has something to do with exploring lost pastafarian ruins that may lead to new information regarding raptor Jesus, but that may have just been a bad dream that I had. In the meantime, I am here to save you from all of your raiding woes. There's no case too big, no case too small -- when you need help, just give me a call! Using my patent pending way-back machine, I want us all to travel back in time to November 2009 when Michael released this article dealing with how to terminate a raid member from your team. All of the information and advice in that column are still very relevant to this day; however, there is a small issue that Mr. Gray did not address at that time. I am, of course, talking about what to do when you have a raid member you wish to terminate, but feel that your guild is currently not capable of handling the loss. It's the end of an expansion once again, and the same problems that plagued guilds during the months before The Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King are hitting us all now. Raiding guilds by the dozen are finding their member rosters slowly trickling away. As Cataclysm draws ever nearer, many players are losing their interest in the raiding scene – at least temporarily. Recruitment is down across the board, and even some of the high-end guilds are having difficulties finding replacement raiders this late in the game. In such a system as this, it is very easy for any raiding guild to dissolve into anarchy. There isn't going to be another raiding tier released, there won't be another year's worth of content to explore and players are just generally losing interest in raiding.
Raid Rx: Are we focused on the right things?
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. The other evening, I had a conversation with a healing priest. She expressed some slight concern over the gems she was using. Turns out she wasn't happy with the current setup and wanted to tinker with it a bit more until she hit the right balance of stats. She ended up asking me how I gemmed my priest. I have to confess that I predominantly stick to intellect. Right when I said that, I immediately warned her that it may not be the best thing for her to do. Different healers are wired separately. There are advantages and disadvantages for leaning towards different stats. Last thing I mentioned was that stats wasn't the only aspect of a healer that needed to be focused upon. For whatever reason though, I kept replaying that conversation in my mind. When conversing with other healers in game or around the community, I notice that things like augments (gems and enchants) as well as glyphs are the most important things that healers are evaluated on. Applicants to a guild are scrutinized based on their choice of gear, gems and so forth. I can't seem to help feeling that something isn't right here. What is it that really matters?
Ready Check: Trading up from 10 to 25
With all of the officially announced changes to emblems and raid sizes, it seems like the day of 25-man dominance is nearly over. Sure, from what we know, 25-man raids will continue to provide the best path to getting fully geared the most quickly. However, you will no longer be forced to raid 25-man to get your various best-in-slot gear. I've always been a bit agnostic when it comes to raid size. I tend to do both versions, because I want to put out the best performance possible for my raid and friends. In the current game, the best performances comes from 25-man gear. Even if you have the one or two best-in-slot pieces in 10-man fights, I don't think anyone can realistically claim 10-man gear is as effective as 25-man kits. Sure, I'm open to the argument that 25-man raids are more difficult to organize, but I'm not exactly sure when "dealing with a pain in the butt" became a virtue in something that's supposed to be fun. Even more, it's not like every single person in that 25-man raid is dealing with the the same organizational pain. That's the job of the raid leaders. With those factors being acknowledged, I've always preferred to rock out with a handful of friends and truly have a good time. I still do 25-man raids for the gear and prestige, but it is kind of a bummer to be forced into the larger raids. So, at the end of the day, I'm fairly pleased that 10-man and 25-man raiders are going to be treated with a level of equality. But it does mean that now's a great time to upgrade your raid to a 25-man group if you're going to do so. By the time Cataclysm hits, I don't suspect many raiders will be yearning to start a new large-scale raid. It's more likely that 25-man raids will break down to 10-man raids than vice versa. If you don't get your 25-man raid started now, you might miss your chance. So, let's talk about how to upgrade your raid from 10 to 25.
Raid Rx: Fun Cataclysm healing talents added
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. Some interesting information has come to light over the past few hours. The one that caught my eye? Some new talents have been added and others have been removed. Chakra, one of the new talents that was mentioned during the priest preview has been included. I did manage to figure out what the talent was designed to do. When I read the talent, I began to really understand the ramifications of the talent. There are going to be some upcoming Cataclysm spoilers in the post. If you do not wish to be spoiled, then you'll want to stop reading.
Raid Rx: Bored of healing
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. Don't get freaked out just yet! I'm not actually bored of healing on my priest. But in the last week, I've tried to do a little bit of healing on my shaman and my paladin. The last time I tried to do it, I felt drowsy and nearly fell asleep during a raid. Unfortunately, these recent attempts proved no different. The Cataclysm changes can't come soon enough. While we're on the topic of healer boredom, Ghostcrawler (lead system designer or otherwise known as the guy who has the power to nerf and buff classes at will) happened to shed a bit of light on healing philosophy. It was about cooldowns and finding ways to make healing just a little more interesting. At first glance, how would you feel if Circle of Healing or Wild Growth had the internal cooldown extended to 8 seconds?
Ready Check: Dealing with disruptive raid members
My primary guild has always traditionally worked with raiding alliances -- that is, two or more guilds who agree to raid together. It tends to go pretty well for us, since we happen to be a large group of relatively highly skilled players. What's more, we're packing all the healers, tanks and key buffs required to make a raid get up and go. We usually top the theoretical DPS for our progression levels and really just need to make enough friends to keep our raids full. It's a pretty good position to be in, if you're going to be setting up a raiding alliance. But, it doesn't always go so smoothly. Don't get me wrong. If you take the time to talk to applicants, make sure they know the rules of the group and have a general idea of how to do their dance steps, then things usually go smoothly. And since the dozen or so of the core group are doing most of the heavy lifting, there's not a whole lot that can go wrong. But sometimes, just sometimes, you get that one dude who's just completely off the rails. They can be a perfectly awesome player. Skilled, geared and knowledgeable. But they just won't shut up. You can beg, cry, bargain, plead, demand, threaten and cajole for them to tone their behavior down. But everything they say is offensive, and they like to say a whole lot of it. So how do you deal with this? Dealing with an obnoxious raid member is a little different than dealing with an obnoxious guild member, because there's an entire additional issue of immediacy. You have to handle this guy now, on the raid, before it progresses into something that disrupts your ability to kill bosses.
Raid Rx: Tank and healer disagreements
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. One way I like to destress from raiding is by doing more raiding. Am I crazy? Yeah, probably. The only difference is that I like to raid on my alt as a DPS class of some sort. If I'm not busy Divine Storming, I'm taking a page from Shatner and unloading bolts of lightning in Icecrown. The funny thing about joining pickup groups is that everyone seems to know more about everyone else's class than the players themselves do. For one thing, the tanks appear to know more than the healers and the healers know more than the tanks. What gives? Let me outline what happened.
Raid Rx: Striving for healing parity
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. Okay, so I completely blew the call last week on druids getting some extra healing spells. Whoops! Now that the paladin changes have been released this week, the healing community has had a chance to digest the new direction we're going in. Actually, come to think of it, it appears that all healing classes are approaching the same direction. A few players quipped if the four healing classes would eventually become clones of each other in the sixth expansion of WoW. The parity is there, no doubt about it. At the same time, I still think that there are enough differences to render each healing style unique. Obviously there is going to be some overlap, but that's mainly to help make life easy for players. Wait until you listen to this story I have ...
