I would have called this something like “initial patch 3.3 impressions” or something, but then this post would have looked like:
FIRE PVP YESSS
QUEL’DELAR AAWWWWWWWWRRRRRRIIIIGHT
OHMAN THAT INSTANCE what was thaaat holy crap holy crap the lich king MARROWGAR HITSA SOA HARDA amfkmgoagoajk.
So perhaps initial structured discourse would be the best way to describe it.
Off we go!
Patch night is always brutal. So many addons… so broken… there were bloody bits of .lua all over the walls! Poor OhNoesQueues… he shouldn’t have come! We should have known this was going to happen!
(OhNoesQueues is updated and presumably working now, so everyone can take a deep breath and run to the nearest wall and relax.)
Surprisingly, we actually did get to raid tonight, though there was a brief hiccup when myself and the main tank ended up locked behind “a character with that name already exists” when the world server went kaput.
Icecrown Citadel is delightfully difficult. By that I mean, the trash will kick your ass if you don’t pay attention, and the bosses are not one shottable. At least not by us, and it was pretty obvious nobody had really “seen” the fights before. The fights, so far, also do not feel impossible. It just takes a few wipes for everyone to get the hang of things, then down goes the boss.
As an aside, when I say I learn as much as possible about a boss before I actually attempt it, that does not include actually running the content on the PTR. I do not, and have never, run any group content on PTRs, whether it be raids or 5-man instances. I’ll watch videos of other people doing that, read up on the tentative strats people are putting together, but I never actually do the content until it’s live.
Anyway, back to ICC. We wiped once to trash when we somehow managed to get a full pack of six (of which four were caster mobs) and two huge ass giants with a million hitpoints and a saber lash capable of near one shotting any non-tank.
For the trash, be mindful of webwraps. They have more HP than you’re accustomed to from Naxx and AN, but it’s basically the same thing. Anyone can be wrapped, even tanks. Or at least ours were. The trash mob named “Servant of the Throne” also casts this Glacial Blast thing, which is a row of spikes that it shoots at someone, but hitting everything else in its path.
Picture the Lurker unit from Starcraft, and that’s about what these guys do. Interrupt it if you can, otherwise stay spread out (this is more for melee than anything) so you don’t get crushed by two of them at once.
Marrowgar himself is a fairly straightforward fight, but it more than likely will take your healers a bit of time to adjust to “oh sweet baby jesus those tanks are taking a lot of damage and I have to keep moving all the time what is this I don’t even”. He doesn’t hit as hard as the stuff in Heroic ToGC, but he still hits pretty hard. No two shotting of tanks, but three shots are definitely possible.
The Deathwhisper trash can also be pretty scary. The humongous spider chicks deal a lot of shadow damage to everyone all the time, and they put a mark of some sort on a random raid member, INCLUDING PETS, though I suspect that could be a bug. The mark explodes after a short time, dealing something like 15k shadow damage to everyone near it and restoring a ton of health to the humongous spider chick.
Just run away from whoever has it. Might be hard considering your healers are yelling at you all to stay close together so AoE heals can work properly, and if it’s a pet you’ll just have to do all sorts of crazy ninja stuff and hope nobody dies.
Frostwhisper was sort of a disaster at first, but then we got the hang of it… then slowly but surely, we wiped. The adds called “Adherents” (get it? ADherents? Oh chortle chortle) will become immune to magic damage via a shield that breaks after they take 50k damage. You can’t do anything when they do that, it’s up to the physical DPS types to knock down that shield.
Oh yes, and keep your spellsteal and decurse buttons hot and ready to go (polymorph too to deal with mind controls on 25-man mode).
Periodically, people will get hit with a curse (the Cult Adherents, the ones you can’t hurt half the time, are the ones that cast this, of course) which, if any ability is used while the curse is active, gives that ability a 15 second cooldown. Essentially a 15 second lockout of that specific spell. DECURSE IT IMMEDIATELY, especially from healers.
Note: Casting Remove Curse on yourself to get rid of it will not trigger a 15 second lock on Remove Curse.
The Cult Fanatics will, every now and then, buff themselves with a little thing called Vampiric Might. This increases their damage by 25% and healing themselves for 300% of the damage they deal. You can spellsteal this, and I highly recommend you do. Healing yourself for 75k never gets old.
I’d talk about the 5-man… but…
Well, let’s put it this way. These three new dungeons is, by far, the best 5-man content ever. It is absolutely incredible. Absolutely incredible. You will laugh, you will cry, you will squeal and make incomprehensible noises, you will have your asses handed to you, you will have your asses pulled out of the fire by an artillery barrage.
You will wage battle against a boss with over a million hitpoints while an entire army of NPCs holds off an even bigger army of undead long enough for you to do so. Then you will watch that entire army be completely destroyed, except the NPC mages because they Ice Blocked. Seriously.
Later still, you will walk into a room… and there, right in front of you, stands the mighty Lich King in all his glorious twenty seven million hitpoints. It is there, in this room, that your true mettle will be tested. Will you stand in awe? Stand in fear?
For the record, I was on my ret paladin at the time (got the Quel’Delar hilt already!) and I said “…!” (it’s harder to pronounce than it looks) then I popped wings and did my level best to bash his face in.
Because, really, what kind of person are you if you don’t charge swinging at something that can one shot you?
You know, I hardly care that Blizzard cut corners like crazy on ToC. If this is the result, where a 5-man instance is in the top three for coolest things done this expansion (the other two being “killed Yogg” and the Wrathgate chain) then whatever. It was worth it.
You hear me? Raiding a single room for months with only 5 bosses was completely worth it.
So much cursing in the 5-mans too!
(And I mean the mobs are casting curses on the players, not just me spewing profanity at the monitor.)
Everyone seems to be pretty pleased with the new content so far. I’m anxiously looking forward to dying in ICC tonight.
The only issue I’m having is with the amount of hit points on the mobs and bosses. My brain just doesn’t want to work around numbers of that size. I need an add that replaces the total number with “A fuck of a lot” or “More than you want to know.”
Great take on the wait for this whole patch. I was almost at the Lich King at the very end there, but we got stuck due to instance server fail. The tunnel “gauntlet” type thing was so much fun! I just wish that our insanely geared rogue wouldn’t keep tanking things and that our retarded pally healer would think it’s more important to heal than to type in chat (while healing, mind you). Can’t wait to see the inside of the raid tonight!
I haven’t even been in Halls of Reflection yet, but I have to agree with you on the 5-mans. Easily the best 5-man content designed ever. And in a lot of ways more epic, more fun than any of the raids I’ve been in. (all wotlk for me)
Can’t wait to finish it up, and maybe soon get in on that raid, especially if t10 is as nuts as you say it is…
i haven’t been in to see any of it yet, but damn, this post has be seriously pumped. *practices fire spells*
Going into the 10 man tonight on my mage… pretty excited about that and did all but halls of reflection last night. I tried to do the halls of reflection… but the instance froze up locking me out of my warrior.
I also got kicked out of groups when other server’s would crap out… which meant I got locked out for a day on heroics for 2 of my characters >.<
Hopefully there will be less congestion tonight… but I think it will take a few days to simmer down. Big thumbs up on the cross realm pug thing though… well atleast it will be once they work out all the kinks.
Oh and ya… I was all like “hells ya they icecblocked!” then they got all mopy afterwards… which isn’t magelike at all… I know when I’m the only one who survives after something like that I’m cheering and dancing on corpses…
Yeah, seriously awesome expansion so far, minus the obvious patch-day server-QQs.
As a warrior tank, I have to say that the tunnel gauntlet was seriously the most fun I’ve ever had in a 5-man. We almost got our achievement too – in a group that was 3-parts pug (me and the healer grouped prior to pugging). But you know how we missed it? With the pug-mage we got who had the ‘Starcaller’ title. How? I mean… okay… I can see if he missed it once… but how does someone who has defeated The Destroyer of Raids stand in big blue runes 6 times in the same tunnel? Does not compute. Oh well, I still love you mages.
And ICC is kickassawesome. Well worth the wait.
Did 2/3 of the 5-mans. After two wipes in Halls of Reflection (during the 10 waves) the event refused to trigger again.
I’d like to say I’m raiding ICC this week, but knowing my guild they will get most (if not all) of it down on Thursday and I’ll be back in ToC on Friday… Hoo. Ray.
Oh, and I’ve decided to use any Battered Hilt I get on my Warlock. My Paladin already has a 245 weapon… it’s time to upgrade my old-school main’s weapon. π
The hilt drops ridiculously often! It actually dropped twice for us in H HoR last night, and I won the second roll.
To be honest, we wiped a bunch of times. But, like you said, you wipe then get the hang of it. We picked a little corner in an alcove to los the mobs, pally tank dropped consecrate, and to get to us they had to run through it and the tank did his job.
Thank god if you die after the first boss it sets you up at 6 waves instead of back to the beginning.. although more chances would be nice for that hilt π
Unfortunately we had a bug where we couldn’t walk up the steps to the Stormbreaker to loot the final chest π¦
“…. Because, really, what kind of person are you if you donβt charge swinging at something that can one shot you?”
This was my reaction also! He was beating on a lady! I charged right in there and started chopping away when I saw that! Meanwhile a little voice in my head was saying how this might not be the best approach on account of the 27 MILLION hit points…
Was all good tho! Then I ran it on my mage and check this out!
Seriously this is no joke.
I USED SHEEP AND IT WAS USEFUL! Flashbacks to heroic MGT and everything. I was thinking how awesome it was that they were bringing back CC in 5 mans, then I remembered when I tanked it on my DK I just aoe tanked everything and that was fine.
So. Not actually necessary but if your tank cant pick up 2 or 3 ranged mobs in a pack then being able to sheep one can make the difference.
Can’t wait to get pwned in ICC tonight!
@Markos – someone told me you need a priest to get to the final chest. I imagine you need levitation. Yes that’s a bug.
on the subject of bugs… anyone get far more frost emblems last night than they were supposed to? Random LFG = 2 frost emblems every time.
People are buying items that cost 50 and 60 badges already.
Wonder if they will take them away again.
Wow, I’d have loved to have that glitch Zupa!
They finally fixed the HoR glitch though… too bad it was after my instance reset and the group I was in had disbanded. π¦
OMIGOD THE FIVE-MANS!
We HAD TO USE CC THIS ONE TIME!! Had to LOS MOBS ANOTHER TIME!! The TANK HAD TO USE COOLDOWNS ON BOSS FIGHTS!!
Also we wiped on said boss fights a few times.
It was awesome. Best part was definitely the Ice Blocking NPCs. Either that, or Jaina getting ROFLstomped because our DPS through the gauntlet was poor. Or the artillery barrage at the end. Yeah. They were all best parts.
completely agree. I’ve been playing practically every free waking moment I had and its..tis…amazing. We haven’t even tried the gunship battle yet, becasue we just barely go Lady Deathwhisper down and it..was..so..much fun! feels good to wipe and learn the fight and figure out strategies, instead of just going in, noticing a few fairly simple mechanics and boom, boss is dead
this patch is…I love it π
I got to shackle! Holy crap!
SHACKLE!!!!11!
And then I did it many more times on the current target mob just to interrupt it for kicks because the tank wasn’t taking damage anyway.
Gosh…. I usually don’t even bother shackling the shadow casters in Azjol’Nerub, but this made life easier! I got to complain to a shaman who broke my shackle with his fire nova!
It’s nice to have useful CC again. It’s nice to actually USE my mana in a 5-man. The fights aren’t really hard, although I was apparently doing the first boss in FoS wrong, or he was bugged or something. Did they hotfix him? When I was fighting him earlier today and he absorbed a sphere he gained like 5% health, but someone else claimed they healed him to 100%, and he ended up being correct. It was very odd.
And then I realized that I had to tank if my warrior ever wanted to run a dungeon using the LFG tool because it takes (relatively) forever to get a randomized group as just a dps. As a tank you instantly get invited. But that problem existed long before 3.3.
I’ll probably never actually finish ICC (my guild never finished ulduar, even now that most of us have gear for ToGC), but maybe I’ll pug part of it one day.
What did you sheep? I thought everything in the new 5-mans was undead π¦
We tried to get into the 10-man ICC, but after half an hour of refusal went and did the three new dungeons on normal to unlock and get used to them. They felt a bit .. empty. Long hallways with no trash, or a single pair of giant patrolling skeletons.
Might be a bit more tense on heroic. The occasional spell reflect from the skeletons suprised us, and we’ll have to be on our toes about that.
There were also lots of “why am I taking damage when I’m over here?” moments, not sure what’s up with that.
I’m really looking forward to finishing levelling my warrior. He’s 73 and he can get emblems of triumph from doing random normal dungeons!
Definitely some humanoids in there, at least in the Forge of Souls (all I’ve been in, thus far).
Sadly, I didn’t get to sheep frig all. We had all ranged dps so a scurrying tank wasn’t problematic.