Its funny how we kind of find ourselves in a rut.  I think in an MMO, its kind of a natural thing.  You end up stuck… you’ve done most if not all of everything in the game and then.. things slow down… they crawl to a halt and you find yourself just filling in the spaces….

I’m sorry if you disagree, but Blizzard in my opinion has proved why they deserve the king of the hill for MMOs.  With the release of 3.3, they’ve redefined what it is to play WoW… again.

Forge of Pit of Reflection

Our guild likes to pride itself on how fast we can clear most heroics.  Its like a speed run where you basically say… “aw screw it.. we aren’t even going to take a healer lets just burn it.”  Well we’re a might be more cautious on newer instances, but I have to say… the new 5 mans were really impressive.  They thoroughly kicked our butts on heroic..

I’ve never been more happy to pay for a repair bill out of a five man instance than I have after coming out of those three instances.  Forge of Souls is your straight forward of the three.  It has a few difficult trash pulls where you might consider using some CC, but only because there are a large number of casters in the group.  Its hard to AOE tank a mob that stands 15 yards away from you and pelts the ranged/healers.

The bosses are pretty straight forward in Forge of Souls, but it is your intro story.  I think what really sold it for me was the storytelling Blizzard crafted into the instances.  All three have very distinct and beautiful art styles and flow nicely from one to another.

They are sufficiently hard that they keep you interested.  I’ve both tanked and healed them.  Tanking them requires in some cases just simple AOE tanking, but there are plenty of pulls where you’ll not be able to quite reach all of the mobs so you’re juggling some taunts and keeping the DPS alive.  I’ve run with both PUG and complete guild groups.  These dungeons on heroic are not for the faint at heart. 

I was blessed enough out of my third run through Pit of Saron to walk out of there with the broken hilt that people are lusting after.  One of our DPS won it, but decided that since I was still using a tanking staff from Naxxramas, that it was a much bigger upgrade for me.  And it is… my threat generation has gone through the roof since I got my new shiny mace.

Halls of Reflection.. now that deserves a post all of its own…

LFG…. redux

The new queuing system for dungeons in my opinion is unbelievably cool.  Not only does it basically reduce your time to get your daily badges down to like 15 minutes, it makes it so you can basically head out into the world and farm your heart out.  You  can queue for a dungeon, sit there farming till it pops and then teleport right there.

Of course if you’re a healer or a tank, you won’t even have to wait.  I’ve never waited longer than about 5 seconds before the LFG tool said… “DING>>>>> YOUR INSTANCE IS READY!!!”  Now that’s not to say that I haven’t had to wait for the instance servers to actually have space on them, but a group was formed super quick.

DPS… you’re milage may vary.

We beat him when he was hard!

This is the obligatory…. “hey… we get to QQ because we beat Marrowgar before he was nerfed… Blizzard… you suck… you are dissing our skills because we downed him before you reduced the damage….

Naw… I honestly don’t care.  Its been a good week of raiding.  In our two nights of working on Icecrown Citadel, we consider ourselves to have killed 3.5 of the bosses.  Our first night was just absolutely brutal.  Learning Lord Marrowgar is quite an experience when you’ve been bored off your gourd for 2-3 months farming in TOC… you kind of lose your edge, but once you shake that little bit of rust, there’s a nice keen razor’s edge to be found just waiting to be honed a bit.

However the team bucked up and we downed him our first night in which is probably not that uncommon.  Our raid times are short.  So downing the mountain of trash in front of him (and bear in mind you can see the guy from the front door practically….) and getting him down I still think is a great accomplishment.  Our second night in we downed Lady Deathwhisper and the Gunship battle and got 4 solid attempts on Deathbringer Saurfang. 

On our best attempt we got him down to around 30% before we lost control of the blood ability.  That’s pretty close for me.  That tells me we need to tune a little bit, and then we’ll probably nail him.  Get the DPS a bit more familiar with the fight, work on timing of abilities used and just go nuts.

On leading raids…

Yes… I told you … I wouldn’t be able to stay away.  I had a bit of time on Monday leading the raid and it felt good to get back in the saddle again, but interestingly enough what I liked best about it was that the team actually functions as a very solid team.  They openly discuss tactics and present feedback on what’s working, what isn’t and basically suggestions on where we might go next.  As a tank, I can’t always see what’s going on everywhere and it helps a ton to have that extra feedback from the people in the trenches.  It helped a lot with our success on getting down three bosses in our first week.  Sure… they’re the early bosses.  Sure… there will be a gateway, but you know what… It was hella fun… all 120g of repair bills… worth every single… penny…

3 Responses to “Icecrown… Born again”

  1. 10:45 am, 17 December, 2009 р.
    Kasdingo says:

    I don’t get the reason for the nerf on Marrowgar. Sure, he hit like a truck, but this is Icecrown. He should hit like a truck. People are actually pugging this wing of ICC in the first week, which to me doesn’t indicate “hard”.

    People may whine that he hits hard enough that some guilds, and some people just don thave the gear or skill to complete it. Well, gear is free now. Heroics spit out badges almost faster than you can spend them. Skill has already been addressed by blizzard, as the difficulty of ICC is set to scale down as time passes and the Ashen Verdict gains more ground.

    So why the nerf Blizz? Yes, he did hit hard. Very hard. But while he is the first boss in the instance, he is far from the first in the expansion.

    As Telent said, we downed this boss pre-nerf and the damage he did was a nice eye opener after ToC. As one of the healers, I learned I had to be on my toes for the whole fight. We went into the fight this week, and I was on edge waiting for the damge to come. And waiting. And waiting. And then the fight was over.
    .-= Kasdingo´s last blog ..Trial of the Crusader cleared! =-.

  2. 3:10 pm, 17 December, 2009 р.
    Nemeses says:

    “We went into the fight this week, and I was on edge waiting for the damge to come. And waiting. And waiting. And then the fight was over. ”

    That is because I was doing all the healing, while you were standing in the fire! lol :P

    ~Neme

  3. 3:21 pm, 17 December, 2009 р.
    Kasdingo says:

    Oh hell no. You had to go there…didn’t you.
    .-= Kasdingo´s last blog ..Trial of the Crusader cleared! =-.