In this installment we talk about Blizzard's track record with bugs, the new bosses of The Crimson Halls in ICC, and the poor economy on Anetheron.

The Crimson Hall is supposed to be a wing centered around vampires, not bugs.

I just cleared the new wing of ICC10 and ICC25 with my guild earlier tonight. Our day started off with the new wing being bugged in the 10man, which should be no surprise to anyone who's had any experience with new content released by Blizzard. They're notorious for having a track record of content on release containing several bugs. It just sucks that only a few servers, including our own, got the short end of the stick. Luckily, things started looking up a few hours later, so it was only a minor setback.

The new wing was finally open to us and we quickly finished it in 10man. We were given only 10 attempts instead of the 15 we were supposed to be given, but since the new encounters weren't very difficult for us, the lack of 5 extra attempts didn't prove to be a problem. I can imagine the limited attempt bug hitting a group of players of lesser caliber or gear causing justified frustration, so hopefully Blizzard has a way to add attempts for them.

The Blood Princes, aka The Illidari Council v2.0.

I found this encounter to be slightly more difficult in the 10man than in the 25man, but both were doable with a competent group as long as the mechanics were understood and dealt with. Although it took a little effort to figure out all of the little tricks, and we even forced a couple of wipes to do so, the encounter really just comes down to control and good positioning where the ranged are always spread out. The reason we'll force wipes even if we can kill it easily through brute force, is because to us, it's generally worth fully understanding an encounter; not only to make farming it easier and faster, but to better prepare us for the hard mode.

The control component mentioned earlier comes down to a few things. Namely, the caster tank prioritizing having aggro on all the dark nuclei on him or her at any given time, having specific ranged making sure a kinetic orb never touches the ground, and having melee run out with the big ball of fire to mitigate it before it reaches its target. There is of course much more to the encounter, but they're all much more obvious and easier to deal with. Just keep in mind that having everyone spread out at all times and having your ranged 30+ yards from the current active boss mob at all times, especially Prince Taldaram to give his fireball more travel time, is key. Also, seeing as how this encounter is all about control and not a DPS race, you should take extra healing when learning it. 3 healers in 10man and 6-7 healers in 25man will suffice.

I don't know about all this talk of Team Edward vs Team Jacob. Team Blood-Queen Lana'thel is obviously superior.

Although I'm not much of a Twilight fan, I'll go into some encounter details since the 25man version of this was the more difficult of the 2 encounters. In 10man, we found the encounter pretty easy and just went in and killed it, calling high DPS bite targets on the fly over ventrilo.

All the encounter mechanics, besides the vampire/bite mechanic, are easy to deal with. Tanks stand together. Don't stand in the fire, and if you are debuffed with it, run it to the outside of the room. Keep the center of the room clear, so the 3 people who get linked have a safe place to run to; and finally, when she takes flight, spread out evenly across the room so that no one takes extra damage from the bloodbolt. That leaves the main mechanic of the fight, the vampire/bite, and it just comes down to the raid leader assigning proper targets. Soon enough, a boss mod will handle the bite mechanic for you, but until then you'll need to figure them out as a raid. Keep in mind the pattern of it's growth, and the boss' hard enrage. Also keep in mind that if you kill off an infected target and resurrect them, the vampire mode disappears. With 15 attempts on her, we thought we'd try several different strategies so that we could find out which one would be the most likely to net us an early kill.

We started off by doing it the standard way and just biting the highest DPS target first. It resulted in us wiping sub 20%. We then tried taking it to an extreme and ignored the bite mechanic altogether. We had the first bitten target suicide in the flame and receive a battle rez, and since she never bit another raid member again, the remainder of the fight was done with no vampire mechanic whatsoever. This made the fight very straightforward, but we wiped to her hard enrage around 22%. When Blizzard implements the raid damage buffs in addition to some gear collection, this will probably be one of the easiest ways to kill her on normal mode if people want to ignore the major fight mechanics altogether (but that would be boring!). Although this strat could be optimized where we just kill everyone off later instead of the first person right away, we decided to try something else. 22% seemed like a lot of damage to make up, and there are only so many battle rez's to go around.

The strategy we tried next was the one that got us the world top 14 kill, seen in the video above. It involves the first bitten target biting one of our highest DPS, and before that person goes insane, they kill themselves in fire. This results in an extra minute to kill her since if you follow the default bite sequence, you'll hit the soft enrage 1 minute before her hard enrage due to the entire raid getting mind controlled. When we tried this and wiped at 8%, we knew it would work with a little adjustment. We subbed out a healer for a DPS, also bringing in a geared rogue alt, and went on to kill her. The fight breaks down for us near the end because we didn't account for the alt rogue in our macro. You can see him getting mind controlled and killing off our primary tank healer and a few raiders. The strategy is strong and the kill very repeatable, so until and unless they nerf the fight, we will continue to use it.

Anetheron is in permanent recession, and I don't like it.

We've done our first main raid on Anetheron, and it's been a great success. Compared to Mal'Ganis, this feels like a raiding paradise. However; as happy as we are with the raiding situation, we're beginning to see and feel the effects of the weak economy. All of us have gold to spend, but nothing to spend it on. No one seems to farm on this server, and if rare raid mats or flasks are even up on the AH, they're going at 2X the rate they'd be going for over on Mal'Ganis. I really don't want to have to start farming mats again and I know that others are in the same boat as me. We're thinking up viable solutions as a guild, and something we came up with that may be crazy enough to work is that we'll just find and pay herbalists on the server a weekly salary in gold to farm raid mats for us; win/win.

Next: Road to Arthas: Chapter 4

Previous: Road to Arthas: Chapter 2