The Hard Mode Race - Icecrown Citadel

It has now been over a month since our first normal-mode Lich King 25-player kill and more than 4 weeks from the beginning of the hard-mode race. Most of the information in this article is somewhat old, but we felt like we wanted to talk about what happened exactly in Icecrown Citadel especially on our first reset there. The following article will feature a lot of personal opinions.

The chart you can see in the beginning of this article is how we as a guild felt about Icecrown Citadel’s hard modes during our first week there. This article will be long, so grab a drink and read on if you dare.

 

Log from Icecrown Citadel, Priest POV

 

Wednesday 10.2.2010

 

On Wednesday 10.2.2010 everyone was set and ready to see exactly how difficult the hard modes would be. Vodka had already cleared 8 first hard modes while we were sleeping and the rumor had it that they had spent _at least_ 19 hours straight getting them. It seemed that the hard modes could not be THAT hard; we needed to clear them faster than US guilds to be able to compete on wing end bosses.

 

At 12:00 we made our first trash pull and soon reached Lord Marrowgar. We had participated on the PTR hard mode testing and knew that there would be a bit more bone spikes and a bit more damage but nothing new. We went with 8 healers and combat resses handy and got the kill on our first pull. The boss was ridiculously easy even for the first boss in the instance.

 

We had some doubts on Lady Deathwhisper especially since we had never even pretended to try dodging the ghosts on normal mode. Where Marrowgar had been a simple hard mode with very little things to watch out for, Lady Deathwhisper was harder to get under control. The idea in the fight is a bit similar to M’uru: adds come from 2 sides of the room and in the second phase some ghosts also spawn. These ghosts blow up should they reach their target. The radius of the explosion adds that little extra flavor of killing everyone else around you as well if you only tunnel on. It was also sometimes a bit hard to get the melee-only adds down as DK’s and paladins do partially magic damage and we our rogues were tied up with interrupting the boss. We used a bit over an hour on her learning how to stop aoe dps when the mind control came and dodging exploding ghosts. All in all we could have done a lot better job on her. An interesting fight altogether, and a fine hard mode, but it could have been even harder.

 

After recovering from Lady came the real challenge – how to not fall asleep on Gunship Battle?! I had to check several times that we did actually have hard mode enabled. The nasty looking bomb graphics on the ground only knock you down instead of killing you – how lame is that? I really liked the idea of the fight on PTR and I still find the lore part of it interesting but the fight itself leaves you cold. There is no way you can fail on it, there is no DPS requirement and you don’t even need to be able to do cool stunt jumps to win. :/

 

After ridiculously easy came hard again. We had heard that Deathbringer Saurfang was the hardest encounter before the limited attempt bosses bosses and that US guilds had used several hours on him. On my earlier article I mentioned that Saurfang had the potential for an excellent hard mode and Blizzard had really nailed it here with the design. The idea of the fight is simple but it requires a lot of dps and a strategy to work your way through the blood boils and blood beasts. There is very little room for mistakes with the bests since they kill when they get to melee someone and Saurfang gains energy. On our second pull we actually had the boss at 5% so we thought we would get the kill very fast, but then all kinds of small fails happened with rng-god raising her head with some insta gibbing blood boils and rune ticks. At the end when we finally got the kill we had pretty much mastered the whole fight and made all the possible mistakes. Good job from our healers tho, I almost had a heart attack looking at grid during those last 5% of the fight.

 

Now we had to make the choice about the next wing we’d clear. We ended up going for Valithria Dreamwalker and ended up spending over an hour on her. Our healers kept losing their stacks and the dps got overrun pretty bad. Also we didn’t realize right away that the frost bolt volley from Arch-Mages had a mana drain so all the mana users had huge issues and had to idle a lot. It took a while before healers got them red floating balls under control and when they did Valithria got healed way before her soft enrage timer. Next we went for Plagueworks and started with Festergut. Professor Putricide throwing goos around the room totally caught us by surprise and we needed to move all the healers and ranged dps around the room from melee. We hit the enrage timer once with people eating some tasty goos and missing the spores but our second pull was already a kill. The encounter could have been a lot harder than it was, but it was a fair DPS check.

 

Where Festergut caught us by surprise even more did Rotface for being such a wuss. With a lot of mistakes and chaos we still managed to one shot him and were now only 1 boss behind the US guilds. Blood Princes was the same retard-check he had been on normal mode with a bit more complexity. I’m actually sad the encounter wasn’t harder as I’m a huge fan of the fight. I just love the concept of the fight but got a bit disappointed with non-existent dps check and the fact that you could make a lot of mistakes and still survive it.

 

At this point we were 8/12 on hard modes and there was still plenty of time raid time left. It had taken us 8 hours of raiding to kill 8 bosses which was fast enough to catch the US lead but we knew we could have done better. Now we had to choose whether we’d try to go and get some fast kills on the remaining 3 wing end bosses or go and scout them out on our alt team. We expected them to be hard enough with a long learning curve and logged on our alt raid. Clearing the first normal mode bosses on alt raid we thought about where to go and ended up choosing Blood-Queen Lana’thel. We felt that she’d be easiest of the three because we didn’t think there’d be anything new to the encounter besides a bit more damage. We only had to pull the boss once on our alt raid to realize how ridiculously easy she was. Of course she required the biting to work good together with healing but the dps requirement wasn’t tough at all to us. We logged back to our mains then spent crueling 45 minutes standing in front of the boss discussing tactics and trying to make our first pull as perfect as possible. I got super nervous and when we were finally ready to pull I was sure something would go wrong. I was right. While we were discussing the tactics the realm had started lagging and we had massive latency and we wiped to enrage at 30%. Disappointed we had to call the raid off and went to 10 mans and waited for the realm to start working again. When we came back 3 hours later the lag was gone and we got the kill. It wasn’t many seconds before the enrage but it didn’t feel tight at all when you could actually cast stuff.

 

 

After getting our first wing end boss kill we had 2 left to choose from. We thought Sindragosa would be a lot harder with all the different abilities and the pretty chaotic last phase. There was also the fact that we had only tried the encounter once last week on normal mode and we had just facerolled it so we had very little knowledge of how the fight actually worked. So we logged our alts and went to Professor Putricide. It was already over midnight in Finland so we knew we wouldn’t have much time but we still decided to give the encounter a go and see if it was as easy as Blood-Queen. That was definitely not the case and we noticed very soon that we needed better addons for goo warnings and a lot more dps on the adds than our alt raid had to offer. We wiped mainly to goo fails and bad playing and didn’t feel like we were getting anywhere that night so we called it and went to sleep.

 

Thursday 11.2.2010

 

We woke up eager to see if anyone had gotten ahead of us while we were sleeping. We logged straight to our alts and expected to continue on Putricide but our officers had made a wise decision based on our performance last night. We went for Sindragosa instead and started learning the encounter pretty much from the beginning. We figured out stuff like the perfect shape for iceblocks in the air phase and what to do with the caster debuffs. After a lot of normal mode practicing we did something like 4 pulls on hard mode but lacked gear overall. Otherwise it looked promising and we logged our mains and did a few practice pulls on normal mode to see the dps difference. When we finally felt that the normal mode had nothing new to offer we put on our gaming socks, set heroic difficulty and killed the boss on our first pull. Now there was only Professor left and we thought we’d have time to kill him on the same day. We were wrong.

 

We continued to use our attempts on the alt raid to get the encounter under control in some way. We still had a lot of people dying to the goos and the plague kept killing lonely healers. We managed to get to the last phase a few times but the boss pretty much enraged at the same time when the transition phase with 2 slimes was over. When it was 2am we had around 5 attempts left and we gave up and went to sleep.

 

Friday 12.2.2010

 

It was Putricide time again. Our alt raids attempts were almost used and we still did not have it all figured out so we started to get a bit worried if we’d be able to kill the boss on our mains. We used the last tries with little success and had to log our mains. We had 19 tires left because of that unlucky Blood-Queen and we were sure Putricide wouldn’t die on the first pull like Sindragosa did. We did a few practice pull on normal and then hit the hard mode. We got to the last phase on our very first pull, the dps difference between the main and the alt raid was huge. On our second pull we managed to get Putricide to 2% before the aoe just killed the whole raid. We were sure we had the right tactic and right setup and that we just needed that little extra dps. We changed some pet classes to classes that do good dps with bloodlust but still were unable to nail those lasts percentages. When we had 14 tries left it looked like the key to get him down was to win more time to the last phase by adding a fourth tank to get the debuff stacks. We decided to have one of our ferals speccing some tank talents and putting on some tank glyphs and taking 2 stacks with all the cooldowns he had. It did the trick and we managed to defeat Professor Putricide for the first time just a few seconds before the raid would have wiped.

 

 

With a non-linear dungeon like Icecrown Citadel it was essential that the bosses were picked in right order. We might have ended up using too many tires on Putricide and losing other first kills if we tried to brute force it down as the first limited attempt boss. It also required nerves to log that alt raid and patiently use all the precious attempts as good as possible in order to get the as many attempts to Lich King as possible. I think we did very good in these 2 aspects, also our leaders kept their heads cool and made the right decisions. No one would have guessed that Icecrown Citadel heroic hard mode difficulty chart would look something like this:

 

Wednesday 3.3.2010

 

We had been working on the 10-man hard mode Lich King for weeks already. It actually tells quite a lot that a 10-man encounter remained undefeated for so long after it was released. We had our whole roster to use to fill up the 10-man raid and we started with very melee heady setup with 3 healers. We were able to make it to the last phase on the end of the first week and got a bit shocked when the whole raid got sucked inside the Frostmourne room instead of just 1 guy. Naturally we wiped there as no one had an idea what to do. On our second week on the encounter we took in a bit more ranged dps to be able to handle the exploding spirits in the last phase. With endless strategy discussions we were able to hit the enrage timer when the boss was at 35%. It looked grave. Our 3 healers were already all dry on mana on the encounter and this meant we’d need to squeeze extra 25% somewhere to make the kill possible. We also needed to worry about the bug.

 

On our second week on the encounter when we made it first time past the first Frostmourne room we noticed something odd. The third wave of spirits spawned just before the whole raid got sucked to the other realm and was stunned when the spirits just came from the other side of the platform and blew everyone up. We made a ticket of the issue and also wrote a post on official forums. The ticket got answered a few days later and the GM said it was indeed not intended and they would fix it during the next maintenance. We thought that it would be on next Wednesday but it took them 2 weeks to fix it.

 

On our third week on the boss we noticed the bug still existed and we needed to work our way around and get that extra 25% dps. We dropped 1 healer and took in one extra dps and started learning the encounter again with more dps but even more oom healers. We managed to get the buggy encounter under control and had the boss really low before the 5% buff hitted next week. We had it all figured out and we were already so close to the kill that we knew that we’d get it down in a few tries with the buff.

 

On Tuesday night the officers asked the 10-man team to log on at 10am to make sure no one else would get the kill before us. Once again they made the right decision. We also extended our second 10-man raid’s lockout which hadn’t killed the boss to be able to get straight to The Lich King. Our team used 4 attempts on the boss and got it down at 11:02am Finnish time. Our tank Lazeil even had the chance to study for his exam after the kill.

 

The 5% buff did make the encounter a lot easier, but it wasn’t impossible with 25-man gear before it. From our point of view it would have been good if Blizzard didn’t implement the buff as we would have been able to do it anyway. Considering only 2 guilds still have killed him (at the time I'm writing this) he would be impossible for guilds who only do 10-man content so we feel it’s only natural that both the 10-man and the 25-man encounters got nerfed (in a way).