Glory of the Icecrown Raider (10 Player)

Its been a fortuitous past couple of days. Anzu decided to finally play nice after 132 tries and last night we went in and completed the meta achievement for Glory of the Icecrown Raider (10 Player). Last week we knocked off heroic Putricide which was the last heroic wing on the list and we were only left with All You Can Eat and Neck-Deep in Vile so our focus this week was to get our protodrakes.

The unfortunate thing was we had to re-clear the instance so we took shortcuts where we could by skipping unecessary hard modes. It took about 2 hours to get to Sindragosa but when we did there, the achievement didn’t cause us too many problems most likely due to the change to Mystic Buffet being increased to a 6s timer (previously 5s). As we got close to completing this achievement we were starting to get pumped for our drakes with only Neck-Deep in Vile left. Suddenly though, the meta completed itself without Neck-Deep in Vile and our Bloodbathed Frostbrood Vanquisher were in the mail! Interestingly enough it seems that this is something that has occurred to many people across many realms where that achievement is no longer required to complete the meta. Thinking about it, it kind of makes sense since Neck-Deep in Vile heavily favors a caster group and is extremely difficult with a melee heavy group. We haven’t heard any news yet on whether this was intended or not but I guess we will find out soon.

*EDIT* Yup it was taken out

Quote from: Bornakk (Source)

The Glory of the Icecrown Raider (10 player) meta achievement no longer requires Neck-Deep in Vile to be completed.

In the meantime here are some sexy drake screenshots!

9/10 aint bad right?

Attracting a crowd...

If you aren’t living under a rock you’ll probably have realized that 3.3.3 is now out which have come with a few feral changes. I wont bother listing them since quite frankly every feral blogger in the universe already has so if you want to read the patch notes, take a look at them here. I will however mention a few unannounced changes that we experienced in ICC:

• Gunship cannons cannot spam 1 anymore, making the fight a lot longer (and annoying) than it used to be
• Festergut heroic now marks the ground with big green circles where the malleable goo will land
• Raging Spirits on Arthas now spawn quickly without a delay
• Neck-Deck in Vile is no longer required for the Glory of the Icecrown Raider meta
• Blood Prince Kinetic Bombs are spawning outside of the room and can be ignored (I cant confirm this, I just heard this)

Onwards to Heroic Arthas!

Anzu 132 – Vallen 1

About eight months ago I posted a guide on how to solo Anzu, something that I had been doing since pre WOTLK. Today that stupid chicken finally decided to play nice and drop.

Final Score: Anzu 132 – Vallen 1

Patience truly is a virtue

Heroic: Deathbringer Saurfang

Its been just a little over a month since our 10 man group took Arthas down and since then we’ve been busy working on hard modes. We’ve tried to avoid changing our play schedules to push hard modes because quite frankly we are at heart a casual bunch and we know once we get to Heroic Arthas we’ll be stuck for a while so whats the rush! So far we’ve been pretty successful sitting at 10/12 ICC 10 hard modes complete. Sindragosa was the most recent one to fall after some really frustrating nights. That only leaves Heroic Putricide and Arthas left.

Heroic Deathbringer Saurfang

The first ICC10 hard mode discussion will be Heroic Deathbringer Saurfang. While he may not be the first boss in the instance, I felt this would be a good one to start with as he is the first boss that drops ilv 264 tokens for T10 and most likely the one that is causing people a lot of problems early on. I’ve also decided on a slightly different structure as opposed to some of the prior hard mode discussions I’ve had, hopefully they provide better insight.

Normal vs Heroic Mode

The mechanics of the fight in heroic mode are essentially the same as in normal mode. The one major difference is Blood Beasts now have an ability:

Scent of Blood: Saurfang’s Blood Beasts catch the scent of blood, reducing all nearby enemies movement speed by 80% and increasing their damage by 300% for 10 seconds.

Keys to the Fight

1. Blood Beast Control
2. Minimizing Blood Power Gain
3. Balancing Control vs DPS Output

Blood Beasts are the most challenging piece of this heroic mode. In normal mode, you have full mobility to kite them or in worst case scenarios let them wack you and let Saurfang gain Blood Power. In Heroic mode, this is not an option as they cannot be kited due to Scent of Blood which reduces your mobility. If they do manage to catch you, it is essentially a wipe as they will in most cases, one shot the target. Without any mobility, more creatives ways to manage the adds must be used (more on that later).

Blood Power is more of a side effect on normal mode, where letting Saurfang gain some here and there isn’t such a bad thing and might not necessarily cause a wipe.  In heroic mode its extremely important to try your best to minimize the gain. The more he gains, the faster he’ll cast Mark of the Fallen Champion, anymore than 2 and you’ll be in for a tough ride.

Finally, and most importantly balance. You need enough control to manage adds, but you also need enough dps to kill Saurfang. If you control too much you wont have enough dps to kill Saurfang, and vice versa if you have too much dps on Saurfang, you wont have enough control to kill adds. Every group is slightly different but you need to find your balance to see what is the minimum amount you need to control while dpsing to your fullest.

Composition

First and foremost, we used a 2 tank, 2 healer, 6 dps group composition. A 3rd healer is too much control and not enough dps which will cause Saurfang to get too many Mark of the Fallen Champion which will become unhealable. How your dps is split is up to you and irrelevant. If you’re wondering, our composition is 2 ranged (hunter/spriest) and 3 melee (arms war/ret pally/unholy dk).

Strategy

As mentioned above, the main challenge of this fight is to control the Blood Beasts. When they spawn, they are fast little buggers so you need to use what abilities are available in your raid to slow them down. We use a “criss cross” type strategy where essentially we force the adds to cross paths (close to each other) which enable us to AOE stun (Warrior Shockwave) to lock them in place. Our ranged then focus on one add (for us always the left one) and I root the right one. That gives our ranged extra time to single target the adds down one at a time. Most likely the target add will still be able to reach their target before it dies so we use aggro dumps and taunts to bounce the add back and forth until it dies. At which point the focus will be switched to the rooted blood beast, naturally similar bouncing techniques are used again for the second add.

The positioning of your ranged is quite critical to the success of the strategy as it will affect which direction your blood beasts will travel. We generally put our healers in the middle so that the initial aggro will force the blood beasts to naturally criss cross or at move in the same direction. Our ranged are spread far left and far right to maximize the distance that the blood beasts will have to ping pong back and forth which again extends the amount of time. Finally and most importantly the blood beasts may not always criss cross naturally so our hunter (on the right) will always pull aggro on the initial target (on the left) which will further force them to criss cross and allow for a stun.

Dps highlighted by red boxes, Healers highlighted by green boxes. Notice the spriest is applying mind flay while the hunter nukes the loose beast (which is going after our hunter on the right) The other beast is rooted at 100%

It is important to note that the blood beasts are stunned/rooted OUTSIDE of cleave aoe. If your melee are in range and pull aggro it will make things a lot more difficiult.

A typical chain of events would be.

1. Hunter drops Frost Trap on spawn point
2. Adds Spawn and move towards ranged (generally healers)
3. AOE stun to lock them in place
4. Entangling Roots on right add (locked until the other add is dead)
5. Spriest/Hunter dps add, slowing it via Mind Flay, Concussive Shot
6. Beast will target hunter (Midsirection for aggro if necessary), and when it gets close, hunter will Feign Death
7. Beast will go towards the spriest and die before it reaches
8. Switch to second beast, again will go after hunter
9. Ret paladin will taunt as it gets close to hunter/Hammer of Justice if necessary
10. Add dies

As you can see, from the series of events its essentially bouncing the adds back and forth until they are dead. Its important to be extremely vocal to ensure that all parties are aware of where the adds are and who they are going after. Naturally, not every raid group will have the same composition but depending on what you have you can use different strategies. For example, this week we didn’t have a warrior tank so we used a warlock Shadowfury to aoe stun in place. It is important to note that only two dps are used to kill adds, having 6 dps total is meant to speed up the fight to avoid getting extra Mark of the Fallen Champion. If you put too many dps on adds you won’t be able to bring him down fast enough.

Other Tips

• Turn Saurfang so that he faces the door, it helps to increase the kite distance slightly
• Ensure that your ranged are max ranged to maximize the kite distance, as soon as Scent of Blood is cast he/she wont be able to move
• If you have paladins/priests, feel free to use Blessing of Protection/Shields to reduce Blood Power gain
• If you are feral and rooting, try and time your rips so that they are applied before Beasts spawn so that you don’t lose much time and you also have an instant root!
• As the person rooting, it is imperative that you keep an eye on your rooted target to ensure that it does not break lose or if your ranged need assistance that you chain root it to help them out.

Thats it for Saurfang, up next Heroic Marrowgar!

Hit Gear Choices for the 3.3 Kitty

Hit is one of those stats that you don’t really want to get but you know you have to. Kind of like those awkward family reunions that you’re obligated to go to but you dread it immensley.

This post will focus on how to determine which slots to gear/gem for hit and how to make those choices. It will strictly focus on 3.3 loot and will not take into consideration any 3.2 or earlier gear (except TOGC25 cloaks!). Yes you can find more hit choices from earlier gear but the end goal of any player is naturally to upgrade their gear and its somewhat silly to use old gear to fill hit slots (even though I’m doing it right now). I’m going to try and use a logical train of thought (vs extremely mathy approach) to make these determinations. First, lets go over the basics.

Basics

As referenced in my Kitty Numbers page, to knock miss completely off your attack table, you need 8% or 263 hit rating. If you’re a Night Elf druid, then you’ll most likely have access to a Draenei and their sexy Heroic Presence buff of 1% hit. With that, the hit requirement drops to 7% or 230 hit rating. More details on how the attack table works can be found here.

Hit Enchant Options

There are three enchants that can provide additional hit:

1. Enchant Boots – Icewalker (12hit+12crit vs 16 agility)
2. Enchant Gloves – Precision (20 hit vs 20 agility)
3. Arcanum of Ferocity (16hit+36ap vs 50ap+20crit) TBC ENCHANT

*The comparison is against what is considered the optimal dps enchant*

All three options to me (personally) seem viable.  Remember, by using any of these enchants, you essentially free up 1 slot which can be used to socket a +20 arp gem which pushes you closer to the arp cap while only losing out on ap/agil/crit which is somewhat negligible.

Hit Gem Options

There are a multitude of gems (common, uncommon, epic) that can provide additional hit, here is a list of the primary ones but you can use Wow Gem Finder for a full listing.

1. Rigid Dragon’s Eye (+34 Hit) JC Only
2. Rigid King’s Amber (+20 Hit)
3. Glinting Amerite (+10 Hit, +10 Agility)
4. Accurate Amerite (+10 Hit, +10 Expertise)

While all of these gems are viable options, the amt of gear with hit on it is pretty limited so you will most likely be forced into using straight hit gems.

Hit Gear Options

Next, lets look at what gear in 3.3 has hit and what choices we actually have. To do this, we can use wowhead and the ever so useful filters which brings us down to this list here. This creates a list of 11 items that provide hit, basically one item per slot. It seems like a lot of choices but its not once you consider:

1. Kitty Kats want 4pt10, which essentially eliminate 4 choices immediately
2. Every item that has hit, has no Armor Penetration which makes the tradeoff very tough

So with that being said, lets get to work on what slots work best for hit. First, lets piggyback off Kalon’s work on gear weights for cats which essentially outline that gloves are the best offset item and your other four slots (helm, shoulders, chest,pants) are the most optimal for 4pt10. As such that means four items from the list above are immediately eliminated and unfortunately there are no gloves with hit either (bummer). In addition, Wodin’s Lucky Necklace is a BOE trash drop so I’m going to exclude this as well as the liklihood of this dropping is not high. That then leaves us with the following options:

1. Cloak – Shawl of Nerubian Silk – (41/48)
2. Ring – Band of the Bone Colossus – (54/62)
3. Ring – Ashen Band of Endless Vengeance (59)
4. Neck – Precious’s Putrid Collar – (55/62)
5. Waist – Soulthief’s Braided Belt – (46/54)
6. Weapon – Hersir’s Greatspear – (53/52)
7. Weapon – Shaft of Glacial Ice – (88/92)

*I’ve linked all the non heroic versions but I’ve included both (normal/heroic) hit amounts*

Rarren’s Personal Thought Process

I’ve somewhat made my decision on how to approach this and I’ll give you my logic on what fits best for my situation. Here are my stipulations on how I eliminated gear choices.

• I have generally good fps/lag so I do not value hit capping as a must, I try and sit at a maximum 1% below hit cap (6%)
• I will use Enchant Gloves – Precision enchant for +20 hit
• I will use Arcanum of Ferocity enchant for +16 hit
• I am a Jewelcrafter and I do have the ability to create Rigid Dragon’s Eye (+34hit)
• I fill yellow sockets (with +6 bonus) with Hit gems to help push closer to the cap
• As stated above, Ashen Band of Endless Vengeance is a must (+59 hit)
• TOGC25 insanity cloak Vereesa’s Dexterity is by far the best cloak in the game, as such I’m going to hold out for this. (hit cloak eliminated)
• Oathbinder, Charge of the Ranger-General is also again by far the best weapon in the game, also I want to use a LK weapon which is a personal preference (hit weapon eliminated)

Based on these two criteria, I am down to 3 choices:

1. Ring – Band of the Bone Colossus – (54/62)
2. Neck – Precious’s Putrid Collar – (55/62)
3. Waist – Soulthief’s Braided Belt – (46/54)

The easiest way to make this decision is base it on ilv. Both the neck/waist are from 10 man and the maximum ilv is 264 whereas the ring is from 25 man and its maximum ilv is 277. The ring also drops from Marrowgar which is the first heroic boss so the liklihood of obtaining this ring should be quite high. This should give you a total of 59+54+16+20 = 149 hit which is still 81 hit short of 7%. Since I am a JC this is where I’ll start using Rigid Dragon’s Eye. 34 x 2 = 68 which is just enough to put us at 217 hit or 6.60%. In terms of where to fit these yellow gems, naturally we want to fit them into slots that will grant us the socket bonus and there happens to be 2 yellow sockets that grant +6 agility socket bonuses (Chest/Pants or Gloves).

This to summarize means we have 2 hit items + 2 hit gems + 2 hit enchant which brings us close to the hit cap. It also should keep you very close to the arp cap as well and with heroic ilv 277 gear both caps should be reached easily.

Making Your Decision

Again, here are some general questions you should ask yourself when making your choice:

• Are you a Night Elf (7%) or Tauren (8%)
• Are you a Jewelcrafter?
• Do you have access to 10 and 25 man gear?
• Do you have access to heroic 10 and 25 man gear?
• Do you value hit capping (lag/fps) more or less?

Lets use a mock example to illustrate a different approach. Lets assume I’m a moo-moo cow (moooo) and I have access to only normal 10 and 25 man ICC (excluding Arthas) and I have good fps which makes me not value hit capping as much and I am not a jewelcrafter.

• Ashen Band of Endless Vengeance still applies as a must have (+59 hit)
• Since I have no access to arthas weapons, Hersir’s Greatspear is a fantastic option to get hit without losing arp (+53 hit)
• Band of the Bone Colossus is still a good option at ilv 264 vs other options which are ilv 251 (+54 hit)
• I will use Enchant Boots – Icewalker enchant for +12 hit
• I will use Enchant Gloves – Precision enchant for +20 hit
• I will use Rigid King’s Amber for +20 hit x3 (+60 hit)

This means we now have 59+53+54+12+20+60 = 258 hit or 7.84%

Conclusion

Every person’s situation is different and as such a different thought process should be used, there is no end all be all “BIS”!

My choices are very specific to my play style, professions, gear options, aesthetic preferences. I strongly believe there is no right or wrong answer. Quite frankly, even if we were to find the most optimal set of gear (“BIS”), how often does a player actually hit their theoretical maximum on a regular basis? The beauty of 3.3 is there is choice and you can make different decisions and essentially come up with the same results/output.

Game Over Wotlk

Daybreak (formerly Midnight) has been through a lot in it’s history. We’ve always struggled with final expansion content (ie. Sapphron at lv 60, Felmyst at lv 70) and we’ve never seen or finished the last boss in Vanilla or TBC WOW. The usual suspects are always to blame, people quitting, people xfering or people just flat out not caring/wanting to put in the effort. However this time around (in WOTLK) things have been different, we’ve been fortunate to merge with some old friends from Warsong and through that we’ve steadily made improvements to the quality of our raid composition. The amount of problematic people have significantly decreased and we have a healthy, stable raid roster which allows people to sit and take a breather to avoid burnout and create an atmosphere that is focused on the same goal. On March 7th, after a few nights of progression wipes we pulled it all together and dethroned Arthas! Although there is still a significant amount of content to come with ICC hard modes and also Ruby Sanctum in 3.3.3, as far as I’m concerned this is game over for WOTLK and anything above and beyond this is pure gravy.

Blizzard has made it very clear that in WOTLK their objective was to allow more people to experience end game content and essentially allow more players to see the fruits of their labor. Afterall, whats the point of making fantastic content if only 1% of the population can see it. I can say they’ve done a good job of meeting their goal. While this fight is still extremely challenging, as their raid wide zone buffs continue to increase (5% -> 20%) we should start to see more and more guilds killing Arthas, if not in 25 man at least in 10 man.

Cudos to Blizzard in making a fantastic fight full of individual and raid challenges. Great way to end off WOTLK!

Congrats Daybreak!

ps. The only thing sexier than Oathbinder, Charge of the Ranger-General is the heroic version! Can we get updated LK weapon weapon models? ❤