I began the weekend by doing some light fishing and failing utterly at catching a giant sewer rat under Dalaran. After some time, I decided to instead get my exploration achieves done. The only ones left were in the backwoods of Kalimdor and it was going to take some time in the doing. As I rode around the world, I chatted with guildies as they prepared to take on the Ice Crown Citadel (ICC), the home of Arthas, the Mother Farkin Lich King (MFLK)
Since I deviated from my ‘normal’ play style (hyper-aggressive solo play) for the purpose of seeing the “end game”, this represented the “holy grail” of Warcraft. Yes, the Ruby Sanctum raid was released afterwards, but from a story perspective the MFLK is the “you win Warcraft” dealie. It comes with gold, prizes, and a nifty “the Kingslayer” title to rub in the faces of those not willing to sacrifice significant portions of their free time to a video game. Fidelis has downed the sucker once before, but it’ll be a while before the raid becomes “routine” and thus it is still special.
The gear that drops in the place is amazing by my current standards, with most of it being of “item level 264” compared to my paltry mix of 219s and 234s. From a “gear score” perspective, I weighed in at a bit over 5k. That’s not godlike, but it is certainly nothing to sneeze at. Pick-up groups by comparison demand, on average, a 5.5k-5.6k score and experience to play with them. Bear in mind PUGs would also likely demand a 5k GS to take on the level 12 elite “Hogger”, so I was curious to see how I’d really fare.
In fact, according to a couple of sites you can use to determine your appropriate raid dungeons (www.wow-heroes.com being chief among them) I was very much ready to take on ICC in both 10 and 25 player modes, although the 25 man group would be “challenging”. All righty then. I figured I gear up a bit and try it out sooner or later.
A few minutes after the guildies entered the Citadel, I swam ashore on a small island tucked away in the corner of Azuremist Isle and was heralded as a world explorer! I may not (or ever be) a Kingslayer, but by gods I’m now “Strev the Explorer”. Suck it, Dora
The following day I blew the bank. I depleted my emblem reserves and purchased a new trinket (with Triumphs) and a new belt (with my precious Frosties). My cash supplies, already low, were devastated as I gemmed and enchanted a T10 PvP bracer I had acquired the previous week in VoA. The gear boosts put me around 5200. I felt I was now “ICC-ready” by guild standards and, as luck had it, there was open space in that night’s 25-man raid.
I spent the every evening watching videos and reading up where I could, but reading about how to dance doesn’t mean anything until you’re on the dance floor. I picked up the supplies I thought I’d need… a few flasks of the frost wyrm (bonuses to damage that last through death) and runic mana potions. An hour before ‘go time’, we still had slots to fill so I volunteered and no one objected.
A short while later I flew my drake over hordes of undead and landed outside the gates of the Citadel aside the Knights of the Ebon Blade as my guildmates arrived in turn. Extremely nervous, I stepped inside the swirling vortex, anxious to see if I was really ready for the trials that awaited…
Once inside, I found myself in a staging area, complete with vendors and a host of NPCs. This took me by surprise. My reading and viewing hadn’t mentioned them at all. They had just focused on ‘boss fights’ and I wondered gamely what else had been glossed over. We’d see soon.
The guild’s group was staffed a bit light and we wound up ‘outsourcing’ for a couple of healers and a couple of DPS slots. While the final preparations and buffing sequences were being made, I surveyed the terrain. It was an enormous structure, with vaulted ceilings and very wide halls and doorways. What it lacked it décor, it made up for in sheer magnitude. Beyond the first archway, giant skeletal creatures roamed and even the ‘trash mobs’ had well over a million health. This was going to be epic.
We cleared the first few mobs and soon faced the first boss of the instance: Lord Marrowgar. I had somehow missed reading up on him and now faced with a giant winged skeletal thing I was having second thoughts about the entire venture. I’d never live it down if my first foray into ICC caused a raid wipe…against the first boss. I quickly hatched a plan. I eyeballed a mage, Eleanor, and decided that I was going to hug her. Where she went, I would too. She’d been around a bit and, logically, knew the right places to stand and when to move. My brilliant and cunning plan lasted about eight seconds.
As luck would have it, I was the first person randomly picked to be stabbed by a giant bone spike erupting from the ground. Impaled and unable to do anything but suffer major internal bleeding, I wondered if I had missed a visual cue to move, but as the battle progressed, it seemed that was random. Several people at a time would get impaled by the spikes. I dodged around when it looked like Very Bad Things were about to happen and I learned to quickly blink out of range when I heard the terrifying phrase “Bone Storm”, a nasty whirlwind-type attack that ended with lines of frost radiating outwards, dealing massive damage. In the end, I probably spent more time dancing then blasting, but I managed to avoid looking like a total idiot.
He fell and we proceeded through the dungeon to find Lady Deathwhisperer. As the leader of the Cult of the Damned, she summons adds to the party. As ranged DPS, my job was to “Seek, Locate, and Destroy” these as quickly as possible, turning fire back to the boss when opportune. Her health, already at over 13M, was supplemented by the Mana Shield of the Gods. All damage went to her mana (all 11M of it) until it was depleted. Once down, instead of summoning goons, she summoned spirits one has to flee from or take the resultant 25k damage “stupid tax”. Naturally, I get targeted with one of these but was able to avoid it for the duration. Once defeated, she dropped the best bracers I’d seen. The Lady’s Brittle Bracers, which sells for nearly 6k on the AH is one of the rare drops that doesn’t bind when picked up and would be a significant improvement over the bracers I had just replaced. My hopes were quickly dashed as my roll was far too low (four other casters beat me on that one), but I remain hopeful for the next run and, by gods, there WILL be another run.
We continued along and boarded the Skybreaker, a flying gunship normally encountered in Icecrown proper as a quest hub. It would carry us to the upper section of the citadel, but the journey would not be a pleasure cruise. This time we would do battle with the Horde’s rival gunship in the skies above the citadel. Some of our melee fighters strapped on jetpacks to board the enemy vessel as the rest of us manned guns and tried our best to deal with both the enemies we could hit from the edge of the ship and the boarding parties assailing our own craft. In the end, we lost miserably while attempting for an achievement that didn’t involve multiple hops back and forth from ship to ship. On the second go through we played it straight and was victorious. We landed on a ledge by an ominous door, with a trove of treasure nearby. The loot we rolled for included another nice piece of caster gear I lost out on, but with nine more bosses to go, my spirits were high.
Throughout all of this we had encountered a number of delays due to people dropping, GF/wife aggro (not mine, yay!), and real life emergencies. An hour had elapsed and we rebuffed up before opening the door leading into the upper spire of the citadel. Even this event was met with resistance, in the form of one lone orc.
The orc was a death knight with some 34M health and some very interesting mechanics. He summons ‘blood beasts’, nasty little critters with their own abilities that mimic player skills, but the far more dangerous bit was his blood magic. All range people spread out wide as he gained strength from his magic and people that were too close sped this process along. If it got too high Very Bad Things would happen, but we avoided that brand of nastiness. Mostly the fight was a damage race we won handily, but it yielded nothing of any use to cloth wearers.
Feeling more confident I could handle whatever the Lich King could throw at us, I strode inside to fight the stuff of nightmares…
We now found ourselves within the Plagueworks, presumably where the Scourge Plague was developed and the source of its noxious spread. The hall quickly came to a fork and two giant plaguehounds patrolled the area along with a quantity of plague scientists. We took on the scientists first. We tore into them and showed the Scourge exactly what we thought of “science”. We pulled the dogs (“Precious” and the aptly named “Stinky”) separately, as mini-bosses they warranted a bit more caution. We cleared a couple of traps that summoned more AoE fodder, then entered a large circular room that screamed “this is going to suck”. In the middle was an enormous misshapen thing named Rotface. At this point, the Raid Leader took the time to explain to everyone what was going to happen…twice.
As we engaged Rotface, the name of the game quickly became “Dance Your Ass Off”. A solid quarter of the ground became toxic. Slime rained down from above and worst of all slimes appeared. The slimes were death made bubbly and if they encountered another slime they merged and became god-awful. One tank’s role was to Run the Slimes while another focused on Rotface. As new little slimes appeared, the targeted player had to run and find the tank circling the outer perimeter to merge ‘his’ slime with the tank’s big one to prevent multiple large oozes from wiping the raid. I was one of the early recipients of a slime, so I darted this way and that circling around to find the tank while avoiding the toxic floor. The somewhat bemused raid leader noted “you’ll never catch him that way, Strev” and I realized I was looping around the room in the same direction as my target. I hastily 180’d and passed off my slime.
As Slimefest ’10 continued, I became adept at strafing to avoid the noxious goo and we felled Rotgut with minimal casualties. We then moved to the room on the opposite end of the ‘fork’ and encountered Rotface’s twin, Festergut.
Festergut required very little from me in terms of dancing for two good reasons. First, he isn’t overly complex, just a major DPS race where you have to melt away his 40-something million health in only five minutes. Second, I spent most of the time watching the fight from the floor after I was killed a minute into it. He occassionally will target a player with a gas spore (guess who was first!) which does godawful damage, but also hurts nearby players, so the strategy is to ‘eat it’ and run away from everyone else. I ate it, but got back just in time to get smacked with another random nuke.
It was very close. The raid leader announced the two minute remaining mark and we still had a good chunk to go. We hit the one minute mark. Thirty seconds and everyone was blasting their hearts out before Festergut could do it for them. Running out on the timer meant he’d be oneshotting each player and a wipe in seconds. Five seconds and he was down to 2% health. Enrage went off and three people joined me for floor time, but we got him at five minutes and one second. We breathed a deep sign of relief as we nursed our wounds and raised our dead.
We turned our attention to the main ‘tine’ of the fork and proceeded up it. A wall came down from the ceiling and we had no choice but to proceed. A short trip later we found the Plague’s origin and the heart of the Plagueworks. Before us was its creator, Professor Putricide. This large laboratory contained a number of tanks, a table covered with flasks, and the aforementioned undead. We went over the strategy and dove into the fray.
As we chewed on the good Professor, he began to release unstable experiments and we hurried out of the way of Very Bad Things. Swaths of the dancefloor became toxic and horrible oozes attacked us… I failed the dance horribly. With all of the confusion, I couldn’t find the oozes to target and between panning around and running slightly behind the group, I was easy pickings and got caught in a number of patches. I know this because of a helpful addon someone had which reports the number of times someone “fails to get out of the way” of certain events. Lovely. Despite our best efforts, it spiraled downhill and we wiped hard.
We regrouped and assaulted the Professor again. This time I was much better at Avoiding Stupid, but I was still unable to consistently both find/blast the oozes and dance swiftly. We failed to get the Professor below 50% before we wiped again and the decision was made to call off the assault.
All total, the raid cost me about 100 gold in supplies and repairs, but the experience itself? It’s worth so much more to me than any quantity of gold.
We’ll meet again, Professor. Mark my words.
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