Icecrown Citadel

Valithria Dreamwalker: Proving to your raid leader that your healers are shit.

Valium Dreamwalker introduces the first think-outside-the-box fight in Wrath of the Lich King. Your healers should stop AFK /follow for this one as they're actually in the spotlight for a change.

Dreamwalker starts the fight at 50% of her health, and the objective is to heal her up to full, at which point she will wake up and destroy the Scourge waves that are stampeding out the doors towards your raid.

One of your tanks should be at the left side of the room, while the other covers the right side, with your DPS split evenly between both. Their job will be to deal with the undead trying to swarm your raid.

Tanks should focus on high threat generation as uncontrolled mobs will make quick work of the raid, and to allow the DPS to go all-out.

* Blazing Skeletons:
- Fireball Self-explanatory
- Lay Waste Deals ~6k fire damage to all enemies every 2 seconds for 12 seconds.

* Risen Archmages:
- Frostbolt Volley Slows movement speed.
- Mana Void Drains mana every second if you stand on top of it.
- Frost Column Deals significant frost damage to anyone standing on the marked location, knocking them upwards.

* Suppressors:
- Suppresion Stacking 10% healing reduction on Valium Dreamwalker.

* Abominations Face away from the group.
- Vomits on targets in front, applying a disease that deals ~15k nature damage instantly and a significant DoT over time. Causes the target to take 25% more physical damage. Needs to be removed.
- Spawns Rot Worms upon death. Need to be picked up quickly.

* Zombies:
- Corrosion Stacking armor reduction and DoT whenever a hit lands on the target.
- Acid Burst Explodes at low health, inflicting ~15k nature damage instantly and one thousand over time every second for 20 seconds to all enemies within 15 yards.

The recommended kill order is: Blazing Skeletons -> Suppressors -> Abominations -> Archmages and Zombies

Throughout the fight Valium Dreamwalker will aid your raid by spawning Nightmare Portals. People that enter the portals can go through Dream Clouds, which will grant them a +10% healing/damage and mana regeneration buff, then throw them back out with the rest of the raid. The buff lasts for 30 seconds and can stack, though you don't always get Portals quick enough to do so.

Your DPS and healers will need to go into portals in order to deal with the increasing rate of undead spawns. Damage will need to be on the ball dealing with the add spawns as the undead need to be killed quickly, especially the Blazing Skeletons. Whenever one is up it must be killed immediately.

Lastly, you should use Guardian Spirit immediately and communicate with the other healers so that they can get as much healing in on Valium as possible during those 10 seconds.

It might be worth trying having dual-specs switch to healing if you're getting overrun, but stacking healers is discouraged as you still have a large number of adds to deal with.

Blood Queen Lana'thel: Feeding the teenage vampire craze.

Hotter than Lestat and better than Twilight saga. She is also the wing boss of the Crimson Halls, giving your raid a limited number of attempts to defeat her.

This is a simple two-phase encounter that nonetheless can go very wrong very quickly. It's also rather intensive on the healing and cannot be done while watching Top Gear on the telly due to attention check mechanics.

Throughout the fight you will suffer from an aura of sorrow, dealing 4.5k shadow damage every 2 seconds. This damage is increased by 5% per vampyr in the raid (more on that later).

To start things off your two tanks shoud stand on top of each other and use taunts to avoid Delirious Slash, a stacking ~5k DoT, getting too high.

You should also be spread 6 yards apart to avoid splash damage from her Bloodbolt on a random target.

The key ability of the fight is the Essence of the Bloodqueen.

This debuff inflicts ~13k damage on a random person and increases their damage by 100%. Attacks will cause no threat for the 60 second duration.

After 60 seconds have elapsed they will thirst for blood, and must bite another player within a 15-second window or they will lose control of their characters and go into a frenzy. Biting someone spreads the Essence of the Bloodqueen to someone else as well as refreshing it on the original receiver.

You want to avoid biting someone as long as possible (without risking the mind control) to keep the number of vampyrs in the raid low, due to the 5% increase to the raid-wide shadow aura, and so you don't run out of people to bite. This also places a soft enrage on the fight so you need solid DPS, even before the 100% damage buff from the Essence. It helps if you arrange your ranged so they're next to each other, as the Bite can only be used in melee range.

Lastly Black Temple raiders will be familiar with the last two abilities.

The Pact of the Darkfallen will link three players together with large red beams, causing them to deal lot of damage to other players. Hello Mother Shahraz. They must quickly run together to unlink themselves. She casts this at random throughout the fight and is just a basic execution check, though it only takes the one person messing up to set the failboat in motion.

The other ability is a simple Legion Flame-type debuff, causing the player to put down shadow flames under their feet every second for 6 seconds. They will need swift heals and must also move so they don't damage other people.

After about two minutes of this she will take to the air. If you were already spread out then simply heal through this high-damage phase. Melee and tanks get a few seconds to spread further apart before the Blood Whirls start hitting the raid.

In 25-man she also does a short fear when she takes off so you should spread out when she leaps to the center of the room. Tremor totems, PvP trinkets, racials and similar abilities work.

 

Dim lights Embed Embed this video on your site

 

---- Heroic----

Dim lights Embed Embed this video on your site

Strategy Guides - Icecrown Citadel

Blood Princes: Touching vampire spheres is enjoyable.

Information at this point is limited to PTR experience. This guide will be updated with more information when it becomes available.

You fight three vampire princes:

Prince Valanar: The melee prince. Uses Shock Vortex, a white whirlwind on the ground, that does ~6.5k physical damage and knocks people back.

Prince Keleseth: The Shadow Caster. Constantly casts Shadow Lance for around ~10k damage.

Prince Taldaram: The Fire Caster. Casts a Fireball that does ~7k damage.

Each Prince has the ability to become Empowered (Incantation of Blood). While Empowered the other two will give him their health to fuel more powerful versions of their spells.

Valanar's Shock Vortex now becomes a 5-second cast. At the end of the cast the whole raid gets knocked back and takes ~14k physical damage. Additional damage is dealt if people are closer than 8 yards together.

Keleseth's Shadow Lance now hits for 90k shadow damage. Mitigated by shadow orbs.

Taldaram's Fireball now chases a target, losing speed and power as it goes. A direct hit deals upwards of 20k damage, splashing (not shared) to nearby targets.

While Empowered you should be damaging the Prince with a health pool. The others will be at 1 HP and cannot be killed; however threat appears to affect them still.

Dealing with the Empowered Abilities

The easiest ability to deal with is Shock Vortex.  . The ranged part of the raid should spread 8 yards apart when Valanar becomes Empowered. Aura Mastery plus Devotion Aura also helps to mitigate the damage as it is considered physical. Melee run away when the cast begins, you should have plenty of time to get away from everyone else.

The Empowered Fireball from Taldaran is slightly trickier. The mechanics on this are unclear but it appears that he will launch great balls of fire that you need to move out of the way of. These deal quite a bit of fire damage to anything caught in the path.

Lastly the Empowered Shadow Lance deserves a bit more attention.

Around the room there will be Shadow Spheres that spawn shortly after the pull. These can be 'tagged' by casting a damaging ability on them, which will make them stick to your character and cause you to take 35% less shadow damage . You can have multiple spheres on you. Someone else can tag them off you by hitting them, or if you run too far ahead of the orb. The orbs will take damage and die from absorbing the Shadow Lances so new ones must be actively placed on the tank.

The final point of note is the Kinetic Orbs. These appear far up in the air throughout the fight, and fall slowly to the ground, but can be kept up by being damaged, and will expire after 60 seconds if they do not reach the ground. If they do however reach the ground they explode dealing significant raid damage. They can be easily kept up and appear to even be affected by DoTs, making handling these trivial.

Thus the whole fight revolves around dealing with the three Empowered versions of the princes as detailed above, switching targets to the Empowered one and not letting Kinetic Orbs reach the floor.

 

Strategy Guides - Icecrown Citadel

 

 

 

 

 

Putricide, Phd. in Alchemical Horrors and Fun.

Professor Putricide is the last boss of the Plagueworks, and is a boss with limited attempts.

This is an interesting fight with simple mechanics that turns into a beautiful ballet routine. However as any ballet teacher will agree nothing is ever simple. The first thing you will notice is the layout of the room.

 

Clicking the table will make you drink a potion that turns you into an abomination. This is your off-tank's job. The abomination counts as a raid member and as such can be healed.

When you become an abomination you gain three abilities:

1.- Makes you eat the slime puddles and grants you some energy. Without this ability the entire room would be covered in green slime which would make quick work of your raid. This will be your most-used ability during the encounter.

2.- Consumes half of your energy bar to place a strong slowing effect on the target for 20 seconds.

3.- A strong melee attack that applies a stacking armor reduction debuff on the target.

Soon after starting the fight Putricide will throw two flasks that create the green puddles. If left unchecked they will continue to grow and grow. Your off-tank should start eating up the slime, making sure to gain enough energy (50) to use the slow.

Shortly after this you will see that he is creating an ooze. The faucet on the right side of the room will open and out comes a green Flubber. The first one will always be on the right side (so you should always start as far to the left as possible).

Flubber will start casting Volatile Adhesive on someone. Your abomination should have enough energy to slow the Flubber down at this point. Before the three-second cast finishes the abomination should apply the Slow (it's a ranged ability).

The Volatile Adhesive will root the person in place (they can still perform actions) and make the ooze high tail it with amazing speed towards them. If it ever reaches them it will explode and deal damage that is shared between those nearby, also knocking them back some distance. It will then pick a new target and repeat the above. If you see that the ooze is about to reach that person you should pile up on them so that they do not die.

This is fairly tight on the DPS to get the ooze down with current gear but should become easier with time.

After killing the ooze the entire raid should move to the right side of the room where the Flubber came from as a new ooze will be spawning on the left side. Your abomination should also slow this down and DPS need to get on it and unload the hurting as soon as it picks a target.

This new ooze is brown and does not root the person in place, rather the person can and should kite it so that the brown ooze does not reach them. If it does it will explode doing an incredible amount of damage to the entire raid.

The above encompasses the key elements of the fight.

At 80% he will release Tear Gas, stunning the entire raid. He will then go and drink something from his table causing him to gain two new abilities. The reason I'm mentioning the transition is that you ideally do not want any oozes to be up when it happens, so control your DoTs on Putricide.

As for the new abilities they are simple 'Move out of the way' abilities that nonetheless add chaos when combined with all the Flubber-killing fun and green ponds of toxic crap on the ground.

The first one is him throwing two large poison flasks that explode after a few seconds, doing enough damage to anything within 10 yards to kill any non-tanks outright. Easily avoidable but requires you to pay attention and put down that slice of pepperoni pizza.

Ability number two is called Malleable Goo. Malibu flies through the air and if you're in the path you'll get hit, doing damage and slowing down your casting speed by ~200%. Healers and ranged DPS need to be at some distance from Putricide in order to react in time to this. It shouldn't target melee unless you're all bunched on him. Healers beware of the spikyness of the damage.

The rest of the fight revolves around dealing with these simple mechanics. Until the last phase anyway.

Enter phase 3

 

At 35% he will stop casting oozes. Rejoice. First off you really don't want any Flubber up on this transition as your off-tank's Abomination will disappear. In the event that you mess it up have him quickly spam the Slow ability on it and pray it goes off as the stun wears off.

Preferably you also don't want any slime pools up. You still need to avoid Malibu and the Gas Bombs. Any deaths at this point will make it harder and harder to kill him.

He will rush to his table and eat some spinach. Popeye the Sailor would be proud. He starts to really hurt your tanks now, and puts a debuff on them that damages the raid. You'll have to switch tanks to prevent this getting too high. At this point it's a mad rush to kill him before he kills you. Use bloodlust and potions. You will also need to move him around the room as you no longer have an abomination to eat the pools.

Kill him and tell everyone the great news.

 

Dim lights Embed Embed this video on your site