Icecrown Heroic: Day 1

We had a chance to finally switch on the almighty Heroic toggle in Icecrown this evening and I personally had a blast and am looking forward to more this weekend!

The fights so far, with one exception, seem very well designed and tuned. Marrowgar took us about half a dozen tries to figure out once we finally decided to go with 3 healers versus our usual 2. That's one of those fights where every little bit of extra health goes a long way, as most of our deaths while learning were not from massive overkill damage, but four or five ticks of bone storm or flames or bone spike that eventually pushed someone over the edge.

I must admit, my favorite thing (not really) about doing Heroics is how suddenly everyone in the raid seems so utterly surprised that this or that ability is now dangerous, because they've become so used to all but ignoring it. The entire Marrowgar Normal fight falls into that category, so Heroic is a nice wake up call that everyone needs to pay attention and try.

Lady Deathwhisper was a lot of fun for me, while the talk made it sound a great deal more difficult than it turned out to be. It only took us a handful of attempts to figure out what the Heroic changes were and drop her in the dirt. That said, I think Blizzard tried to include too many things into the 10-man version rather than focusing on a handful of aspects to increase. For example, for those that don't know, on Heroic she now charms a player every so often, the adds spawn at a much faster rate than on Normal during Phase 1, adds continue to spawn during Phase 2, and she is taunt immune. However, the rate of adds during Phase 1 will quickly lead your raid to believe that Phase 2 adds will be a huge handful to deal with, but in reality, she only spawns one add at a time during Phase 2. I suppose it makes sense in a logical manner since if she spawned them during Phase 2 just like Phase 1, I'd be sitting here bitching about having to use 30% of our raid as tanks, whereas the same job is done by 12% of the raid in a 25-man... blah blah.

In the end, however, the 'extra adds' feel very weak during Phase 2 and it's not enough to add much difficulty. By far, the bigger issue is if players don't properly avoid ghost explosion AEs in combination with other random damage, but it seems like the design was spread a little too thin on quantity of ideas, not quality.

The Gunship Battle is the exception mentioned above, and it's so trivially easy if you are careful about Marudin stacks, that I can't help but agree with the majority of the community about this one and wonder if something was left out or forgotten. The only differences I could even tell (other than the health of the ship being higher and of course various damage hits harder), is that our OT found the adds that teleport into our ship move extremely quickly. They also deal enough damage that the OT has to be healed a fair bit (whereas Normal he's HoTed and ignored for the most part). Still, since the Marudin tank never has to tank beyond 10-12 stacks before a reset, there's almost nothing to do other than heal the OT and dodge cannon fire. Nearly as boring as Normal.

Saurfang was the real meat of our evening and our first genuine challenge, which I must say I expected. This is one of those fights that, due to it's exponential design, lends itself very well to providing a very steep challenge and from our experiences tonight, he's going to do a great job of being the "gatekeeper" (the Vael, if you will) of most of Heroic Icecrown for some time to come... assuming of course you don't just swap it to Normal to scoot past him!

We spent a good 15 or so attempts on him this evening trying to perfect our strategy and gameplay, and while we are definitely making progress, it's proving to be a pretty hefty challenge.

Obviously all forms of damage and abilities are increased, but of course the biggest factor is because of all that, he gains Runic Power at a much faster rate than Normal. This of course means whereas normally you wouldn't even see a Mark of the Fallen Champion cast, now we're definitely hitting 3 marks before we'll be in range to drop him. This of course means the healing requirements, which again are virtually non-existent on Normal (our single Druid spends most of Normal spamming Ninjfire and Wrath), are massively increased. We tried for a while with a two-healer setup, thinking along the same lines as normal that higher DPS will reduce the time for Marks and thus make it easier. This worked a bit, but once he enters his 30% Frenzy, two HoT-based healers just aren't able to keep up with Marks on 2 people while Saurfang's Runic Power climbs to 80+. We then went for a 3-healer setup, which I think will be necessary, though we didn't get enough tries in to really tell for sure.

The downside to this fight, is even though "rng sucks" is often thrown out as a crutch excuse by poor players to excuse preventable deaths, it does seem there are some situations where "rng deaths" really are possible on this fight for Heroic, which is unfortunate. For example, we had one of our Mark targets during sub-30% Frenzy take 3 Mark hits, each over 8500 damage, and a Boiling Blood tick over 9000, all within less than 2.5 seconds. Now, that's not to say in that particular example with hindsight, we couldn't have saved that person's life (Hand of Protection, Divine Sacrifice, Holy Paladin spamming 1.1 sec Holy Lights, etc.) the moment Boiling Blood hit, but looking through our logs and from our in-game experience, these situations are not uncommon. What happens when you don't have a HoP/Guardian Spirit/Divine Sacrifice/whatever off cooldown?

The good news is, probably more than any other fight we've seen so far in Icecrown except perhaps The Lich King, Saurfang is completely a gear/dps check fight, so every little bit of extra DPS we can squeeze out will greatly ease the fight as a whole.

Anyway, had a blast, looking forward to more soon!