Thanks to Leafshine for the blogroll link, I guess this means the blog becomes a little more of an obviously public place rather than a place for really random witterings.
Anyway some ponderings based on something I was reading earlier, is ICC too much of a leap from TotC, is it “just too hard”. I’m not convinced. Ok I started raiding recently, the alliance I joined (Even Odds) was busy working Ulduar 25 and had recently managed to beat up Vezax if I recall correctly and was spending serious pain time kicking a god in one of his many sets of spare teeth. From the point of view of a tree who hadn’t done masses of healing in a raid setting (though I had pugged up OS & Naxx on the tank) it was hard work but nothing the team wasn’t handling. Wipes were on the bosses which we all learnt were trickier (Thorim, Crazy Cat Lady and Mimi).
The hard modes tended to be much harder and there are still some which haven’t been properly nailed down (I need to get back in there for the drake). Either due to much higher situational awareness requirements or simple healing or dps checks in blowing the boss down before the enrage.
TotC25, or as I shall refer to it from now on “The 10th circle of hell – The Boring One”, we mostly blew through the normal mode bosses. Champs gave and continue to give some problems simply because the mechanics of the fight are so different from the more traditional PvE fare. I think on balance it was a useful change to keep raiders slightly off balance.
The hardmode version of TotC25 was just that, brutal. The dps check to get through the beasts had us smashing our faces into the various phases for weeks. However once the beasts fell (after the enrage timer had tripped on the first kill) we rolled through the Gnome and his Demon friend and the champs went down surprisingly quickly.
So… ICC25
Firstly, Trash!, we’ve missed you. Yes I like trash, they’re what we need to reset our poor raiding brains before and between bosses, warm up time, time for the comedy wipe because the mage decides to pull both packs in Deathwhisper’s room and so on. The best bit, they’re not trivial faceroll material.
Marrowgar, he’s a dps and healing check. The dps need to keep on their toes, keep moving and kill those spikes dammit!
Deathwhisper, watch out for the solo trash on the sides of the room, the AoE damage from them can be pretty nasty if you’re not prepared. She’s an interesting fight, again lots of target switching needed by the DPS and they need to be on top of their game here to make sure the dangerous targets are nuked quickly before they cause major problems for the tank or the raid. Then it’s a tank, spank and heal like hell through the AoE from the boss in phase 2.
The ship. Flying bear butt!!! Blizzard get your fingers out of whatever you’ve got them in and let me fly as a tree, please, pretty please. This is just the fun loot fight, nothing special for the healer.
The Deathbringer… It’s all about nuking the adds and keeping the number of marks under control, the healing is heavy at 30% and gets worse. More on him in a later post.
So coming back to the difference between TotC and ICC, the jump between TotC25 normal and ICC normal is going to be heavy but let’s be honest it’s progression, it’s meant to be hard. The relative jump is higher than from U25 to TotC25 but this is it, we’re going up against the BigBad of this expansion, Arthas, that dude we’ve been taunted by all the way through since November 2008. We want him to be hard.
So in summary, it’s not going to be an easy raid to pug, there is a requirement for co-ordination which isn’t normally found without a group used to working together, happy to accept the direction of team and class leaders and who can keep quiet on vent when it matters and finally, who turn up regularly and on time to work through the wipes, the many wipes without any QQ.
Is that such a bad thing?