PTR Testing Day 3: Rotface & The Blood Princes; New imbalanced Legendary; ICC raiding system

Good evening everyone and welcome to yet another day of Icecrown Citadel PTR testing.
Unfortunately, due to having volleyball practise, I was 15 minutes late for my own raid, and thus unable to set up a proper blog for yesterday, but ill give you a quick rundown on what happened.

                                            Lord Marrowgar

At 19:45 we finally started clearing trash, things weren't looking to good, since we just got banned from the Vent server we were using (still looking for replacement and we were 15 minutes late.

Trash went more or less perfectly but having a group of 5 uncontrollable mobs spawn 2 very hard hitting elites is slightly overdone for trash, so we wiped a couple of times, but really nothing noteworthy about the trash.

As I said on my previous blog, Lord Marrowgar is really a pushover, and so we one-shotted him with only 2 deaths.

The few things I can say about it is that it mostly requires luck, rapid switches and good healers.

He has 3 important abilitys:

1. Bonestorm: This ability works really comparable to bladestorm it lasts for ~6 seconds and he spins around the entire room hitting everything for ~5k/tick, no biggie but if you are to bunched up on eachother it can cause some strain on your healers.
2. Impale: This is very comparable to the mechanics of High Warlord Najentus in the way that it impales someone with a spine, and the rest of the raid has to nuke this spine. If this doesn't happen quickly the target can and will die, especially if he has a doomfire on his ass aswell.
3. Doomfire: This is very comparable to the mechanics of Archmonde in Mt Hyjal: it is semi-intellegent (which means it follows people around but switches regularily) but unlike the archimonde doomfires, it doesn't hurt that much: it ticks for aprox ~5k/sec.

The only way that you can actually die is if your tanks arn't near him quick enough after his bonestorm ends, since he also has the ability to split his normal hits on the two targets closest/highest on threath. If one of those targets is a clothie, it means hes gonna die, which is what happened to us, twice.


                                                   Gunship Battle

The second event of yesterday night was the gunship battle, which your raid, Saurfang and a couple of npc's, fighting an entire boat of alliance soldiers.
The objective is to beat their boat up so badly that they flee and you can continue progressing to the upper spires.

For this fight you have to devide your raid in two halves, group 1 will consist of 3 ranged, 1 tank and 1 healer and stays on our ship, to fight off boarders and shoot their gunners.
Two players from group 1 will also man the guns and shoot them when they become avaible.
Group 2 will consist of 2 melee, 2 healers and a tank and will teleport to their ship using rocket packs, take out the casters freezing our guns, and then teleport back quick enough so that muradins buff (he gets +5% damage for every hit he lands) doesn't stack up to high and oneshots the tank.
This buff will wear off in aprox 15 seconds, allowing your group to go kill the sorcerers again.
I am not sure what triggers the sorcerors to spawn, either its at 75/50/25% or just at timed intervals.
For now the Gunship Battle is for me the best fight in the Icecrown Citadel so far, in the end we got the enemy boat to 14% before the testing ended.

                                        Shadowmourne, the new Legendary

Today blizzard released the stats from the new legendary: Shadowmourne and from what I can see, its overpowered like hell.
Compared to a random legendary looted from ICC25, which will most likely have the same dps as the new wrathfull weapons, this is a 50!!! dps increase.
Not only that, but the weapon hosts 3 red sockets, and the socket bonus is +str, aswell as the weapon having a nice bit of arp and critical strike rating.

Having to fight a double healer warrior team in 3v3 with a warrior who has this baby will be difficult as hell and as far as I can see, we are basicly back to the TBC era, where having Warglaives meant you went from a 2000 rogue to a 2400 rogue.

I am currently not sure wether the proc will work in arena or not, the old proc (8k damage after 10 soul fragments were captured) was confirmed not to work on players, but this proc is only 2k, so I personally think it will be avaible in arenas.
I currently donot know how often you can proc this weapon, but if it procs often, and the +40 str proc stacks, were going to have to go pve again in order to be competitive for rank1.

                                        Blizzards new PvE Progression Path

Blizzard has just released word of their new progression pve path in ICC:


As we're now getting closer to the release of 3.3.0, we wanted to talk about our plans for access progression within Icecrown Citadel. Icecrown Citadel is going to be broken up into four distinct sections: The Lower Spire, Plagueworks, Crimson Hall, and Frostwing Halls. We plan on releasing these four sections of Icecrown Citadel over time and not all immediately when patch 3.3.0 goes live. At this point we can't give precise dates for these release dates as they are determined by when patch 3.3.0 goes live. Once dates are known with more certainty, I'll update the community so they can plan appropriately.

The first section that opens will include the Lord Marrowgar, Lady Deathwhisper, Icecrown Gunship Battle, and Deathbringer Saurfang encounters. Progress beyond that point will be prevented for several weeks. Then the Plagueworks will open with Rotface, Festergut, and Professor Putricide becoming available. After another period of time, the Crimson Hall will open and you can then fight the Blood Princes and Blood-Queen Lana'thel. The final Frostwing Halls unlock then occurs after that, making Valithria Dreamwalker, Sindragosa, and the Lich King available. We believe a staggered release of the content will allow players to experience Icecrown Citadel at a sustainable, measured, and ultimately more enjoyable pace.

There are other elements that gate access along the way. Players may not attempt any Heroic versions of 10 player encounters until they have defeated the Lich King in a 10 player raid. Similarly, players must defeat the Lich King in a 25 player raid before they can attempt a Heroic 25 player encounter. So players must master every normal difficulty encounter in Icecrown Citadel before attempting Heroic difficulty.

The Lich King may not be attempted until Professor Putricide, Blood-Queen Lana'thel, and Sindragosa are defeated. Furthermore, the Heroic difficulty of The Lich King encounter may not be attempted in any week unless the three aforementioned encounters have been defeated in Heroic difficulty that week.

The Ashen Verdict provides reinforcements and material for players to assault Icecrown Citadel, but this support is not endless. Raids will have a limited number of attempts total each week to defeat the four most difficult encounters in Icecrown Citadel: Professor Putricide, Blood-Queen Lana'thel, Sindragosa, and the Lich King. As these boss encounters are unlocked, the number of attempts available per week will increase. The initial number of attempts provided for defeating Professor Putricide is only five. When Blood-Queen Lana'thel unlocks, the amount of total attempts remaining will increase to 10. Then when Sindragosa and the Lich King unlock, 15 total attempts will be available to defeat all four bosses. After a raid has exhausted their attempts for the week, the Ashen Verdict must withdraw their support and the four most difficult bosses all despawn and become unavailable for the week. The limited attempt system is a feature of both Normal and Heroic difficulty.

There will be no explicit rewards for defeating the Lich King with a specific number of attempts remaining as there was with Trial of the Grand Crusader. There will also not be an achievement to complete Icecrown Citadel without being defeated by a boss encounter, or letting a raid member die. (i.e. A Tribute to Insanity).

In the weeks and months after all twelve encounters are unlocked, additional attempts against the final four boss encounters become available. This represents the Ashen Verdict growing more powerful and gaining a stronger foothold in Icecrown Citadel. To further help raids, Varian Wrynn and Garrosh Hellscream will begin to provide assistance by inspiring the armies attacking Icecrown Citadel. This is represented as an additional zone wide spell effect applied to all players that will increase their hit points, damage dealt, and healing done. This effect will also increase in effectiveness over time. Players may opt out of the spell's effect if they so wish.

This basicly means the following:

1. Sunwell-esque gating progress, every once in a while a new wing of the instance will be opened, this can take as long as blizzard feels comfortable with.
2. Togc-esque attempt system, you only have 5 wipes to kill the last boss of each wing (Prof Putricide, Blood Queen and Syndrygosa), only, after each passing week, you will have another 5 tries to do it, so that there is gradual progression on the boss kills. There will, however, be no achievement for completing ICC while having all your tries still left, or without anyone dying, like there is in totgc.
3. And now the most important one: graduel progression with a buff which increases in strength each week, which makes sure that  blizzard doesn't have to nerf the bosses overtime to let the worse players experience them aswell. I personally think this is one of the best things they could ever have done to their pve game, as it really allows graduel progression for both the casual and the hardcore guilds. Ofcourse, there is also a way to turn this buff off, which will probably rewards you with an achievement if you manage to complete the instance in this way.

                                 Rotface & The Blood Princes

Now onto the content of tonights PTR raid.
We are going to test Rotface and The Blood princes again, both encounters have already been tested atleast once (Princes) or even 3 times (Rotface), so there isn't much I can say about the encounter really.
Here are the models of the bosses, they might be placeholders but I personally doubt that, thanks to mmo-champion for making them.

A full list of their abilitys can be found here and here.

As usual, my xfire stream is http://www.xfire.com/live_video/nomennescios/

                                                       The Liveblog

19:06 Invites should have started by now, but Blizzard just had to choose this moment to reboot their servers, so I cannot get online, im guessing the show will start soon.

19:10 Remulos (the french server) just came online, and the rest will soon follow.

19:16 Remulos just went down and Brill, the server were on, completely disapeared from the server list

19:43 Just wtf is blizzard thinking their doing with those damned servers, wtb everything up already

19:45 Servers finally comming online, however I still cannot log onto my own account for some reason, so I logged onto a friends priest and started the invites, stream is up now.

19:54 It turns out only people who actually had a battlenet account before the patch can login

20:14 Icecrown Citadel isn't currently open, even though the entrance is crowded as hell, a guildie of mine just spoke to Boubouille (the main mod of mmo-champ) over IRC and he says hes currently trying to find out what happens aswell.
Hopefully the raiding won't be cancelled.

20:22 Finally, the instance opens, time to get rocking naow

20:45 Okay turned out I was wrong, some blizzard guy said they would be opening up....around 20 minutes ago..... blizzard service at its best guys

20:57 The instance opened up 10 mins ago but still we havn't been able to clear anything significant, people are dcing/slacking bigtime and someone just pulled the valkyrs

21:25 We are now nearly at the boss, just have to dispatch the two big gluthlike dogs

21:33 we just wiped twice on the gluthlike dogs, because appearently they seem to pull eachother even if they arn't remotely close

22:04 Tonights raid is going really ****ty, we just had our first wipe in the Blood Quarter because of tank failure, I mean how fkin hard can it be to keep decent agro as a warrior?