With the release of Icecrown Citadel in Patch 3.3, Vortex looked forward to the first new bit of content that we had seen in months. In a completely unexpected turn of events, we had our 10-man raid ready to go and in the instance *prior* to our scheduled raid time.

After a bit of time reacquainting ourselves with the novelty of trash mobs, we faced off against the first boss of ICC, Lord Marrowgar. While Marrowgar is the owner of certainly one of the more innovative models to come from Blizzard lately, he unfortunately isn't really any challenge and we easily downed him on our first attempt.

Several trash pulls later, we found ourselves at Lady Deathwhisper. She proved to be slightly more difficult than Marrowgar as we were stacked with magical DPS and that made killing her magic-immune adds a tad difficult. A couple of small tweaks to our tactics later, she met her end.

An elevator ride and several more trash packs later, we found ourselves at the long-awaited "Gunship Battle". This fight had gotten quite a bit of coverage in the PTR news and so we were eager to experience it. Once we got over the novelty of the rocket packs that allowed us to jump over to the enemy ship (for extra giggles, check them out against druids in forms), we settled down to work.

We faced some initial difficulty with Muradin Bronzebeard, who guards the mage on the Alliance Gunship, but with some positioning changes for the tank grabbing him and our second healer on the Horde Gunship, we were able to easily defeat the encounter.

The final guardian to our entry into ICC was a familiar face in the form of Saurfang the Younger, who we thought lost in the events of the Wrathgate. In turns out that the Lich King had retrieved his broken body from the field and turned him into a Scourge agent.

While there are a variety of strategies being suggested for the defeat of Deathbringer Saurfang, we decided to go with our standard combination of skilled tanking, strong healing and massive amounts of DPS. We eschewed a tank-swap strategy and simply burned down Deathbringer Saurfang and the Blood Beasts that he occasionally summoned while earning the I've Gone and Made a Mess achievement.

So, in a night complete with some (expected) instance issues, Vortex managed to learn and defeat the first 4 bosses in ICC and finished the night with time to spare. We're not wild about the 28 day delay until the next ICC wing is accessible, but it's very nice to have some new content to chew on regardless!