Just this past week though, Blizzard threw another small wrench in our Heroic LK work by releasing the Ruby Sanctum along with Patch 3.3.5. Still, with a shortened raid week due to a U.S. holiday, it seemed like a good fit for our schedule while still allowing us to clear out 11/12 ICC Hardmodes as we continue to gear up. Overall, the zone itself was somewhat disappointing. The trash and minibosses were simplistic and only the final boss, Halion, presented any real challenge for us.

The Halion encounter forces you to break your raid into 2 roughly balanced 5-man teams and then work together to balance the damage output from the two sides while also sustaining some pretty hard hitting raid damage on one side and hard-hitting tank damage on another. It took us a bit to figure out what tweaks we needed to get the kill, but eventually figured it out and secured an easy kill with zero raid deaths.

We are now working on the heroic mode of the encounter, and have found it's given us a bit more of a challenge!

Since our kill of normal-mode Lich King, we have been steadily progressing through the hardmodes, though with a large hiccup trying to get Professor Putricide (H). We were one of few 10-strict guilds to go the route of downing H-Sindragosa before H-Putricide, but once we finally clicked with a strategy that allowed our ranged dps to kill the green ooze spawn before it even reached the group, it suddenly became laughable.

With 11/12 hardmodes cleared, we have reached the current plateau of 10-strict raiding world-wide: heroic Lich King. Before taking the time to splatter ourselves across his floor, however, we've decided to take the time to knock out the remaining achievements needed to outfit our raiders with the Frostwyrm drake mounts.

These beautiful frostwyrms represent the hard work we've put and the success we've enjoyed during our time in Icecrown Citadel.

With that said, the toughest fight that we've ever seen as a guild now sits in front of us. No 10-man strict guild has killed him yet and we expect a long and arduous journey in our pursuit of his death. Still, if there's a couple things that you've picked up on by watching our progress, hopefully it's these: we're good at what we do, we work hard, and we don't give up easily!

Regardless of the reasons, our ability to work on the Lich King has suffered as a result. Thankfully, things have (somewhat) settled down and that didn't bode well for Arthas.

As befits an instance (and expansion) end-boss, the Lich King fight is complex and difficult. There are 5 distinct phases (6 if you count the end) and you have 15 minutes to do roughly 15.6 million damage to the Lich King. Sounds easy, right? Wrong. I won't go into all the different hurdles that Blizzard throws your way, but suffice it to say that this is a well designed fight that puts pressure on your entire raid, especially when you're a 10-strict guild (like ours) still struggling to gear up.

Like nearly all people who worked on this fight, we struggled in Phase 3 with the combination of Valk'yr Shadowguards and Defile (seriously Blizzard, is it too much to ask that the effect and graphic edges line up?). Thankfully, this part Sunday we snapped out of our mental funk when it came to handling them and started reliably pushing through to phases 4 and 5.

In true Vortex fashion, our last attempt of the week was our best as we put all the pieces together and defeated the Lich King. Kudos to Blizzard for well-designed (save Phase 1, which will numb your brain) encounter that really pushed our 10-strict guild to its limits, but let us blow out each other's eardrums with a loud scream of "YES!" on Ventrilo when we got it. Those (for me at least) never get old =)

Bring on the Heroic Modes!

• Dreambound - Lich King Comic strat

Warlock PoV:

Priest/Pally PoV:

Our first challenge in the Frostwing Halls was Valithria Dreamwalker, a unique fight where you "save" her by healing her to full health. Our healers are top rate, so we knew that it wouldn't take us long to complete the encounter. After a few opening jitters and strategy tweaks, Vortex was able to save Valithiria after 4 attempts. Kudos to Blizzard on designing an encounter that really let healers let loose and have some fun.

Shortly after Valithira was defeated we faced our next challenge: Sindragosa, Queen of the Frostbrood.

Sindragosa is a Frost Wyrm in the same vein as Sapphiron in Naxxramas, but far deadlier and possessing of some unique abilities that made her a real challenge for a small 10-man strict guild such as ours. Before we could start working on Sindragosa though, we faced another challenge: a buggy instance that didn’t let us to get into Sindragosa’s room and cost us half a night of progression work.

The delay turned out to be a relatively small speed bump as the Sindragosa fight took us several days to figure out as we took to our forums to refine our strategy. We claimed the World 11th kill (for 10-strict guilds) with a strategy that had things looking like “offspec night” as we swapped 3 raiders to their offspecs to secure the kill. She was certainly a fight that, for us, confirmed the maxim that in 10-man strict raiding, flexibility is key.

Bring on Arthas! We're anxious to topple the Lich King!

Guild Strats:

• Sindragosa Overall Strat - Dreambound
• Sindragosa for Resto Shaman - Ancestral Knowledge

The Yogg-Saron fight is a good example of a well-designed encounter by Blizzard. It can range from near-trivial (Yogg+4) to pretty challenging (Yogg+1) to ridiculous (Yogg+0). We've put in an easy 75+ attempts on Yogg+0 and it's remained a challenging fight requiring near-perfect execution.

Alone in the Darkness, (a.k.a. Yogg+0) shifts the focus of the fight from Phase 2 to Phase 3 by forcing players to deal with the Empowering Shadows mechanic that sporadically heals up the Immortal Guardians defending Yogg-Saron. These Guardians do damage based on their total health - the more health they have, the harder they hit.

One of the challenges about being a 10-man guild is that you can't rely on things that a 25-man guild takes for granted. Vortex, for example, has no rogues and the AoE wound poison that would be quite helpful in this fight. A second hunter would also help us trivialize the fight, but we make do with what we can.

We've also tried nearly every strategy imaginable while working on this kill. For our kill we went with a two tank, two and a half (let's hear it for Beacon of Light!) healer strategy. Our tanks alternated taking Immortal Guardian spawns while our DPS chewed into Yogg-Saron. It was close at the end, but we're relieved to finally have it over and done with.

We now return you to your regularly schedule Icecrown Citadel news.

Guild Strats:

• Alone in the Darkness - Dreambound

The Blood Queen is a relatively simple fight in theory. Basically she "bites" raid members, which empowers them for a short period. At the end of that time though, the empowered raid member needs to "feed" by biting another member, which empowers them and resets the blood thirst on the original member. In a perfect world, you cascade this ability through the raid, eventually allowing you to push out enough raid damage to defeat the Blood Queen before she enrages.

In reality though, Blizzard has added a lot of factors that complicate the fight - constant raid damage that increases by the number of "vampires" present in the raid. Dark pacts that link raid members and do damage to those around them until they get close enough to each other for it to fade and then lastly, nasty blood bolts that can chain between raid members.

She proved a tough fight for us. We've rarely come up against some of the gear limits we face as a 10-man "strict" guild, but she came close as we finished her off with roughly 10 seconds before her enrage timer.

Guild Strats:

• Lana'Thel Strat Comic - Dreambound

After carving our way through a bit of relatively simple trash, we stood in front of our first opponents - the Blood Prince Council. We've seen all three princes before in various WotLK locations, but all of their various abilities being used in a single area made for quite a few things to keep track of and a worthy challenge.

We originally tried to employee a ranged tank strategy on Prince Keleseth (the biggest wild card for us), but our intrepid warlock's health pool couldn't handle the hits coming in from Prince Keleseth when he became empowered. We needed a bigger health pool, so we went with the most natural choice: a large, smelly black bear!

From then on out, we had control of the fight. We had figured out how to communicate the things we needed to know during our previous wipes, so the fight simply became one of execution, which is something that we usually handle pretty well. Two pulls later, the Blood Princes were dead.

We also had a chance to take an initial look at Blood Queen Lana'thel, but only spent two attempts on her so we could take our time discussing the strategy we'd need to defeat her. Expect some news on that front soon!

It started off easily enough - Festergut took 3 attempts and then got steadily harder. Rotface (although bugged) took a day of strategy rework before we were able to kill him. Despite the Professor Putricide fight "clicking" for us on our last attempt before despawning for the week, we weren't able to defeat him in the first week that he was available. That left us with a bad taste in our mouth.

Fast forward to last night. We'd put in hours of research analyzing our mistakes and were determined to be one of the first 10-man strict guilds to defeat the encounter. In the end, the Putricide fight is a large number of relatively simple mechanics requiring very clean execution to succeed against. There are bombs, slime, ooze and a hard hitting boss combined with a substantial amount of raid damage. We solved phases 1 and 2 pretty early, but still struggled with the phase 3 transition and a lack of DPS time in phase 3 due to situational awareness issues.

Still, we're lucky enough to have incredible players in Vortex and they took the challenge personally. We knew what we needed to do and on our second pull last night (after 15 attempts total), we defeated Professor Putricide, making Vortex one of the early 10-man strict guilds to do so. Kudos to Blizzard on a well designed (although occasionally buggy) encounter. It was a fun challenge and we're looking forward to the opening of the Crimson Halls!