Icecrown Citadel

[Lucinde]

It's been a long time since the homepage has gotten some love, and while I probably should write some stuff here more often, not much stuff worthy of writing about has been happening as of late. Sure, we killed Algalon months ago, but since it was only a few weeks before 3.2 and we did it like, server sixth, I didn't think it'd be worth posting a picture. Then there was the first Icecrown wing that was as easy as everyone expected and even killing Anub'Arak with less than 5 wipes in total is hardly worth spamming the website with.

Three weeks ago the doors to the second wing of Icecrown finally opened and much to everyone's surprise, the bosses weren't as easy as we would have imagined. While Festergut and Rotface died on the first few pulls, at least you had to actually have some sort of strategy for Rotface and some sort of gear for Festergut. Then Putricide turned out to be a lot harder than anyone could have predicted. Granted, the hardest component was the limited amount of tries, which I still think is a stupid idea. Fifty for Trial of the Grand Crusader was alright, but ten for Putricide was a disappointment. I could go on and complain how we lost multiple tries to disconnects (followed by another wasted try when that person reconnected) and that we actually would have gotten it a week earlier if not for those disconnects, but the fact remains that we used 26 tries to get this guy down and I'm pretty sure that's the most wipes we've had on a non-hardmode boss other than Yogg-Saron.

The fight itself is actually quite nice. Phase 1 gets you familiar with the mechanics of the two different ooze-add types and is a nice moment to get into the flow of the fight. Then phase 2 is where the fight is won or lost. The addition of raid hazards that need to be avoided at all costs makes for an intense experience where you need to be very much on the ball when ooze fixates and malleable goo's coincide. We struggled quite a bit with where to tank him and changed the positioning and mobilty in phase 2 multiple times. We ended up using a some sort of reversed version of the "table strategy" and that has proven to be very stable for us. Once you get past phase 2, phase 3 is just a hard burn phase, but any guild getting past Festergut should easily manage the DPS requirements in the last 35%. In that area, I was actually quite surprised to see three of our raiders sitting comfortably in the european top 15 DPS done on Putricide on WoW Meter Online. I know meters like this don't mean a lot, but it's a nice compliment for three amazing players as well as a confirmation that the positioning strategy we developed is one that maximizes DPS.

The only thing I don't really like is the artificially tacked-on need for a third tank in phase 3. It's bad enough that you are pretty much forced to put a tank in the Abomination (although Stormknight does an astounding job at it), having one tank just be a sunderbot for 70% of the time is just lame. However, overall I think Putricide is a fun fight and it's extremely well-tuned as well. Compliments to Blizzard for finally giving a "middle of the pack" endgame guild like ours a challenging fight without it being an utter cockblock.

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