On the new LFG and Icecrown Citadel raid

I’m possibly one of a minority of players who has finished the new World of Warcraft raid but hasn’t stepped foot inside any of the new 5-man dungeons. /facepalm As my guild raids on Wednesday and maintenance is usually done Tuesday night, the only time I’d have to do non-progression stuff is right after maintenance (Wednesday dawn) onwards, up to before scheduled runs. Looks like I really can’t be arsed to wake up at 5am after maintenance even when a new patch is out. ;)

(All my recent posts are WoW-related -_- I do have other things ongoing but none I can talk about yet!)

On the new Looking For Group mechanism

But before the scheduled progression run I did get to try out the new LFG and random dungeon option (not gonna pass up my emblem of frost, y0). After the raid, I also went a second time. Both times were… quite different. It feels like I went the full pickup group experience spectrum, actually; which is to be expected, I suppose.

For the first group, we got Nexus and it was quite a fast run; one pull after another, finished flawlessly plus some chatting about the new LFG. It was a nice, friendly bunch of people, with some jokes and laughter all in. If I could add them to friends list, I would have. (Much love to the new disenchant option. I’ve grown to hate doing it, it’s such a chore to look through rolls manually and whatnot.)

For the second group, it couldn’t be any more different; once I got zoned into Drak’Tharon Keep, the tank already had aggroed the first few trash mobs. And he kept going through the whole hallway. Straight to business, eh? By the time the last trash pack in that hallway was down, I was almost out of mana, and wasn’t able to pick up any of the loot from the earlier mobs. Without waiting for the healer or myself to regen, he pulled two of the abominations and goodness knows what else in the room before Trollgore. No communication whatsoever, mind. Naturally, we wiped. On DTK trash.

We went in again, got Trollgore down. Pulled all the spiders. Started Novos right when running in (no regen), didn’t finish off adds coming down. No regen, went directly to the room with the bats. Straight on to the dinosaurs and riders. (Still no talking at this point.) Once we got to Dred, tank said, don’t heal, I’m pulling all. He went directly to the end of Dred’s area, and didn’t come back. We wiped. He asked why he didn’t get any heals, and the healer said LOS (line of sight [issues]). Why where you LOS? he asked.

Healer quit.

I don’t blame the healer in the least, man. Tank has the gall to say, why did he quit? What the hell. The kitty with us commented that he shouldn’t have pulled all; I asked, are we in a hurry? Kitty said no, tank remained silent. Seriously, if you’re going for a quick run, make sure the rest of the party is in the same boat as you. It’s not like old LFG where you can whisper prospective party members and say “fast run only” or whatever. You should have woken up and smelled the coffee when we wiped on trash mobs, slow down a bit, y0.

We did finally get to have a healer stay for a half-finished dungeon, and finished the rest of the dungeon without much more fanfare (and no more stupid too-fast chain pulling). And I’m ashamed to say that the tank apparently is a Filipino player (based on his name anyway). I was going to get chatty and say I was too, but given that kind of player? Hell no.

I forgot to put that tank on my ignore list. I’ll have to check out how later.

On the new Icecrown Citadel raid

We went for 10-man last night, we had three groups running concurrently. I finished the whole raid, but on different toons. :D For the first group we ran into a problem when our warlock disconnected on the gunship battle and didn’t come back online, and we couldn’t get a replacement; after a couple more tries 9-manning it, another guildie needed to go, so we called it and continuing later tonight.

After going back to Dalaran, my guild master (who was raid leading the second group) asked if my priest was 80, etc. So I came in a subbed on the gunship battle as well. We got both the gunship and Deathbringer Saurfang down! So essentially I did get to complete the whole raid within a night, just on different toons. Heheh.

The fights were prety interesting; I should think gear is important but they felt more like mechanic-driven fights than anything else. There are plenty more qualified sites that talk about strategy, so I’ll just add a couple of my own notes on the fights:

Lord Marrowgar

Interesting movement fight, can be rather challenging to find a place to run to when he whirlwinds and there’s cold fire all around. A target Bone Spike macro should come in handy here for casters–I couldn’t tab to it half the time and had difficulties clicking on it to target and dps down.

Lady Deathwhisper

Add fight, basically. It looks like getting most DPS on the adds and getting them down quickly and then switching to the boss’ mana shield is the way to go. It was a little messy and crazy, and should probably bear with some reading up on the fight to smooth out the fight next time. Good thing 10-man didn’t have the crowd controlling part–really need to work that in somehow (buff and debuff notifications are a little off when using Pitbull for raid frames and nothing else).

And, elevator! Do you get squished if you stand underneath?

Gunship Battle

Absolutely fun fight! You equip a rocket pack on your shirt slot and using the rocket pack allows you to target somewhere and, well, fly to that area. Some fall damage is imminent if you fly too high/far. What I did was, I bound it to my fourth mouse button for easy usage/targeting. Win!

Very simple fight over all, just rinse and repeat (and don’t 9-man while doing progression).

Deathbringer Saurfang

After wiping a couple times, what we ended up doing was running with two heals for higher DPS. The damage is manageable (considering that we had a geared resto shammy and my, er, not-so-geared disc priest) as long as you know who to focus on and keep alive (tanks, and whoever has the Mark of the Fallen Champion). I’ll be trying this as DPS later tonight, so should be an interesting fight as DPS as well.

The take so far

All in all, rather pleased with the patch so far, if a bit pressed for time–too many errands and things I need to do as Christmas vacation is looming closer and closer. Looking forward to finish off the available raid wing tonight, and actually get to see the 5-man dungeons. XD