LoDBlog

LoD ventured into Ice Crown Citadel (ICC) Tuesday night with great anticipation.  This dungeon is supposed to be the crowning achievement of this expansion, with an end boss of great significance to the Warcraft franchise.  Already I went into this patch skeptical and upset with how the instance will be rolled out with staggered releases in an effort to “allow players to experience Icecrown Citadel at a sustainable, measured, and ultimately more enjoyable pace”… but I’ll leave those concerns for another post.  For now let’s just say that I had high, and probably unfair, expectations of what this instance and these encounters should be.

What follows is an initial impression of each encounter and some quick thoughts on the opportunities I see for disc healing/shielding on each encounter.

Lord Marrowgar –

Reading about this fight from a healer and raid leader’s perspective I thought that we’d be dealing with a 3 tank fight with moderate to heavy tank damage based on the saber lash mechanic.  I was all set to assign 2-3 healers to the MT and at least 1 healer per offtank.  Whirlwind scared me because the room seemed small and I was concerned we’d see a Leo type DoT for people that got hit.  I wasn’t sure if coldflames would remain up when we had to run from Whirlwind.  I expected the worst.

Turns out that nothing in this encounter does much damage at all!  Whirlwind hit for so little and left no DoT/bleed, bone spikes had less hp than people I see in arenas and coldflames were easily avoidable.

In encounters with little to no damage disc can actually do quite well.  While other healers have to fight and battle overheal, disc can simply apply shields and reserve themselve a big portion of the healing to be done.

Disc priests, if you have a holy paladin or two to tank heal, should be shielding with every gcd with the following priority:

• tanks every time you can
• bone spiked raid members
• everyone else in the raid!

Keeping PWS active on everyone is going to absorb a lot of the whirlwind damage, he seems to be fast moving and hit a ton of people in our raid at least once or twice.  I can’t think of a better use of gcds than just shield spam on this one.  Again if your raid needs you as a tank healer then it’s certainly understandable for you to be using shield, penance, GH cycles on whichever tanks need it.

Overall this is a pretty boring encounter for healers, maybe we’ll try 2 tanking it in the upcoming weeks, though the added DPS isn’t even needed.

Lady Deathwhisper –

I expected this fight to work like Shade of Akama and offer little healing stimulation.  I was pleasantly surprised that this fight has a little bit more in the way of raid/random damage, I was actually concerned that someone might die (which after Marrowgar was a bit of a relief) and AoE healing classes will perform better here.  It may sound weird, but I’m actually a lot more comfortable with encounters where RNG and raid damage can insta-gib someone… Marrowgar made me feel we’d be dropping down to 4-5 healers for ICC.

For a disc priest it is probably most appropriate to heal one of the two add tanks on either side.  Fanatics and Empowered Fanatics were hitting very hard (55k in .2s on one attempt, maybe this was an aberration?) so keeping the tanks topped off at all times is very important.

LoD was running with two holy paladins at this point in the raid, so I was on raid healing.  Again as disc you want to look for opportunities to predict damage.  There’s a lot of random damage that happens, which you can reactively shield/heal, but we can rely on the familiar adage…

• When in doubt shield melee. 

Between aggro pulls, cleaves, and explosions the melee were taking big chunks of damage and keeping them shielded at all times was a valuable use of gcds.

I used fade whenever adds spawned to assure I wouldn’t be hit if the tanks were slow to them up and I also found that fearing mind controlled people was quite helpful until the mage in the raid was able to sheep them.

Once phase two hits one worry is frost bolts that get through.  With a decent interrupt rotation you shouldn’t have many hit your tanks.  I hate recommending it, and probably won’t do it myself, but this seems like one of those appropriate situations where keeping PWS and Penance off cooldown for your tanks might be a good idea.  Using those following a frostbolt that happens to get through might save your tank.  Also you probably don’t need the HPS and absorption from steady Penance and PWS because she doesn’t hit very hard in P2 regularly.  (On fights with intense tank damage (algalon, anub, thorim) I’m a big fan of spamming penance and PWS on cooldown)

If your raid has tank healing locked down with holy paladins then you can always raid shield.  Between the frost bolt volley, d&d, and people getting hit by ghosts there is always going to be damage taken.

Ghosts are ghosts… run from them… god how many times can Blizz use these same mechanics >_<

Gunship Battle –

Ooh, a new mechanic!  After dodging whirlwinds, not standing in fire, and avoiding ghosts in the first two encounters Blizz rewards us with a totally new and fun toy in the Jet Pack.

Jet Packs are loads of fun, I encourage you to take 10-15 minutes to play with them before you begin this encounter.

Unfortunately Jet Packs are about the only interesting part of this encounter for a healer.  There isn’t a ton of raid damage, most of it is EASILY avoidable, and the tank damage isn’t very intense at all if you understand when to move back and forth between ships. 

Heck, you can’t even shorten the encounter that much by dropping healers and bringing in more dps since your damage on their boat can only be done with the 4 guns.

I guess in the end its okay that not every encounter is a pure HPS / Heal-fest, and I like having a tweak on the encounter with rocket packs and still being able to play our actual classes, rather than relying on a lot of the dumb mini-games Blizz has based encounters around (vehicle fights, gorefiend, etc).  Those fights had more to do with people’s ability to grasp entirely new concepts rather than simply adapt to their role with a new wrinkle.

Deathbringer Saurfang –

This is the most challenging encounter of the four released in the first ICC push.  A very interesting set of mechanics, at least in terms of what we’ve seen before, and disc can play a huge part in mitigating the strength of these dangerous mechanics.

Basically there are a number of ways to screw up on this fight as a raid.  Throughout the fight Saurfang gains Blood Power, each time his blood power hits 100 he marks someone and the fight gets harder.  If you don’t spread out and if you can’t deal with adds you’re penalized with having people marked, which makes them take 6k damage every time Saurfang hits a tank.

Disc feels very powerful on this encounter for a number of reasons.

• By the end you’ll have 6-9 people either tanking or marked (LoD ended with 4 marked people), so you’ll have multiple targets taking steady damage which you can PWS.  If you have a tank and 5 marked people then every time Saurfang lands an attack it does 5*6k = 30k damage to your raid, as well as the actual damage taken by the tank.
• Boiling Blood (a DoT which inflicts 9500 damage every 3 seconds for 24 seconds) is also cast on up to six targets at a time.  This gives you even more people that you KNOW will take damage over a period of time, meaning more PWS targets.
• Blood Nova (targets one person and deals 10k damage to anyone around them) happens frequently enough that shielding the entire raid is not a bad idea.

The most important thing to note is that Saurfang doesn’t gain Blood Power from damage that is absorbed.  I don’t know whether partial absorbs reduce the BP gain or if you must fully absorb the damage (this seems unlikely to happen with the size of PWS vs the damage being done) and I’m sure we’ll find this out as more testing gets done.  But PWS could offer your raid a valuable way to prevent BP gain and people from getting marked.

Overall the fight has a soft enrage feel because of the people getting marked.  If any of the marked people die they heal Saurfang for 5% and it seems difficult to recover from these heals.

I feel this is pretty PuG proof at the moment.  There’s so much your raid needs to coordinate and take care of, and a few screw ups can cause a domino effect of marks, deaths, and heals.  This was one encounter I felt was set to an appropriate difficulty level.

Overall impressions of ICC p1

Pretty disappointed in the tuning of the instance, two of the fights seemed even easier than ToC fights were at first.  Deathwhisper and Saurfang required more intense healing and raid coordination, so that was welcome.  Disc feels pretty powerful on these early encounters and like I’ve said before, your first priest in a raid should be disc!  They bring a unique type of healing to the raid.

What did other people think about the first set of encounters in this expansion’s “defining” instance?  Too easy?  Too hard?  Fun?  Different?  Brute forced easily?  Should raids only bring 4 healers?