It has been a long time belief for me, that 10 man instances, are harder as you have less room for error then the average 25 man raid. I have recently come to understand this is not necessarily the case. It is significantly easier to coordinate 10 people, then it is 25 mans.

It would seem that many people have become complacent, or accepting of the idea, that gear be it, lvl 245, or 251 is sufficient. Most of this gear can be acquired by Triumph or Frost badges. Why quit there? Why not head into Icecrown Citadel, see the content, kick the Lich King, and get more gear, see some ugly monsters, and have a good time. There is much to see in the Citadel. Many people have found this new add-on relating to gear score is the end all be all of raiding. While gear score does play a role in raiding, it does not mean that a player not be worthy of the experience. Don't get me wrong, gear does play a role, but gear does not make the player. While it does insure a certain level of acomplishment, why settle for the minimum. The other thing that I don't like about this add-on is that. Anyone could say. ICC 10man Fresh run, must have GS 6k. What they don't tell you is, that they just bought their account, or have less then the GS they require, and are looking for free loot.

Several weeks ago I was invited by chance into a PuG ICC 10, with several members from the guild Distorted. For the first time, I got to see bosses past Marrowgar. This was a truly exciting time for me. Since then the past few weeks, have been an eye opening experience. Raiding with Distorted. A group of highly skilled, patient, and dedicated people - they are what raiding should be all about. Having seen both 10 man and 25 man Icecrown Citadel has been the experience I was hoping it would be. Though the continual repetition of dialog from the NPC bosses can be - annoying at times, over all the interaction is nothing short of fun.

MARROWGAR

Marrowgar can be a boss that will undo most raids with the whirlwind, and the AoE fire. Causing most groups to scatter, become distracted, and disoriented. Thus bringing an quick and abrupt end to the raid. No one likes repair bills, lets face it - that is a fact.

However, if you keep your cool, and stick to the plan, Marrowgar is a push over. Most people recommend that everyone be at least 4k dps, while this will help, and becomes more important in later fights, you can drop Marrowgar with patience, some skill, and coordination.

LADY DEATH WHISPER

Lady Death Whisper - well she's just a push over. The simplicity of this fight can be confusing, or a straight up win. Melee takes down Melee, Ranged drops casters. Unless a skeleton is raised,then it's opposite time.

In between groups of adds, DPS should be focusing on Death Whisper's shield. It is imperative that you have someone watching the shield to ensure it does not drop until all the adds, have been handled. Once the shield is down, it's an old fashioned tank and spank, eith the exception of her Frostbolt. The unique thing about this, is it is perfectly timed to the Deathknight's Mindfreeze. When your Mindfreeze is up, she's casting a frostbolt. Nail her! This will save your healers, and your raid.

The Airship Battle

It's a pretty straight forward fight. If you consider hopping from the Sky Breaker, or Orgim's Hammer straight forward. You have a Tank, tank Surfang, while the DPS drops the battle mage.

Ranged sits in the cannons, and fire on the enemy ship.

More or less it's free loot.

At this point, it gets to be a bit - odd. After the battle at the Wrath gate, Varian goes ballistic, and declares straight up war on the Horde, then after the air battle he gets all sentimental. I wonder if he's bipolar...

Surfang Jr.

He's a tank and spank, and crowd control the adds. This particular boss, is where the a fore mentioned DPS comes into play. As he does have an enrage timer, and most bosses here on out, have something of the sort.

At some point you should have if not already hit Friendly with the Ashen Verdict. It is important if you are either a Warrior, Paladin, or Death Knight. Each step of the way with this faction you can trade up a ring, similar to the way you could with Karazhan, back in The Burning Crusade days. Eventually you will reach Revered. Once you have, Darion Mograine will have a quest for you.

This particular quest is reminiscent of the old Thunderfury the Windseeker quest. It will require you to acquire 25 Primordial Sarronite, Lights Vengeance.

Light's Vengeance is where this particular quest becomes of personal interest to me at least, As I am always intrigued by the implementation of Lore into the World of Warcraft. Anyway, Light's Vengeance is Arthas's mace from when he was a Paladin. It can be found in Frostmourne Cavern. If you are not particularly confident in your abilities, or have gear, that is - well less then adequate, I would recommend that you find a friend or two, maybe a pally, if you are not one, and a healer. However if you have been raiding the Citadel, your gear should be sufficent to get you through this.

When you enter, the cavern will be empty. As you approach the mace, the Lich King will appear, there is some dialog here, that more or less points to the fact that Arthas knows about the plans. Indicating that Darion had this planned for some time. Likely while he was still under the Lich King's control.

The Lich King will throw the mace to the other side of the room, and raise a significant number of undead, and one Elite to thwart your endeavor. Drop the elite, and make your way to the mace.

Once you get the mace, and the saronite, you will need to get blood off of Festergut, and Rotface. Not to worry there is nothing special that you have to do during the battle. The blood drops as a quest item.

Once you acquire the blood, you can turn the items in to Darion, well his forge. Once this is done, you get to listen to Darion, advise you further on the situation. His tale is one of caution. After listening to Darion, you acquire Shadow's edge. This weapon is probably the single most devastating, and truly awesome weapons currently in the game.

The quest goes on, to have you acquire 1000 souls from the scourge in Icecrown Citadel. This part of the quest seem eerily reminiscent of Arthas's fall from grace, in his acquisition of Frostmourne.

Eventually following this quest you will receive Shadow Mourne. Anyone who wields this axe in any form, is unmistakably noticeable. The final piece of this unique weapon is the goats head hilt from Frost Mourne.

Raiding, questing, for a truly bad ass weapon. It all ties in nicely. Blizzard actually accomplished something on this particular expansion.

So many seem to think that they can form any guild of 10 people, and clear ICC. While some may very well succeed, I would much more encourage people to return to guilds with a track record, of success. If seeing, or experiencing the content of the game is your desire. I encourage you to follow through, make new friends, find a guild that suites your needs, and accomplish your goals.

After you’ve killed Pestergut, your next target is Rotface (well, technically, you can do either first). Rotface is a “Do Your DPSers Suck” check. While healing and tanking are important, I think the fight relies more on situational awareness than tanking and healing savy or gear.

The main gimmicks of the fight are Rotface, the Big and Small Oozes, and the Ooze Flood. You want to tank Rotface in the center of the room, and have a zone around the boss set aside for your ranged dps. Healers can float in the middle because you’ll be using your second tank for Ooze Kite duty. In a way, this fight is a lot like Grobbulus, but with some fresh gimmicks.

The first major problem is the Ooze Flood. It lasts for 20 seconds and covers about 20% of the area on one side of the room. The flood causes around 4500 damage every second to those standing in it, as well as reducing movement speed by 25%. Stay the f out.

Secondly, Rotface will occasionally target a player, turn, and cast his Slime Spray. It hits for about 5,600 a second for 5 seconds. It’s easy to avoid by not standing in front of while while he’s casting. Stay awake and it’s not really a big problem.

Lastly, a player will get targeted by Mutated Infection. It causes a small amount of damage, and reduces healing, but when the infection is cleansed or ticks off, a Small Ooze will be spawned. The infected player needs to kite his ooze to the outer ring where the Ooze Tank will be standing by.

If this is the first Ooze, the dps’er will need to hang with the Ooze Tank until another Ooze is brought over. The two Oozes will merge, forming a Big Ooze, and the dps’er can return to the boss. The Ooze Tank kites the Big Ooze around the room until the Big Ooze absorbs 5 additional Small Oozes. When this happens, Unstable Ooze Explosion is triggered. This fires off several Ooze missiles which deal quite a bit of damage (around 10k nature damage to an area). So you’ll want to be aware of where those are heading and avoid them.

The biggest problems in this fight are remaining situationally aware while dpsing away. The key to the fight is doing this as tight as possible, and reducing damage taken by the raid via Ooze Fields, Slime Sprays, kiting your Small Ooze out asap, and staying the f away from Unstable Ooze Missiles.

Festergut a.k.a. Pestergut is really not that difficult. Like Loot Reaver, Patchwerk, and others before him, Festergut is a gear check. The mechanics are pretty easy; made up of elements that we’ve seen before. The three main elements of the fight are Gastric Bloat, Spores, and the Blight which covers the floor.

Gastric Bloat causes the tank to take a lot more damage per stack, if your tank gets a 10th stack, he explodes and probably dies. So you need to do the familiar tank-swap if you want to be victorious. As the debuffs increase on the tank, the raid takes less damage because of the spores. The spores are periodically cast on raid members; which explode and provide your raid with a stacking 25% shadow resistance. The idea is, you need to stack up on resistances so that your raid is taking less damage as your tank is getting hit harder and harder by the boss.

During the phases of the fight, the number of spores available increases with each phase. At the end of the last phase, Festergut inhales the Blight and the fight starts over at the beginning again. Besides the usual gear checking for tank survivability and healing throughput, this fight is about coordinating the spores.

From your perspective as melee dps, there’s really not much for you to consider, unless too many spores pop up in the melee zone. So, you need to pay attention to this for that reason. Stacking ranged on this fight will eventually bite you because the ranged get Vile Gas which in addition to damaging them, damages the players around them too. The ranged will need to spread out.

We used a triangle formation, and swapped out a hunter for a third healer. On healing duty we had a Druid tank healing, and a Priest providing utility heals where needed. Both have significant mobility due to faster cast times and insta-casts. We positioned a Resto Shaman in the melee group for AoE heals. Our Druid, Priest, and Warlock formed a triangle around the boss.

These spores look similar to the spores in the Loatheb encounter, except that they spawn on a player and are not targetable. They deal inconsequential damage and then explode, providing the needed shadow resistance to the raid around them. Ideally, you will have one spore on your melee and one spore on ranged.

When a ranged member gets a spore, it’s necessary for the other members of the ranged triangle to collapse in on the spored player so that they receive the shadow resistance, and then move back to their original position.

The inherent problem with this strategy is that there’s no guarantee that a ranged player will receive a spore. If two or more of your melee receive spores, it’s necessary for them to be ready to fall back to the ranged group until their spore explodes.

Do this, and throw in a well placed heroism following a tank-swap, and you will be victorious. This is how my guild chose to approach this encounter. Do you have a different way that you’d approach it?

Consider the greatness that is [Ramaladni’s Blade of Culling]. DK meet your new ticket to DK tanking badassery; a truckload of Stamina, plus two blue gem slots, expertise, and AP. I would say that this is probably the best DK tanking weapon you can get.

I had an opportunity to get this item earlier this week. My guild, The Core, beat Saurfang for the second week in a row and this bad boy was lucky to be in the loot table. Unfortunately, one of the problems with being a DK is that there’s just way too much plate to compete with right now. Our raid group has 2x Ret Paladins, 2x DK’s (including myself), as well as a hunter and a rogue, so getting any dps gear for me is going to be a fight.

I’m a Frost DW fan, so I’m currently using [Singed Vis’kag the Bloodletter] from Onyixia and [Nighttime] from Heroic FoS. So far, we’ve had two [Citadel Enforcer’s Claymore]’s drop, which went to Incitatus, our top Ret Pally, and Garinoff, the second DK; leaving Beldun, our second Ret Pally using EoR from Heroic ToC.

Ramaladni drops last night, and Beldun began to convulse and wet his pants in raid chat; Something along the lines of “OMG ITS AN EPIC WEAPONZORZ THAT I’VE ALWAYS WANTED I NEED THAT AXE I WANT I WANT I NEED I NEED.” Keep in mind that we’ve already explained that it’s pretty much a tanking weapon and the Claymore is a far superior dps weapon, and its dropped every week for us so far. Beldun proceeds to get epic fever, he saw it, it required two hands, and he saw that the item level said 251; greatest weapon ever for Ret Pallies, right?

Normally, I’m a forgiving guy. I gladly passed on the two claymores, but ths guy is definitely on my want list. I mention that I’m happy it dropped, and I receive the following response in officer chat: “Beldun really wants a weapon we need you to pass it to him, you use one-handers anyways.”

I’m happy to rake them over the coals on this one; particularly because I’m not a fan of Beldun as a player. He’s one of those people that plays whatever class is easiest and most OP at the time, and then hides behind it so everyone will think that he’s just an awesome player. He played hunters when they were sickly OP, then switched to DK (which he played quite badly, but we were admittedly OP at the release of LK). His decently geared DK was crushed on the damage meters by Incitatus when he was in mostly blues, so Beldun switched to Ret Paladin.

My main problem is that I have to use all my skills to beat him on the meters, when all he’s doing is sitting there and punching buttons to spam Divine Storm, Consecrate, and Crusader Strike. It takes little skill to generate high moderate dps on a Ret Paladin in ICC because it’s all undead and involves a lot of AoE pulls. It really burns me that a mediocre player can nearly equal, and in some cases, outshine a good player who’s playing a class that’s not over powered.

Do you all feel that damage is balanced among the dps classes? Do you feel like Retribution Paladins have an advantage or you, or is it about equal?