Lo-Quality WoW

Since I havn’t been posting the past few months, there’s nothing here about our first forays into the Icecrown Citadel.  The slow progression as we slowly got to the point that clearing the first four bosses, those on the Lower Spire, became commonplace.  Our first demented tries against those of the Plagueworks.  The confusion we felt as we first took on the Crimson Hall.  Our triumph as we finally blasted through the Frostwing Halls.  And the coolness of facing against the Lich King.  So instead of going through all that, I’ll instead take you on a brief tour of the place, the bosses and my usual role for them.  And since I’m not really explaining the fights, you should read up on them or experience them yourself or I won’t make any sense at all.

When you first enter, you are of course at the Ashen Verdict base.  You fight your way through vairous mobs.  For awhile, this is all that anyone saw as they slowly built Ashen Verdict rep by clearing each and every mob, including some that activated via traps.  By now, our raid group is maxed out on rep so we tend to kill the bare minimum to get to the first boss, Lord Marrowgar.

As usual, this fight is a bit of a multi-task for hunters, while making life difficult for you.  First off, Marrowgar’s big-ass hit box means you have to stand a bit back from everyone else.  While a lot of places this wouldn’t be a problem, it becomes one if you’re on the receipt of a bone spike.

Since most of the raid will be bunch close together, practially under the boss, when one of them gets spiked, it’s easy for the melee to quickly add their efforts to breaking the spike.  When a hunter get’s spiked, the melee often has to run back to help out.  And because the hunters are also busy dodging the coldflame attacks, which melee can completely avoid if they’re close enough, sometimes you find yourself spiked but with the other hunters in the group either too far to shoot you down, or too near and under the minimum distance of their ranged attacks.

Then there’s Marrowgar’s fun little Bone Storm attack, which is a whirlwind type of attack against a random palyer.  Or at least it seems random but most of the time I’ve done the fight, he seems to try and pick those furthest away from him.  Or at least the first attack seems to almost always chase one of our hunters.

And lastly, for our group at least, as soon as Marrowgar does his last Bone Storm attack, we’re assigned to Misdirect him back to the tank as quickly as possible.  Which means while running away from the Bone Storm and subsequent Cold Fire attacks, we generally have to keep track of how many attacks he’s done and then MD back to the tank before he can accidentally aggro and kill someone important but squishy, like a healer.    Doable but I tend to feel like a bit of a lunatic as I scrambling around the room.

After Marrowgar is Lady Deathwhisper.  Our tactics have somewhat evolved as our gear improved.  Previously, the game for hunters was to make sure Wyvern Sting was up as much as possible on Lady Deathwhisper, to both wear her shield down and keep the hunter’s mana levels up, while dpsing the adds.   We were also responsible for kitting Deformed Fanatics and using Ice Traps on mind-controlled raid members. 

Nowadays, our tanks kite the Deformed Fanatics themselves, and the raid as a whole can focus fully on the adds and wipe them out with more than enough time to return to beating on Deathwhisper’s shield well before the next group of adds spawn.  The CC on mind-controlled members was deligated to anyone who could CC them, but since the raid ALWAYS has at least one hunter, we’re still on trap duty.  (Although I would also Scatter Shot them to give a few seconds to put the trap into place.)  And oddly enough, for awhile Lady Deathwhisper would almost always drop Zod’s Repeating Longbow.  Enough so that I know that myself, all the main hunter’s in the guild and at least 2 non-guild related hunters all got the bow from those runs. 

Next up is the fun Gunship Battle.  Initially we had the hunter’s in the cannons, which was a blast for me.  Until we realized, all ranged dps should be taking out the axe throwers.  So that’s my main job for most of the fight, taking time to take out boarders when the axe throwers are all down.  In general, I usually don’t join the boarding party unless it’s taking unusually long to drop the mage or we’re just in a rush.

That’s pretty much it, a pretty simple fight for hunters.  And actually as a group, except for some issues the very first time we did the fight and didn’t understand how things worked, this has become an “automatic” fight for us.  It’s a nice break because the Deathbringer Saurfang fight is a pain.

For our formation, we generally have a hunter on either flank, relatively close to the dias, with the healers in the center and any other ranged dps either behind or off-center from the healers.  The hunter’s job is to drop a Frost Trap and then to target and aggro one of Blood Beasts furthest from you.  We, or at least I, pull out every hunter trick in the book I can to slow the Blood Beast, while still killing it.  The afore mentioned Frost Trap along with Disengage, Snake Trap, Concussive Shot, Feign Death, and Distracting Shot are all used to keep the Blood Beasts occupied and away from the melee and healers.  Which is great until an errant Distracting Shot wings Saurfang himself.  (I’ve since become a bit more judicial in it’s use.)

We’ve got it down that we usually only get one Mark of the Fallen Champion, possibly two, while bringing Saurfang down.  I know for awhile this was our usual endpoint, but from start to finish, we can usually clear everything up to and including him within an hour.  This usually gives us time for another boss or two before some of us have to start logging off do to that whole “sleep” thing.

And that’s a quick, dirty look at the Lower Spire fights from my perspective.  As a side note, we’ve managed to clear the first three fights on heroic mode, after a few learning wipes.  We still havn’t quite got a good strategy down yet for Saurfang on heroic.  We’ve come close a few times but usually there’s one mess-up and then a cascade wipe at that point.  Who knows?  Maybe I’ll interrupt the tour with news of a Lich King demise!  But we’ll just have to see as the week goes on.