Guide to Heroic ICC

[Admuntour]

If Lady isn't tauntable, the only way I can think of it working is that, you have 2 tanks that build aggro constantly and have rogues and hunters MD to them. Tanks switch naturally when ones aggro falls enough. Problem is, the DPS have to be really careful with the aggro they generate to not overtake the tanks.
Also, if adds continue to spawn you probably need 4 tanks. Sounds interesting.

Anyway, if these reports are accurate, I'm disappointed with the hard modes, I was vast enhancement of tactics, and perhaps even have a couple more phases per boss on certain encounters.

[crazerk]

Regarding Lady fight - i would think 2 tanks (for 10man ) is still manageable, just that as you say, the 2 tanks stay on the boss, and the raid probably has to position further up the stairs so that adds aggro in that direction.

Fanatics may be MDed to the OT (though MD for boss should be priority, since tanks can just taunt Fanatics) while Adherents can be burned down. Ofc the main issue will be threat management.

But if you think of it logically, I don't think it'll be that big an issue? The moment P2 starts, the DPS can just wait for adds to spawn and clear that wave before DPSing boss. During this time the 2 tanks build up threat on the boss, and the 'tank rotation' will be natural due to debuff.
Then depending on how fast DPS kills off adds, there is only about 10-30s window to DPS boss until next set of adds spawn.

So it's like the tanks are 95% of the time on the boss while the DPSers are only about 50% of the time on the boss.

Ofc, i haven't personally tried the heroic mode so all this is just my theorycraft.

[Sidonis]

Some of this can be gleaned just by checking the RSS feed page for DeadlyBossMods being updated, such as:

Deathwhisper: Adds spawn every 45sec instead of 60sec, she mind controls 3 people at once instead of just one, and her Berserk timer is 6 minutes instead of the 8 or 10 minutes it is on normal.

[Kikazz]

im sureon gunship heroic mode the mortars one shot u if u not a tank? please verify

[Sidonis]

im sureon gunship heroic mode the mortars one shot u if u not a tank? please verify

Only if you let them gain a few ranks. It's more important to kill Riflemen and Mortarmen on Heroic to prevent them from gaining ranks from excess time alive. Basically the melee that go to kill the mage each time need to kill half the Mortarmen each time they go over, to prevent them from gaining too many rank increases.

[DragonFireKai]

And Vezax, Freya, Iron council, Deconstructor and Hodir. Yes, "some" do forget quickly.

Irae AoD downed Vezax Hard on April 17th. Inner Sanctum downed Freya Hard on April 17th, and Hodir Hard on April 19th. Deus Vox downed IC hard on April 20th.

Deconstructor was broken, and was downed by 24 guilds the day it was fixed.

[Nitros14]

Some of this can be gleaned just by checking the RSS feed page for DeadlyBossMods being updated, such as:

Deathwhisper: Adds spawn every 45sec instead of 60sec, she mind controls 3 people at once instead of just one, and her Berserk timer is 6 minutes instead of the 8 or 10 minutes it is on normal.

Berserk is NOT 6 minutes, watch Deus Vox's video. It is 10 minutes.

[Threndsa]

For Lady DW do the adds have more health as well or just her?

[Meredi]

Judging by how many guilds are already 8/12, I'd say the difference doesn't appear nearly big enough. Seems to be a bit of a joke compared to the old Ulduar hardmodes.

Considering that its only the top guilds that are even attempting the hardmodes this week (only 12 guilds are 8/12+ HC), I'd say that they are just as challenging.

What people don't consider when making statements like this is that content has always been cleared fast by the top guilds on the world. We haven't seen a HC LK kill yet so I'd say thats the real challenge based on the last boss of content being the only challenge (KJ in SWP, Yogg+0/Algalon in ULD, and Anub in ToGC). Final bosses of content rarely see week 1 kills (i know LK was killed on normal but it was normal so who cares), ICC HC is exactly how it should be. also when Ulduar launched the entire raid was new (with some testing), people didn't get to farm the content for months then clear hardmodes, the top guilds were clearing them early with lower gear than the raid they were in, so obviously the with hardmode system any guild that was clearing ToGC and ICC was gonna have a better shot at it than clearing it in regular ToC25 loot (which is pretty much comparable to doing ULD hards in naxx25 loot).

however ulduars hards actually altering the encounter was alot better design than just buffing the bosses and slightly altering their skills, but still its harder and it works so w/e.

really you see it too much and its just sad, people on here bashing the difficulty of a raid they arent clearing. stop living through your favorite end game guilds and do something for yourself, then maybe you can say content isn't hard enough.

[Shiira]

Icecrown hard modes are being cleared faster than ulduar hard modes because we didn't have two months of gearing up from normal modes before attempting ulduar hard modes.

[mmamor]

how many marks of sanctification do the end bosses in heroic icc10 drop?

[Gollum]

tbh those differences are just crap. same fight with with few crap added mechanics.

seems like ulduar won this expansion.

[zaneosak]

tbh those differences are just crap. same fight with with few crap added mechanics.

seems like ulduar won this expansion.

If it wasnt for the lore behind ICC, it would be a very fail expansion besides how amazing it looks inside and out....

Ulduar mechanics were more clever and thought out and original.. same with the hard modes.

ICC bosses are very recycled, the only FUN bosses are the end-wing bosses and Lich King. The rest are just very boring and routine. I think Ulduar will be remembered as the best Expansion of Wrath. Don't get me wrong, I still like ICC , its new and fresh and end-game but its not as good as Ulduar if we are talking about boss encounters.

[Waterisbest]

There are 15. Out of 25 000 at least. That makes Hardmodes a joke?

Oooookaaaaayyyyyy.....

Apparently, for people who read forums it is. It is true that most people who play WoW think THEY have cleared the when only a few top guilds have actually done them, and these people (the whining people) won't even see any of the hms or even LK in normal mode, until blizz nerfs the encounters and give even more gear just to push them through encounters just like they have been doing the entire expansion. Still these people turn around and blame blizz for helping them, what a shame really.

As far as differences go, i was also thinking that its just more hp/dmg/healing, but after reading some tacs, alot of bosses have very interesting and ball busting mechanics, like the thaddius kind of twist to prof. put. or the "don't move" mechanic on princes, a fight where moving is very important. Lady is also very interesting.

I had high hopes for both rot and fester (especially rot), but so far the mechanics for these bosses disappoint me a little.

[Saliz]

Alright, I didn't read page two so I don't know if this has been covered. I will ignore first four bosses since they seem to be pretty well known. Most of them get like 4+ mil hp increase, some double, etc, it's pretty irrelevant, so I won't mention that.

Rotface: He gains Festergut's Vile Gas.

Festergut: Putricide shows up on the balcony and throws Maleable Goo to your raid. Pretty simplistic, just dodge it.

Putricide: This is a bit more complex and the data I gathered is from 10 man alone. There might be two additional abilities in 25 man, but I'm not entirely sure so I'll just keep my mouth shut.

First and foremost, you need to deal with http://www.wowhead.com/?spell=70911. It deals increased damage each second it ticks, you will have to throw it to someone else (throw as in, go close). Once it jumps off you, you get this http://www.wowhead.com/?spell=73117 for one minute. The plague itself also disappears in one minute, but it will be recasted shortly after. The 250% debuff can stack if you get it on yourself more than once.

Second, he doesn't cast tear gas anymore. Instead, he will spawn both orange and green oozes in the same time.

Blood Princes: http://www.wowhead.com/?spell=72999. Fire bombs will also drop faster to the ground. Much faster.

Blood Queen: She's shit and didn't even notice what she had extra since we 1 shot it and nothing seemed out of ordinary, except the extra health. Seems her aura deals more damage or whatever.

Valithria Dreamwalker: Hardest boss in the zone except LK. She starts at 6m/12m and her health decreases gradually. She takes invisible damage permanently, quite a lot of it. It SEEMS the damage stops once she reaches 75%, but I'm not entirely sure. Each add gains something new. The lich's aoe frostbolts also burn mana equivalent with the amount of damage done. The zombies put a new debuff on tank. The aboms also have a frontal cone spit.

Sindragosa: Same routine, extra damage to the raid. The only twist, compared to normal mode is that Unchained Magic is rather dangerous here. If you keep casting and get a few stacks on you, the Backlash damage also damages the nearby people in a rather big area, 20 yards~ or so, not just yourself.

Lich King: Well, you better discover this for yourself

[Beace]

Let me point out a few things.

1) Paragon have cleared 11/12 hardmodes by now. According to their website they've used up 6 out of their 20 tries. Yes I'm sure they've also done all the practice they can on alts and 10-mans, but that doesn't change this fact.

2) Yes, a lot of Ulduar hardmodes were cleared early. Specific encounters, by specific guilds. They didn't go there and 1-shot the hardmodes, they wiped tons before getting their kills. Let's check a few numbers.

Freya with 3 elders: Inner Sanctum got an early kill. This guild only managed one more hardmode on this reset, and I'm willing to bet they needed 50+ tries (maybe a lot more). Week 2 only two more guilds managed it, it took till week 3 for it to "loosen up" for the others. (I can't really remember if there were any major changes to this encounter early on)

Iron Council hardmode: Deus Voux got an early kill, I believe this is where they had tanks HS out of instance to manage it. After blizzard made some adjustments, and it took till week 3 before we saw more kills, and even then it was with voidwalker tanks at first. Additionally, this is the only hardmode Deus Vox did week 1.

Thorim hardmode: Inner Sanctum and Method got early kills, none other did it until week 2. Additionally, Method only accomplished 2 hardmodes the first week.

Hodir hardmode: Again only IS and Method got kills week 1. I don't really recall exactly how the timer was changed around at this time, so hard to analyze exactly what went on. Anyway, took till week 3 for kills to start rolling in (this is when they nerfed the timer making it a bit of a joke as I recall).

Firefighter: First kill happend in week 3 by Ensidia, and it took 2 additional weeks before another was done.

Vezax hardmode: Irae AoD killed it week 1. This was the only hardmode they accomplished week 1, and it took two more weeks for it to be repeated.

I don't need to mention YS.


So basically what we have here is this. Yes, guilds did Ulduar hardmodes the first week, completely true. But let's not ignore the fact that it was different guilds focusing on different hardmodes, and probably wiped 100+ times overall depending on guild and encounter.

Only a couple of guilds managed 2 hardmodes in the first week, and today we see a guild that have done 11/12 and we're up to 21 guilds that are 8/12. To me this speaks a lot louder than the fact that the ICC encounters were already "known" when they hardmodes were released. These guilds had for the most part already practiced on Ulduar PTR, and obviously they had limitless number of attempts when the instance was actually released. If you went for a ulduar hardmode, you learned the fight pretty damn fast, it was about finding the tactic and execute it. Any argument about raiders already knowing the fights from normal mode in ICC today is void in comparison.

As for gear... the guilds accomplishing ulduar hardmodes back in the days were pretty much full BiS of ilvl 213/226. Gearwise, the step from BiS T7 to T8 hardmode isn't much different than BiS T9 heroic/T10 normal to T10 hardmode. I think you can assume well geared raiders had about avg ilvl 220 going into ulduar, making it a 19 difference to ulduar hardmode loot. Well geared raiders today (few weeks ago) are at maybe 260, making the step to icc hardmode loot 17.

We're seeing shitloads of ICC hardmode clears because the encounters are "easier", not because guilds already know the encounter or because they're already geared up. Same thing was true for Ulduar.

[crazerk]

Second, he doesn't cast tear gas anymore. Instead, he will spawn both orange and green oozes in the same time.

Do you mean instead of throwing Tear Gas, he spawns 2 adds during each transition?

Fire bombs will also drop faster to the ground. Much faster.

Do you mean Kinetic bombs?

Updated the original post with your feedback, thanks!

[Saliz]

Do you mean instead of throwing Tear Gas, he spawns 2 adds during each transition?

Yeah

Do you mean Kinetic bombs?

Yeah

Updated the original post with your feedback, thanks!

No problem

[Franzeska]

As for gear... the guilds accomplishing ulduar hardmodes back in the days were pretty much full BiS of ilvl 213/226. Gearwise, the step from BiS T7 to T8 hardmode isn't much different than BiS T9 heroic/T10 normal to T10 hardmode. I think you can assume well geared raiders had about avg ilvl 220 going into ulduar, making it a 19 difference to ulduar hardmode loot. Well geared raiders today (few weeks ago) are at maybe 260, making the step to icc hardmode loot 17

The thing you're forgetting with your discussion of gear is that guilds have had like 2 months to gear up in normal mode ICC before they could even try hard modes. Most of them have probably been doing half-alt farm raids for extra tier pieces as well. They're going to be sitting close to the best they can get before hard modes already.

In Ulduar, guilds were attempting the hard modes right off the bat in mostly Naxx gear. It would have taken them a couple of weeks to collect full sets of Ulduar gear equivalent to the full ICC sets they're wearing right now.

Not to mention the fact that some time spent in Ulduar PTRs doesn't really compare to 2 months of being forced to repeatedly farm a lot of these encounters over and over again. A lot of these hard mode abilities had been around or data mined since PTR as well so I'm sure some of these guilds have been using the time thinking about these sorts of things.

And finally a lot of these hard modes in Ulduar were stupidly overtuned or broken for a while until Blizzard made some fixes. It was still an experimental thing back then. Now they probably have set the tuning to the level it's intended right from the start, which means the encounters are doable and not massive brick walls. And any encounter that is doable is going to be cleared fast because that is what these guilds live for.

[Pieterman]

they shud have made gunship alot cooler :P to win you must kill the enemy faction leader. thx for this info, was looking for this!