Heroic Icecrown, 10 man only.

[Deleted]

I'm curious, I run a 10 man guild on Doomhammer-EU and my server doesn't have much in the way of successful 10-man guilds, so we've really no one to compare ourselves against. We're at 9/12 and wiping like pros on Putricide Heroic atm.

What I was thinking was, how are other 10 man guilds going? We don't particularly do much in the way of 25s, other than me and 3-5 others start a 25 4-6 boss pug on saturdays, so gear is somewhat a limitation for most of our core group.

So far we've only really struggled on Saurfang, where with the 10% buff it seemed almost impossible, clothy got a mark, wipe, 3rd mark during frenzy, wipe, teeniest tiniest slip-up of the healers, wipe. Anyway, you see my point. Other than him, the rest was execution refinement rather than hoping god would grace us with good RNG. That said, we got started pretty late and after our first 10ish wipes on Saurfang the 15% buff came in and we got him down fairly quick.

We're trying hard to get us some Frost Wyrms but I can see Putri and Sindra being cockblocks of the highest order.

So, how's it going for other 10 man guilds on other servers? Are we particularly slow or only a bit behind the pack?
Anything else particularly hard for other guilds?

[Deleted]

this is totally not a shameless self-bump, and I am in fact simply adding my own armory to add clarification and maybe peak the interest of readers.

http://eu.wowarmory.com/character-sh...er&cn=Kharadin

p.s. not self-bump, I swear.

p.p.s. also curious to amount of 10 man guilds out there, in comparison to 25 I heard the number was incredibly small, though that was just hearsay and I can't remember it coming from a credible source, though I can attest to logins and people being sat out due to having too many online at a time being a cause for concern, especially when both of these instances can happen on the same week. Curse of the 10-man I guess.

[Wingwraith]

Let me preface by saying, I'm not in a 10man only guild, however, all my gear is from 10mans and the same goes for most of my 10man group. (10m H > 25m N)
We're 11/12 on Heroic. We've had our Frost Wyrms for a few weeks now.
H PP and H Sindy were are last kills to get the meta-achievement.

A tip on H PP: the key is proper disease management. If at all possible, have range handle the disease exclusively, passing it back and forth as needed.

[Deleted]

We've only just started PP atm, I mean literally about 40 minutes on him, so far we're just getting blown up and people dropping from orange ooze damage, or explosions from green oozes taking out a person or two.

But yea, I think we're gonna 3 healer it to get the hang of phase 1 and 2 and work out any kinks we might have with disease management. We'll probably get back up to him on our Thursday raid and then have all of Sunday on him too, we'll see.

[Mixon]

set up an order of passing the disease so everyone knows who will have it b4 them and after them ... also abom slow orange and melee green with the rest of the dps in transition. took about 6 tries to get the hang of the disease but once you get that its gg.

[Wingwraith]

And also, make sure to go into a transition after you've killed a slime so that you don't have 3 slimes on a phase change.

[Steady]

[SLIGHT TLDR]

As Guild Leader of a 10-man guild currently working on ICC heroic (currently 10/12, Sindragosa @ 2%), the following has been my general observations and scores out of ten for difficulty (not fun) :

Marrowgar

Surprisingly difficult at first. Obviously the tank phase is still utterly simple but the huge bone storm damage combined with healer loss to Bone Spikes can be devastating for guilds just starting out on the boss. We took 4 healers to our first couple of kills, though we're doing it fine with 3 now. The key to the fight is proper spreading, avoiding unnecessary Coldflame ticks during Bone Storm and prompt Bone Spike destruction (i.e. anything to help healers, a survival fight).

7/10.

Deathwhisper

Unlike her 25-heroic counterpart this is really, really easy on hard mode and one of the first I'd recommend others to take on. The key to this fight is good CC on MC'd targets, raid awareness of ghosts and threat management. Tanks really need to be on the ball with Deformed kiting too. Two healing this was no problem at all.

3/10.

Gunship

Hi!

0/10.

Saurfang

If your guild's DPS isn't top notch this can become straining on the healers at the end. We usually kill it just before a third mark, our beast management is sound and DPS pretty good for a guild lacking in 277 gear. We had a few low% wipes due to Mark deaths before we killed it, but running 2 healers and an offspec hybrid seemed to handle the end of the fight well. Key to the fight is beast management, strong mark healing and high DPS.

7/10.

Rotface

Pretty much a joke and the second easiest hard mode. The extra damage and healing mitigation from the injection can be countered with slightly early dispels and (for us) having a Druid kite the ooze meant he could shapeshift and completely remove the movement speed debuff from the slime at will. We do usualyl use three healers however, just because if one has the injection there can be a short time where a fair amount of damage is going out compared to the output of one healer (though it's easily two-healable). Key to the fight is quick effective handling of the injection.

2/10.

Festergut

Tank damage spikes up quite significantly and healers will have to be on the ball with Malleable Goo. We three-heal this boss aswell, just because we aren't perfect and a healer does eat the occasional goo. The enrage shouldn't be a problem still even for 10-man/heroic gearing so the third healer doesn't cause problems, just adds stability. Key to the fight is proper malleable goo avoidance and strong tank heals.

3/10.

Blood Princes

Another boss we actually had a few problems with to begin with despite few changes in mechanics. Many guides suggest a proper tank but we run a ranged tank with significant stamina gear (also he is a frost mage for an additional pet to put on orbs). The more pet classes you run with the fewer problems Kinetic Orbs should pose. The Shadow Prison debuff is mostly a non-issue, there isn't a huge deal of movement required on the encounter. The key to the fight is keeping concentration up, not letting Kinetic Bombs hit the floor and ensuring healer range is kept on tanks (they hit pretty hard compared to normal mode).

5/10.

Valithria

Completely depends on the healers. We single tank this allowing an extra DPS outside to keep adds fully under control - it becomes pretty intense in the very late stages of the fight with the increasing add spawn rate but if your healers keep their stacks up from the portals it should be a clean kill. Key to the fight is taking absolutely minimal raid damage outside (Zombie explosions, Blazing Skeletons), interrupting the Frostbolt Volleys from Archmages and keeping portal healer stacks high.

6/10.

Lana'thel

If you can kill Lana'thel on normal mode before she flies up for a second time, which should be the case if you can kill LK/some hard modes, you can easily take her down on hard mode. Raid damage is slightly higher but by the time the stacking buff to her aura stacks high enough to cause a problem, half the raid is healing itself from the bite anyway. If you survive the first air phase (which you should do with DSac, DHymn etc), it should be a safe kill. Key to the fight is keeping the raid alive until most bites are out.

4/10.

Putricide

It's a well designed hard mode, and one that poses a challenge without being overwhelming. Mutated Plague is not a significant problem on ten man, 12 second intervals on passing the debuff allow for it to stay at range at all times. People must be aware if they are being targeted by an ooze/cloud to quickly pass it on though. In the transition we slow the orange add while the entire raid nukes the ooze into oblivion, we usually have it explode once before it dies with stacking mitigating most of the damage. The orange add is kited long enough that either the raid kills it before it reaches its target or the explosion simply doesn't have enough stacks to cause damage. If your DPS is solid I recommend popping Heroism going into the second transition phase (35%) in order to ensure both adds are down before the stacks start hitting the tank and to minimise damage from the volatile experiments. Have a DK use AotD on the green add if available, it'll be a complete non-issue before it dies. Phase 3 is unchanged ignoring the Plague which you should have mastered if you're reaching P3 consistently. We took about 19 tries overall to down Putricide, I was expecting to spend a lot more but it seems that Sindragosa/Putricide's difficulty levels on 10 hard are reversed compared to 25 hard.

8/10.

Sindragosa

An absolutely awful encounter. Having to battle through the first, relatively unchanged 65% of her health pool to reach the hard part is just tedious. Make sure no one takes damage from Blistering Cold or the Frost Bombs as they will one-shot, and take the time to practice management of the Unchained Magic explosions which can be brutal in P3. Heroism as soon as P3 hits and ensure stacks of Mystic Buffet remain in control. Our DPS is just high enough to solo-tank it with a fully Frost Res'd Bear in 251-264, ending with 15-20 stacks (we haven't killed it yet, but it's more than doable if your DPS is high and controlled). I, a DK DPS, am also capable of tanking 5-10% of her health pool away with frost pres, IBF and Bone Shield, so should the MT fall I can tank the remainder as long as the raid as a whole is reasonably healthy. When CDs fall off I tend to have 8 or so stacks of the Buffet, so after 1 AMS soak I'll get gibbed by melee/high damage aura ticks or one-shot Breaths, so I can't OT indefinitely.

9/10.

Having no experience with LK heroic, but full knowledge of the fight mechanics and tactics to counter, I can't comment reliably but I have to say as a 10-man only guild I'm less than optimistic. The guilds killing him currently are almost exclusively 25-heroic guilds in 264/277 combinations, simply because the numbers required from everything is barely possible currently in 251/264. I think Blizzard tuned the 10-man version slightly higher than it should have been just to block off 25-man heroic raiding guilds from trivialising it with high gear levels. Seeing the sort of numbers put out across the board on heroic-10 kills (6 dps, usually all around 10-12k) it's a push considering on normal mode our DPS will tend to hover between 8-10k overall for the fight.

[Bokchoii]

Honestly, questions like this are very vague.

It all boils down to the quality of the players, and the amount of time spent raiding.

It parallels 25 man raiding as well. If you are raiding 2-3 hours a week, you can't be expected to keep up with some guild (10m or not) that raids 15 hours a week.

Check out other 10m guild websites, either from ones you know on your server, or from wow-progress. See if with the amount of time raiding spent vs. the time other guilds are spending, if you are where you want to be.

[Ozzie]

[SLIGHT TLDR]

As Guild Leader of a 10-man guild currently working on ICC heroic (currently 10/12, Sindragosa @ 2%), the following has been my general observations and scores out of ten for difficulty (not fun) :

*snip*

Very grateful for this. I raid lead our 10 man only guild on Nordrassil EU, and so far we're doing OK. We managed the first 4 on our first night of hardmodes, and personally I felt that morrowgar was actually the hardest until we actually understood it. (EDIT: By "understood" I mean sorted positions and healing assignments. We effectively seperate the healing in to 3 sides, left, middle and right which allows us to spread our bone spikes enough so that we don't get a bonestorm immediately on top of them)

Going for Rot/Fester tonight, followed by Princes/BQL to at least get a 2nd tier token per week.

How do you suggest handling the flame orbs, considering we will have no melee to run along with them and decreasing their damage, particularly when they're empowered?

[Ghengie]

If you are interested in your progres versus other 10 man guilds, www.guildOx.com is a nice site to track this. As long as you fall in the guildOx criteria, you could track your guild on the 10 man strict rankings. Currently only 21 10 man only guilds are at 11/12 HMs. On this site you can also find other guild's websites if you're interested in what the others are doing.

I am raid leading <Amicus> which is currently 7th on that ranking. We are not entering ICC25 at all, the 25 man kills we have are caused by new recruits that have been pugging/raiding it before. We are working on LK HM, which is a pain as a good night of progress is incredibly set-up dependent. We're at LK HM for over a month now, having had 2 weeks of horrible sign ups which yields us only 2 nights of wiping so far. Seen the fight until ~50% and it is not too overcomplicated, but every moment in the fight has to be planned ahead and executed perfect.

Tips so you can push past Putri and Sindra. We are farming them for some time, the 20% buff will negate part of this tactics we brought them down with.

Putri: Tanking him on the spawn for the green add is working for us. All dps targets the green add as soon as it spawns. During phase transition Green > Orange. Depending on your melee/ranged distribution you might want to have all melee run out until somebody is targeted. During phase transitions, this will also count for the tank in that case.
Spread the ranged out in a full circle around Putricide and pass the disease on clockwise, or counterclockwise if you prefer that. Diseases can't really go wrong as long as people pass it on in ~12 seconds, passing it to a person with the debuff won't be devastating either as long as it will be passed on in a few seconds.

Sindra: Get your tanks a set of frost gear and let the healers pot resistance flasks so the need to reset their stacks early decreases. Mages and spriests are brilliant as they can dps through the instability as long as they stay out of the raid when they IB/Disperse the explosion. Hpallies can bubble through too, if needed in p3. Just mind the explosion which will go off as soon as he bubbles. Let your tanks call out when they have reset their stacks so iceblocks won't get nuked too fast. Once you did it once, you won't even know why it was hard before.

[coldfront]

There is a lot of ways to overcome Putricide Hardmode on 10 man. For instance if you have 1 warlock have them soul stone a certain raid member, when that member gets the disease let them die. Allowing a person with the disease to die, will make it vanish from the fight for a duration of time until he re casts it.

Also another way is to let a Shaman die with the disease and the re ank. It really isn't a guaranteed way of killing it on Hardmode but it does allow it to become some what easier if you are having trouble. The other thing you may consider is will the dps be enough, now that a 20% buff is out I doubt it will be a problem with enrage timer.

Also remember that after the first phase transition oozes, their will always be a 30 - 50 second wait until he re casts the disease in phase 2, so get maximum dps time on PP.

Multiple times of killing PP, he has only ever cast the disease at the very end of the fight, not sure if it's different for others or it's lucky RNG for us but it always occurs for us.

We didn't use this strat of letting people die, however it can be used to your advantage along the way.

[Luminee]

The key is surely communication. Especially for Putricide, without proper knowledge who's free and who has to pass the disease it's like roulette. When we first killed him (we did this after Sindragosa hm when 10%-buff was up, in my opinion Putr is harder than Sindr) it was like Lich King (normal) has been before. Once you get comfortable with timing and positioning it's a peace of cake if and ONLY if you talk to each other. After your first kill you will faceroll Putricide everytime while disesase hops around melee camp before you catch it laughing your ass off and still win because it's not that difficult.

I'd recommend 2-healing Putricide, it's giving you a lot more time to finish blobs. Don't necessarily get stiffed on one disease-rotation, stay flexible but don't wait too long (it's stupid).

Hope I didn't sound like a complete douche good luck.

Multiple times of killing PP, he has only ever cast the disease at the very end of the fight, not sure if it's different for others or it's lucky RNG for us but it always occurs for us.

That's totally RNG. We usually get one or two diseases in phase 1 and 2, but almost never get something in phase 3.

[Hetrofi]

I'm curious, I run a 10 man guild on Doomhammer-EU and my server doesn't have much in the way of successful 10-man guilds.

i myself play on doomhammer and i got to disagree on that point.
Eternal Gathering (A) has got all on HC.

and all these guilds have got 11/12 in HC 10 man:
Gaudium (H)
Knights of the Blackrose (A)
Insidious Intent (H)
Quelm (H)
Daggers of Darkness (A)
Vivid (H)
Aquamarine (A)
The Lost Chapter (A)


Emanate (H) has also got 10/12 in hc 10 man.

rest is below that
Atlas Shrugged

[Nifelheim]

I run a 10 man guild on Doomhammer-EU and my server doesn't have much in the way of successful 10-man guilds, so we've really no one to compare ourselves against.

Nah most of the ppl on our server is just full of fail! And the good ones is just in the top 6 25man guilds :P Casuals ftl :<

Oh, I'm Nifel from <Knights of the Blackrose> btw ;D

[Smartie]

ICC 11/12 HC..

Still failing to get the sinda achievement, someone gets a 6th stack and then the boss dies from the dots on her ^^ WTB an instant wipe button!

Another wednesday, maybe we'll get our drakes today.

For PP Heroic, have the ranged work together to pass it between them, melee just dps

[Kheirn]

Currently 6/12 HC, casual 10-man raiding 2x2 hours a week.

Got the first wing + Rot/Fester the first week, then we had to skip a week due to people being unavailable, and this week we'll have our second shot at heroic. Most likely going for Princes and Queen now, although Valiathra seemed to go pretty well last time.

[Steady]

Very grateful for this. I raid lead our 10 man only guild on Nordrassil EU, and so far we're doing OK. We managed the first 4 on our first night of hardmodes, and personally I felt that morrowgar was actually the hardest until we actually understood it. (EDIT: By "understood" I mean sorted positions and healing assignments. We effectively seperate the healing in to 3 sides, left, middle and right which allows us to spread our bone spikes enough so that we don't get a bonestorm immediately on top of them)

Going for Rot/Fester tonight, followed by Princes/BQL to at least get a 2nd tier token per week.

How do you suggest handling the flame orbs, considering we will have no melee to run along with them and decreasing their damage, particularly when they're empowered?

Aside from the tanks we only have myself as a melee DPS, so I wouldn't worry a great deal about the soaking. Regardless of melee DPS we have the tank on Taldaram pursue the orb for a little while (until 5 or so stacks have been soaked from the orb) and then move back into position. Ranged should be spread evenly anyway to ensure coverage for Kinetic Bomb bouncing, so if the Orb travels near a ranged on its way to another, they step in and soak another few stacks. Overall, if you run a Disc Priest, their shields will absorb the majority of a non-, or barely-soaked Orb explosion anyway on the 10-man encounter.

One thing I'll advise about the fight is not to overestimate the Shadow Prison debuff, if movement would help the raid significantly (such as soaking as mentioned above) then it'll likely not be fatal - the debuff only really starts to hurt when you're hitting 9-10 stacks, which should give ample time to move and carry out whatever needs to be done.

[Ozzie]

Live Update: Just gone 6/12 after one shotting rot/fester.

Thanks for the blood prince tips

Just about to try now after a 10 minute break.

I'll let you know how it goes

[Kélek]

I recently changed from a 25 man guild which was 7/12 hc 25 and 10/12 hc 10, to a 10 man strict guild with 9/12 hc progress. The increased difficulty in 251 gear to 271 gear was staggering.

It's also worth noting that no 10 man strict has killed the Lich King on heroic mode.

[Ghengie]

It's also worth noting that no 10 man strict has killed the Lich King on heroic mode.

The set up dependance is also a big factor here. From our own experience, as i posted before (Amicus), and from chatting with other 11/12 10 strict guilds.

Not having the perfect set up greatly decreases chances, being; Hunter (tranq shot), prot warriors (val'kyr stuns, intervene 'cd'), holy paladin (tankspammer), disc priest (infest, shield spammer).

These 4/10 spots already are needed. The fight also favors ranged, which makes it even harder for a 10 man guild who doesn't have more than 10-15 raiders in general.