Every boss is now released, your Icecrown Citadel boss difficulty rankings.

[Nitros14]

With all the bosses now out I'm thinking back over the dungeon and putting the bosses in a logical order.

Personally I prefer 25-man raids so my specific list will only be for 25-man difficulty. Others can surely comment on 10-man.



25-man Icecrown boss difficulty ranking

#1: The Lich King is easily the most difficult encounter in the zone. Not going to say anything more until I've killed it.

#2: Sindragosa isn't really any harder than Putricide or Lana'thel until she hits 35%, but her soft enrage is an extremely hectic phase. This encounter is markedly more difficult than the other wing bosses in the final phase, Putricide phase 3 is pretty tame compared to this. Keeping up with everything thrown at you and still DPS-ing Sindragosa is a big challenge.

#3: Blood-Queen Lana'thel is probably slightly less theoretically complex than Professor Putricide but the DPS and healing requirements are leagues higher. She turns into a monster going from 10 to 25. The air phase is hell to get everyone alive through on 25 and if anyone dies the enrage is a huge threat.

#4: Professor Putricide is an encounter that requires a fair bit of learning and he's definitely not too forgiving just not on the level of the other end wing bosses. When it comes down to it his DPS and healing requirements are low enough to give you leeway in screwing up his mechanics. Random crap like abilities hitting rooted players are annoying but you can have someone die and still be okay.

#5: Blood Prince Council: I've changed my mind on this, this encounter has a lot of points of failure that will just instantly wipe you, two Kinetic Bombs going off or Keleseth tank dying or a fire sphere hitting a bunch of players when the target is slow. There's a lot going on and it's more to learn than any of the other non-end bosses. The DPS requirements are very low however.

#6: Valithria Dreamwalker seems like a encounter that walks a very fine line of tuning. If your healers don't lose their dream stacks and your DPS keeps up with the spawns this will seem very easy. If you get behind at all or the healers lose their stacks getting overwhelmed is just as easy.

#7: Rotface seems more and more to me like a fight that is entirely reliant on a fast DPS burn. The mechanics are very simple, kite an ooze around and run to it when you have a debuff. Move a bit when it explodes. This encounter isn't too bad to learn at all, it's just getting the DPS you need. As your DPS increases this becomes incredibly simple and the healing load much lighter.

#8: Festergut is a gear check. Easy to learn and easy to execute. If you're wiping on this your gear is terrible or you're not playing well.

#9: Deathbringer Saurfang got buffed this week but he is still relatively easy. A decent gatekeeper for the rest of the dungeon.

#10: Lady Deathwhisper used to be harder than Saurfang but after the nerf not too bad at all. Lots going on but the tuning is incredibly forgiving.

#11: Lord Marrowgar exists to be slain for a raid weekly these days, and also to not drop whatever you need.

#12: Gunship battle is just Yeah.


Your thoughts and opinions on the instance?

[Wannabetank]

Saurfang is buffed right now so he has 11/10 hard difficultly. His damn blood power goes up even without having the mark on the tank.

[Bolg]

Saurfang is buffed right now so he has 11/10 hard difficultly. His damn blood power goes up even without having the mark on the tank.

Got already nerfed. :

We've just deployed a hotfix that reduces Saurfang's blood power gain from ability damage back to 3.3.0 values. There was also a minor visual range issue with Blood Nova that was fixed.

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...&pageNo=13#245

[Nitros14]

Saurfang is buffed right now so he has 11/10 hard difficultly. His damn blood power goes up even without having the mark on the tank.

We uh, didn't even notice he was bugged. I assumed getting 4 marks was just our playing sloppy. He still died pretty easily on the first attempt.

[tawney]

Dreamwalker is alot harder then blood princes. We killed princes the first nite with only 23people in the raid.

[Nitros14]

Dreamwalker is alot harder then blood princes. We killed princes the first nite with only 23people in the raid.

I'm inclined to disagree, we 9-manned Dreamwalker on 10-man on the third try when someone was AFK for an hour. 25-man was pretty easy too, got it on the second attempt after coming pretty close on the first one.

Yet we still wipe weekly to something on Blood Prince Council because it's less forgiving of people slacking off.

[Izenhart]

Agree with the difficulty rankings

[cobra9244]

Agree.

[tawney]

You 2shotted dreamwalker yet think princes are hard? That is odd. I'm in a very casual guild and I'm sure we could 20 man princes, no way in hell could we do that with dreamwalker. I guess each g has its own issue.

[Gerina]

for 10 man(haven't done lich king or sindragosa yet though)
gunship<lady<marrowgar<deathbringer<festergut=dreamwalker=rotface<blood council<putricide<blood queen<sindragosa<lich king

note i haven't done sindragosa/lich king yet, we got 20 tries left on those though :P

[sscavenger]

I have yet to get a group that can get past Saurfang. Ten man or twenty five man, just seems to me that one group will always lose it. Tanks aoe entire fight, ranged won't kill blood beasts, healers panic, or dps will aoe and get blood beasts on them. I don't know, funny thing is almost revered and never done a single rep run. I love the groups I get into and they wipe on trash. Trash mobs with mechanics?! Inconcievable! Just aoe them to death, arg what is wrong with you idiots why can't you kill? Stop dying!

[Sammonoske]

Well, i can't say much because my guild has not killed that many.

1. Prof. Putricide: We just have not gotten to many chances to learn the fight and the last time we tried we only got him to 75% ish.

2. Festergut: My guild does not have the best dps (we have to many stragglers under 5k dps), with a full raid we can beat him with 10-15 seconds left. If we are missing just one dps we cant beat him.

3. Rotface: The randomness of the encounter is most bothersome for us. And people fail to run away when they have a ooz.

4. Blood Princes: We started with war pally, S. priest for tanks. We swapped S.priest for a DK and it made a significant differences. And people are paying attention more. Although our last kill we had about 7+ ppl dead.

Everything up to Saurfang are all faceroll for us now.

[jeffason]

your ranking seem accurate

[Sarcasm]

I would rank Blood Princes and Valithria at around equal difficulty, if anything Valithria is a tad harder. Other than that, agreed.

[Raunoman]

I nearly entirely (see what I did there?) agree on the list but personally I think Princes are easier than Valithria.. but I like your reasoning!

[Bluedynamite]

I agree pretty thoroughly with your rankings, well done!

[Herecius]

Everything seems correct for us except for 5, 6 7. I would place Dreamwalker at 5, Rotface at 6, and Blood Princes at 7. We literally 15-manned the last 40% of blood princes, with all of our melee dead thanks to a bad empowered flame orb that decided to slam into a melee just 2 yards out of melee range. It's unbelievably forgiving, and as long as people are continuing to bump kinetic orbs in the air, and your healers are still keeping the tanks alive, then the encounter is pretty much a done deal.

[Kynlas]

I'd rank them:

- Putricide
- Queen
- Rotface (turns into a sh*t show around 20% for my guild)
- Festergut
- Dreamwalker (tried her for the first time last night, really fun)
- Saurfang
- Blood Princes
- Deathwhisper
- Marrowgar
- Gunship

havent seen Sindragosa or obviously the Lich King yet

[rocius]

from hard to easy:
1. lich king
2. Professor
3. Sindragossa
4. Blood queen
5. Dreamwalker
6. Blood council
7. Rotface
8. Saurfang
9. Lady deathwhisper
10. Marrowgar
11. Gunship

Festergut difficulty scales on the gear so cant rate that, its a simple gear check boss, no tactics needed, just simple facerolling.

[Cerabret100]

How do you guys feel the overall difficulty is? How do you think heroic is going to turn out?

And please note, i'm not asking how easy it is for blood legion or other top guilds, i'm asking YOU. people seem to forget difficulty is subjective. I find Resident Evil easy to moderately challenging, but my friend who just bought Code Veronica ran out of ammo and died in about 15 minutes, she can't turn around and say it's easy just because I can beat it in a day or two. Same thing applies here.

I personally havent set foot in ICC (our guild had a 10-man, scheduled during my physics class, and had a WoW-heroes GS requiremtn of 2600 whereas i have 2480...and it sucked).

In fact i haven't really done anything but Arachnid Quarter nax (25 man) and Flame leviathin 25 man on account of our guilds raid organization up to this point being a complete and total cluster-fuck, and i'm more of a solo gamer specializing in Survival horror, RPG (Specifically JRPG's), "spectacle fighter"s like Devil may Cry and Bayonetta.