Empowered Fire

First Impressions: Icecrown Citadel

Ais and I had our first peek at ICC this week. I think it’s safe to say we’re both enjoying the instance: I actually missed trash pulls and Ais is adorably geeking out over the lore. I’ve been a bit distracted during raids lately, but I thought I’d put together a few of my thoughts concerning the fights from the magely perspective.

Marrowgar
I stayed arcane for this fight, with good results: I was able to burst down the bone spikes quickly while doing solid damage to the boss. The only tricky things are the aggro reset after Bone Storms and the Coldflame, which is easily avoidable. (Pop frost ward if you find yourself taking a tick from it, particularly if you have Incanter’s Absorption.)

Lady Deathwhisper
Mages have a lot to do on this fight. In 25 man mode, random raid members will get MC’d, so be quick with a polymorph if you’re able. Depending on your raid’s strategy, you may be required to focus down adds or stay on the boss full time; either way, arcane is probably your best bet. Arcane has the superior threat reduction talents, which is very handy for DPSing down the adds (especially given that establishing and maintaining threat on them can be dicey): Ais stayed fire for this fight and found herself subject to a lot of unwanted attention. When Lady Deathwhisper empowers a Cult Fanatic, the mob will get a decidedly sexy spellstealable buff — these need to be purged off quickly, so you might as well get the benefit from stealing it. Apart from that, the fight is pretty straightforward: kill what you’re assigned to kill, avoid ghosts that are coming towards you, move out of death and decay. Piece of cake.

Faction Warships
I’m gonna level with y’all right now: I got my rocket pack and I promptly stopped listening to anything my raid leaders were saying. (Sorry Weazey and Gradar.) ZOOOM! My role was to stay on defense, so I flopped to FFB, cast living bomb on every single thing in sight, then spent my time doing Rank 9 and Rank 8 flamestrikes followed by blizzard. But, seriously: rocket packs. ROCKET PACKS. Um. I’ll pay more attention this week and report back.

Deathbringer Saurfang
All of the damage on this fight is physical, so buffing everyone with Amplify Magic is a good idea. Three of the four mages in my raid had 2/2 Magic Attunement so we split up the buffing responsibilities. I started out as FFB for the slow applied by the main nuke and so I’d have blast wave to knock back mobs close to me, but after one pull I swapped back to arcane: DPSing the mobs down quickly seemed more beneficial than kiting them around with frostfire bolts.

So, for the first four fights in Icecrown Citadel, arcane still looks to be the most beneficial. Fire or FFB will probably do better on Warships simply because of the AOE capabilities of living bomb explosions, but arcane will still do well enough. In short, arcane will do better on any fight where you’ll need single-target DPS or controlled burst; fire will do very well on any fight with multiple targets tanked near each other.

I think Ais and I have made it abundantly clear that neither of us are going frost any time soon. The buffs simply weren’t enough: simulations show it lagging drastically behind even frostfire bolt. Sorry, frost mages.

I hope you all enjoyed the first taste of ICC! It’ll be a while yet before we get more.

Tags: frost-ward, icc-mages, icc-raid, Icecrown-Citadel, Icecrown-Citadel-raid, icecrown-mage-strats, Icecrown-raid-instance, patch-3.3