battletagoneCof5#1879

19 February 2013

Godmode in ICC

Years ago, I was playing Diablo II quite a bit. I know, I know, that was a decade ago. That's not my point. The point is that D2 had an Easter Egg or cheat depending upon your perspective that allowed your character to become invincible and unable to be killed. I remember having a ton of fun blowing through content knowing I was unable to die.

But this is a WoW blog, and there are no cheats within Azeroth!
Ah, true. But, tell me.... have you taken a raid to Icecrown Citadel lately? I've set up some weekly meta runs (we've done Glory of the Ulduar Raider and now working on Glory of the Icecrown Raider) for the old drake achievements.

At level 90, the fights, even at Heroic mode, are trivial. However, I would not say they are all brainless. Actually, the largest challenge on some fights is to not to too much damage! Consider our guild fun run  Sunday night...

The Lower Spire

Getting Boned by Lord Marrowgar was pretty much a given. All you have to do is DPS the boss. At level 90, he dropped before he could cast a single bonespike.
But then, dealing with Lady Deathwisper's Full House proved to be a bit more of a challenge. We had to wipe the first attempt because we pushed her into phase II before we had enough of the cultists up to qualify for the achievement.  The act of wiping required the enrage timer to actually incur enough damage to offset our warrior's regen (thanks to Second Wind)!  The second attempt on Lady D went as follows:  a single hunter dropped her shield to 20% and stopped. Nobody else did ANYTHING but get wailed on by adds. After three rounds of adds spawned (we didn't count the individual adds, just the number of waves), then we opened up on Lady D and got the achievement.
The gunship battle went as follows: a warlock and a hunter jumped across and stayed across. The pets fought Saurfang for aggro. Pretty much cakewalk for I'm on a Boat.
Same for Saurfang himself. I think we killed him before he could even summon blood beasts, so I've Gone and Made a Mess should be a done deal.

The Plagueworks

For Rotface's Dances with Ooozes and Festergut's Flu Shot Shortage, all you do is burn the boss. On Professor Putricide, whoever drives the Abomination should just slurp up slimes. Again, the Professor was only able to summon one ooze before he died, so this one is pretty straight-forward and you'll easily get Nausea, Heartburn, Indegestion....

The Crimson Hall

On the blood council, The Orb Whisperer is a DPS race. Instead of using the intended mechanics of collecting blueberry adds and taunting, keeping the beach balls up in the air.... Pssh.  Just nuke Prince Keleseth. The encounter will be over before another prince activates!
We did hit a challenge on Blood Queen Lana'thel, however. There were 4 people that needed to be bitten for the Once Bitten, Twice Shy achievement. We almost had to wipe because we dropped the boss to 20% before the second vampire bite. It doesn't sound hard, but it is difficult to resist hitting back and just letting a boss wail on you, but that is exactly what we had to do. We're coming back for the 2nd kill needed for those that don't want to be bitten, but that should be a bit easier to do.

The Frostwing Halls

We failed the Portal Jockey achievement because we missed a portal. Next time, we'll have a dedicated healer take the portals and then back up DPS jump in so that we get each portal as it pops. The adds outside are trivial, so DPS just unleash and it should be cake.  Meh, live and learn.
I was personally missing All You Can Eat, but at 90 this one's also a no-brainer. Just DPS. You'll kill Sindragosa before the stacks even have a chance to reach that high.

The Frozen Throne

Finally, the Lich King. We were going for Been Waiting a Long Time for This and too just concentrate on the Meta instead of also dealing with shadow traps from heroic mode, but we still failed the meta even though we killed the King. After reading up, the approach we'll take next week is as follows:

  1. Use 2 dedicated tanks (we used a DPS warrior, and while health wasn't an issue, aggro was). 
  2. One tank is on the Lich King (solo taunt). Second tank targets all the ghouls (little ones and big ones). 
  3. When Necrotic Plague is cast the first two times, those raid members run away from the entire raid to be dispelled -- so that the Plague disappears. When the third plague is cast, that raid member runs to the growing pile of ghouls to be dispelled (so that the Plague jumps to a ghoul).
  4. Each remaining Plague that is cast needs to run out of the raid and get dispelled so there is only only Plague active. 
  5. Wait... well for a Long Time. The achievement is named appropriately. 
  6. Don't rely on the Lich King buff from Plague to monitor the number of stacks --- try to monitor on the actual impacted ghouls (this is where we failed!)
  7. One Plague hits 30, then burn Lich King.  

We failed because we had two plagues active, one at 14 stacks and one at 18 stacks, but that didnt count.  However, we did earn Neck-Deep in Vile because we pushed the encounter directly from Phase I / Transition to the end.  Huh?  Yeah... Ranged stood in the Remorseless Winter and kept beating on Lich King, getting him to 10% and the insta-death before we even saw Phase II with Valks or Phase III with Vile Spirits.
I know this content is old. I know the Lich King has been solod. But you know what?  It was a TON of fun to casually go back and farm achievements for guildies that had never seen the content. I still love Icecrown and it remains one of my favorite raids in the game.


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