If ever there were a boss just begging to be turned into a totally Camaro-awesome tattoo, it’s Lord Marrowgar. Like an epic, multi-skulled skeleton made of bone and skulls and spikes, Marrowgar is hands down one of the coolest looking mobs in the game.
While the sophomoric “Dude, he’s a bone guy with a bone axe!” revelation has me only a little ashamed, I nonetheless get a certain thrill up my spine each time I see him.

Lord Marrowgar is not a complex fight, although there’s a few things about it that are going to be counter-intuitive. I think that slight change-up in normalized behavior is probably the biggest challenge of this fight. It’s kind of a clever design that way, but otherwise, you should expect Marrowgar to be your first, solid gear check in Icecrown Citadel.

The fight with Lord Marrowgar seems incredibly straightforward, since he really only has four or five abilities. Basically, two tanks start the fight. He shoots lines of fire, which your raid should not stand in. (You’ve got the “don’t stand in fire” trick down at this point, right?)

Periodically, Lord Marrowgar will impale a member of your raid on a bone spike. Kill that spike to free your raid member before that member dies. Lastly, Marrowgar does a whirlwind. That’s where the counter-intuitive piece comes in, since you really don’t need to run around like a herd of panicked cats to avoid the damage.

I mean, not taking the damage is great if you can avoid it, but the whirlwind doesn’t hurt so bad that you should range your healers. But, ultimately, the whirlwind damage isn’t all that deadly if you’ve got a potion, or if your healers are on their game. I’ve seen more raids die trying to get back together after the whirlwind than raids that die during the whirlwind itself.

Okay, all that being said, let’s take a look at Marrowgar’s actual abilities.

Abilities

Saber Lash: Saber Lash is one of Marrowgar’s more iconic abilities. It is a massive hit that is split evenly between the tank (technically, Marrowgar’s target) and the target’s two closest allies. This is, therefore, also the ability that requires you to have two or three tanks. (Two in 10-man, three in 25-man.) If you don’t have someone else to help soak the damage, this ability will make pretty quick work of your tank.

Coldflame: Coldflame will target a random member of your raid, and then draw a blue, burning line of fire on the ground between Marrowgar and that raid member. Your raid should simply sidestep out of the flame.

Bone Spike Graveyard: This hurls a massive bone at someone. Whoever gets in the way will get impaled. It really sounds like you can avoid it, but I’ve never seen a spike happen without someone getting impaled. As soon as a raid member is impaled on the spike, though, all possible DPS should be dedicated to freeing them. If you leave your raid buddy impaled on the spike, they will die from the periodic damage.

Bonestorm: The ability known as Bonestorm actually looks like a big spinning whirlwind melee attack. Most raiders — especially melee raiders — are very well trained to not stand in whirlwinds. They instinctively pull away from the whirlwind, so as not to get simply turned into jelly as soon as the ability happens.

This whirlwind, however, doesn’t actually do a vast amount of melee damage. If you can somehow manage to avoid it without completely leaving your raid miles away behind you, go for it. Otherwise, just try and sidestep the worst of the hits. Marrowgar will Bonestorm in four different corners, and then return back to his tank.

What makes Bonestorm really dangerous isn’t the melee attacks — it’s the additional Coldflame lines of fire he puts on the ground when the attack occurs. Just like Coldflame itself, you should avoid standing in it. It’s just as deadly as the regular ability.

So, ultimately, if you can manage those four different abilities, you can handle Marrowgar. It’s a gear check — mostly for your tanks, admittedly — to be sure you’re ready for the rest of the Icecrown Citadel.

Achievements

Boned is the only boss-specific achievement for Lord Marrowgar. You achieve Boned by not leaving any raid members on their bone spike for longer than 8 seconds. That’s not a very tough achievement, but it’s made easier with the use of a handy “/target bone” macro. Pulling off Boned will probably rely on your ranged DPS characters more than your melee ones, since it’d take a few second for them to get into position.

Summary

So, the final summary of fighting Lord Marrowgar is pretty simple. Don’t stand in the fire. When he whirlwinds, avoid it if you can, but don’t lose your head trying to dodge it. When Bone Spike Graveyard happens, free your raid members as quickly as possible. Make sure you have two tanks soaking the Saber Lash.

The most difficult part of this fight, again, is fighting the urge to completely scatter while trying to avoid the Bonestorm.

Good luck!

Following up on their neat entry for Ulduar, Blizzard has released their newest Bosstiary, this time for The Frozen Halls, the collection of new Icecrown 5-man dungeons coming with Patch 3.3. The site serves as an encyclopedia of information on the many and varied bosses of the Forge of Souls, Pit of Saron, and Halls of Reflection.

The Bosstiaries often have information that the dungeons never really give you; for example, who knew that Auriaya was the Titans’ librarian? Nobody, that’s who. We just wondered why the heck she was wandering around Ulduar with a bunch of cats and a bad attitude. But now you can go into the Frozen Halls and know exactly who you’re fighting and why, replete with marks on the map indicating the position of the bosses and the instance entrance.

The Forge of Souls sees us freeing the souls of innocents from Arthas’ Soul Grinder machines, run by Bronjahm, Godfather of Souls. Guarding the machines and preventing souls from escaping is the Devourer of Souls.

The Pit of Saron is Arthas’ saronite mining operation; Krick, a leper gnome, oversees the operation from atop his abomination, Ick. Forgemaster Garfrost shapes the saronite into weapons of destruction under Arthas’ command, and Scourgelord Tyrannus lords over the pit with his fearsome Scourge powers.
The Halls of Reflection are Arthas’ private quarters, guarded by his lieutenants in life, Falric and Marwyn. Inside, Arthas himself keeps Frostmourne locked away from those who would try to use it against him.

It seems like every Wrath patch brings with it more items than the last by an order of magnitude. It was eight hundred of ‘em for 3.1, between the Argent Tournament and Ulduar, and now Ghostcrawler says that 1400 more PvE items will be packed in every box of Patch 3.3, including our big orange buddy up there.

Given the recent interview with Cory Stockton and our man GC, it seems like there’s a lot of attention going into itemization for all of the Icecrown gear, and thus it’s actually a little surprising that there’s so darn much of it. And there’s a ton of new kinds of procs, set bonuses, et cetera, building on the “Epic. Cool things. Proc’y stuff.” mentality that GC says Icecrown items are all based on.

Then again, with what’s going down with items in Cataclysm, fourteen hundred new items seem downright mundane in comparison. It must seem that way to Ghostcrawler, too, given that this whole comment off-handedly came out in a post where someone was loudly complaining about an itemization bug on a piece of Icecrown gear. That’s casual conversation for ol’ Greg. “Yeah, put the finishing touches on 1400 new items today. Figure later I’ll get the number of that waitress at Applebee’s. Tomorrow I personally reitemize all of the old-world quests for Cataclysm. I’ll get up around noon, probably leave work at 3:30 or so.”

Wowhead has been a go-to site to track what’s going on on the PTR for quite some time, and now there’s even more reason to go there. Their improved new items in patch 3.3 page features the following improvements:

• Categorization by item level, with breakdowns for the five levels of items that are coming at us (219, 232, 251, 264, and 277).
• You can now filter the new items and search within them.
• Items are also sortable.

And this isn’t a new feature, but it bears mentioning, at least if you’re a major news geek like me: you can get an RSS feed of the new items added to the Wowhead database. If you wanted to you could probably hook this up to Twitter, or put it on your blog, or whatever.

Anyway, if you want to know what items are coming at us along with Icecrown Citadel, I think there’s no better place to be. What items are you most excited about?

The latest patch 3.3 build on the PTR has yielded tier 10 purchasing information. When players were purchasing tier 9, they had to to use badges to pick up the item level 232 iterations. But to get the next rank up, they needed badges and a token. When purchasing tier 8, all you needed was a class specific token which dropped from different bosses.

That will not be the case here. Tier 10 purchasing has been streamlined further, and I think this is the best solution as it contains elements of both tier 8 and tier 9 models.

Now when you want to buy tier 10, you have to use Emblems of Frost to purchase the item level 251 variants. This is the lowest version of tier 10 you can get. In order to get the next level which is item level 264, you’ll need to get a class specific token which presumably drops from Icecrown Citadel on 25. It could drop from Icecrown Citadel 10 after taking down Arthas or doing some heroic versions of bosses. We have no idea yet.

In other words, if I want to get item 264 versions my shoulders, I have to first spend 60 Emblems of Frost to get the Crimson Acolyte Shoulderpads. Then I have to raid and patiently wait for a Conqueror’s Mark of Sanctification to drop (Paladin, Priest, Warlock). Once I get the mark, I visit the tier vendor in Dalaran and turn both of them in exchange for the Sanctified Crimson Acolyte Shoulderpads.

In other news, tier prices also released. Gloves and shoulders can be bought for 60 Emblems of Frost, while the Helm, Legs, and Chest can be had for 95.

We’ve been waiting to see the end rewards for Patch 3.3’s Quel’delar questline, purported to be capable weapons, and it looks like this latest build revealed the stats for all of the weapon’s incarnations.

Swords:

• Quel’Delar, Ferocity of the Scorned
• Quel’Delar, Cunning of the Shadows
• Quel’Delar, Lens of the Mind
• Quel’Delar, Might of the Faithful

And if you can’t use swords, you can turn Quel’delar in for:

Maces:

• Cudgel of Furious Justice
• Hammer of Purified Flame
• Lightborn Spire

The stats are pretty good, actually! Not a bad reward at all. No tanking sword, though. Weird!

I’m on a boat!

That was the first thing that came to mind as I entered Icecrown for today’s Gunship encounter that will be coming in patch 3.3. It was another fun fight against those foul Horde forces although there were a few slight bugs in the mix. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to complete it because the Alliance cannons just didn’t seemed to be working properly. The goblins must have sabotaged it. Either that or someone forgot to reload them.

I added some screenshots of the event into the Icecrown gallery.

Anyway, it’s time to grab your sword and fight the Horde!

After teleporting up to the exterior area where the gunships were held, our raid group immediately engaged several Horde vermin. I was worried that it was going to be Faction Champs for trash. We easily swatted aside this healing druid (who wasn’t even in tree form) and ripped apart a blood elf priest. The hunter and rogue fell swiftly underneath the might of the Alliance task force after that.

Once we rescued our fellow Alliance NPCs, we had two ways to go. Going right would mean we would have to get by this abysmally large frost wyrm. It looked like some Horde attackers were trying to keep him at bay. Going left meant plowing through more orcs and their allies with the Alliance gunship, The Skybreaker, docked. Even though it would have been fun to sandwich the Horde units between us and the wyrm, we decided to head for the alliance vessel.

After all, we had an event to start.

Just as we were approaching dock, a large shadow appeared overhead. We looked up only to discover that the frost wyrm we left alone earlier blocked the path between us and the ship. Naturally, we did the only logical thing that came to mind and charged in. The frost wyrm put up a good fight but was soundly dispatched.

We boarded The Skybreaker and who did we see?

It’s our friend Muradin Bronzebeard!

His buddy beside him offered us a gift. It’s a jet pack that we get to wear in our ill-often used shirt slot. Activating it allows us to jump to any point within several yards. Supposedly it’s meant to be a safety device in case we fall off the ship. But we’re a little more ambitious than that. We’re going to use these jet packs (pictured in the very first image of the post) to board the other ship.

The premise

The basic idea of the encounter is that both the Alliance and Horde gunships will be squaring off against each other. Throughout the encounter, your raid team will be busy fending off intruders from the opposite faction as they board your ship. You’ll have several players manning the deck guns as they open fire on the other ship. Once the health of the ship drops to a certain percentage, the mages on the other ship will encase the guns in a solid block of ice preventing them from firing. It’s up to your team to then take the offense to them and knock out their mages and their rocketeers so that you can resume pummeling their ship and until it crashes and burns. Not only will you have to mess with opposing faction NPCs, you get to deal with High Overlord Saurfang. If you’re Horde, you get the pleasure of trying to stop Muradin Bronzebeard (and no one can stop a dwarf).

Attempt 1

Once we were ready to begin the encounter, it was time to ascend Icecrown. We talked to Brann and he gave the order to fire up The Skybreaker’s engines. The course was pre-plotted and we decided to take the scenic route. The architecture was admired. Bone dragons were spotted circling around the tower.

But then we were beset upon by the Horde gunship, Orgrim’s Hammer. They called for us to stand down and retreat. Of course Muradin was having none of that and said the dwarven version of “Hell naw!” and basically ordered us to open fire. Both gunships leveled off in the air and virtually hovered side by side.

Unfortunately, we came across a slight malfunction. Our cannons appeared to be ineffective (bugged as I had mentioned earlier). We discovered this while dodging incoming rockets. Without being able to do much of anything else, a group was dispatched to board the other ship to attempt to stop the rockets and take out the mages. Sadly, they didn’t last very long without any real support and we wiped as a result.

One thing I will say is that it seems to take a while for the encounter to reset after a wipe. Once every player died, we’d have to wait to zone in because the encounter was still in progress. It seems like it won’t reset until the Alliance gunship is destroyed.

Attempt 2

We dusted ourselves off and went back once we were clear. Knowing that the cannons were bugged, we decided to try something else and see what the trash did. We talked to Muradin and we were up and away!

All of us decided to forgo the cannons and simply board their ship. We looked for a safe zone which appeared to be toward the… bow of the ship. My naval terminology fails me but I think that’s what it’s called.

Axethrowers

These were annoying. All they do is throw axes and it seems as if they are able to hit players from any range. They weren’t difficult to take down.

Sergeant

They’re the main muscle for the Horde. Sergeants have a nasty whirlwind effect which is capable of decapitating clothies such as priests within their range. Players hit with a Wounding Strike will have the effectiveness of healing spells on them reduced by 25%.

Rocketeers

These are the enemies that are shelling the Alliance gunship and they are a priority target. Take them out and the ship will experience some relief from their rockets for a while. The rockets they fire are easy enough to spot and dodge. Players can even see the runes on the ground that show rocket impacts before they strike. Simply stand out of the rune and you won’t take damage. If you do take damage, it’s easy enough for healers to handle. But that doesn’t mean get careless.

Battle Mages

Mages are the key. Take them out and your cannons will be free to fire again.

By the time we figured out the individual abilities, High Overlord Saurfang had approached us and began systematically dismantling all of us one by one. The clothies had no chance. When he was on the tanks, the damaged appeared to be marginal. The tank I was with reported that Saurfang gained a stacking buff that would increase the amount of damage the orc would do. This lead me to conclude that a tank would be needed specifically for Saurfang while the rest of the raid was working on the other NPCs on the ship. We would have a limited window of time before Saurfang tore us apart and it was best that he be held off to the side. Once the NPCs were taken care of, it was time to strategically retreat to Alliance ship and continue firing cannons (if they were working).

Healing this fight is going to be random. There’s a lot of stuff to keep track of and if you’re caught looking the wrong way, some players could drop to 0 fairly quickly. Saurfang’s tank will need a set of heals especially when that stacking buff starts piling high.

All in all, it was a fun fight and a nice preview of the mechanics that are involved. At the present, it’s still a bit buggy with the guns and without them we can’t beat the encounter. We ended up staying a few more attempts after that just to get a firm handle on the mobs. Again, I’m not sure if the encounter is properly tuned yet. The trash went down much quicker than expected. To be fair though, this isn’t meant to be Faction Champions 2.0 in the skies or anything. This is certainly one of the encounters I will be looking forward to in Icecrown.

Oh I forgot to add. You can’t kill Saurfang. When he reaches a certain point, he just lays the smacksdown on the entire raid. We found that out the hard way by pouring massive DPS on him. Nope, didn’t work.

Daelo has posted this week’s raid testing schedule for the patch 3.3 PTR, and we’re going to get more looks at what the Icecrown raid has in store for us:

US Servers
Monday, October 26 at 7PM EDT / 4PM PDT – Festergut
Wednesday, October 28 at 7PM EDT / 4PM PDT – Icecrown Gunship Battle
Thursday, October 29 at 7PM EDT / 4PM PDT – Sindragosa
Friday, October 30 at 7PM EDT / 4 PM PDT – Valithria Dreamwalker

EU Servers
Tuesday, October 27 at 19:30 CEST – Lord Marrowgar
Wednesday, October 28 at 19:30 CEST – Lady Deathwhisper
Thursday, October 29 at 19:30 CEST – Professor Putricide
Friday, October 30 at 19:30 CEST – Rotface

A little bit of analysis about the schedule after the break.

The four new fights were all mentioned in the Icecrown raid preview — Sindragosa is the big frostwrym seen on the login screen that Arthas summoned in the Wrath cinematic, Valithria Dreamwalker is a green dragon that the Scourge has been doing some experimenting on (that doesn’t sound good, but keep an eye out for some Emerald Dream teasers), Lady Deathwhisper is the Supreme Overseer of the Cult of the Damned, and Professor Putricide oversees the Plagueworks. He’s the creator of Rotface and Festergut, and his fight will probably be a gross one.

Look for our impressions of these fights later this week, and if you’re looking to test any of these yourselves, better roll on over to the PTR. As always, this schedule are subject to change at any time without notice. Such is life on the Public Test Realm.