3.3 – Impressions and ICC

3.3 launched yesterday with the usual fanfaire and shenanigans. The servers were down, logins were aborted, instances crashed, and UI errors filled the screen. In all honesty, I’ve seen worse from a major patch (AQ anyone?), and this was pretty mild considering the changes that were put in. All in all I’m impressed with 3.3 – and here’s a quick overview of Tuesday night in .

LFG and the new 5 mans

Since half our guild was already inside the first five man, I partnered up with Monger and hit the LFG for a specific instance. The interface was really smooth, and about 30 seconds later we were at a loading screen. There were some issues with getting into the dungeons (and the instance servers crashing) but all in all it was a pleasant enough experience.

I didn’t get an opportunity to complete all three five mans before raid time, but what I saw was pretty awesome. I went into each boss fight blind, and really enjoyed some learning moments with both trash and the bosses. They are definitely a step above the original five mans, and the loot is pretty sweet. I managed to win myself a Quel’Delar hilt, but I passed it off to Monger. I don’t heal as much where I need a big upgrade, I have the 245 axe from Anub, and I have three different 245 tanking weapons. I’ll try and grab it again for sure though, just to complete the questline.

Into ICC – Raid Time

First impression on entering ICC – Tirion needs a bigger battering ram. Honestly though, this is what Ulduar should have looked like. A massed army and their cohorts, though I expected to see more folks outside shooting at the citadel or something. I liked that you could see Lord Multiheaded bone guy (Marrowgar?) from the entrance, and the trash was somewhat spooky. “I wonder if those things chase us, it looks like it’s breathing”. RAAAWWRRRR!! Yup.
We took it cautious on the trash, next week we’ll probably go back to just AoEing everything down. We elected to use some CC and LOS pulls though and made it to Marrowgar with nary a scratch. Nobody had done any real reading on him, so we just rattled off some major abilities and went to it. I didn’t feel that he hit particularly hard, and his whirlwind was easy enough to move from. The biggest issue we had was not collapsing after a whirlwind, and someone being out on an island and getting a bone spike. We one shot him, and moved on to the next boss.

Lady Deathwhisper

Fortunately the elevator boss up to Lady Deathwhisper was nerfed, the elevator goes up not down (like SSC), so there were no falling deaths. The trash was entertaining, and in typical fashion we wiped on the trash and then one shot the boss. Deathwhisper’s mechanics were fairly straight forward, and the only time I felt like I was in danger was when I moved out of LOS while tank changing. I will say that 10min CD on the druid battle-rez is pretty nice – especially when we have three druids in the raid.

The hardest part of this fight was one of the big spider adds. They have an ability similar to Mark of the Faceless. After wiping on them once, we wound up fighting them along the wall near the cubby holes. When someone got the mark they would duck in, similar to Chromaggnus in BWL.

The Gunship

This is by far one of the coolest fights I’ve done so far. I mean, who doesn’t want to be Bobba Fett with a jump pack? Add in the engineering wrist rockets and I was looking to toss someone into a Sarlacc pit. We had two or three wipes here trying to figure out the timing and such on the Alliance ship, and Mauradin starts hitting like a truck in short order. Once we got the adds and timing sorted though, the fight was over in short order.

Saurfang the Younger

I have to say I was pretty disappointed in the entire encounter, though the interaction between father and sun was interesting. I also loved hearing Fordring fighting against the Lich King. Stand strong brother.

Conclusion

Overall the ICC raid and 5 mans were awesome, though I felt the encounters were a bit easy. It’s now Wednesday, and we’re sitting on ToC for the rest of the week. We may try and pull together a 25 man foray into ICC instead of farming 25 ToC again. Then again, the thought of running the gunship with some of those PUGs makes my skin crawl.