Many thanks goes out to the guild officers and members in Dsylxeic for finding a way to continue on in Wrath and not only get him down the first time a couple weeks ago but to continue to go through the content each week and help those of us that were not in on the first success. I watch many guilds fall apart this close to an expansion and the job the officers have done to keep the raids happening has been awesome.

On another note, I wanted to mention how they are rewarding Invincible. Unlike a lot of hard core guilds that would probably just loot council it out, they devised a method to take each persons time invested in ICC and create piece of pie that represents commitment. Each piece has a randomly assigned range of numbers 1-1,000,000 and a roll is done to see what piece and player wins. I don’t know who thought this up but what an excellent way to fairly reward the people who you play with.

I was actually lucky enough to have my piece win last night, which has to be some kind of luck becuase I have to assume my slice is pretty darn thin (though I never really looked). I passed on the mount knowing there were quite a few players WAY more invested than I to get us to where we are now (Farming LK Hero 25) and people that having the mount would mean a whole lot more to.

Mounts are cool, but I play the game to have fun. I know many others get more satisfaction than I collecting mounts or rare game items so it didn’t make sense for me to take it. It’s the same reason I don’t have Anzu, a Tiger or Raptor mount, yada, yada, yada…. just not fun.

Beating hard content is fun, and no mount could have been more satisfying than getting Light of the Dawn accomplished.

Now the Reins of the Icebound Frostbrood Vanquisher… That’s a different story. That would be fun.

We look forward to our 10 man raiding for more than just achievements and downing difficult content but because of the fun we have playing together.

Hopefully we can shake the rust off quickly but we have not done anything as our complete 10 man since sometime in early June… Woof.

Thanks to the GM (Selmak) of my guild Dsylxeic (Well, not my guild but the guild to which I belong),  for standing in with his DK for our fallen Warrior (his motherboard was fried).

So just an FYI to everyone out there, EW&F is not terrible at all. With current ICC gear most likely the largest problem you will have is not killing bosses too quickly. The hardest part of the encounter is timing the death and that is about it.

We went with 3 tanks, Pally, DK, and Myself (Yes, I still bear it from time to time), 3 healers (Pally, Disc Priest, Tree), and 4 DPS.

We start on Fire Dude, Misdirect him to the hallway entrance to his wing, DPS him while moving him to Stone dude. When Fire dude hits about 30% we go in on Stone Dude. When both are at about 25% I run along with 2 DPS and 1 healer to Storm dude and tank him and all the adds in the middle. 2 things I have to do…

1. Don’t stand in Fire.
2. Pull spawned adds of my healer.

Basically the rest is just talking in vent and coordinating their demise.

After that we moved on to Hero LK, we are now making solid progress and finally saw phase 3? The room with all the spirits… well at least 1 person did… progress none the less.

So I was inspired to write about my UI button layout.

Our resident 10 man Pally Tank had switched up to Ret and was having some issues with button presses. It occurred to me at that moment I could break down my button layout in my UI and maybe help some ferals out there new to either spec maybe layout their buttons better.

First, get Bartender addon.

Here is my Kitty map…

Lets start with the most important row… the bottom row is keybound to my number keys. I play with 4 fingers (pinky on 7, fingers running to the right 8, 9, 0.). I can reach over and mash – and = or 5 and 6… sometimes I stretch and reach 4. 1 I have 7 on my Naga mouse keybound to the 1 key just for Vamp biting, otherwise I never hit 1.

So lets look at my layout for the bottom row…

1. Autoattack
2. Moonfire – This is for pesky horde that try to run with 100HP left after a beat down.
3. Ravage – Just cause
4. Maim – Valks or trash/Horde caster interrupts.
5. Feral Charge (Cat) – comes in handy on lots of fights, in particular Heroic Prince ICC… a Feral game changer.
6. Rake – in the rotation
7. Savage Roar – in the rotation
8. Shred – in the rotation
9. Mangle – in the rotation… sometimes… when I am unlucky… or stuck in front
10. 0 on the bar, Rip – in the rotation
11. - on the bar, Prowl
12. = on the bar, Dash

So I use my right hand on the mouse for movement, and my left mostly for 6, 7, 8, 9, 0 the meat of kitty DPS rotation. Lets look at bottom bar when Prowling.

So Bartender changes my buttons when I am in Prowl mode. My favorite combo is on boss opening I mash 7 for FF and quickly hit 8 for kitty charge before bartender makes the button corrections for coming out of Prowl. I have Dash, this is for PvP purposes, pounce and the usual other Prowl openers you would expect.

Ok, lets take a look at the middle row. FYI, I mouse click anything on the top 2 rows.  I spend the bulk of my time from Cower over to barkskin. FF, Swipe, FB, TF, Berserk, and barkskin get used quite often. FR is right there on the far right in case I go bear and need some self heals (PVP or trash pulling). To the left of Cower you can see decurse which I use when needed on myself, then a macro labeled MIGHT… this is a fun macro for asking Pallies for might… we will leave it at that. Next is Abolish poison (PVP) and Challenging Roar (This should be Demo Roar, for PVP, I need to fix my bars.)

Finally the top row, from left to right…

1. Rebirth – This gets liberal use.
2. Hurricane – Just cause I can.
3. Meld – Cause I like to live.
4. NG – PVP
5. Macro – Shift out and back into Cat (This is to break snares)

The next 5 are all healing, keeping myself or others alive in a pinch. Note that Tranquility is right above Barkskin, this is because 10/10 times you are going to Bark then Tranq.  The last is the Rocket Pack for ICC Ship.

Next post I will break down my bear bars, most importantly I change very little in the top 2 bars when in bear form or spec which makes it worlds easier to find spells when I need them regardless of form or spec. Main attacks like Mangle also don’t change so 9 in any spec of feral form is mangle.

Anyway, maybe this can benefit some people… if anyone sees a way I could be doing it better let me know… though old habits are hard to break.

I have to update my gear list, I am running all Sanc T10 264 now and was lucky enough to get Heroic hurt stick Distant Land. Incredible how good this staff is that it essentially unbeatable until a Heroic LK weapon. I think someone messed up when they let this drop off a boss not LK, Sindy, or Putricide.

The closed beta has started… I am hoping to get invited. If I do, expect ALOT of posting as I am VERY excited about the changes in Azeroth.

Please Blizzard, don’t hold it against me that last time the invite ended up in my junk mail bin… by the way, watching my junk mail bin is not fun but I am watching it hard core this time.

Valithria Dreamwalker was silly easy on Heroic. DPS gets assigned a side, just run around on your side killing mobs that appear. Make sure if a blazing skeleton appears you prioritize getting it down first. Archmages might need to be stunned, but usually another class is assigned to that duty. Suppressors are the next real important targets and then the rest. I am sure it seemed easy cause we had a lot of healers in the raid and I am sure some really good ones at that.

Sindragosa was a little tougher on Heroic, but not horrible. I believe it took just 3 attempts to down her and only 1 attempt once hitting phase 3. This fight is actually pretty fun for physical dps. This is what I/we did and some tips…

1. DPS her but watch your Chilled to the Bone stacks as they will get high pretty quickly. I make sure to get in a full rotation and that she has a rake and rip up before I run out of Blistering Cold. Keep in mind the use of barkskin at this time to mitigate damage and help your healers when the stacks get high. I try to disengage at around 7 stacks. Also, burn Berserk right at the pull.
2. We stacked people getting tombed in the air phase in 2′s. 2 people on the left, 2 center, and 2 on the right at the base of the stairs. Tuck in behind as to line of sight Frost Bomb. DPS the snot out of people in the tombs but be careful and make sure you break people out according to how the raid is directing you. We broke 1 person out and then the second right after the last bomb. Shred works on people tombed, just go through the regular rotation and maximize DPS.
3. I personally burned my 2nd Berserk to make sure we got her to transition into phase 3 before the 3rd air phase and to be honest holding it for phase 3 most likely will not optimize it’s use as you will be spending time bouncing between tombs and Sindy.
4. In phase 3 make sure you know where to go if you get tombed. If you are not tombed keep an eye on your stacks of Mystic Buffet and make sure you are running out of LOS using tombs to clear stacks at about 2. Not much time to DPS boss but every little bit helps here, try to get in a rip and rake every time you get to hit her.
5. Be prepared to run away and sacrifice yourself at the end. With about 5% of her health left I believe we stopped breaking people from tombs and just burned her. I was one of the lucky ones that had to run out and stay tombed… I still managed 7th on DPS with ZERO 25 man heroic gear so I was pretty happy. (WTB Legendary Druid Staff)

No neck dropped (and I would not have bid on it or won it anyway) but I was able to upgrade my last T10 to Sanctified.

I do have the gear now to hard cap ArP but at the loss of a massive amount of hit and having to use the crappy 5 man normal TOC trinket… so that plan has been put on hold. What would be nice would be to get a 264 or 277 weapon with ArP and then gem for hit but so far no such luck.

I can’t help that my blog has become somewhat stagnant as I am no longer really in the position to be getting upgrades or challenging the meters as I get outgeared by people still running 25′s… or better yet running 25 ICC Heroics. No way I pug a 25 man Heroic ICC fight… ok, maybe ship but what good would that do?

I am sitting on over 200 Frost Emblems and I don’t really want to bother with the DPS cloak or the Tanking trinket… short of Heroic 25 the upgrades are just not that earth shattering.

I am looking forward to Ruby Sanctum and it’s new and shiny… hopefully mount… but I don’t really know.

Our 10 man LK Hero tries although fun, have been infrequent and progression has been slow. This fight is VERY unforgiving and having the majority of our 10 in <264 gear isn’t helping matters… I SO look forward to Cataclysm and the same gear dropping in both 10 and 25, hopefully they can get the balance right on the encounters to match the new loot ideologies.

Well, that is all for now… I will try and drum up the interest for a 10 man Hero ICC full on guide… ugh.

One tool at everyone’s disposal is WOL. This is where people post parses of combat logs from actual gameplay and raids to analyze later for checking on their own in game performance, or what others are doing during a raid.

A look at the parse HERE will show you that the 2nd highest DPSing Kitty on Heroic Saurfang (the first highest was a Russian kitty which made the parse hard to read) is obviously not using a mangle spam build. Just hover your mouse over his name and take a look at the breakdown… that is right folks, no mangle there.

Click on his name, and then the damage by spell tab and you will notice he mangled…. 4 times.

Feel free to go through the rankings for any given boss in ICC, find the ferals, and see what they are doing… pretty sure it’s not mangle spam. Just go to the main WOL page, then rankings, then DPS, then ICC. Pick your size and difficulty raid tab, then click more to get past all the warriors with Shadowmourne.

Another way to use WOL to your benefit is to look up some of these high DPSing ferals on the armory. Make sure to use the EU armory when looking up EU players, and US for US. Now you can take a look at the builds, glyphs, and gear choices of some of the highest DPSing kitties in game.

I was up there for a short point in time but players and gear have passed me by with my focus on mounts and achievements and 10 man raiding.

Frankly, I am no longer motivated by gear and high DPS numbers but progression, achievements, mounts, and titles. I get the best I can to contribute as much as possible but in the end sound game play, good strategy, and a good connection is usually enough…. of course that could be the 15% buff talking.

Typical Gratz and Kudo’s to my team, coming together after not playing for weeks to get this done in one hour. We were also able to squeeze in one night last week to get the All You Can Eat (10 player) out of the way which helped as we really didn’t want to get that one doing heroic.

We are hoping to follow up our Realm first kill of LK with the first Realm kill of LK Heroic… but we are already down to just 1 night next week so it may not happen… we still need to clear the rest of ICC first so it is looking like a raid extend of 2 weeks before we can even get in some serious tries.

I feel VERY confident we will down him given 2 nights of full attempts… even if we need that many… our group just plays together that well.

I was trying to get my It’s Over Nine Thousand! achievement but now I think I am going to wait for our LK Heroic kill as it will take me over the hump.

As soon as I can, I plan on doing a post wrapping up our entire ICC 10 experience with some tips and tricks.

For the record, we are doing this with no gear over ilvl 264 except for ICC rep ring. Also we are doing this without the benefit of Val’anyr, Hammer of Ancient Kings.

Heroic ICC is tough and not very forgiving. It takes every ounce of skill, Macro’s, tricks, tips, ETC.

I am going to go over each fight on heroic and the little things we can do as kitties besides Uber DPS (which is still important).

Lord Marrowgar

• Use kitty leap to close the gap between yourself and people that are spiked. Sometimes you can even time this when targeted by bone storm to get out of range fast.
• Use Dash to get through flames quickly during Bone Storm when you need to get into a better position.
• If you get targeted by Bone Storm shift to bear and pop barkskin to help with the incoming damage.
• If spiked in a lot of Coldflame be ready to pop barkskin right after you are released to buy some extra healing time for the healers. You might be getting released into Flame and a Bone Storm… you never know.
• Have an innervate macro lined up for one of your healers ( /target Healyguy /Cast Innervate).
• Have Brez ready, like most of the Heroic fights you are going to use it.

Lady Deathwhisper

• On this fight I have the prime responsibility in phase 1 to down her shield and I use my DPS at the end on and off to time it’s removal. You don’t want adds up when the shield falls.
• Be prepared to bounce between her and the spawning adds during phase 2. If you are getting an agro warning it is time to switch.
• Have an innervate macro lined up for one of your healers ( /target Healyguy /Cast Innervate).
• Brez on the ready.

Gunship Battle

• Beg to be a cannon so you don’t fall asleep.
• When jumping across using the rocket pack shift back to cat mid flight. Instantly target the mage, FF, Kitty leap in and get mangle up for your rogues as fast as possible.
• Did I mention not falling asleep?

Deathbringer Saurfang

• First get an addon called Control Freak.
• Set up control freak for Entangling Roots.
• Be prepared to target 1 add and click the Control Freak button to Root it in place. Make sure it is out of melee range.
• Time the root right after a 5pt Combo move for instant roots or time it on the cast time.
• I always get the right add while the DPS burn the left. You can root it and 9/10 times go right back to kitty DPS
• This will help if your raid comp makes add CC difficult. We have our resident tree do it until the 3rd mark I believe then I take over, some raids won’t have this luxury.
• Use barkskin when you have boiling blood or the Mark. Time it when it will most help the healers.
• Be ready to innervate.
• Be ready to Brez.

Blood Prince Council

• Move as little as possible but not at the expense of strong DPS.
• Chase the  Empowered Flames (Kitties love chasing balls). You can help save a fellow raiders life.
• Use dash and kitty leap to help move around the room limiting damage.
• Have moonfire at the ready for a last minute stray Kinetic Bomb.
• Be careful with your threat on Keleseth, dead kitties do no DPS, Innervating, or Brezzing.
• After leaps and dashes try to stay still as long as possible while DPSing to wipe the Shadow Prison debuff.
• Be ready to Innervate and Brez.

Blood-Queen Lana’thel

• Time your berserk at the pull to gain threat right before the first bite and get it early.
• Barkskin right before Bloodbolt Whirl in the first air phase.
• If possible be prepared to Barkskin/Tranquility on the 2nd air phase during Bloodbolt Whirl.
• Use kitty leap to return to the boss after running out from Shroud of Sorrow or Pact of the Darkfallen.
• Be ready to Brez and Innervate… again.

If anyone has any other tips or tricks I might have forgotten on any of these fights please leave a comment and let us know.