PTR And Upcoming Articles

3.3 may be as early as Tuesday.

What have you and your guild done to get ready?

My list is:

• Make sure your UI is working
While the PTR is still up, take the time to double check that everything works as you expect.
• Have consumables ready
Frost Lotus prices will go up.
• Be ready for the new craftables.
That means using every cooldown on Spellweave, Ebonweave, Titansteel, and buying up Arctic Fur (or farming)
• Be ready for the first set of bosses
Lord Marrowgar, Lady Deathwhisper, Deathbringer Saurfang and the Gunship Battle
• Be ready for unstable servers
Always go into Tuesdays being pessimistic -- who knows, maybe for once they'll be up!
• Familiarize yourself with WoWProgress's Icecrown rankings plan
Kernel is asking for feedback too.

Speak up in the comments with other ideas for 3.3 prep!

If your server is down, but ours is up watch our Live Raid Streams (complete with vent!)

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We have some new guides to share the last few days:

Mauru of Purple Baby Dragons takes on one of the toughest guides in current content: trying to explain Faction Champions.

• Heroic 25 Man Faction Champions Strategy

Dethkrik from War Machine keeps rocking the PTR strats with:

• Gunship Battle Pre-Release Strategy

Falynx of Voracity posts his popular guide on guildleading:

• Starting Up a Successful Guild

And finally, Repeek of Fusion posted a guide on Fury warriors:

• Raiding as a Fury Warrior

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A big grats to Potlol of Cuties Only for writing such a great guide about Unholy DK's in ToGC that he's become the first guide to reach 10,000 views, and better yet he has 33 votes, all of 5 stars -- top notch!

• Unholy DK - A guide to ToTGC

In other news, Dethkrik of War Machine has been hard at work and produced three guides:

• Onyxia 3.2.2
• Lord Marrowgar Pre-Release Strategy
• Lady Deathwhisper Pre-Release Strategy

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Our Icecrown PTR library is almost complete, only missing guides for Blood Prince council and Gunship Battle.

Icecrown is coming soon, and we're doing our best to help you get ready by having all the abilities up to date and in one easy location, at least one written strategy for every boss, and at least 2-3 movies to watch.

StratFu is close to, if not the, most complete set of information on ICC available.

We would welcome any new guides anyone has, but especially for the EU bosses, as ours are sparser than we'd like.

We're also interested in any additional movies for any bosses, especially from different roles (melee/ranged/tank/heal) that we don't already have, to provide additional perspectives and make things as clear as possible.

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First off, all the bosses now have their abilities attached to them -- sorry for the delay in that. The abilities are also clearer and easier to browse.

Secondly, we have a funny-as-only-YOGS-can video preview of all of Icecrown, which I heartily recommend you watch:

• YOGScast: Icecrown Citadel Preview: Bosses and Legendaries

Dethkrik of War Machine on Turalyon has written an Affliction Warlock guide for us. The warlocks have gotten every spec with a guide faster than every other class -- including mages. The rest of us are slackers!

• Affliction Raiding Guide

Finally, Spaceace, who plays Puppytoes in Titan on Skywall, brings us our first healer guide:

• Holy Paladin

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First up, from tonight's PTR, an explanation of what Lord Marrowgar's hard mode is like:

• StratFu: Marrowgar Hard Mode (PTR)

Secondly, two class guides:

• Demonology and You, the much-anticipated Demonology/Metamorphosis guide from Brubaker of <Fusion>
• Raiding as a Combat Rogue, a guide to being a combat rogue from Ellyee of <Fusion>

And finally, fleshing out our ToC strats, two contributed boss guides:

• Semper Fortis VS Northrend Beasts from Stave of <Semper Fortis>
• Onslaught's guide to Lord Jaraxxus Hard Mode from Pulsar of <Onslaught>

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Swiped this from Idras of <I Stab Your Face> on Outland-EU on the EU icecrown progression thread:

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TL;DR summary of this entry: This system combines all of what I hated about Algalon and ToC and makes it worse. Raiding used to be relaxing, the most frustrating thing was losing a few hours to bad internet -- when did Blizzard decide they needed to force 9-10 guilds in the world to get out of the house more?

Not looking forwards to dreading server instability and key people DC'ing again and ruining the week.

Summarizing this post from Daelo: Icecrown Citadel Raid Access Progression

First off, there's multi-week gates for normal mode icecrown. So your raiders will be bored. The good news is, this means we can probably get past the holidays without hard-mode raids, so holiday schedules will be easier.

The unlockings are (with "several" week breaks in between):

1. Lord Marrowgar, Lady Deathwhisper, Icecrown Gunship Battle, and Deathbringer Saurfang
2. Rotface, Festergut, and Professor Putricide
3. the Blood Princes and Blood-Queen Lana'thel
4. Valithria Dreamwalker, Sindragosa, and the Lich King available

The reasoning? Very clear this time, no beating around the bush: they're playing nursemaid and mommy:

"We believe a staggered release of the content will allow players to experience Icecrown Citadel at a sustainable, measured, and ultimately more enjoyable pace."

Unfortunately that's all the good news.

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Bluedeep over at CUTIES ONLY has written a great guide about the strategy they used to down Valithria Dreamwalker on the PTR.

Valithria Dreamwalker (PTR v 0.1)

Not only is it a good strategy, but he also wrote some very good tips for the different roles (caster, melee, healer, tank) that make it even clearer what to expect.

Thanks, Bluedeep and CUTIES ONLY!

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Thanks again to Firstaidspec of Blood Legion and Veyril Cuties Only we have Sindragosa information:

Another very very detailed strategy from Firstaidspec, including tips for every role in the raid: Sindragosa v1.0 (PTR)

And a nice video from Veyril: Cuties Only Icecrown Citadel PTR 25 HQ Sindragosa PTR

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