Project Lore

Some of the first unofficial information coming out of the new build of Patch 3.3 includes a preliminary list of achievements associated with the Icecrown Citadel raid and 5-man dungeons. The breakdown and running analysis follows:

Icecrown Citadel 10-man Stand-Alone Achievements

These are the achievements associated with individual events and/or bosses. This is most certainly a cursory list, as they do not cover every encounter in the raid as past achievements have. The early inclusion of these, specifically, may indicate that these bosses will be available for testing soon, as they are all included in the first section of the dungeon.

• It's a Trap! - Survive the Ice Jets in Icecrown Citadel.


• Unboned - Defeat Lord Marrowgar without anyone taking damage from Bone Cyclone.


• Thirty One - Defeat X (-this is a placeholder variable-) of Lady Deathwhisper's adds with her bombs and the defeat Lady Deathwhisper.


• I'm on a Boat - Claim victory in the Gunship Battle in which every raid member visits the enemy gunship only once.


• I've Gone and Made a Mess - Defeat the Deathbringer with fewer than X (-this is a placeholder variable-) raid members suffering from Garrote.

Icecrown Citadel 10-man Completion Achievements

These are the achievements awarded for completing different wings of the raid. By looking at each individual feat, we can see the full list of boss encounters for Icecrown Citadel.

• Storming the Citadel - Defeat the first four bosses in Icecrown Citadel: Lord Marrowgar, The Deathbringer (could it be Saurfang or Bolvar?), Lady Deathwhisper, Claim victory in the Gunship Battle.


• The Frostwing Halls - Defeat the bosses of The Frostwing Halls in Icecrown Citadel: Rescue Valithiria Dreamwalker (sounds like a friendly member of the Green dragonflight being turned), Sindragosa (you'll finally get to go toe-to-toe with that Frost Wyrm you see every time you log into the game).


• The Plagueworks - Defeat the bosses of The Plagueworks in Icecrown Citadel: Festergut, Rotface, Professor Putricide.


• The Crimson Hall - Defeat the bosses of The Crimson Hall in Icecrown Citadel: Defeat the Blood Prince Council, Queen Lana'Thel.


• The Frozen Throne - Defeat the Lich King in Icecrown Citadel: The Lich King.


• Fall of the Lich King - Defeat every boss in Icecrown Citadel.

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Icecrown Citadel, from the bottom, up.

For those of you keeping score, that brings the list of boss or primary encounters in Icecrown Citadel to 12. To reiterate:

Lord Marrowgar

The Deathbringer

Lady Deathwhisper

Gunship Battle

Valithiria Dreamwalker

Sindragosa

Festergut

Rotface

Professor Putricide

Blood Prince Council

Queen Lana'Thel

The Lich King

Icecrown Citadel 5-man Dungeon Achievements:

These achievements are associated with the three 5-man dungeons that lead up to the raid: Forge of Souls, Pit of Saron, and Halls of Reflection. Unlike the raid achievements, this is probably a comprehensive list.

• Icecrown: The Forge of Souls - Defeat the bosses in The Forge of Souls: Bronjahm, Devourer of Souls.


• Icecrown: The Pit of Saron - Defeat the bosses in The Pit of Saron: Forgemaster Garfrost, Ick and Krick, Scourgelord Tyrannus and Rimefang.


• Icecrown: The Halls of Reflection - Defeat the bosses in The Halls of Reflection: Falric and Marwyn (Arthas' closest confidants in the Third War), Survive the encounter with the Lich King (could this be a Metroid-style escape sequence?).


• I Feel Good - Defeat Bronjahm in The Forge of Souls on Heroic Difficulty without letting him cast his big spell.


• The Faced - Defeat the Devourer of Souls in The Forge of Souls on Heroic Difficulty after having interrupted his big nuke.


• Don't Let It Go to Eleven - Defeat Forgemaster Garfrost in The Pit of Saron on Heroic Difficulty before he gets 11 stacks.


• Don't Look Up - Clear the hallway before Scourgelord Tyrannus in The Forge of Souls on Heroic Difficulty without anyone taking icicle damage.


• We're Not Retreating; We're Advancing in a Different Direction. - Escape from the Lich King in under two hours and eleven seconds.

Don't be alarmed by that last one. It's undoubtedly one of Ghostcrawler's "let's give the our players a heart attack" placeholder numbers. The encounter will not take two hours and eleven seconds!

Feats of Strength

There's only a single new Feat of Strength listed, but boy is it a doozy!

• It's Over Nine Thousand! - Earn more than 9000 achievement points.

I'm only at 5130 myself, and I don't see that number increasing significantly anytime soon. It may not seem impossible, but the closer you get to the maximum, the thinner the margin, since you'll have done most of the achievements you knew you were capable of.

What say you of these achievements, friends? Cool? Uncool? Hard? Easy? The boss-related ones give us some hints about how those encounters might work. What do you think of their potential capabilities?

Keep in mind that the 10-man stuff isn't complete and the text is not final. Not to mention that there are likely 25-man versions of each one, as well.

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It seems as though the patch notes for 3.3 have been updated once again, meaning that a new build on the PTR should hit sometime within the next couple of days. Here's what's new:

General

• The existing /welcome emote now greets/welcomes targets (character says “hello”), while the new /yw is for saying "you're welcome."
• Many of the tail sweeps with knockback effects will no longer hit players’ pets.

Icecrown Citadel

• The Forge of Souls and Pit of Saron in the 5-player dungeon are currently available for testing.
• Additional Icecrown Citadel dungeon and raid content will be made available in future test builds. For more information and testing schedules please visit our Test Realm forum: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/board.html?forumId=11572&sid=1

Classes: General

• Area-of-Effect Damage Caps: We’ve redesigned the way area damage is capped when hitting many targets. Instead of a hard cap on total damage done, the game now caps the total damage done at a value equal to the damage the spell would do if it hit 10 targets. In other words, if a spell does 1000 damage to each target, it would hit up to 10 targets for 1000 each, but with more than 10 targets, each target would take 1000 damage divided by the number of targets. 20 targets would be hit for 500 damage each in that example.
• Pet Resilience: All player pets now get 100% of their master’s resilience.
• Taunt Diminishing Returns: We’ve revised the system for diminishing returns on Taunt so that creatures do not become immune to Taunt until after 5 Taunts have landed. The duration of the Taunt effect will be reduced by 35% instead of 50% for each taunt landed. In addition, most creatures in the world will not be affected by Taunt diminishing returns at all. Creatures will only have Taunt diminishing returns if they have been specifically flagged for that behavior based on the design of a given encounter.

Races: General

• Orc and troll shamans now have their own unique totem art.

PvP Battlegrounds

• Battleground Experience: Battleground experience gained is now based on the level of the player gaining experience, rather than the highest possible player level in that Battleground.

Death Knight Unholy

• Scourge Strike: Redesigned. The base ability now deals 50% weapon damage plus an additional amount as physical damage. However, for each disease the death knight has on the target, the target will take additional shadow damage equal to 25% of the physical damage done.
• Unholy Blight: This talent now deals only 10% of Death Coil damage as a damage-over-time effect on the target.

Druid

• Prowl: This ability no longer has multiple ranks and penalizes movement speed by 30%.

Hunter

• Call Stabled Pet: Cooldown reduced from 30 minutes to 5 minutes.
• Deterrence: Now also increases the chance for ranged attacks to miss the hunter by 100% while under its effect.

Pets

• Avoidance: This talent has been replaced by Culling the Herd. Hunter pets now innately take 90% less damage from area-of-effect abilities like all other class pets. This does not apply to area-of-effect damage caused by other players.
• Cower: Redesigned. This ability no longer affects threat, and instead reduces damage taken by the pet by 40% for 6 seconds with a 45-second cooldown. While cowering, the pet’s movement speed is 50% of normal speed. Cower now only has a single rank and is available at pet level 20.
• Culling the Herd: This pet talent has replaced the Avoidance talent in the pet trees (Hunter pets now gain that benefit automatically without expenditure of talent points). Culling the Herd increases pet and hunter damage by 1/2/3% for 10 seconds each time the pet deals a critical strike with Claw, Bite, or Smack.
• Demoralizing Screech: The attack power reduction from this ability has been increased by 40%, equaling the maximum possible attack power reduction from the abilities of other classes.
• Improved Cower: Redesigned. This ability now reduces the movement penalty of Cower by 50%/100%.
• Venom Web Spray: Range increased from 20 yards to 30 yards.
• Web: Range increased from 20 yards to 30 yards.
• Wolverine Bite: This talent is now enabled when the pet lands a critical strike rather than from the target dodging the pet’s attacks. In addition, this talent no longer has a prerequisite.

Paladin Protection

• Divine Guardian: This talent no longer increases the amount of damage transferred to the paladin from Divine Sacrifice. Instead it causes all raid and party members to take 10/20% reduced damage while Divine Sacrifice is active.
• Divine Sacrifice: Redesigned. The effect of Divine Sacrifice is now party-only and the maximum damage which can be transferred is now limited to 40% of the paladin’s health multiplied by the number of party members. In addition, the damage transferred to the paladin is now reduced by 50% before being applied to the paladin. Finally, the bug which allowed Divine Sacrifice to sometimes persist despite reaching its maximum damage has been fixed. Divine Sacrifice will now cancel as soon as its maximum damage value is exceeded in all cases.

Priest Shadow

• Mind Flay: The range of this ability has been increased to 30 yards, up from 20.

Rogue

• Vanish: For the first half second after this ability is used, neither Vanish nor Stealth can be broken by taking damage or being the victim of a hostile spell or ability.

Warlock Affliction

• Improved Felhunter: This talent now also reduces the cooldown on the felhunter’s Shadow Bite ability by 2/4 seconds.

Demonology

• Decimation: Redesigned. When Shadowbolt, Incinerate or Soul Fire hit a target that is at or below 35% health, the cast time of Soul Fire is reduced by 30/60% for 8 seconds. Soul Fires cast under the effect of Decimation cost no shards.
• Demonic Pact: This talent now also increases the warlock's spell damage by 1/2/3/4/5%.

Destruction

• Conflagrate: Redesigned. This talent now consumes an Immolate or Shadowflame effect on the enemy target to instantly deal damage equal to 9 seconds of Immolate or 8 seconds of Shadowflame, and causes additional damage over 3 seconds equal to 3 seconds of Immolate or 2 seconds of Shadowflame.

Pets

• Doomguard/Infernal: These pets now innately have Avoidance like all other warlock pets.
• Shadow Bite: This pet ability now provides 15% increased damage for each of the warlock’s damage-over-time effects on the target.

User Interface For additional notes on Lua and XML changes please visit the UI & Macros Forum: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/board.html?sid=1&forumId=11114 Enchanting

• Enchant Weapon - Unholy: This enchantment now inflicts Shadow damage in addition to its original effect.

First Aid

• The training costs for most bandages have been reduced.

Mining

• Enchanted Thorium: This ability now uses the Mining skill and is learned from trainers at a skill level of 250.

Quests

• Weekly raid quests are now available from Archmage Lan'dalock in Dalaran. Every Tuesday at 3 AM the Council of Six will choose a different strategic target that must die from either: The Obsidian Sanctum, Naxxramas, The Eye of Eternity, Ulduar, Trial of the Crusader, or Icecrown Citadel.
• For the various Icecrown Bomber quests at Aldur'thar: The Desolation Gate, players can now choose to eject from their bomber seats mid-run. If you do so, a rescue vehicle will transport your character back to the safety of your infra-green platform.
• Azure Drakes and Dragons will now attack back when attacked by characters not riding Wyrmrest Defenders.

Items

• Death Knight Tier-9 4-Piece Bonus: This set bonus no longer grants Frost Fever a chance to be a critical strike. It still grants that possibility to Blood Plague.

Bug Fixes Items

• Glyph of Immolation Trap: Now properly increases damage by 100%.

Classes Druid

• Infected Wounds: This ability is no longer considered to be in the magical defense category; therefore spell hit no longer applies to its activation.
• Nature's Grace: The tooltip now correctly indicates that it will not be activated from periodic spell critical strikes.

Hunter

• Concussive Barrage: This ability is no longer subject to spell reflects.
• Point of No Escape: This ability no longer stacks and now only functions for the hunter.

Mage

• Flame Strike: Some ranks of this spell had an incorrect cast time of 3 seconds. All ranks now share a 2-second cast time.

Priest

• Inspiration: The tooltip now correctly indicates that it also functions with Prayer of Mending.
• Mind Flay: The rank 1 tooltip has been corrected to indicate the accurate damage and snare effect.

Warlock

• Curse of the Elements: Rank 4 has been increased to 11%, up from 10%.
• Drain Soul: This spell now deals 4 times the normal damage for all ranks. Previously it was only ranks 6 and above.
• Suffering (Voidwalker): Ranks 5-8 had the incorrect taunt radius of 5 yards and have all been adjusted to a 10-yard radius.

Looks like there are a lot of changes coming to Hunters and their pets as far as class tweaking goes. And it also seems as though the design team still hasn't settled on how to handle a Rogue's Vanish skill, as it's down to .5 seconds from 1. Feral Druid's Prowl skill has now been modified to stay in line with the changes made to Rogues' Stealth. There's also a confirmation of weekly raid quests, and I do believe that we'll get to test Forge of Souls pretty soon. Looks like they fixed the bugs associated with it (we were supposed to test FoS instead of Pit of Saron last week), so hopefully that means those that prevent people from seeing the instance portals are, as well. You can find the full list of Patch 3.3 changes here. Whether you like the shape of things to come or not, chime in with your thoughts on these latest changes below!

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It looks like we will see the new patch, patch 3.3, on the public test realms any day now. Check out the current draft of the patch notes: General

• Icecrown Citadel
  • The Forge of Souls, the first wing of the 5-player dungeon, is currently available for testing.
  • Additional Icecrown Citadel dungeon and raid content will be made available in future test builds.
• Dazed: Creatures attacking a player from behind can no longer cause players level 1-5 to be dazed, and have a reduced chance to cause players level 6-10 to be dazed.
• Copied Test Realm characters will no longer be copied with their achievement history in order to better facilitate the character copy process.

Classes: General

• Default Equipment: Starting weapons are now more uniform. Rogues now start with a pair of daggers equipped. All other classes except shamans start with a 2-handed weapon equipped and the required skill already known. Shamans start with a 1-handed weapon and a shield, as they benefit more from the shield than they would from a 2-handed weapon.
• Glancing Blows: The mage, warlock, and priest classes no longer have an increased chance for their melee attacks to be glancing blows; and the damage penalty due to their glancing blows is the same as for other classes.
• Health and Mana Regeneration: These regeneration rates have been increased by up to 200% for low level characters. As a player's level increases, the regeneration rates gradually reduce, returning to normal rates at level 15.
• Spell Mana Costs: These costs have been reduced for almost all lower level spell ranks. In general, if a spell decreased in cost with a higher level rank in patch 3.2.0, that spell now has the decreased cost at all ranks. In addition, spells learned before level 20 with reduced cast times and/or durations have even further reduced mana costs, proportionate to their reduction in cast time or damage.

Races: General

• Racial Attribute Bonuses: These bonuses have been recalibrated to even out the amount of starting health on the various races. All races start with a standardized level of stamina, except for orcs, dwarves, and tauren who now start with 1 extra point of stamina. For each class, bonuses and penalties to all attributes have been adjusted so that each race has an equal attribute total.

Death Knights

• Rune of the Stoneskin Gargoyle: There is now a 1-handed version of this rune in addition to the current 2-handed rune.
• Talents
  • Unholy
    • Night of the Dead: Now reduces the damage your pet takes from area-of-effect damage by 45/90%, but no longer applies to area-of-effect damage caused by other players.

Druids

• Pets
  • Avoidance (passive): Now reduces the damage your pets take from area-of-effect damage by 90%, but no longer applies to area-of-effect damage caused by other players.

Hunters

• Misdirection: Redesigned. Instead of having finite charges, it now begins a 4-second timer when the hunter using Misdirection performs a threat-generating attack, during which all threat generated by the hunter goes to the friendly target. In addition, multiple hunters can now misdirect threat to the same friendly target simultaneously.
• Talents
  • Beast Mastery
    • Intimidation: If the hunter's pet is in melee range of its target, the stun from Intimidation will now be applied immediately instead of on the pet's next swing or attack.
• Pets
  • Avoidance: Now reduces the damage your pet takes from area-of-effect damage by 30/60/90%, but no longer applies to area-of-effect damage caused by other players.

Mages

• Talents
  • Arcane
    • Arcane Empowerment: This talent now also grants 1/2/3% increased damage done by the mage's party or raid for 10 seconds after the mage gets a critical strike with Arcane Explosion, Arcane Missiles, Arcane Barrage, or Arcane Blast. This effect is exclusive with Ferocious Inspiration and Sanctified Retribution.
• Pets
  • Avoidance (passive): Now reduces the damage your pets take from area-of-effect damage by 90%, but no longer applies to area-of-effect damage caused by other players.

Priests

• Pet
  • Avoidance (passive): Now reduces the damage your pet takes from area-of-effect damage by 90%, but no longer applies to area-of-effect damage caused by other players.

Rogues

• Dual Wield: Rogues now know this ability upon logging into the game at level 1.
• Stealth: This ability no longer has multiple ranks. While active, the single rank of this ability (available at level 1) allows rogues to move at 70% movement speed.
• Vanish: For the first second after this ability is used, neither Vanish nor Stealth can be broken by taking damage or being the victim of a hostile spell or ability.

Shamans

• Fire Nova Totem: This totem has been replaced with a new spell, Fire Nova, which is available at the same ranks as the old Fire Nova Totem. Existing characters will automatically learn this new spell in place of the totem. With a Fire Totem active, shamans will be able to use Fire Nova (fire magic) to emit the same area-of-effect damage as the old Fire Nova Totem from the active Fire Totem, not consuming the totem in the process. Fire Nova will activate a 1.5-second global cooldown when used and has a 10-second spell cooldown. The caster must be within 30 yards of the totem to use this ability, but does not need to be within line of sight of the totem.
• Talents
  • Elemental Combat
    • Improved Fire Nova Totem: Renamed Improved Fire Nova. This talent now provides an additional 10/20% damage to the spell and reduces the cooldown by 2/4 seconds.

Warlocks

• Pets
  • Avoidance (passive): Now reduces the damage your pets take from area-of-effect damage by 90%, but no longer applies to area-of-effect damage caused by other players.
  • Summon Imp: This ability is now available from the trainer for level 1 warlocks and no longer requires a quest to learn.

Warriors

• Victory Rush: This ability is now trainable at level 6.
• Talents
  • Protection
    • Damage Shield: This ability will no longer trigger any chance-on-hit effects from the warrior or the opponent it damages.

User Interface

• Quest Tracking Feature
  • This system is currently under development and is not fully functional.
• Looking For Group System
  • This feature is undergoing several improvements and is not available for testing at this time.
• For additional notes on Lua and XML changes please visit the UI & Macros forum.

Graphics

• A new feature has been added to the D3D graphics engine to improve texture management (particularly for Windows XP users). This is currently enabled by default on the public test realms. For more information please visit our Test Realm forum.

Professions

• Enchanting
  • Black Magic: This enchantment now sometimes increases haste rating for the caster rather than inflicting the caster's target with a damage-over-time effect. It is also now triggered by landing any harmful spell rather than inflicting damage with a spell.

Items

• Glyphs
  • Death Knights
    • Glyph of Icy Touch: Instead of granting additional runic power, this glyph now causes Frost Fever to deal 20% additional damage.
  • Shamans
    • Glyph of Fire Nova Totem: Renamed Glyph of Fire Nova. This glyph now reduces the cooldown of Fire Nova by 3 seconds.

Bug Fixes

• Druids
  • Rejuvenation: Rank 15 of this spell was providing a 15-second duration. It has been correctly reduced to 12 seconds.
• Mages
  • Flame Strike: Some ranks of this spell had an incorrect cast time of 3 seconds. All ranks now share a 2-second cast time.

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The Forge of Souls

With patch 3.2.2 now live, the next major patch on the radar is patch 3.3. It introduces three new 5-man dungeons with both normal and heroic modes, as well as Icecrown Citadel, the flagship raid of Wrath of the Lich King where players will face off against Arthas. The 5 man instances will be three wings of "the Frozen Halls." Players will be assisting one of their faction's heroes, either Sylvanas Windrunner or Jaina Proudmoore, as they infiltrate Icecrown Citadel through an alternative entrance while the Argent Crusade and Knights of the Ebon Blade attack the main gates. An epic questline will lead players through the three instances, and players must participate in the questline in order to get attuned to the second and third dungeons.

Scary

The first wing, The Forge of Souls, tasks players with assisting their faction's hero to destroy machines known as "soul grinders." The instance has two bosses who operate the machines: Bronjahm, the Godfather of Souls, and The Devourer of Souls. The second wing, Pit of Saron, is home to Scourgelord Tyrannus. Players will free soldiers of their faction to assist them in combating Tyrannus. It is not clear who or what this "Saron" is. Players will apparently get clues as to where Arthas' private chambers outside of the Frozen Throne are. Three bosses inhabit this instance: Forgemaster Garfrost, Krick and Ick, and Scourgelord Tyrannus. The final hall, the Halls of Refection, seems to house Frostmourne, the legendary weapon that the Lich King wields. Players, accompanied by their faction's hero, will ultimately confront Arthas. It is unknown how this encounter will progress. Two encounters exist in this instance: Falric and Marwyn, and The Lich King. More information can be dug up at the official World of Warcraft website.

10-man	ilvl	25-man
Naxx	200
KT, EoE	213	Naxx
Ulduar	219
IC 5 mans	219
Ulduar hard	226	Ulduar, KT/EoE
CC	232	Ulduar weapons
IC heroics	232
	239	Ulduar hard
CC hard	245	CC
	258	CC hard
IC Raid	??
	??	IC raid

This information is flooring. Not only is it a lore-gasm, but the loot here is astoundingly good. Players can grab iLevel 219 loot in the normal version of the instances, and iLevel 232 gear in the heroic version. That puts the normal mode on par with Ulduar 10-man, and the heroic version gear on par with 10 man Crusader's Coliseum loot. The full, updated iLevel chart is on the left. The first two wings seem to introduce new characters as bosses, but the final wing, Halls of Reflection, bring back Arthas' two old commanders, Falric and Marwyn as bosses. It was unconfirmed prior to this announcement if they were truly undead. They were last seen accompanying Arthas into King Terenas II's chamber to slaughter him and signal the downfall of the human kingdom of Lordaeron. And who knows of what nature the encounter with Arthas will have? He will not be defeated here, as he is the final boss of the 10/25 man raid instance. Jaina is seeking any humanity left of him, so perhaps this will be some shade of Arthas' soul. I, for one, look forward to accompanying Sylvanas to hunt Arthas to the death.

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