Icecrown Citadel: Forge of Souls Strategy Guide

With patch 3.3 looming just around the corner, many people want to prepare themselves in anticipation of Icecrown Citadel making its debut in World of Warcraft. Alongside the new raid dungeon, which will feature only the first 3 bosses on launch with more bosses being added later, there will be three new 5-man dungeons with both normal and heroic modes to tackle. The loot is better than that available in any other 5-man dungeon so far added in Wrath of the Lich King, and the heroic versions of these dungeons will offer players the chance to fill in the gaps in their gear with 232 item level loot. The dungeons will need to be tackled in order and a quest chain completed before the heroic versions will unlock for players. Judging by first appearances, it also looks like the quest chain is actually able to be done daily, and will reward a total of 6 of the new Emblem of Frost. This may mean that players will be able to farm 8 of these new emblems per day even without raiding!

The first of these instances is known as the Forge of Souls, and will contain two bosses with some interesting mechanics. In the Forge of Souls, both bosses deal predominantly shadow damage, so a priest buff for shadow protection will probably help in groups where gear is still an issue. For better geared groups of raiders, this will more likely be a non-issue.

Bronjahm, the Godfather of Souls

An obvious reference to the legendary James Brown, this boss requires relatively simple tactics to beat him. During the first part of the fight, Bronjahm will cast shadow bolts at people and will use an ability known as Corrupted Soul on a random player. It is advised that the player who gets this cast on them should be as far from Bronjahm as possible since once this finishes casting it will create a Corrupted Soul Fragment, which will begin to move toward the boss and needs to be nuked before it reaches him or he will receive a heal from it. Generally, the boss will need to be kited away from these shards to give the dps more time to nuke them. At 30% health, Bronjahm will port to the center of the room and begin to cast Soulstorm, a powerful AoE that also slows movement speed by 50%. The damage on this ability only affects players who are more than 10 yards away from the boss, so all players should stack at this point. The boss will occasionally also randomly fear a player into the Soulstorm and so tremor totem should be placed if you have a shaman with you, and healers will need to be extra careful to heal up players who do end up in the AoE.

The Devourer of Souls

The Devourer of Souls is basically a giant head with three faces, and has some interesting abilities to be aware of. First of all this boss will hit the tank pretty hard almost continuously throughout the fight. On heroic mode the damage will be around 15-17K. Other than this, she has four main abilities that she will use somewhat randomly during the encounter.

Soul Well

The Devourer of Souls has the ability to jump to a random player and place a Well of Souls at their location. This is a relatively powerful void zone that will last for around 15 seconds and must be moved out of quickly to stay alive.

Mirrored Soul

When the boss uses this ability on a player ALL DPS must stop attacking at once. This ability will place a debuff on a player which causes them to take all the same damage as the boss whilst it is active. If you carry on hitting the boss, you will kill the player with the debuff.

Wailing Souls

This ability will cause the Devourer of Souls to jump to a random, debuffed player and begin a clockwise or counterclockwise sweep of a quarter of the room. She begins wailing and will continue to wail until she has finished the sweep. No player must get caught in her path during this ability as it does a very high amount of damage to anyone in front of her.

Unleash Souls

Occasionally the boss will summon a large number of souls to attack the party. These cannot be targeted and hence cannot be killed, so you will either need lots of healing or to move away from them.

As long as all of these abilities are accounted for and all players in your party know what to do when they occur, the Devourer of Souls is a pretty simple fight.

Be ready for all future patches and expansions with the best Horde Guide - Joana's Guide and the best Alliance Guide - Zygor's Guide.