Icecrown Citadel: Lower Spire – Marrowgar and Deathwhisper

The main attraction of patch 3.3 will be a brand new raid dungeon: Icecrown Citadel. Inside this huge instance will be where players will ultimately be able to battle against the Lich King himself after defeating the many dungeon denizens and bosses faced along the way. Although the entire raid will not be available straight away, in patch 3.3 the first wing of this new content, the Lower Spire will open up to players and will offer four major new encounters to put their skill to the test. The first two of these are Lord Marrowgar and Lady Deathwhisper.

Lord Marrowgar

The first boss in the Lower Spire is Lord Marrowgar, an abomination created by the Lich King to guard the Frozen Throne. The boss encounter will require players to move around and avoid a couple of abilities that will kill people who get caught by them. The first of these is Bone Storm, a powerful AoE ability which applies a debuff to anyone within range that will tick for large amounts of damage. This will probably have to be avoided by running out of range until its over. The second is Coldflame, a summoned line of frost on the ground, that should it get within 8 yards of a player will cause them to take massive damage. If anyone gets clipped by this ability, your raid healers will have to work hard to keep them alive. Lord Marrowgar will also cast Bone Spike Graveyard, throwing a large spike of bone that will impale any player in its way. This will do around 10% of the player’s maximum health as damage per second for five minutes or until killed. These will need to be taken care of quickly.

Lady Deathwhisper

The lich Lady Deathwhisper is the second boss in the Lower Spire area of Icecrown Citadel and is also the leader of the Cult of the Damned. She has two phases of combat and has a hard enrage timer of 10 minutes, so you will need to make sure both phases are complete and she is killed within this time period.

Phase One:

When pulled, Lady Deathwhisper will put a barrier around herself and cannot be tanked. Although her target will be random, the main tank for phase two will still need to build threat throughout phase one as they will keep it in phase two and Lady Deathwhisper is immune to taunt abilities. She will cast Death and Decay as well as Shadowbolts at random raid members throughout phase one and in 25-man will also mind control random players quite often, with several being controlled at any one time. These players will need to be kept at bay via Polymorph or some other effective crowd control technique until the MC wears off. On top of this, every minute or so the boss will summon a wave of seven adds, a mixture of Fanatics and Adherents. Three will come from either side of the room and one from the stairs. These adds can be mind controlled, snared and polymorphed but Adherents are very dangerous AoE adds that will explode at low health, they can also only be killed by melee, meaning they cannot simply be nuked at range.

Phase Two:

Once the raid has burned through the boss’s mana shield, phase two begins. During this phase Lady Deathwhisper will no longer summon adds but will continue casting mind control and death and decay. A different kind of add will also appear at random intervals known as Vengeful Spirits and these will chase a random player around. Should they catch the person they are chasing, they will cause large damage in an AoE attack. This will probably spell defeat should anyone be caught on heroic mode. Another complication in phase two is an ability known as Touch of Insignificance, which she will cast frequently on her tank. This ability places a stacking debuff on the tank which reduces threat by 20% per stack up to a maximum of five stacks (100%). It is unclear whether Lady Deathwhisper will still be immune to taunt when the patch arrives, but if so it will likely take some serious work by the tanks to manage threat and ensure that DPS don’t pull the boss form them.

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