After our success in the Plagueworks of ICC last week, Vortex was eager to work on new content. Blizzard obliged us on that front last night by opening the Crimson Halls, the next to last section of Icecrown Citadel.

After carving our way through a bit of relatively simple trash, we stood in front of our first opponents - the Blood Prince Council. We've seen all three princes before in various WotLK locations, but all of their various abilities being used in a single area made for quite a few things to keep track of and a worthy challenge.

We originally tried to employee a ranged tank strategy on Prince Keleseth (the biggest wild card for us), but our intrepid warlock's health pool couldn't handle the hits coming in from Prince Keleseth when he became empowered. We needed a bigger health pool, so we went with the most natural choice: a large, smelly black bear!

From then on out, we had control of the fight. We had figured out how to communicate the things we needed to know during our previous wipes, so the fight simply became one of execution, which is something that we usually handle pretty well. Two pulls later, the Blood Princes were dead.

We also had a chance to take an initial look at Blood Queen Lana'thel, but only spent two attempts on her so we could take our time discussing the strategy we'd need to defeat her. Expect some news on that front soon!

With the unlocking of the Plagueworks in Icecrown Citadel, Vortex had hoped for more challenging content than we had seen to date in the instance. We weren't disappointed.

It started off easily enough - Festergut took 3 attempts and then got steadily harder. Rotface (although bugged) took a day of strategy rework before we were able to kill him. Despite the Professor Putricide fight "clicking" for us on our last attempt before despawning for the week, we weren't able to defeat him in the first week that he was available. That left us with a bad taste in our mouth.

Fast forward to last night. We'd put in hours of research analyzing our mistakes and were determined to be one of the first 10-man strict guilds to defeat the encounter. In the end, the Putricide fight is a large number of relatively simple mechanics requiring very clean execution to succeed against. There are bombs, slime, ooze and a hard hitting boss combined with a substantial amount of raid damage. We solved phases 1 and 2 pretty early, but still struggled with the phase 3 transition and a lack of DPS time in phase 3 due to situational awareness issues.

Still, we're lucky enough to have incredible players in Vortex and they took the challenge personally. We knew what we needed to do and on our second pull last night (after 15 attempts total), we defeated Professor Putricide, making Vortex one of the early 10-man strict guilds to do so. Kudos to Blizzard on a well designed (although occasionally buggy) encounter. It was a fun challenge and we're looking forward to the opening of the Crimson Halls!

With the release of Icecrown Citadel in Patch 3.3, Vortex looked forward to the first new bit of content that we had seen in months. In a completely unexpected turn of events, we had our 10-man raid ready to go and in the instance *prior* to our scheduled raid time.

After a bit of time reacquainting ourselves with the novelty of trash mobs, we faced off against the first boss of ICC, Lord Marrowgar. While Marrowgar is the owner of certainly one of the more innovative models to come from Blizzard lately, he unfortunately isn't really any challenge and we easily downed him on our first attempt.

Several trash pulls later, we found ourselves at Lady Deathwhisper. She proved to be slightly more difficult than Marrowgar as we were stacked with magical DPS and that made killing her magic-immune adds a tad difficult. A couple of small tweaks to our tactics later, she met her end.

An elevator ride and several more trash packs later, we found ourselves at the long-awaited "Gunship Battle". This fight had gotten quite a bit of coverage in the PTR news and so we were eager to experience it. Once we got over the novelty of the rocket packs that allowed us to jump over to the enemy ship (for extra giggles, check them out against druids in forms), we settled down to work.

We faced some initial difficulty with Muradin Bronzebeard, who guards the mage on the Alliance Gunship, but with some positioning changes for the tank grabbing him and our second healer on the Horde Gunship, we were able to easily defeat the encounter.

The final guardian to our entry into ICC was a familiar face in the form of Saurfang the Younger, who we thought lost in the events of the Wrathgate. In turns out that the Lich King had retrieved his broken body from the field and turned him into a Scourge agent.

While there are a variety of strategies being suggested for the defeat of Deathbringer Saurfang, we decided to go with our standard combination of skilled tanking, strong healing and massive amounts of DPS. We eschewed a tank-swap strategy and simply burned down Deathbringer Saurfang and the Blood Beasts that he occasionally summoned while earning the I've Gone and Made a Mess achievement.

So, in a night complete with some (expected) instance issues, Vortex managed to learn and defeat the first 4 bosses in ICC and finished the night with time to spare. We're not wild about the 28 day delay until the next ICC wing is accessible, but it's very nice to have some new content to chew on regardless!

Since we've completed virtually all of the released content with our recent defeat of Anub'arak in the Trial of the Grand Crusader, we've been spending our time polishing our tactics and going back to complete some unfinished business that we'd left behind in Ulduar. Chief amongst those was Algalon, an observer sent by the Titans to analyze potential corruption on Azeroth. If he were to detect such corruption, his job was to sent a signal to the Titans to "re-originate" the planet, wiping it of all life in the process.

We had spent a bit of time with him prior to the release of the 3.2 patch, but weren't able to come back regularly as we worked our way through the Trial of the Grand Crusade. Now that we've got Anub'arak and company pretty well under control, we've been making a point of consistently making use of the full hour that we get to face Algalon on a weekly basis.

Algalon himself is a tough fight from a tank & healer standpoint. He hits hard, fast and there's widespread raid damage as well. There's also a great deal of environmental factor that requires good situational awareness from everyone in the raid.

Thankfully, those are all things we can bring to the table when we understand the mechanics of a fight and despite a bit of craziness towards the end, we were able to defeat Algalon on our 3rd pull of the evening this past Sunday. The kill, combined with some other achievements that we decided to knock out, helped us reach the World Top-10 in terms of 10-man Strict Achievements and the World Top-25 in terms of 10-man Strict Progression Achievements.

Ahh, Anub'arak. Didn't we kill you before? Twice even?

While we'd probably disagree with Blizzard in calling Heroic Anub'arak one of the "hardest" WoW bosses to date, he certainly was no pushover. As with the rest of (10-man) Heroic ToC, we found him to be well tuned and a tough, but beatable, challenge for a 10-man strict guild like ourselves.

All in all, he required about 3 full raid nights worth of work to finish. During our work, we tried virtually every well-known strategy and our own variations thereof, but came to settle on a single submerge strategy that utilized our high raid DPS to push Anub'arak into P3 a little over halfway through his second ground phase. We continued to polish our ice patch placement, kiting, and add handling and were soon pushing consistantly into P3.

As anyone who has done this on Heroic will attest however, P3 is a pressure cooker. Tanks take massive damage, straining healers to their limits while DPS does their best to relieve the pressure by controlling adds and burying Anub'arak for a final time. Thankfully, our folks were up to the task and we took out Anub'arak shortly before the end of our raid this past Sunday.

Hurry up Blizz! We need some new content!