Vortex was eagerly anticipating the release of the Frostwing Halls as we saw it as a chance to start separating ourselves from the multitude of the 10-man strict guilds that exist. That's a hard thing to do when everyone is steamrolling through the same content, so we've enjoyed watching Blizzard gradually increase the difficulty as we've explored Icecrown Citadel.

Our first challenge in the Frostwing Halls was Valithria Dreamwalker, a unique fight where you "save" her by healing her to full health. Our healers are top rate, so we knew that it wouldn't take us long to complete the encounter. After a few opening jitters and strategy tweaks, Vortex was able to save Valithiria after 4 attempts. Kudos to Blizzard on designing an encounter that really let healers let loose and have some fun.

Shortly after Valithira was defeated we faced our next challenge: Sindragosa, Queen of the Frostbrood.

Sindragosa is a Frost Wyrm in the same vein as Sapphiron in Naxxramas, but far deadlier and possessing of some unique abilities that made her a real challenge for a small 10-man strict guild such as ours. Before we could start working on Sindragosa though, we faced another challenge: a buggy instance that didn’t let us to get into Sindragosa’s room and cost us half a night of progression work.

The delay turned out to be a relatively small speed bump as the Sindragosa fight took us several days to figure out as we took to our forums to refine our strategy. We claimed the World 11th kill (for 10-strict guilds) with a strategy that had things looking like “offspec night” as we swapped 3 raiders to their offspecs to secure the kill. She was certainly a fight that, for us, confirmed the maxim that in 10-man strict raiding, flexibility is key.

Bring on Arthas! We're anxious to topple the Lich King!

People will probably be a bit surprised to see us posting about anything to do with Ulduar, but we've never been a guild that goes with the flow. For quite some time now, we've been sporadically working on defeating the last encounter in Ulduar to elude us: Yogg-Saron without the assistance of any Keepers.

The Yogg-Saron fight is a good example of a well-designed encounter by Blizzard. It can range from near-trivial (Yogg+4) to pretty challenging (Yogg+1) to ridiculous (Yogg+0). We've put in an easy 75+ attempts on Yogg+0 and it's remained a challenging fight requiring near-perfect execution.

Alone in the Darkness, (a.k.a. Yogg+0) shifts the focus of the fight from Phase 2 to Phase 3 by forcing players to deal with the Empowering Shadows mechanic that sporadically heals up the Immortal Guardians defending Yogg-Saron. These Guardians do damage based on their total health - the more health they have, the harder they hit.

One of the challenges about being a 10-man guild is that you can't rely on things that a 25-man guild takes for granted. Vortex, for example, has no rogues and the AoE wound poison that would be quite helpful in this fight. A second hunter would also help us trivialize the fight, but we make do with what we can.

We've also tried nearly every strategy imaginable while working on this kill. For our kill we went with a two tank, two and a half (let's hear it for Beacon of Light!) healer strategy. Our tanks alternated taking Immortal Guardian spawns while our DPS chewed into Yogg-Saron. It was close at the end, but we're relieved to finally have it over and done with.

We now return you to your regularly schedule Icecrown Citadel news.

(Strategy posted to Dreambound.)

In our last update, we talked about our upcoming battle against Blood Queen Lana'thel, the ruler of the San'layn, a sect of blood elves who were raised in undeath by the Lich King.

The Blood Queen is a relatively simple fight in theory. Basically she "bites" raid members, which empowers them for a short period. At the end of that time though, the empowered raid member needs to "feed" by biting another member, which empowers them and resets the blood thirst on the original member. In a perfect world, you cascade this ability through the raid, eventually allowing you to push out enough raid damage to defeat the Blood Queen before she enrages.

In reality though, Blizzard has added a lot of factors that complicate the fight - constant raid damage that increases by the number of "vampires" present in the raid. Dark pacts that link raid members and do damage to those around them until they get close enough to each other for it to fade and then lastly, nasty blood bolts that can chain between raid members.

She proved a tough fight for us. We've rarely come up against some of the gear limits we face as a 10-man "strict" guild, but she came close as we finished her off with roughly 10 seconds before her enrage timer.

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!