Icecrown Hardmodes, good or bad?

My guild finally managed to beat Lich King on 10-man normal difficulty and thus allowing us to progress into the 10-man heroic version. In a single night we managed to get to Saurfang and I’m not sure if I’m pleased or not.

As far as difficulty goes, I can’t say I have much to complain about. I like my content difficult, and the Icecrown hardmodes offered much in that department.

I was happy that they didn’t decide to make the heroic version of ICC a separate instance. They did that with ToTC and it was an absolute nightmare for me. Farming an instance in four different ways burns you out quicker than a match-stick. However I was disappointed that the trash remained the same. I would really like to see some difficult trash that keeps the raid on their toes, trash that demands CC in order to get through.

Marrowgar literally tore us apart and we did not at all expect him to be that difficult. The amount of damage he deals out to the raid is huge and very unpredictable and I found the encounter to be more based on luck than actual skill.

The problem I have with this encounter is that it can go wrong, and when it goes wrong there is absolutely nothing you can do about it. If you get placed in a bone spike during bone storm and he decides to do a little dance on top of your head then there is no amount of healing that can save you, you will die unless someone has life-saving cooldowns. Difficulty is good, random elements which you do not have control of and cannot prevent is not good, it makes for a frustrating encounter and is in my opinion poor design on the part of Blizzard.

Also, according to Blizzard, hardmodes were supposed to have “elements that make them different”. I can hardly say that placing bone spikes during bone storm is a very big difference-maker. If you compare this to the first hardmodes when Ulduar was released, it seems like Blizzard are getting lazy. Making a boss hit harder and have more health is not my idea of a different encounter. Since we only have one instance per tier, can’t they at least take their time to make the hardmodes different? They obviously know how to, Yog’Saron and the four keepers was completely genius.

We eventually downed Marrowgar. We came to the conclusion that the raid took less damage with two healers then three, because getting people of out bone spikes were crucial. I do feel like it was mostly luck that made us down him, and I can’t say I liked the encounter much. What I did like was the fact that I haven’t been healing that hard since fighting High Warlord Najentus in Black Temple and that definitely was refreshing.

I will save the other bosses for later segments, as I don’t want each one to be extremely long. For the next segment I will talk about the Lady Deathwhisper encounter.