World of Warcraft Classic Takes Players Back to Icecrown Citadel Next Month

World of Warcraft Classic fans have been waiting for developer Blizzard Entertainment to announce the release date for the re-opening of Icecrown Citadel. The fan-favorite raid was the crowning piece of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion, which is when the MMORPG’s audience was at its largest. Yes, some of the quality-of-life features introduced during the Icecrown Citadel patch eventually led to the playerbase starting to dwindle, but it’s impossible to deny that this was WoW at its biggest and most important moment. Now, Blizzard has finally revealed that World of Warcraft Classic fans will get to relive those heady days of 2009 and take down Arthas Menethil once again.

World of Warcraft Classic Icecrown Citadel Release Date

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The 3.4.3 patch in World of Warcraft Classic is set to launch on October 10. That drop includes three new dungeons which give players the story leading into Icecrown Citadel. Whether you’re jumping The Forge of Souls, Pit of Saron, or Halls of Reflection, it’s going to be a test. At the time, these represented a solid step up in difficulty and it doesn’t seem like Blizzard is changing that in Classic. 

The patch will also introduce the Random Dungeon Finder to WoW Classic. This feature lets you easily queue for dungeons without having to have a pre-made group. Many view this as the game’s downfall because it took out the social aspect many players loved, but it will make it easier for everyone to experience the content. 

As for Icecrown Citadel, the raid is set to launch on October 12, giving you a few days to get your gear up in the dungeons before diving in. ICC includes 12 different boss encounters across five wings, so you’ll definitely want to have coffee on hand if your group is planning to fight through it all in one go. 

You’ll find a full list of the PTR patch notes for Icecrown Citadel below, though keep in mind some of the fixes could change when the patch launches.

World of Warcraft Classic Icecrown Citadel Raid 

• Icecrown Citadel is the final major raid in Wrath of the Lich King Classic and has twelve bosses spread across five different wings.
  • The Lower Spire
    • Lord Morrowgar
    • Lady Deathwhisper
    • Gunship Battle
    • Deathbringer Saurfang
  • The Plagueworks
    • Festergut
    • Rotface
    • Professor Putricide
  • The Crimson Hall
    • Blood Prince Council
    • Blood-Queen Lana’thel
  • The Frostwing Halls
    • Valithria Dreamwalker
    • Sindragosa
  • The Frozen Throne
    • Arthas Menethil, the Lich King
• Each wing is fully unlocked for testing on both Normal and Heroic mode.
• Additional adjustments:
  • Similar to Trial of the Grand Crusader, the Heroic mode of Icecrown Citadel has a finite number of attempts. When a raid group runs out of attempts, they will be forced to flee and will not be able to engage in any additional attempts that week.
    • Currently, this number is set to 50 attempts across the entire raid, matching the final state of the attempts counter in patch 3.3.5.
  • Additionally, there will be no restriction or gating to prevent access to later wings of the raid, and all will be fully unlocked at launch.
• PTR Gear Vendors
  • For the first round of PTR testing, we have not updated the PTR gear vendors with gear from Trial of the Crusader and Trial of the Grand Crusader. This is deliberate.
  • If you wish to test Icecrown Citadel, we suggest you utilize the character copy button on the character select screen copy your character from live realms, and utilize your current gear. It is important to us that players and raid groups use their own gear for this test, to help us establish a realistic baseline for how raid groups will perform in this content when it is released.
  • We will test the ICC raid again after this initial test, and we may update the gear vendors with additional gear if we are satisfied with the data we obtained from this first test.

Shadowmourne Legendary Quest

• The Shadowmourne legendary weapon quest chain has seen several major adjustments:
  • Shadowfrost Shards will no longer require that a player in your raid group to have advanced to the quest “The Splintered Throne” in order to drop.
  • The drop rate of Shadowfrost Shards on 25 player normal have been adjusted to match the drop rates of 25 player heroic.
  • The “End” boss of each wing (Saurfang, Lana’thel, Putricide, Sindragosa, and The Lich King) will now always drop a single guaranteed Shadowfrost Shard on both 25-player Normal and Heroic difficulties.
  • Primordial Saronite will be more obtainable as well and will be purchasable from both the Emblem of Frost vendor as well with a new currency gained in Titan Rune Dungeon: Gamma Protocol dungeons. We’ll be sharing more information about Defense Protocol Gamma and its reward structure very soon, so stay tuned for those updates!
    • Developer’s Note: There’s a large opportunity cost to obtaining Primordial Saronite early on as many guilds may opt to funnel all of their Primoridal Saronite to would-be Shadowmourne Wielders. Primordial Saronite is also the main ingredient for many new crafting recipes and obtaining the Primordial Saronite for said crafts will be very difficult early on, leading to a situation where by the time the guild is ready to give out Primordial Saronite for non-Shadowmourne Crafts, the items that can be made with this material are much less relevant. Giving an alternative method to obtain this resource made sense in this regard.

The intent of these changes is to accelerate the acquisition of Shadowmourne significantly. The original Icecrown Citadel raid tier lasted over 11 months in 2009/2010 and while the Icecrown Citadel raid tier in Wrath Classic will last a good long while, we felt it was important to allow Shadowmourne to be enjoyed by more people while the content is still current. In the original game Shadowmourne could take anywhere from 18-24 weeks to complete and similar to our adjustments to Val’anyr, Hammer of the Ancient Kings, we felt that we wanted to err on the side of fun here rather than creating a situation where guilds may only be able to complete a very small number of Shadowmournes before the next major content update. We expect with these changes the time needed to complete Shadowmourne should be closer to 8-10 weeks. Please note that these adjustments are not final, and we may opt to increase or reduce the rate of acquisition, or make other adjustments as needed.

New Dungeons – The Forge of Souls, Pit of Saron, and Halls of Reflection

• All three dungeons are available for testing now and can be found on the upper balcony of Icecrown Citadel, in Icecrown.
• By default, the Heroic version of these dungeons will benefit from the additional rewards from Titan Rune Dungeons: Defense Protocol Gamma but will see no additional mechanics or difficulty adjustments as other dungeons are getting in Defense Protocol Gamma.
  • Developer’s Note: These three dungeons are some of our favorite content from Wrath of the Lich King, and we were concerned that if we added additional mechanics to these dungeons from Defense Protocol Gamma, many players may never get to experience this content in its’ original Wrath of the Lich King iteration. Most other Wrath of the Lich King dungeons were available in their original form during the first phase of Wrath Classic had their time to shine before Titan Rune Dungeons were introduced in patch 3.4.1, but as these dungeons are only just now becoming available and are themselves a step-up in difficulty over normal heroics, we felt it was important to protect the original 2009 experience here. We will publish more information discussing Defense Protocol Gamma and how these three dungeons fit into the Wrath Classic patch 3.4.3 endgame content in the coming weeks.

New Collections User Interface

• A new collections interface has been added to Wrath of the Lich King Classic to gather Pets, Mounts, and Heirloom items into one convenient location.
• Most pets, mounts, and heirloom items are also now account-wide.
• You will find the collections UI in your micro bar here:

Please note that in order to access your heirlooms in your collections UI, you will need to log into the game world with whichever characters have your existing heirloom items. Simply logging in will automatically add them to your collections for your account.

Please note that account data on PTR may not always be perfectly indicative of your account data on live realms, so you may find yourself missing mounts or pets you feel like you should have. The best bet is to copy all of your characters with unique pets, mounts, or heirlooms to PTR and log into each of them at least once to ensure that those collections items are added to your collections interface.

Class Adjustments

• Hunter – A new skill has been added for Hunters: Trap Launcher: Explosive Trap.
  • This skill can be trained at any Hunter class trainer and is available to all specs.
  • This new skill is not usable in PvP Arenas or Battlegrounds.
    • Developers’ notes: Due to the fickle nature of Explosive Trap’s hit detection in PvE content, particularly against large or sessile creatures, Hunter DPS tends to fluctuate wildly depending less on player skill and agency and more on boss positioning and an element of luck as to whether or not certain bosses consistently trigger traps. With this adjustment we hope to make it slightly easier to position traps in a position where they will detonate, without impacting a Hunter’s performance in PvP.
• Druid/Priest/Shaman – The Wild Growth, Circle of Healing, Ancestral Healing, and Divine Hymn spells have been adjusted to favor players over pets and guardians.
  • With this adjustment, these “smart heal” spells will still attempt to heal pets that are very dangerously low on health, but in general this spell will favor players that are missing health first.
• Warlock – Reduced the internal cooldown of Demonic Pact from 5 seconds to 1 seconds.
  • Optimal play for Demonolgy warlocks is currently to wait several seconds to send their pet into combat while waiting for trinkets and other spellpower-increasing procs to occur, to prevent from locking yourself out of a higher snapshot of spell damage that occur a few seconds after you pet’s initial Demonic Pact proc. This adjustment is merely meant to slightly smooth out optimal usage of Demonic Pact and to allow demonology warlocks to send in their pets into combat a bit faster.
• Warlock – Demonic Pact will now always be 10% of the Warlock’s spell power.
• Warlock – Summon Infernal’s cooldown will now reset on encounter end events, similar to other long cooldowns in Wrath Classic.

Known Issues

• Please be advised that the LFG tool is not functional in this PTR build. We are working to update the group finder tools for this patch and as a result, the previous iteration of the LFG tool is no longer functional but has not yet been replaced with the new iteration.
• There are several interface errors that may appear on login and during gameplay.
• The Argent Crusade NPCs, camps, and Battering Ram have not yet arrived at the entrance to Icecrown Citadel. We expect them to appear in a future PTR update.
• There are several issues with the RP scenes that play after the Deathbringer Saurfang encounter.
• The Flesh Eating Insect swarm trap outside of Professor Putricide room must be triggered and cleared twice before the door to Putricide’s room will open.
• The Frostwing Welp packs leading up to Sindragosa have multiple animation issues and may float when dead.
• The visual effects for Sindragosa’s Frost Bomb and Blistering Cold abilities are not the correct size.
• Sindragosa’s Tail Swipe ability doesn’t properly knock players down and immobilize them.
• Players can see their own Frenized Bloodthirst target “blood drop” visual effect on them during the Blood Queen Lana’thel encounter, even when they do no themselves have the Frenzied Bloodthirst debuff.

Random Dungeon Finder

The first iteration of the Wrath Classic random dungeon finder is now available for testing.

You’ll see options to queue for individual dungeons as well as Normal Dungeons, Heroics, Defense Protocol Alpha, Defense Protocol Beta, and Defense Protocol Gamma. Please use the random dungeon finder to queue for Defense Protocol Gamma dungeons and let us know what you think.

• For this test environment only, the item-level requirement for using RDF to group for Titan Rune Gamma dungeons is 200. This is intended to streamline testing in an environment with template characters and upgrade vendors available.

This feature is still under development, and there are a few known issues and incomplete functions.

Known Issues

• The premade group finder portion of the tool is not yet implemented and is missing from the interface. We intend to add that in a future PTR update.
• The rewards for daily dungeon completion are not yet finalized. Currently all of these activities award 2 Emblems of Triumph and gold.
• When queuing for a Defense Protocol Alpha, Beta, or Gamma, you still must sometimes click the Mysterious Device object to activate Alpha, Beta, or Gamma protocol. In the final release we intend for the desired additional difficulty to be automatically active upon porting into the instance.
• Group chat inside of groups formed via RDF is using Battleground chat instead of Instance or Party chat. At this time, you’ll need to type /bg to speak with your group.
• When the dungeon queue pops and the pre-dungeon ready check appears, the “ready” check marks do not fill in for each group member as they accept the queue. This is a visual bug that will be resolved in a future PTR update.
• There is currently a 15 minute timer for requeuing after doing a Random Dungeon.

We encourage you to please utilize the bug reporter for any other issues you find with Random Dungeon Finder.

Titan Rune Dungeons: Defense Protocol Gamma

The new Defense Protocol Gamma mode is now available for testing. You can find this via random dungeon finder or by manually travelling to dungeons and activating the mysterious device inside and selecting “Defense Protocol Gamma”. For this iteration of Titan Rune Dungeons, creatures inside dungeons deal increased damage and have increased health, and there is a single unified mechanic across all Wrath Classic dungeon “families” to compliment the additional mechanics from Defense Protocol Beta, which are still present. Upon entering a dungeon with Defense Protocol Gamma active, an agent of the Argent Tournament specific to your faction will be present and offer each player a selection of additional beneficial buffs to assist them in the dungeon. Please experiment with these powerful abilities and let us know what you think!

Rewards

• Every boss in Defense Protocol Gamma dungeons will drop a Defiler’s Scourgestone currency. This currency may be used to purchase item level 245 Trial of the Crusader 25-player raid rewards from either Korralin Hoperender in the alliance area of Dalaran or Kolara Dreamsmasher in the Horde area.
  • Developers’ notes: This is a continuation of the Sidereal Essence model we introduced with Defense Protocol Beta and we felt it would be better to award one of these from each boss rather than a single currency from the final boss to encourage players to clear more of the dungeon and not skip as many bosses. Boss skips can cause a lot of friction in groups, particularly in Random Dungeon Finder groups. The Ulduar drops in Defense Protocol Beta are still in place in Gamma, and other than this new currency no additional rewards have been added.
• You can expect to be able to earn 5 Emblems of Frost per day doing Defense Protocol Gamma dungeons in the final release, however, this is still a work in progress and Emblems of Frost are not yet awarded for Heroics or Titan Rune Dungeons. We intend to have this updated in our next PTR build.

Please note that these rewards and values may not be final.

Defense Protocol Alpha Adjustments

We’ve made an adjustment to reduce the total health of creatures in Defense Protocol Alpha by approximately 25% across the board. Additionally, creatures in Halls of Lightning and Halls of Stone now also deal less damage.

Additional Known Issues

• Achievements related to Defense Protocol Gamma are not yet implemented.
• The Emblem of Frost rewards for daily completion of a Titan Rune Dungeon are also not yet fully implemented. You will be able to earn up to 5 Emblems of Frost a day for completing a Titan Rune Dungeon similar to how it works now in the Call of the Crusade update with Triumph Emblems.
• There is an issue in Utgarde Keep that can sometimes cause players to become permanently stuck in combat.
• The Macro interface is currently broken and has many visual and functional issues in addition to causing interface errors. Apologies for the inconvenience.