Icecrown Citadel Zone Buff Activated

The latest epic raid instance just got a bit easier

Today Blizzard added a mini-patch to World of Warcraft that implemented the Icecrown Citadel zone-wide buff. The buff is a flat 5% buff to damage, healing, and hit points.

This is the first of up to 6 stacks of the buff, eventually players will gain 30% additional damage, healing, and hit points. It will be increased in 5% increments every few weeks. This is a very substantial buff, although it might not seem like it on the surface. In a 25 player raid 5% is equivalent to 1.25 extra players, so those guilds that have been falling just short of enrage timers or finding encounters just a tiny bit too overwhelming will be able to progress a bit further into the instance.

The wing end-bosses on heroic difficulty have also been given 15 additional attempts, bringing the total to 35 attempts per week. As anyone who raids will tell you, almost noone other than top tier guilds has the kind of time on their hands to burn through such a large number of tries, particularly when there is so much other challenging content around. Limited attempts will be much less of a factor as this number continues to increase. It is unknown exactly what the cap will be on attempts, but Trial of the Grand Crusader was 50 attempts, so that's a safe bet.