Icecrown Citadel is the last major raid in Wrath of the Lich King. With that, every class is getting some of the most insane gear and crazy DPS upgrades that they possibly can throughout this entire phase to end off feeling like god.

But you might be a little confused on how exactly you’re gonna get all of your gear, how do you get your tier gear, what are the fastest ways to gear up your character, and what are some of the catch-up mechanics.

So, here, I’m going to try to break that all down for you.

ICC Raid Intro

Before getting into the raid itself, the patch will launch two days early on NA and one day early on EU. This will give you some time to catch up your character with any of the gear you don’t have yet from the last few phases that could be some of your business items.

How To Get All Of Your Gear?

Specifically, I’m talking about trinkets mostly, like Comet’s Trail, Death’s Choice, Flare or Rain. You can actually get these just from running the new Titan Rune Gamma dungeons. These are the heroic plus pluses.

The easiest way to do this is to just queue up for your random dungeon finder because this should ignore any lockouts. This means that by just doing this method, you can spam these all day and get an infinite amount of these as well as you can also buy some Primordial Saronite from this and probably make a ton of WOTLK Classic Gold on day one through the first probably two weeks. This will catch you up very quickly.

How To Get Tier Gear?

We probably won’t have the Vault of Archavon bosses released yet. You don’t want to do VOA on the patch day. Wait until the raid launch because you probably will lock yourself without being able to actually defeat the boss.

But the new boss will drop some tier pieces as it always does and these tier pieces will be from the 25 Man difficulty. This will save you a ton of emblems because emblems are the only way we’re actually going to be able to get our tier gear and even upgrade our tear gear. So, there’s a major change in the way we actually get our Tier 10.

In the heroic Trial of the Grand Crusader, as long as we got a Vanquisher token or whatever token for our respective class to drop, then we could instantly turn it in for the max level of tier gear. This is no longer the case. We actually have to upgrade our gear in order to get the highest rank, which is going to start out at item level 251 (lower than the gear we have currently). Move up to item level 264 and then into item level 277 for the best gear in the game.

To get each piece, it’ll either cost you 95 emblems or 60 emblems if you’re just grabbing these shoulders or gloves. This means that if you do get the gloves as well as the legs to drop in Vault of Archavon, this will save you 155 emblems that you needed to get to get this tier gear as well as this will be upgraded tier.

Or, if you actually just get the normal version, this is really useful for you, too. Because if you do it from 10 Man, you can just upgrade it initially. But, you need to turn in your old gear to upgrade it into the next level and then one more time to get that heroic loot.

In total, if you don’t get lucky and get any drops from Vault of Archavon, then you need to have 405 emblems to get your entire set of Tier 10. And if you farm every single emblem you can each week, then you can get up to 104. This means it’ll take you at least four weeks to get all of your tier gear.

And then, you also need to get the marks to even be able to upgrade them, so the mark drops are as follows.

Also Read: WOTLK Classic Phase 4: Changes Coming To Fall Of The Lich King - Raid, Dungeons, Collection Content & More

How To Get Marks?

Any of the endgame bosses in 10 Man heroic or 25 Man normal versions will drop the 264 marks. The endgame bosses are Deathbringer Saurfang, Blood-Queen Lana’thel, Professor Putricide, Sindragosa and the Lich King. That’s five opportunities from normal mode 25 and again heroic 10 Man to get some of your marks to be able to upgrade your tier gear.

If you’re in heroic mode though, you will actually get two of those normal marks to drop and one heroic mark to drop, so you can upgrade it again. It’s going to take you at least a couple of weeks to get all of your tier gear and then to start upgrading it.

How To Get More Emblems Of Frost?

But you can also use emblems for other items. Within ICC itself, there’s an Emblem of Frost vendor that you can go to and he has a ton of things for you, such as trinkets, relics, off hands, cloaks, belts, chess pieces, and your PVP gear. You might actually still get some of your best in slot items from this vendor.

Since you might need even more Emblems of Frost, here’s a quick breakdown of how you can get as many that you can each week.

First of all, there’s a new heroic daily and you can get five of these each day. That means you can get 35 per week just from doing the heroic dailies. Then, there is a new weekly raid quest that will give you 10 each week. From doing the bosses in Vault of Archavon on 10 and 25 and difficulty, you’ll get two emblems each and each boss you kill in ICC will give you two of these.

So, in 10 and 25 Man, clearing all of the bosses will give you 48 per week because there’s 12 bosses. Within the raid itself, there’s a weekly quest you can do on 10 and 25 Man for five each. That’s 10 per week.

An Item level jump from phase 3 to phase 4 is massive with the correct gear:

• If you’re just going into normal 10 Man, you will get 251 item level loot and then the Lich King will give you two 258 item level gear.
• If you do heroic 10 Man, then you will get 271 gear from the Lich King and 264 item level loot from normal bosses. This is also the same item level you would get from normal bosses in 25 Man (the 264 gear).
• But if you just do those bosses on heroic, you will instantly start getting 277 item level gear.

The Fastest Way To Gear Up Your Character

Now, the heroic Lich King is ridiculously hard. Even though he does drop 284 item level weapons, it is really going to be a struggle for most guilds. For quite a while, some people think it’s mathematically impossible to do it on day one without doing 10 Man splits. And we’ll find out on the stream when it happens in race to world first on the 12th where we either see people do 10 Mans to be able to defeat it or not.

But most groups will be opting to kill Lich King on normal for quite a while and he drops 271 item level weapons for you. These are going to be huge upgrades out of the gate, no matter what. Not necessarily as good as the best in slot in the entire game, but they are very strong, just a little weaker than your normal heroic items that are 277.

So, if you want your absolute best weapons, you’re definitely going to want to try to kill a heroic Lich King. But again, I would actually focus on gearing up your characters way more before you really go into this. Because he is a very hard encounter that we have still only heard of one group on all three PTRs ever being able to down it just yet.

Now, I wouldn’t doubt at all that other raid groups haven’t taken them out by this point, but this is how you’re going to completely gear up your characters in the next phase to be ready to move on towards.