Cataclysm

[lesion]

A tank really should be able to survive that more-comfortably-than-dead by popping cooldowns (and making sure the casters don't mulch the group with their directional wave spells).

[kaid]

Yeah, the trash in the last hallway in ToT really suck. Not sure who thought that sort of thing was a good idea. It's a crapshoot. Sometimes you can kill the little bastards and not lose anyone. Same tactics will wipe next time. No rhyme or reason for it.

The faceless ones are a damned nuisance, too (heal check, you fuckin' "won't heal dps" wankers...), but I actually find them kind of fun. The gobbos, though, are pure unadulterated suck.

The gobs are annoying but most tanks should be able to pop a cooldown and survive as long as healer is aware they are going to need to start their healing dropping the big fast heal bombs. When I am in the group in arms mode as long as the tank can survive about 5 seconds once bladestorm goes off in their faces the giblins explode fast.

[Furiously]

Just pet pull them!

[K9]

MC pull, let one of their own eat the damage 

[Ironwood]

Two bosses down on HoO.

This is the one to start on.  The second boss was exactly the same as on normal.   

[kildorn]

HoO is like, 90% the same just longer due to higher HP.

Setesh is a bit different (you kill the portals, not ignore them unless you have crazy dps)

[Ironwood]

Mr Omega Beams stopped us for the moment.  It's a DPS race (clearly) and the group I was in, though good, didn't cut it.

I'm still pleased.

[Ashamanchill]

Seriously though, as a group that queues together (me as tank, another buddy as healer, and another one as dps/cc), HoO is a breeze, so is Vortex Pinnacle, Lost City isn't toobad, and Grim Batol can be good if we get the drake run right. The rest are, 'Oh fuck, we got Stonecore' moments, and we ditch the dungeon like our plane is going down. Stonecore, and TotT in particular are: "Nope, not doing this dungeon, I'd rather go gooble down paint chips for half an hour then run this with even too pugs".

And that is my problem. If we don't get the dungeon we want, we ditch for half an hour, saying "what do ya want to do til then....I dunno, what do you want to do?" and we can't think of anything. We are all honour capped, and cap out arena in a few fights on Tuesday (and no, we are not deluded enough to think we are making a run for a rating that matters.) So then we log, and if something like doing my laundry occurs to me (or any of us) in the meantime, we do it, and don't bother to log back in. WoW shouldn't be like this......especially during the start of an expansion phase.

[caladein]

Stonecore is definitely guilty of having an ultra-cheap boss in Ozruk, especially if you're not running with good DPS and his ability timers start getting way out-of-sync.  If I were charitable I'd call it a pseudo berserk timer, but I think he's just broken.

The rest of the bosses are just retard checks.

[Zetor]

I was actually in a h-HoO pug yesterday on my resto shaman that simply could not get past Omega Beam Guy. Even with heroism and everyone going 'all out', the dps was so low he reduced everyone's max hp by 90% and the tank just got gibbed. It didn't help that the frost DK would invariably die in void zones by the 3rd or 4th switch... at that point even healing surge spam wasn't going to keep him up.

(I thought that fight was actually easier for melee than casters since you could just circlestrafe the boss during alpha beams and completely avoid voidzones with no loss of dps?)

[K9]

From the hotfixes thread:

Deadmines
Heroic Deadmines now has significantly less trash mobs.
The mechanical nightmare section of the Vanessa VanCleef encounter has less sparks of doom, and is notably easier and faster to navigate.
Vapors in the Ripsnarl encounter now increase in power every 8 seconds, up from 6.

[Azuredream]

Now they need to adjust SFK along with Deadmines, in regards to the amounts of trash. Part of the problem is the total surface area of Deadmines or SFK is probably 3+ times bigger than TotT.

I like TotT when running with a guild because it's quite small. Interrupt first boss, CC adds, dispersion/ice block/divine shield goblin alpha strike, Spellsteal water elemental AoE of doom, you can smash through that place.

[SurfD]

The number of absolutely fail mages, priests and shaman i have seen recently while tanking or DPSing heroics makes me want to smash my head into something.

Case in point: Running Heroic Grim Batol today, we had a mage as our only person capable of efficiently removing magic buffs from hostiles (we had a Shaman healer as well, but he had enough on his hands keeping everyone alive to worry about Purging stuff).  After I finally mention that he can spellsteal the 70% damage reduction buff off of the Earth Adepts (or ascendants, cant remember exactly which), he goes "Ok, you will have to tell me when though".  Appearently he was unable to see buffs on hostile targets on his UI.  derp.

Second heroic of the day, Throne of the Tides.  I literally mention every buff any mob can cast that is dispellable (Swell on the Elementals, Magic Absorb on the Mindslave thing) multiple times.  Does the priest bother dispelling?  Of course not.  he would rather we nearly wipe on bosses or trash pulls then hurt his dps debuffing a mob.

some days.....

[kildorn]

I'm guilty of not dispelling often when I'm healing. That said, not spellstealing is criminal. There are some hilarious buffs out there that are entirely built around the idea that mages will spellsteal them.

[kaid]

Mr Omega Beams stopped us for the moment.  It's a DPS race (clearly) and the group I was in, though good, didn't cut it.

I'm still pleased.

Nice thing about HoO being managable on heroic is its hella good at gearing folks up due to the large number of bosses. Not a great dungeon if you are going for chaos orbs but great for gearing the crew up.

[K9]

Actually I think it could be quite good if you just want VP and Orb. As far as I know the only bosses you need to do are Anhuur, Anraphet and Raj.

[kildorn]

VP/Orbs, I highly recommend Vortex. What I don't get is why I keep getting in process heroics for Vortex. Like, how do you suck and drop from that run?

[Shrike]

Shaman are used to purge not doing anything, so most don't bother. I keep discovering purgeable mobs and I do like it (which then goes to the proposed purge nerfs in PvP, where MW stacks still won't build on shields...and...fffffuuuu...). Ahem. Purge is just a lot easier for enhance to manage than resto or elemental.

Now the cleanse magic thing, that I'll need some getting used to. It's very awkward for enhance, but I've seen at least one situation where it makes life a lot easier. I have glyphed SR, so my gut instinct is to say 'Haahaa, fuck the rest of you, I've got mine" and go my merry way, but it really does make certain situations easier. It might require a major UI adjustment just for this.

[Rasix]

Shaman are used to purge not doing anything, so most don't bother. I keep discovering purgeable mobs and I do like it (which then goes to the proposed purge nerfs in PvP, where MW stacks still won't build on shields...and...fffffuuuu...). Ahem. Purge is just a lot easier for enhance to manage than resto or elemental.

Now the cleanse magic thing, that I'll need some getting used to. It's very awkward for enhance, but I've seen at least one situation where it makes life a lot easier. I have glyphed SR, so my gut instinct is to say 'Haahaa, fuck the rest of you, I've got mine" and go my merry way, but it really does make certain situations easier. It might require a major UI adjustment just for this.

Grid + clique makes any sort of debuff removal trivial.

[kildorn]

I actually roll with my heal frames up when tanking on my paladin entirely so I can see cleanse targets and easily deal with them without target switching. Plus, I can randomly use my Word of Glory on OTHER people, too!

What I need to do is recode it to ignore trash debuffs though. My healing UI goes all kinda wonky with shit like the fire elementals in HBRC's forge area, that just spam technically cleansable debuffs on everyone every second.

[Merusk]

VP/Orbs, I highly recommend Vortex. What I don't get is why I keep getting in process heroics for Vortex. Like, how do you suck and drop from that run?

Some groups struggle severely with the whirlwinds.  My very first run was 3 melee dps and we wiped several times on it, including one where the tank was stuck in a corner being juggled by 3 vortexes that had him penned-in while I was being juggled in a different corner doing the same thing.

Thinking on it, some idiots also insist on pulling the trash as whole packs with no CC and that gets painful.   Plus I've had a few normals on the priest where the tank didn't understand "PULL THE TRASH OUT OF THE TRIANGLE"  The pull with 2 adepts nearly made me cry from lack of interrupting/ cc.

[Dren]

I actually roll with my heal frames up when tanking on my paladin entirely so I can see cleanse targets and easily deal with them without target switching. Plus, I can randomly use my Word of Glory on OTHER people, too!

What I need to do is recode it to ignore trash debuffs though. My healing UI goes all kinda wonky with shit like the fire elementals in HBRC's forge area, that just spam technically cleansable debuffs on everyone every second.

As a tanking paladin, I use heal frames for taunting agro off others too.  See dps or heals get agro and start dropping hps?  Click them to grabe whatever is hitting them.

[Paelos]

Unfortunately, this expansion has imo taken a step backwards in the melee department. There are already places where taking melee dps is just going to cause you headaches in five mans.

Then you get jewels like this quote from the uber-raiders who are downing all the content biz as usual:

Also, a big thank you for the melee DPS'ers who play in the guild. They had to pass up spots again for alts, simply because the encounter design is incredibly punishing for any melee. It's a pretty glaring oversight when bringing in more than one or two of them results in ridiculous increases in damage taken in the last phase due to non-stop chaining chain lightning. Dropping out melee characters in favor of ranged ones has been a recurring theme throughout this whole raiding tier, but we hope that it's over now with only the end bosses and Sinestra left.

Here's to hoping next tier of raiding won't favor ranged by design. Maybe even go wild and give some incentive to bring in melee, too

So yeah, they were rotating out melee simply because it was easier not to have them around. That's not good news in my book.  

[Ingmar]

On heroic difficulty raids, mind you. I am led to believe it isn't really terrible on normal raids. I'm not going to spend a lot of time worrying about what happens on hardmode raids personally.

[Merusk]

No reason to bring melee.. ranged has interrupts aplenty and does the same or better dps.. plus most ranged can DPS on the run these days.. not tip top, but then melee can't tiptop on the run either anymore.

[K9]

4.0.6 Patch notes

Nice to see Disc getting some much needed buffs.

[koro]

I'm starting to get kind of fed up. Four different heroic dungeons, five different PUGs, five groups that failed to make it to/past the first boss, either through CC fuckups or tank fuckups. No guildmates on interested in heroics without a tank, who isn't interested in going.

At this point I would rather have the ability to "heal stupid" like in Wrath than get absolutely nothing out of three hours of my time.

[caladein]

No reason to bring melee.. ranged has interrupts aplenty and does the same or better dps.. plus most ranged can DPS on the run these days.. not tip top, but then melee can't tiptop on the run either anymore.

Eh, if you need interrupts, you usually need to bring melee (or Elemental Shamans).  This is much less of a big deal in large raids as you can usually platoon enough casters to get the same effect.  That's really about it though as their self-heals (and +healing modifiers) are pretty trivial in light of the extra damage they take.

The Disc Priest (and Renew) changes are nice and Glyph of Prayer of Mending looks really good for tank healing.

[kildorn]

The spawn rate of Alliance and Horde Infantry for the quest "The Leftovers" has been increased.

^^ Buh?! I have been farming them this week for embersilk. The spawn rate is HILARIOUS as is, and I frequently have two actively engaged and one feared just from being stationary by a doorway.


That said, the 208% PW:Shield increase is awesome, though I wonder how the mana cost increase will interact with Disc, since rapture is kind of built around returning more than the spell cost. But hey, a ~30k PW:Shield is now officially worth casting occasionally.

Renew Change is meh, imo. DK changes seem solid, though I'm not sure about the 2h damage change in frost, and the str reduction to unholy.

I'm absolutely shocked there's no PoH nerf or mana tide nerf.

[koro]

Considering Rapture's getting another buff as well, running with Inner Will will probably make PW:S still return more mana than it costs.

[Ashamanchill]

4.0.6 Patch notes

Nice to see Disc getting some much needed buffs.

I get the feral cat nerfs, I really do, but why the feral bear nerfs?!?! Ah well, prot pally buff so at least I have that.

[caladein]

Bear Druids have a pretty substantial lead on DPS over the other tanks at the moment, like north of 10%.

[Rendakor]

The bear dps nerfs come hand in hand with a very large armor buff; it's sort of the opposite of what they did to DK tanks.

[apocrypha]

The spawn rate of Alliance and Horde Infantry for the quest "The Leftovers" has been increased.

^^ Buh?! I have been farming them this week for embersilk. The spawn rate is HILARIOUS as is, and I frequently have two actively engaged and one feared just from being stationary by a doorway.

Farming them when there's nobody else around is fine, yeah. Trying to get the 12 you need for the daily quest when there's a few other people also trying to do the same thing is very frustrating and tedious.

Also nice to see they've reduced the spawn rate in the prison a bit, it was kinda nutty in there.

[Sheepherder]

Arms
Juggernaut no longer increases the cooldown on Charge, but instead increases the duration of the Charge stun by 2 seconds. In addition, Charge is usable in all stances, however, the talent now causes Charge and Intercept to share a cooldown.

Why don't they get it over with and just remove Intercept already?