Cataclysm Raiding

[Hutch]

If I could be arsed to log into their forums and throw in my voice among the throng of feedback his post will generate, I might say something along the lines of: In the next tier of dungeons and heroics, maybe not quite so many fights with swarms of adds.

That's selfish of me. Forcing the DPS to switch from single-target boss action to aoe add action is challenging, and I'm one of the dps in my group, and it frustrates me when I'm the only one switching in a timely manner when we start learning a new fight.

But so far in the current raid tier:
Council of Wind
Magmaw
Omnotron (well there's just 3, and they fixate, in a fight that's already all about target switching, so never mind)
Maloriak
Cho'gall

I haven't seen Nefarian yet.

There were a lot of bosses who summon adds in the Cata dungeons as well. It's like Blizzard didn't want to let us lol-aoe our way through the heroics like we were doing in LK, so they made aoe both necessary and highly annoying in the expansion.

[Hutch]

They recently nerfed Magmaw, which I think needed it. People were killing Omitron before him because Magmaw was such a gear check right up front.

People are making progress for sure. I'm not sure I would put as upbeat a face on it from my alliance's perspective, but that's a subsect of the whole. I think GC is being generous when he's saying they are seeing some PUGs for the earlier bosses. If they count the TB stuff, yeah, that's puggable. Omitron or Magmaw? Not so much.

They nerfed Magmaw? I didn't know that. I thought we'd just gotten so good at his encounter that it seems easy.

Progress update: my group got down the elementium monstrosity for the second time last night. And this time we started off doing pretty well, and made obvious progress with each successive attempt until we got it. I'd like to think it will only get smoother from here.

[Merusk]

People are making progress for sure. I'm not sure I would put as upbeat a face on it from my alliance's perspective, but that's a subsect of the whole. I think GC is being generous when he's saying they are seeing some PUGs for the earlier bosses. If they count the TB stuff, yeah, that's puggable. Omitron or Magmaw? Not so much.

I'm amazed to see any PUGs at all.  The shared lockouts killed it for the most part on my server, because the people who'd run the PUGs were top-tier raiders (10 or 25-man) wanting to help their non-guilded friends & acquaintances.  They'd simply start a raid for the size their guild didn't focus on, knowing that it wouldn't cause a problem.  Nowadays, not so much.

[Lakov_Sanite]

With the new dungeons system in 4.1 if you want to max out your valor point gain from heroics you will be expect to run 14 a week. 

[El Gallo]

Or just 7 of the new ones. 

Hitting the cap with the new dungeon dailies
Even with only doing the dungeons (both types), you'll hit the cap before the week is over, without stepping foot into a raid.
Nah, you won't. You'll only be able to earn up to 980 VP per week from running random Heroics, not 1470 VP (we're purposefully placing a soft cap on VP from Heroics). If you want to reach the 1250 weekly cap, you'll still need to run raid content.

Again, I know it's a bit complicated, so let me give you some examples:

Example 1:
Player A has a blast on a Friday with his friends and runs seven Rise of the Zandalari Heroics, earning 980 VP (7 x 140 VP). The next day, he helps a friend with a random tier 1 Cataclysm Heroic -- let's say Heroic Deadmines. Because player A has already earned 980 VP from random Heroics, he won't receive any VP from the Saturday's Deadmines run.

A massive improvement for weekend warriors and anyone with a job or other responsibility that keeps you from reliably logging in every single evening.  I've been asking for this since dailies were invented in TBC, and I hope it will soon spread to all daily quests and trade cooldowns.

[Ashamanchill]

How exactly is this going to effect the daily lockout of specific dungeons though?

[Rendakor]

I assume they're putting in a random "ZA or ZG" option.

[caladein]

How exactly is this going to effect the daily lockout of specific dungeons though?

They don't need to change how the dungeon lockouts work as the random queue has always been able to stick you in a dungeon that you were saved to.

[Paelos]

I assume they're putting in a random "ZA or ZG" option.

Yes, they say those will be on a difference dungeon tier.

[Rendakor]

Confirmed now, sauce here.

# You'll be able to randomly queue for the Rise of the Zandalari Heroics separately from the tier 1 Cataclysm Heroic dungeons.

This is a nice change, and honestly I'm surprised they didn't do this for the three ICC heroics since they were a large step up in difficulty.

[Paelos]

It's part of the Blizzard "immediately learning what was  about their design but only using that knowledge in future designs" philosophy. I give them credit for not repeating horrible mistakes, I just wish they would be more active in fixing them in the current iteration instead of just filing it away in the "that sucks" folder.

Although I think they lost the 2005-06 docs in that folder when they made some of this content.

[Simond]

At some point between WotLK and Cata, Ghostcrawler stopped looking at data and drawing conclusions and started drawing conclusions and looking for data to support them.

[Shrike]

I'm amazed to see any PUGs at all.  The shared lockouts killed it for the most part on my server, because the people who'd run the PUGs were top-tier raiders (10 or 25-man) wanting to help their non-guilded friends & acquaintances.  They'd simply start a raid for the size their guild didn't focus on, knowing that it wouldn't cause a problem.  Nowadays, not so much.

What I've noticed since the great character exodus from Whisperwind is that different server cultures do things differently (big surprise, eh?). On WW, the PuG raid thing is about as dead as dead can be. Very few form and douchebaggery in them is so bad I haven't touched one since midway through ICC. On Uldaman, it's similar, though I have no clue how the server PuG RLs behave--because I haven't  seen anyone in /trade or whathaveyou even bother to form anything. Interestingly, though, on Aerie Peak the PuG culture seems pretty lively. Again, I don't know how successful these might be, but /trade is filled with people looking to put things together (also of interest is the fact that /trade on AP is surprisingly free of idiocy).

Of course, since my shaman is back to raiding, the lockout will probably keep me out of any PuG regardless. Also, my guild hops from raid target to raid target on a whim, so you never really know what the RL has in mind until you get the raid invite. This makes it diffcult to plan ahead to avoid the lockout. Which might be deliberate, now that I think about it, but regardless it's how they do things.

[Lightstalker]

At some point between WotLK and Cata, Ghostcrawler stopped looking at data and drawing conclusions and started drawing conclusions and looking for data to support them.

I don't see that.  I don't really see what they are doing as any different than what they've always done.  They've always substituted pain for effective bootstrapping at the start of a major version.  That's why we start with only blue gems, a rarity of high end enchanting materials, and moaning about how hard the heroics are.  Stonecore was obnoxious, the lightning ball maze in Deadmines was obnoxious (due to terrain clipping, ground clutter traps, and the camera), but overall difficulty... isn't.  Look, even in the super easy entry raid of wrath until people cleansed Noth was a raid wiper.  The difference in this tier is the complete requirement on everyone in the raid doing something at just the right time or wiping the raid.  It is hard because you can't carry people like you could before, they've raised the bottom bar and lowered the upper bar... and there are more people being detrimentally impacted to complain.

Most of Mount Hyjal was an 8 person instance with 17 ablative players to soak damage.  Today you need 8 or 9 of 10 to do the right thing or you wipe.  This is again the same mistake behind "bring the player not the class," not every player is worth bringing on their own merits.  Basically, this has been a long running emphasis on individual contributions from every contributor - no more raiding with 15 on follow through Molten Core like in the 'good old days.'  So, meh.  Not a surprise that people aren't as enthusiastic about raiding when they are expected to perform for the duration when previously they could watch TV, cook dinner, read a book, etc. while raiding.

The shared lockouts were a bone headed move that limits the ability to help out in normal mode while you progress with your hard mode raid, but people asked for that and complained about running ICC and ToC 4 times a week in the last tier so the only complaint here should be that they dev team should spend more time ignoring the players.

[apocrypha]

I don't see that.  I don't really see what they are doing as any different than what they've always done.  They've always substituted pain for effective bootstrapping at the start of a major version.

The difference in this tier is the complete requirement on everyone in the raid doing something at just the right time or wiping the raid.  It is hard because you can't carry people like you could before, they've raised the bottom bar and lowered the upper bar... and there are more people being detrimentally impacted to complain.

This whole "Cata has ruined WoW" argument is just a difference between people who think that your 2nd quote there is just a minor caveat on your 1st quote, and those for whom the 2nd quote is the straw that broke the camel's back.

Personally I side with the idea that it's camel's back stuff. You are 100% right when you say this is what they've always done, and mudflation will ease the current difficulty level over time. However plenty of people are simply a bit tired of WoW and are using the current difficulty level to justify their outrage at the game and blame the designers for the fact that they've finally got bored of playing the same game for 5 years.

Or maybe the people who are leaving (and going on and on and on about it!) just have too many bad players who are really bad players in their guild instead of bad players who were only pretending to be bad players. 

[Lakov_Sanite]

WOTLK day one was a vast amount easier than cataclysm day one. You remember what the first raiding hotfix was in wotlk? It was making i so only level 80 players could enter naxx because people were going in with groups at 78+ and beating KT. Can you really compare that to anything in cataclysm? We're talking about raids with maybe not all but a good amount of players who didn't even have level 80 blues on and were able to tackle the content.

Then as wotlk progressed they made the instances even EASIER but the baseline for all of them was much much lower.

[SurfD]

WOTLK day one was a vast amount easier than cataclysm day one. You remember what the first raiding hotfix was in wotlk? It was making i so only level 80 players could enter naxx because people were going in with groups at 78+ and beating KT. Can you really compare that to anything in cataclysm? We're talking about raids with maybe not all but a good amount of players who didn't even have level 80 blues on and were able to tackle the content.

Then as wotlk progressed they made the instances even EASIER but the baseline for all of them was much much lower.

The Naxx is easy thing has been done to death though (and it was too).   Naxx 3.0 was super fucking easy compared to pretty much every raid released previous to it.  I mean, how many level 78's were going into Sartharion and killing that?  Much of the Naxx easyness came from the fact that most of the active raiders on most servers going into wrath had probably already cleared at least half of naxx already (either back at 60 as current content, or at 70 before they took it out as a novelty raid).   Unfortunately, malygos doesent reallly work as a metric, since you had to kill Sapphiron to get the key, but I dont imagine many level 78 would have been clearing Malygos either.

[Lakov_Sanite]

Sartherion was killed within hours of being released by the players who were already there and it was being released for.

It's about difficulty versus your baseline of players. When naxx was released in wotlk it was being beaten within a week of the expansion by quite a few guilds and within a month by most raiding guilds. When each teir of content was released in wotlk it was all conquered fairly quick(with i believe ulduar being the slowest) However in cataclysm the amount of players beating the first tier(and that needs emphasis because this IS the naxx of cataclysm) has gone way, way down.

Now some would say that wotlk was easier overall than any expansion and yes, I agree but you can't lower the difficulty down to easy and then raise it to nightmare mode the next expansion either, it had to be a lot more gradual.

[Paelos]

MMO Champion is going into depression mode about how long 4.1 is taking, and the fact that it doesn't even include a raid.

The proposed point of doing 4.1 as a smaller patch was to get it out faster, but right now the best guess is that it won't be out until the end of April if they are lucky.

[Ingmar]

Technically that is probably still faster than if it did have the raid. 

[Rendakor]

Ulduar came out mid-April; even accounting for the fact that Cata hit 2 weeks later in the year that WotLK late-April isn't any earlier than last time.

[Lakov_Sanite]

Ulduar came out mid-April; even accounting for the fact that Cata hit 2 weeks later in the year that WotLK late-April isn't any earlier than last time.

I'm talking about within the cycle of the expansion, not the actual calender date. Naxx was the first tier of wotlk raiding, BoT/BRD are the first tier dungeons of cataclysm.

[Merusk]

He was addressing the MMO-Champion whines Paelos was relaying to us, I believe.

[Lakov_Sanite]

Ah that would make more sense, though ulduar was a raid dungeon(was there other content that patch?) and this is two more heroics which are already recycled content.

[Paelos]

Ah that would make more sense, though ulduar was a raid dungeon(was there other content that patch?) and this is two more heroics which are already recycled content.

There general feel of the populace that watches this stuff closely seems to be a mix of boredom, tossing in the rehashed comments, questioning whether the next raid will be out before July, and insulting people for not being 12/12 heroic and complaining about the lack of content.

Personally, I believe that Blizzard should never have used "smaller patches = more frequency!" as their tagline for why a raid wasn't coming with the 4.1 patch. Hell, we all know Blizzard doesn't do anything fast. However, I think the people would have raged less at a "it's not done yet, and you fuckers haven't even scraped half of what we've given you" in PR speak rather than anything that was mildly related to speed. That's a check Blizzard simply can't cash.

EDIT: To further the point, though, why isn't a raid ready at the end of this month? If it comes out in July, that's another quarter where we wait for their sub numbers to take a nose-dive.

[Ingmar]

Because Blizzard is goddamn slow at everything. Why is Heart of the Swarm not coming out until 2012? Etc.

[Paelos]

Because Blizzard is goddamn slow at everything. Why is Heart of the Swarm not coming out until 2012? Etc.

Yeah, but being slow compared to yourself is just silly. We at least have comparable points at this juncture for expansion release, patch release, etc.

[Rendakor]

That was my point as well. Relative to WotLK the new raid zone should be hitting at about the end of April; instead we're getting two recycled heroics. 

[Simond]

Because they're saving 4.2 until the SWTOR beta.

[apocrypha]

So, last week we wiped repeatedly on both Maloriak and Omnotron... this week we 1-shot both of them and then wipe 6+ times on Atramades. Got him down to 9% on our penultimate try though! Felt like the fight had finally clicked for most people. We'd have stayed to try again but our raid end times are fairly strictly adhered to because lots of the guild have family commitments. Felt good though, lot of fun, really nice bunch of people we've ended up with.

[Samprimary]

I'm still trying to decipher, through video, the best ways to improve our raid group's dismal performance on Cho'Gall, who is considered by many others to be easy but who we cannot, for the life of us, beat. I am not the raid leader but I want to be able to impact the outcome through education and monitoring what's happening to others.

[caladein]

What's getting you guys?  Tank deaths?  Overwhelmed by bloods at one point?  Overwhelmed by the last phase?

[Samprimary]

damned if I could figure out a specific pattern. sometimes a tank urks out. sometimes a healer gets squished in the back. sometimes blood overwhelms us. sometimes corruption overtakes someone and it spirals out from there. It is like a roulette wheel of something going wrong each time with no consistency, and no progression to phase two. Sometimes someone pukes on someone else. Yet they say he's not really a gear check, or that it should be easy. Each time I just end up standing there watching names go grey, going WELP and waiting for my turn.

[Rokal]

If people are throwing up long before phase 2, that's your problem. There are only three things that cause corruption p1:

People getting hit by depravity.

People getting hit by corrupting crash.

People getting hit by blood of the old god.

If you look at recount (or any DM) after a wipe, you should be able to take a look at Damage Taken on someone who had high corruption and see which of those three things caused them to get high corruption.

I'm guessing they were getting hit by corrupting crash. Unfortunately the only fix for that is to pay better attention to your character so that you see the spell effect warning when crash is about to hit you. You could also turn on some sort of yell/whisper warning for it using DBM or another boss mod, but the warning spell effect is fairly large so I'd just emphasize that people need to look out for that in order to succeed on the fight

If it turns out it was depravity, work on getting your interrupts on corrupting adherent down. On 10 man you should probably have the tank and at least one other person dedicated to interrupting the adherent. I've never done the 25 man version of the fight, but I suspect you'd just want one a tank and an interrupter on each. They'll cast depravity roughly every 10-11 seconds, so one person can solo the interrupts but it helps to have some insurance (or someone to interrupt the interrupter if they start worshiping Cho'gall). It also helps to make sure the interrupter knows how frequent the spell is cast. From personal experience, the Adherent's hitbox is kind of small so knowing that depravity is about to be cast really helps me focus on being in position for the interrupt, especially if the add is moving.

If blood of the old gods is getting your corruption up, it would be helpful to know where your guild is killing adherents, and what your class comp is for your raid. If melee dps is trying to help out on blood, this could be another source of high corruption.

On a good attempt everyone will go into p2 with 10-20 corruption at most. If someone does pass 25 corruption, make sure you dispel them asap to make sure they don't continue to stack corruption. That said, whether you win or lose on the first depends almost completely on how well you avoid stacking corruption, so you'll need to figure out how people are getting high corruption and fix that.

It took my guild longer to get a Cho'gall kill than a Nef kill, so I wouldn't get too discouraged: learning the fight is harder than most guilds would have you believe (though once you do win the fight, every week after that seems to be a cakewalk).

[SurfD]

damned if I could figure out a specific pattern. sometimes a tank urks out. sometimes a healer gets squished in the back. sometimes blood overwhelms us. sometimes corruption overtakes someone and it spirals out from there. It is like a roulette wheel of something going wrong each time with no consistency, and no progression to phase two. Sometimes someone pukes on someone else. Yet they say he's not really a gear check, or that it should be easy. Each time I just end up standing there watching names go grey, going WELP and waiting for my turn.

I have only DPS'd Cho as boomkin in my guild's 25 runs, so I am not super familiar with how difficult the fight can be from other perspectives but important things to watch out for:

First off, you are 10 man group, right?  What is your raid comp?  
- If bloods are getting you: Do you have any AoE slows (hunter traps, boomkins who can spec into SlowShrooms)?   Just not enough dps on the last one?
- Tank deaths can be a pain, as Cho does have the ability to put some nasty hurt spikes on the tanks (especially if you are even a fraction slow interupting worshippers).  Again, group composition could help here.  A prot warrior is AWESOME for interupting worship if everyone stacks right behind Cho so shockwave can hit them.

- One thing that sticks out would be Corruption tho.  Unless something is going very wrong, no one but the tanks should be getting corruption untill phase 2.  If dps are ending up with raid wiping stacks of corruption, that means they are standing in stuff they shouldnt be standing in (shadow missiles from adds, fire from Fire Cho) or geting hit by AoE from the Dead Add Pools, or the Adds themselves are getting off the AoE that happens if you dont kill them fast enough.

---------------------------------------------

Also, a fun Phase 2 Cho trick that my guild recently started doing (not sure how viable it is on 10 man, but it makes 25 man Cake).  When phase 2 starts, have the tank drag Cho as far back into his throne as he can get him.  Appearently, the corrupting tentacles that Cho summons periodically durring the fight work a lot like placing Shaman totems, and are range blocked by close walls, so since the Throne is a very tight box, the tentacles all spawn practically ontop of eachother, and can be aoe'd down by mele literally in seconds.