f13.net

Okey dokey. I've been hearing that some of the poopsock guilds have already burned through all the raid content in Wrath. This is the first WoW expansion where I've hit the ground raiding  :drill: and am wondering how long it takes the average  :awesome_for_real: guild to go through. Mine, for example. is still getting Naxx25 and Auch/Sarth25 down, while waiting for some of our guildies to hit 80.

Where are you at raiding? I'm sure most aren't as... dedicated as the poopsockers.

We're deliberately going slow: folks consciously did not want to burn through everything (and we're not a hardcore guild in any event). So mostly folks are just doing the normal instances and a smaller group of us are doing Heroics...we'll probably start on Naxx fairly soon. So far I've found that some of the Heroics are really no big deal but some are strikingly difficult--Old Kingdom on Heroic is a gear check as well as a tactics check.

The bleeding edge guilds had cleared the raid content within 3-4 days of release. Most casual guilds are probably still progressing through T7 content quite happily I'd imagine. There's such a range of guilds though it's hard to say what constitutes average. So long as you're having fun, and not feeling cockblocked then you're progressing fine I'd say.

Oh yeah. Just wondering where people here are at. I'm happy with my guild's progress. I'm also boggling a bit at the fast consumption of the content. I don't even see how it's physically possible to squeeze all the raids into 3-4 days. It took me weeks to hit 80, and I racked up 50 hours one week. (Yay for unemployment!  :uhrr:)

We only have about 6 people at 80 atm and they all hit 80 within the last 2 weeks, so we're just doing heroics (did about 4-5 so far). Not sure we'll be doing any raiding at all even after everyone hits 80, so eh.

I've pugged sartharion-25 [no drakes] though.  :awesome_for_real:


-- Z.

My guild is small, but we've downed everything as far as 10 man raids. You only really need a core of about 5 people with gear for 10 mans. We have three geared DPS, one relatively geared tank and one relatively geared healer. We sub in the rest as necessary, and they don't usually have great gear.

We generally pug into 25 mans which works out fine, provided you know what pugs to get into and what ones not to.

Edit: I mean for 25 man Naxx. OS25 (no drakes..) and 25 man Vault are incredibly e-z.

Our guild alliance has done full clears on all the 10 man stuff, one run 9 bosses in 25 man Naxx, and I've cleared out both Archavon and Eye of Obsidian. We haven't tried any of the fancy drake stuff on Eye yet. I've got a second 25 man going into Naxx at the beginning of the year.

My guild is going to start 10-manning Naxx like...tonight. Sarth is so easy with no drakes up my guildmates have been running him for a while. Everyone's been itching to get into Naxx but work/class has really split everyone up on the leveling, along with people like me who wanted to enjoy the ride.

Lot of my guildies have been successfully pugging Archavon in 10/25 man flavors for weeks.

A large chunk of my guild isn't even 80 yet.

The guild Im in is pretty "casual", so we havent really guild-raided alot. Most people arent even 80 yet (I poopsocked and was guildfirst 80, WotLK just clicked for me  :uhrr:), and people are just playing around with alts, doing wintergrasp, sitting around doing nothing.

As far as raiding goes, Ive pugged VoA and Obsidian Sanctum. Also done some bosses in Nax. Everything is really easy, in the good sense, no more if you fail doing X while Y is happening; YOU DIE. The wintergrasp boss takes all of 10minutes if the tanks have done it before, and people "dont stand in the fire". So far the raiding content is really nice, its nice to be able to Pug stuff and not have to wipe 5 times on a boss.

It's not that people were hardcore catassing but rather that the content was easy. We literally cleared each zone the first night we tried. So, yeah, two nights naxx (because it's big and we were undergeared), one try Sarth, three tries Malygos. Beat the game. Two nights raiding a week, grand total of six hours.

The meat is in the optional difficulty stuff. Sarth+3 will destroy a guild of bads but it doesn't take any more time than it otherwise would.

While the absolute only difficulty in OS is keeping everyone from being hit by waves, I still can't imagine doing +3 drakes. The situation would just be too chaotic for a pug to ever succeed at.

Oh, absolutely but it's not what I'd call a catass thing, either. The time investment learning it isn't huge. It really is a skill check first, gear check second and time check waaaayyyy at the bottom.

We're like one person away from being able to do ten mans, what are you bitching about! We're just not ever on at the same time. I think you mean "a large chunk of the guild we have to raid with in order to even do ten mans isn't even 80 yet."

Semantics  :oh_i_see:

At first I was like manwhat? So Malygos is as far as Wrath goes so far, right? I thought people had beat down Arthas and were waiting on the next raid expansion patch to open up more content.

I think they went a bit too far reacting to the problems of the last expansion's raid difficulty. The difficulty of Gruul's Lair was a very high starting point most groups, with a huge amount of damage hitting the tanks randomly and a lot of coordination and DPS needed to get the last boss down. There was also the stupidity of making a 10 man run absolutely mandatory to complete before 25 man runs could commence. People bitched that the content was ridiculously overtuned, so they nerfed it later. Then, they kept nerfing it until is was appropriate for the more casual audience.

Now, the starting point is much easier. Naxx content is well-tuned for what it should be, a longer instance with a lot of varied encounters that acts as a starting point for many groups. What I think they dropped the ball on is the ease of Archavon and Sartharion. It's damn near impossible to wipe on those bosses after you've tried them once. The abilities are overly simplistic, and the encounters themselves are very bland. Now, Sarth does have a difficulty increase with the drakes, so I give them credit for that, but that doesn't mean the regular version should be simpler than Onyxia.

Given that I've seen Archavon pugs inexplicably hit the enrage timer I would caution against overestimating the intelligence of the bulk of WoW players. The gorgeous thing is going to be the shrieking involved as the game slowly ramps up in difficulty each content patch and those pugs start trying Arthas after a Sartharion wipe.

After doing Sarth once with Paelos I'm itching to do it with at least one drake up. After everyone knows how to "not stand in the fire™" a semi-competent raid group shouldn't have much trouble.

My new guild is "fairly competent", and we can reliably clear Naxx 10, Vault 10 / 25, and Sarth 10 / 25.  We, unfortunately, have a number of people who for the life of them cant seem to grasp 25 man Thaddeus, so he is our Naxx 25 roadblock.  Also, we havent really spent much time on Malygos, but we can reliably get him to stage 3.

A lot of the 10 man stuff is pretty damn easy, especially if your players are at least geared in level 80 / heroic dungeon blues.  Heck, i got the 8 man Sartharion achievement a week or two ago, without even really trying.

I think the only really hard stuff in the game at the moment is multi drake Sarth, or specific achievements in Naxx (like the less then full group ones and such)

We got that Grobbulous fart monster down tonight. After clearing spider and... another wing. I forget which. I just heal their asses.

Gonna try and clear 10 man Naxx tomorow when we continue.

Just started doing heroics this weekend. We were able to do some of the easier ones, had some problems with The Oculus and Utgarde Pinnacle. We got cheesed by Ymiron's transitiion as his orb didnt despawn and mowed into us while we were stunned. We wiped with Ymiron at 18k health  :mob:

Once we get our healers geared up we'll start trying Sarth.

I've done everything there is to offer (10 and 25 man), sans the drakes-up versions.

Sadly, we usually have to pug people on Sarth runs, so drakes up is never really an option. With good players, I don't see 1 drake being all that hard.

Man, going through some instances as DPS gives you so much more room to sightsee and admire the artwork.

Fuck, play as a tank and all you see is crotch.

Crotch, crotch, crotch, crotch, crotch.

"Hey, Ragnoros is cool !"  Crotch
"Wow the Curator is awesome" Crotch
"Man, That Boss that we just fought who has a model that's twice the size of the tank is great!"  Fucking Crotch.

Hell, even the Maiden isn't fun.  Skirt Crotch.

Ain't it the truth.

Our guild raids in tandem with another guild - we don't really have a full roster on our own, and we're still waiting on a lot of the other people to hit 80, plus a few of our own stragglers. I am hopeful we can start Naxx next week, but I don't know where people are on stuff like their head enchants.  :oh_i_see:

Head enchants? Fuck that, I'm showing up with WG enchants like the cheap bastard I am!

Especially since I can't tabbard my way to hodir!

Or the joys of tanking a boss that has any kind of knockback as a druid, where you are backed into a wall staring at Bear Ass....

At least they're redoing the animal forms to the quality of the Flight Form/Raven Lord mount quality.

Yeah, that change cant some soon enough.  I am always reminded of those "here is a screenshot of my feral druid in his leet Tx raiding gear", followed by 40 posts of "and here is my bear in this other set" with screenshots of identical Bears in various locations.

Soon


I don't know how to make the little TM symbol :(


-fake edit-
I  :heart: that thread on the druid forums. "Hay guyz check out my awesome new armor *bear*"

We spent 15mins killing Loatheb tonight  :awesome_for_real:

I saw a video of a paladin/warrior 2manning him. i think the fight took 35minutes.

Unless you're a bear tank, then all you see is bear ass. ><


EDIT: ONE DAY I will learn to read the WHOLE THREAD before talking. :(

My guild is currently hitting 10-man Naxx with 3 healers since we did that with Kara and ZA when we were learning the place. Welp, we had no mage and the only druid was feral when we got to Noth, so we ended up with 4 healers since the druid just had to get into their resto-set and back up the other healers.

Took. Fucking. Forever.

Then we decided we'd rather do Patchwerk instead of Heigan and with 3 healers we destroyed Patchwerk with plenty of time to spare. Our DPS is 90% in blues and all of them put out about 2900 DPS, with me and the other prot warrior putting out like 1100. If you like some big numbers that's your fight.

I OT'd vault10/25 last night.  Was fun, quick and easy.

But fucking Loken and the RNG since he won't drop his trinket for me.  God damn running useless HOL on regular over and over and over.

I feel your pain.. At this point I'm just holding out for the epic Def trinket off Thaddius in 10 man Naxx  :ye_gods: I cant even GET groups to do normal HOL at this point. People look at me like I'm smoking crack in church while fucking a nun..

I can get regHOL runs real easy.  It's just boring and fustrating especially since I end up with level 76-79 people all the time.  At least I get rep with a tabard.

Our MT said fuck it and soloed Shadow Labs for the Adamantine Figurine. I think we've run HoL 10 times, probably more.

Why there are so many haste trinkets that nobody wants but no +defense trinkets is beyond me.

While the basic raid content right now is all pretty easy in comparision to anything previously released, the addition of achievements for doing things a certain way or with less people have added some of the challenge back in for the bleeding edge kind of guilds.

Sarth + 3 drakes is fucking nigh impossible in 10 man right now, and it is very damn hard in 25. We spend 3.5 hours trying it with all 3 drakes up last night (25) and we were really not even close, though we are able to handle doing +2 just fine (though that is by no means easy either).

Also, the Malygos in under 5 minutes thing is way hard as well.

I was thinking about doing that as well. 

Last night was our 25 man Naxx. (And my birthday!  :grin:)
We've already cleared the Spider wing on heroic so we went for the Horsemen.

Instructor Rasuvious on the second try. MC is kinda borked right now, so we had to be careful with things that might break it.

Gothik the Harvester on try four. Very difficult to figure out just how many and of what type to put on each "side". Not a pretty end, but we did it.

Four Horsemen on try four. Again, group makeup of the mini-groups was difficult. Had maybe 9 people left standing for Lady Blammo in the end, and got her down.

A very nice trinket (Adds like 111 SP and a chance to hit the target of direct heals with an extra HOT) dropped from Gothik, but I got outbid.

10 man Naxx is really handy for learning the fights before taking it to Heroic. Our offtank runs the 10 man pickups on "non-raid" nights.

I hear there's a new raid coming out relatively soon.

Frankly I have mixed feelings about it.

I've got my gear and my only upgrades are in Naxx 25 and Malygos 25. I can basically attend raids as I choose. Since I ignore PvP this time around and have no use for achievements, I'm left in a RELATIVELY healthy place with my WoW addiction. I log on to raid or to pewpew the hell out of a couple heroics for my girlfriend, and that's that.

As interesting as the prospect of a new raid is, I just don't know if I can face the impending doom of constant content addition that follows. It feels like a fucking hamster wheel every time. BUT YOU CAN'T QUIT, BECAUSE THEN YOU SUCK ASS WHEN YOU COME BACK AND ARE UNDERGEARED! MMMMWHARLGARLGARLL!!

Oh shit. I think I just incinerated my account with my MIND.

I wish my guild could find a 3rd healer.  We fail on things we've already killed because 2 druids as the only healers on 10-man Mex is HARD and makes fucking Le.. whatisit, the guy with the necrotic aura, impossible.

As such we've killed spider wing twice failed many times on plague wing and done bits of construct.  We're failing hard and it's not tanking or DPS, it's sheer lack of healing and coordination.  /sigh.

I should level up my priest but I hate healing, and love the DK.  LOVE IT, but there's so damn many out there I have no chance at Pugging 25s.  I guess what I'm trying to say is I hate you all out of jealousy.

Gotta say, Loatheb as a holy priest is cake. PoH + CoH,CoH every 17s > the damage.

That said, I don't get why you're having difficulty on Maexxena. Hot's are win there during web wrap.

The fight we struggle on is Heigan, because running is hard.

Did the Twilight Zone Achievement (all three drakes up on Sartharion) last night and I have to say it was BY FAR the most fun fight I have ever done in WoW. First time since a LONG time ago I get an actual sense of achievement out of something in this game. Its not that its 'hard' but there are alot of moving parts and there are alot of times when stuff can go dramatically wrong.

Close on Malygos 5min achievement too. 5min 9 seconds is our best so far, should be going down soon.

There is no reason loatheb would be hard with two druids as long as they're precasting (biyotch).  Note that failing on loatheb 'because of healers' can very much actually be caused by DPS who can't kill him fast enough, ie aren't coordinated about the spores.

Now, if they're letting the tanks die on patchwerk, it's time to bust out the booterang.

lol @ heigan wipes

Because they're hilarious.

.. but should never happen. Rofl.

Well, part of it is an undergeared healer (at least I think 1500 is undergeared, I just don't  know anymore)  combined with an inconsistent raid base.  

We've got enough people (well, not healers) to field a 25-man team IF everyone logged-on consistently.  However, since we're all couples or married w/ unplaying spouses and parents with 'real jobs'.  I'm one of the 3 most 'hardcore' players of the group and I only do 10-20h on a "hardcore" week anymore, so I'm sure you can imagine how consistent our groups are.  There's only 2 or 3 unmarried and there were no Teens/ College kids in the guild until this week when a long-gone friend of MC/ BWL days came back to play.  Say what you will about stereotypes, but the younger kids pick-up stuff a lot quicker and are more focused.  Wipe recovery shouldn't take 15 mins, but it does.

Sooo.. we get a lot of folks in and out week to week.  Things take a while to learn and the ranged dps assigned on web wrap isn't always on top of things.  Should be really easy, right? Always on the west wall, big struggling white thing, but the Hunter or Lock always says "ping so I know where you are" and then they run to near melee range to break the person out.  Fuck, I've done it faster as a DK running from Maex to the person when I notice how consistently shitty the person assigned is doing.   If one of the healers gets web-wrapped, it's almost always game over.  

I'm about to give up entirely, since the RL is now convinced we just can't do Naxx at all without 3 healers and we have a hard time just fielding two regularly.  Blah!

We did Heigan for my first time last weekend.  He was fun, and after the first attempt I learned exactly where to stand and how fast to run.  Not terribly hard, just tedious.   We learned that you only need one dps, one healer and one tank to live and win the fight in 10-man.  Sure, it took 15 mins but he died.


The tank lives, but the offtank dies on hateful strikes within 1 min with the 2 druids. Priest or Pally in the mix, we can do it with 2 healers easy.  I don't get it other than I know one of them was forced to heal and isn't happy and probably not concentrating on it.  I'd yell a lot but being as it's my wife I'd rather not have a family argument over a video game.  :drill:

Biggest problem with druid healing is if they aren't geared or spec'd for it.  I have healing gear but don't usually switch specs for it, so if I *have* to heal, it is usually not a good thing.  My main heal only gets around 2500-3000 health nomally, which on a tank with 20-25k HP that is taking a beating, it drains the mana pool VERY quickly.  HoTs help, but you can still have serious problems if the damage taken is faster than you can heal it for.

Having two druids healing as your primaries probably conflicts with a lot of other buffs you should have in a 10 man raid. For one, it's likely you don't have a priest in that group (unless you have a shadow, which at this point should consider switching) so you're already out a fort buff right off the bat. Right there, your entire group is operating without a 1650 health boost, which is especially huge for keeping everyone alive on heavier raid damage fights. Also, circle of healing is just ungodly right now, and druids simply can't raid heal like they can, plus they can get crit heals around 13k.

Selby is also right about the druids gear issue. Many of them want to be doing something else besides healing as a primary, so their gear can be iffy at best. Having one as a 3rd healer with average gear is fine because they can really help out with a lot of hots. Relying on them as your main healers is something else entirely. The short answer is that if you got a priest, you'd be fine, but having 3 healers (we use priest, priest, shaman, although i'd love priest, druid, shaman) is my favored setup for Naxx 10.

Yeah, this I know, but hey we're not as raid focused as some (like the RL) like to think.  If we were we'd just pick up any random asshat priest, knowing they were using us for gear and going to drop and pick up a more hardcore guild after they got what they wanted.  Which is tricky anyway since there's so damn few healers anymore. All the ones we knew rerolled a DPS'er or a DK and refuse to go back.

Saying "just add a priest" isn't as easy a solution as it seems when you have ONE in the guild who's willing to heal and only level 74 because she's a newlywed (and hot :drill:) so she and the husband are more interested in things OTHER than playing WoW.  So instead I vent.  :grin:

Guilty as charged.  :heart:

My DK is a tank, although I wind up mostly DPSing since we're still just kicking around heroics and Ingmar is a GIANT MAIN TANK HOG. I'll level up my healer eventually, but it really is such a relief not having to be the one that HAS to go or else everyone sits around bored instead of instancing.

I think that the healers will come back eventually as well, mostly because people are going to eventually get bored of the smaller content, even at a glacial pace. It may be June, but I think that releases of higher content beyond Malygos in the coming months and Blizzard (supposedly) looking at why the healing classes are so far out of numerical balance, we could see some number shifts. Or, if we don't, Blizzard could see some dropping subs due to raid stagnation and boredom and they will be forced to look into the healing issue of it not being as fun as tanking or DPS.

I have an incredible healing set by default. A lot of the time, I'm the only Paladin in our raids. Meaning that I actually get more plate, and often mail, healing gear than I do Ret DPS gear. Just because it'd be disenchanted otherwise.

One would be tempted to say "PUT IN DUAL SPECS SO WE CAN MAKE GROUPS AGAIN", and I would be one of the most obvious candidates to make something like that work. But honestly... healing is stupid, and I don't do it unless I'm absolutely forced (especially on a Paladin  :ye_gods:). Quick and easy way to change my spec or not, I want to DPS because it's way more fun. And I don't want to get known as the one who will switch to heals. Because then, guess what? You're a fucking healer.

This is officially my last attempt at Heroic Anub'arak today!  :why_so_serious:

I know it's one of the more difficult heroics, but trying to keep the main tank up, party heal, and cleanse poison all at the same time (With my very good guildmaster and raid leader backseat healing  :uhrr:) is just... not... possible.

Take a Ret Paladin.

His job is to Repentance the first Veromancer, and fear the second. Everyone else has the job of not breaking that CC until everything else is dead.

Run out of range of pound, don't get hit by spikes.

After that's all down, you have a cake boss.

We didn't have a ret paladin that time. I think I'm just gonna sit out AN runs, and let someone else heal that shit. We were on a Heroic run today and got lots of other shit done.

Do you have any shaman dpsers? Poison cleansing totem will more or less solve your problems too I suspect.

Anub'arak heroic can be tricky. I have to berate my DPS to nuke venomancers, because as a priest I can't do much about poisons except heal through them, and the volley from 2 venomancers is more damage than spamming PoH cah neal for.

What type of healer are you by the way?

Oh, sure. That's the easy way.

Hi, I'm in one of those poopsock guilds. There's not actually much poopsock to it though. At the most, we raid 5 nights a week, 4 hours a night and that's for short stints. Usually it goes back down to 2-3 days pretty quickly. We cleared all the basic raid content the first week the expansion came out (I admit a lot of people in the guild DID poopsock the leveling portion and I almost mean that literally). Everyone in the guild had leveled to 80 on the beta and we had beaten all the content on beta already so it wasn't really a huge accomplish. Our reward for this was getting highly ranked on wowprogress.com and getting all three Realm First Feats of Strength (on top of catching realm first 80, 8 of 10 class first 80's, and all horde races to 80, as well as US first Tauren, Warrior, and Troll).

After completing the basic content we went and started working on Sartharion with 3 drakes up, the strategy of which was unknown at the time so it counted as true progression content for us. It took about 3 nights of work. We finished that at the beginning of December and have been in sort of a lull since then, raiding on a few nights a week. We put a couple nights into 10 man Sarth with 3 drakes up and got that with one of our groups. Weren't able to do it with the second group though sadly.

We've been working towards Heroic: Glory of the Raider and are down to the 5 minute Malygos which we should get next Wednesday. The Immortal is by far the hardest of the achievements, much harder than Malygos 5 minutes. Doing every boss in Naxx with no deaths is certainly a hair raising experience, but we managed to do it a few weeks ago. Malygos 5 minutes just relies on a pretty specific group composition and a specific strategy and it's pretty easy once you get it down. The trick though is you get him to 1 health during phase 1 after he takes off (he can't die in the air). If you overshoot the 5 minutes by a little and someone gets too fire happy with their dragon in phase 3 you'll accidentally kill him and lose your chance for the week. This happened to us the week before Christmas and we haven't had the group comp since then to do it (requires 4 druids and at least 2 deathknights).

Oh and hey, check out my poopsock blog: http://www.tardfactor.com

Thanks for the completely unrelated e-peen comment coupled with the blog inclusion.

It's related! The topic was "what are you raiding?".

Touche, but the blog inclusion was over the top. I reacted to that mostly. That, and I just essentially pugged an entire wing of 25 man Naxx with drunken folks. That place is a joke. I've gone to the dark side in terms of the difficulty argument. If I can one shot bosses on the very first try, with very little knowledge beyond the 10 man idea, with five healers...yeah.

Paladin.  :awesome_for_real:

I got a bit upset when my guild leader started telling me how to heal... after raiding with him for months in BC and now Wrath. That and we were using zero crowd control and just trying to tank n' spank through the entrance monsters.  :uhrr:

hehe, whenever i need to go into that hell hole, we do it the good old "kite the adds way".

Have your tank, heals and 2 dps hug the wall, and move around the corner to the right into the room.
Have someone who can grab a lot of aggro, and move fast, grab ALL of the adds on the first boss, and just run back up the path to the zone in portal. A mage (Blizzard + blink + iceblock at the end), Hunter (Volley, Fire or frost traps, FD at the end), etc.

As soon as the adds are off after the decoy, the tank grabs the main boss, and the rest of the party dogpiles onto him.  He should die before the adds manage to run all the way up and then come back down.  Collect the achievement, wipe to the swarm, run back and finish the rest of your easy ass instance for 3 badges in like 15 minutes or less.

Paladin healing straight up makes me angry these days. If I level one of my healers, it'll be my priest. And she will be disc. And my guild will LIKE IT.

We're a casual raiding guild and we're short about five people for the 25s so we're always pulling in non-guildies for it.  It's been mostly positive so far, but we're not finding other people to fill our ranks as we'd like. 

We've got guild and pug completions for all 10man content, although I personally have yet to see Malygos.  In 25s, we've got Archavon, 9 of 15 Naxx bosses and Sarth with no drakes on our kill sheet. 

I think we're doing great, but the lack of a few key players is hurting us. 

My Mage is done raiding.  Went to 10 man Naxx the other nite and we couldn't kill bosses.  My GM spoke very nicely to us, saying that we need to really need to study up on the game, l2p etc.  Screw that.  I'm addicted enough, I'm not going full catass.  Plus raiding is just not fun for me.  It feels so much like work.  I work hard enough in RL.

More power to those folks who like raiding.   Maybe I'll try again once my Priest hits 80.

A real raiding guild does not feel like work, it is fun because everyone is there to have fun.  A fuck up guild feels like work because you are not having fun, you are spending your time teaching people what to do and when to do it over and over again.

Find a new guild.

I cannot stress this enough. There are so many misconceptions about the investment to be "good" at raiding at this point it's not funny. The most hardcore thing you can do in this game is suck. With few exceptions you can do everything in this game raiding no more than two nights a week. Do you play two nights a week? For about two to three hours each of those nights? Thought so.

To compare: my old guild is wiping on Malygos, has cleared everything else and is struggling with Sartharion+2. They raid four nights a week, sometimes five. My guild has cleared everything (with my particular raid group doing Sarth+3 probably tomorrow) and we raid two nights a week.

It's fun because I don't suck and I'm with other people who don't suck. If I miss out on dope lootz it's no big deal because I'll be there with no problems later. Old guild? Constant loot arguments because they deep down never know if they're going to get a boss down without wipes. Are they progressing? Sure, but at what cost?

Just don't be bad and find other people who aren't bad.

That's assuming raiding is your big goal, of course. Our WoW guild, I'd say most of us are decent enough, and I enjoy raiding with most of them. We have some other members who are nice enough, but ... not good. Either they have zero attention span, hyper focus on their one job so much they don't notice when they're hip deep in lava, or completely out of it because they're on a morphine drip. But I've been playing with just about all of them for years, and I would rather struggle through an encounter that seems designed to fuck up, say, hyperfocus dude specifically than try to find another group of people I get along with so well.

We don't have loot problems, unless you count "Everyone passes just to be nice" a problem. Which sometimes I do.  :oh_i_see:

I like everyone I play with as well, but I've had to cut the people that can't figure out where they are in the past. I'm sorry, but if you are so fundamentally bad at the game that you literally never make it out of "glowing shit on the ground" mechanic, you're hopeless and you're pissing on everyone's fun. It's one of those things that's been consistently in every raid instance since MC, and it's unlikely to suddenly disappear in the future. Time to hang it up and go play Bejeweled or Solitaire. Either that, or start over in your gaming career with some NES or Atari games.

Sure, people fuck up and die in it once or twice. Sure, people may have an issue with it and only make it 50% of the time. All of that is acceptable. It's the people who get broken-legged immediately when you enter combat, and don't move even after you tell them.

Y'know. Aside from Anub'arak, I have few problems healing as a Paladin. I think a full out Holy Pallie should be as desirable as a Holy Priest or whatever, but we're no slouches. We just really feel the pinch in 5 mans.

I really want a version of Consecrate that heals instead of harms.   :drill:

It's less "I can't do it" and more "This is a stupid way to have to heal" for me. I like the priest better because I have lots and lots of tools to use. The paladin, not so much. Really, it's probably more burn out than anything, I've healed as a paladin for a long time and I'm pretty sick of two heals + gimmicky band aids from a personal playstyle standpoint. Plus I am annoyed holy shock is apparently my third heal for no rational reason. <3

I feel for you.  I have a pally healer that's very good who I do heroics with.  That is the ONE fight we striaght-up can not beat without an off healer.  It's fucking stupid. He has a choice, cast a heal or cast a cleanse, but not both.  The venomancers wtfpwn him as he's healing or cleansing the rest of the group, or he keeps himself and the tank up while the rest of us die and then it's game over.  Pallies need either the lovely AOE healing or the pulsing cleanses/ totems that the other classes get to deal with it. Right now they're just kind of fucked on that fight.

Take your Pally healer to H HoL and enjoy the fact that it's not just very hard, but kind of impossible.

I once did Heroic HOL with a pug pally healer in blues and DPS that were mostly below me, the warrior tank.  We one-shotted loken.  He really is not hard at all as long as you aren't trying to make it hard on yourself by using bizarre back and forth kiting strategies or all stacking on top of him or all spreading out too much or telling the healer to 'heal through lightning nova'.

Couldnt kill "bosses" is kind of vague.  What bosses were you having problems with?  Did you fail to kill ANYTHING? Or did you only fail to kill a few end of wing bosses?

I have assisted in running near complete pugs through 10 man naxx, and most often then not, we at least end up with only Gluth and Thaddeus left up if they are only moderately bad.  Most of the rest of the bosses in Naxx 10 should only require about 3 or 4 minutes of explanation for people who have never done the fights before.  After that its 1 or 2 wipes while people get the hang of some gimmicks, like MC tanking Instructor for the first time, or Dancing With Heigan.

Unless your group is, i hate to say it, REALLY bad, you should at least be able to full clear the spider wing, kill Noth, Instructor and Gothik, and Patchwerk and Grobulous

A moderately good group can add 4horsemen, Heigan and Loatheb to the list as well.

The only nasty fights are usually Gluth (kiting can be hit or miss) and Thaddeus.

Sapph is actually pretty easy if you can get to him.

And KT is only a bitch if your group composition is strange (for example, very mele heavy groups just dont do KT)

Im a bit confused, as you seem to have basicly ruled out EVERY accepted strategy for doing Loken.   Usually, you stack together, and move together during Nova, then move back to meet the boss as he comes to the tank.

You only "eat the nova" if everyone has a decent HP pool and your healer is a good AoE healer.

We couldn't clear the two spider bosses.  GM said our dps is low.  I dunno, don't have a meter.  I have decent gear, I've done all normal and half heroics. Then again I'm almost all blue gear.   I am Arcane so maybe that's a problem, but it's getting buffed next patch, at least Arcane Blast is.  Also we only had two healers and he said we needed three.

Our guild has cleared the spider wing before, just so ya know. 

Here's my dude  http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Gilneas&n=Rivengrave (http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Gilneas&n=Rivengrave)

Yah! You should have specced Warlock. :P

If you're learning encounters with two healers you really need good DPS, as shorter encounters mean healers can be less frugal with mana and cooldowns. However if your DPS is bad, your healers will get ground down. Naxx is fairly forgiving, as very few fights have any form of hard enrage, so you can take three healers and go slow and steady until you get some gear, and your DPS get their rotations down better.

My guild is at that frustrating point where we only need 2 healers 80% of the time, but there are odd moments in fight where we need some extra heals, and we don't run with any classes well suited to off-healing. (I don't want to use our ret paladin for off heals as he's one of our top two DPS).

Our 10 man made it to Kel'Thuzad last night. Didn't get him, but we knocked out abomination wing and Sapph, so I'm pretty happy.

We could make it to phase 3 pretty easily, but not very far into it, and usually lost at least one person in phase 1 or 2.

Your hit rating is 24 and you skipped each and every one of your +hit talents. That's why your dps is likely in the toilet.

That's because those strategies are all suboptimal.
A. Back and forth kiting strategies: It's way too easy for someone to go the wrong way and everyone has to spend a lot of time running around him to get back into position for the next kite.
B. Stacking together on top of the tank is asking to be smacked around by his chain lightning.
C. Spreading out too much is asking to be eaten by the aura.
D. Asking the healer to heal through nova: wut.

So what should you do?
1. Spread out somewhat - But not too much!  If someone gets chain lightning, spread out more for a bit so it stops jumping.
2. Kite in a straight line away from his starting point; establish which way you're going around the pillar if necessary.  By kiting in a straight line, no-one needs to run away from Loken and then circle BACK around him so they can run back the other way after Nova.  Back and forth kiting strategies are the self-inflicted wound that makes Loken hard.

--

Three healers is a luxury, but a really great one for your first Naxx clear and highly recommended by me.   The only bosses with meaningful hard enrages are grobb, gluth, noth, and patchwerk (4H and Sapph also have hard enrages, but I can't imagine hitting them without sitting down and trying to).  The fights that will have you really lusting after three healers are 4h, sapph, and KT, maybe loatheb depending.  So if it's a problem, just save DK wing for last, have a hybrid respec, and do the rest of the instance with three.
Let's imagine you are fighting patchwerk, a boss with no movement and the only meaningful 'phase' being that at very low health he does somewhat more damage.  How do you do damage?  Walk us through it, step by step, cooldown by cooldown, explain what you do on each proc.

Dude. You wiped on CHESS.

/snarky comment because he wasn't online that night

Really, our worst problems are entirely related to taking 15 minutes for everyone to figure out how much they really want a drop compared to everyone else.

And fire. For some reason our entire guild is cold, and likes fires.

I'll second this.  My buddy stumbled on a guild and I tagged along.  This group of people don't suck ass.  It's really a breath of fresh air.  My last guild that I raided with all really really sucked.  I ended up quitting because of it.

Yep, the guy above that said your +hit is starved is fully correct. 

Also, the vast majority of your 'blues' are quest rewards.  Simply running dungeons doesn't make you better.  You have to run them enough to get the gear from them.  When you're in 2/3 rep or heroic gear, you'll see your dps and survivability spike upwards.  Good luck, and check out the wow mage stickies - even if the rest of the forums is a cesspool, the stickies are at least a base to get you started. 

Hey man, post-3.0 Chess was serious business.

One of the Not Good people was the King. It is also Bad if he manages to get his hands on the Mage.

We're about to start 10 man Naxx with 3 Resto Druids.  :ye_gods:

Anyone want to tell me how fucked we are?

Ahhhhhahahaha.

No seriously, after Patchwerk you should be fine. As I understand it, healing hateful tanks with resto druids is a pain however.

Patchwerk is pretty intense. With 3 druids though you might be able to get away with one druid rolling every HoT in existence on both tanks with the other two spamming HT on the hateful guy, maybe one of those guys splits time between the two? I haven't touched my druid since 70 so I'm not totally sure how things have changed, but if there was ever a time for HT...

Maybe a tranquility rotation.  :awesome_for_real:

Yeah this is what our RL said. Our OT is a Death Knight, hopefully that self-healing crap they do is enough to help. Our raid comp could not be any weirder. No mages, no rogues, no priests, no shamans. Bring the player not the class? Heh, we'll see about that...

This is a reminder of why I hate MMO raiding so much.  You should be able to do a 5 man with 5 of any class.  Similarly with a 10 or 25 man raid.  The fact that raids require certain classes for optimized performance is a daily affirmation of what's wrong with MMO's.

no priests/shamans/mages/rogues sounds like you aren't bringing ANY classes

So wait, you're running with warriors, hunters, DKs, druids, pallys, and a warlock? No fort, spirit, or intellect buffs, no mage food, and no real AE healing...

I'm intrigued by the possible results. Gearing three of the same exact type of healer will be a PITA. I would expect that yall will be sharding a lot of shit.

To be fair to Blizzard, they're trying. Only at a few points did I ever feel that we "needed" a certain class along for heroics or 10 man. 25 is even easier, since you tend to have all the bases covered.

I do wish they'd put the mind control pedestals in 25 man Razuvious. We had mind control issues one time, which made the encounter unbeatable and had to try another wing that night.

The Mind Control thing is annoying, agreed.

I agree that raiding should be fun - if you dont enjoy it dont do it.  Its a game etc etc.  However, you should expect that raiding requires a step up in difficulty, and thus you need to step up your performance over a normal 5-man run.  And that means doing some research.  It doesn't mean you have to spend hours every day theorycrafting on elitist jerks, but you should at least know the basics of how to play/gear/spec your class in a raiding environment.

Saying 'I'll play my char how I want' is fine - but its like being in a football team that just joins a higher league.  You may have been able to get away with being fat and not practicing how to pass in the lower league, but you're playing with the big boys now.  If you don't bother getting fit while everyone has, you will stand out as the fat bloke in the backfield huffing and puffing and letting the side down.  And that will cause resentment with your team(guild)mates.  If you still dont want to go for a run, fine, but just accept that you won't be successful at the higher league (ie raiding).

And when you consider Blizzard has said that Naxx 10-man is Raiding 101, and Ulduar will be Raiding 201 (ie the next step harder), if you want to advance in WoW, you either gotta learn to enjoy doing some research on your class (and it doesnt have to be a lot - half an hour on wowwiki will be 80% of what you really need), get into PvP, or get really bored running the same 5-mans again and again.

3 resto druids, 1 ret pally, 1 hunter, 1 tank DK, 1 DPS DK, 1 prot warrior, 2 warlocks. The druids can at least both wear cloth and leather, so those won't go to waste. At least we have a good mix of melee and ranged, but the lack of buffs is a concern. I'll keep you guys posted on our progress (or lack thereof).

Noth does not have any form of meaningful hard enrage.


Get an arcane mage.

Well it could be worse - only HALF of your raid wants the same tier set armor tokens.  :drill:

Do so. I'm interested to see how you guys progress from the ground up.

P.S. Got Kel'Thuzad 10 man on the first try tonight. And then wiped like mad on Malygos. He seems to be a big gear check with his storm thingie kicking our asses.

We also cleared 10 man Kel'Thuzad tonight. It wasn't as bad as Sapphiron oddly enough.

So far Grob and Heigan annoy me more than anything. Good fucking luck to your raid members with lag issues.

Grob just annoys me since we're melee heavy usually and that sucks shit for him.

Did Heroic Sarth + all 3 tonight.

Pretty intense fight to say the least.

I think Malygos 10 is the hardest fight that is not tricky extra drakes sarth in the game atm. Basically have to have a priest as one of your healers for vortex. We had a Pally+Druid+Shaman the other night and phase one rocked us like 4 times. I think they are planning on nerfing the vortex a bit soon, the falling damage after the vortex itself is the big problem.

Neither does Grobb (12 minute enrage?) or 4h (they enrage after 99 mark casts).  If it takes you that long to kill them, something is VERY wrong.

I'm not sure what you mean by "back and forth" kiting strategies.  Loken is essentially heroic Murmur, except the boss can move.   The chain Lightning is a "charge" debuff.  It sits on one person, then every 3 seconds moves to someone else and deals 3kish damage.  In the greater scheme of things, the damage the charge does is meaningless.

also, i'm not sure why you would want to spread out at all, seeing as you have a very limited amount of time to get away from the boss when the cast starts, and the boss is designed that the farther you are away from him, the more damage his constant aoe pulse hits for.  If you are spreading out around the boss (depending on how many mele you have) to avoid the charge, there is a good chance that someone is going to be somewhere inconvenient when the nova cast starts, and keeping enough space to avoid the charge jumping is going to mean someone is taking more damage from the AoE pulse then they need to.

Strategy I have always used for him is to just stand with the tank, and when nova starts casting, run away down the white line.  Nova goes off, and you can either move back a bit to get to the boss faster, or just wait for the boss to come to you.  He should pretty much be dead by time he gets to the bottom of the stairs.

Thaddius has an enrage, of sorts.  If you don't kill him in Xminutes everyone dies instantly. 

Yeah, for naxx, the bosses with a meaningful (meaning short timer) "hard enrage", meaning that they go "berzerk" after x minutes and start doing 500% more damage are  are Patchwerk, Gluth, Thaddeus, and maybe (though i cant be sure) Anub'rhekan.

Sapph, Grobb and the 4h also "hard enrage", but their timer is something like 12 minutes or the like, and if you can survive that long without actually killing them, something is very wrong.

all the rest of the bosses sort of "soft enrage" meaning they either do steadily increasing damage passively over time (loatheb casts doom faster, Noth just keeps summoning harder and harder waves of skeletons each time he ports to the ledge, Gothik keeps reducing your stats), or the gimmick that lets you keep the fight going runs out (limited supply of worshipers to remove frenzy off of Faerlina or the adds tanking Razuvius eventually both die).

Random question.

Who's playing a raiding DK? 

I've been raiding as Unholy DPS now.  I'm nearly hitting 3k dps sustained.  Last night I got the epic sigil that adds to SS damage, but I also got Widow's Fang since DW spec seems to be doing more.  I'd couple that with the sword from Wyrmrest.

At what point does DW overtake 2H spec?  Or is it always that way.   I'm getting sick so I can't wrap my head around EJ spreadsheets right now.  Who's gonna help me.

I'm playing one, but haven't been reading EJ "like I should."  Only doing 10-mans and heroics means I'm only at 2300-2500 DPS depending on buffs. 

What I've read from blue posts indicates that Blizz wants DW to be competetive, but not overtake 2H for output.  They're keeping an eye on the procs like Blood Caked Blade to make sure that as faster high-dps weapons come out DW doesn't overshadow for DKs.  GC stated something like they're ok with it doing so for Warriors and Shammies but want DKs to not turn into "just another DW class."

I play a DK, but I don't raid [except for pugs] and my gear is really really bad. I have one [suboptimal] piece from a heroic, everything else is a blue or green quest reward. I finally got enough badges to buy a mirror of truth yesterday after doing VOA10/25, and won the t7.5 chestpiece from voa25, but that's neither here or there :awesome_for_real:.

At that gear level, I was doing 1700-1800ish dps in 5-mans as 18/0/53 unholy [using the 2-h sword from ebon blade rep]; after I switched to 32/39 [dualwielding the wyrmrest 1-handers], this went up to 2650ish in that one VOA run, and that was at literally 0.5fps and 500 ping. So yeah, I'd say DW is broken and likely to get nerfed...


-- Z.

DW won't be getting nerfed most likely until 3.1 patch so we can get a few months out of it :)

I got brave and read a few posts over there.  32/39 is the build to go with and there doesn't seem to be a gear threshhold.

If I wanted to dual wield, I'd play my goddamn rogue or shaman. LAME.  They should just remove the option. "Oops, we're sorry.  How'd that get in there? Here take a stun!"

Good thing I'm not quite 80 yet and in a guild of bads that wouldn't know an optimal spec if it ran up and hit them in the face. Still, once I'm 80 it's just a matter of time before I'm bothered to either tank or dps in heroics, Naxx and elsewhere.

From what I read, the reason for allowing DK to dual-wield was to permit them to DW warrior and paladin 1h tanking weapons to help reach the defense cap. Why they did this rather than design a range of 2h tanking weapons (maces) useable by DKs and Druids and not give DKs dual wield is slightly puzzling.

This is compounded by the somewhat blurry line between DK tanks and DK DPS.

Especially since in 3.08, DKs are getting epic tanking 2-handers and the 2-hander only Stoneskin Gargoyle rune (+25 def, +2% stam)...

Me, I much prefer the 2h unholy playstyle [a lot more variance in abilities], but I can't argue with a 1000+ dps increase, even though it entails mashing only three buttons repeatedly. Sigh, I guess that's template optimization for ya. :p


-- Z.

For the triple resto druid plan, another boss fight that might cause some issues is Heigan. There's a pretty serious disease in that fight that needs to be cleansed, at least until you outgear it. You do have some cleansers, but it will cut your dps down to have them spamming that on people.

Our raiding DKs have tried both the 2h Unholy spec and the DW hybrid spec. I think they all did slightly better DPS on most things as DW, but are back to Unholy. At least I know we had 2x Unholy aura last night which we did not have when they were the hybrid spec.

If I remember correctly, our top DK on patchwerk was 3rd in overall dmg. Did something on the lines of 5500 DPS I think, would have to look at the WWS when it is posted to be sure.

In a thread on the WoW dps forums, the one that basically showed how insane DW as a DK is with the 32/39 spec to the masses, there are posts where DK's have posted recount/WWS logs of them breaking 7k dps at the 25 man gear level and thats with the gargoyle not even showing up correctly.  Since Ghostcrawler posted in that very thread, you can bet they are looking at it closely and I can't imagine it not getting nerfed pretty substantially.  I mean I sincerely doubt they designed the current level of raid content with people breaking 7k dps in mind.

No, but they designed DKs with everyone rerolling in mind.

The high DPS comes from kicking out Army of the Dead, trinkets, buffs, Gargoyle, Bloodlust, then your normal rotation.

Poopsock raider checking in: I raid as a DK. Ive gone with 32/39 for now. I prefer unholy with a 2h'r but i cant beat the dps. Nearly topped 6k dps on Patchwerk this week. Came in around 5600-5700 on wws. Went through my skills once, hit trinket + blood fury + empowered rune weapon + gargoyle. Went throguh as normal. Garg did 1800 dps for a full minute, Ghoul did 700 or so.. Its definitely OP so I'm not at all suprised with the nerfs to Killing Machine and garg getting knocked down to 30 seconds. I have the gear to switch back to 2h at any time, but I'll wait to see how it plays out, the removal of the CD on Howling Blast may make up for it.. You never know. Instead of IT spam can go with HB spam with Epidemic..

Currently looking at: It-Ps-Hb-Bs-Bs-RP // Hb-Hb-Hb-RP.

Will need alot of testing to see if it works.

Yeah I made the switch to 32/39 myself.  I'm parsing a few 100 dps higher than my Jawbone + Sigil of Awareness with only Widow's Fury and Fang of Truth.  I can't get a good roll or a good drop to upgrade the rest of my gear unforntunately.  Sitting at hitcap + 2400 ap.  I can sustain almost 3k dps throughout the raid.

Except my guild is shit now.  Can't even get a 25 man together.  Can I raid with you? :/ 

I hear KM is going PPM with each point in the talent giving you 1 PPM, so 5/5 is 5 PPM and the theory is it's per weapon i.e. maelstrom.  Possible hitting 10 ppm as higher end folks are right now.  It's also affected by haste allowing perhaps more in Unholy Presence + haste gear?  Brings KM up to par for 2h builds perhaps.

I can't wait for IT-PS- HB- BS-BS-DC-HBHBHB-DC.  Thats a fuckton of AOE.

Changes as I see it to DW:

Nerfs:

KM going to PPM. 5PPM but not based on CRITS anymore, just based on hits. I dont know how that number is normalized but I'm guessing that  Fast/Fast (MH/OH) with lots of haste could bump that number up.

Gargoyle reduced to 30 sec max. This one is pretty huge.. Gargoyle accounts for a SHITLOAD of my dps. But, to be fair, it was pretty broken.

Blood Caked Blade Nerfed. Sort of.. They are just making it so that it differentiates between main hand and off hand swings that proc. So, people who do slow/fast will see a dps reduction. People who do fast/fast wont.

Buffs:

Various Glyph Buffs

HB Cooldown removed. My HB's crit upwards of 10k on bosses, adding 2-3 (more with Rime) more HB's in per rotation 'should' outpace IT spam. I dislike the PTR's so I havent tested.

New Icy Touch Sigil. HB cd removal sort of makes this less appealing as you wont be spamming IT as much, in theory, but it still adds quite a bit of damage. It took me 20 minutes to get 30 venture coins.. Basically a freebie item.

Necrosis Buffed. Necrosis right now accounts for 2.5% of my dmg. Not a big number, but its passive and I have to put points down in that neck of the tree anyway. So, Blizzard has stated that they think 1 talent point should be worth 1% dps.. Necrosis was way underbudget. 5 talent points, 2.5% dps increase. So, now they have brought it in line.

Overall it feels like DW will not really change much. Give the EJ thinktank a couple weeks to work out the rotations and all that and I bet it doesnt really lose ground at all.. On trash Im already spiking up over 10k dps at times.. Can IT-Pest-Blood tap-HB-HB on trash.. Will be sick.

KM gets better for 2H builds IF its normalized.. But if its a flat 5 PPM regardless of weapon speed then it may not really be a net gain. We'll see. I could be thinking of that wrong, but thats the way it used to be, iirc. Using fast/fast and fullyl raid buffed im about 1s on my MH and OH swing times. Thats alot of contact for procs.. And the shorter the fight the better that could work out, based on how the PPM system works.

At least you have the Sigil! I havent even seen one drop.. I think one dropped for us and I wasnt there. Total crap.

I left my guild since we can't get a 25 man together, and when we do it's with bugs and we wipe on patchwork all night.

Meh.

So instead of doing a recruiting drive, you quit?  I'm not sure I understand. 

I've played with the same guild for 3.5 years since WoW launched.  Do people guildhop that much?

Pretty much, yes.  If you're still playing with the same group 3 years later you're an anomaly not the norm.   I'm still around many of the same folks, but the guild name has changed about 5 times now.   It's even more common for people to join smaller guilds, get geared and hop on up to the next guild doing the next tier of stuff if the first guild is at a point they just can't transition to the next tier of content.

Yeah, I used to think small / casual guilds like mine that stick together forever (possibly across games) were commonplace, even if not the norm... after TBC, and especially WOTLK, it seems they're an almost-nonexistent minority, almost everyone is either raiding or wants to raid, and progress / purpz trump everything.

Might just be my perception though...  :awesome_for_real:


-- Z.

I've been with the same guild since launch. Started with like 8ish active players, now we have like 60 people who play actively. We're all over the place in terms of location however so we can't really get 25 people on consistently. Also we have like 6 active healers in the entire guild. No one wants to play a healer class.

Large scale raiding guilds are kinda like sport teams, except everyone is a free agent and there is no salary cap. If a player can move onto a 'better' guild, they will. The best guilds have the luxury of picking the best players from the pool, everyone else get's to constantly jockey for position among themselves and the various 'tiers' of raiding guilds.


The small tight-knit guild still exists, and is quite plentiful, but like someone else already mentioned... This type of guild isn't 'recruiting' and has no aspirations for 'greatness'. Also tend to be self sufficient and insular. Our guild on Doomhammer has been there since day 1 server release (arguably since Beta). The number of people on that server that actually know we exist that aren't in our guild? Maybe a dozen. Probably less if you don't count the people from our 'sister' guild that we team up with to run 10 mans regularly. Only like 2-4 of our members ever PuG or group outside the guild/alliance, the rest of us are content and happy with our small community.

Were there, just kinda invisible unless you go looking for us.

That's pretty wild stuff.

In truth, we had a guild splinter (real life friendships were ended in the process) right after BC because we could no longer carry people in greens through raiding like we did in vanilla.  We took half the guild with us to form our raiding guild, so I guess I really haven't been immune to the process. 

But at this point, if the guild I'm in now broke up I'd likely quit on the spot.  I have no desire to find a new group of people that aren't douchebags. 

Last night our 25 man made it to Thaddius. It was the end of the evening and people were dropping out and coming in, so we just practiced the polarity transition with 25 people. Herding cats indeed. But our guild is good at co-ordination fights. We'll probably get him next time we run.

This is where I'm planning to start farming Prot/Ret sets from 10 man and heroics. My Holy set is pretty strong, and we had 8 healers, 4 of them priests, on the run last night.  :grin:

Question to Ret Pallies out there on Thaddius, since my group cleared to him last night as well.

Is it possible to cross TOO FAST?

A combination of being in melee range, actually paying attention, and having pursuit of justice making me move 15% faster than most everyone else had me on the other side generally before they had even started moving.

I got bitched at for doing a lot of raid damage, and I'm wondering if this could possibly be why. Because it's CERTAINLY not that I was moving too slowly, as it was insinuated that I "must be" doing.

Polarity shift damage is a big concern. One of the first things to practice in the fight. Our tactic is to "pass on the right" and when we were running with 25 people, everyone steps left or steps right when the polairty shift happens, depending on if they changed or not.

So-
1. Polarity shift.
2. If you stayed the same, step left and wait.
3. If you changed, step right and then pass on the right.
4. Group up again when everyone is on the 'correct' side.

That seemed to help us a great deal. Not sure about the melees, but I believe he has a big hit box and you should do a little circle around him to prevent that. But I'm no melee, and had enough trouble paying attention to healing and positioning to notice how the melees handled it.

You don't need many healers on the last part of Thaddius, just two works for us. Either paladins (they are horrible dps in holy spec, holy gear) or random /roll, others can go smite the heck out of the boss. The dps is a bit of a problem here, every try some random guys just die, it takes a few tries and a bit of luck with the beserk timer to down Thaddius here :cry:

Yes.

Can't really cross too fast because of the mechanic of how Polarity Shift works.  When he finishes casting it, you receive the + or - debuff, and you have a few seconds (3-5, I'm not sure exactly) to move before it kicks in.  During that 3-5 second window, nobody takes damage from polarity shift no matter who they're next to.  They also don't get the stacking damage increase.

As long as everyone near you is the correct polarity when the 3-5 second "arming" period is over, you won't take or cause damage.  Therefore, the only way you could have done damage if you were across within that time, would be if you were either crossing when your charge hadn't changed, or if someone else wasn't where they should be.

Nevermind. The raid leader (Paladin tank) was bitching at me because he didn't know what fucking seal of the martyr is.

 :ye_gods:

I played with the same group of people for 2 years in WOW.  When I came back they were all gone (See my thread on how finding a guild is tough).  My buddy joined this guild and I followed.  I didn't know anyone and seeing how they were playing the game, no one showing up for raids, how they performed in game I felt like I couldn't go any further with them.  I didn't owe them anything.  I was sitting in a raid group for an hour and a half after a raid start waiting for people to come on.

It was irritating.  I don't want to guild hop either, I'd like to find a nice group of people to play but it really wasn't worth it to stick around.

We had a horrible run in Naxx 10 last night because we kept having issues on Sapphiron. We're carrying 3 healers, shaman, priest, pally, and myself as the tank with full heroic and 10 man tanking epics so far. I'm over def cap, and carrying about 36k health buffed, but I'm still getting nailed for 8k+ hits at times. This wouldn't be a problem, except that the blizzards seem to always find people when they are behind an iceblock and it kills them. We killed him once before, but for some reason this time the blizzards just seemed to be worse.

Do yall have any particular tips or tricks yall use to minimize the random factor of the event? Currently we use the strategy of spreading everyone out on one side of the dragon, and AE healing the melee and ranged.

The iceblock is just buggy. We've had it totally bug out and only give us one iceblock twice during a fight.

We have our groups split to the left and right with a healer and decurser on each side. This provides less player density for blizzards. When Sapphiron takes flight we all shift to the west side of the room near the entrace, spread out enough to avoid AE but close enough for everyone to be within range of an iceblock on any one player. Once he lands the tank picks him up and we return to our sides. With all the movement everyone needs be be very aware of huge cleaves and avoid being anywhere near the front or inside of Sapphiron.

If the ice bolt kills the target, it doesn't create an ice block.  I don't believe that's a 'bug' so much as 'heal moar'.  Or are you encountering something else?
1. Boom phases are 30 seconds, you've got a lot of slack on how long you can run around to ice blocks.  If the first block has a chill on it, just watch for the second and get over there.
2. If a chill lands on top of you behind the ice block, it's no problem as long as the healers aren't all iceblocked.  It's not unhealable at all, just spam COH/chain heal/don't paladins get some ghetto AOE heal with a really small radius?/ and you'll be fine.
3. You also don't need to form a tight stack of DOOOM behind the block; I experimented with it some and found you can move back from the block some to dodge a chill without risk (note: Only applies when the blocks are out of melee range of the boss; those inside melee range of sapphiron are total crap shoots with regard to protecting you).
4. Tell the melee it's OK to jump to the other side of sapph for a time to dodge a chill and to also remember that sapphiron's hit box is the size of a small moon; I'd conservatively say you can be at least 10 yards away from sapph's center and still melee him.

Yeah, on our first (and thus far only) trip in there, one of the two iceblock targets was instantly killed by the thing.  Poor priest.  Just need more health or frost resistance I guess.

The other target was me, the rogue, who had dutifully followed instructions to "spread out when the dragon takes off" and sprinted way the hell to the other side of the cave.  Oops.   So I lived through the breath, but got to watch everyone vainly run towards me to hide behind the block and get mowed down en masse by the dragon.   Good times.

Indeed. Such as 10 people being alive and Sapphiron only iceblocking one person.

The directions were actually, "spread out when the dragon takes off BUT NOT TOO FAR."

OMG U NEVER LISTEN

It's a proven fact our guild is terrible at judging distances. See any 5 foot jump in game.

That jumping puzzle in Blackfathom Deeps is SRS BUSINESS.

Don't split up on 10 man, the standard melee vs ranged split will take care of most things. It sounds like a classic case of not enough heals, make sure your healers understand strength and use their cheat skill here: priests POM every cooldown, druids WG the melee, shaman can chain heal everything and paladins are the best tank healers in game. Most of them require players to be close, so just stick together in packs of 5 (or up to 10 in 25), it's safer that way.

Try to keep everyone on full health, the ice bolt doesn't hit for more than 10k, most players will have 10-15k left after that. You need the buffer to avoid deaths on mistakes like standing in the blizzard, because people will do it no matter what you tell them :awesome_for_real:

@ Melee ice blocks: yup. We figured it out the hard way - a quarter of our raid got killed when some stupid guy wanted to a bit more damage in the air phase and stayed in melee range. Avoid ice blocks inside the big grey circle.

But amazing at barely beating encounters we have no right beating <3

 :uhrr: at imp death being the last man standing.

I actually checked the logs, like 3 people were still technically alive when Sarth died, then they all died to like, DoTs or whatever.  :awesome_for_real:

One thing that isn't really mentioned is that there is a large damage aoe around whoever gets iceblocked - that's why you spread out. You also don't run for the iceblocks until DBM says 'he takes a deep breath' - this is because while running, everyone is clumped together and if someone gets hit by that second iceblock, it can take out two or three people. We even had half the raid hiding behind the iceblock when someone got hit next to us and killed us all.

Yay. Trying Malygos 25 again. Hit the Malygos P2 Lag (http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html;jsessionid=C904E239F1A750C7C818BCFDD08BEFC5.app11_06?topicId=13392249339&sid=1) bug and wiped all the time kinda sucks.


Didn't test it yet, but if it works, it's the first encounter in WoW requiring a Logoffski to beat :awesome_for_real:

Bend over, because the healer situation is going to get worse.

Barf. That sounds poopsocky.

I don't get it. Most groups already need 3/10 of the raid to be healers for 10 man Naxx already.

It can be done with two, but that requires healers who are actually good.

So, what. Ulduar will require 3-4 healers who are actually good, and 4-5 healers for most groups?

Sounds AWESOME.

By the time we're raiding Icecrown Citadel, you'll need 9 healers and a tank.

Pro Tip: ALWAYS take priests for SW:P.

Not only that, we found melee had to turn autoattack off or drop the dragon as target or they would get pasted dispite being behind an ice block. However, you can be behind the ice block about 10 ft away from it as long as it's between you and the ice meteor he casts so there is some wiggle room for getting out of blizzards.

We have everyone spread out until he takes off then run up close to the blue circle on the floor where we fight him. That insures that everyone can make it to an iceblock. Haven't done it on 25 man yet though. Is this strat gonna get too crowded?

You're forgetting that dual-specs are supposed to be coming with 3.1 too. So I'd expect that you'll take 2 dedicated healers and a 3rd healing class who can alternate between their DPS spec and their healing spec depending on the fight.

Also, you only really need 3 healers for Naxx right at the start, when learning fights. We run with 10 and have plenty of slack on most fights. The only slightly sketchy fight can be Maexxena if a healer gets wrapped during the enrage. Some fights are complete snoozefests for healers, such as the entire plague wing.

You'll be able to change specs on the fly?  I don't know how it's being implemented in WoW, but in CoX* you have to go to a trainer to toggle between specs.

*I realize CoX isn't WoW, but it's the only MMO I know of that has dual-specs already implemented.

Supposedly that's how it is going to be. So you can have a feral or enhance player switch to resto for some fights, then back to DPS to others. If there are any fights like Loatheb(10) which a holy priest in heroic blues can solo heal, then it'll be nice to have the other healers switch to DPS.

I heard it wasn't supposed to be an in-instance thing. Like, maybe with a cooldown on doing it, but the idea was more "We have 10 people on, but 4 are healers! Oh wait, one of you toggle specs and let's roll" thing than a per fight stacking thing.

Its being argued back and forth, but the initial idea was to allow swapping inside of instances, but not in combat.  If you still have to portal a player back to a city, talk to a trainer to switch specs, then summon them back what's the gain?  Hardcore or really small guilds do this between fights already, so no point in continuing to make it so cumbersome.

The last big argument I saw was about swapping in and out glyphs as well as talents.

Update:

I'm sad to report that for the time being our raid won't have 3 resto druids, because we managed to snag a Holy Paladin. That may only be temporary though so I'll let you guys know.

We did Sarth + 0 last week with the 3 restos and wiped a few times because of enraged elementals but once we got the positioning right we took him down.  Our hunter is survival specced.  :awesome_for_real:

Tonight is first time in Naxx, looking forward to it.

Naxx is a fun place.  A lot of interesting fights and not much trash pulling.

When they say "bringing more healers will be the norm" they're talking about in the 25 person raids.

At Blizzcon they told us you would be able to do it inside an instance. Also I am pretty sure I saw a blue post to the effect that your glyphs would switch too, even the contents of your taskbars.

My only complaint about some of the fights in 10-man is that they are too long and too forgiving. Heigan and Noth being prime examples of this. I'd prefer fights which are over quicker, but have reduced margins for error. As it stands, on 10-man Heigan our holy pally solo heals everything pretty much, and I just keep abolish disease up on the melee folk and then spend the rest of the time DPSing, occasionally throwing out a ProM or renew.

Naxx has a lot of fun fights. Also much :heart: to your survival hunter.

I think the 'forgiving' factor is what opens up raids more. As fights get more intensive they also get more exclusionary. If one person dying is a raidwipe, then people are going to be more picky about group makeup and more yelling over vent that everyone sucks ass because they got lag and stood in the fire.

Can't they make raids challenging without turning them into gear or latency checks?

Did my first 25 man naxx tonight, guild decided to take the 11 of us and PUG the rest. 

It's serious, serious bullshit that the fights were measurably easier and the loot is so much better.  It's not like we had a bunch of overgeared puggies either, as my ass (http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Alleria&n=Merusk) was usually in the top 5 on bosses. (Top 3 at the end, but who counts trash)

Yeah, no durability loss (the 10% on death part) and no consumable loss on death.  Then they can make it so hard that your eyes bleed and people will still PuG it and slam their heads against the wall without getting bitchy about their 50g repair bill.

But this will never happen.

Naxx is a lot more fun than Kara was starting out since the trash distribution feels a lot more balanced (none of Kara's shit where you have small amounts of trash between the first 5 bosses and then an hour+ of the shit), but fuccccccccck a couple of the gimmick fights. Heigan is easy after you get used to it (or just use the safe spot if you're lazy/pressed for time), but you better not have any lag.

Gluth is what's currently infuriating us the most since we have only one active raiding mage and he raids with another group. We have one semi-active shammy too, so we're stuck with hunters or DKs for kiting. This means we've been clearing the military/spider/plague wings and then stopping on Gluth repeatedly.

Any palys? we use a ret pally in some tank gear. Though he is backed up with a shaman, however a hunger with the aoe freeze trap would do just as well.

A hunter/DK team can kite it better than any other class, imo.  Hunter keeps frost trap down a few yards behind the healer/dps core near the boss.  DKs drop death and decay on top of the healers whenever it refreshes.  Since the mobs spawn and go right for the healers, as soon as they hit them they get a DnD tick, head to the DK but get caught in the frost trap in between the healers and the DK.  Both the DK and hunter should be kiting as they can, any aggro on the healers needs to come off. 

It works perfectly for us. 

I'm honestly shocked at how hard Patchwerk is hitting ppl in 25 man. I didn't expect it and he was hitting me for over 22k at times. We wiped because I don't think our healers are there yet, but damn if that wasn't a bit ridiculous as an encounter compared to it's 10 man counterpart.

Are you MT or hateful tank?

edit: Also, how many priest and shaman healers do you have? If you're not getting Inspiration or Ancestral Healing that will make it harder.

They should also be prehealing as you go into the fight... that took us a try or two. 

It's sad but true, my guild powered our way to server first because our MT at the time was a bear and bears right out the gate are beasts in pve raids. Now, later on their threat gen doesn't seem to scale as well as a warrior but when you have a tank with 40-50k hp, it's REALLY hard to die.

Hateful, 3 priests, 3 druids, and a pally. We lost our shaman healer to Final Fantasy. And yes, I realize they should be prehealing, but I don't think they are remotely in the gear range for the fight yet.

We have had two successful approaches to gluth.
A. Hunter with a gorilla pet+a mage.
B. Me saying "I am not going to wipe on fucking gluth again.  Retadin, put on some tank gear and put righteous defense on your bar!", respeccing to piercing howl and kiting the little bastards myself.  This is what we did last time since we were 8 manning it.  I am terrible at kiting since I am a warrior and I typically do not kite so I had 73 stacks at the end, but it got done.

Eh? Can't a DK only slow with desecration which requires melee range? I guess if Gluth goes down before the disease stacks too high it'd work.

I think the DK is just there to collect them, not snare them.

Plus an unholy DK likely has +15% runspeed.

Any DK has 15% runspeed in Unholy presence.  You're kiting and shouldn't be getting hit, right? 

Yes, the DK isn't snaring them, rather using DnD to get snap aggro off the healers.... but the mobs head straight into the Hunter frost trap so the DK only has to kite in a large circle around the trap.  We killed him on first try in 25man, didn't realize how many more zombies there are in 25 compared to 10man.  It's a lot more.  So we adjusted on the fly and owned him. 

Hopefully one of our 600 DKs will be on tonight so we can test that out. People were late and we were tired so we only knocked out the Plague, Military, and Spider wings.

More shammy loot and DPS leather everyone already had. Yay. Fucking RNG.

We've had the same shit luck over the past month.  It's to the point where I'm thinking of calling it quits.  I'm not much of a loot whore myself, but we're seeing so much gear sharded because the shit drops for classes that aren't there or for off-specs that people will never, ever use. 

Hell, we ran heroics one night for six hours and not one single upgrade was looted.  20+ badges later, sure... but it's so demoralizing to see that shit go to waste. 

I'm getting pretty fucking irritated at this point really. Nearly a month and a half of running Naxx and I've only gotten my chest token. We've had to shard or off-spec loot 80% of all the drops roughly. If there's a shammy piece you bet your ass it drops.

Here's my luck:

I don't have one piece of 25 man loot equipped at the moment, but have been raiding every week.

I have seen one two-hander drop, which I was muscled off of because I was in a guild run. It went to a DK tank.

I finally won Fury of the Five Flights tonight, only to have two rogues and their friend literally scream and nearly cry in vent for half an hour until the raid leader let them roll between themselves. Because the trinket is better for rogues than for Ret Pallies. Maybe. If you theorycraft it.

I know the feeling about considering calling it quits because your loot luck is so miserably bad that everything you do in the game just turns into a massive waste of time at the end of the day.

Heroism badges are fucking useless.

And funny story relating to that, and to bad loot luck - I had 99 badges of heroism before getting one purple to drop for me from Heroics. Completely true story.

Wait, what?

It's a fucking AP trinket, it isn't magically better for one physical class than another.

Judging by the whining and crying described, you would think it was.

Time to find a new guild. Those people are bad news.

It is.  It's still second (or possibly third; working with retadin spreadsheets is worse than sucking satan's asshole) best in slot for retadins next to the obligatory darkmoon card, but all other physical DPS (particularly rogues) will gain more because they can build a 20 stack way faster.  This isn't too big a deal on Patchwerk, but on Sapphiron you will almost certainly be forced to rebuild the stack after every bomb phase.  It'd take many retadins a solid 40 seconds to build a full stack, leaving them just 20 seconds to DPS at full power, whereas a muti rogue could plausibly build a full 20 stack in under 10.

Also relevant: Who beat who on the meters?

This whole "best in slot" argument and fighting over loot drops is exactly why I don't raid anymore.  My current guild is trying to get there and is giving lots of grief over my lack of interest in pouding my head against the table for 2 hours a night while we wipe.

I dominated the meters through trash, and placed second on Sarth behind a boomkin who was aoeing the adds.

I think I ended pulling about 3400 on the boss, or thereabouts.

The rogues crying were 8th and 11th.

This was a PUG, by the way. Not a guild run where giving people best in slot items is benefitting the group.

Here's how you deal with this sort of situation:

Whisper Rogue B (the one who didn't win) and say, "Hey <name>, someone told me on Vent that Rogue A finished writing his gold farming bot and sent it to you.  He says it's "better than pirox or glider" or something like that.  I'd never use it, the risk of getting banned isn't worth it, but did you try his bot out yet?"

Did our first Naxx raids this weekend. Cleared Spider, Plague, and Military, and got Patchwerk down. We're doing Sarth tonight and might try to go back in for a try at Grobbulus before the reset.

Quite the change from TBC Kara, much smoother learning curve. I'm not going to say its an epic vendorfest like the teenagers in the D&R forums bitch about, but even with our unorthodox raid comp we didn't have very many wipes. That said we took our time and everyone was heroic-badge geared, so that helped a lot.

So far I think the biggest thing holding back our raid, besides some undergeared/underexecuting DPS, is freaking AFKs.  :awesome_for_real: If you can do all that stuff on the first try, Sarth will be a snoozefest for you guys, he's easier than anything in Naxx.

Lag beast destroys guilds, story at 11.

Oh yeah, well you suck, too!

Oh wait. You don't mean me. I think.  :oh_i_see: And yeah, Naxx seems a lot more of a pain than Sarth with no drakes up.

On the plus side, you no longer need to PvP for PvP gear. Just walk into VoA and ask Archavon for his PvP epics.

You don't even have to ask nicely, really.

Our guild downed Malygos10 the second night.  Not too bad a fight, although not as interesting as say, Zul'Jin.  Ah, memories of wiping after eagle phase.  Of course plate heal shoulders dropped, and I ended up with them.   :oh_i_see:  At this point, my heal off set > ret main set.  This does not please me!

It's like that with every Ret Pally. It's because if there's no Holy Pally in the raid, guess where the only place that gear can go is (and sometimes, if there's no shammy.. etc).

And we all know that Holy Pallies don't exist anymore, so.

We downed heroic Naxx a couple of days ago. And last night, we got the "Safety Dance" achievement on Heigan 25.

 I guess after Malygos I can start calling myself a neckbeard poopsocker?  Or is that 3 drake Sartherion? (We still can't do Sarth with even one drake up. We've been trying, but it's too chaotic and WTFwipe!)

I've seen 25 pugged without a single death. :drill:

Doing the stand-in-the-corner x-ploit, amirite?

We did it without the exploit, on the grounds that if they ever fix it, we'll never have practiced it 'right'.

Was talking about Sartharion + 1.  I wasn't playing, just watching over my brother's shoulder.  Still have no clue how they managed it when my server seems to produce innumerable 400 DPS death knights to pug with.

It's been fixed

Hows blood tanking?

I wouldn't know.  I'm typically Unholy but I specce'd blood last night to test out the changes but with the wintergrasp crash-of-doom bug I wasn't able to do so.

 I'm in my shittyass "lol off-tank" gear because someone asked me what I could get my armor to now with the changes to frost presence.  That's not even my best armor value set, as I was swapping in and out pieces when I decided to give up for the night after another crash.

Sartharion Strat using stuffed animals (http://pwniepedia.com/index.php?title=Sartharion)

 :awesome_for_real:

LOL @ Restoration Druid.

Patchwerk.  Really, really not fun.

 :oh_i_see:

25-man patch?

Got the safety dance achievemtn tonight after BLizzard fixed the corner exploit so the rest of my guild had to learn the dance. Currently working on Sapphiron. Hardest fight in Naxx from a healer pov certainly, we keep getting chills on top of ice tombs which screws us over. Anyone got any advice (normal).

The 25 man version is really one of the worst parts of the whole place. It's not terribly technical, it's not about skill or coordination, it's simply about tossing some meat in front of a guy that hits like a mach truck and praying your healers can keep up.

Essentially, it's like most of the shitty BC fights.

EDIT: I'll even go further. "Rape the tank" fights aren't fun. They are the dumbest things ever created. Fights that figure out how to involve the entire raid and use different skills, those are your memorable fights. Those are the ones you enjoy learning and fighting and winning. The Military wing is a good example.

Patchwerk doesn't...well, work in terms of scaling.

Naxx 10 and 25 are supposedly designed to be done in the same starting equipment, i.e. ilevel 200 blues ideally. Even if you set a baseline really pointlessly high like "full ilevel 200 epics" the problem is the same. Tanks have negligibly different HP, and since you have roughly twice as many healers, you have to ramp up the damage to make it even remotely difficult. Since the gear differences are so small however you end up with tanks nearly being instagibbed every 4-5 seconds.

As a healer, I :heart: Patchwerk.  If your DPS sucks, you die.  If your healers suck, you die.  If your tanks suck, you die.  I'm not sure how that doesn't "involve" the raid.

The only fight that I feel the same way about is Gothik.  On Patchwerk, essentially half your DPS/healers can make up the slack of the other half, but that falls apart hilariously on Gothik.  The rest of military is "Hope your Priests don't suck." and "Hope your back group doesn't fail."

Blizzard's ahead of you there.  The real danger in patchwerk isn't how hard he hits his main aggro target, it's his hateful strikes.  Every time Patch-25 hateful strikes, he looks at the health of tank #2 and #3, picks whoever has more, and pimp-slaps them.  This means he can hit extraordinarily hard (ie challenge the healers) because he has to blow through two entire tanks worth of health before he kills someone.

Um, you're on drugs.   As the dancing monkey said (and he's a tank) it's not a fun fight for a tank.  There's no 'sucking' involved.  We just fucking stand there.  I am eager to hear what skill you think I require to do 'better.'

As a tank, all you do is get the crap beaten out of you for four+ minutes on Patchwerk.  It's not a fight where a tank can expressly wipe the raid (failing screw-ups in the pull), but it's not like the tanks are a non-factor in downing him.

If a HS tank(s) can't produce enough Threat while having enough Health to avoid being gibbed he either a) gets gibbed and you wipe or b) slows the DPS down to the point that you hit Berserk and wipe.

If the DPS aren't Threat-capped to the point of hitting the Berserk timer and the Healers are able to do their jobs (which just comes down to raw health for HS), the Tanks are "not sucking".  This is the case the vast, vast majority of the time.

Just like the threshold for Healers is "Did people who weren't doing something stupid die?" the bar is not very high, but it still exists (and fails to be met occasionally).

Patchwerk chooses his hateful targets based on threat not HP.

I'm sorry, but HAVING HEALTH and Generating Threat are not really things that a tank has all that much control over.

If he's a good tank, he'll have his optimum threat rotation worked out Waaaaaay before he hits level 80.

As I said, this is a fight that has fuck all to do with tanking and DPS and whatnot.  It's about healer reaction time and, here's the big one, it's a goddamn static GEAR CHECK.

Not fun.

They may as well just count the stats on your items and let you through or not.

That is what I said: In Patch 25, he hatefuls tanks #2 and #3 based on their health.  They wouldn't be much of a tank if they weren't #2 and #3 on the threat list (especially with Patch's special aggro mechanics).

That's not what you said


No, he doesn't.

 :awesome_for_real:

 :oh_i_see:

Yeah, having eaten a hateful despite being #5 on the threat list I learned real quick to 'dance in the slime' when my health gets above 75%.

What's the average health of an 80 rogue these days ?

Surely you jest.

0

I'm missing a maths joke here, aren't I ?

Most rogues are dead.

I do not. It was one of our first runs through Naxx, and DKs run around with 19-21k hps raid buffed in DPS gear.  I'm not that far behind the tanks at that point, hateful tank didn't get topped completly off on one hateful, putting him below me and the next one gibbed me.  So yeah, I dance in the slime now.

http://www.bosskillers.com/cgi-bin/bbguild/index.cgi?action=view_guide&guide_id=532&sid=pkjEEbdTUP
http://www.worldofstrats.com/Patchwerk/tabid/110/Default.aspx

TL;DR: Both say it's goes Melee DPS -> Highest Health -> Highest Threat when determining the target.  The bosskillers guide recommends using the slime momentarily to drop your health.  From experience experimenting with the slime and being in a raid with paladins who can't seem to grasp the idea that they're not supposed to Judge Light I'd have to say that what I have seen is pretty consistent with what is written.

Ouch.  Fair enough ;  I just find it strange that a viable tactic on a boss is to wander into the corner and quietly cut your own throat.

 :ye_gods:

Yeah, but wierd shit manuvers are gonna pop up from time to time in any battles that aren't totally vanilla tank n' spank.

I don't... hate Patchwerk. I do think he's a pretty boring boss. (and thankfully quick) I reserve my hatred for Grobbulous. Latency and stupid check all rolled up into one boss. God forbid one person out of 25 lag out and/or plop a fart on the party.  :awesome_for_real:

Both of those articles are wrong.

In a 25 man, Hateful Strike will hit the highest hp melee who is 2nd or 3rd on the threat list. Being hateful striked will add large amounts of threat to everyone on the top 3 of the threat list to help keep them up there.

If melee are getting gibbed and the tanks are still alive one of two things are happening: Either the tanks got a (un)lucky evasion streak and hateful strike was evaded a few times in a row and they lost threat, or one of the tanks was slacking and wasn't throwing up sunders, judgments, whatever threat moves they have.

Judgment of Light is not supposed to be used in Patchwerk true, but that's because it's bugged and deals out massive threat in 25 mans. It was supposed to be fixed but no idea if they have yet.

And while that is viable its certainly not required.. I raid a DK and fully buffed I'm over 25K hp easy and have never stepped in the slime on this fight. Tanks have 36-40K. If melee die on this fight the healers aren't doing their job. This fight is 2 parts: Healers top off tanks ASAP and 1 part: DPS him before he berserk's. I give tanks 2-3 seconds to get established and dive in.. Me and the other DK in the raid have the highest HP by far of the melee dps and neither of us has ever eaten a Hateful.

I ate a hateful strike on Patchwerk this weekend... but that's because the hateful strike tank intercepted our boomkin right at the start.

*looks pointedly at Gobbeldygook*

I actually hate (10 man) Razuvious more than any other fight, mostly because of everything in there - every boss fight I've ever personally done in the game maybe - it is more a fight against the interface than a fight against the monsters.

Patchwerk doesn't bother me. There's a place for fights where dps gets to see just how well they can unload in a static situation.

So, my ragtag band ran Nax10 for the first time this weekend. We had a blast, there was 7 of us, and 3 pugs. Two of the pugs where decent, and the last one was horrible. But from a group where no one except one healer had ever done nax, we did fantastic I think.

We ended up at Sapphron. We 1 shot a lot of the fights. The only ones that gave us any real problems where Grubbulus(sp?) and Thaddius.

That is definitely a good job. How many hours would you say you spent?

Doing Kel'Thuzard with a melee-heavy raid is pretty painful I discovered tonight.

Whatever. Doing ANYTHING with a melee-heavy raid is painful. There's absolutely no boss fight that I can think of in WOTLK where a melee is advantageous versus a ranged DPS.

In just about every fight there's something that makes DPSing as melee far more complicated.

Melee rule in any fight without a retarded kiting or AoE element, especially since melee are the king shit of DPS ignoring hunters. Razuvious, Patchwerk, Grand Widow (not like they have to worry about much), Loatheb. That's about it though.

As my main is a rogue, I'm really hating the suppurating hostility towards melee DPS that oozes out around every corner of Wrath. There are almost no fights where ranged DPS are at special risk. There are tons and tons where melee DPS, especially rogues, are at serious risk if they don't do everything exactly right. For example, there's a huge overuse of whirlwind and retaliate which more or less require a rogue to get the fuck away before they even start, and neither move is signalled with emotes or any other mechanism well in advance on bosses or trash mobs. It's like the overuse of dual-direction cleaves in TBC Heroics when they first went live. Which of course also impacts your DPS, and when people are hovering over the meters every second, that counts. One of my few cool new things isn't even being appreciated much, also: with Tricks of the Trade, I'm actually helping weaker tanks keep aggro and boosting the raid DPS considerably, especially when the tank can output decent DPS to begin with, as with a tank DK.

"Kel'Thuzad make Patchwerk his avatar of war"
http://eqbeastiary.allakhazam.com/search.shtml?id=6416

This is not a co-incidence.

Do Sapphiron's Chills ever go under him? We have the ranged kite the chills, so it would seem that melee are slightly better off there, but I'm not sure if chills go under Sapph ever, so I may be wrong.

However, it does seem that the difficulty incurred by being melee-heavy isn't always balanced by their superior DPS in fights like Patch and Loatheb. Healing up 5 frost-tombed melee on KT in 10 man is a bit of an arse.

The other thing to consider with Melee DPS, is almost all of it is 'infinite' in duration. No such thing as a OOM Rogue.

There is such a thing as an OOM enhancement shaman, though. Well, if there's no ret pallie around, and usually there isn't.

Blizzard has always been melee hostile, not simply just WoW. Diablo springs to mind, especially Diablo 2--which was particularly egregious following patch 1.7 and patch 1.10.

Sapphiron's blizzards are a pain in the nuts as melee. Yes, they come into melee range. Often.

They also prevent me from doing DPS whatsoever after I run away from them and wait for them to GTFO so I can go back in.

This "supreriority of melee DPS" has me confused, too. I'm currently seeing SPriests and Boomkins pull 5k and be untouchable at the top most often, with Mages, Hunters, Ele Shaman being at the top sometimes too. Those are all ranged and mostly casters.

I don't see DKs destroy anything anymore, rogues are generally middle of the pack, Fury warriors got better but they're not anywhere near as OP as I anticipated (Perhaps the bad ones are still gemming for hit? I don't know..).

As a Ret, I'll pull untouchable DPS on undead trash. That's about it.

Our top dps tends to be hunter, moonkin, retnoob, in various different orders depending on the fight. Sometimes the enhance shaman gets up in there too. I dunno, from the front side of the mob (tanking) it seems like things are generally better for our melee than they were in TBC.

The only fights I find to be truly annoying as a ret paladin are Grobb, Heigan, Sapph... and other fights where there's just too much movement.  Well, and those stupid scions.

Also, if ranged DPS is running out of mana, there's something seriously wrong with your raid composition.  Get a paladin of any sort in there, and have them judge wisdom.  Tada, mana problems solved.  Or get a ret paladin (yay), shadow priest, or survival hunter.

Thaddius is an awesome fight for ret paladins, for example.  Yay for charges. (http://wowwebstats.com/eokvj4lgw6kr5?s=131199-138616)

I abandoned my Rogue for a SPriest in the Burning Crusade after dealing with progression through Karazhan.
I abandoned my SPriest for an Enhance Shaman in Wrath because things aren't so bad for melee dps anymore.  They are still bad, mind you, but they aren't as bad as they have been in the past.

In 25-man:  Warlock, Mage and Hunter should be top DPS based on the strength of the class abilities right now (even on a melee favorable fight like Patchwerk).  Warriors should run away from everyone on Thaddius and Loetheb because their Deep Wounds gets to run amuck for a very long time on these bosses.  Outside of those two fights where a class ability simply overwhelms the player's contribution, it comes down to the player pushing their buttons at the right time.  As Enhance I can top the damage meter on:  Archavon, Patchwerk, Gluth, Thaddius, Widow, Maenexxa, Gothik, Noth, Loetheb, KelThuzad, Sapphirion, Malygos, and Sarth+2.  That's 2/3 of Naxx plus all the other end-game raids at the moment, so while there is a lot of running around like an idiot and standing in fire on a lot of fights melee isn't in that badly off.  For reference I clear 5k on Patch/Gluth/Maenexxa and 8k on Thaddius, so there is room over the top for stronger classes and better players but the choice of class won't disqualify you from claiming top DPS in your raid by itself.

The place I do feel utterly useless is clearing trash.  Dropping totems will put you in a ready state right when everything falls down dead.  Death Knight wing is just pain for melee with too many whirlwinds and way too many spell effects to actually stay on target.  Fortunately, trash is taking less time than bosses in a full Naxx clear, instead of dominating the day's activities like with Molten Core.

Probably 6 over 2 days. With a good portion of the time spent explaining fights.

We went back yesterday and killed Sapphron in 3 tries. We also found out:


Yes, yes it is. We couldn't bring him down. Probably didnt help that our DPS was low, we had 2 tanks, and one feral in half tank gear, and one of our main healers was so high on pain pills she had no idea what was going on half the time.

Can you name a class that has troubles with mana nowadays?



No, they're not willing to wear any leather and telling themselves that itemization is better this time around. :why_so_serious:  Also, the two-handers make rage generation and avoiding stalling your rotation difficult-ish.


They are, this time around I didn't double my DPS going from Blues to tier gear + entry purples and expect another doubling by the time I hit end-game.


Deep Wounds tends to lower reported warrior DPS when there's a lot of movement and only a single target, because it tends to trick meters into thinking that your warriors have a lot more DPS up-time than they actually do have, because they're constantly doing damage. :uhrr:

Which is why I only use the "Damage Done" option on meters for making determinations, because I know it's valid.  Unless you were retarded and got yourself killed, in which case it's equally valid, because the DPS you could have done generally doesn't kill a boss.

EDIT: Pruned.

Unsupported, moonkins have quite a bit of trouble. Nobody has much trouble with replenishment in the mix.

Yes, rage gen is extremely streaky as fury and it's compounded when you don't have any haste group buffs in your raid.  Finished up a 10 man Naxx the other night and without Imp Icy Talons or WF totem there are consistently periods where you sit there for 1-2 gcd's waiting for your white swings to land so you can get some rage, then they hit and your rage bar is almost full  :uhrr:  This can make it pretty hard to keep a steady flow of special attacks going every time they're off cooldown.  It's also the reason Fury warriors put up crazy numbers or at least significantly better numbers on fights with splash damage.  The damage keeps us raged up so we don't have to contend with dry spells and we can always use specials as soon as they're off cooldown.

I just think it's lame that the new whirlwind glyph is the only significant dps boost for fury warriors in 3.0.8 and Bloodsurge actually seems nerfed to me in it's new implementation.

Also, minus the ass cleaves from TBC, raiding seems just as unfriendly to mele as ever in Wrath so far to me.  If I didn't have almost 30k hp raid buffed in dps gear I'd eat the dust a lot, no threat dump is serious business.

Holy Priests have the most difficulty out of all the healers I'm sure. I rarely have problems so long as I get replenishment, however raiding without replenishment makes life as a holy priest a lot worse. It doesn't help that Shadowfiend dies before it gets more than one or two ticks off on the fights where you need mana the most (Sapph and Grobb).

Re: Replenishment

Are you really trying to tell me that your server population isn't at least 30% ret paladin? :why_so_serious:

Most of the paladins in my guild do crazy shit like tank and heal.  :ye_gods:

We did finally convince one of our trusty hunters to respec to survival (my main is a tankin' DK, otherwise *I* would be the survival hunter) and another dude hit 80 with his retnub, so things are looking better for our poor mana users that had to do without (no!) for the first couple-a weeks of raiding.

As Ret DPS is surpassed more and more (single target DPS from Ret lags behind, other classes are being buffed while we get nerfed, and we'll lose a lot of umph when Ulduar comes out) and Ret PvP becomes far less viable with each patch (I use my shield basically as a quick burst interrupt or CC breaker now, then click it off so I can DPS again.. I'd much prefer if it was a three second ability instead of a 12 second one in its current state), you're going to find that more and more Paladins end up Holy and Prot.

Besides - there are only more nerfs to Ret incoming and everyone knows it. The spec will become obsolete before Blizzard is finished with it, like it always has been shortly after every time it ever got buffed.

Wut ?

Yea, in full 25 man Tier 7 with mostly all BiS items and gemmed for stam.. Also I think most of our tanks are JC/BS so they get ALOT of stam from the JC only gems + extra sockets. Last time i looked our Pally tank had 40k, 2x Warrior tanks had 37 and 38, DK tank had 40k and Feral druid tank the other night had 46k. Im sure if they swap gear around to stack avoidance or other stats they lose some hp, but I doubt it's alot..

Hell on my DK with tanking gear on and NO buffs im sitting at 32k hp.. and half my tanking gear is blue.

doomgaurds now have 40k+ health as well

Yeah those must be 25 man gear and fully raid buffed. I'm only hitting 36k-ish as a warrior fully buffed with commanding shout up, and I have a lot of stamina for a warrior running 10s.

Yeah, I was kinda talking about 10 man Patchwerk....

Not even approaching those kinda STA figures yet...

So we asked our less experienced Warrior to MT patchwerk tonight, full of vim and vigor he proceded to charge Patch.... while he was in the middle of frogger

Hilarity ensued

I'd laugh at frogger more if more of my guildmates weren't complete and utter cock-ups with machines in the "passable to run WoW" range. 

Every week 3-5 people die then complain "I was way in front of it."  Never mind the trick is - as I have explained NUMEROUS times- if your framerate sucks or you lag often, run at the rear of the damn things.

I'm fairly sure there's something wonky with Frogger.  I've run through the damn thing too many times, only to die directly between the slimes, to not believe that.  I've also watched people run right through the slimes, and of course die, which I can't believe they are doing on purpose.  Or it could be internet lag.  It's not the computer itself, of that I'm fairly certain.

Of course, if we do have to run through it multiple times, I just bubble through it, mostly out of sheer annoyance.

My computer is coming up on 5 years old, and I never die in Frogger. Like Merusk says, you run just behind the tail of each blob. That means you never lose.

Frogger is a good example of why we're not even close to having twitchy action MMOGs yet.

Darkfall  :awesome_for_real:

Maybe it was mentioned earlier in the thread and I'm too lazy to find it, but "The Safety Dance" is another test for your computer/lag performance.  We wiped twice last night before we figured out to tell everyone to stop following other people and just look at where the twinkling ground is at.  When looking at other characters in your raid, everything was screwed up.

Even then I still got hit once on our successful run at it.  I didn't die, but when it happened I couldn't help thinking this kind of mechanic in raids is just not a good idea for MMOs.  I was doing it right and ran for the ground that was just finishing having the green lava stuff come up.  The problem was my graphics said the lava fell down when obviously I actually ran right into it just at the end.  Frustrating.

I don't die on Heigan, unless the tank decides to run from Zone 4... deeper into Zone 4.   :awesome_for_real:  So, I don't think it's me being stupid on Frogger.  I could be wrong.

What are we talking about ?

Mechs. They're unrealistic.

Yeah that can be frustrating, particularly since so many people DO just follow others.  I've told my raid about a simple way to find the 4 safe spots on the ground in front of his platform. The fissures along the front form 5 little "y"s. Stand on the first fissure at the corner near the door, move to the next one, then the next, etc.   You never have to guess if you're in or out of the right zone, and since you're right at the platform it's a much shorter run than farther out. (Yay geometry.)  We still wind up having to down him with 4 people after the first run across the room.

   I'm beginning to suspect everyone who dies is a keyboard turner, since it's the 4-to-3 transition that kills them.  It's like they walk into zone 4 and then stop for 5 seconds, waiting for the lava to eat them.

I made all my guys watch this. It helped.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-msjvccLB8

One of the things we've been talking about in our guild is that by design or by accident, Blizz seems to have just given up on tuning some instances so that pulls have to be managed with CC. I'm not saying that cc doesn't help reduce the chances of getting killed, but in heroics especially but even raids, unless you're very very undergeared, you're generally fine with just going in and blasting the living shit out of the entire pull. A part of this is also that unless the tank is extremely incompetent and/or massively undergeared, it's also a lot easier to hold aggro in Wrath than it was in TBC or pre-TBC. So ranged and melee dps can go off on a large trash pull with abandon and it is exceptionally rare for them to overtop the tank by such a margin that the tank loses aggro and cannot get it back.

In one sense, I applaud this: you don't have to spend hours and hours working your way through trash o-so-carefully and it means that pugging content is not painful usually because you're not hostage to a minimum necessary level of actual skill. It also means you don't have to compose a group with an eye to the particular kind of cc that you need. ("Oh, humanoids, ok, get a sheep or a sap" etc.)  But I'd almost rather, if the goal is to make instances relatively fast, that there be fewer trash pulls but that each trash pull involve a bit more skill or puzzle-solving. CC is such a deep part of the game mechanics that if they're going to make it fairly unnecessary, they should go all out along those lines and get rid of it entirely. There's nothing I hate more in a MMOG than having a bunch of skills that there is no meaningful use for.

This is addressed by a Blizzard poster here. (http://blue.mmo-champion.com/28/14595070061-will-we-ever-see-cc-in-pve-again.html)

Don't expect CC to play a major role in 5 mans ever again.

It'll crop up in 10's and especially 25's, but for 5 mans, there was just way to much of "oh, you don't have <blah>, have fun wiping for the next half dozen pulls" in previous dungeons.

CC wasn't a role in BC if you ran with a protadin tank.  Blizz simply gave this perk to all tanks.

My impression was that they actually wanted to put CC back in. Fun as it is to AoE trash, having every pull anywhere be a more or less mindless zerg isn't actually all that entertaining. Even if all tanks can put out AoE threat reliably now, if the pulls contained multiple hard-hitting mobs (like in the original BC heroics) then AoE isn't really an option. The problem isn't so much that AoE threat is over powered, so much that the trash mobs are too plentiful yet hit like concussed ducklings.

Hell I'm a priest and I'm not scared of aggro from pretty much any mobs other than those titanium vanguards in HoL, and only then because I can't remove their poison. In TBC about half the mobs in heroic instances could 1 or 2-shot me, which gave instances more of an edge.

When is Blizzard going to wise up and realize that if you put poison effects in practically every dungeon that you have to give all healing classes the ability to cleanse it? Seriously, how annoying is it to take a good priest healer into places and get fucked over and over by poisons you can't do a damn thing about?

When we first started doing the heroic dungeons and achievements, my little group usually ran with an ele shaman and a priest healer.  We hadn't realized how important the ele shaman was until we tried to do the azjol-nerub achievements with a different tank and just got sodomized by the poisons that we'd forgotten he'd been dealing with.

Now we bring a boomkin and I'm leveling a shaman.
This argument would have merit except people also AOE'd raid trash.  By far the fastest way to do bear runs was to use a protadin main tank and just AOE all the trash down with SOC etc.  For Hyjal, a protadin was the superior option for trash waves; the only time you had to worry about his health was from aboms, so you'd sent the paladin in first, then have the other tanks pick aboms off him.  Then you made the paladin sit in the corner and pretend his heals were relevant on bosses.

If blizzard brought in heroic trash that hit so hard you couldn't AOE it, it would mean tanks that didn't have the gear to AOE the instance would be forced to off-tank naxx until they had the gear to run heroics they no longer wanted to run.  You know, like in BC.

- Stacking Mortal Strikes.
- Shared and/or stacking auras/buffs/totems between the mobs.
- Scripted enrage/frenzy effects.
- Non-self buffs used by the mobs.

I think it's pretty comical that most players have become so used to Blizzard's wildly inconsistent difficulty curves (gear/skill/or both) that now when they release brand new content that is reasonably tuned and has an appropriate difficulty curve right from the start (Wrath) there seems to be widespread shock and disbelief, as cries of "omg Blizz ruined the game by making everything EZ-mode" begin to ring out across the interwebs.  :awesome_for_real:

I personally enjoy the lack of CC for 5 man content.  I played my warrior as dps spec for a good portion of TBC and even though I had very respectable gear it was a royal pain to try and get a heroic MGT group.  In the ideal group all 3 dps would have solid CC (mage, warlock, rogue, hunter, even a shadow priest could MC) and if you were a dps with limited or no CC you were basically a detriment to the group.  If you were really well geared or had a really skilled group you could get by with 2 CC.  That basically left all dps warriors, paladins, druids, and shamans competing for 1 slot and even then most groups (even guild groups) would opt for a 3rd CC unless there was no other option, and I don't blame them.  I don't want 5 mans to end up in that situation again and I doubt Blizzard does either with their "bring the player not the class" mantra for Wrath. 

Why do we want harder trash?  If I'm gonna die, I'd rather it be on the bosses.

Same reason some people want the return of weekly honor calculations from wow classic. If you don't have to stick your dick in a meatgrinder, you're not having fun.

This. While some trash mobs are actually fun/interesting to fight, they're mostly there as a pacing mechanism between boss fights. As such I don't think increasing the difficulty or complexity of those pulls will do anything other than annoy people for the most part.

That and there already exist trash mobs that require more than just 'lawl AE them down'. Slimes and gargoyles in the Naxx plague wing come to mind.

Personally, I'd prefer trash to be slightly more challenging, fewer in number, and have better loot tables. Essentially, I want 2 trash pulls per boss, have them require some sort of CC and higher health in the mass, and have a decent chance at dropping boss items randomly. Why do the bosses have to have all the loot?

Probably as annoying as it is when a Druid healer is screwed by diseases, or a Paladin healer is fucked by curses etc.

It's especially annoying with diseases since those tend to last a very long time.

I might be wrong, but I think the proportions are off in that department. I seem to see a lot more horrible poison effects in 5 mans than diseases or curses. Everywhere we went it was more poisons. Ajol - poisons, Temple - poisons, Skadi - poison, Halls of Lightning guys - poisons, Snake boss - poisons, etc. Healers would be better equipped to see if that's their experience, but yall tell me.

In 5 mans in Wrath it leans towards poisons; the situation has been different at times in the past.

Examples of curses/diseases screwing things up exist in Naxx, too: Noth for curses (one time we fought him, 80% of his damage output - well over 500,000 damage to the raid over the course of the fight - was curses, because Fordel couldn't be assed to decurse his curse bombs) and Heigan for diseases.

That's what Chain Heal is for.  :oh_i_see:

If it makes you feel better, I haven't noticed a long, annoying disease from Outlands on. So that's something I guess!

The only annoying long-lasting disease is Cadaver Worms, and that's only for people soloing outdated content for a mount. The only significant disease is Heigan's.

Poisons did see an over proliferation in WoTLK. Who knows though, maybe Ulduar will be all about magical debuffs and curses (which priests and paladins can't do much about either, why did mages get decurse....).

As far as Noth goes, I'll need to look at the damage taken from one of our parses, but 500K seems like a lot. Then again, we don't always have a decurser in our raid and we rind it easier just to spread out the ranged (Noth's room is HUGE) and have anyone with the curse run hug a wall and let it expire. Occasionally we get two tanks with it, but it's healable. I guess we might stop bothering to even run out and just heal through it, and DPS him faster. I wouldn't say Noth's curse is particularly dangerous though, unlike Heigan's disease which he loves to drop on your entire raid just after the dance...

I think on that run someone before the pull said 'there's no reason to not just stack up the ranged rite'...

Gauntlets appeal to me, just not the way Blizzard does them.  Ideally you would have infinite amounts of trash thrown at the raid in waves which would fight to gain checkpoints, at which point a small NPC army would move up and create a safe zone where the entire raid would get ressurected at once with full health, mana, and buffs (re-use the battleground buffing mechanic) if the raid wiped.

Of course, just removing trash altogether would be nice, as it is it's just a cockpunch to seperate the casual from the hardcore, as it causes casual guild more trouble than hardcore ones.

You're completely misunderstanding the purpose of equally-interesting non-epic dropping mobs.  It's used as a pacing mechanism, no different from the two hour duration on flasks, or the way a movie director has the hero beat up a couple mooks before the big bad guy.  If blizzard ever 'removes trash', they simply roll it into the fight itself.  Skadi, azjol-nerub's first and second boss, Brann's event and the final boss of HoS, etc.

Edit: And if you think 'clearing up to checkpoints' is a fine mechanic, I am going to guess you never had to reclear fucking hyjal trash waves. ARRRRRRRRRGH.

I hate gauntlets. I'm usually not alone in that fact. The reason is that respawning shit is never fun. I killed it, and there's no reason for it to keep coming back faster and faster until it wipes out the group. Halls of Stone is especially annoying on this principle. Two fights in the place involve add rushes, and as such very few people like to run it.

HoS has that annoying robot that keeps its +dmg buff even out of combat, so if you wipe on him once it's kinda GG for second attempts and then pointless after that.

Gauntlets are pretty annoying, I hate Skadi in UP, and I hated the Akil'zon trash back in BC (pre-nerf). The gauntlet before Loatheb isn't too bad once you have it down I guess.

We were all stacked up because we had a few issues with adds, as in "Oh God, an add is on me, I shall do everything conceivable BUT run to the add tank so she can get it off me"

No, I'm really not misunderstanding the purpose of trash.  It's there to cause you to take more time, it's "trash".  Fuck it.  The hardcore guilds will power their way through it and the casuals will slowly work their way.  It's only purpose is to delay people who don't catass their way through it with balls to the wall chain-pulling and batshit crazy DPS.  I've watched a brother get pugged into a raid guild's runs and saw them complete two Naxx-25 wings along with Saph and Kel'Thuzad, Sarth-25, and Maly-25 in less time it took my current guild to do two wings.

If the objective is pacing it's doing a terrible job, because all it's doing is delivering a swift punch to the cock for casual guilds.  If the objective is to set up the scene for a boss fight the optimal solution is to have something that looks like a tactical strike into the heart of your enemies citadel (read: tightly scripted, many checkpoints, a "safe zone" behind a phalanx of advancing friendly NPC's which cease forward movement if your raid retreats behind them, instant raid wipe recovery through battleground-like mechanics).



I can see your point, having to do the Rage trash again and again must have been hard on you.

I believe I was in blood stance for that first try and only lost one add. I'm the best offtank ever!

...what.  Since when is clearing trash fast 'hardcore' or 'catass'?  It's doing it in the way that takes the least amount of time!  It is the ANTI-CATASS.  You keep track of mana, pull the next pack/position so it'll pat into you/ and voila, you've dramatically cut down the amount of time you spend on trash.  If there are some DPS not AOEing the trash, you gently poke them and suggest they should start.
I really appreciate the irony of a guy bitching about how trash is a COCKPUNCH TO CASUALS FROM THE HARD CORE ZOMG, then turns around and disses someone for content they've experienced in the game.  Would you like a filled poopsock with that, sir?

p.s. It was That Guy dropping an infernal on top of the tank.  Twice in a row.  I booted him. "We are not that kind of guild!" "You going to bring him back?" "...No."

Heh, equally-interesting dynamic pacing mechanisms. Loved that thread from the D&R forums.

But yeah, everyone complains about trash but if there was NO trash ever it would just feel like a loot dispenser. There's a fine line between good pacing and cockblockage and for the most part the WOTLK dungeons have been fun and well-paced. Oculus excluded >.<.

They clear the shit fast because they're hardcore and want to get the shit done fast because it's on farm.  It gets done fast because they're committed enough to the task at hand to be serious about getting it done efficiently.  If you want to make the argument that quick success makes a guild casual then you are left with the conclusion that that poopsockers that cleared the Wrath content in under a week are casual because they did it quickly.

The best aspect of a gauntlet is that slowly plodding through the trash is not an option.  Combine this with scripted effects like a instant reset of health and mana to full after every cleared wave and you can very finely tune the amount of time it takes for a adequately geared group to clear the trash, because currently the major limiting factor for people not deliberately attempting to plow through trash is slow pulling and stopping to rebuff/drink.  At this point the remaining problems come down to general tuning and establishing a system of checkpoints which doesn't erase more than a single wave's worth of progress if you wipe.


I merely assumed that since your attention span doesn't last the length of a paragraph that you would have issues with the strategy of staying out of the particle effects. :why_so_serious:

(Note: sometimes it's wise to refer back to the premise of an argument)


This.  Gauntlets allow Blizzard to force a fast pace.  Most arguments against gauntlets can be boiled down to "Blizzard is shitty at implementation of them".

Dear blizzard: presences as listed buffs, plz. So that either I'll notice when I start a fight in Frost, or someone else will fucking notice ><

I think showing the aura as a buff is what screws with my head, since I always take the imp. frost aura BECAUSE I CAN. So I THINK I'm in frost stance.

Of course, I've forgotten to switch from berserker to defensive stance on my warrior before, so really I'm just a tard.

Sarth+2 down tonight. I'm hoping we can get Sarth+3 before Ulduar, but we'll see...

Congrats, 10 or 25?

25. We were beating our heads on it for a while, but we kept making progress and then it just clicked on the final run. I'm dreading 3D.  :ye_gods:

Because of the glasses ?

(http://forevergeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/08/mitsubishi-3d-blu-ray-player.jpg)

Just did my first full-clear of 25-man Naxx today.

Holy fuck did Blizzard really get the difficulty scaling backwards. Ignoring Kel'Thuzad and Raz (if you don't have priests or have shitty ones) the whole place is magnitudes easier than the 10-man.

Blizz agrees and said they are working to ensure(insure?) 25 man Uld is in fact more difficult then the 10 man one.

Patchwerk is a much stiffer gear check in 25 than 10s too, otherwise completely true.

Yeah the first 25 PUG I did was a bit of an eye opener. Not having to do tank swaps on 4H makes me go  :uhrr:.

25 is easier than 10 to PUG because you have a much higher margin of error, or as I like to say margin of retard. Everyone in 10m pretty much has to be on the ball, while in 25 a couple slackers will not wipe you.

Everything just seems to die much faster in the 25 man version. Whether they underestimated the difference a full set of buffs from every class would make I don't know, but the difference is extremely noticeable.  From a healer's point of view the bosses don't seem to really hit any harder either (with the noticeable exception of patchwerk).

My guild is small and only does 10 man raids, but we can do 25 man ToS easily.  This is with our regular group of 10 people and 2 healers.  The trash is slightly harder but the only other noticeable difference is that Sartharion has more hp.

Just got my Glory of the Raider last night (yay, Plagued Proto Drake!) http://www.wowarmory.com/character-achievements.xml?r=Illidan&n=Non - I'm not really a main raider, so I managed to convince people to help out with various stuff.

The last thing I needed to do was three-drake 10-man Sarth, which has notoriously been much more difficult than the 25 man version.

However, we decided to try the Sarth zerg strat that has been popular in videos recently, where you just immediately hop into a hard burn on Sarth.

After trying it a few times to get the hang of it, we managed to down sarth in 1 minute 17 seconds - when the first drake came down, we just had one of our druid DPS go bear and pick it up. Everyone dies at the end, but then the drakes despawn, and everyone is happy.

It really is kind of stupid how easy it was, if all the DPS are pulling good DPS. I was pulling between 5k and 5.5k DPS, and I was 3rd on DPS.

Oh, sweet - our tank Frasps'd it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=In3F1z43ugk

Congrats.

That's kind of sad.  I'm fairly sure it's not a legit strat, but I doubt anything will happen other than Sarth being given a hard enrage if he hits 30% with a drake still alive or something.

i.e. everyone who abused voidwalker tank or zerg Sarth with drakes still alive should lose the achievement.

All they need to do is change the achievement to say kill the three drakes while sarth is up, then sarth - or two drakes while sarth is up, then sarth, etc.

We were there and prepared to do it the normal way (we do one every week), but we just wanted to try the zerg strat for fun.

Don't take my achievement away.

:heartbreak:

Taking things away from players because they figured out how to beat an encounter better than Blizzard designed it shouldn't be punished on behalf of the players, because that way in the future, they'll just exploit and not even tell Blizzard or anyone about it. Was Naxx designed to be beat in an hour and 15 minutes? Probably not, but it's being done anyways.

By this logic, they should take away all achievements from anyone who ever did them at the wrong level. Explore Elywynn Forest? Sorry man, you have to do that before level 10 to make it meaningful.

Burn the boss and die to the adds has been a legit (if desperate) strategy since Wow's release. The challenge is being able to burn it fast enough to pull it off.

Exploring a zone at level 80 is nothing like winning an encounter in a way not intended by the developers.  They even gave the drakes a hard enrage when Sarth hits X%, probably figuring it would be sufficient to wipe any raid before he could be downed.  Has anyone a link to a comment by a dev saying it's a legit strat?

Soo, assuming it is legit, use a DK to tank the drakes, and have him use cooldowns when the enrage hits?

There really aren't enough words involving a combination of douche and bag in the english language to properly describe you.  I bet when someone cheats at minesweeper you think their computer should melt down as well?

Exploting using hacks is one thing, finding a new way to do something has been a tradition in online games since they were created.  Clearly blizzard did not intend voidwalkers to tank sarth or for people to ignore the drakes but that hardly diminishes the effort put in.

 Honestly I've seen the voidwalker strategy used and while it does negate the flame breath I found that it was just as difficult because controlling the VW was so damned clunky when it came to the flame waves that I didn't see it as a huge improvement. As to the dps race? Well damn, if a group is putting out that dps they need an achievement.

The only reason 3d 10man is so hard is because of class cockblocks, you need a very specific comp to do it and that's really not a matter of skill so much as having all the right people to do it. I.E you NEED a shaman for bloodlust and a minimum of two tanks two healers, maybe three give or take. 

In short, 3d sarth is not serious business, stop shitting on peoples fun.

That comment is beautifully retarded.

I fully expect that in 3.1 they'll change it such that Sarth enrages rather than the drakes. This detail is really the only flaw which enables the zerg strategy.

It's not that the zerg approach is cheating, but it does cheapen the fight, and it does require that you significantly outgear the place. In all Sarth 3D is somewhat of an anomaly, it is harder on 10 than 25, it is incredibly complex if you do it the 'intended' way, and it is effectively impossible without 25-man gear. People who can get the DPS to burn him down probably don't stand to gain much except for the achievement, as the gear is almost certainly useless by that point; the folks who can handle doing him the complex way will probably be beating the Ulduar hard modes quicker than most too. In the end it really makes no difference, except to e-peen.

You forget that blizzard also cares very little for 'old' content and in a week 3d sarth will be old. They've already said that you won't be able to get proto-drakes from the glory achievements after 3.1, only the ulduar achievements.

If anything I expect to see 3d made a bit easier in the ten man since right now you do need 25man gear to beat it, even doing it the 'right' way. Blizzard has said on several occasions they don't want to make 25man gear necessary for 10man achievements, even going so far as to make in the next patch achievements that cannot be earned if wearing any items above the 10man ulduar level.

As much as they do ignore old content to an extent, they do tend to patch or hotfix 'unintended' approaches to content, such as the diminishing returns on taunts in 3.1 (fixing the 3-hunter Raz method), the shield buff on DK-wing trash and . They may or may not, my suspicion is that they will, but then nerf the whole thing 6 weeks or so after 3.1 hits, in one of the subsequent tweak patches. It will be easier, but it will force you to do it the 'intended' way. That would match my experience with Blizzard.

You're the one who thinks progression doesn't mean a damn thing if any Tom, Dick, or Pug can accomplish it, so you can kindly sit down and drink yourself into a stupor with a warm bottle of STFU.

It's clear the VW strat is abuse: the pet can have 90k health, isn't knocked around by lava waves, and in fact can be positioned such that it can avoid lava waves altogether.  On top of that, Blizzard intends to fix it (or has already) by nerfing the talents that even made a 90k HP pool even possible.

And yes, it does diminish the "accomplishment" if the fight is done in a way that wasn't intended.  The VW tank is abuse, the "zerg Sarth" "strat" is purely avoiding the fight as intended altogether, and will also likely being fixed by having Sarth enrage instead of the drakes.  Particularly since Uld gear will trivialize the DPS requirement to down Sarth before the second drake lands.

I'm all too aware that Sarth10 3D is hard, and the best way to down it is via stacking of melee or caster DPS to maximize buffs.  Even so, making the fight "easy" by not doing it as intended is bullshit.

How is it retarded, much less beautifully so?  Dazzle me.

So we'll be requiring dev posts every time a new strat is elaborated?  :oh_i_see:

While I am certain that that wasn't what you meant, that was what you said.

Sooo, wait.  You have nothing?   :oh_i_see:

Not to turn this into a flame war or anything, but why the hell are you getting so pissed that I managed to down it using the zerg strat? I've done it using the normal 3d 10m strat as well, and they both require stacked groups.

They'll fix it, sure, but why the hell take it away from anyone? Does that make your victory against a badly tuned encounter that much better if you know that everyone else who did it this way lost it?

I really don't understand!

E-Peen, if everyone has one, then no one has one.


Or something.  :awesome_for_real:

It's just an achievement.  Really.  I think I got the same amount of points for getting a haircut. 

This is one of the things I hate most about Blizzard.  They demand everything be done their way, and if you DARE to show even the slightest bit of intelligence and initiative in discovering a different strategy to use, they will nerf the crap out of it.  It's one thing if a new strategy makes a fight entirely trivial and has it pose zero challenge...but it's entirely different if the new strategy poses a challenge in a different way than was "intended."  Doing Sartharion by hard-burning him still poses a challenge - it's just a different kind of challenge.  I hadn't heard of doing him with a voidwalker, but as far as I can tell, that doesn't make the fight trivial either.  Using three people to bounce Razuvious around isn't trivial, it's in fact MORE CHALLENGING than the 'normal' method because if any of them are even a split second off on their taunts, it's entirely possible Razuvious will one-shot one of them with an unbalancing strike. 

The shield buff on death knight wing trash, on the other hand, allowed a 25 man dungeon to be done by a single character who isn't even that well geared.  That's a somewhat different matter there, because while it might in fact be quite challenging for the mage doing it to pull off, it does still trivialize the place, so it's entirely understandable for that to be changed.

This is one of the reasons why raiding in WoW is kind of dull and boring to a degree.  Everyone does the same exact thing on every single boss.  Everyone.  Because the devs demand it.  Rather than designing an enemy and seeing what clever solutions the players come up with, they design a fight, including dictating the actions of the players and if the players ever come up with a clever solution it gets smacked down.  Almost as though they get personally offended that someone came up with a plan that works and they didn't think of, and their designed method may not be the best way to do it.

One of the other major reasons it's moved to dull and boring is the cold war they got into with the mod community.  They pretty much gave this up when all their testers started using the mods as well.  Encounters were balanced and are now designed with the assumption everyone is using them.  A lot of mechanics and 'fun things' they can add to boss fights get trivialized by UI hacks so they only get a token representation.

I seem to recall several blue names implying that allowing the degree of freedom they did with the UI was a mistake.  Be interesting to see how much of that carries over to their upcoming MMOG.

It's the only reason I played as long as I did initially. I think Lum called it a 'enjoyment multiplier' or something similar - a very apt description.

The developers don't like having their own stupidity shoved in their face. End of story.

Except their stupidity was actually rather brilliant, because dieing to a debuff because you didn't have time to read the tooltip, or because you just reacted to the fire effects and the raid blew up fucking sucks.  The information has to be presented somehow, and the animations, sound, and built-in text is often insufficient, particularly with older content.

I'd call MC's mechanics anything but brilliant.

Oh hay mages, YOU GOTTA DECURSE 40 PEOPLE! STAT!

The initial Oprah giving out curses shit in MC was stupid. Rapid response debuffs, also stupid (CAN I CLEANSE THIS ON.. TOO LATE TO READ!), things like Flame Wreath, stupid.

Essentially, there are fights in the game you must know ahead of time or you will automatically wipe to them. The learning phase sucked when every week you brought a new person, they had to figure it out. Things like Bigwigs/DBM are only possible because the boss encounters are shockingly static (every X seconds he does Y. The pre UI mod method of doing this was some jackass counting on vent.)

Any time a fight becomes Player vs UI, it's stupid. UI mods make that a bit better (heal frames, debuff displays that will only show what the hell I can actually cure so I don't need to mouse over mid fight to look and see if that's a disease or a poison because we can't have nice icon borders by debuff type..), and as a side note: Maly sparks are a pain in the fucking ass to see, especially after they spin you around and give them a runbuff. That entire fight has to be played zoomed out to EVE fleet fight levels to effectively find the fuckers around the goddamned dragon taking up the entire floor. And hell, that stupid Wound debuff from TBC makes no goddamned sense until you read the tooltip, and if you stop to read the tooltip your tank dies.

/stoneform

Hm, they nerfed Luffa (http://www.wowhead.com/?item=19141). Yet again proves dwarven might.

Huh? The only Flame Wreath I can think of was Aran's and that was actually a pretty cool mechanic in my opinion.

The only time when you shouldn't remove a debuff is on Grobbulus, but you learn not to do that pretty fast. Equally, the only fights with annoying cleanse-spam are Noth and Heigan, although these are paltry compared to fights like Felmyst.

I agree with your sentiments about the sparks on Malygos, that whole fight is far too gimmicky.

Flame Wreath is stupid because at the time it was the only ground effect during a boss fight where you had to NOT get the fuck out of it or you died. It's an example of "know the rules beforehand because you have no time to read the tool tip before reacting"

It's a fine mechanic as is, but only with posted strats/boss mod type effects, otherwise it's player vs UI.

There is very little room between trivially easy to handle and something hard to survive the first time you encounter it.  It usually involves heavy fight scripting and telegraphing.  Both of which are awesome for longevity.

I agree. I compare it to memorizing multiplication tables. Pretty dull and awful.
But this kind of game design goes way back, and permeates a lot of games now. Expert players pretty much expect it now, and want to be challenged on that meta-level.

WoW is designed for you to die many times before you can win a fight even if you KNOW the strategy (but haven't practiced it).   There is no way they were expecting people to get it right the first time.  Its, oh hey, this will definitely wipe the raid the first time someone sees it.  Oh well, they'll run back and do it again.

And in the case of Aran....get fucking lost on the way back.

Fucking hate the god damn MC Escher part of that place.

But, fortunately I guess, no one on the live servers ever get's to see the fight for the first time. By the time it's off the test server into live there are 20 different mods and strategies posted for it to help you. I doubt even the people on the test server have to figure this stuff out, really. They probably just get hints and spoilers from the dev's monitoring the testing.

No hotfix for Sarth3D.


[urlhttp://blue.mmo-champion.com/26/14637425299-25-man-raids-more-difficult-false-assumption.html]Source[/url]

Except in the very early BC/Kara days when Aran could cast Flame Wreath and Blizzard at the same time  :awesome_for_real:

I hated copping both, knowing it was a guaranteed wipe - thank god they fixed it.

And hell - if you missed the big red fire circles around you, you deserved to wipe - I'm not sure they could have made the wreath any more obvious.  :grin:

Heh - the nightmares from that place, getting lost was the worst.

Mind you, it was one of the most enjoyable raids I've done, I'd rate it up there with early Scholo Raid, BWL and AQ40 for fun factor (MC made me cry with boredom). Actually, I really liked all of TBC's raids, I just don't get that feeling as much with Nerfed-Naxx. Comparing TBC to WoTLK isn't fair though - WoTLK doesn't offer anywhere near as much depth and variety at the moment and the heroics are a joke.

Kara was a yummy raiding truffle with a trash-filled shitty center.

I just wish they'd have cleared out more of that annoying back door trash.  The front section wasn't bad at all after the 2nd zone nerf, but the back end never got any better.

Kara was a really good raid zone, with the exception of the trash between Opera and Curator (If people find it quicker to leave your instance and use a different entrance you know your trash pacing is wrong) and the Trash between Curator and Aran. Once you were past Aran the trash thinned out.

Well, the trash in the viewers gallery included several mobs who dropped 1-1.5G for -each- raid member. We killed them off to cover repair costs. Clever design really.

The shit sandwich was all the trash AFTER the curator.

Unless your spell effects were turned down low to avoid framerate issues on low-end machines with a raid casting spells in that tiny room, in which case they were either invisible or very hard to spot.  :awesome_for_real:

Also it just didn't put the circle around everyone.

It was reallly terrible after Curator. I think if you counted up all the mobs, it was well over 50 elite trash kills and 20 something pulls before you got to a boss in that middle section.

Doing the fish with a caster-stacked raid sucked so bad.

Really though, other than that retarded section, the rest of the instance was paced well and the whole place had really great zone design.

Yeah all it would have taken to fix that bit is to move Illhoof downstairs a bit - as it is he's sandwitched right in there with Aran.

I actually find myself being really nostalgic about Kara. It genuinely felt 'epic'. Naxxramas was paced better overall, but after finally seeing it top to bottom I'm not particularly blown away by its design. Kara was visually -amazing-, I never got tired of looking up into the library. Naxx I can't hardly tell where I am.

Its the winged design.  Kara is relatively linear compared to Naxx, but you can really imagine it as a tower of an eccentric old mage.  In Naxx, you are sitting in what is obviously a raid zone.

I agree that Naxx feels like a raid zone, but I don't think this is really a winged vs linear debate. Winged worked for places like SM while retaining the "feel' of the zone. What made Kara great was that it was believable for what it was, a house gone mad. The place had all the elements of a mansions, hell you get to fight in the stables, the kitchen, the bedrooms, the library and eventually the roof. Each room made sense, and the layout and progression between the sub-zones made sense. Naxx on the other hand does just feel like a bunch of corridors with mobs in. I can't tell you what the point of Anub's room is, or Gothik's; but I can easuly make sense that Moroes, as Medivhs butler and steward, would be haunting the banquet hall.

Having done naxx a lot, there are a lot of fun fights in there still, but the zone itself is horrendously bland. Tempest Keep was the same. Conversely the AQ zones (to me) make sense, as do ZG and ZA. MC makes sense too, but in a horrendously boring way. Sunwell is sort-of there, but not quite.

I had the notion last night that Uldar is too fucking big.  I'm already tired of the run from the entrance to the teleporter platform and wish they'd put it at the entrance, not down the damn ramp.   I think it's just that the zone itself feels like MCII, even though it's not a cave.  Wide-open spaces you just run forever to and fro in aren't inspiring.