f13.net

Old Gods, Siege Weapons, and 11 "Hard Modes" (http://www.wow-europe.com/en/info/underdev/3p1/ulduar.xml)

This is Ulduar in a nutshell. I must admit that using vehicles in a pve setting to break through the massive defenses could be really fun or really annoying. It depends on the design of the encounters. What I like to hear is that bosses have difficulty levels like Sartharion and the drakes, which means you can choose how hard you want the fights and get better rewards for it.

V0-L7R-0N

I go tonight for my first look at Ulduar. I knew better than to try right after the update went live.  :uhrr:

I shall return with opinions and possibly screenshots.

We didn't get a lot of time to try Ulduar last night. Got FL (duh) and Razorscale down and had to call it a night after a few tries on the deconstructor due to people having to leave.

Seems fun but a bit tightly tuned so far.

It's not a joke. They obviously were butthurt over the Naxx comments and have turned up the heat on a couple of these encounters. I'm really hoping it's not being turned up with a bunch of cheese though.

So far I'm not seeing cheese so much as encounters that make me think "those sons of bitches" like large packs of mobs with anti-aoe abilities. Well, maybe that's cheese but i like that you can't turn your brain off, even for trash

We made it past Flame Leviathan after a few tries, and then spend the rest of the night wiping on Razorscale. Only got it down to 86 percent, I think, on our best run. We made progress, but couldn't quite get the hang of it yet.

(http://screenshot.xfire.com/screenshot/large/98a1df6328950e736f39d4eb07e31042c8b92124.jpg) (http://www.xfire.com/screenshots/ratmantransform/ss_file-98a1df6328950e736f39d4eb07e31042c8b92124.jpg)

Went in the other day. I actually enjoyed the vehicle section, reminded me of Jackal and other old-school games. Got Flame Leviathan down, then for some reason they wanted to do Deconstructor next. So we slammed our heads against the wall for a few hours before calling it.

Coolest.  Entrance.  Ever.

(http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/40252/WoWScrnShot_041509_024052.jpg)

We're up to this guy (Kologarn) on 25-man and on Mimiron in my 10-man group.

Also, fuck Mimiron.

In theory our guild will be boarding the Ulduar failboat this coming week. I predict at least one person will start to wail it's hard after we wipe once. Our guild generally has like no patience with the "learning" stage of raiding. Complicating matters is our totally random ability to one-shot fights we have no business one-shotting and then wiping 800 times on fights we've cleared easily before.  :awesome_for_real:

We didn't have enough healers online Tues for 25man, so we ran 2 10man groups.  Talk about a fucking disaster.  Leviathan is a complete joke once you figure out the "launch people on top" portion of it.  We wiped about 3 times at 20% before someone said "hey, what's this for?" and then it was a cakewalk.  Our other group did it without the launch portion and got the achievement after 4 wipes.

We then headed for the XT whatever the hell thing, which apparently had bugged trash just before it, which would instagib a healer randomly every 2 seconds and wipe us.  That lasted about 4 wipes before I saw the blue tracker with the "oops, trash before the XT is not supposed to all pull together, hotfix inc" message.

Our next target was Razorscale, which after trying twice seemed completely manageable, but by this time it was late and people were pretty irritated.

My observation is that there is very little room for error, and apparently 3/5 mobs were bugged as of Tues, at least on 10man, 25man has always had more room for error, so I'm assuming it's much less difficult.

Ya our main tank commented last night on the 10 man, saying he wouldn't really like to try it in the previous 10man gear. Somehow I doubt their testers had all T7 gear too.

So far in the first 4 bosses killed in 10 man uldaur, we've managed to score achievements for 3 of them, having no idea what they were or how to get them.

What's worse is significant (as in vital to progression) enhance shaman loot is in those hardmodes. Most of which our guild can't be bothered with (Sarth who? It has drakes?).

We're taking a stab at it tonight. Not clear how (25 man or two 10 mans), and that will depend on who shows (or doesn't show) up. The hell of it is 10 man T8 isn't really an upgrade over 25 man T7. Still, there's a couple of good weapons in 10 man for shaman--especially important to me since KT won't drop the damned claw. I dread the vehicle shit, though. Absolutely dread it. Hate that stuff with a passion already.

So far in the 10-man:

Flame Leviathan: Retardedly easy on easy-mode after everyone knows what the buttons on their vehicles do. Hard-mode for this should be doable after a month of destroying easy mode.

Razorscale: Pretty easy IMO since we went in knowing fuckall about the boss outside of the fact there are adds and you need to use the harpoons as they come up, and we got it on the third try (with 1 wipe being me accidentally dragging my abilities off my bar because I forgot to lock them). If you can manage the adds properly and put a lot of DPS on the boss each grounding phase, you're gold.

Ignis: Skip it, this encounter is way overtuned IMO and gay. It sounds like fun on paper but all of his abilities seem to be fucking chain-cast to the point where he's screaming his emotes non stop after the first scorch. Fuck this boss.

XT: Doable, but don't 3-heal it unless all of your remaining DPS are good because -one- slacker will make you fail the enrage. We got really close 2-3 times but we had 3 healers, 1 DPS that couldn't control the adds right, and one bad DPSer. Make your OT swap to a DPS spec and have the MT tank the big pummeler adds. With 2 healers, 7 DPS, and proper add control I see this as being a fairly easy fight when people get used to it.

10 man, we've downed FL, Razor, XT, Kologarn.  Skipped Ignis because he's a right bastard.  Currently wiping on Iron Council, but it's doable.  Just need to get it done.

25 man, we weren't so lucky.  Lots of wipes on Razor, and XT basically twoshot the tank the one time we pulled him.  We haven't tried Ignis on 25 man yet, but I eagerly await the mayhem of tornadoes EVERYWHERE.

re:  Ignis.  Way overtuned is about right.  You have a tank on Ignis, a tank on adds, you have to have three healers, possibly more.  You can easily lose because your offtank healer gets potted, then he's out of range, GG.  I think our best effort was to get him down to 5 million health, from 7 million.

Also, fuck the trash in the antechamber.  That shit just isn't funny.

Fixed

Yall are confirming my pain on Ignis.

You say that like it's a habit of ours to refuse to die randomly, and noob it up on trivial shit.   :grin:

So if the first boss is a vehicle fight, what's to keep the less-geared among us (smiles sweetly) from taking 9 of our friends in similar straits and working it? I can't believe toon stats mean >>nothing<< in this - at the very least your resistances, stamina, regen and armor (?) are taken into account?

The hit points of your vehicle is dependent upon the average item level of your gear.  I'm sure it's still very doable with alts and people with sub par gear however.

In theory it's also doable with less than 10 people pretty easily also.  Again assuming everyone knows what they're doing really well.  Throw a shadowpriest up on Leviathan and he can take out both turrets and keep himself up.  I went in to screw around last night and learn about it, with 6 people, and we got him down to like 75%.  If the demolishers are on the ball and can get a ton of blue pyrite thrown at him during the stun, it should only take one or two stuns to finish him off, even without people on the siege turrets.

We only hit three bosses on 25 man last night.

Leviathan was--dare I admit it?--pretty fun and very easy. I'm shocked.

Ignis. Sucked. One of our guildies was stating that fight might be bugged, but it's a right bitch regardless. Hell, the trash are no prize either. I did get the Hot Pockets chop, though.   :grin:

We tried the whining boss (XTwhateverthehellitwas). We were short on healers at this point, but it seemed very doable. Sadly, three people (one was a healer, don't you know) had to bail at that point and our excursion into Ulduar came to an end. What really grinds me on Ignis is he's such a royal pain, but the miserable bastard has the only really good enhance shaman totem upgrade. Friggin' Blizzard.

Ignis from all reports seems to be horribly horribly bugged (not losing stacks = perma huge damage, rollback to a version where the golems are practically unkillable due to stacks dropping too fast, melee on charge = oneshot random raid members)

I'm looking forward to our Uld attempt though. It should be a blast. I REALLY want to do Flame Lev. That looks like a hoot.

I wonder how over-signed-up we'll be...

I'm graciously not signing up, for the good of the guild.

Did Ulduar-10 tonight, got flame leviathan down after a few tries, seeing how stuff worked. The vehicle gauntlet is actually a lot of fun, although I can see it being a nuisance after a while. We ended up ignoring the turrets on top and nuking the boss down, since that seemed easier. When you put people up on top they seem very very prone to dying when they get knocked off. Anyhow, was much more enjoyable than I anticipated it being.

Did Razorscale, got to 40% on our best attempt; we had various problems with DPS being a bit slow, althhough I think we are yet to get an optimal tanking strategy for the adds. We were getting some overlapping waves on some attempts. How do you guys handle the adds on 10?

We gather them and aoe.  Anything else and they overwhelm us. 

The key to the fight seems to be the damage you can pump out when he lands in phase 1.  At that point we have our tanks take any adds round the front of him as his breath damages them as well while being easily healed through on the tanks themselves.  Everyone else switched dps to razorscale immediately, blowing all dps cooldowns, and moving around behind him.  After that it's back to gathering and aoe'ing adds, rinse and repeat until phase 2.

If your dps is taking off around 25% of his health every time he lands you're on about the right track, any less and you might struggle as you'll get more air phases than necessary.

We got 25man razorscale down to 250k health before we wiped. Did 9 tries last night. Ugh. If you're curious to see fail in action, check here (http://wowwebstats.com/6rsroirpk1fla).

One thing I DESPERATELY need is an addon to track what characters in raid can provide those non-stackable bonuses, like Faerie Fire / Misery, Sunder Armor, air totem, etc. etc. I suspect that we aren't filling those slots in our raid correctly but I haven't memorized every single person's spec and what they can do.

How does everyone else do this? There has GOT to be a mod with a little list. If not, it's really really tempting to create one - I don't know why no one has before.

http://raidcomp.mmo-champion.com/


-edit- seems to be slightly out of date.

Yes, I am looking for something just like that, but in Addon form.

Bonus points if it can watch buffs/debuffs and tell me if someone isn't doing their job.

Couldn't a WWS report track buff uptimes?

WWS reports track buffs gained/lost and uptimes, just look in the "Abilities" section.

Bhodi, you're running with 3 holy priests for Razorscale? I've only tried him on 10, but there I was healing as disc and found it far superior to holy. There's a lot of raid damage, but it's distributed really randomly, so CoH and PoH were really inefficient for me. Pre-shielding 8 people in a rotation mitigates a large chunk of the fireball damage, and -3% damage taken to the whole raid is nice. Renewed hope is one buff you're missing for sure, and it's a pretty powerful one.

3 Holies will step all the fuck over each other, really. I had mana issues pre-shielding large numbers of targets, but if it's a raid damage fight where I know the shield will be eaten, it's free. *shrug* It's just a waste when it doesn't get eaten.

Yep, I know that 3 holy isn't optimal. I'd move to disc myself if I hadn't already stacked spirit gear. As I get Uludar gear, I'll very likely shift into disc to cover that hole. The other priests are also gear-bound.

Unfortunately, we don't have a lot of options for raid composition. We're doing everything we can to recruit, and we have a decent core (several of which were absent last night) but as you can see by the numbers, the people we're getting really aren't cutting it. The skill level for a lot of these people just isn't there which is why I'm wracking my brain trying to pull out every edge I can that doesn't involve slaving someone else's keyboard to mine. Ultimately, I'd like to ditch the other two holy priests and that resto druid - they're really slow on the uptake on both learning and reaction time for saving people.

WWS will tell me after the fact, but what I'm really wanting to do is look at the raid, see if there are any holes, and get people to switch to their dual spec or bring someone else in before the raid starts to fill that hole. I don't even know if it's needed in 25man, but I was curious to find out.

As long as you aren't raid stacking, very few buffs/debuffs are hard to get. Grace/Sanct is one (disc priests or a pally buff are your only options), and the bleed increase is the other I can think of. Maybe totem of wrath, but I don't entirely know what it's crit does/does not stack with.

Mostly I think your raid just needs a better DPS rotation on a few people, and mainly reaction speed when the fight changes. The % time on in the WWS is really varied based on player, but I don't really like WWS stats on add-heavy fights anyways. It just seems like people weren't hopping back on razorscale fast enough during ground phases and the fight just took too long.

Totem of Wrath is neat. I was amused when I saw that it places a debuff on mobs.  Makes the placement of it a little interesting, but shouldn't cause problems unless a shaman is placing it farther away from the mob than they are. I don't think it should have any stacking issues except with itself and flametongue totem.

Are you running with a shadow priest or moonkin?  It's nice if you can cut 3% hit off your caster's spell hit needs.

I think I'll be doing 10 and 25 man Ulduar this week for the first time.  I moved to a bigger and more competent guild that raids closer to times I can attend.  Of course, I joined right after big split where the guild I joined is getting roasted alive on the forums  :awesome_for_real:  I can't seem to get away from this kind of crap.

Ret pallies provide the same 'puts crit on other things' debuff, and the spellpower bonus is a flat 280, doesn't stack with other spellpower buffs - flametongue, imp divine spirit, and whatever it is that one spec of warlocks provides that gives everyone 10% of their spelldamage - once the warlocks hit 2800 spellpower totem of wrath is eclipsed.

Mangle?  You mean I'll always have a spot in raids, and not just because of my good looks?  :grin:

Arms warriors give it too now.  :grin:

(http://www.anaitgames.com/wp-content/darth_vader_nooo1.jpg)

Oh a mere 2800 spellpower?  :oh_i_see:

It was starting to happen in fully geared 25 man raids even before Ulduar. What I don't know is what happens when a lock only hits 2801 because there's a ToW down. Possibly it is like putting a bag of holding in a portable hole.  :ye_gods:

Just saw a video the other day of a Demo warlock in full Naxx 25 gear, who through talents/self buffs/cooldowns could get their spellpower to almost 5k.  The key to getting spellpower this high is the talent that gives them a % of their pet's health and mana as spellpower + the buff when their pet crits.  When combined with the Berserker buff his Soulfire was critting for over 20k and 1 shotting people.  The era of the 1 shot has apparently returned!   :ye_gods:

I can post a link when I get home if anyone is interested in seeing the carnage (and the lols cause he is a clicker which makes the people who take pvp very seriously rage even more).

I wonder if they'll end up moving wrath spell damage increase to some sort of % based increase due to shaman whining over scaling post Ulduar.  Something nifty that'd be a nerf to low end groups and actually keep pace with end high progression. 

Thanks to your totem of wrath comments I looked on the class forums for the first time since the expansion released (I usually confine myself to EJ).  :ye_gods: Apparently elemental shaman are noticing anywhere from a 300 to 1k DPS reduction once they dual spec.   :tinfoil:  I had no idea.  My patchwerk seemed a bit low but heh, I'm having a hard time believing it.

Quick Google-fu suggests: http://wow.curseforge.com/projects/raid-buff-slots/ YMMV etc. etc. etc.

That is very very odd. I haven't dual specced mine yet - I wonder what could be causing that? Maybe some talents aren't registering when they switch back to elemental?

I checked, EJ doesn't mention it, and the thread seems to include a lot of dual specced people going "uh, no?"

From what I can tell, it's people who went into Uld and are reporting lower DPS because the fights involve more movement and retargeting, then comparing it to their best patch runs.

In other news, Ony deep breaths more since the patch.

Prevailing though seems to be that there's some sort of bug preventing elemental oath from working like it should.  Perhaps a buff conflict with mages (crit bonus from EO not stacking) and boomkins (moonkin aura overwrites elemental oath apparently)  that I suppose you'd only see in certain situations (others say it's all over). Combined with melee getting more out of haste/armor pen and you'd seeing some elementals saying they're tumbling down the DPS charts. 

But yah, no stink from the number crunchers.  So, I doubt it.  I doubt any are reporting apples to apples.

Tumbling down the DPS charts is something else entirely. Losing DPS and losing DPS meters are often confused.

I always hate the "what class wins meters now OMG" shit though. Honestly, as long as they're within a few percent of each other, I'm fine with any DPS setup that isn't 80 goddamned melees, since every other fight punishes tons of melee dps.

We just need our DeathKnights to spec IceTouch spam.

Unlikely, since they nerfed Icy Touch.

WHY DO YOU HATE OUR RAIDS

One of the shamans in my guild mentioned last night that his lava burst appears to be doing significantly less damage now.

Any chance they lowered lava burst damage as a stealth nerf to shaman burst damage in pvp? :tinfoil:

I know Ele shamans aren't exactly pvp powerhouses but even Resto shamans which are fairly well represented at the moment can kick out some nice situational burst damage with a lava burst.

Is this still the case in Ulduar?

Have not witnessed personally, but it's just been true for the majority of WoW's history. There will always be a "spread out" phase, and it will always fuck melee heavy raids due to needing to be in the same place to dps.

Not sure about Ulduar but the new guy in VoA is very unfriendly to melee heavy raids. Between the nova/chainlightning and having to run back and forth between boss and adds regularly, you really don't want a ton of melee in there.

Last night in EoE10 my rogue did 34.2% of the raid's overall damage.

Have to say I am pretty happy with the patch.

I love days like that.  Or when you're in a 5-man heroic and the people are commenting about how fast the group is going, then you look at recount and see you did 50% or greater of the total damage for the run.  Woo!

I just found out about a new development in the battle of Blizzard vs. Hardcore raiders last night.

Apparently a few guilds have managed to unlock Alagon in 10-man Ulduar already, which is no small feat since it requires beating the hard modes of Iron Council, Freya, Thorim, Hodir, and Myrimon to create the key.  The interesting development is that after trying Alagon for 1 hour he despawns, much like Vael of old in BWL.  Even more interesting is that Blizzard confirmed he will not respawn again until the next week so you only get 1 hour to try him per week.

This has become a pretty polarizing issue as people who like the lockout and people hate it or think it's lame duke it out flame war style on the internets.

One thing is for sure, it appears he really will have plenty of tears to feast on.   :grin:

It doesn't really bother me much. I say that knowing I won't see him for MONTHS though.

Considering I'll never see it, I don't really care. However, the one hour mechanic a week does seem a little stupid. They are basically admitting that they can't make an encounter hard enough to stifle the uber playerbase anymore, so instead they are going to bottleneck the access to content. Doesn't that defeat the point of even having content in the first place?

Ulduar is pretty interesting so far.  How many healers are people running with in the 10 man version?  We ran 2 for XT and the tantrums didn't have much margin for error.  I was tossing LHWs during them as chain heal can be pretty ineffective in that situation. 

Still, fun boss mechanics so far even if Flame Leviathan is a bit easy.  Got the first good looking helm I've had since before Outland of XT.

Eh, I don't think that's the right way to look at that particular encounter. Algalon is a special little bonus encounter for the hardcore people. It isn't THE CONTENT of Ulduar. It is the cow level.

Right, but I don't think restrictive timing is the way to make something harder. It's a way to make it more frustrating and ridiculous, but I don't think that increases the actual difficulty of said boss.

I would hate for something like that to start becoming the norm. What if we could only fight Arthas once a week because he's so uber, so some shit like that.

Consider it adding perma-death to the game.

I don't think they'll do it on anything that is part of the normal zone progression. I think they learned their lesson with Vael.

TLDR: At least I get a chance to sleep now.

Real Response: It's an optional hard mode only boss not required for instance progression. It exists only to make sure that hardcore players have some other measurement for their virtual phallic projections beyond "we beat the lag boss and got H:GOTR an hour before you did, you're bad-E we're super pro and I'm sorry, I have to go now because these supermodels are just insatiable in their desire to pleasure me". That said, I'm sure I'll be bitching about it when we get a 5% wipe and our hour for the week runs out or something. But at least this way, you don't have to corpse canon the boss the moment it comes alive, even if your fiance is already done raiding with her casual guild and is in bed making eyes at you, wondering why you seem to prefer server first to sex.

I mean...

Well, the other ways Blizzard have tried to make ultra-hard bosses varies between "No, we've done the maths and this isn't actually physically possible" followed by a hotfix and an immediate defeat of the mob (C'thun) and "We can do this, we just need to stack half the raid with class X and the other half with classes Y and Z. Sorry, everyone else, you can't take part" (whatsitsface in the Sunwell). For the sorts of people already complaining about Alganon there's pretty much no grey area between "tricky but very doable" and "impossible" without having things like forced raid stacking (which is a Bad Idea) or other gimmicks...like a one hour/week shot at the boss.

People are way better at the game than they used to be and the interface mods are way better than at the start of WoW. The only way to give any boss a reasonably long life is to as said, come as close to mathematically impossible as you can or to gimmick it up. Not a bad idea IMO since it means whatever the uber-guild of the month is can't just take a week off of work (if they have a job) and zerg the fuck out of the boss for 100 hours straight until it goes down.

1 freaking hour per lockout is a bit ridiculous IMO but I think some time restrictions on something like Algalon aren't too bad of idea. It'll show if some of these uberguilds are as good as they claim to be or if they're just a 1000 monkeys on a 1000 typewriters.

That's my thought on the matter as well. Yes an hour timer is ludicrous but that's the point. This is an epeen boss plain and simple and what better way than to give you only few attempts to beat him? There's no corpse runs in baseball or tennis, if you lose, you lose. You don't get 30 tries to beat the red sox until you finally get lucky and they make a bad play.

I'm in a guild that beats our heads repeatedly on bosses. We're server best but we're not super hardcore or even all that good overall, we're just the most stubborn and it gets us places. I don't think I'll ever kill algalon in my guild because we are the 'corpse cannon' types but I'm ok with that because I'm not overly concerned with the size of my digital schlong(unlike dr manhatten)

In other news, they completely unfucked mimiron and his trash! still hardest boss in there so far but at least not impossible.

We're using 3 main spec healers, with 2 who can switch to do decent DPS if needed.

Did 10man razorscale, ignus, deconstructor with our 10man last night with our stacked core group after failing on deconstructor 25 for the past 3 days. Ignus down in one try, two tries for the others. 2 healers, priest and pally, with a shaman throwing in a heal or two on the needful spots. Healing overall was pretty intense, especially during ignus and tantrums.

On 25, we've hit a wall with Deconstructor.  Our best attempt got him to 9%.  To be fair, he repaired for more than that.  So it's just a matter of killing the damn scrapbots.  Or maybe taking one more healer.  We're only using 6 healers for the fight.  I wish I had a bit more pull in the guild, I'd push to try it with 7, or even 8 healers.  Since we're losing at least one person guaranteed on the first Tympanic Tantrum.   :oh_i_see:

Divine Hymn is lol

Divine hymn is seriously good. There's a reason it's a 10m cooldown. It's like heroism for healers. I dumped out 140k of healing during duration. It's essentially 12 greater heals in 8 seconds.

We got within a hair of beating deconstructor (250k) and really believe that timing the heart is the key to victory. here's how we got close.

Standard fight which I'm sure you all know; Melee stacked up on top of each other (we marked one), ranged spread out but near their party healers (more on this below). We had two priests and we both took lightwell (lawl) so we dropped lightwell on the left and right about 15-20m away. LIGHT runs RIGHT, dark runs LEFT to the lightwell and then back to the group when they get it.

DPS him in the center to 75%, heart opens up, DPS on the heart to 5-15%. As soon as the heart goes back in or you reach that, ranged dps on the adds. Offtank on the pummelers, no DPS on them. If there's a bomb in the group, single target it, otherwise AOE. They are snareific, so totems and frost nova/blizzard win the day.

For healers, you DEFINITELY want assigned groups. One healer per group. Make sure you have druids in the group you want them to heal (tranquility is party bound). We had 5 healers, one in each group and healing was about 200% better when each healer took care of their own group during tantrum rather than piecemeal. Paladins (we had two) kept the tank beaconed so tanks stayed alive during the tantrum. Priests saved serendipity for the quick PoH, priest (my) rotation during tantrum was PoM->PoH->FH->CoH->FH->PoM->FH->CoH with all but the CoH going to the paladin party to help them out. Saved divine hymn for emergencies instead of blowing it on tantrum.

One quick thing you may not know about the new prayer of healing. The first is that obviously priests can PoH outside their group. Now that PoH is targeted, however, the burst is no longer centered on you. The burst is centered on the one you cast it on, even if that person is in your group. That means that even if are in the back and most of the group is out of range of you, you can center it on a moderate target and it will hit the out of range people. This is quite useful and is worth playing around with. I've healed people who are outside my 40yrd range just by targeting someone on the edge and having it spill over.

It's already a DPS race to beat the enrage;there is no way you're going to beat it with 7 healers. Try group assignments. Even (our) mediocre healers were able to keep themselves and 4 other people up.

Letting you all know I found one. http://www.wowinterface.com/downloads/info11031-InTheBuff.html

I'll be trying it out tonight.

Edit: No I won't. It's broken with the new patch/dual spec. Boo. I did find this: http://www.wowace.com/projects/utopia/  utopia which tracks active buffs/debuffs.

 :heartbreak: achievement is fun for Deconstructor.

A simple 25 man strat:

1. Heroism on the pull. 100-75% is half the fight. If your DPS isn't pants on head terrible, you'll have spill over heroism into the heart phase. DPS  :heart: to 10%.

2. Have the pummelers MD'd to your deconstructor tank. Have the OTs DPS (in DPS spec and gear). They don't hit hard (ideally your MT is using a shield, if so you'll block 80% of their damage) and deconstructor is in the melee phase for like 5%. If none of your tanks are capable of switching to a healing/DPS spec, might I suggest that you get right on that? Sure the game isn't balancde around dual spec per se, but it isn't necessarily balanced around using glyphs for your spec or flasks, but both of those help a ton.

3. 1 AoE class can easily clear a side solo, maybe two if they're good. Have those people clear adds, have everyone else DPS.

4. Spread out up to ~10 yards. Have people run away for light bomb/gravity bomb. This lets the rest of the raid DPS like nothing ever happened.

5. If you get a tantrum, have your disc priests preshield everyone in the raid up to ~25 sec prior. Yes I'm serious. One priest can provide the means for about 15 people to survive tantrum with no outside help, and will get faster penances to burst onto the tank twice during that time. You'll also get the mana cost of 3 of those shields back. Combine this with a resto druid dropping hots on everyone who isn't shielded (divide by groups or whatever) and you can 2 heal tantrum. Considering you should have 4 more healers who are presumably also doing something to help, no one should die. If they do, blame the people who can't run the basic strat of "okay now start shielding people by going down your raid frames. that's all you have to do"

6... profit?

Anyone who has a raid capable of what you're suggesting won't need that walkthrough :P

I also think your definition of 'pants on head terrible' dps and other peoples' is probably quite a bit different. I'm happy if people in my 25 can break 3k, and ecstatic if they're inching on 4k.

From what I understand, the bare minimum using 90% DPS uptime on heart/deconstructor (reasonable what with bombs, etc) is 3200 DPS from 15 people. This is using the old enrage timer. I'm not sure what it is with the new timer.

Again, this is raid dps not including the heart, so with the heart bonus, your 2.2k dps people are magically at 3.3k and now pulling their weight.

The strat I mentioned really only has two things that need to happen to be able to cheese the encounter:

1. Your MT needs to be geared enough to be able to tank XT+pummelers (freeing 1-2 extra DPS makes it easy mode) or alternately needs to be a warrior/paladin (shield block go!).

and

2. You need 2 healers who are really good at being able to predict raid damage.

Condition 2 is probably harder to satisfy than condition 1. Though to be fair (and I'm not trying to take a knock at you here) if you cannot increase your raid DPS you will have substantial issues with Kologarn and Hodir. Not to mentioned Mimiron and Freya's trash (which is harder than either of those bosses).

I'm fully aware of our difficulties... we do what we can :) I fully expect our stacked 10man to clear ulduar, our 25man is another story...

Having the MT tank the pummelers is perfectly fine until the totals get above half a dozen. They do almost no damage. Unfortunately, you do need misdirect/TotT to get them on the tank. We don't currently have a hunter at all and having a rogue run around picking them up with FoK and TotT probably wouldn't work very well and the amount of time he'd spend doing it is very likely the same as having a dedicated OT. I do agree that with good players, having two paired ranged dps on the left and two on the right side (essentially one for each corner) is enough to stop the bombs/scrapbots.

On the healing front, we did it (almost) with 5 healers - 2 holy priests, 2 paladins, 1 resto druid, 2 shaman. Healing ceased to be a problem as soon as we told everyone to stick to their group. In fact, while I'm not convinced 2 healers can completely do it, when one healer died halfway through the combat I found I was in fact able to heal two groups through a tantrum. I expect that with pre-tantrum shields it would be quite easy to keep 10 people alive. Unfortunately, it does require level of competence that just isn't quite there with some of our other healers.

I may go holy/disc for my dual spec and see what this disc healing is all about, even though I've stacked the hell out of spirit (as you can see (http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Icecrown&n=Sooth)), I can still probably do OK.

You should have mentioned that you have no hunters. It's still possible, you just need the tank to be good at taunting mobs (taunt now has a 30 yard range). This method is going to be a lot more tricky than the other one, since you might have issues where a taunt resists or if you get more than 1 up every 8 sec (though they really don't hit hard and quick vigi swaps can let you snag them off whoever they're going for after the first hit).

In regards to the healing, while I haven't ever done it with as few as two (last was with 5 I think), it does seem possible in theory, and certainly something I'd like to try. As for the spirit stacking, I'd be curious to know how much mana you end fights with? We tend to run as few healers as possible and that tends to push our mana pools to the limit (if I ever take my druid to runs, I end up at 10-20% mana). At the same time, I never have mana issues per se, it's just very tightly tied to the DPS being high and killing the boss before we all OOM. I should note that with that few healers you tend to see very efficient healing, since you can't afford to heal snipe hots and not have people die. And dps dying WILL run us oom.

Interestingly enough, I never have mana problems at all. There are two reasons for this.

The first and most major was that we had no consistent raider with replenishment before the patch. Accordingly, I was never able to just stack int for a huge mana pool and replenishment abuse. I chose spirit both because of the better itemization and +spellpower, even though (I suppose) technically mp5 would have been better since I was rarely outside the 5 second window. I've never REALLY done the math, I just arbitrarily picked spirit because I knew holy = spirit, disc = mp5. The downside is that I'm relying heavily on spiritual guidance (spellpower +25% of spirit) which I'd lose if I go disc.

The second is that even though the patch 'nerfed' mana regen, the fact is that for holy priests staying almost exclusively within the 5 second window, we're almost untouched. The loss of mana refund talents deep in the holy tree is offset buy the new useful hymn of hope and the shorter cooldown on shadowfiend. I throw my first shadowfiend when I'm at around 75% mana, hymn of hope when I have none left, and then on longer (7m+) fights I can actually throw out a second shadowfiend. When all else fails, I call for an innervate from our main tank who has the shapeshift innervate shapeshift down pat.

The only fight recently that has taxed my mana pool and caused me to call for that rare innervate is when I dual-healed ignus 10man. Otherwise, I end most fights around 30% mana and often still have hymn of hope or shadowfiend to use.

We finally downed Deconstructor after about 6 hours of progression on it.  Yay progress.  We then wiped a few times on Ignis, but did fairly well on the test pulls.  He's doable in his current form.

I've done all the outside guys (XT, Ignis, Razorscale, Leviathan) on 10 man on both my druid and warrior, and gotten pretty close to killing Kologarn, if it weren't for bad players.

My guild downed Yogg on the first timer, and is working on the hard mode bosses this week. The guy who runs the raid for us 'casuals' within the guild is out of town this weekend, so hopefully within the next week or two, we'll get the uld25 going. Should be pretty cake by that point though, as half the raid will be the main raider's alts.

We finally went yesterday! Killed Leviathan and XT, got totally pasted by Razorscale and Kologarn. I think we're not really there yet, but we weren't exactly experts on the strategies involved, either.

My guild has been skipping around.  I'm fairly certain the RL and GL just want to say "hey we finished Uldar!" because we've skipped all the optional bosses.  Downed Kol on Friday night and ran into troubles with Auriaya since one of our healers bailed and a 3-year Feral druid stepping-in as resto just doesn't work well.  So we skipped her and went to Thorim.

 First off, let me say the lightning-enhanced trash mobs in the hallway to Thorim are bullshit.  They two-shot our MT several times before we finally got the 4 mobs dead.  No idea what was going on, but a dual-wielding mob that can deliver a 11k hit followed by a 26k hit in 1.2 seconds in 10-man is bullshit and tuned WAY too tightly.

Thorim himself, however, is a fucking pushover fight.  Took us only 4 attempts to down him, and that was just trying to find the right balance of AoE vs Single Target dps for the group split. Having a DK or Pally tank forr the 'ground group' would make this fight almost cake-walk easy, too, as you'd be able to generate enough AOE aggro and Damage to never have to worry about that random commoner spawning and pummeling your healer. (I don't have good enough tanking gea, to swap with our OT here, thanks to pugs always beating me on rolls for offset pieces. Bastards!)

 As it was I just had to keep dropping D&D to make sure they beat on me while the tank's Thunderclap was on CD instead of picking up the healer.  Me + a 1pt Fan of Knives rogue + a Mage was more than enough AOE dps to take care of the adds. 

Seriously, Uld trash is serious business on 10 man.

We had a hilarious time with our first watcher dude. "pulling it noAUGHEKJHOCWDK_QV !#!"

I love the trash we've tried so far.  :heart:

Yeah, the trash on the way to Kologan was an adventure. I hope that it mostly stays that way through Ulduar, where there's relatively little trash but it's mean. I prefer 5 pulls of having to pay attention to 587432875634534 pulls of no-brain trash.

That said, Thorim's trash sounds a little  :ye_gods:.

Went in tonight on our 2nd run (10-man), 1-shot Flame Leviathan, 1-shot Razorscale and then got XT down after about 8 tries, having never seen him before. Was a lot of fun, and XT was really close, even with 5 guys pulling 3-4K DPS (we're running 3 healers).

The trash in XT's room wasn't up on our first attempt, and then preceded to be the cause of our 2nd wipe. Still, a great satisfaction to be making progress. Also getting useful and desireable loot is win. Ulduar is definitely a lot of fun for guilds at my level and will provide us with amusement for a long time.

Ulduar 25 broke my new guild I think.  They had just recently had a split and so a lot of people were doing offspec and they had to even resort to bringing me and lesser geared folk in for 25man progression raids.  The guild leaders a bit too late realized that perhaps Naxx (and not starting on fucking construct with half the healers being offspecs) would be advisable to gear up new recruits instead of chain wiping on XT.  Sadly, more hemorrhaging occurred and I think their attempts to get even a full Nax 25 together will be fruitless. It's just a matter of time before the core raiders start leaving out of boredom or get cherry picked by guilds actually advancing.

Smells like Sunwell.

With a kid coming in a 4-6 weeks, I really don't care all that much. But it's just amusing that I managed to join yet another guild in its death throws.  At least these next few weeks will be interesting.

Well this shit is officially way way harder than anything we did in Naxx obviously. It's kinda funny, but I guess that's what I expected. I'm gonna give Ulduar about 2 months and then see where we are in the 25 man version. If it looks like things are fun and doable then I'll stick with it, but if it's just going to be killing the same 3 bosses over and over while we bash our heads on the XT, I'm just going to fold up the tent and declare WoW is not for me anymore.

Stand XT in one of the corners and the adds won't spawn from there. When the heart drops there will be a AoE pulse that hits everyone around the heart for 12-16k a pop+silence however.

My guild got 10-man XT to 4% and 10% with 2 pretty substandard DPSers and 3 healers. You just can't bring anyone under 2.5k DPS. I'd say 3k minimum myself.

We haven't even gotten past Razorscale 25 yet, so who knows  :awesome_for_real:

I do know the A Team run is having gigantic problems with XT though.

I think Naxx has made us all suck to be honest. I was in a 25-man pug the other day that one-shot everything but Saph and KT (with 2 tries apiece on them)...

but we wiped 3 times on the eye stalk/maggot room before Loatheb due to people not killing the goddamn stalks properly. We ended up just doing the fight down 2-3 people so we could move on. That just shouldn't happen.

Me, my GL and the other officers in my guild are having kind of a conundrum since there are people in the guild we simply cannot take into Ulduar and expect to get anything down. Then we got some people who -can- play but get discouraged after like 2 wipes and complain because we aren't just rolling over everything. Most of the core group that can play like the challenge so far (ignoring bugged fights), but it's going to be a pain in the ass to figure out how to keep running Naxx to gear people while trying to do anything in Ulduar.

Yep, the gearing problem reminds me of Black Temple all over again. "Well, I'd like to have you, but you must be this tall to ride the ride. Unfortunately, nobody is running the old ride anymore, so too fucking bad."

Are you complaining or just making a statement?

Just an observation. It was annoying for both sides.

In 10, XT seems to be easier than either Razorscale or Ignis, and that is also what I am hearing from the 25 raiders I know, but that's only second hand info. So honestly you might want to change your focus to him for a week and see what you can do.

It's a fun place, so I am looking forward to doing when we get a full group of ppl who know what they are doing. We don't always get that both days a week though. I think if we had the top 25 out of the 35 on the list, we'd be gold on all the early stuff. It's just a logistical problem over the actual fight, as usual.

That and the "I wanna see new stuff!!!" people who get mad when you flat out tell them they aren't going to see anything until they start out DPSing the tank. Or tanks who can't do anything but stand in one place and mash devastate. I don't think the gear situation is going to get any better since we don't have enough people who can be on at the same time to run 25-mans, and I don't think killing just Flame Leviathan every week is enough to make up the gear gap.

In the 10-man (and I imagine it's worse in the 25-man), you cannot have a single slacker. If you're 3-healing (which you will be if you're all in 10-man gear. Good design blizz!), all 5 of your DPS better be on the fucking ball and putting out I say about 3k DPS on average or you're not getting shit done on anything with an enrage timer. You can bore Ignis to death since he doesn't have an enrage but in exchange for not requiring really stellar DPS it requires geared/skilled tanks and very good healers.

A guild that can clear Naxx 25, decked out in full 25-man gear in every slot could easily take months to get through 10-man Ulduar right now if they take even 1-2 people they had to carry in Naxx. That's progression when the first raid is leagues easier.

Shrink the raid size to 10 and you have my guild's situation. I know that sounds silly. :P

Nope, we run 10-mans, it's not silly.

We have literally like 50+ish really active players and like another 30 or so who log in like 1-2 days a week for the odd heroic/dailies/short run. Problem is that our server is the unofficial Aussie server and generally has a population that is ALL over the place in terms of time zones. Also, we have a lot of people in the military, post-grad college, or working odd hours. We could probably get about 18 people on reliably if we tried. We were running two 10-man Naxx runs since we just could -not- get 25 people on. We just couldn't. And both runs had 2-3 people who just aren't that good. We carry them and get it done pretty easily still, but you aren't doing that in Ulduar.

Proudmoore?  I didn't think there were any unofficial Aussie servers any more, since we have several official Aussie servers these days.  There ya go.

Our guild is having probs with 10man Ulduar, not so much due to gear, but rather people standing in bad stuff.  We just appear to have several people who can concentrate on one task, but get them to worry about random bad stuff, or moving based on situational awareness, and they're dead in about 10 seconds.  And has been said, you can't have any slackers in Ulduar 10man. 

We've dropped back to Naxx farming to get KT gear, and trying Sarth 1D.  Even that is still failboat due to people standing in bad stuff (ie flame wall).  I think our raid leader is slowly turning into 50 DKP MINUS guy, as he bangs his head against his desk...

The damage from the blue fire on Razorscale is really high and it kicks in really fast. Even our good no-stand-in-flame people are getting a bit mauled by it. I expect we'll get it down eventually but it is rough right now.

It also doesn't land just anywhere.

Yeah, the last wipe we did on it I got a blue flame hit/tic when moving out, and immediately fireballed. Doom in two seconds. <3

I think half the challenge of razorscale is that there's no way to resist gear for it effectively right now.

THat said, Uld is FUN, I'm just frustrated looking over 10 man naxx/OS/eye/heroic lists trying to find how I could possibly gear better for these fights. The 10 man tuning seems amazingly tight.

Just do the trick where you have one guy standing underneath him, eating all the blue flame fireballs. A hunter works best, because he can mark the boss and then watch the minimap and stay under the icon.

People are right; having a disc priest in your raid is like cheating. I do nothing but PW:S people non-stop and PW:S->penance or PW:S->Gheal on the damage spikes. If you aren't running with a disc priest I highly recommend getting someone to dual spec and try it out.

Just wait til you see Hodir.   :awesome_for_real:

Do stand in this, don't stand in that,  move after 2 actions or the debuff builds up, frozen blows doing 40k damage to the entire raid over 20s, make it onto the snow piles or you're frozen...  I'm not sure I remembered everything.

Having said that, we downed him after a couple nights in 10 man.  I can't -wait- to see that fight in 25 man.   :heartbreak:

On Razor, you have to watch for the blue fireballs coming down, and move before they land.  The frostfire ones can be dodged, but it's probably not worth the effort.

The trash in the place is definitely worth doing though, at least initially.  We've gotten at least 3 trash epix so far.

The further we get into Ulduar though, the more baffled I am at the seeming expectation on the part of Blizzard that PUGs will be able to do the place.  Uld makes Heroic Oculus look like a walk in the park, and I refuse to PUG -that-.

I'm fairly certain that's precisely what they wanted. Every pugger started thinking they were leet raiders, and now the hammer comes down.

I don't think that's what they wanted. That implies some sort of malicious revenge. What they DON'T want is the top 25% of the server clearing it in two weeks, getting bored, and unsubbing next month. It will be like all the rest, a month from now they'll start gradually de-tuning it.

You think hodir is bad? Wait until you get to mirmion.

One big difference for us between Naxx and Ulduar, and one that will be possibly the biggest nuisance for us and a lot of other 10-man guilds, is the implied requirement for a semi-sane comp. We've done Naxx-10 with a raid that is 60% paladins, or random melee and caster DPS; however in Ulduar you notice the difference (particularly in DPS) between taking a full caster raid, or a full physical DPS raid and a hodge-podge assortment of classes and specs. It's not really raid stacking, but it makes sense now to ensure that your classes are complementing and buffing each other, unlike before.

I think hodir has a lot more movement and things to watch out for than mimiron or are very close in that regard. What makes mimiron so much harder in my opinion is that the fight is VERY unforgiving of even the slightest mess up.

Yep.  Ghostcrawler posted at least once to the effect that they expect it'll be a few months before the average PUG will be clearing Ulduar. 

I fucking suck at Mimiron25 phase 4.  Cannot for the life of me see the faint "rocket is going to land here" mark on the ground while also watching the head to see where he's shooting and behind to see where the bombs are so I can get out of the big aoe. 

Blizzard should add a feature where your melee character is automatically transformed into a ranged dps the moment you (the player) turns 35.  I don't know that I have the reaction times to not suck at this shit anymore. 

Or at least give us more finely-tuned particle density filters (turn spell effects from other players to minimum and mobs/environment to max).

General vezax is your apology fight. As melee you don't have to do anything but spam your favorite buttons, occasionally have someone interrupt the aoe. For range that fight is a kick in the balls.

Except hunters, they can diaf.

If you just position yourself outside the circle, most of them are fall in harmless areas.  We had a lot of good dps (BIS 25 man geared) and combined with this fight being relatively easy on an OT (as opposed to Ignis) and easy to 2 heal; Razorscale was a lot easier than XT or Ignis for my group (didn't down Ignis).   Only my weak ass sub 3K dps was holding us back  :awesome_for_real:  Even with adds still being up on the first group phase, we were able to get the achievement.

Ulduar seems to be a little rough on offtanks so far. They need to really be on the ball, almost moreso than the main tank.   My group has 2 furry warriors trading offtanking duties.  One has good gear and bad skills, one has good skills but bad gear. The first 10 man group has all core raiders playing their actual main spec and is doing much better (10/14 down).  They'll likely be on Yogg this week or next.

Edit: An for everyone being on the ball, my first night in the 10 man we were having some problems downing XT.  There was another ele shaman in the raid who had great gear but managed to not heal during tantrums, fail at killing adds, and got himself killed before a wipe most of the time.  He dropped and we brought in an ok DK.  XT was dropped on the next attempt.

Kologarn or Ignis first?

Kologarn looks a lot easier, IMO, at least from the few attempts we got on him before folks had to crash. 

Everyone I've talked to says Ignis is the hardest thing in the first half - we haven't tried it yet. But the consensus would seem to definitely indicate Kologarn first.

Suits me fine, I desire [Spark of Hope].

Was that a 10 or 25 man run?

I've seen a lot of "10 man isn't that bad!" from people running BiS 25 equipped 10s and flattening the content. Our issue was a lot of execution and figuring out the fights, but some of it is also just tuning for Naxx10 gear, whereas the instance appears to be tuned for a mix of 10/25 gear.

Kologarn looks doable, it's just a matter of healer assignments and getting used to the chaos. I'm really not pleased that Blizzard went back to the raid style of massive raidwide damage again, though. Resto druids seem to be bar none the worst healers for Uld due to the incoming damage pattern.

Yeah, Mimron is a bit rough. He's fun, though. I'm running 10 man Uldars for us casual players in the guild, and we're all mostly BiS naxx25 geared, and we're basically stomping the place.

What I don't like is how his difficulty ramps up exponentially in P4 such that it takes 10 minutes to find out if you're going to wipe or not.

We had a bad kiter for the assault bots in Phase 3, so we kept wiping on that particular phase.

Dk's are hax for that. Also we noticed the magnetic charges stack so saving a couple for 100% dmg boost works nicely.

Yeah, we had a DK keeping it slow while a shaman kited it around, but the ranged DPS weren't putting out enough damage on it to drop it before another one spawned - it was a bit of a mess.

Few bad players, though, so we're swapping out next week.

So yeah, looking like a hotfix is up to nerf everything up to around Kologarn, clips Emalon, and takes a side swipe at Disc priests (barely).

Essential reasoning seems to be that it was too tightly tuned to allow the expected percentage of players to proceed.

Raid forums, as expected, are hilarious.

I am happy with the changes to Ulduar and so is the casual raiding guild I belong to. We enjoyed clearing Naxx 25 but with Ulduar many of our members were not having fun, for good or bad they expected to progress into normal Ulduar 25 at a similar pace to Naxx 25  leaving the hard mode encounters for the hard core raiders.

I like a challenge, I just do not miss the good old days where raids were intended for you to down the first two bosses for a month to have gear to down the next two for a month, repeat as needed to get to the end. And other such lockout based farming bullshit *coughonycloakscough*

The priest changes are a mixed bag. The divine hymn change isn't wholly surprising, although a little sad. With a 10-min cooldown it's a cooldown on a par with heroism, and it's effect was noticeable. I'm not sure what their concern was here, if it was about stacking priests to trivialise stuff with divine hymn then I'd have taken a heroism-esque debuff over a nerf. Still, it's not an ability I depend on so much to worry about the loss. The body and soul change makes no particular sense, since holy priests are hardly spamming PW:S like disc priests. The change to the mass dispel glyph is utterly bizzarre, it's a terrible glyph for a highly situational ability that nobody uses, you have to wonder what the point was.

Pretty sure the mass dispel glyph nerf is aimed at pvp priests.  In pvp gear conserving your mana is a big deal and Mass dispel even after some disc talents is sill over 1k mana, thus balancing it's game changing power with an appropriate cost. 

Lern2Throne, nub.

It's a nerf to Disc Priests all 'round.  They're fucking ungodly right now.  I'm able to spam shields, PoH and Mass Dispel and rarely go below 30% mana after a long fight in BGs and I'm in shit gear.  It's crazy.

It's easy to not drop mana in BGs, since you have lulls between spam casting. Mana is only really an issue for me around the 4-5 minute mark in a fight with no real breaks.

That said, 15% more mana cost to PW:Shield isn't going to change much.

Well, I did notice mana issues and was running out of mana last night. To compensate, I just threw in my spirit trinkets that I use when holy. That brought me back up to where I was before.

I'm playing a disc priest at the moment and spend plenty of time doing PvP, but even with almost 900 resilience I don't feel anywhere near ungodly.  A decent rogue, warrior, hunter, or DK can still drop you without much difficulty.  Healing debuffs + physical damage is a tough combo to handle and DK's get a mention because of Strangulate.

It probably doesn't help that as a priest you are somewhat reliant on your teamates to help you kite and keep the mele riff raff off of your ass and for whatever reason the Horde on the battlegroup I currently play on are some of the most awful PvPers I have ever witnessed in my WoW history.   :oh_i_see:

Disc priests are the single most difficult kill for my AWESOME protection warrior/moonkin 2v2 arena team, even worse than resto druids. It is probably because our only dispel is melee range, on a cooldown, and costs rage, but yeah. Basically impossible for us to beat when played decently right now. Of course, it may not necessarily be a big deal that our weird-ass comp can't beat them, but I expect there are other more normal ones that find them hard to deal with as well. Nerfs don't exactly surprise me.

It's lolpenance mostly I think. Even if you are fast enough to interrupt it, you are still talking 50-75% of a healthbar healed.

They are also the worst for our only-slightly-less-weird 2v2 ret paladin duo.  So far most of them seem to be able to sit there happily healing themselves through two paladins beating themselves to death on their reflective shield.  We are definitely a one-trick pony, though, so I'm not too broken up about it.   :awesome_for_real:

I'd recommend dual spec'ing to Arms or Fury for pvp, as a priest a good Arms/Fury warrior is probably tied with hunters as the biggest thorn in my side simply because berserker rage nullfies my fear without even needing to use a trinket, thus I get no breathing room when one jumps me.  Plus you want healing debuffs because without them a healer will typically have no problem keeping up with damage from 1-2 players.

Arms would probably be an easier transition for you since they get in combat charges now, which you should already be used to with warbringer from playing prot spec.

I realize we'd be much better as arms/resto (once I learned how to play an arms warrior) but we're doing it this way on purpose to see how far we can get.

I imagine you do fairly well versus double dps teams, but healer-dps teams or healer-hybrid teams must be pretty rough with no healing debuff's and not a lot of crowd control options.

We destroy double dps, yeah. (Especially double rogue: damage shield + talented thorns = ha ha ha ha) Anything with a healer is hard for us unless the healer isn't very good.

Yea, all of our Healer + anything strategies revolve around us hoping they are retarded or wearing quest greens or something. We haven't really figured out a decent lockdown/separation strat yet.

Dance at them!  It should distract one of them long enough to pull the other away.

Once that boomkin startes going, I sure lose concentration.

Of course that means Ingmar needs to be innoculated before this strategy is put into play.  Fordel, let's tie him up and dance for him all night. :evil:

As long as you don't do it with the ogre disguise.

 :ye_gods:

I better respec my druid.

Freaking furry guild.  :ye_gods:

You'd be surprised how much lockout power a prot warrior has.  When 3.0 rolled out I chortled with glee every time some S2/3 geared asshole decided to try me 1v1 on Quel'Danas, and as far as I can tell they still haven't nerfed the stuns/disarms/interrupts.

The highest rated warrior in season5 on the Cyclone battlegroup was prot (this dude (http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Daggerspine&n=Alloraan)). He stacked the best +block value gear at the time and drew many hate tells for 14k shieldslam+conc+shockwave burst sequences (with shield block and recklessness up). I think he's arms now, though.  :awesome_for_real:


-- Z.

The problem is generating enough rage to put out a burst sequence or sustain some output of annoying/interupting abilities.  Good players will just ignore/cc the prot warrior and put the hurt on his teamate, then it's a 2 on 1.  With no incoming damage I imagine it can be quite difficult to maintain an effective amount of rage, especially if going up against a team with a priest and the PW:shields.  Not to mention that unless he's spec'd for piercing howl, getting kited will be a serious issue and even with it will be dumping rage to keep enemy players in mele range.

Silence is on diminishing returns now.

We are getting a little better against teams with healers, but they're still mostly losses. If we can hit 1550 for that achievement I will be happy, but even that will be hard as there are disc priests EVERYWHERE and those are by far the most difficult healer for us to deal with. We've clawed our way to 1400 so far but it is getting to be slow going.

Obviously, I should be arena whoring it up and dropping Ingmar's rating.

My guild had a few people out last night, so they called out to their casuals (read: me) to come and help them wrap up Uld, so I got to do General Vezex and Yogg-Saron on Heroic difficulty last night (my 10 man group had made it up to Vezex).

Man, Yogg-Saron is really fun! It's terribly complicated to explain, but in execution, it's actually not all that hard (with all the watchers up, of course). I ran around in the visions and got to attack the brain, which was fun. I destroyed tentacles with my whirlwinds of justice!

All the 'turn around so you are not facing this creature' mechanics are a nice twist, if a bit annoying. The whole sanity mechanic is also pretty slick, though I have no idea how you'd be able to beat this boss without Freya's wells of sanity. Robot jesus coordination, I suppose.

Talking about Arenas though, I'm playing with a Paladin friend who has a very interesting spec - mostly Prot, then the rest in Holy, but he plays as a healer. The net effect is he gets the talent where 30% of his stamina is spellpower, with the improved spell crits. With Blessing of Sanctuary on himself, he gets so much mana back, he can tank a melee all day long. Against mirror matches with normal Beacon paladins, we just curb stomp them mercilessly. I basically just get to tunnel vision against a healer, while he whistles away and heals.

Like we'd let you on the team.

My 25 man went in the second time into Ulduar and managed to get our first kills on Razorscale and the Robot. I think the place is a pretty fun without being overly retarded.

I meant my own team, and demolish you with your WEAKNESS.

Jalago and I shall RULE THE ARENA

I don't think I have ever seen a boss wipe a raid as quickly as Kologarn, much fun. Got him down after 1-shotting FL, XT and Razor. Having your lowest DPS  (of 5) pulling 3.2K DPS is a new phenomenon for my guild.

How are you guys doing Ignis? We tried zerging him and got him to about 50% before stuff fell apart. The kiting was pretty terrible, and people seemed to be getting uneccessary damage. However I doubt even with Hero and our full A-team we'll have the DPS to push him through the last 50% before the tank starts getting 1-shot.

Played Disc/Ret up from 0 to 700ish rating today. Got outplayed a couple of times, but in general did well considering I'm in a PvE disc spec at the moment. It's a pretty nice defensive setup; we rarely blow stuff up but we seem to handle double-DPS pretty well. Arms/Resto druid demolished us though.

Zerging doesn't quite work anymore since they buffed his...well, buff he gets from activating golems.

I slaved over photoshop for a good..4-5 minutes making this shitty image, so you better use it.

(http://img514.imageshack.us/img514/8641/ingis.png)

Yellow=Ingis
Red=Where the scorch should go.

Pull first according to the arrow, after the first scorch take him south so he places the next scorch there, then go west to the next one, then north, then back to where you started. Your addtank will pick up the golems and stand in the scorch, remembering to retaunt after they go molten and run them into the water which should be right next to them.

Make sure you have a ranged DPS who can do 5k in a single hit (we used a boomkin), blow up the add, heal the OT, pick up the next one.

DPS/healers can stand whereever IMO, but we had everyone stand in the middle so group-heals could go off and the melee can constantly be on Ingis without much running around.

Yea we used a strategy simliar to Fabricated's, not that we got him down. We were actually tanking him IN the water, only dragging him out for every other scorch so the tank didn't have to take the hit. Certain things would result in wipes:
1) Me (OT) getting put into the stomach pot thing, adds go crazy, gg.
2) Designated 5k rdps gets put into pot, no other dps blows up add, I end up having 4 adds on me, boss gets crazy buff, gg
3) MT who is less well geared than me gets instagibbed by who knows what.

Course, this was a PUG so I didn't expect much better.

@Fabricated Thanks, that's a massive help.

Our one attempt at Ignis taught me I sux at the kiting part.

On the whole, I really like Ulduar even though it's hard. It's hard in a nice next step sort of way, where I am sure we'll be able to do it all EVENTUALLY, rather than when Zul'Aman came out and was all "ha ha, fuck you Karazhan-only people." ZA wasn't worth the giant pain in the ass it was for us, but Ulduar is.

Auriaya is so much fun. We're finally going to a full 2 night Ulduar schedule this week so our progress should improve from the 'one more boss per week' rate we've been at. We've done FL->XT->Kologarn->Auriaya now, so I guess we should go back and actually work on Razorscale and Ignis now.

We've been working on Council. It's  :ye_gods: on the tank, but doable.

If you can do Kologarn you should have no problems with Razorscale. We're 1-shotting FL, Razor and XT but seem to have a problem consistently managing Kologarn ourselves. We can do it with our full A-team, but unstacked DPS and paladin healers don't seem to agree with this fight.

I'm looking forward to Auriaya though.

Are you doing it on 10 or 25? Here's how we do it on 10:

- Ranged and healers stand in a line in the middle of the room, if one gets eyebeamed they just run straight backwards so that they don't hit anyone else, then come back when the eyebeam is over
- All DPS stays on Right Arm (the grabby one) until it breaks, then hits body
- 2 tanks swap normally, with the tank who doesn't have aggro picking up rubble to be AEd down

We use 3 healers and 2 tanks, usually. I can see it being a lot more trouble on 25 since there's not room enough for all the ranged to stand so the eyebeams only hit one person at a time. I find that I have enough avoidance so that the armor crush debuff falls off after one stack more often than not too.

We leave the back row of tiles clear. Anyone with eyebeams runs off to the side then back to that row and across, so nobody should ever get hit.. in theory.  In practice you sometimes miss the beams closing in on you until they hit.

We took 3 pallies on one boss and it was pure failure.  Same comp and people the next night with a druid swapped for one of the pallies and we oneshot him. I can't recall which one, though, so I'll have to ask.   Stacking healer classes other than druids does seem somewhat detrimental in general, though.  Damn druids.

Auriaya's trash sucks more than she does.  The worst part of her is the pull.  If you don't do it just right you'll have her panthers pouncing your healer or a DPS and one-shotting them.  19k pounce-bleed in 10-man. Woo, fun.

Auriaya is tailor-made for a warrior tank too, which is unusual this expansion. Berserker rage the fear, shield bash her cast.  :drill:

This is how we're doing it, except for the eyebeam stuff. Do you kite it down (to) the stairs then? We normall have people run out to the corners under his arms, but this wasn't working well with the paladins. We could definitely do with a better strategy for the eyebeams.


We normally run Resto Druid, Resto Shaman and Holy or Disc Priest (me), although tonight neither the Druid nor the Shaman was available. A shame, since we seem to complement each other really well. Admittedly I've only seen the first 6 fights in there, but I haven't found one where (as a priest) I feel gimped. Also started using the Guardian Spirit glyph today, damn that thing is awesome.

As far as I know they just run back out the door, but we might have tried having them run straight back and then along the back of the room on one of the attempts last night. I can't actually see what is going on back there, mostly I just get a screen full of giant abs.

That's how we do it as well, except we use 2 healers instead of 3.

As far as eyebeam strategies go, we don't really have one.  That is to say we stand sort of in the middle and run off to which ever side is closer when we get targeted as they tend to be fairly empty.

Kiting down the stairs is generally a bad idea as it takes you out of line of sight of the healers.  As a healer myself it's also a bad idea as it takes me out of line of sight of the tanks and the rest of the group.  As a last resort the stairs are a better alternative then dying however  :awesome_for_real:

The important bit is you never want to run side to side when you're in the line with the other ranged; if you go straight back before you go sideways you never kite the beams onto anyone else.

I wasn't saying that the other healing classes are gimped, just that it seems like stacking them doesn't work but you don't have that problem if you stack druids.  A small inequity but one that's there.

I agree on the GS glyph.  Dropped it on my heroics-only priest and I don't feel bad dropping it on the tank now.  No more "Ah crap, that was blown."

Fuck Kologarn. And stacking priests on that shouldn't suck either. Anything with a raid heal should stack. Almost all our issues are when one healer is gripped, one is running from eyebeams, and the third gets overwhelmed reacting to the situation.

Crazy Cat Lady is amazingly fun. Like, the pull sucks, but the rest of it's just relaxing compared to fucking kologarn. Except when I DC at 4%. That's exciting for me.

Really though, I'm really loving Uld. Not because it's progression, but because it's actually worth thinking about the entire way through. Even the trash is a blast.

Council isn't actually that bad.  All you need is fast reaction from the tank to pull Steelbreaker out of the Rune of Power (but keep him close enough so mele / ranged can get in it and hit him with the damage buff), and lightning fast reaction on Overcharge Dispells.  If your dispeller is fast, you can often dispell it before it even manages to tick the first time.

We often have a Warlock with Felhunter as the overcharge dispeller, since Overcharge and Devour Magic are both on the same cooldown.  He just macros something to have the Felhunter Cast it on the tank and spams it when the Overcharge Cast is called.

Unless you are doing Hard Mode, then yeah, That would be one Nasty fight on your tank / healers.

My guild got Thorim down last week and we got Hodir to 30%. Hodir isn't terribly fun and supposedly Freya is worse, with Mimiron being double++ worse. Oy.

10 man or 25 man?  I have done Hodir and Freya 10 man, and put in a few attempts on mimiron. 

Freya is all about trash management.  Once you have the trash figured out, the boss is pretty easy.  Now, doing it with keeprs up could be a lot more crazy.

Hodir is pretty crazy on 10 man.  I imagine 25 man would be insane, with people running everywhere, trying to stack buffs and fires and light beams while dodging ice.  Hodir pretty much defines the concept of "organized chaos" as a raid fight.

Mimiron, from my experience in 10 man, is all about execution, and not standing in shit.  Really, 90% of the stuff that kills you in mimiron kills you instantly and without remorse, but can also be largely avoided.  What really sucks on mimiron (in my expreience as a feral tank) is trying to dodge rocket strikes when you are standing in the middle of 5 different ground effects from DK's and paladins.  End result is usually OOPS, all the mele died cause no one could see the bloody impact circle.

10-man. Thorim was stupidly easy, 3 wipes which taught us important lessons (1. Melee in the arena - ranged in the gauntlet, 2. Kill the arena mobs faster, 3. Use a pet to pull the second mini-boss on the gauntlet) and we got him down the first time we managed to get him into the arena.

Hodir I think is a simple matter of our DPS and healers learning to not get bonked. Everyone's pretty good about not getting frozen now (ignoring our members who get frozen while standing dead center on a snowdrift for some reason), it's just the DPS getting good at output while dodging everything and breaking out the NPCs.

This seems to be a latency problem.  We tell our players to jump once when they get on the snow drift as to the best of my knowledge this updates their position with the server.  At least the problem stopped after we started doing this, it might be entirely coincidental  :oh_i_see:

We found mimiron considerably harder than the other keepers as well, phase 4 in particular.  There's just so much going on for melee to avoid in that phase it took some time to learn it.  Still we've only killed him once and I fear we'll have the same problems next time we're there.

On the plus side General Vezax felt like a walk in the park compared to Mimiron.

If you're curious about aggregate statistics, check out:  http://www.worldoflogs.com/stats/ulduar/

Of course, this does not distinguish between people trying hard mode and people just doing regular. Still, it seems to think thorim is slightly harder. You can, however, see the gradual difficulty curve that blizzard has tried so hard to maintain.

We finished siege, antechamber, and Hodir in one go last night (http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/NGDVQTE9XK5zxFN3/), so tonight hopefully we'll be able to finish off the keepers. Mirmiron and Thorim are crushing our balls currently.

Flame Leviathan
Wipes: 48.8%
Kills: 51.2%
4707 kills, 4494 wipes, 51.2 % success.
264237 DPS, 109 HPS, 401.0 seconds.
   
Razorscale
Kills: 39.0%
Wipes: 61.0%
5020 kills, 7858 wipes, 39.0 % success.
46344 DPS, 7208 HPS, 456.0 seconds.

XT-002 Deconstructor
Kills: 26.1%
Wipes: 73.9%
5330 kills, 15126 wipes, 26.1 % success.
72953 DPS, 11150 HPS, 369.5 seconds.
   
Ignis the Furnace Master
Kills: 28.8%
Wipes: 71.2%
4556 kills, 11287 wipes, 28.8 % success.
57429 DPS, 19508 HPS, 331.1 seconds.

The Antechamber of Ulduar

Assembly of Iron
Kills: 21.2%
Wipes: 78.8%
4403 kills, 16334 wipes, 21.2 % success.
56015 DPS, 13575 HPS, 528.7 seconds.
   
Kologarn
Kills: 25.1%
Wipes: 74.9%
4968 kills, 14808 wipes, 25.1 % success.
62382 DPS, 20534 HPS, 275.8 seconds.

Auriaya
Kills: 20.2%
Wipes: 79.8%
4476 kills, 17651 wipes, 20.2 % success.
57976 DPS, 13462 HPS, 401.6 seconds.
The Keepers of Ulduar

Mimiron
Kills: 10.3%
Wipes: 89.7%
2474 kills, 21649 wipes, 10.3 % success.
50475 DPS, 13288 HPS, 629.4 seconds.
   
Hodir
Kills: 20.8%
Wipes: 79.2%
3876 kills, 14715 wipes, 20.8 % success.
79396 DPS, 16828 HPS, 404.0 seconds.

Thorim
Kills: 9.2%
Wipes: 90.8%
3147 kills, 30981 wipes, 9.2 % success.
49156 DPS, 9664 HPS, 510.2 seconds.
   
Freya
Kills: 16.8%
Wipes: 83.2%
3359 kills, 16579 wipes, 16.8 % success.
47389 DPS, 11831 HPS, 455.7 seconds.

The Decent into Madness

General Vezax
Kills: 12.2%
Wipes: 87.8%
1968 kills, 14201 wipes, 12.2 % success.
67806 DPS, 5828 HPS, 496.4 seconds.
   
Yogg-Saron
Kills: 2.7%
Wipes: 97.3%
1006 kills, 36326 wipes, 2.7 % success.
74366 DPS, 8244 HPS, 803.2 seconds.

Could you explain those numbers a little more please. How can you have less FL kills than Razorscale kills?

Some people don't bother logging Flame Leviathan, since it's primarily a vehicle fight.  Others forget to type /combatlog until they're past a boss or two.  :grin:

Roger.

On another note, can anyone with experience with FL hard mode explain it to me? As I understand any +towers is harder, but you only get bonus loot for doing +2, and then +3 and +4 are just for acievements, or do you get more loot for those?

We're having zero problems killing him on 10s with 0 towers, although we don't bother killing his turrets (which makes the whole thing easier I think). If we were going to try +2, which towers should we leave, do we have to coordinate turret killing and are there any other strategy changes we should work on?

Leave the flame tower up. It's still incredibly easy and a way to get conquest badges in the 10man.

The 3rd and 4th towers are to get the glory/heroic glory achievements and really only for a proto drake.

Each tower increases his overall health and each has a special ability during the fight.

Thorim:drops lightning balls randomly

Mimiron:drops lines of fire you need to avoid.

Freya:spawns lots of plant adds you need to kill.

Hodir:ice beams focus in on players and then freeze the vehicle in place and needs to be broken out.

They nerfed Kologarn on 10 again, he's almost silly easy now (you can single tank him, leaving the other tank free to handle rubble).

I can't figure out why we can't deal with Razorscale, though. Everyone says that it is easier (even much easier) than Kologarn/XT/Auriaya but we killed all those in the first 4 or 5 attempts and have never really come close on Razorscale in several tries. It seems like it should be pretty straightforward.

you might be missing the key of keeping one person directly below razorscale while he is in midair to draw the blue fire, immediately DPSing the big guys, waiting until there are no big guys left to bring razorscale down, and keeping dkp away from the big guy because of whirlwinds? Dunno.

Thanks, do you get hard mode loot with just 1 tower up?

I don't know if I can spare 1/10th of the raid to just follow the dragon around like that though? We haven't tried that though, at this point I'm willing to give anything a chance.

Generally we have two tanks pick up the adds, kill order is caster->whirlwind guy->normal ones, harpoons where there are only a couple adds up. I think we're just not getting enough damage on her when she's down, I am pretty sure once we get her grounded we will handle that part easily.

My guild puts everyone on the southern half of the platform with a ranged DPS on activating the harpoon guns. One tank grabs the northern adds, another grabs the southern adds and the Sentinel if it shows up. If a Sentinel shows up, kill it ASAP. When the last harpoon needed to ground razorscale becomes available just immediately use it unless a new wave has JUST shown up. The instant you do this all DPS stops whatever they're doing and goes apeshit on Razorscale. We run a warrior tank (me) and then usually a pally or DK, so we usually have the OT take all of the adds while she's down so I can contribute my sunder armor on Razorscale.

Our issue seems to be how many flight phases we get, and at least for me personally, healing on fumes by the third flight phase.

New innervate is  :heart:

I wondered if you were going to approve of that change.  I only got to read the patch notes.  The auth  server wouldn't let me in. ><

Your DPS may need some work then. Razorscale should be grounded for good by the second or third landing easily.

Some attempts on our guild have her down by the 3rd attempt, and last night we couldn't get her down at all.  Of course, our healing missing the harpoon launcher being hit with flame 3 times in a row kind of brought things to a halt quickly...

I know at least one of the DPSers last night (I was sitting out last night) is incapable of reacting immediately to ANYTHING, so I'm sure that did not exactly help. Morphine slows reaction time, who knew!

If Razor's not coming down by the 3rd landing, you're simply fucked. That can either be one of two things: 1) Your dps are dying too quickly from adds, which is almost assuredly their own fault from overaggro, or 2) Your dps suck and/or are undergeared for the fight.

If everybody is alive and you can't pull it off with 10 ppl and three landings, your dps are either terrible or in the wrong instance, and the rest of the fights will just crush you down the line. I think bare minimum is 2k while he's on the ground to do that. It's 3k to do it in 2 landings.

EDIT: As a tip for dealing with the fires, any kind of pets that can attack the boss when he's in the air and not harpooned once should be attacking him from the ground to draw fires. Once harpooned, have one person stay near the center to draw fires away from the melee. Hunters or locks work well at this job.

Our problems were just bad luck - we had some strange lag issues affecting 1 of our 2 healers and our other healer bit it in the first 2 minutes of the fight for some reason.  We're bringing new people through Ulduar, so we're still learning the fights, but we do pretty well so far.  We've already taken Razorscale down before, so it's just an issue of everything working and coming together.

It's not an easy fight really. There's very little margin for error early on in terms of dps being alive, the random element of sentinels coming up at bad times, and he can rough up a tank who's not geared up from Naxx.

As Paelos said, more than 3 flight phases and you almost certainly won't have the DPS to meet to soft enrage in phase 2.

There are a few likely issues on Razorscale:
1 - You get unlucky and get a disproportionate number of sentinels (nothing you can do about this except to DPS them down quicker)
2 - Your DPS aren't up to par and you are getting waves of adds either overlapping with each other or with the boss. (n.b. you should be firing the harpoons as soon as they are ready). If you do get overlap with the boss your DPS needs to know to switch to the boss immediately while your tanks offtank and hopefully you can catch up in the brief interval before the new waves spawn. If your DPS are getting waves of adds overlapping prior to harpoons then they probably need to go back to Naxx and improve their gear.
3 - Your DPS suck and die to fires/chain lightning. Get better DPS
4 - Your healers are healing sub-optimally and letting DPS die. Change your healer makeup, change your group comp or improve your healers.
5 - Your tanks suck and cannot control the adds. Get better tanks.

What sort of healer do you play? Priests have the worst mana issues of all the healers as holy, but are all right as Disc, and Disc is incredibly effective on Razor. If you are using a holy priest, consider seeing if they can dual-spec to Disc for this fight (and XT too, since a Disc priest can more-or-less solo heal tantrums). Shields cycled over everyone really takes the edge off the fire damage and allows your other healers to focus on the tanks.

Do you have a shaman? Heroism on the first landing makes a huge difference. We usually aim (with hero) for 75% HP after one landing. If you aren't getting add overlap you can use most of your healers to DPS (Priests and Shamans are great for this), and if you are a priest you can use heroism+shadowfiend to get back most of your mana.

Do you have replenishment? If you're ooming with replenishment then you're probably undergeared, or have a significant bias towards throughput stats.

Are your healers DPSing (even wanding, or whatever) during the ground phases?

Do you have paladins who can use FR aura? (this is more useful than conc or dev auras)

Are your tanks controlling and stacking the little adds so they can be AoE'd? While AoE isn't the solution to the adds, when used well it can be very helpful.

That's all I can think of right now. I do razor as Disc and find it an easy fight to handle.


Edit: When razor is grounded she cannot turn on anyone and so your tanks can DPS from anywhere on her. If you get a bad fire-patch placement (i.e. in front of her face when she's grounded) your tanks can DPS or build threat from the side of the boss, even for bringing her down to 50%.

Tee hee hee hee hee hee!  :why_so_serious:

(Our shaman is the DPSer I refered to before.)

Like I said last night, deepz harder!

In 10 man, if i'm actually ranking things in terms of ease and general fun I'd go:

Flame Leviathan
XT
Kologarn
Razorscale
Ignis

I believe the reason for this actually has to do with the Devouring Flames.

Current theory is that razor casts Devouring flames at whoever happens to be DIRECTLY closest to the boss at the time, NOT at random people in the raid.

Due to the fact that Razor flies erraticly around above the area, Who is closest generally changes often, giving the appearance of random targeting.

HOWEVER, each harpoon attached to Razor restricts her flight movement range.  Basicly, if you attach 2 harpoons or so to her, and have either a ranged class (in 10 man) or your Sentinel tank (in 25 man) stand inside the marked circle in the combat area, while everyone else stays outside the Circle border, there is something like a 90% chance that that person will end up being the "closest" person to the boss while she is in the air, and as such, will essentially be able to "tank" the Devouring flames, by keeping them in one area, and leaving the rest of your raid completely free to stand still and DPS adds to their hearts content without the need to flee from death-from-above every 10 seconds

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmm. Perhaps we will give that a go tonight.

Yes, a person drawing flames down on top of themselves away from the group is the key. Simply put.

The best person to do it is a hunter, since they can track the dragon and simply keep underneath at all times. We actually just have our tank who is on sentinel duty stand in the center to eat the flame.

Apparently having three tanks in our 10 man raids is the way we get shit done.  :drillf:

Killed Razorscale and Council of Iron tonight. I even SENSED the try we would beat the Iron Council and got the But I'm on Your Side achievement.  :grin:

Iron Council is pretty easily 2-tanked if you want the fight to go faster. One on Steelbreaker and one on the other two. If you got a warrior tank make sure he's on rune-guy and the caster since between revenge stuns, shockwave, conc blow, shield bash, heroic throw, etc they can generally keep him locked down until you get to him. This is particularly important after Steelbreaker goes down since that lightning whirl hurts.

Biggest pile of fucking horseshit in history: Having Rune-guy toss a power rune on the caster the instant he dies, while all the warrior's interrupts are on cooldown, the rest of the raid is too far away to help, and the caster follows with an immediate lighting whirl that kills half the raid.

We tried the two tank once (I was actually supposed to be there as dps) and then went "screw it, three tanks AWAAAAAY!" The runecaster guy hits kinda hard. :(

The other times I'm not REALLY a third tank, just sort of.

Iron Council was fun.

Razorscale was totally us just picking up our game a bit and doing it right this time. <3 Also, having sjofn bait fires.

I had to yell at people to git outta my circle a few times. I am very territorial.

The breath doesn't hit that hard on 10, so if there were adds up I just dragged them all in front of her and it was fine. That seemed to help a lot too. That said we *barely* got her to 50% in 3 tries on our best attempt, so I think dps is definitely the limiting factor.

Iron Council is totally fun! To tank anyway.

Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck Ignis. Fuck him! And fuck my OT job on that fucking fight! Argh!

(We killed him tonight but FUCK THAT FIGHT.)

It was fine, yea baby!  :grin:


Have fun doing that one without me though.  :why_so_serious:

Ingis is a snap on 10-man and irritating on 25 since it takes 2 off tanks to really take care of the adds.

It was our first night of trying Ignis, so it took a few attempts to work out all the kinks. My personal favorite is when I blew myself up with a shatter.


"Oh hey guys, just an FYI, don't stand beside those  :oh_i_see:"

I see things like "Ignis is a snap on 10-man" all the time, and I don't really get it - I thnk he's probably the hardest boss of the ones we've done (the first 7, haven't done any watchers yet.)

Are you doing it in Naxx 25+ gear?

We just need to deepz harder, so the fight doesn't take 12 minutes or whatever. That's like our issue on every boss, ever.

If you're up to snitching, there are two mods that are a HUGE advantage to your general raid.

The first is called "RaidBuffStatus" (http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/raidbuffstatus.aspx).

It's a small dashboard that has icons for all of the different buffs that people should have - everything from your standard stuff like AI and Fort, well fed, flasks, checking to make sure no pallies have crusader aura, to personal buffs like mage armor, inner fire, weapons buffs for rogues on your entire raid. It also hooks in with pally power and can point fingers at who is supposed to be keeping the buffs up. If you don't want to track something (like shadow protection) you can just click the icon and it becomes an X and is ignored.

It can send reports as whispers to the responsible people by ctrl-clicking the icon, or shift-clicking to report to raid, or hitting the raid button delivers a full report of what's missing. It's terrific and ALWAYS catches someone. I whisper to tell people to eat the fish feast several times a night. It's little stuff but it all adds up. It's also good for catching rebuffs on the one guy who died.

The second is called "Utopia" (http://www.wowace.com/projects/utopia/).

This has a icon for each type of buff and debuff that can be put on the raid or boss. I use it for both group composition ("We're missing +10% AP. In our raid, so we need to bring either that Enh shaman or a blood DK") and during combat I glance at it ("Warriors are not sundering armor, and we're missing faerie fire on the mob"). Again, little stuff but it all adds up.


I personally think someone with the first addon is critical, the second is just helpful.

I don't think we're ever missing buffs (maybe potions if we've been wiping on shit all night), we don't raid stack though.

Ignis is just a bitch because it's essentially two fights and a LOT OF GIANT GRAPHICS IN THE WAY

Yeah seriously, I can't see a fucking thing in that fight.

Install it and see; you'll be quite surprised. Trust me on this.

With a good off-tank taking care of the adds and healers/casters that pay attention to the flame jets so as to not stupidly get silenced, it's really easy. The adds are the only real x-factor in the entire fight. I was 3/4ths in Naxx10 gear when I went into Ulduar as a tank, and we brought healer alts -entirely- in Naxx10 gear too. We did have a couple DPS completely bedecked in 25-man gear though.

Yeah I already scan through people by hand and I see stuff like missing food buffs all the time. We didn't have shadow protection up for the Auriaya kill this week, too, which I didn't notice until near the end of the fight. Definitely going to look into this.

Aside from being able to see fuck all the entire time, the adds were acting totally stupid threat-wise. I never usually have threat problems, but it was hard as hell to keep the attention of the adds. It wasn't SO bad once they turned molten, because I knew they'd wipe their aggro (or at least seemed to wipe their aggro) once they were done thinking about how they're red golems now instead of grey, so I could taunt or DG them over to a water pool, but it seemed like they would tear off at random while I was trying to lead them into a fire patch.  :angryfist:

Fish Feasts have made people lazy about food buffs.  Swapping from 2h flasks to 1h has made a lot forget to reflask. Particularly if you're in a guild like mine that ran MAYBE 2.25 hours a night, so you just weren't used to doing it before.

Yeah, the adds wipe their aggro when molten. I've heard of the same complaint about random aggro from our tanks on that fight.

After the adds go molten, after they first leave the scorch, if they touch another scorch again, they dump aggro. Learned this painfully in the 25-man version.

Its actually the pre-molten phase where they were acting strangely for us, but I was on the boss himself so I'm not really 100% sure what was going on.

We just tried this for the first time properly and it worked like a charm, thanks a lot.

Which keeper should we start with on normal? I'm thinking Thorim, and definitely not Mimiron, but I'm open to suggestions; thanks.

We ended up doing it differently - just putting the scorches in a half circle around the boss, who we kept stationary. There was a whole side that never saw a scorch that way, which helped to keep the ranged from having to move, etc. The scorches disappear fast enough that you only need 3 spots to drop them, at least on 10.

Hodir is probably the easiest keeper to start on.  Although it looks madly chaotic, it's not really that bad of a fight.
Priority is always to break NPCs and players out of iceblocks.
Don't stand in falling snow.
Do stand in circles of light.
Keep moving.
Get onto the snow drifts.
Win the DPS race.

Thorim, on the other hand...

The first part of the fight is balancing arena vs tunnel groups.  This is also the hardest part.
Next, you have to get people to not stand in lightning.
Then, you have to have your tanks swapping out correctly.
Hopefully your healers are paying attention.  Or maybe your tanks will actually call out when they are taunting.
Finally, you have to win a DPS race, as Thorim buffs himself with a nature damage multiplier that will eventually overwhelm healing.

Our tanks call switches. Plus, aggro indicators on heal frames are <3

Really, our tanks are pretty bulletproof. We're well beyond the days of hoping the tank doesn't up and die. We're totally an endurance guild. <3

Thorim on 10man at least is way easier than Hodir when you get your group makeup right for the arena and hallway.

Also, the pug Uld25 I usually run in is up to Auriya now and holy shit is that fight annoying on 25-man. It's a breeze on 10-man, but on 25 that fucking guardian refuses to not spend 99% of its time pouncing so I keep missing my taunts.

After last night's Mimiron nerf, I think Thorim is now the hardest keeper.  It's prolly a toss up between Fyrea and Mimi, with Hodir definitely the most accessible.

10-man Ignis seems hard to me. 10-man Razorscale is insanely easy for our folks and has been pretty much since the patch went live, we went in two weeks in and instantly ripped up Razorscale and Deconstructor. Ignis continues to be a real puzzle for us. I think maybe it's a DPS problem, since I think we have the pacing and mechanics right.

Ignis is very much (from what I can tell at least) a game of two fights and completely ifnoring the part you're not involved in. Offtank/druid play with adds. Everyone else ignores everything but staying out of flame patches and DPS's the boss. Then it's just healer stress and tank stress.

At least for me healing it, it didn't click until I mentally separated the fights and stopped trying to keep track of the offtank/druid game and concentrated on who needed what healing and where the fuck was ignis facing.

As my guild slowly dies the death of, "Hey guess we should have recruited instead of being a closed circle of folks" I went on a preliminary run with a higher-end guild I apped. (oddly, they raid fewer days and hours than my 'casual' guild did. 4 days a week, 3 hours max.)   Because of this I got to see fights I'd never have seen in the old guild, since we were struggling to do Ignis and Hodir. 

Mimirion is a damn fun fight, chaotic as it is, but I can not see casual guilds that downed Naxx doing it without some more nerfs. (And even then, prepare for half your raid to die to Frogger 2.0, revenge of the bomblings.)  That's a shame, really, because the train and the modeling of the later parts of the instance are great.  The area leading up to the General was the most atmosphere I've seen in a place since Kara, which really jazzed me.   

Hopefully I'll get dragged along for the Yogg fight this Sunday, too.  Then, even if I don't get into the guild I'll have at least seen all the bosses, and partaken in the fights, which is all I'm really after.

As far as i know, ignis does not have any kind of Hard Enrage timer.  So the only problem with ignis in 10 man would be just not having the offtank who is on Add duty getting the adds to the molten state and then getting them to water fast enough for someone to shatter them.   Unless he starts activating them a lot faster as time goes on, you should never really have more then 1 up at once.

I've come to the conclusion that even fairly skilled people in wow lack the most basic amount of situational awareness. I don't know if it's the fact that they personally suck, the quality of the player base has gone down, that the UI is in the way, or that health/mana/useful information is not integrated into the world properly, but we just spent 4 hours wiping on yogg phase 1 because people can't stay out of the god damned clouds. It's frustrating as all hell.

Dang, that's excessive.  I don't think I'd stick around for 4 hours on a single boss these days, did that too much when I was in a "real" raiding guild.

My stacked guild PUG (25 man, 2 nights a week) just got Freya and Thorim down for the first time and it was pretty awesome.  Freya's 3 add spawn caused a bit of trouble because our DPSers are overzealous, but it wasn't terrible. On Thorim our tanks died at around 500k and we managed to burn him down before everyone died. Intense and fun!  Casual is the way to go methinks.

Usually for us there was only a real problem with mind controls running through them.  That only really happens when there are too many adds up, and the dispeller gets overwhelmed.  The key is to get those adds down as quickly as possible.  If there's any more than three dudes up at a time, it's pretty much a wipe.  I know it seems counter intuitive, but making sure there's enough ranged people ensuring those guys die in the middle where they're supposed to and not linger helps a ton.  It's counter intuitive because it means more dps dodging the clouds, but it works.  I swear.

People have been incapable of NOT standing in shit since forever and a day. There's just more shit to potentially stand in as the fights get harder.


"Must, finish, spell cast!" :awesome_for_real:

I got into that Yogg run last night and this was a good part of the problem.  The Mind control part wasn't too bad, but I watched many Moonkin, Locks and the single mage get hit by a cloud as they just HAD to get that cast off to blow-up the mob near Sara.  Nevermind that there were 3 other people doing the same, so they really didn't have to.

The other problem I saw was our ferry tanks were dragging shit right through the clouds, spawning another add.  I think the entire group was getting overzealous, as it both always happened when we only had 2-3 adds left to go on the phase.  We'd still have 2, maybe 3 adds and then suddenly there would be 5-6 and we'd wipe out.

Another possibility is that people have shitty computers/ connections and don't see the clouds soon enough or lag right into them.  That's a fight whose mechanics are not forgiving  of anyone having either.

Sometimes I wish I could see some of this fancy "raid content" stuff (I play in a non-raider guild with an EU schedule on a US west coast server)... but then I read reviews like this, and I'm suddenly glad my 900+ ping self doesn't have to be yelled at for staying in the fire that hasn't even appeared on my screen yet.  :awesome_for_real:


-- Z.

900 ms ping is actually playable as long as it's consistent and you have a decent raid mod running.

And don't mind dying to frogger.

The trick to doing frogger at 900 ms is to try as hard as possible to kamikaze directly into one, which you will miss, as well as the one behind it.  Not hard.

EDIT:

(http://i19.photobucket.com/albums/b190/16509/WoWScrnShot_041809_000902.jpg)

I actually disconnected fully that one.  I'm still better than most of the retards you find in a PuG.

EDIT2:

And that might have been the one where I disconnected right off the pull and got a battle rez, hence the buffs.

Hey, some of us have that achievement! And then we have the rest of the lovable guild.  :heart: :heart:

We're having the exact same problem.  We can pretty much blow through the rest of Ulduar now, but several people just can't avoid the clouds. 

We run into this problem a lot when learning raids. A few people might get hit by various things on our first ever try then never make that mistake again; however for some it takes weeks and weeks of trying before they get it, and some never ever learn and we have to just carry them.  Our first 3 Heigan kills were all done with the same 4 people left standing for example  :ye_gods:

Unfortunately with Yogg you just can't carry people, one screw up and it's over.

Fuck, that does not Bode Well for my guild at all, then.

Having the same feeling. Well we have the keepers to amuse ourselves with for the next month or so; I wouldn't be surprised if Yogg has been nerfed a little by the time we get to him.

Same with us, really. In fact, I'm going to stop worrying about it right now!  :drillf:

We'd have to get through the first 7 fast enough to even have time to try a keeper in a given week for me to even start thinking about semi-worrying about it.

We've started pre-clearing Flame Leviathan with alts and bads, since the Leviathan trash and fight takes 45mins or so to clear, but after it you have a more-or-less straight run at the next 5 bosses. We're going to pre-clear FL and Razor this week, to give us more time learning Keepers. At 45mins for a run, that puts it on par with a quick heroic. While you get less loot per hour than a heroic, the potential loot is much better, and the gauntlet and boss are pretty relaxing to do on a thursday evening or so.

Also, if a keeper was your goal, you could always skip Ignis, Razor and Iron Council, although I guess if your guild is anything like mine (and by judging what you write it sounds like you are uncannily similar) those bosses still hold some upgrades for most of your raiders.

Pre-clearing Flame Leviathan isn't a bad idea at all, except we raid on Tuesdays and Thursdays, so the reset screws it up.

I would be perfectly happy with never doing Ignis again, but SOMEONE insists we need to do it more. :(

If progression through the instance is your goal as a casual guild, then you focus on FL, Xt, Kolo and then start working on the keepers.  If you have extra time during the week, you go back and pick-up the optional bosses.  Bonus being that you'll have picked up enough upgrades to make the optionals a bit easier.

Yogg needs some very hard nerfing for casuals to do even attempt.  The clouds and adds they spawn in P1 are only one tiny fraction of the fight, but that alone will kill a guild who doesn't think raiding is srs bznz.   

Nerfs I see happening for the casual guilds:  Clouds have a smaller radius, cap on the number of adds that can spawn, no more 'three taunts and it's immune' on the keepers, Portals in p2 stay open longer/ don't go away when one person clicks on it, a longer time in the brain cave.

That's about as far as I'll go predicting, since I haven't seen p3 yet.

Trash->Flame Lev takes 45 minutes? You know you can shoot the tower on the left from below, the tower on the right from above, and leaving 1 tower up is very easy, making the only tower you have to 'drive' to the one past the bridge on the north-east (leave the one in the alley on the north-west up). Don't attack guys unless they're coming for you, stick together, and pilot down one side. We pilot down the left edge, bomb the tower from below, skirt across, bomb the tower from above, keep hugging the edge, hard right, kill tower, then back and we're at flame lev. Last pack and then the pull.

Even if you want to kill the 4th tower, hugging edges and only going across when you have to speeds up this section immensely.


We're on Yogg now in both 10 and 25man. We have almost no hope of doing it on either. The movement and attention required is, as I bitched earlier, way beyond most of the people in my guild. And all it takes is one. We're going to focus on sarth+3d, I think.

Yogg is harder than Sarth 3D 10 man?  That's... just fabulous.

My guild has downed Mimiron in 10 man, but we're stonewalled by phase 2 in 25 man.  That's just entirely too much damage to heal.

I was not aware of any of this. Do you need to kill turrets for +1 tower?

We'll still pre-clear because FL+trash is a much bigger timesink than most of the other bosses imo.

I dunno. Some people Paelos and I know have managed to get Yogg down and I've uh, never been terribly impressed with them.

The 10 man group? Yeah they are basically meter-watching tards. They just enjoy the sound of beating their dicks with a hammer for extended periods of time.

EDIT: The truth about the 10 man is bringing in people that aren't drooling morons when it comes to actually learning what they are doing wrong, and going at it vigorously for at least 5 hours a week.

It takes us rather a while even with ignoring hard mode, but we always do an extra pass through the middle part to make sure all the helicopters on the map are dead before we engage, we were having endless problems getting stuck in combat after Flame Leviathan until we started doing it. Maybe they fixed it now, but I'm a little sketchy about trying it just because if we do still get stuck in combat it takes a REALLY long time for people to run manually back to the entrance and zone out and back in. (Can't mount or use teleporters in combat.)

I kinda got that impression when they never got Kael down ever and downed Vashj a grand total of like...once or twice I think.

Bunching the whole raid up and focus firing over vent or setting an assist makes the gauntlet way, way, way faster. My guild tried this after spending way too long clearing that place and it knocked 10+ minutes off the time. The towers and big mobs disintegrate when focus-fired and the little mobs can almost be ignored.

My feral durid got the crazy polearm off General last night, and is now insane.

More Ulduar changes.

XT nerfs? Really?

Too little, too late. May slow the bleeding but won't win anyone back.

Too late for what?  Anyone who's casual and cares is already in ulduar and probably not even on yogg yet, the rest of the nerfs are for hardmodes which is perfect for guilds who've beaten yogg but aren't bleeding edge enough to have done hardmodes.  Who exactly is this too late for because if someone wasn't interested in raiding to begin with it wouldn't really matter would it?

Wat

Everytime they nerf XT it makes me laugh at how "awesome" we were to beat him before nerfs! Same with Kolo. They can feel free to keep nerfing Ignis though.

I don't know if they need to nerf the Mind Control on Yogg's adds AND decrease their spawn time.  That's kind of over the top.  I think one or the other would make that phase pretty trivial.  I guess it's supposed to be trivial, as it's the first of three phases.  But yeesh.

Also, is this hotfix, or next patch?

XT seems relatively easy already, especially since we got three of the normal level achievements last night.  Including the speed one.  And I don't think our runs are normally noted for super high DPS.

It's actually fairly hard to kill xt's heart in heroic difficulty right now, the speed achievement is easier than that since you only need to get the heart to about 25% each time.  My guild had already killed yogg and still didn't have enough dps with 6 healers to kill the heart. Whether some were slacking or not that's still a pretty rough dps check.

Well they already nerfed him like 32 other times before this latest one.

Yeah, the first time we did him, pre-any-nerfs, he was kind of a bastard.

will-kill-everyone tantrum was a definate healcheck, after that nerf he became relatively easy (which is befitting his position in the instance, but still)

I can see a heroic nerf, but light and gravity frequency nerfs? REALLY? It's not like he got grobb level silly about spamming them.

Hotfixed last night.

Yogg went from completely impossible to totally doable for us - it took 6 tries, but we finally got him down in 10man - every single try we got past phase 1 no problem. Something not mentioned is that the clouds move at about half the speed they did before.

You kind of feel robbed on Yogg loot - 219 gear and 2 valor tokens :/

Tried hardmode XT tonight on 10-man. Was pretty rough.  That's a lot of fucking damage to deal with. I think we could've done it easily if we could get away with 3 healers and still break the heart but we were only beating the timer on the heart by like 3-5 seconds tops.

Also, I forgot to take off my fucking high ilevel DPS gear I threw in most of my slots for Flame Leviathan and I tanked both Ingis AND Razorscale with it on before I noticed. Blargh

Too late for those who took one good look at the jump in difficulty and scampered.

Haha, I have done that a few times. I've tanked Kel'Thuzad in frost resist gear like 3 times.  :uhrr:

Yoog with 3 watchers is perfectly doable, the fight isn't much harder it's just a bit more of a dps check. I'd suggest going without hodir or mimiron first.

That's fine with me, it means when the next raid comes out we won't be having to run the entire raid over and over to get the couple nice higher level drops at the end, with all the prior stuff getting sharded.

I still need (real) epic boots :(

Feeling good about stuff. Got Freya down on the 3rd try and made good progress learning Thorim. Not looking forward to learning Mimiron though.

10 or 25 man? If you can do Freya you can do Thorim fucking easily. 100% of that fight is figuring out the group makeups.

P.S. Gauntlet team should be all or nearly all ranged if you can help it at all when it comes to DPS.

10-man.

Our main problem was keeping everyone in the arena alive. Next time we'll probably go with a 4/6 split with 2 healers in the arena. The tunnel healing didn't seem to be very strenuous at any point.

Freya trash can go die in a fire though. Quick question, do the Guardian Lashers heal themselves, or is it triggered by damage to the small adds, or is it random? Our zerg and nuke strategy has somewhat mixed results.

The guardian lashers give a buff to the smaller lashers around them and vice versa. Have one tank take the big lasher away from the group. Burn the big one then aoe the group.

And Thorim we usually have 2 healers in the arena and then 1 tank, 1 healer, 2 ranged in the gauntlet. If you have a hunter or warlock you can expedite the second half of the gauntlet by having a pet go aggro the second mini-boss after you melt the first 3-4 mobs on the stair case (or at least the acolytes). Make sure everyone stays the fuck away from eachother though due to rune explosion.

It takes a bit more work but our gauntlet group just polymorphs the guys on the stair and runs right past them, keeps them poly'd until the 2nd miniboss is down, then they just vanish. (25man).

We use the 4-6 split for 10man, our holy paladin goes into the gauntlet since the arena is mostly aoe heals.

Just a quick question, what kind of DPS/Healing/Gear are you running your 10-man XT hard mode?

My family/friend/casual group is up to Mimi/Freya for 10 man but can't seem to get regular/structured raiding times enough for us to get solid learning runs on Mimi/Freya.

We end up clearing early content (FL/XT/Kolo/Auriya) in a night then drop off focus vs Hodir/Thorim, so I was wondering if it were possible to do XT Hard mode for some easy upgrades

Do you mind giving me your guild name/realm to armory/compare?  :pedobear:

I'm the MT and I'm kinda overgeared at this point for Uld10 since we have a regular Uld25 pug with a couple other guilds. Our OT is usually one of two prot pallies who are more in-line for Uld10 (sporting mostly Naxx10/badge/odd naxx25 piece/Uld-10 gear).

http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Proudmoore&n=Bryce

My guild: http://www.wowarmory.com/guild-info.xml?r=Proudmoore&n=Fell%20Omen

We tend to run two priests (who swap Disc/Holy depending on what we need) and for a third healer we usually have either a resto shammy (Wulffy) or a druid (Caeda) who can swap from feral to resto. One of the priests has a geared holy pally but the entire instance seems to scream "FUCK YOU" to holy pallies so they prefer taking their priest.

Our DPS can change week by week depending on who's available. Between mains/alts we got a boomkin, 2 warlocks, 2 DKs, 2 rogues (both geared out the ass), the mentioned feral druid who is insane (5k+ dps. That's why they're getting nerfed), 1 mage, 1 shadow priest, 2 hunters, and an elemental shammy to pick from regularly. We got a few more people but their work shedules only permit kinda scattered attendance so they can't always go. Gear level is mostly 10man Naxx/Uld/OS/Maly gear, with Valor badge gear and some people having 4-5 Naxx25 pieces since that place is retardedly easy to pug.

XT felt like it'd be really easy if we could do the following:
1. Break the heart with 3 healers.
2. Drop the sparks faster.
3. Not drop voidzones on anyone.

With 2 healers it felt like the damage was just out of reach in being handled. With 3 it'd be pretty easy to keep everyone up, but your DPS need to be pretty good to beat the enrage.

I'm the MT and I'm kinda overgeared at this point for Uld10 since we have a regular Uld25 pug with a couple other guilds. Our OT is usually one of two prot pallies who are more in-line for Uld10 (sporting mostly Naxx10/badge/odd naxx25 piece/Uld-10 gear).


One of the priests has a geared holy pally but the entire instance seems to scream "FUCK YOU" to holy pallies so they prefer taking their priest.

[/quote]

Why do you say that?  We had absolutely no problem getting glory with our holy pally healer; for the 2 healer fights either the resto druid would go moonkin or the disc priest went shadow, but the holy pally always stayed to heal. A good one can keep the tank up solo through near anything, which is very handy on a lot of hardmodes since it leaves the other two healers to cover the raid. You def. want this for freya hard, hodir and very definitely for algalon - high, predictable tank damage phases.

I'm only halfway through Glory in 10 man with my holy paladin, but I've had little to no trouble keeping up so far on healing.

Paladins are great healers in their particular niche. The bitching is that they aren't as versatile and can't stand on their own like priests or druids.

If I had any complaints about paladin healing, it's all the work I have to put into keeping my mana up.

- Learn a boss fight so I know when to use Divine Plea
- Be ready to burn a mana pot
- Try to keep beacon up so I can kinda sorta raidheal, and pray I don't get sniped
- Melee the boss for sweet delicious seal of wisdom procs
- Try to pace my use of Holy Light, so I don't run out of mana

My mana pool is 292xx when raid buffed, and yet I can run out of mana on any given boss fight.  We're not even doing hardmodes on 25 man.

I would also cite ridiculous amounts of damage done to the tank by the bosses as being a complaint.  If a tank doesn't avoid three times in a row, that's 75000 damage over 5-6 seconds.  Holy Light bombing keeps a tank up through that sort of damage, but it's uninteresting, and it runs the risk of running out of mana.

Yes.  Paladins are fine in the sense that their raid slots are not in serious danger, but imagine the hypothetical situation where it's raid time and all of your healers are of a particular class.

Yeah I would be comfortable doing a 10 person raid with just about any combination of 2 healers, except 2 holy paladins. I dunno if new beacon is really going to change that. And yes I know you *can* do it that way. I can climb the stairs by hopping on one leg too.

Having your healers be the same class in any 10 man is probably the best way to hamstring yourself. Can it be done that way? Sure, but it's nowhere near as effective on certain fights.

The exception being a disc and a holy priest; they don't overlap much.

You're never going to say "FUCK, we only have druids today," though. You will if you have only holy paladins.


EDIT: And as a player, I don't find it weird someone with a priest AND a paladin would prefer to heal as a priest if given the choice. Paladins CAN heal every fight in Ulduar, but some of them are WAY more annoying than they should be for a healer like the paladin. Priests are way more flexible.

Just about every fight in Ulduar is a "HA HA, FUCK YOU" to pally healers since Ulduar thinks the two tastes of "massive tank damage" and "massive raid damage" taste great together. The only fights where it's semi-nice to have a holy pally are in the first half of the instance (XT, Kolo, Iron Council, Razorscale in 25-man but not in 10 since anyone can heal that while asleep). Gigantic tank heals and blessings don't add up to a compelling reason to not just take a Disc Priest instead.

Massive tank damage fights are wonderful for holy pallies (I love doing Iron Council with them since their gigantic heals are perfect for Steelbreaker), but just because you can do it doesn't make it fun or easy (easy meaning not teeth-grindingly frustrating). Just about everything else in Ulduar I'd rather have druid HoTs or Priest prayer of healing/shields.

Also Pally healing is disgustingly boring. To quote my friend who plays our sole holy pally: "Gee, do I want the class that has 5000 tools for healing, or the class where I get to play whack-a-mole with the big hammer or little hammer?"

What pisses me off most is how Blizzard seems so fucking dead set on making any additional tool for the paladin extremely gimmicky and annoying. The FoL HoT thing is, so far, the epitome of this. There's no fucking reason for paladin healers to be in the position they are right now, and there is EXTRA no fucking reason they keep having to take it up the ass because their ONE thing they're good at, they're super duper good at, but continue to suck it raw in any other situation because "omg ur so gud at tank heelz," as if other healers can't fucking tank heal if they have to.

Grrrraaaaaah!

It's awesome, I'll post about paladins as my DK on the WoW boards and without fail some other paladin will say, "You used to be a holy paladin, huh." I'm so transparent. :(

It's not like I don't have a list of shattered ex-healers behind my priest. No matter the change, being able to react and adapt to phases or new bosses is a key skill a healer needs.

Do I LOVE when our holy pally is the other healer? Fuck yes. It means I can pay attention to everything and never be concerned the tank might die while I'm distracted. Do I think it's fun for her? Probably not as much as it could be with more buttons and things they could do.

I just don't see how giving paladins a legitimate HoT or a highly inefficient or 6s cooldown based group heal would make the class overpowered. They'd just give them other options they'd rarely use.

My guild is priest heavy and I do 10 man Uld healing on my priest with another priest and a resto shammy with an elemental off-spec.  The only thing that really hurts multi-priest synergy is Prayer of mending.  Unlike hot's which now coexist peacefully, PoM's cancel or "eat" each other if they are cast on or jump to the same target, no idea how the game determines which one stays and which gets canceled.  No idea if this is intentional or simply a bug that's yet to be squashed, but it happens a ton.

There are a few situations where multiple PoM's can somewhat coexist (raid wide damage with the raid spread out or grouped in separate areas), but a majority of the time you are essentially limited to 1 active PoM regardless of how many priests you have.

Spellpower at time of casting. The holy priest's PRoM should stay the duration, even if it only as 1 jump left and a 2sp lower one has 4.

That said, most of the time PROM will hate other similar spells, since they follow the exact same leaping logic. Multiple Priests work well due to group assignments for raid damage healing, though. Even without PROM, you can all use Prayer of Healing on your assigned groups to immediately counter large predictable raid damage spikes.

That said, the priiiiiiiiiiing means it's working!

In my limited observation it doesn't appear to simply be spell power at the time of cast, or number of charges.  I have often accidentally thrown a ProM at the tank (out of reflex) immediately after our other priest who has a slight gear edge on me and 2 piece T7.25 giving his an extra charge and cringed as mine still overwrote his wiping it out completely.  It almost seems like the more recent one gets precedence regardless of the charges or spellpower which is pretty unfortunate if true.

Did they change it (again)?

It was initially "new cast overwrites", then "spellpower wins", and I'd assumed it stayed "spellpower wins", because PW:Shield runs under that stupid, stupid rule still.

In that if anything I have procs for spellpower, and I cast PW:Shield, take a 6k hit, and try to reshield after the weakened soul wears off (less than 1k remaining on shield), I'll get a "more powerful effect exists" error because in theory the current shield would be stronger if it wasn't almost burnt anyways.

I'll have to test with our other priest at some point. I have the gear edge right now, but holy priests cheat spellpower like nobody's business (when I switch specs I gain 200-250 sp :( )

Honestly I'm not too bothered if it overwrites or not. I'll still be chain casting it on someone on CD, and with the amount of raid damage in Ulduar it'll be getting used somewhere.

In uld if you stagger them they tend to be fully used. Mine rarely get used up slowly by bouncing as people take minor damage. It goes ballistic during large raid hits and procs all at once and dies.

But those are the fights I can totally cheat as Disc and whore out rapture for half a dozen 60ish mana PW:Shields.

The only problem with high raid dmg situations where everyone is within range of each other is that since they try to seek out the lowest health nearby target they will often meet up and merge/cancel after only 1-2 jumps regardless of who you start them out on.  Still not a dealbreaker by any means but it would be nice if they just got along like most other healing spells do these days.  Especially since the spell works quite well with multiple tanks all taking dmg and off-tanking is now a requirement in nearly every fight (trash and bosses) for Wrath.

BOO HOO PRIESTS



(That is mostly sarcastic, it is a bummer when stuff like that fights.)

The true whoring begins when you abuse the rapture bug on oblivion, flame jets, scream, tantrum, etc.

God I love disc. With my SP now over 3k, my shields have shifted into ludicrous size. 7k shield for an instant cast plus a 2-3.5k heal is completely broken. Oh, we also beat yogg 25 tonight. Flawless P1 by keeping everyone away from clouds and shuttling mobs in, p2 by killing tentacles within 20 seconds, and p3 by having good tanks. 14 shards!

grats!

Really? Wow. I thought I was doing well with ~2350ish raidbuffed and flasked as Disc. Don't know how I'd make up an extra 600ish SP, even with hardmode gear.

Grats on the shards.

Armory (http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Icecrown&n=Sooth). Haven't done a single hardmode; Only have 2216 without buffs. I'm counting raid buffed and flasked, plus my T8 bonus, plus inner fire, etc.

I'm still missing some key items, like a good weapon, shoulders wrists need updating as well. I desperately need illustration of the dragon soul, and I pug OS every week but so far I haven't won it.

At this point, it's looking like I won't be able to complete the mace until the new content is out. That is immensely frustrating.

You might get a laugh, our first 25 yogg kill dropped this thing (http://www.wowhead.com/?item=45532) and was almost instantly DE'd. Thanks, RNG! Actually, fuck you blizzard for putting a head on the last boss of the end dungeon that is wildly inferior to every single person's T8 piece that they can buy with tokens AND that has a blue gem slot. The best thing that people can say about it is "Well, at least it has a nice model".

Any of the predictable "will barely eat shield" hits do that. I was laughing at Hodir attempts, where I could time it and get 8 shields back. Oh how I love rapture bugs.

Its nice until they nerf prismatic JC gems I guess.

Problem is, pallies are SO GOOD at single target spam healing, that several hard modes on 10man and almost all 25man ones /require/ pally healers.

Yes they're very niche and have zero healing tools, but massive tank damage seems to be the only way to "test" healer competence these days. Algalon 10 is much, much harder with a non-pally healer, to the extent that I have never completed it using anything else. That isn't to say that it can't be done (I'm sure it has been) but it was pretty obviously tuned for this class in mind. This is pretty bad design, since as you correctly state pally healers are not the best at other fights in the instance. But there's stuff like firefighter, freya +3 (25man), IC hard and thorim hard (25man) which scream "spam that Holy Light". The patch changes will make this no longer possible, but I'm not sure how effective pallies will be at expanding from their niche. The class could well become the worst healer period, instead of just the least versatile one.

Ah right, that seems closer to what I would expect, I'm at 1984 SP now in mostly 219 gear (although no tier yet; our Mages Druids and DKs are pimped though...) as someone who doesn't really do 25-man uld. Loving Disc and struggling to find a reason to use Holy. I keep a holy spec of sorts for casual NAxx 25 runs and blowing up the meters on the occasional Naxx-25 I do. Yet for all the insane numbers Holy puts up I feel far less useful than as disc. The ONLY things I miss from holy are Body and Soul and Guardian Spirit, the rest is forgettable.

I guess my other gripe with Holy is that making a good Holy spec is pretty difficult and largely unintuitive. Any sensible holy priest will ignore a bunch of the "core" talents that are focused on GHeal because GHeal is useless at 80. However this leaves various parts of the talent tree really lopsided.


Sucks. I'm really struggling to keep my crit down and haste up with Ulduar gear; there's a real shortage of haste cloth and sp gear in all of Ulduar I've seen so far (up to Mimiron). I lost a load more last night when I moved from the Handbook of Obscure Remedies to the Igniter Rod (which is one of the best-looking items in the game ever, so that's a small compensation). My main hope is that, since most T8 has haste I'll be able to shed crit once I get a few pieces of that.

I feel far more useful in general as disc, but certain fights I feel better as holy (my holy spec right now is entirely for hodir's raid damage)

I tried doing this week's uld as holy until the end (switched back on crazy cat lady), but there were too many times I felt out of control of the incoming damage. Disc gives me a lot more "instantly save YOU, now fully heal YOU, now save YOU" toys.

I find myself waiting for the next round of content because Ulduar just seems long and pointless. I'm going to get an entire set of gear in the next expansion by doing what I like (running 5 mans), and I don't have to kill 13 bosses in one place. I'm getting really tired of any instance that has more than 6 bosses in it. This expansion has put way too many eggs in one basket with the raiding content.

I'm looking forward to the 5 boss raid in the tournament, and the obvious difference in difficulty. I just really hate linear instances where you kill the same shit over and over, but you kill the last boss a few times before everyone gets completely bored.

K9: shedding crit? Why?

My crit to haste ratio is something like 2:1, which is pretty bad even for holy. For holy I'd aim for 1:1 as crit and haste have relatively even weights. For Disc however, playing a priest who tries to maximise PW:S coverage, crit is a weaker stat as PW:S doesn't really benefit from it. I need more haste to increase my throughput, since 7.29% haste is pretty low, and I never have a shaman in my raid unless I'm playing mine. So I'm looking to shed crit in favour of haste as I move from T7 to T8, however, the intervening pieces are all heavily crit-biased, which isn't helping.

Of the ilvl 219 gear that is useable by a healer priest (cloth, no +hit) there are 7 haste items (http://www.wowhead.com/?items&filter=qu=4;maxle=219;ub=5;cr=123:103:16:119;crs=1:1:4273:4;crv=0:0:0:0), and 17 crit items (http://www.wowhead.com/?items&filter=qu=4;maxle=219;ub=5;cr=123:96:16:119;crs=1:1:4273:4;crv=0:0:0:0) in Ulduar. It's not the most balanced itemisation. Why there are 2 almost identical +crit cloth belts off adjacent bosses and no +haste belt, or no wands or offhands with +haste is a frustration.

I'm actually enjoying Ulduar more than any raid instance since Kara myself. The bosses have a very natural progression, and the fact that so many are optional, and the general lack of trash makes raiding more about fun and less about the hassle for me. My guild is very definitely casual, but my Ulduar group cleared 8 bosses (FL -> Thorim) last night for the first time. It seems the best instance in terms of reward vs progression. We're doing 1 new boss a week, and will be clearing the whole place in 2 nights by the end I'm sure. Unlike Naxx where there are long stretches of "fuck me, not more of this" trash, Ulduar seems paced very well.

To each their own though.

At least you don't have tanking gloves with armor pen (http://www.wowhead.com/?item=45310)!  :drill:

Why do you stack so much haste as holy? For most fights in our alt runs, whenever I'm holy about 90% of my healing is renew, CoH, Mending and instant flash heals. Serendipity interacts well with haste, but 99% of the time, the PoH is precast anyways to account for raid damage from predictable sources. I tend to use the same gear for holy and disc, and once I hit the haste cap on disc, I just focus on selecting crit heavy pieces. If I had access to doubles of the same item, I might get a crit gemmed set for disc and an int gemmed set for holy, but that'll be a while coming :S

Seriously, those are so weird. So are the lol no defense rating tanking pants.

Those are for tanks who are overcapped on defense (cough DKs) and want to shift to a better stat distribution. Same with this ring (http://www.wowhead.com/?item=45871) from 10man heartbreaker.  The gloves though, I don't know what to tell you. I guess it's more elegant than giving the boss a 15% chance to drop an abyss crystal.

Assuming your spec'd into Divine Aegis (no idea why a disc priest wouldn't be), stacking crit is the way to go for maximizing it's potential benefit.  I mean for PW:S all you care about is spell power, but assuming you spend your Penance mostly on the tanks when it's off cd divine aegis is great.

Also, the PW:S glyph heal can crit so crit will benefit you there.  Haste will only really help you with lowering the gcd and you need to stack pretty significant amounts for it to be more than negligible.  Plus thanks to the haste you get from casting PW:S, going for haste doesn't even seem all that necessary as disc.

Even as holy now I find myself favoring crit and enjoying it's benefits (increased mana regen, mana free instant cast flashes, better uptime on inspiration, getting even more out of Circle of healing).

The only time I even find myself wanting a bit more haste is if I feel like a lot of my heals are getting sniped, but typically that is just a timing issue and doesn't happen very often with so many tools at your disposal (many instant cast).  Not to mention, sniping usually only happens to a significant degree when there's much more healing available than necessary.

It's impossible to keep PW:S up on everyone in even a 10-man raid without any haste. Since the largest part of my time is spent casting PW:S I need haste to fit penance and PrOM in between PW:S casts. There are no fights in Ulduar where having PW:S on everyone is not beneficial. Also, 1.8s PoH with borrowed time is pretty sick if you need some AoE healing. I'm not saying crit is totally useless, but since I spend most of my time casting PW:S, having haste helps burst heal when needed.

Divine Aegis is such a tiny portion of my effective healing that it's not really worth stacking crit for. I guess if I was doing pure tank healing I would get more mileage, but for raid-healing as disc crit is fairly weak.

For Holy I aim for 1:1 crit:haste. Overstacking either is sub-optimal in my view. Since holy casts so many heals, it's pretty easy to maintain a very high uptime on Holy Conc and SoL even without high crit. You want to keep haste up to improve throughput, mainly though stacking serendipity faster.

That said, Holy is such a wierd mixed bag I could happily concede that there are a bunch of ways to play it well. As an aggressive raid healer I don't find much need for excess crit. For my part I'll stick to disc for most of the time since it's more fun overall for me.

I honestly only spam shield people to prevent expected raid damage. If I can't exploit rapture with a known big hit across the raid, it's not worth it to overspam for me. But I heal funny, and love crit due to DA.

Yeah the pants are actually useful - I'm using them myself. Still kind of odd, but I still haven't found anything worth replacing my Thaddius trinket with yet, so I have plenty of defense to spare.

My guild generally likes Ulduar but what little trash there is, is very fucking annoying after Auriya. We're just coming up against our available raid times a lot. We only have 2 nights tops we can work on Ulduar with our capable players and even one-shotting everything on farm (everything up to Mimiron) we still run out of time a lot on Vezax/Yogg.

The lockout extension is great but that comes with new content that's a boss rush with gear that's a full Tier and a half better than Uld10 gear, and gives badges that can buy gear over 2 tiers better. My guild has been poking at hardmodes but the general consensus is that no one really thinks the hardmodes are fun, or that they're worth doing just to see Algalon.

The Flame Leviathan intermediate hard modes are decent effort-reward.

My guild has cleared 10 man normal, and is working on hard.  We've done pretty much everything up to the keepers, but can't manage to do a single keeper hardmode as of yet.  That should hopefully change this weekend.  We would have done Thorim last week, but we'd lose a couple DPS to the lightning every time we pulled him.   :oh_i_see:  Hodir, not enough DPS.  Haven't tried Freya or Mimiron hard yet, and I'm completely baffled by the idea of doing Vezax hard.

25 man, we can oneshot everything up to Vezax (and oddly, Ignis is still a two or three tries before downing boss as well) but we spent three hours last night working on phase 1 (got it down) and phase 2 (... not so much) of Yogg.  Vezax only took a couple of tries this week, so we're probably three weeks or less from consistently oneshotting him as well.  I'm not certain we'll try any hardmodes in 25 man, other than FL of course.  We do two towers for the pattern, which speeds the run up, as you don't have to run off to demolish those two towers.  We keep kicking around the idea of doing 3 towers, but haven't bothered, mostly to give us more time on Yogg.

Yeah, but assuming your already strapped for time to finish the place, blowing through the first half as fast as possible often seems like a more sensible option.

My 10 man group only does two nights a week, 3 hours max each night and we've been stuck on Mimiron for 3 or so weeks now mostly due to time limitations.

This week we finally got all the other Keepers on lockdown and 1 shot all of them (in the same night/week) giving us a full hour+ to practice Mimiron.  Typically we'd only have 30 min or so left on the second night to try him which really isn't enough.

Even if we get Mimiron down and can 1 shot everything consistently I'm not sure I see us progressing very quickly on General V or Yoggy simply because we'll have less than an hour even on a good week.

I find myself in agreement with Paelos that 10+ bosses in a single raid is getting pretty ridiculous, and although the lockout extension is nice, I'd rather they give more raids with slightly fewer bosses each so there's horizontal choices instead of just extending the trudge through one really long raid out over two weeks.

We're trapped on Hodir at the moment. I think I've finally cursed at our failboaters enough that they're finally NOT getting flash freezed (seriously, our first night on it, we'd have some asshole get flash freezed EVERY TIME). Unfortunately we haven't really gotten to take all our A-team DPSers in there, so even when we're not sucking, our DPS just isn't there yet.

On the other hand, I tank it like a pro.  :why_so_serious:

EDIT: Oh right, I was going to comment on the size of Ulduar. I MOSTLY like how many bosses there are in there, but only because there's hardly any trash in there, but I do see how even once my guild can brute force its way through it, I doubt we'd be able to clear it in our usual two nights, which is unfortunate. On the other hand, I really, really hope they continue on the "less trash, but it requires you to pay attention" model, because it's just so much better that way. We're still dealing with a pacing mechanic, but it's actually interesting rather than "zzzzzzzzzzz AE AE AE AE, next pack" like Naxx or Kara.

We'll Abandon Uludar once the big Argent Arena is released!

Lots of people will. I don't think Blizzard is happy with Ulduar given how quickly they are going to cannibalize the content. In all seriousness, you won't have to even bother with Naxx or Ulduar as a new 80 to be gtg for the tournament. We're basically getting a mini-reset-button 10 months after expansion release. I like the idea of giving a leg up to other toons, and doing it through badges and heroic rewards. However, Blizzard is pretty much admitting that they fucked up the badge system, are giving it a restart, but they aren't fixing the underlying problem. There should still only be ONE SET OF BADGES. The two/three/four badge is vastly inferior to the inflationary system of old. It might take forever, but you could get cool rewards by running heroics. That's very key in keeping the gear gap close for people that take breaks and want to raid, or those that really hated a particular tier of content.

They should also be significantly stepping up the drop rates on all of the old content, so that they actually are a good way to get alts geared fast without having to convince your guild that it would be in their best interest to run you several weeks.  Along the same line, they should have drops that attract raiders to the old content without handing out cutting-edge gear, like (old) recipes at high drop rates, trade skill ingredients, BoA gear (maybe BoA gear tokens?), weekly gold quests (one per wing completion) etc.

Also, nerf the fuck out of the trash.  Seriously, that shit needs to get cut.

I've been saying this forever.  Really helped keep Karazhan and heroics viable until the expansion in TBC.  When Sunwell badges came out, everyone was super pumped, even though some of the crap was 6+ Kara runs worth of badges.

They were once again trying to cater to that wonderful minority of people whose 'achievements' were diminished because all the scrubs could just farm badges for 'equivalent' loot.


Seems to be a running theme, Blizzard screws something up in an effort to make that small part of their base happy.

I'd agree.  They keep a close metric on who's killed what and Ulduar seems to be behind compared to the Classic and BC progression curves.  One of the guys in my guild was discussing it in vent a few days ago, I'll have to find the stats link he was using.  Only something like 7% of all raiding guilds have gotten to the point of attempting Yogg.  That's nutty considering the combination of 10 and 25s out there.   

The instance also seems to be killing a lot more guilds than the previous expansions did, even accounting for the usual summer lull in playing. 

I'm entirely running on anecdotal history here, but uld seems to be following the same crap we saw in BWL. Essentially it's a highly technical raid right after a highly accessible raid. Uld doesn't want you to DPS harder, it wants you to DPS roughly the same as you were, but while paying attention to and understanding a lot of moving parts during said DPSing.

The easy fights in Uld are the ones where the phases are clearly marked, and are essentially the quick gear check fights (XT, Kologarn), the things people seem to get stuck on (at least from personal experiences) are the many moving parts fights. Ignis and Hodir both just have a lot of crap going on you need to pay attention to. Hodir moreso then Ignis, Ignis just likes to pretend he's got a lot going on that's important to everyone.

That and the addition of a few race fights is my main beef. Hodir has no reason to have a short enough enrage to burn you on normal 10. Everyone else has stupidly long enrages (besides old XT), they just tagged a short one onto what should have been a technical fight, not a race.

Anywho, long and short of it: we've seen guilds shatter on sudden introduction of highly technical content before. You waste Naxx, think you're the best there ever was, and proceed to wipe to XT repeatedly. If your guild is based on the mental idea that "we rock, woooooo!", repeated wipes on progression content will murder your guild attendance rates.

Yeah, the enrage on Hodir seems shorter than it needs to be, given all the other crap flying around.

Although at the same time, if he didn't have one at all, we'd probably still be fighting him with four people.  :drillf:

Blizzard overestimated how good and/or devoted the 'average' was.

So without an enrage, he's totally the heigan of Uld. Dance and all.

Pretty much! But there's no pattern and you can't carry people through it. :(

The end result of Naxx was that the designers took it personally. Everyone was stomping the content and raging on the forums how a bunch of one-armed midgets could deal with the raid. They were bitching about a challenge.

The natural response was what we got with Ulduar. "Oh you want a challenge? Fuck you then, here you go."

I say this with the original design in mind, not the constant nerfs that have happened. Think about it. It's a battle of hubris v. ignorance. Nobody is winning because Blizzard should be better than that, but after 4 years they still haven't learned anything when they are hit in the mouth. They react just the same.

EDIT: Then when they actually learn they swing back too far to the other side and set themselves up again.

I think most of the problems (and good things) about each raiding tier Blizzard has released from Vanilla to now has been them trying shit out and seeing what works and what doesn't. It really is like we're beta testing the game for them, but I can't really think of a good way to do it otherwise and find shit people like.

There are also a lot of "better" raiding guilds, many of whom swore they'd quit if they saw naxx25 level difficulty again.

Obviously they have to cater to the masses, but I think some part of keeping just a couple of things (titles/mounts/etc) exclusive helps promote the mystique of raiding.

The sheer fact that world firsts are 'important' and people compete for them is free marketing for them.

I figured it would happen after all the MEW MEW MEW NAXX IS SO EASY whining, to be honest. Those drove me crazy partly because it was totally obvious it was the noob raid, they said it was about a billion times. I can only imagine it was even MORE irritating as a dev.

Even though Ulduar 25 and the 10-man normal mode of the Coliseum provide loot up to 3 tiers better in ilevel, there's gonna be some real "FUCKING CASUALS" whining about the new 5-man.

http://www.mmo-champion.com/index.php?topic=74311.0

Niiiiiiiiiice. Very good patch for your alts and guildmates who are cursed by the RNG gods.

Yeah, I'm really excited about the new five man. It having really nice lewts is icing on the cake for me.

I'm hoping for a good design on the 5 man as well. What I'm really hoping is that they avoid the Magisters Terrace design template and go for something with less annoying trash and no "you got your pvp in my pve" fights.

I liked MgT, even though it was rude to my holy paladin and kind of annoying to tank with my warrior. I did enjoy the howling about the PvP fight from the poopsockers at the time, though.

I was a warrior tank at the time and I hated the place. It was also back in the OMG CROWD CONTROLZ hayday that made putting together any random group of classes an exercise in 'doh. It was loaded with pull after pull after pull of caster groups that were exactly the same, and the pvp fight which made bringing a tank completely pointless even though you needed it for every other fight.

Today I could see the pvp thing as less annoying because of dual spec. It still wouldn't be fun though. Also I hear the first fight in the new 5 man is...

Jousting. Ugh.  :oh_i_see:

I'll give you that there the trash was way, way too repetitive, but I really enjoyed tanking it as a warrior.  IIRC, I really only 'needed' one CC.  I range-tanked one caster with spell reflect and kept the other four from killing the healer with thunderclap/cleave.  There was always some shit to dispel with shield slam and plenty of opportunities to shield bash.

The PVP fight was a lot less annoying once you knew how to use /target macros to figure out what the enemy comp was before the first pull, so you'd know if you should leave and try for a better composition.  If you went in before you put the group together you could even recruit classes based on the comp.  It was a really fun fight when it actually went right.

Meh, other then maybe having a mage or rogue or hunter to sap / sheep one of the adds, you really didnt usually need massive croud crontroll to deal with those packs.

If anything, that dungeon was an awesome way to train people how to LOS pull, and not be a dumbass and let the mobs actually come around the corner so the tank could get aggro on all of them before unloading with threat.  People learned real fast that when i said i was going to LOS pull a group, they didnt to anything unless they were to CC a target, because if they pulled something when it was incoming, i generally let it kill them before picking it up.

It is.. AND it's so buggy it causes you to crash when you win from what I've read.  Awesome.  I wonder if it also has the usual jousting problem of "you are too close to do that" followed by the mob warping around randomly.

The designers can cram jousting right up their narrow asses. This expansion will only be remembered for the shitty abortion that was vehicle combat.

I quite enjoyed the arena style fight in MagT, personally, although there were a couple enemy lineups that were a lot harder than the others. A 5-man like that *should* be hard, though.

Yay for shoehorned mechanics.

The new 5man is terrible.

Not because of the loot - fucking everyone has alts now, and an easy way to gear them is fucking awesome (and any hardcore that cries about it is a retard). I for one love being able to gear my new shiny warlock alt without having to do naxx25 again.

The actually instance, however, is worse than naxx25. In addition to lul vehicles it's short, has shitty fights and has an extra long RP sequence at the start (wonder why I never ran CoT? Yeah). It's also the most efficient badge farm (on normal even), and so will be  run repeatedly by groups of the people getting their conq gear.

It's bad content. MGT was hard but fun. This is... neither.

Time to unload your abyss crystals too; since even normal mode is a 10 minute fountain of epics.

certainly makes berserker a less annoying enchant now since it requires a fucking fountain of epics to make.

Phunked, could you provide some more details? How are the fights shitty? Too easy? Too hard? Annoying?

You seem very angry but besides vehicles (which I don't mind after seing FL) and the zone being short (which is actually a plus imo) I don't realize what's wrong with it.

The new 5 man isn't even close to done yet in terms of bugginess, so that is obviously causing ppl headaches atm.

I don't really mind the jousting that much when it's the one you can group and gang up on the mobs.  It's only annoying when you have to do all those solo duels, not because it's hard (I'm at the point now were I can win all seven duels in a row without having to use the self heal once, so fuck you 'in combat' bug) but because it just takes too long to do it.  It's still not half as annoying as that fucking 'kiss the frog' quest.

A macro is your best friend for that. Frankly though all the "Fetch me a sword from the other side of the world!" quests suck balls.

Both of those quests are god awful. Theres no excuse for it.. Really, I have to travel the entire diagonal length of a whole fucking continent to do a quest.. REALLY?? Is that supposed to feel 'epic'? And whats more is, I find it impossible to believe that when they were writing that quest not one single person thought 'well, thats alot of travel, thats pretty annoying, I would really hate that shit if it were me..'

I had quit out of wow after the Naxx debacle and just came back a couple of weeks ago into a semi-casual guild that had just downed Yogg. I actually quite enjoyed Ulduar, given that I havent had to go through the entire learning curve. I think Mimiron, XT, and Yogg are all reasonably well designed and fun encounters, the first time through. But, after now more than one kill on every boss in there it just feels.. lacking. I still remember killing Ragnaros and Nefarian and even Vashj and Kael Thas were pretty memorable. But BT, Sunwell, Naxx25, and Ulduar have all felt pretty dull, overall. Maye I've gotten older and after 10 years of MMO's its time to hang up my hat.. And the Coliseum certainly doesnt look like itll be a cure for boredom..

Ok.. back to lurking.

The actual kissing was only part of the problem.  I have the macro, it still just takes forever to fly out there and takes forever and a year for the stupid princess to spawn even using the macro.

Those princess quests remind me of the suck ass TBC cooking dailies.

You know what sucks worse than doing those suck ass TBC cooking dailies?

Doing them a year later on your DK because you want that fucking Chef title and need the recipes only those quests drop.  Fucking Kibler's Bits.

I'm right with you. They're just about bearable with an epic mount, because you can afk-autopilot to them in a couple of minutes. Without an epic mount they are unbearable

The weapons-fetching quests are really just about the worst that WoW designers have ever shoveled out the door in terms of lack of imagination + tediousness. Right up there with the shredder pages. Just stupid. I can think of ten tedious standard quest templates I'd rather have endured than have the same assholes tell me to fetch the same fucking stupid sword again and again.

It would be Broiled Bloodfin for me.  Literally the only thing I need to get Chef.

Reasons it sucks (non-bug related. I imagine those will be fixed). Spoilers below. Don't read if you don't want to know.

1. The instance starts with a 4minute (yes that long) RP moment ala Arthas in CoT. Not skip-able. This is fine, the first time. Or ten. But you're going to be doing this till your eyes bleed because of the well itemized loot, badges, etc. You sit there, and listen, or better yet, half the group AFKs and you come back to a dead body. Do they not realize that you can only in the mountains for so long?

2. The trash is low. The bosses are three. Sounds good right? The actual fight mechanics are pretty bad. It's like giving you back the ulduar tier in 5 man glory. The first boss is a vehicle fight on the jousting mounts. My problem with vehicle fights is that they're almost always exactly the same (not even small variation in group comp, because every member has the same skills) and they don't go any faster. My entire guild hates FL+4 for this reason: it isn't any faster now than when we first did it two months ago.

3. The bosses themselves are bland and boring. MGT had interesting mechanics (loved the 5s team, the mini TK event at the end, etc). Here, there's a boss that has the Yogg mechanic (second boss) where you don't look at him while he casts. That's about all that's new. There's a guy who summons an old boss (ala memory) for you to fight. That's awesome. Heroic hogger? This is how they bowed down to the casual QQ about upgrading level 60/70 content to 80 without having to design new fights.

4. There's a 5s team of the opposite faction. They're about 5x easier than the MGT version.  Much easier.

5. The black knight is the last boss. He summons two adds (read: you kill 3 bosses here - the two faction leaders then him). It's amazing. The guy is a stock DK - does disease, sets up damage, etc. Can you 5v1 my DK?  Can you do it 3x? Now you win!

Thanks for the heads up. None of the things you describe seem to bother me, except the RP scene.

The RP scene strikes me as "grr, annoying", but I can live with it.  Everything else I'll want to see to see how I feel, but nothing triggers burning intuitive hatred just on hearing about it. Well, maybe jousting.

I just hate seeing recyled content. I really look forward to new mechanics. If I can describe something as  "take yogg's stare add a bursty tank thing a la thorim and that's it" it frustrates me, because they can make new and innovative content (for those who think it's all been done before, it clearly hasn't since they do add new mechanics at times). Just shoddy, in my opinion.

I think there's a place for nostalgia, and the summon-an-old-boss fight is welcome. I don't have much of an opinion one way or the other on fight mechanics on the other fights, but the "LOL its Van Cleef!" fight is a total win in my book.

Yep it sounds like it will be fine once you get past the first fight. Hopefully that will be toned down as well. Although now I have to learn how to joust since I've never done it once.

They've never recycled VC. So sad too.

Deadmines was merely a setback

I feel the same way, but honestly MgT was the exact same way.  First boss was just a rehash of Warlord Kalithresh(sp?) from Steamvaults, the second boss was just a mini-Curator, the thrid boss (5v5) was actually new but had plenty of issues that we've already touched on, and Kael was an almost carbon copy of phases 4 and 5 from his fight in The Eye.

I hated MgT for the most part but a lot of that was due to things like my class/spec at the time, my server, and having terrible luck with usually having the rogue, MS warrior, and shaman in the 5v5 fight most times.

Kalithresh and Curator were two of my favourite fights in TBC though, and the versions in MgT were well tuned and sufficiently different to be interesting.

The only upside to all this is that Jousting will probably be exhausted before the launch of Icecrown.

Back on Ulduar we fiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinally killed Hodir, and got the 'nobody gets flash frozen' achievement on the kill attempt. Although to be honest, I'm not sure we could actually beat him in the enrage time without getting that achievement with our dps where it is if we're packing 3 healers, and I'm not sure our healers could keep up if there were only 2 of them.

The main trick to Hodir (dps wise, aka beating the enrage) is to prioritize the mage NPC.  His bonfires are great for casters so they can nuke w/o interuption and not build stacks of frostbite, plus having and maintaining as many stacks of the singed(?) debuff is crucial to maximize your dps.  In my 10 man group we even went as far as having the caster dps focus on Hodir 100% since our mele dps could free the NPC's so fast and effectively after flash freeze.  (They would wind up a shadowbolt/fireball/etc and the NPC would be free before they finished casting half the time.)

In 10 man the mage is the one farthest to the right at the start and then you just mark him with a raid icon after freeing it the first time.

The only exception to this would be if you have no caster dps I guess, but that would be quite the unusual group make-up.

I probably should mention that we usually have at most one 'caster' DPS character on a given raid.  :grin:

We were prioritizing the mage NPC, but it doesn't help our hunters that much. The fire is nice to stand near, of course, but the singed thing doesn't help them at all.

Are they not Survival spec then?  Pretty much all 3 hunter specs now get a significant portion of their damage from spell damage, with Survival getting the most with Explosive shot, Black arrow, and Serpent sting.  Marks and BM aren't far behind in the spell damage department either with Arcane shot and Chimera shot.  This is one of the main reasons armor pen is less appealing for hunters than it should be.

Although it wouldn't benefit them as much as it would a pure caster, I'd imagine the benefit of the singed debuff wouldn't be a trivial amount either.

What NPC did you end up priortizing over the mage? Sounds like you developed an interesting strategy.   :grin:

We prioritized the mage heavily, since at the very least the fire lets the healers stand and cast during frozen blows.

It's just a question of keeping our DPS high enough, since it's a bit harder to keep the other dps inflating buffs on the melees.

We kept prioritizing the mage (and priest as the 2nd choice to help with dispels), since the toasty fire buff was important for our pally healer. I ended up also having one hunter (the BM one) just completely in charge of de-freezing the other npcs after the mage was loose, that seemed to help as otherwise the dpsers just sort of seem to assume someone else will do that.  :oh_i_see: The other hunter *is* survival, but I think we didn't realize he could apply the singed stuff. I also think I probably didn't adequately communicate how good it is to stand in the starlight things since I didn't notice people really going after them heavily while I dragged the big guy around.

Really our strategy was "Thorgrim (me) yells at people until they stop failing at flash freeze".  :grin:

Did you guys use any FR gear? We found one piece to be handy for taking the edge off frozen blows. Having an OT who can dual-spec and do good DPS is also a huge help.

Yeah our OT's fury suit is not there yet I don't think. I believe some of our dps was wearing a piece or two of FR - I know the mage was.

Yeah, we have the same problem as our two best tanks aren't really great in DPS offspecs. Our DK tank does 3K DPS in tank spec anyway, so he's my preference.

We're using one piece of FR gear (ring or boots are best generally) plus FR auras and it really helps cut down the frozen blows damage which is worse than pre-nerf tantrums, and a bitch to learn to heal through.

The key to hodir is actually, for all roles, intelligent management of the stormpower buff.

The crit increase is best on classes that crit a lot (mages, moonkin) but making sure that all your DPS have as close to a 100% uptime pretty much doubles people's DPS. This is pretty much how you can get to doing hardmode also, so it's best to start learning now. You might want to give the first one to the tank as well, so that he/she doesn't have issues holding threat over 11k rogues.

This.

Storm power > Toasty Fires > Moonbeams.

- Get Storm power to the tank asap, then get it to your caster dps as fast as possible.
- Caster DPS should try to get storm power, then stand near a toasty fire
- Healers should try to stay near toasty fires, or maybe edge into moonbeams if possible while staying near a toasty fire.  Storm power is useless to them.