f13.net

So one of my friends got rid of her old account due to some interpersonal drama and had to start a new one, on top of which she's developed some health problems and is stuck in a country where she hardly speaks the language. Net result, I'm doing my best to powerlevel her and spend a lot of my WoW time lately just ripping through instances with her. It's faster than questing, more fun, and more profitable.

I never got much past 50 in the old vanilla days, and now that she's hit the high forties we're doing a lot of the bigger instances that I have no real experience with. Stuff that nobody bothers to LFG for anymore, like LBRS and Scholo, but which nevertheless give a hell of a lot of XP to someone who's being zoomed through by a level 80 pally in (welfare) epics.

I have to say these are, on the whole, much better dungeons than the ones I've done in Outland and Northrend. We did LBRS tonight without bothering to look at any sort of guide, and it was the first time in a long time that I got a sort of "dungeon crawl" vibe from anything in the game. Sure, part of it is that it's largely new to me, and that being high level it's all sort of a Diablo-esque killfest for me, which is nice.

(SM Cathedral is a rather boring little instance, unless you do the whole thing in 5 minutes by killing every last mob in a single giant ridiculous AOE-fest. God I love being a paladin.)

Anyway, that aside, I like the fact that these mostly-abandoned "fuck LFG I'll just go to Outland" instances are so large, with more than one way to go, and the chance to go off the tracks by jumping off a bridge or something. It gives them much more of the aforementioned dungeon crawl feel, as opposed to being just a big hallway strewn with a chain of trash -> boss -> trash -> boss. Blood Furnace, I'm looking at you.

I don't really have a point here except to complain that I'd like more of that feel, and ask what Northrend instances I might have missed that have some of it. I don't PVE enough to know that there aren't some out there. Maybe they decided those old instances took too long to complete, like Blackrock Depths which is just fucking absurd even if you like that sort of thing, but a dungeon doesn't have to be a six-hour slog just to give you a feeling of choice as to how to attack it.

/ramble

The main problem was they took for-freaking-ever to run. BRD at level 60 could easily take 3-4 hours even without a wipe. There were a couple quicker runs (dead side Scholo could be done in under an hour) but most of those old world dungeons are really really looooooooooooooong. And heavy on trash besides. Sometimes there are pacing issues, too, like Scholomance - here's an hour of trash, then almost all the bosses crammed in at the end.

The only instances I can think of that hearken back to older ones might be nexus, and maybe Gundrak a bit. With Gundrak you have 2 entrances so right there you get a bit of a choice what to do first. The nexus I must have gone through a few times before the "right" way became obvious.

I'll agree that none of the WoTLK or TBC instances share the sprawling and epic feel of instances like Stratholme; but then back in the day many of these places were too big and were painfully slow to clear. Strat was actually one of the better ones, BRD and Mara I didn't see the end of until I was 80.

They could do instances on the same scale and have them go by a lot quicker if they just cut down on all the god damned trash. I mean there's just no reason that a room full of 50 zombies couldn't be a room full of 25 zombies. Although for my current purposes all the trash is great for XP farming.

Someone doesn't remember vanilla Scholo. <3

Fucking trash fest of doom, with a payout of six minibosses with a 5% chance to drop a green set item. Fucking place.

The newer instance designs just feel like new construction. Even the nerubian places just LOOK like they're built in the last 10 years, while Scholo and the like feel like invading hostile ancient locations and uncovering shit. BRD was some bullshit however. Fucking torch room pre nerfs with your only AE being a holy paladin's lame consecrate <3

The dungeon crawl is fine, once, maybe twice.


The 7th, 12th, 32nd time, because someones set piece hasn't dropped, ever? Yea, fuck the dungeon crawl.




If blizzard wanted to be REALLY awesome, they would somehow create a system of randomized generated crawling dungeons, that only took an hour AND weren't just CoH warehouse full of mobsters revision 5.61. Keep dreaming though.

I hate them all passionately.  Getting forty assholes geared for MC back in the day meant a lot of Strat/Scholo/UBRS runs.  Fuck the mother fucker who thought that trash was a good idea.  Fuck him in the face.  He knows who he is, too.

Who is that badass looking samurai man in your avatar and why does he want me dead?

That's Yamamoto Kansuke.  He wants you dead because you fucked with Kai.

I still think BRD is the best instance in the game.

Why do you hate freedom?

There's too much influence in EQ and others on the old world dungeon design. Things have gotten a lot better but there's still some painful grinds.

Fuck the old forever-long dungeons right in their ear. I liked how TBC split those old dungeons into seperate instance wings. Want a quick run? Just do Hellfire Ramparts. Want it longer? Do Blood Furnace right after.

Northrend has kind of a mix, some are quick (AN, UK) or simple (VH), while others are longer (Nexus, Gun). Once you're 80 and running them as heroic, there are a couple paired close together and similar in theme, so you can run them back to back for a longer experience (UK/UP, AN/OK, DTK/Gun).

I don't really have a problem with the 'few packs of trash - boss - repeat' system they've got going on. I find the old world dungeons were great to run ONCE while the Northrend ones are far less annoying to FARM. And since Blizz's design theory is 'repeatable content' we get smaller, faster zones. In order to really justify making a long, trash filled BRD style dungeon viable now, they'd have to put a couple quests there for endgame gear, or give the bosses hardmodes for gear (not just achievements) or something. In otherwords, treat the zone like a raid zone except requiring only 5 people. Casuals have asked for this numerous times over the years, they've gotten 10 mans. Not sure they're going to lower that bar any time soon.

I liked the old dungeons for the experience with a good group learning it all the way through and finishing it.  What I didn't like was how quests would start and end randomly in the middle of the dungeon so if you wanted to get all of the quests done, you had to run the dungeon multiple times or get everyone in the group to wait for you while you went to the other continent to turn a quest in to Thrall, get it's follow-up and then come back to the dungeon.  Not to mention "I need my T0.5 helm and need to run Scholo again!" that turned into everyone hating life for having to run the trash-fest that it was with poor loot chances.

The main issue I have with dungeons as the are crafted now is how homogenized the experience is.  It's on rails and my run is identical to the last time I ran it and also the same as the next guys run.  There is almost no room for experimentation or optimization.  Seem like about three expansions from now it will just be a slot machine that requires five characters to activate.  Then you move to the next one and do it again.

I had the best and worst times in wow in BRD.  When I cleared it the first times with my friends and we vowed to do it without a guide, it was a fucking blast.  Grinding out shit for Molten Core would be the worst.  However, I would still nominate it for one of the best put together/cool feel dungeons, losing only to Shadow Fang Keep in my mind.

While Mauradon was a terribly long dungeon, I always liked the stop point in it.  PUGs would usually drop out after the first half, but my guild groups would always push forward to princess.  It gave it more of an epic feel. 

I'd like to see a raid-style 5man dungeon with the size of LBRS but with 3-4 exit points after a few bosses each.  Instead of "wings" per se, each segment would be 45-60min but would ramp up in difficulty. 

It's worth noting that all the dungeons in question (UBRS/Strat/Scholo) were originally 'raid-able' and all allowed more than five people.  I  remember some of the original server lulz were over screenshots of people zoning into them with ten or fifteen people.  Of course they were slightly tuned higher then.  And they were nerfed in one of the first patches. 

So it's never really been clear to me what the intention was with those dungeons with respect to their place in difficulty.  Maybe it wasn't very clear to them either.  But if they were meant to be raids, then the trash is at least explainable. 

Still, fuck trash, and fuck people who like trash.  Right in the ear.

You could make an interesting and less-linear dungeon with no higher trash-count than one of the recent monster-hallways, easily. But then you probably wouldn't have to kill every single last piece of trash every single time just to get to the final boss and farm him for whatever, and I don't think Blizzard wants that.

The trash in Ulduar is fun.

If they made zones completely trash-free then people would start calling all the bosses on the way to the REAL boss trash.

So?

Then you'd be bitching that those bosses need to be removed and we're left with 20ish Vault of Archavon style zones.  Which would be fun for oooooooh a week or so.

Yea, I was gonna be snarky.  But instead, I'll go with you're prolly right.  Some people will say that.  But it's completely beside the fact that trash is still dumb.  Aaaaand, I don't really think it would be as you say for people who are not retarded.

The thing is you may enjoy dungeon crawls.  But it works both ways.  Why the fuck does EVERYTHING have to be a god damn dungeon crawl.  It sucks.  If it were only one or two, okay.  But jebus.  Every single instance I've been in since EQ LDoN has had bullshit mobs designed to 'pace' me.  Fuck that.  Even caves have trash.  It's enough.  And I think they're finally start to sort of get away from it, even if only a little.  About time if you ask me.

The whole 'divergent paths' thing is also mostly a load of shit in the end too, since the player base will find the most efficient path after everyone has run through the place a couple of times.


Steam Vaults being a good example of that. You can theoretically, tackle the place a variety of ways, different routes and all that jazz. After you do it a few times though, the novelty and mystery are gone and the only fun to be had, is finishing the place in record time and not getting your tank cloak, again.  :oh_i_see:

Nexus has the whole divergent paths thing going too, kind of. But if you don't go the most efficient way, the group just yells/calls you retarded.

Well, to be fair, who knows how long the Ulduar trash will still feel fun. There IS an amusing level of OH JESUS WHAT IS THIS TRASH DOING NOW HALP though. <3

If you like the horror things with the eleventy billion HP you can simulate the feeling by slamming your dick in a sliding screen door.

Will you forgive him again when he sells this account?   :grin:

I always liked LBRS, actually. But Scholo and Strat at 60 were a fucking punch in the nuts, for sure.

If you want a bit of the openness and you've got a couple of 80s to help out a 70ish character, Karazhan certainly had some of that old-world dungeon crawly feel to it. Kara might be the best job they've done in the game at balancing trash, bosses, some dramatic pauses and changes of tempo, and a few choices about where to go next.

ZG might also qualify.

Outside of the volume of trash in certain areas, I'd agree.

I really liked doing Kara and never got tired of it provided I wasn't escorting a bunch of bads that would inevitably move during flame wreath or cross beams.

I thought ZA was a better raid than Kara.

ZA didn't have too much trash really, although as a whole instance I liked Kara more.

Something I'm liking a lot about Ulduar, and something that I think should be used more, is the layout of the bosses in the sense that many are "optional". The only mandatory bosses are Flame Leviathan, XT-002, Kologarn and Auriaya (not sure as I haven't been past here). Alng the way with the first 3 mandatory bosses are several optional bosses. I think this form of highly-branched dungeon design is a good thing, and means you can add bosses of varying difficulty without having too many cock-blocks so long as you ensure the mandatory or gatekeeper bosses are some of the easier ones in the instance.

Kara is about the best paced dungeon they've released outside of ZA. ZA is fun overall but the trash is boring or irritating. Most of the trash in Kara was pretty fun (AoE pulls in ballroom, mana fiends+wyrms, curator wannabes) or at least properly challenging without being a royal pain in the ass. Naxx trash is -completely- forgettable in every single way. Gather up, AoE, done. For -everything-.

Hell, Nightbane and Netherspite are more complicated fights than most everything in Naxx AND Ulduar. Could you imagine if Kara was retuned for 80 and re-released now? Even if it was tuned for players in level 80 blues I think we'd hear screams for nerfs on Nightbane/Netherspite/Aran.

I never found Nightbane to be very complicated - there are a LOT of 2 phase bosses of similar complexity in WoW. XT is basically the same as Nightbane, for example; phase 1 kill boss phase 2 kill adds repeat. Netherspite I am with you, though I don't think it is especially more complicated than, say, the construct wing bosses other than Patch.

Never did ZA.  There was kind of an elitist attitude about ZA on my server.  Both of my characters were easily geared for it, but it was serious business.

The only problem with ZA was it was frankly a little too hard to progress straight out of Kara into it. We had to farm a lot of badges to get the higher Sunwell-ish badge gear and stuff before we started seeing any success in there. And then they nerfed it just as we were really starting to do better so it turned easy.

This was the story for my guild too. Walking in to ZA you had Nalorakk as a significant Tank/Healer check for guilds in Kara/Crafted/Heroic gear. Without badge gear it would have been impossible for the majority of 10-man guilds to make any dent in ZA.

The only slight downside to ZA was that it was pretty short. I realise that was part of the point, but it didn't feel as epic as the bigger raid zones. On the plus side, the ZA quests were nicely done, and offered nice rewards. I don't know why Blizz gave up on raid quests and reps, as I feel that they offer a nice small sense of parallel progression; the Violet Eye being the example of a perfectly done raid rep.

Netherspite is easy.
- Have tanks trade off red/green beam
- Have two ranged trade off blue beam
- One healer on blue beam person
- One healer on raid
- One hybrid helping to heal raid as necessary
- Don't stand in anti-shiny
- Run to windows or run out of nether breath, whichever strat you were using


Nightbane isn't terribly complicated
- Don't stand in shiny
- Melee must stand on the side of the dragon
- Tank has to be good at picking up dragon on landing (alternatively, don't have your mage pop a manastone on landing)
- Don't stand in shiny
- Have a warrior tank it.  Or bring a shadow priest, and beat him until he l2fearward.
- Gather up adds and kill them with great vigor.

Nalorakk was very much doable with Kara gear.  I was in a 10 man group that managed to get 12+ bears in badge/kara gear.  Only the prot paladin had a piece of T6, and that was the trash mace drop from Hyjal.

By comparison - Hodir
- MTs must swap on Frozen Blows beginning and end (you can get away with a druid or dk tank in frost resist gear for the entire fight in 10 man)
- Snowflakes are bad, run
- Perform two actions, move to remove debuff
- Move further to remove stacked debuffs
- Watch for the freezing thingy, move by shiny on floor, move on top of snow
- Stand in the shiny that the NPCs cast
- Pray you live through Frozen Blows
- Free up anyone who gets frozen

badge gear and kara gear were not the same thing.

My point was more that we did Nalorakk in Kara gear initially, and moved up to doing 45 minute runs of the first four bosses when we were ZA/kara/badge geared up.

I don't think anyone is trying to compare Netherspite to Hodir. It would be best compared to something like Hex Lord, if you really wanted to make wierd comparisons.

I was trying to compare complexities of the fights, not outright compare them as examples of a "type" of fight.

Hodir is a very technical fight, your success is based on successful execution on the part of everyone in your raid.  And not just "don't stand in shiny" type of execution, but "don't stand in this or you'll get beaned in the head for 12k damage, do stand in that to increase your dps and we need that, do stand on top of that but only after it falls down, pop healthstones/potions/mitigation during frozen blows to help out healers.  Oh, and don't forget to move every 5s or you'll die horribly.  Plus, bring a priest to dispel magic, or bring a very sad paladin to do it one at a time."

Malacrass should be compared to Moroes, if anything.

The only thing Malacrass should ever be compared to is a stab in the yans with a rusty knife.

Newbie update: Ripping through Scholomance seems to be THE way to powerlevel someone from 45 to Outland. The other instances in that range tend to be too sprawling and too patrolled for really efficient farming, but in Scholo I can grab a whole room, AOE it down, and start gathering up the next while she loots. Between greens, runecloth, blue recipies, and the BOE pieces of the old tier zero sets there's healthy AH money to be made too. She's level 52 now and has more money than I do.

 :awesome_for_real:

Scholo is a farmer's paradise to be sure. Full clears netted me 150g a shot as a warrior.

Its really about a balance of lore/setting and playability.  The old dungeons were heavy on the former, and the expense of the latter.  In fact, Lich King is the first time I've felt like I have a chance at doing max level content with non-guild mates and still have a shot at having a good time.  I still have the occasional just plain terrible group, but I'd say I have a least a 75% success rate.  Compare that to vanilla WoW, or even BC, where the thought of doing pick ups in those dungeons just made me log off and do something else.  The new dungeons ARE a little ho hum compared to the old ones in terms of feeling, but I've also yet to be pushed to the same sort of rage that I would in some of the older dungeons. 

The new ones scream: Oh hai, I am a dungeon, please come complete me for fun and profit.  the old ones scream: Haha, you are gonna spend 3 hours here and your group isn't even going to kill the last boss.  For christ's sake, BRD wasn't so much an instanced DUNGEON as it was a instanced NPC CITY!  Thats awesome in its own right, but it doesn't make for a very good experience.

The other thing to take into consideration is the drastic changes in game mechanics.  Before classes were super pigeon holed.  Paladins were Holy, druids were resto, your tank was a warrior, almost 100% of the time.  Paladin tanks ran into big time mana problems, and druid itemization was just so bad that feral was not really viable except in some specific circumstances and/or by people who spent an enormous amount of time acquiring JUST the right set of gear.  Now warriors, paladins, deathknights and druids can all easily tank any instance in the game.  There isn't a huge difference between them in effectiveness given = player skill level.  Now all these classes have AoE tanking abilities as well.  Before you were going to want to bring some CC to ANY instance, and you also wanted to bring a warrior you knew well and weren't worried about.   

It isn't just that people are better at the game now, its that they've made it a hell of a lot easier.  Hell, I pugged Heroic Halls of Lightning today for the heroic daily and we went start to finish in 25 minutes.  Given the old world instances at level 60, I don't think there was an instance in the game I would have expected to pug in 4 times that.

Its such a radically different game now than it was then.

wut?

All I'm saying is that if you take every trash mob out of Kharazan, then lots of problems with TBC are insta-solved. 

-Splitting up your 25-man raid with 5 guys left to pug?  No biggie, it's a loot pinata now.
-Grueling 4 hour clears on pre-nerfed kharazan drilling explosion size holes in your guild?  Pfft.  There's no trash now.  Wheeee.
-Key requirements shooting your guild in the dick?  Meh, it's easy now, just go do it noob.

Now expand our little philosophy to SSC, and pretty much all the problems with TBC are solved.  In fact, I think it would have been pretty awesome.

I understand that living in a WoW with no trash is a pipe dream, but the whole 'pacing' dungeon-crawl bullshit is just insane.  I think what I've seen of LK strikes a pretty good balance, but it is still trash heavy imo. They seem to be slowly ramping up the content difficulty, and that's fine.  YMMV.

Average trash pulls between bosses right now is what, 4-5?

The longest trash pack I can think of off the top of my head raid wise would be the crap before Patch. And that's mostly pacing due to the lack of crap between Grob and Gluth.

Entrance -> Raz or Entry -> Patch are probably the longest, although it's debatable which is the most unenjoyable.

Raz sucks the most.  Whirlwinds of melee death + immune-to-everything DKs where you have to keep reminding people to dispel because they keep putting it up ("I did and it doesn't work!" "Use the AE one you knob, and spam it.") are much bigger headaches than a few Aboms that stun and some mildly annoying AOE packs.

The military wing in general could use less trash, really. Even after Raz there's an awful lot of trash between bosses in that wing.

It just needs another boss!

I dunno - I remember running BRD in beta on my night elf prot warrior. I witnessed the first ever drop of the epic hammer that the king in there drops, and lost the roll on it to a holy paladin (hah).

They were pretty epic in beta. One of my favorite instances in classic era was Sunken Temple. Something about the whole rock puzzle, and the dragons all over the place - it was neat!

But yeah, BRD was basically a city. I remember having to go in there all the time to use that damn anvil and forge for Dark Iron gear. That's one aspect I don't really miss, but for the purposes of flavor, was actually pretty neat. Same with the alchemy tables in Scholo.

I don't mind the Ulduar trash, really. My 10 man casual group I run on the weekends wipes more on the trash than they do on the bosses, though, heh.

Ironfoe?  Man I dreamed many dreams of that thing.

Most Ulduar trash pulls are harder than almost any fight in Naxx.

Welp, those Outland monster-tunnels may not have atmosphere, but they're some awesome grinding. I can whip through Ramparts in just about 15 minutes and the trash mobs are each worth 500+ experience to an unrested level 59, even after the "Hey you're grouped with someone too high!" penalty. Going from the end of 58 to the beginning of 60 took less than an hour.

I'm having more fun than I expected powering through all this stuff. Especially since it's almost all instances neither of us have done before, so inevitably something happens that we're not expecting and I end up frantically trying to pull half the instance off her while she frantically tries to stay alive. The arena in UBRS where you fight all those waves of stuff and then Rend was... interesting... the first time. I told her to just stay up on the edge while I dealt with it, not knowing that an NPC would come along and boot her into the middle of the fray.

Killing stuff by the dozens feels sort of Diabloish, while having to keep a newbie alive through patrols or whatever in unfamiliar territory is surprisingly entertaining. Makes me wish the game was a bit more fast-paced in general.

The Rend fight was about the only good thing about UBRS. That and the first pull into the room before it, where the charging melee mobs would often body check shitty tanks clean over the ledge into the whelp eggs.

If you haven't powered someone through a lot of the stuff before, it definitely is fun, and it can even be profitable.   I will say though, I don't think its something that could really carry the game by itself.  The fun wears off after you've run this stuff so many times.

That can be applied to nearly everything, tbqh.

Yeah.  I gained about a level by having Never power me through ZF so I could get the quests completed, which got me another half a level.

Maradon and Sunken Temple are stilll probably my two favorite dungeon crawls in WoW when done at the appropiate level.

For powerleveling a great scheme I've found is WC-SM-ZF/ST-Scholo and if you have access to recruit a friend you can level to 60 in a day from level 1, or in a few days at a more casual pace. Afterwards just get a bunch of low 60+ gear with lots of gem slots and fill them up with cheapo Northrend gems to have an outland killing machine.

You are a terrible person and probably broken in some fundamental way.

I'm glad someone said it.  :awesome_for_real:

I wandered through Maradon for some seasonal achievement, and I have to say, that place is miserable.  Full of trash, meandering, wandering, non-linear, and multi-dimensional.  I can't even imagine how little fun that place would be if done by a level appropriate group.

ST seems to be more of the same.

I went back and did Mara too.  I know where the areas are and the general structure (since I ran it so many damn times years ago) and while it isn't horrible, it sure as hell is long.  Level appropriate runs would take 2.5-3 hours years ago.  Get a geared 60 running you through and it took about half that.  The biggest problem with it is that if you wanted to get all of the quests done for leveling (which at the time helped alot) you had to convince your group to go through the orange AND the purple wing, when all of that stuff was elite and hard, then ALSO go through and do the respective wings of the dungeon and THEN go to the falls and take out the princess.  Long fricking instance.  Once you got the rod though, just portal to the falls and take out princess, get gear upgrades, etc.  Some of those old world dungeons were very epic in feel and while doing them now is fun and can be nostalgic for some people, the sheer amount of difficult you had to deal with years ago when they were new really brings me back down to earth.

A few questions for anyone who can answer:

How far up the list of 5 man dungeons can a ret pally in full honor purples solo? I'm up to Mana Tombs and I'm not even breathing hard, but then I'm not grabbing two dozen mobs at a time like I used to either. I'd like to at least get out of Outland before having to resort to grouping. I never really did these on the way up, so I don't know how steeply they scale.

Heroic Magister's Terrace. My ret in honor purples, plus another ret pally in Naxx purples. How difficult?

How easy if we add a 78 or 80 holy pally in crafted PVP blues?

If I can I'd like to add a small addendum to WUA's question, since I have been wondering basically the same thing with my pally that I have left at 74.  Which would be better for soloing all those BC dungeons on heroic, ret or prot?

I can't answer for paladins, but if they're anything like warriors then protection will be a better solo-the-dungeons spec. Given that your specs can all heal themselves though I'm not sure the comparison will hold.

Maraudon, much like most of the other huge dungeons back in the day, wasn't meant to be done all at once.  Each 'wing' was more like a separate dungeon, kinda like Dire Maul or the Burning Crusade 'winged' dungeons.  Except it was all part of the same place.  Not to mention if you look at the level spread it's clear it wasn't meant to be taken in one shot.  Purple and orange areas were meant to be done in the lower 40's, and then once you were high enough for the part beyond the falls, you would have obtained the scepter to allow you to skip the lower level areas and go straight to the upper-40's portion of the dungeon.

It's comparable to Blackrock Spire, which again is just one dungeon, but people behave as though it's two (there's really three 'sections' to Blackrock Spire).  Much like Maraudon, you needed to do Lower to gain access to Upper.  Maraudon was more refined (it came out later) splitting it into even more sections and making it easier to go to the specific part you needed to do.  It's just that in general, people wound up not doing the lower level areas of Maraudon at all, if it could possibly be avoided.

WUA, as far as old dungeons go, at 80 in purples you should be able to do up to the level 70 regular dungeons.  I'm not sure about heroics on a paladin, but I suspect most of them are doable unless there's very paladin-unfriendly mechanics.  However, tanking gear/spec may be needed - I do all my soloing old stuff in full tank gear and frost presence most of the time.  Heroic Magister's Terrace is pretty tough, but I've soloed it on my death knight, so I suspect two paladins can probably do it.  With a healer, there should be no issue whatsoever for two paladins of any spec to make it through any of the Burning Crusade dungeons, though.

Adding the healer will mostly trivialize Magisters, although you may have to be a little careful on mr energy boss.  Or not.  I doubt you'll be able to solo the entire place as ret.  I do know someone who soloed it as a prot paladin, but it did take a while, and he preferred to take a healer.

Isn't the best way to spec prot, get some shields with spikes, and aggro the whole dungeon?

Thanks for the info. Yeah, it would probably be easier if one of us was prot. With a ret, a prot, and a holy the three of us could probably do all sorts of damage. But none of us have any tanking gear, or interest in tanking beyond this little powerleveling binge, which will end when she's caught up to us.

Random aside that doesn't deserve it's own thread: I'm working up my mining and holy shit, a stack of 20 thorium sells for 100g on the AH easy.

Sweet Candy.

Thorium is rather painful to mine though, I've never found a good zone for it.  Either that, or I really have no patience for resource gathering without an epic flying mount.

Winterspring, that place with the 60 elites. Have fun.

Yeah, nobody goes there because... fuck, who goes to Winterspring? But there's decent thorium and the elites keep away the level-appropriate miners.

A paladin in my guild managed to solo heroic Magister's as Ret, though I think he died a couple times.  He did complete it though, so it is possible.  His gear is quite excellent though, for whatever that is worth.

It's great questing for level appropriate people.  I can get from 54-58 on most of the Winterspring and Felwood quests.

Well that's it.  I have to officially stop running dungeons with anything other then guildies.  Tonight I attempted a Maruadon run with one of my alts.  Despite the fact that we were over leveled by quite a bit, we couldnt even come close to doing it.  It might have had something to do with the fact that our tank was a warrior using a grey stave, one of our mage deeps had twenty untrained talent points, and our healer was a priest who had never heard of flash heal, or heal for that matter as she had not visited a trainer since level one.   How do you even get to that level with only your starting skills.  How is the game even enjoyible at that gimped state?    Anyway, lesson learned, fuck groups on this alt.

Edit:  I didn't really know where to put this bitter rant so I crammed it in here.

Just FYI, but there is a known bug that sometimes shows talent points as being unused when inspecting others who have purchased the dual spec option.

Always good for a laugh though.

If they're new players, it's entirely possible they didn't know to spend the talent points as they may have decided early on all those stupid ! tips were annoying and turned them off.  By the time you get your first point at 10 you wouldn't have any way outside of someone else telling you about it.    I had a friend when I first started who didn't know there were multiple tabs on the talent page.  He asked me around level 20, "What is this I keep hearing about Fire mages? How do I become one of those?"  He'd been speccing only into Arcane because that was the first page that came up. Also try to remember how much Arcane really, REALLY sucked 4 years ago.  He was very frustrated with the class and about to quit.   Embarrassment ensued.

The narrative I'd go with for the person who hadn't trained is this.  They were a new person to online games, dragged in by a friend and told "Just install Quest Helper and turn in/ kill what it tells you to do.  Get quests from guys with ! and don't bother reading them, it will only slow you down."   This means they never read that level 2 quest about training or the response from the trainer that says, "Hey, come here every few levels and learn new spells, dummy."

I can't imagine having made it to 40 without quitting in frustration, though.  That level 1 smite would have gotten them killed far more often than they'd have ever killed a mob. I think that person was full of shit and didn't want to heal. 

Yeah, I can sort of see it with a melee class and a really stupid player, but I don't think it would even be possible to level a caster type without training spells, you'd just get to a point where you cannot kill anything that gives exp before it kills you.

Yeah, I'm not even sure why I posted that, except for the grinding frustration I felt at the time :ye_gods:.  I slept on it and I realized it wasn't even that big a deal.  Everyone has groups like that.  They were all in the same guild, and were probably RL friends who were just new to the game, no problem.  The priest may well have been joking around with me, but I totally believe the mage had all those unspent talents, he came in just beneath my pet on the dps meter.

As an aside, I have begun experimenting with what i can solo as a feral druid (full naxx 10 / 25 Tank / Dps gear).

So far, my list includes:
Onyxia
All of Zul'Gurub
Attumen and Maiden in Kara (Morose keeps whooping my ass, so I can't try anything further)
Heroic Magisters Terrace

Going to mess around with some bosses in AQ 20 and MC sometime later this week to see if they are doable.

MC you shouldn't have a problem on.  One of my guildies had the whole place cleared solo as a warrior and only needed help on Ragnaros due to his "Nobody in melee range, I blow you all up" + knock back mechanics.

AQ20 you'll need some nature resist gear for the prophet.  The guy on the DK forums who's been doing all the old stuff tried it without and said he couldn't do it without and will go back later to give it a shot again when he has some.

Is Moros' bleed what's getting you in Kara?

Prophet is AQ40.  AQ20 is easily doable except for two bosses (and some of the trash).  The ooze mobs will mean certain death if you try to fight them, because they can engulf you and do >100% of your HP while you can do nothing, so they're unsoloable.  Fortunately they're also easily avoidable, unless you try to kill Buru the Gorger.  That's why I've never killed Buru myself, because there's one static ooze in his pit and one that paths into the pit.

Ayamiss has an air phase where she's completely immune to anything but ranged.  At the same time, she puts out considerable damage through sprays of poison, so as far as I can tell Ayamiss is totally unsoloable.  Maybe some kind of hybrid druid build that can do magic DPS and switch to Feral, plus has enough mana and regen to heal themselves on top of that, but other than that I don't see any class being capable of soloing Ayamiss.

The rest of the bosses are easy solos, so you can take out Kurinaxx, Rajaxx, Moam, and Ossirian.  Ossirian is a pain for several reasons though, not the least of which is the anubisaths in his room.  They randomly have either Plague or Meteor. If they have Meteor, prepare for the pain.  Alone, since there's no one else around to spread the damage to, the meteors will be doing ~12k damage.  There's not much of a cooldown on this ability, they just have to decide to use it.  Sometimes they'll use it once before you kill them.  Other times they just decide to use it two or three times in relatively short order.  However, if you can solo Attumen and Maiden, you shouldn't have a major problem with the Anbisaths, they'll just be a really annoying part of clearing the room so you can kill Ossirian.

I question how anyone can clear all of Molten Core solo - there's two fights I just can't see happening.  Sulfuron Harbinger, who has four adds that crossheal each other unless you pull one away from the other four and kill it separately, and Golemagg the Incinerator, who has an unavoidable Magma Splash that does 50 damage and reduces armor by 250, and stacks to 50, causing it to eventually do 2500 damage per tick and reduce armor by 12500.  If someone has done them completely solo, I'd love to know how.

I wonder if that is what happened to my druid. Afrer the patch that added dual spec, he showed as having no talents used or available, but his talents still worked (still had mangle etc) dispite it not showing up on talents. I petitioned and the gm reset my talents and it fixed it up.

http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=16300.0

I don't group on alts (unless being ran through something) before I get to the current expansion set of dungeons and rarely even then.  The most annoying part right now of leveling my warlock has been people asking for groups for content they're far too low for.  The level spread in these zones can be quite large, but it seems like Outland and Northrend has people thinking that they're entitled to finish zones off all at once.

The Sulfuron adds run out of mana relatively fast (~10 min or so) so something like a protection paladin can solo this fairly easily since it can cleanse the SW:P and such that gets thrown out. Similarly paladins can bubble the splash stacks on Golemagg off. I've also read about DKs killing Golemagg that just beat him down before it gets that bad.

My problem with moros is that by time i have managed to burn through the adds, i am out of cooldowns to keep myself alive on the Boss himself.

I'm not sure whether it's coincidence or what, but I've caught wind of several rather impressive solo feats recently.

The most notable were:

Rogue soloing Onyxia

Prot Paladin soloing all of the BWL bosses after Vael

Warlock soloing MC

I've wanted to try a BWL solo myself.  Although getting a group to help take down Vael and then leave you to do the rest alone would be a major hang-up for me.  As a death knight I would never be able to do Chromaggus, though, since I have no way to get rid of at least two of the curses and would therefore be transformed into a drakonid.  My paladin could probably do it though.

AQ40 is one I've never been able to crack cause I'm not well enough equipped to take out the Prophet Skeram.  I discovered the last time I was there that C'thun is bugged as all get-out these days, too.  The red beam extends both in front AND behind him, and once you're past that phase the stomach has some weird bugs or something too, because several times I died but my logs registered nothing, no damage or even a message stating I died, I was just suddenly dead.  Had a decent sized group and didn't kill him mostly because of odd things like that.

I can see where that'd be a problem.  DKs just get to toss up AOtD and eat the adds, then use Death Strike to work through the bleed.

My bad on AQ20.. I kept thinking "25-man" for raid size.

It also largely depends on which of the adds you get.  If I get the Paladin healer add instead of the priest, I pretty much say screw it, cause even if i get her low, she bubbles herself and i have to waste more precious seconds to kill her, which screws me over even more.

C'thun has been bugged for a LONG time.  The red beam thing is always funny.  Last time i was in there with an Achievement pug, we specificly told the Mele Dps classes, "don't hug the back of the Giant Eye when it does the Red beam of death, cause the beam clips a little behind the center and will kill you".  We said this about 10 times before we started the fight.  6 people STILL managed to get instagibbed by the beam because they were too busy backstabbing or whatever to pay attention.

The stomach also has issues.  Biggest one for me is that occasionally, the stomach acid does 10x more damage per stack then it should.  It should tick for about 200 or 300 per application of the stack.  Sometimes however, you get in there, and the first tick of damage hits you for 3000, then the next stack hits for 6k.  If that happens, you basicly make a beeline to the exit port thing or die in very short order.

The acid debuff doesn't disappear after death either anymore (at least the last time I was in there). If you are on your way out of the stomach and die landing, if someone rezzes you you die to the ticks.

It was quite funny actually, as we kept rezzing the guy and he kept dying until he finally said "Fuck it" and corpse ran.

BC five-mans are, on the whole, pretty boring and terrible.

Yep.  I only really liked either CoT instance. The rest varied from tolerable (Tempest Keep instances) to pure, unrestrained torture (Auchindoun instances). Some were just too long with too much stupid trash while others were just brutal (on heroic) unless you were completely over-geared or had multiple crowd control options.

This was a major reason my stints playing in BC were pretty short.

It could be worse.  My options for an ISP are satellite or dial-up, both of which effectively precluded tanking before 3.0.  Which meant I probably finished a dozen heroics before the Wrath pre-patch.  Then I tanked a Kara. :why_so_serious:

Yeah, if the BC CoT instances didn't require level 66 to enter, I'd have had her in there from the moment she hit Outland. They're pretty cool. Auchindoun is indeed some bullshit though, even in "lol 80" stompfest mode. The art design and lore alone piss me off. Those bird guys all fucking sound like the Chicken Lady (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQ_IXZ0Bksg).

Going 45 to 58 via endless Scholo runs with the occasional LBRS/UBRS/BRD mixed in never felt anywhere NEAR as tedious as 62-66 in the BC dungeons.

(Chicken Lady is marginally NSFW)

BC had moments of brilliance with the Caverns stuff, and that carried forward to my current favorite dungeon in Wrath. They really did things well there in terms of offering players quick fights if they wanted them, and scaling gear to content that negated a lot of time-wasting crap. They took the BM design into VH and it's been very successful for example. Players like dungeons that last less than 30 minutes. It's been proven. It works. RUN WITH IT.

Real take away message: People do whatever is easiest.  Despite so many people calling them their favorites, the COT Heroics were some of the least-run heroics even post 2.4 because they were brutally unforgiving of PUGs - especially Old Hillsbrad.

Of course people want short and easy in 5 man content. They also want chances of random long term "OMG MAYBE" rewards like mounts. People will keep running things if they are under 40 minutes and they don't have a bunch of annoying trash that will screw up the noobs they have with them. They'll do it over and over for a mount too.

It helps that the WotLK heroics are a better stepping stone to gear up than TBC heroics were. Some of them were way too hard for someone who had run the regular 70 dungeons enough to feel like it was time for the next step, and the loot was often not worth the trouble. It was easier to just do Kara.

I loved tanking regular BM on my druid, though. I found it relaxing. <3

Ahh yes, I remember that fondly.  It gave people the false impression that I was actually good at tanking.

I didn't care for the heroic modes of either BC CoT instance (I rarely ever did them and no one wanted to). However, I enjoyed the pacing, story, and overall experience of them in regular mode and ran them whenever someone wanted to, even if I was completely over-geared for them.

The Auchidon dungeons were just some of the worst dungeons ever made.


That one with the boss that was virtually impossible without a Druid.  :awesome_for_real:

Heroic BC dungeons were really poorly itemized compared to WotLK as well.

You gents are failing to remember that those things were absolutely golden compared to vanilla.

Of course, I think that's been discussed earlier in this thread.  I did like DM East, DM North and Strath dead side for max level. DM itemization started to finally make sense but when it released that was really only relevant for my alt.  There just wasn't a whole lot of options and the other dungeons were just long and not worth the effort if you were in a guild doing any sort of raiding.

Leveling up I only bothered with SFK and SM for alts and didn't even bother with that for my warlock. Spell caster gear is just so goddamned terrible until you hit Outland.

Leveling a warlock in pure shadow wrath gear was amusing. Old world elite mobs were mostly fearable, with very rare exceptions.

Heh, I doubt that stuff would be available on my server. I'm not saying the lack of gear is making anything difficult.  I haven't faced an elite mob yet that's given me any trouble.

What?

SLabs was a really fun instance once you had enough gear to do it in under 2 hours. The 7-mob pulls before Blackheart were always fun  :heart: The only Achunidoun instance that really blowed was crypts.


They were arguably the toughest heroics, along with Arcatraz. In fact I miss the level those dungeons were tuned at. Completing Arcatraz for the first time felt like an accomplishment. On the flip side, heroic BM was the fastest badge farm bar none once you could comfortably 1-shot the whole instance.

Arcatraz was tough because the last boss was so horribly overtuned at the time.  :awesome_for_real:

This happy fellow : http://www.wowhead.com/?npc=18371

AKA: haha fuck anyone with a cast time

Mana-tombs was ok once you got a decent group of people who knew it. Crypts was terrible simply because the bridge of LOL KNOCKBACK TO CORPSE RUN and the fact it took longer than Shadow Labs and only had 2 bosses.

I often told guild mates that crypts was the worst instance in BC.  They always thought I was exaggerating until I took them along.  I never had someone ask to come along twice.  Here's why it sucks:

• Invisible ambushing mobs.  In the original incarnation of CRYPTS, there were hostile non-elite mobs that would randomly ambush you.  They were later made neutral.
• The first part of the trash takes practice to pull without overpulling.  Almost every pull also involves doing two pick-ups, first of the elites and second of the non-elites.  The non-elites can include ones that cast a 5-second uninterruptible mind control on the tank forcing a wipe.
• THE BRIDGE OF DOOM.  I have never cleared the instance without someone being punted off the bridge and enjoying the nice, long walk.
• The first boss is insanely unfair to certain healers, particularly paladins and shaman, due to the cast time debuff.  He is also unfair to melee thanks to a harsh AOE bleed.
• The second part of the trash is complete bullshit.  It's a series of skeleton pulls.  Half of them have a mild enrage, half of them periodically wipe their aggro list.
• TWO BADGERS.
• The bosses drop a number of amazingly terrible items.  We're talking ele shaman gear, mail with mp5 and attack power, gear with resilience, and a single piece of the level 70 dungeon set.

They don't make 'em like they used to, thank god.

Crypts actually dropped 3 badges, since there was an extra boss on heroic. And there was a balance of some really nice items in there too. Still a wank dungeon and not challenging in a fun way though.


Ah, you got me with the druid thing. As a priest I never wiped on him once, but I can understand how paladins really wouldn't enjoy the fight.


Arcatraz also had probably the most interesting trash of any dungeon in WoW imo. While I broadly agree that the WoTLK model is more accessible, I do equally miss the feelling that some heroics were.... heroic.

OK that makes more sense. I was racking my brain trying to remember any giant badgers in there and just getting DaoC flashbacks  :uhrr:

Crypts sucked shit since the trash to boss ratio was awful and there were mobs with really fucking long mind controls. So long that you would wipe before it wore off and the victim would have to sit there and wait for it to wear off.

The CoT instances were really cool and atmospheric though. Shattered Halls and Ramparts were also passable on atmosphere/fun/looks. Heroic Shattered Halls somehow made 5-6 mob pulls fun where Shadow Labs made you want to unsub.

The big shattered halls pulls were good because they were completely controlled and fairly similar mobs so it did not really matter which order you killed them in and they were followed up by the guy that was in his base killing his mans.  You fought on your terms.  Shadow Lab had the pats, definite kill orders and it was followed up by the boss that actively fucked DPS over for gearing up.  Shattered Halls is controlled chaos.  Shadow Labs is just chaos.

Its not really surprising that BC had some pretty hard heroics.  At that time, I think they were trying to match the difficulty of raids.  Original Gruul's lair (before they nerfed it again and again), was very hard, and the hardest 5man heroics matched it in difficulty (by appropriate geared players of course). 

If I recall correctly, both Shattered Halls and Shadow Labs Heroics had something to do with original Attunement for "The Eye", so they were overtuned to still be difficult to players who were clearing Kara, Gruul's, Magtheridon, and possibly even some SSC.

There was also some progression to BC heroics that doesn't really exist in Wrath, in my opinion.  In wrath, pretty much all of them have the same generally difficulty level (read: low), where as in BC, there were definitely some very easy ones that seemed to be designed to get people into the idea of hard 5mans.

Original Gruul's Lair was the epitome of overtuned when it released as the first 25 man.

Maulgar was the hammer, and the tank was the nail. I got pounded into the ground in the first few hits so many times, "I'm dead, run out" became a running joke in my alliance to this day.

There are definitely easier LK heroics (VH, UK, Strat) but the only hard one (Occulus) is hard due to the vehicle gimmicks and not truly challenging NPCs.

I think Pinnacle counts as hard too. The monster trophy room and the Skadi gauntlet are both hard on PUGs.

Final bosses of AN and HoL are both very tough if your group is not decked out in heroic/raid gear and the entire Old Kingdom instance is rough in Heroic.

I must have had good luck with UP groups then.  Both heroic UP pugs I've been in had no problem with it.  Old Kingdom, on the other hand...   :ye_gods:

UP groups I've been in haven't had a problem.  We did have a fun Ymir fight when the entire group got stunned on top of one of his orb things.  Luckily he was almost dead.  Of course, I've never pugged the place and my unguilded friend never had one that went smoothly (Skadi problems). 

I've never done Occulus (reg or heroic) as no one ever wants to do it.  I never pug OK, AN, HOS, or HOL unless I know it's a very good group going in.  I will never, ever heal Heroic HOS again after a very bad time healing that Maiden bitch (I'm not a great healer as I don't do it often. Fight is hard on a shaman and the DPS was fucking awful). 

Everything else is fair game.  Any of them can get messy if your tank or healer sucks, but that's not too often of an occurance.

The main trick with Maiden of Grief is to run into a void zone right before she casts that group-wide incapacitate so the void zone damage will break it.

The one takeaway from this expansion for the dev team is that flying combat is completely unacceptable in a raiding format. In a quest, MAYBE, but never trying to coordinate groups of people to get on the same z-axis and fight with abilities they never use.

On the plus side, the Ulduar vehicle combat is actually pretty fun. I was really afraid it was going to suck like Malygos.

Ground vehicles on the whole don't suck because there isn't a Z axis. I would like for them to put in ships into the game at some point for ship-to-ship combat. PIRATES STYLE!

To me its like any gimmicky fight or mechanic, its interesting the first time, ho hum the second time, and annoying every subsequent time.  Vehicles add for some interesting possibilities in WoW, but I think overall they are implemented very poorly, with a few exceptions that work fairly well.  

Let me play my damn class, I chose it for a reason.

(http://www.blizzplanet.com/content/warcraft-ii-tides-of-darkness/war2-ships.jpg)

That's what WotLK needed, us departing a troop transport, storming the snowy beaches.

You mean like Strand?  :oh_i_see:

Strand is more like, walk onto the beaches and don't get sun burned.

We need more submarines in WoW

I love how half the higher-end five man shit (even non-heroic) in BC requires a key or some other bullshit. Way to make sure those instances see less activity than Deadmines once the next expansion hit.

That is even after they changed a bunch of shit to make it even more open. Or 'open'.


Oh how many keys did we have to farm for Arc? :(

Damn it.  I missed the original opening of heroics, and I didn't get to do them until they were long since farmed out, and required a certain build just to gain entrance.  Wait, what changed in the expansion again?

While some of the WotLK heroics are harder than others, the difficulty is entirely arbitrary. Every heroic has the same loot formula of "Bosses drop 1 Blue, Final Boss drops 1 Epic, 1 Blue and 1 Frozen Orb;" all heroic loot being ilvl 200. In order for the difficulty to mean something, the harder heroics should offer better loot. One suggestion in that direction would be to up the ilvl of the drops in the harder ones, and/or giving bosses other than the last guy an epic or two on their loot table that they have a chance to drop.

When BC first hit, All heroic keys required you to be Revered with the faction connected to the instance.

Many of them also required you to complete a quest or previous dungeon to get the key to open the door, if you didn't want to wait for someone else to open it for you (Shadow Labs, The Shattered Halls, and especially The Arcatraz were like this.  Arcatraz being bar none, the worst)

Sometime near the end of BC, they shifted the entry requirement to get the Key down to Honored, which made it WAY easier for anyone to get in.

It was astonishing how hard people raged on the forums against this. I guess it was the "if I had to shove glass shards up my urethra, then so does everyone else forever!" factor.

Well, I noticed that immediately after there was a sharp rise in incompetent and undergeared people LFG for heroics.  In Lich King heroics this wouldn't serve that much of a purpose since they're all so easy, but in Burning Crusade heroics were tough, and after they lowered entrance requirements it became harder to find people to fill out groups that weren't worthless.

Basically what Koyasha said.

When the entry bar for Heroics was Revered, you knew that the person trying to get in generally fulfilled at least 2 qualifications:
1 - they had run the normal instances so many times that the change to heroic would not be that drastic of a shock.
2 - they were most likely properly geared for the place.

2 was usually fulfilled because the only way to get to revered with most factions was to either A: run the normal versions enough times you are going to end up with most of the Best non heroic gear you are likely to get from them before you hit Revered, or B: do all the quests you can for the factions, in which case, you are going to have most of the best quest gear you can get.

Lowering the Bar to Honored (which is stupidly easy to get from just a few dungeon runs and a tiny bit of zone appropriate questing) usually resulted in people who had probably only set foot into the normal version of the instance 2 or 3 times tops, and who were WAY undergeared for the Difficulty curve of many BC heroics turning your Heroic run into a disaster that lasted twice as long as normal and cost you more in repair money then you made running the place.

It was a different way of thinking about stuff. In TBC heroics were a significant step up from the top-level normal instances, now at the start of LK, everyone assumed that they would roll straight into heroics and they were tuned as such. In LK everyone does normal instances once if at all and just rolls into heroics at 80, rather than working through the normal versions and rolling into more challenging heroics once they had some grouping experience.

The Revered requirement was horrible. It was bad enough grinding dungeon rep the first time. It was a soul killing experience doing it all over again on an alt.

Sure, you could say that previous games had worse key/attunement requirements, that's just saying that this previous shit sandwich you were forced to eat in the remote past was arguably worse than the current shit sandwich Blizzard was cramming into your mouth. The TBC heroic situation, from difficulty to loot, was confused. You had worse loot than from Karazhan coupled with a higher difficulty level. I'd rather have tanked/healed anything in Karazhan than the last felguard trash in heroic BF.

I'm really pleased with is how much better the WotLK heroic situation is.

Oh, and the dungeon rep tabard deal. That is fantastic.

Yeah, this is a great improvement. Although I disagree that the WoTLK heroic situation is better in every way.

Same here.  I love the fact that the tabards fix the rep grind issue, neatly removing the soul crushing grind from 90% of the Rep dance, however, 90% of the heroics simply do not feel so.

I mean, half the time, you barely even notice some of the instances are set on heroic.  Heroic Violet hold is laughable.  Only a few of the heroics are actually difficult in one way or another, and most of those revolve purely around gimping youself deliberately in an attempt to get certain achieves.

hell, i think 90% of the heroic instances in WOLK can be 4 manned quite efficiently, with only a well geared tank and healer, and some moderately decently geared dps as filler.

A couple of guys in my guild 3 man UP every day for the drake....

HVH is laughable until you get a tank that doesn't understand "KITE THE FUCKING BOSS" and just stands there tanking the ethereal like a dullard.  Void guy can be a pain if you're with a bunch of bads (that guy can get glitchy anyhow).  Those two always pop up when I end up pugging with someone that's completely undergeared and half retarded.  When I'm grouped with people I know it's always a combination of 3 tank'n'snooze bosses.

With a high DPS tank and well geared DPS, you'll easy do the damage you would with 3 ungeared scrubs, and you'll have the bonus of none of the idiots standing in fire. Tangentally, I remember when farming roses for Love Fool title, we'd just 3 man it instead of bringing along a couple of lowbies.  Same principle applies.

I'd like harder heroics if the rewards were somewhat worth it.  Once you get 2 or 3 badge items, you're just farming for BOA gear. There's no Isle badge vendor selling you nice stuff to keep you a step behind the bleeding edge raiders.  Of course people would just do the easy heroics for badges, and then you'd have to likely add yet another level of badge gear to the already unsustainably stupid system they've decided to follow in WOLK.

The Arrakoa boss is the toughest if you kill BOTH his adds first. Chained stormstrike and earthshock is nasty.

I hold out hope for the heroic in 3.2 being one where the trash hits for 12K+ and comes in packs of 4; although this would make it harder than all of the trash in Naxx.

I think you'd have to skip questing completely in the zones the factions with key vendors cover now in order to be locked out of any heroic.

Which is entirely possible given the fact that you can hit 68 in Nagrand, go directly to Northrend and never get much rep of anything past cenarion expedition.

My alt who did 58-68 in three zones is still honoured with HH and Cenarion, and friendly with the Sha'tar and Lower City, and I haven't done a single instance on it bar a couple of low-level boosts. It's somewhat of a moot point since it's all redundant content now, but the bar to entry is really very low. At worst you can blow through the normal versions to get rep up to revered if needed.

Exactly my point. Thank you for a real world example instead of gloomcasting theory.

I didn't say it was impossible to get into heroics, I said nobody is going to bother. I wanted to try leveling my friend by running her through a supposedly easy heroic like Ramparts, but despite having quested to 70 back in the day as well as run it a fair number of times on normal I was only honored with Honor Hold. So we just did Auchindoun normal stuff until 68 and took off for Northrend. Her health problems are bad enough now that she's not up for much anymore, so it's all moot anyway.

You can get the heroic keys at honored rep.  It was changed from revered some way through tbc.  I think you still need to be 70 to enter though.

At least a balance.  I appreciate the fast run new instances but something like BRD or DM would be cool to as an option.

In the end, however, one instance rules them all:  SFK I agree :)

Kara has been the most fun I have had in any "raid" instance.  Super stuff.

Ya I think they changed it to honored in the 2nd or 3rd patch after bc shipped.

I could almost swear it was still revered. In any case I couldn't get the key, and they serve absolutely no purpose whatsoever.

No, it was lowered to Honored. It was changed in the same patch that they lowered the 1-60 levelling curve. The only zone that requires anything special to get into heroic mode that regular does not is Magister's Terrace, in which you have to finish the quest that has you speak to Kalecgos inside a regular mode instance, then kill Kael'Thas.

Regardless, levelling inside of heroics is not really feasible as they require the level cap at the time of their release to enter. If you want to instance grind someone who is level 70, Utgarde Keep is probably doable for a level 80 running someone through at this point and is shorter than most of the Burning Crusade instances.

Actually, a  friend took me on a few rampart runs as soon as I brought my dk to Outlands and it was great exp even at normal. I gained a couple of levels that night ( and burned through a week+ worth of rested exp too)

Phred, you sound like you are disagreeing; Outland instances are good xp on normal. By the time you can get into the heroics (lvl 70), you could instead be in the low end Northrend instances, which are worth more xp.

Which level of dungeons do you all think a badly geared 80 (probably shaman in quest greens'n'blues) would be able to take a couple of dungeon-appropriate-level characters through?

My hour-a-day might get my 2 mains to 80 in the next couple of weeks and my brother's characters are just approaching 60 now, so it'd be nice to be able to take him through some of the Outland instances. Plus, since I was late to TBC there's lots of them I haven't even done myself, but of course getting groups for any instances except level 80 heroics on my server is impossible, especially if you're limited to 1 hour sessions.

Would we be able to manage the TK instances do you think? Maybe even early Northrend ones?

What spec is your shaman? And what class(es?) is your brother?

If you're enhance, you could probably handle early Northrend instances (UK, Nexus).

Yeah he's enhance, but I've also been collecting a full set of (equally crappy) spellcasting gear so he can go dual-spec whenever I get round to doing it.

Between us we've got loads of different classes we could level past 60. He's got a paladin, a rogue and a DK. I'm a 2-account dual boxer with pretty much one of everything over level 55 (and er, 3 druids, oops). Plus my girlfriend has a level 61 warrior that she has never taken into an instance and has no idea how to play  :why_so_serious:

Good point. Overall a waste of time then except for nostalgia or something I guess.

Didn't want to start a new thread for this so I thought I'd ask in here...

Finally dinged 80 today with my shaman & my paladin and was wondering if anyone can give me some suggestions for quickly and easily gearing them both up a bit for heroics. There's pretty much zero chance of getting groups for non-heroics on my server (believe me I've been trying for weeks) and it's going to be a long time (i.e. probably never) before I'm able to do Northrend instances with the other 2 people in my guild.

I don't mind reputation grinds too much, as long as I can achieve something useful in an hour or so. I also don't need epics, I just don't want to make a complete tit of myself by joining heroic groups and being hopelessly undergeared. Oh and I have no interest at all in WoWs stupid pvp  :grin:

Maybe next expansion I won't end up 6 months behind the levelling curve *again*!

Argent tourney gives really nice gear for both characters: http://www.mmo-champion.com/index.php?page=857

Shaman:
In general, the final quest rewards in icecrown give you enough blues to be able to run most heroics. Here's a loot list, weighted for your spec, and you can just go down the list and find the nearest one to the top that you think you can do (this is for when you start running heroics)

Wowhead Elemental Armor Presets (http://www.wowhead.com/?items=4&filter=qu=3;ub=7;gb=1;wt=119:103:123:61:96:23;wtv=100:73:69:35:33:13)
Wowhead Enhancement Armor Presets (http://www.wowhead.com/?items=4&filter=qu=3;ub=7;gb=1;wt=134:119:117:21:103:96:23:114:77:123;wtv=191:100:84:55:55:55:55:33:33:30)
Wowhead Restoration Armor Presets (http://www.wowhead.com/?items=4&filter=qu=3;ub=7;gb=1;wt=61:23:123:103:96;wtv=100:80:30:10:10)

Elemental and Restoration Weapons (http://www.wowhead.com/?items=2&filter=ub=7;gb=1;wt=119:103:123:23:61:96;wtv=100:73:69:50:35:33)
Enhancement one-handers (http://www.wowhead.com/?items=2&filter=qu=3;maxle=200;ub=7;cr=93:79:131;crs=2:3:1;crv=0:0:0;gb=1;wt=134:119:117:21:96:103:20:77:114;wtv=191:100:84:55:55:42:36:33:26#one-hand)

Sorry I don't have equiv gear lists for paladin.

Depending on the kind of cash you have to spend, there is also some pretty solid crafted gear. 

For Shaman http://www.wowhead.com/?items=4.3&filter=minrl=80;cr=86;crs=11;crv=0 (Look at the ilvl 200 stuff)

For Paladin: http://www.wowhead.com/?items=4&filter=ty=4;minrl=80;cr=86;crs=11;crv=0 (ilvl 200)

Awesome, thankyou folks  :awesome_for_real:

I've been enjoying Icecrown (fantastic design, it's cool just flying around there) and haven't done many of the quest lines there so I'll start by farming those for a while :)

-Unless you're an inscriber, blitz Storm Peaks until you unlock the quests for the Sons of Hodir.  Those dailies are how you get the Wrath shoulder enchants.

-Leave no stone unturned in Icecrown.  You need the rep from Knights of the Ebon Blade for your melee DPS head enchant.  The knights have a shitload of dailies, so make an effort to do those.

-Do the PVP region dailies in Grizzly Hills until you have the totems/librams you want.  I don't believe any of them require PVP.

-I know you say you hate PVP, but give Lake Wintergrasp a try.  The weekly quests give a lot of honor for the effort, allowing you to fill a couple of those hard-to-upgrade slots.

-There's a LOT more BOE blues than before and I'm not just talking about craftables.  Just poke around the AH, you're bound to find some good stuff.

Thanks Gobbledygook, advice all noted. I was definitely planning on having a play in WG, if for no other reason than to see what it's like.

You don't need to be that geared for heroics if you are just DPS'ing.  Most quest greens from Sholazar and up should be sufficient.  DPS should probably make sure they have the weapons from the arena quest in Zul'drak.  The Honored blues for most reps are good too and not out of reach if you get the zone quest achievements.  Weapons show up at Revered mostly.  Combine them with some of the tradeskill items and you should be good to go.  Tanks need to hit the defense cap though.  And a healer will probably want to have a heroic geared tank if they are just starting. 

Agreed.  The curve for this vs. TBC heroics is drastically different.  You can start out in heroics if you are mostly in quest blues.  Obviously if you are a tank you have more riding on your performance and gear, along with being the only healer in the group may also not be so great.

You should at least try.  DPSers pulling sub 1k DPS (of course, movement heavy fights and gimmicks fights excluded) are just being a drag on the group.  If you're pulling sub 1k and you're a DK, delete your account (or maybe try another technique, like using both hands).

It's really not difficult to have just about every slot in a crafted/rep/quest blue outside of trinkets.  Going in obscenely undergeared is a choice and a rather rude one at that. 

That's a completely different story.  As a mage with quest blues, I was pulling 1200-1300DPS on the average boss fight where I was supposed to just DPS and not be on web or harpoon duty.

We had a PUG DK join our Naxx10 group one night and his DPS was like 400.  Ended up kicking him out after a few fights where he complained about how hard it was to do good damage.

I'd roll my eyes at anyone doing 1300 dps or less in a heroic.

1300 is marginal for quest blues.  It largely depends on iLevel and stat allocation though.  My mage is mostly iLevel 200 with three epics and I can normally manage ~2000 in a heroic on a single target, though my connection is so bad recently that it has timed out while loading google during peak.

Not to mention build.  My mage as frost was giving up 1700-1800DPS in all Naxx-10 gear and with an arcane build it's considerably more than that in certain bosses and situations.

I would love to know exactly how some people manage that kind of shit at 80.   My alt ret paladin is 75 right now.  I was managing to pull about 1600 dps in violet hold and Drak'theron.   I mean, unless you have completely skipped +hit as a stat on all of your gear, most mele classes can practically maintain more then 400 dps simply auto attacking shit.

A DK should be able to maintain 800 + dps easy just spamming nothing but X strike (for whatever spec he is) whenever his runes refresh and Deathcoil whenever he has enough runic power.

I can do 700DPS on a combat dummy with my level 60 DK in starter blues...I just don't get it. It's so easy to DPS as a DK, you have an infinite supply of ability usage that isn't effected by how much damage you do or take and even picking bad abilities doesn't hurt you like it does say a rogue or druid.

Yikes, I must really suck ass... I'm running Naxx 10 with a Palladin and a DK.  The Paladin is just a flasher, but he's ret offspec, so gets to roll when plate drops that's crappier than our mass of DKs are toting.  So he's got two or three Naxx pieces, some of the PvP pieces, and some of the purple crafting pieces, and still only pulls in about 1.3k on a single target.  The DK's tanking, but his tanking gear (since it's Naxx stuff) has more DPS than his DPS gear, and even then only pulls a little over 1k dps.

Well, I'd like to be reasonably geared as DPS for a few reasons. My server has a very small Horde population, getting groups is hard anyway, it would be even harder if it was widely known that "that stupid shaman LFG only does 900 DPS".

Also, enchanting and gemming gear kinda doesn't seem worth the expense if the gear is really crappy.

And as people say, dragging a group down with crappy DPS is indeed rude.

As for the paladin, well, badly geared healers aren't fun for anyone  :why_so_serious:

Heh, I was pulling 1700 dps before I set foot in Naxx on my DK. I think you're making some false assumptions or just gearing him badly.  Only epics were a Mirror of Truth, goggles, and Titansteel Destroyer. 

I can see myself pulling terrible DPS when I first bring my warlock into heroics.  So many goddamn dot timers to manage.

edit: This was pre-DK tree adjustments/nerfs.  Numbers may be slightly inflated.

Don't bother gemming/enchanting greens or lower level blues.  Once you're in gear around ilvl 187 it's worth gemming and enchanting as well as you can afford.

Meh, just use the cheapo green gems. There like a gold each at worst.


As a DK, you should be abusing the crap out of your many AE's to inflate your DPS numbers.  :grin:

I'd do this. The green gems sell for a pittance now, but add a disproportionate amount to levelling gear.

I've known DKs who don't pick-up X-strike for whatever spec they're in, or if they have it they don't use it.  It's baffling.

Spec has a lot to do with it, too.  Unholy spec for example is a lot less gear dependent than Blood so will put up better numbers with crappy gear.  Blood relies almost completely on physical strikes so it needs better gear to put up good DPS.  Frost falls between the two.  I bet the people putting up good DPS in blues are Unholy.

Well, that's annoying.  Anyone know of any sites that might have a reasonable level of detail for this kind of thing?  Most of the ones I know of are either devoted to specific tasks (e.g. tanking, how to beat specific bosses, that kind of thing, not so much "how to not suck at DPS in general") or way out of date.

I always go to www.elitistjerks.com for my "Serious business" wow discussion. 

Also, keep in mind that Arcane mages burn like a motherfucker if they're not worried about mana.  I've been in situations where I've been 40% of the DPS in a ~1.5 minute boss fight yet been completely OOM as the boss drops.  Some people get panicky when they think they might run out of mana eventually and try to conserve it even though they have four stacks of mage water and will get through the fight easily.  Others don't burn cooldowns because they figure they might need them, so they save them for only when they absolutely need them, therefore they never use them.

There are exactly three stats worth gunning for as plate melee.  Hit, Expertise, and Strength.  You need at least 9% hit, and 26 expertise for any physical attack dependent spec (Unholy and Frost scale a bit more poorly with expertise).  Every other DPS stat is mediocre in comparison, and only should be taken over strength if the difference is massive.  A single point of DPS on your weapon is worth 7 strength assuming the speeds of the two weapons being compared are the same, if not then slower is better.  You almost always stand behind the boss, you generally should use your highest damage moves first, and you should strive to have your Global Cooldown always counting down.

Give us armory links, we should be able to tell you what's wrong with that info.  No, I'm not going to freak out if they're not in blue gems and fully enchanted, I meet neither requirement.

Pretty sure the 9% melee hit cap was proven wrong on EJ.  It's 8%.

Unholy is your best bet if your gear isn't that great or you just honestly want an easier rotation.  Frost and blood were way too spammy for my tastes. Frost was just too damn much information to parse in the heat of things.  12/0/59 was a good non-top of the line gear heading into 3.1 as 0/10/61 supposedly did better with higher gear (no threat reduction if you skip blood though). 

Unholy EJ thread.  (http://elitistjerks.com/f72/t53615-unholy_gains_shadow_death_unholy_dps_discussion/)

Has builds, rotation, and stat weights.  Still, hit cap first.  Then I usually pile on the STR as it's weighted much better than exp rating.

Disclaimer: I don't play a DK as a main anymore and haven't been on top of the EJ shit since Ulduar. Still, concepts haven't changed much for the entry level DK.

I herded melee DPS in the right direction for all of TBC.  It's habit now.

Yeh, not even close. (http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Cenarion+Circle&n=Frostscythe)  Still running around with a few pieces of 74 gear (gemmed really weirdly, because I'm completely lost as to how much str/hit/parry I should be stacking as a tank).  But if there's fresh eighties doing like 50% more DPS than me, that suggests to me that the problem is more than just a few "replace this later" rings or whatever.  Thanks for the links, I'll have to check those out; I'm probably missing some key talent or not spamming the right attack or something.

Want to log out in your DPS gear?  Because if that what you're going with specifically for DPS you're completely missing what Blizzard values most for performance: gear and spec.  All you're bringing to the table is the ability to hit buttons and not stand in shit  :grin:

You're DPS is low because you have a tank spec.  No Killing Machine cuts down on the crits and no Chill of the Grave means less runic power which means less frost strikes.  Those are the first things that jumped out to me.

Rule #1 of tanking gems: never ever ever ever gem for parry. Gem for dodge if you're going to gem an avoidance stat. The diminishing returns on parry are much steeper and even without DR parry returns less per point of rating. Even if your dodge rating is 300 ahead of your parry rating, dodge gems will be better.

Rule #2 of tanking gems: once you've hit the defense cap, gem for stamina unless you've got a meta bonus you need reds for or a good socket bonus. There are people who say its a new world! Only noobs stack stamina now! Those people are wrong.

Threat stats will mostly come on their own from wearing good gear anyway. I'm sitting at 39 expertise with no gems spent on it, and one old enchant that I need to replace.

Hah, done.  It's really horrible, though (and half leftovers from my tanking set), has worse +hit and +str than my tanking set.  So, if I'm supposed to be coming off the bus doing 1300, and can't pull that much even with a few Naxx pieces (tanking gear though it be), that suggests to me that (partly, at least) the problem is the monkey at the keyboard.

I really enjoy tanking more than DPS, so if 1k is golden DPS for a tank in half Naxx gear, I'll be fine with that, but I suspect this is not the case.

My dps varies pretty wildly as a tank, some fights I'm doing 1500, some fights I break 2000. It's not really something that my guild pays much attention to, though.

It's only note worthy when an actual DPS'er can't beat our tanks.

Download and run the addon called RatingBuster, it makes gear decisions a lot easier.  Also, your specs are both pretty funky IMO, though I gave up on my DK early into the expansion.

Rating buster is nice but needs some tuning if you play an enh shaman, unless you believe spelldmg is all that matters to an enh shaman. Fortunately the interface makes it quite easy to tune.

I thought ratingsbuster was the one that just told you how much actual % you get from various ratings? Not the one that does the EP calculations or whatever.

It is, but for Shaman by default it only tells you caster stats. You have to go into the interface and turn on things like attack power.

I prefer the raw numbers.

I'm sure most of you all are aware of this but I've just discovered Rawr (http://www.codeplex.com/Rawr). Very handy little tool for planning gear upgrades. It says it covers "Bears, Cats, Moonkin, Healadins, Retadins, Mages, ProtWarriors, Trees, Hunters, Tankadins, HealingPriests, ShadowPriests, EnhShams, and DPS & Tank Death Knights".

Takes some tweaking of options and filters to suit your own purposes and it's item database isn't 100% up to date, for instance a lot of the Argent Tournament gear is still listed as "Other" source, but apart from that it's awesome.

Again with the elitistjerks.com - these people are generally morons. Of course I was there for the pre-BC balance druid faq that said druids shouldn't be using cloth gear or that BC prot paladins should take kings. Complete sheeple and clique-mindedness that makes them far from serious.

The signal to trollnoise ratio is small enough that you can consider EJ an extension of a server's trade chat or just the regular wow forums, but with more traffic.

maxdps.com is what you're looking for, in this particular case.

Go away.

edit: It's been a while since I went to maxdps and it still as terrible as I remember.

First, the broad strokes
-A number of specs are not modeled (frost dks, feral DPS and tank, destruction and demonology warlocks, arcane mages, mm hunters, protection paladins) at all.
-They have ZERO wrath support for Rogues.
-Most of the specs that do have wrath support haven't been updated since Wrath launch despite major changes since then.  The only specs I noticed being up to date are retadins, moonkin, blood & unholy dks.
-No support for glyphs.

Detailed problems I was able to spot in moments:
-Enhancement shaman contains no mention of where maelstrom weapon casts go in your rotation.
-The prot warrior section completely fails to mention that concussion blow should be a part of your rotation.
-The healer sections are universally worthless with no guidelines on when or how to use your abilities.
-The default fury warrior spec is flawed.  It doesn't have Two-Handed Weapon Spec, a straight-up 6% DPS boost that is massively superior to anywhere else you could put those three points.

Maxdps is a retarded site for retards like you.

Our old raid leader insisted we were to use maxdps.  I went there and it said my mage with my gear I should be good for almost 2300DPS in Frost spec.  I never even came close to that, even all purple'd out now - it's more like 1800 max on a pure DPS fight and maybe a bit more if various trinkets and cooldowns stack properly.  EJ on the other hand said to spec and rotate a certain way with some numbers, so I tried it and my DPS shot up considerably over that.  I don't completely disavow maxdps, but I do take all of the sites with a grain of salt until I can try it out in an actual fight situation to see how it behaves.

No U.  :oh_i_see:

maxdps.com is just mathematically flat out wrong about every spec I play at least.

Yes you have to have some slight filtering skills for EJ, but they're much much much more reliable than any of the other sites, short of a few very good spec-specific ones (shadowpanther, maybe maintankadin and tankspot).

The big problem I had with Maxdps when I played and people were using it (which was during Sunwell) is that it's gear ranking system that everyone uses takes every single item in a vacuum. So what it tells you is a best in slot item for every slot, ends up meaning jack shit if you lose something more important overall.

Plus, with any theorycrafting in WoW, the "optimal" is never anywhere near reality. Those sites really come down to "perfect world" scenarios, which end up making things harder than they should be for groups run by people who do everything solely on "what the spreadsheets/maxdps/EJ/bosskillers say". Every group and every encounter is different, if you don't adjust things for how your group dynamic shines, you will ultimately fall short of your goal.

Of course, that is most of why I stopped playing as few people I was around would ever think of doing something even remotely different than what they had read on some website, and never took the big picture into account when assessing DPS/healing/etc.

I just use EJ as a guideline, a place to find out simple game related information that is not readily available without say, hours spend attacking a dummy. Hit cap, for example: a stat that varies based on class and spec, but is incredibly a) incredibly important for PVEing successfully and b) not stated flat out anywhere in game. EJ has that information available. Other examples include the way certain talents work, effects of meta gems, proc rates/ICDs on trinkets, etc. I take everything said there as nothing more than a guideline, however.

I don't raid, I don't care about having the ultimate possible DPS, I play multiple characters and classes, I'm not interested in epic-chasing. Being limited to a couple of 1 hour sessions a day and being 6 months behind the levelling curve means that I know I'll never see 70% or more of the current end-game content.

I just want an easy tool to tell me what gear upgrades I can aim for and what would be useful gems & enchants to put on it and Rawr (from EJ) lets me do just that. Combined with the good posts in response to my questions on the previous page of this thread it means I've managed to usefully upgrade a few bits of gear (head, axes, enchants) on my enhance shaman already and I've got some nice, relatively easy-to-achieve goals to play with when I get bored of levelling my army of alts.

Luckily I also a hoarder (for the Hoard! Hahah) so I've just managed to level blacksmithing, engineering, jewelcrafting, inscription *and* alchemy to 400+ on a bunch of different characters in less than a week without having to spend 1000s on materials, which helps the upgrading no end  :awesome_for_real:

I use RAWR whenever I need to know if X or Y item is superior, since RAWR takes a look at your items and talents as a whole. It's also very accurate for DPS estimations on tank and spank.

Or it was like 2 months ago when I last opened it.

The most fundamental reason that EJ is superior to maxdps is it's transparency. All the logic is laid out, and you can ask questions and get answers. The EJ Theorycrafting Think Tank articles are generally the best guides I have seen for classes (where they exist).

My warrior according to MaxDPS's armory import. (http://www.maxdps.com/warrior/protection.php?z=US&r=Burning%20Legion&n=Frederic)

My warrior on the armory. (http://www.wowarmory.com/character-talents.xml?r=Burning+Legion&cn=Frederic&gn=IRONFIST)

Something isn't right here. :awesome_for_real:

You don't have any minor glyphs  :grin:

I've never done heroic SL...I have no wish to be chaosed into killing my own party members by Blackheart. I probably would unless my shammy just stood there casting Lightning Bolt the whole time. Not my idea of fun

Oh crap moments like that are sometimes outright awesome tho.

I remember the good old days in ZG when people who got mind controlled by hex piles did like 300% damage.  Nothing like looting a hex pile when no one was paying attention and having the decked to the teeth rogue suddenly go cuisinart on 2 or 3 unsuspecting clothies before anyone realizes what is going on.

And it is still fun to run unsuspecting 60s through Strathholme on my 80 feral druid, just to see if i get possessed by the banshee mob and murder them.

Mind Control is nowhere near that awesome.

Mind Control is typically the AI switching your auras around or dropping sentry totem.

TIME FOR FUN

That is one of my favorite fights ever, but most of my guildmates don't agree. It can lead to some totally hilarious outcomes.

Mind control fights are great.  Why so serious?  :why_so_serious:

Typically, mind control means "shaman blowing bloodlust under mind control while fighting the last few packs of lynx trash while in the last 8 minutes of a bear run."

Good times.  Good times.

It only really bugged me when he'd MC us with three HP left. I loved MC'd tree though.  :heart:

Totally agree, stuff like that that keeps instances fun & interesting  :why_so_serious:

The problem with randomly dieing to a shaman popping heroism during a MC is that most people get pissed with the corpse run and repair bill rather than appreciate the ludicrous situation that just unfolded.

Repair bills and corpse runs: unfun shit that should be cut.

As far as i know, you will never take a durability hit if another player kills you while under the effects of mind control.

Or from many other forms of "friendly fire" either.  For example, you do not take durability if you are killed by a crossed polarity on thaddeus.

Yep.  You don't appear to take a hit if you get MC'd on Yogg, either. So if it's a wipe I make sure to stare directly into the skulls, then enjoy watching as I kill 2-3 other players.  The DK AI is much smarter than the hunter one ever was. (Wtf dropping traps and Vollying, then running up to melee..)

The paladin AI was pretty stupid at times too, it would switch my aura to something completely idiotic (it would wind up on crusader sometimes in TBC, for heaven's sake)  and then fiddle with random seals.

Warlock Hellfire doesn't give durability loss either.  However, in this situation all it takes is for the tank to come off the MC segment with low enough health that he is effectively unhealable and all of a sudden everyone gets repair bills.  Repair bills are one of those arbitrary and fuckstupid ideas out of the dark ages of MMO's that Blizzard simply refuses to purge with fire.

Repair bills work in single-player because it's very easy to tell who fucked up.

Which was a pain in the ass if you were tanking.   Plus, I'd inevitably go toe to toe with whoever was our highest DPS.  Pre-Wrath.  Hitting for like 100-125 max.

Sad panda.

So glad the Wrath changes gave me some actual damage when I swing my hammer.

The new 5 man is not easy to heal as a just-dinged 80.

You just don't have your old LifeRoll clutch!

It wasn't easy, but you did pretty well. The only deaths were LOLadds bug, and stop-bitch-out-the-mage-and-heal <3

Just depressing that it was all mail and feral dps night.

Well, it extra special didn't help it was a JUST DINGED level 80 druid tank.

I SUX AT BEAR OH NOES

Only one class to go and I will be officially one of those broken people that has one of each tank at level 80.  :drillf:

Has anyone tested the supposed rake scaling in occulus and/or EoE?

Not yet, I have been meaning to do Oculus again hoping that the scaling will make it non-painful.

I noticed a HP increase with gear item level in Occulus, similar to FL. Not sure if damaged scaled as well; the zone is still painful as hell. Haven't done Maly since patch, and probably won't ever again.

Edit: spln iz hrd

Blizzard seems insistant upon making vehicles a focal point, but I can't, no matter how hard I try, seem to like them.   There are a few ok implementations, like I don't mind Isle of Conquest, but in general, I think the game would be just as good were they removed entirely (Maybe with the exception of mounts with extra seats, if that counts).

PvP with vehicles is actually fun. It's interesting to blow shit up without an agenda beyond taking the next hill.

In PvE they suck ass. They should be completely abolished from that aspect of the game. People don't enjoy doing technical fights where they can't use any of their normal abilities. They don't want to get into a wonky viewpoint and then try to negotiate completely different controls. And lastly they HATED having all their fancy gear reduced to a worthless pile of crap on the floor.

I believe it was in the patch notes.  All vehicles currently in the game (with the exception of the Jousting Mounts) now scale with gear.  Maly included.

I know; I was replying to K9 asking if anyone had tried it.

Well, it is sorta fun to just put the highest level gear you got into every slot and turn your siege engine into a rolling death machine. With my latest upgrades I'll be able to get a siege engine to 2 million HP.

So, heh. Did my first heroic with my enhance shaman this morning, after lots of work getting as good gear as I reasonably could. Went fine, great fun, wasn't even bottom of the DPS meter, raar etc.

Realised I'd forgotten to pick up the daily quests for it, so back to Dalaran, pick them up, find another group to do it again, no problem I thought. Er guys, where are you all? What does instance lock mean?

Many lols in /p. Sigh.  :why_so_serious:

I don't understand why maly and occ exist.

I could say the same for Obsidian Sanctum since it felt shoehorned into the game as far as lore goes. Also, Argent Tournament, lol.

Argent Tournament exists to make it easier for players to attain 100 mounts.

At least most of the lore for these were in game, though scattered through half a dozen random quests in Borean Tundra and Dragonblight.

Starts off with a bit of lore they don't tell you, that being that WAAYYY back during the sundering that destroyed the Well of Eternity, the 4 Good Dragon aspects fought Deathwing, and drove him off.  However, Malygos, being a very heavily tied to the magic of the world, suffered some kind of nasty mental blow durring the fight (partly because he had given some of his power to an artifact Deathwing had created and then turned around and used against the aspects).

Anyway, Malygos goes into retreat to hybernate and recover his power.  Many centuries later, the artifact Deathwing created is finally destroyed, returning the stolen power to the dragon ascpects.  Somehow, this return of power to Malygos drives him borderline insane, and he up and decides that Arcane Magic (which he is supposed to be watching over, and which the mortals have been rampantly abusing, much to the detriment of the planet) is too much for the Mortals to handle.  So he sets out to do something, which will eventually destabalize the arcane fields of the planet enough to either make magic unusable, or kill us all off, one or the other.  So we have to break into his pocket universe and put him down, before he dooms us all, or something like that.

As for Occulus, from what i can tell, his plan was to do something along the lines of use the surge needles and focusing rings to artificially redirect power from the leylines around northrend, and from the Blue Dragon shrine, across borean tundra and to the Nexus / Occulus, which would act as a giant focusing tower, beaming the power into his little pocket dimension, where he would then use it to power his anti-magic death ray, or whatever his master plan was.  Appearently, we managed to at least stop him from completing the cross borean pipeline at the border of Dragonblight.

I think the whole thing started when Deathwing killed most of Malygos' dragonflight at the aforementioned battle over the Well of Eternity.  He never really recovered from that.

Deathwing and Malygos were best friends, so Mal took the betrayal rather hard.  The betrayal, the death of much of his dragonflight, and his magic being used against him turned him.

Of course Deathwing turned too.  He was a hippy, and then became a death hippy.  Decided that Azeroth was better off without anyone tainting it.

And before obth of them, Sargeras turned as well.

You've dealt with the douchebags of Warcraft. You'd turn to thoughts of "Fuck it, better to just kill everyone," too.

Some people just want to see the world burn  :why_so_serious:

After being stalled for a million years, partly because we kept having to cancel raids due to server fuckery or lack of healers showing up, we finally made some progress and got Freya and Thorim down tonight.

I tanked the hallway on Thorim, which was fairly fun. Not sure what the arena part is like as a tank yet. Freya is a very cool encounter but totally boring to MT. The OT has a way more interesting job.

I had to lead our 2nd string group through ToC10 tonight. For learning attempts we did well, 2-shot beasts, 1-shot Jaraxxus, 4-shot Champions, then wiped multiple to Valkyr, including hitting the enrage twice. We finally downed them after 7 or so tries.

Before this night I didn't even realise that the valkyr had a hard enrage :( So yeah, the new DPS failed us a bit on that.

So those of you who are cool and whatnot, explain to me how the Champions fight goes simply and what works best.  Yes, I know it's a PvP fight and not a pure DPS or PvE fight, and we're not trying it the "normal" raider way.  But we can get the druid down to ~40% of health within the first 30s or so of the fight, and then, *bam* and he's back at full health.  Do we need to just try and pick off whoever is convenient?  Ignore anyone in particular?  Interrupts work great for those first few moments, but it seems like everyone is on cooldown when the healing starts up again.  Same for all of the other mobs too as long as the druid or pally lives.

Granted, we'll eventually get it but I would rather not wipe 15 times before we do.  Any strategies or advice that can be given would never hurt.

from what I've seen; Lots and lots of interupts and spam dispels for the HOTs.  Miss one and you're doomed.

Now to try and find another guild. Inattentive and indifferent officers + failling on Yogg for 2 months = everyone quits and now I'm a DK trying to find a guild that doesn't raid until 1 fucking AM EST. 

WTF, goddamn college kids.   I won't even get to see Icecrown at this rate.   :cry:

We CC 4-5 of the mobs on the pull, including the healers, then burn down the most threatening DPS (Shaman, then rogue, then warrior) under a heal debuff. Dispel like mad and re-cc when you can. Once the first DPS is down you have more or less won.

We just zerged the druid down with as many interrupts as possible.  It was funny watching him go down as fast as he did.  Then the shammy came over and 2-shot me (cloth wearer curse).  Luckily the group pulled it together and got the rogue down, then the priest and after that it was pretty much a cakewalk.  Lots of cheering too.

It's amazing how well a raid can do when everyone is geared for it and doesn't stand in the fire ;-)

In our view the enhance shaman is the most dangerous and annoying one you can get, and needs to die first. Congrats on killing them though.

Did my first ever Naxx 10 run last week. Was a random PUG and it went very smoothly mostly.

It did confirm my complete lack of interest in raiding though. Sure, some of the fights were fun, especially the one with the dancing round the floor flame things, but not worth sitting through 3 hours for, and there's no way my back can handle that, I had to take several breaks.

Naxx is easy to the point where it's almost not fun. Ulduar with a competent group is really fun IMO. And then ToC/Ony/Sarth/Maly are over so quick that you probably wouldn't need a break.

Sadly even ToC10 requires a bit more than Naxx10 gear unless you're a pretty good player.

I guess the fun of a fight varies between roles. As DPS fights like patch are fun because you get to see some really impressive numbers flying, but it's probably the single most boring fight for a healer. I'd agree that Ulduar fights are broadly more enjoyable than Naxx, and with a lot less trash Ulduar is far more forgiving on your sanity, and gives you more opportunities for breaks. Fights like IC, Thorim and Freya are really fun imo, as the dynamics of the fight change, and you have multiple tasks that need to be done differently. IC in particular is a nice evolving fight, and a mechanic I'd love to see used again. Sapphiron was probably my favourite fight in Naxx.

ToC is broadly fun, although beasts are just tedious and Jaraxxus is really uninspired. Champions, Valkyr and anub are interesting though.

Could always be worse, could be clearing trash between the Twin Emps and C'Thun at 60.  *shudder*

The heroic badges evened out most of my gear, and much of my team's gear. We've cleared the place after a little over a month of trying, and nothing but mail and cloth dropping. I'd say if you can stand 5 mans, and fill in the gaps with some stupid Naxx runs, you'd be pretty much exactly where I was starting it off.

Yeah heroic badge loot is where I'm gonna be at, I think that's my end game until next expansion.

I wouldn't be so sure of that.  IIRC, they said the new 3.3 heroics will drop Triumph emblems.  If they're handing out ilevel 226 weapons in a pathetically easy holiday, I'd bet the new heroics will drop something like ilevel 232 gear.

This is why I haven't broke on the Triumph badge gear.  If I get a Trophy, then I'll grab the 9.5 stuff.  But I'm pretty much assuming the three Icecrown instance will drop at least 10-man ToC level gear.

I'm sure the 3.3 heroics will be "serious business" and there will be "gear checks" since maybe they'll make it so you can't just gather up all of the mobs and hit your favorite AOE ability.

At this point, I'm just planning for the expansion.   Buying hierloom gear to finish off leveling my rogue, that will then be passed on to a goblin hunter.

I think WoW dungeon design peaked with Dire Maul.

I don't know if you're being serious or not, but I loved Dire Maul.  North was just awesome.  You could play it straight or go for a tribute run.  East was a boss bonanza, but was generally a bit easy (I believe it was tuned for 56-58).

Wasn't very fond of West through.  It was kind of a pain.

Confirmed. (http://www.wow-europe.com/en/info/underdev/3p3/icecrown.xml)


Also:

:drill:

One of the most fun things that I've done recently is burn through halls of stone with a ulduar25 geared healer+tank+2 dps+1 scrub. It was extremely fun to just chain pull the entire instance. The hallway where the guys unfreeze? We did that in one single go. We almost didn't stop at all. I healed on the run and we powered through the entire thing in about 15 minutes. I've never seen it done so fast. No pausing, no delays.

That wasn't to say it was easy, I had a hell of a time keeping the tank up when we're tanking the boss and the pack before him, and that unfreeze area got hairy as we all got stunned every time one of them died, but overall it was very fun. No single pack pull everyone sit there while the tank loots, casters drink, it was just 15 minutes of go go go. A nice change.

Isn't that HOL?

I did something similar where I was the scrub. I think all were on their offspecs though.  Their DPS wasn't that impressive, but stuff exploded pretty quick and the pace was pretty fast even if the tank seemed distracted.   Still, it was over in like 20 minutes, and managed to make a Wintergrasp I thought I was going to be late to.

Dear Jesus, Buddha, Yoda, Zeus, Joe Pesci, anyone who's listening... Please let that miserable Horde-kissing twat Jaina die in the 5 man confrontation with the Lich King. With Theramore advancing into the Barrens in Cataclysm, it sure looks like she has to go. And supposedly she's going there to try and redeem Arthas. It's the perfect opportunity for him to stab her and go "MUA HA HA! COME AND GET YOUR REVENGE IN THE NEW RAID, NEWBS!" before flying away on his broom or whatever.

I hate Jaina more than any other Warcraft character.

Ohh god, don't get all loregasmy in here too.

New avatar.  :awesome_for_real:

 :awesome_for_real:

Wait, is she still trying to redeem him?  Didn't Tirion determine that's really a lost cause?

To himself, perhaps.  We had the discussion where Mr. Anagram leads you in the other direction. 

I'm still leaning towards Arthas redeeming himself in the final fight and self destructing/ destroying Frostmourne.   At Blizzcon when the Icecrown Legendary Axe was announced G4 asked "Why not Frostmourne!"  The response was, "Well, if you took hold of Frostmourne, then you wouldn't be playing your character anymore because Frostmourne would overpower your will.   That's all I can say but you'll see what I'm talking about when Icecrown comes out because it's going to feature prominently (in the dungeon/ final fight)"

Yeah, that statement didn't strike me as weird at the time, but it is kind of odd in light of the fact that I'm replaying Warcraft 3 now and doing the Arthas parts of it, its pretty clear that Frostmourne's main thing is to make you obey/subservient to the Lich King, act as a conduit for him talking to you, etc? So if the Lich King's dead you'd think that stuff would basically shut down. Maybe Arthas has made some modifications to it.

Anything involving Arthas is inconsistent and dick. The book proved that. Whatever is Frostmourne is no longer explainable and illogical in a realm of gnomes and world-invading demons.

All i remember about Frostmourne was the supposed "sequence of events" involved in it's "appearance".

Goes something like:
- Ner'zhul fails his burning crusade masters during First Orcish Invasion.  Gets captured, has his soul ripped from his body, and his soul is then tortured until it is so scarred and twisted that there is probably nothing much of the original Ner'zhul left.   Then his now totally insane tortured soul is magically bonded to a Suit of Armor + Sword, entombed in a crystal of magical ice, and sent hurtling back to Azeroth through the Twisting Nether.

- The Icy Prison of The Entity that is now Ner'zhul / The Lich King crashes in Icecrown, which causes it to crack slightly.  The crack is big enough to allow the Sword (Frostmourne) to be forced out of the prison.  The Lich King then uses his incredible mental abilities to start subverting the locals, raising the dead, gathering minions (like Kel'thuzad) and eventually set in motion the events that lead to Arthas (his chosen mortal Vessel) picking up the sword, trecking to icecrown and completely shattering his prison, and then putting on the Armor.

So the big question is:  What properties did Frostmourne / The Lich King Armor have BEFORE Ner'zhuls soul was bound to them?  There are LOADS of theories as to what Frostmourne actually is, one of the more interesting ones being that it is the polar opposite of Ashbringer (theory being that each one is forged from a Fragment of a Naaru, one in it's Dark state, the other in it's Light state after being purified).  However, since literally NOTHING is actually known about where, when or even how Frostmourne was created, all we can do is speculate.  One thing I wonder about though, is that the Armor and the Sword came as a set.  Maybe more attention should be payed to the Armor as well?

Somehow, regardless of what the book says Arthas THINKS he did (he thinks he destroyed Ner'zhuls soul in a battle of wills over who would be the dominant personality in the "Lich King" body), I don't think we have seen the last of Ner'zhul, and I am pretty sure that since Ner'zhuls tortured soul was bound to the Armor / Sword (as in, the Lich King had no PHYSICAL BODY before Arthas, but existed completely as a Possessed Sentient Artifact), the only way to completely purge Frostmourne of his influence would be to destroy the sword.

I mean, heck, for all we know, "Arthas" doesn't even NEED a physical body to exist any more, and is probably just as closely bound to the Armor / Sword as Ner'zhul was.

Personally, I think Ner'zhul is fucking with Arthas.  I mean, I don't care how powerful Arthas may have become over the course of the WC3 campaigns, pretty much everything he EVER did after picking up Frostmourne was fueled in part by Ner'zhuls own power, and I highly doubt that someone who started out as a Paladin in training, and was so EASILY manipulated into dragging his soul through the dirt, would even stand a ghost of a chance in a contest of wills against the soul of one of the greatest Necromancers / Warlocks the Orcs ever produced, especially when you consider the kind of power and influence the Lich King could wield while simply stuck in a block of ice in the middle of a glacier.

Tichondrius stated that the Lich King forged Frostmourne.  Go play the first mission of the Undead campaign in Warcraft 3.  As for the armor, it was forged specifically to hold Ner'zhul's esscence.


Where did you get that from? Arthas was a very willing servant of the Lich King and I am certain he knew what would happen when he put on the armor.   He was very happy to become the Lich King.

I mean, heck, for all we know, "Arthas" doesn't even NEED a physical body to exist any more, and is probably just as closely bound to the Armor / Sword as Ner'zhul was.


There really was no contest of wills.  All Ner'zhul has to do was use Arthas''s youth, hot temper, and lust for power against him, and he was easily turned. 

According to the book, whatever "soul" occupies the Lich King's shell is no longer any contribution from Ner'zhul or Arthas, or at least the humanity of Arthas. Arthas's "good" side or what not. I don't know what the results of that internal struggle were because the "third" personality, the Death Knight Arthas, is the only remaining entity within the Lich King, and what its motivation is, you got me. Simply to rule? Simply power? The game made it much more mysterious and intriguing, but after reading the ending of the book, it seems really dumbed down and confusing. Classic fofofo villain stuff.

The fall wasn't as excellently narrated in the book. Arthas wants his horse back. Waaaaah. Arthas never in his heart gave a damn about his people (evidenced by the fall and his priorities). He was nice out of ceremony and formality, or at least had a rather unrealistic view of the world due to the fact his "humanity", his inner light, was represented as a naive, innocent child. The Culling of Stratholme was all about spiting Mal'ganis. That he should be surprised his compatriots acted with the horror they did showed that Arthas had gone full retard.

Warcraft lore and status quo is about results by any means, no matter how fucked up the methods. The books that get written, especially retellings, are trying to justify the ludicrous developments, and its clear those restrictions affect the quality of the work.

Well, problem there (as with a lot of WoW lore) is that it was later expanded upon.  In the Rise of the Lich King (http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/wrath/features/story/story.xml) story on the official WoW site, it is mentioned specificly that Frostmourne pre dates Ner'zhul, and that his soul was specificly Shackled to the Armor and Bound to the Sword before being encased in the magic icecube that was later to be the Frozen Throne.  So basically, they retconned / expanded the lore so that either Tichondrious was not 100% sure of Frostmournes origins himself, or he was just lying to Arthas so as to avoid having to spill too much information about who his True Masters were (ie, info on Frostmournes origins leading to unwanted pointed questions about the Burning Legion and the fact that the Dreadlords were the Lich Kings jail wardens, and not his friendly associates.)

It supposedly came from the novel dealing with the fall of Arthas.   In the novel, sometime after Arthas puts on the armor, he supposedly engages in a battle of wills with whatever remains of Ner'zhul's soul to decide which "personality" will be the controlling one in the "new" Lich King, and the book has him (him being the Death Knight Arthas personality) utterly crushing the "old" Lich King personality and taking control.  

There is also a scene in the book where he supposedly does some "soul searching" and roots out the last remaining spark of "good" in his soul, has a nice little dialogue with it, and then calmly crushes it beneath his mental boot heel, symbolizing his complete severing of all ties that might remotely bind him to humanity /good / etc and completing his total decent into utter evil.

It was all the same scene (Kills the sickly child that represents his humanity and, in a twist, spins around and destroys Ner'Zhul). But according to the game, he never really killed his good side, just extricated the heart (the physical representation of his goodness, I guess) from his body, which persists as a spirit named Matthias Lehner. The Lich King is just a shell, and what's inside might as well be creamy nougat for all I care for him now.

Arthas is dead as a character. There's really nothing left to work with, no character development. He's as flat and uncomplicated in a cartoonish villian sort of way, dramatic cinematics aside. Even Illidian was amusing to watch as he struggled to hang on, knowing defeat was coming but unwilling to accept it, fighting with emotion and fervor before the bitter end. There was personality in Outland. Everyone playing a role. Vashj, Kael'thas, Gruul (Yeah, Gruul. The ogre / gronn stuff was fun and believable.). Interesting stuff was happening.

Arthas / Lich King has been shown as weak, vulnerable, and very uninspiring in every event, where he just sort of stands there the whole time and lets his minions do the dirty work, then he steps in and gets bitch-slapped in some fashion (be it Ashbringer, Forsaken plague, or his heart getting rocked). His power is in the forces he controls, not in his being. The lesson I take: Arthas may be unkillable, perhaps, but not all-powerful.

One-shot Saurfang the Younger aside, of course.

I imagine if he couldn't kill his good side then Ner'Zhul is still in there somewhere, but it's all so convoluted.