f13.net

I've been into it for a week now and I'm finding out some interesting things about it, so I'd like to open the floor to a few questions:

1 - What's your overall impression of the instance in terms of aethestics?
2 - How do you rate the difficulty of the boss encounters?
3 - How do you rate the gear drops in the instance?
4 - What do you think of the trash and the respawns?
5 - How much does gear from five mans affect your progress in the instance, in your opinion?
6 - What's the ideal group setup?
7 - What do you think Blizzard will do to change the instance in the future?

I figured I'd let you hash those out for a few posts before I put in my two cents.

Had a bunch of guildies running it last night. From the bits I caught in gchat, it looks A) reasonably tough, and B) pretty damned lucrative. I'll let you know in a month or two when I get a character to 70  :cry:

I have been there twice, having fought only Horse, Moroes, and Curator, so take my opinion with a grain of salt.

1 - I loved the design. I felt like I was intruding on the ruins of a castle that was actually lived in at one time. Little things like the waiters serving the guests added a lot of character. Its a shame that the pullers are the only ones who can safely get nice views of this kind of stuff.
2 - The first few encounters seemed to be of decent difficulty without being oppressive, or requiring some difficult gimmick to pull off. The Curator was the first fight I saw that required a fair amount of precision in both party selection and execution. For the sake of longevity I like to see a dungeon with a couple of epic pinatas followed by challenge. No complaints here.
3 - All sidegrades that I saw.
4 - Excluding the Horse event respawns were too fast. Spawn races should not be a part of every boss. They can be fun in moderation.
5 - Curator was the first mob that really seemed to stress gear. Up to that point we got by easily with a healthy blue/green mix.
6 - 2 tanks, 2 healers, 1 cup of water (mage), DPS to taste
7 - I think enough people will complain that they will eventually extend some of the respawn timers to 1 hour or more.

I've done it for a couple of weeks so far, having killed every boss but Netherspite.

1 - What's your overall impression of the instance in terms of aethestics?

It's very well done.

2 - How do you rate the difficulty of the boss encounters?

Most are pretty easy with a decent group. Nightbane being the only real challenge. That said the variety of the encounters is fun, and none are so easy that you can just sleep through them (except perhaps huntsman and Maiden - and chess).

3 - How do you rate the gear drops in the instance?

Most of the gear upgrades I want drop in the instance. I've been getting 1-2 upgrades per full clear, which seems reasonable to me.

4 - What do you think of the trash and the respawns?

Some trash is just too long. Ok the first time, but once you've done it a few times it just gets boring. There is nice variety, just too much of it.  Havn't had to deal with respawns as we 1-shot most bosses.

5 - How much does gear from five mans affect your progress in the instance, in your opinion?

A lot. People who have done a few 5 mans and have decent gear will contribute a lot more than those in quest rewards.

6 - What's the ideal group setup?

Prot War
Feral Druid
Warlock
Shadow Priest
Mage
Rogue
Shamen
Hunter
Holy Pally
Holy Priest

7 - What do you think Blizzard will do to change the instance in the future?

They will hopefully lower the trash respawns as lots complain about this. Hopefully lower some trash numbers too. They're probably nerf the harder bosses at some point to let more people complete the place.

I'll add my own thoughts:

1 - It's very well designed in terms of layout and look. I like how you could actually compare it to a real building or keep in terms of walking through it.
2 - Bosses are hard, but I think that's mainly because you have to have a specific group setup that our alliance hasn't keyed yet. Moroes' debuff is completely ludicrous for example.
3 - The drops look good to me as a tank, but I can see slightly less utility as the low levels of the place for casters.
4 - The trash is fine, the respawns are horrific. There's no reason things should repop every 30 minutes in an instance with a 7 day lockout. Put them on the same timer as everything in 5 mans.
5 - I really can't measure how much the gear is affecting our progress, but I'm guessing part of the issue is we're not fully decked out in our 5 man sets at all. I'm sporting about 2 pieces myself and I think that's pretty average.
6 - Our setup isn't good from what I'm seeing. Two priests is an absolute must for shackling, as are 2 tanks. From there I think it's hard to go wrong. Unfortunately, finding two priests that have keys is never easy.
7 - Blizzard better change the respawns. It's going to cause a lot of people to just throw up their hands for a while until they do.

Damn it. The whole time me and my friends have been drooling over the Karazhan media all we kept saying to eachother was, "Oh christ, look at all that room for trash."

I thought Blizzard's big idea with Karazhan was having the place be easy to get back into after being gone for a day? Whatever happened to that?

My little guild is kinda fucked really on Karazhan. We got every single class needed except for priests. We have 3 Holy Priests, but one is not gonna be on for quite a while, and the other two have odd schedules. I'm getting ahead of myself though, since I've been so busy with classwork (never take more than 3 online classes, ever) I haven't been able to get my warrior past 66.

Im a bit disapointed in the loot from there. There is no offspec loot. No DPS warrior plate, no ret pally plate, no feral drood leather. Meh.

Uh, what? There's like a loot table of 12 items per boss. Feral druids can take their pick from the roguish leather for dps, not to mention the tokens for Tier 4 which go many ways. Granted, plate drops in there basically go towards either pally heal or warrior tanking, with some exceptions off Nightbane, and a few others. But seriously, in the long run DPS warriors are better served gearing in pvp than raids, and retribution pallies, well, I've never really understood their utility in big raids that wouldn't be better served by a healing pally or some other dps class.

A ret pally that knows what he is doing can output a decent amount of DPS. Not rogue type dps, but enough, also they have +6% to heal aura, and +3% to crit seal. Also with Crusader Strike, they can keep all the other pallys judgments active at the same time. You dont bring a Ret pally for their DPS, you bring them for the whole package. DPS + Buffs + debuffs + Judgement refresh (which frees up your other pallys). Also, if it gets nasty, they pull back a heal, or equip their sword and board and grab an add. They are the jack of all trades more so than any other spec. But they cant tank or heal as good as holy or prot.

I think it just remains to be seen if blizzard was good enough at designing encounters to make this a viable raid spot.

Unlikely they will ever be valuable in 10mans. Of course there will be room in 25s - if you have a smart guild and the player is decent.

I don't get why everyone is complaining about Kaz loot. Every run I have been on nearly everyone in the raid has got at least one upgrade per run. The only bosses that don't drop much in the way of loot are Huntsman and Moroes. And they still have some stuff, just not always.

Given they're so piss easy and close to the instance start this is understandable.


Otherwise...

This week so far:

I got the dagger from Prince. Mage got the cloak. Druid got the T4.
War got neck on Aran. Rogue got boots.
Druid got staff on Illhoof. Shaman got belt.
Shadow Priest and me both got Neck from trash.
War got sword on chess. Shaman got shield.
Mage got T4 on Curator. Can't remember other drop - was used though.
Shadow Priest got legs on crone. Priest got wand.
War got gloves on maiden. Pally got bracers.
I got brooch on moroes (before trash drop). Rogue got loot too.
Both drops used from huntsman.

So:

War got loot - check. Heaps!
Rogue got loot - check. (both)
Druid got loot - check. 2-3 pieces.
Warlock got loot - check. 2 pieces.
Mage got loot - check. 2 pieces.
Shadow Priest got loot - check. 2 pieces.
Pally got loot - check. 1-2 pieces.
Shaman got loot - check. 2-3 pieces.
Priest got loot - check. 1 piece.

What's the issue?

Maulgar and Gruul tonight. Looking forward to it. Hopefully the belt drops on Maulgar, it's sooo much better than what I have right now.

Moroes is tough for us, but we only have 1 priest. I'm also thinking we're undergeared as a whole.

Gruul's HAAAAAAAARD. He was hitting me for 6k a shot, but I know we're undergeared for him.

Here's some questions I have:

-Doable without Vent/TS? I fucking hate using TS/Vent on WoW.
-Doable with 1-2 dummies? We've got some good players but I can't imagine us being able to field 10 of them due to their schedules, so we'll have to take some of our uh...less talented members.

Yes but it makes it harder.

Yes but it makes it harder, to much harder, depending on the fight and classes.

As far as TS goes, I'd find it tough. A lot of the fights require a lot of explaining, so unless you have macros in chat ready to roll, it's going to be rough. Also, adds happen frequently because the aggro ranges are large, so being able to make split second assignments helps.

As far as 1-2 idiots goes, it's easily done as long as they aren't horrible hunters with loose pets, your tanks, or your priests. Locks, Mages, Rogues, Druids, Shamans, Pallys, all have fairly straight forward jobs without a lot of issues.

Okay, that makes me feel a bit better then. Our small stable of dedicated healers is pretty damn good, I'm MT, and we got a couple great feral druids for OT/DPS. I was worried that not having a DPS class or two that aren't so great at their jobs would make some fights drag too long to survive.

It will matter.

One thing non DPS classes assume is that you can get anyone DPSing and it's doesn't matter. DPS matters a LOT.

You wont be able to beat the harder encounters without decent dps who knows how to assist quickly, and who do a lot of damage. You will get overwhelmed by adds. The fight will last too long. Someone will break a shackle. Someone will pull aggro. Someone will do something wrong.

That said, if you have a shitty tank you wont be able to do ANYTHING, so it's not on that level.

While I agree good DPS is very helpful Lamaros, I think you're giving DPS a little too much credit. Not breaking shackles and not pulling aggro is pretty much all you have to worry about with DPS, and if you have a threat meter you're not going to pull aggro unless you are a complete dumbass. If you can't assist a target, you're an idiot, plain and simple. Hell there are macros for that even if you can't figure out how to target things with clicking.

It's not really comparable to healing and tanking as far as what makes or breaks a group. It matters, but you can get by with one shitty dps person in a 10 man. You can't with one shitty tank or healer. Thus the suggestion to Fab.

I did say that a shitty tank will be a bigger problem. :)

But you wont be able to kill any sort of "timed" boss without good DPS (like Gruul, for example). You will have trouble on R&J without DPS that has good timing. You will have a lot of trouble on curator without decent DPS, especially burst DPS. You will have trouble on Aran with ANY idiots. You will have trouble on Prince if you cant DPS him quickly form stage 2 to three.

DPS is not really a factor on these fights:

Huntsman. Maiden. Nightbane. Chess Event.

That's about it really. Crappy DPS will stuff you up on the others to varying degrees.

Though you'll probably think it's your healers fault because the end result in things taking too long to die is healers cant keep up.

Healers can't heal with no mana. At that stage I'm always sure our DPS is the problem. I'd add Moroes to that list of things you don't need awesome DPS on. You need a good strat two priests, and a hunter. The solid class balance makes that fight cake.

I'm mostly trying to figure out what my guild's group makeup should be when we start hitting Karazhan, and who we need to recruit so we can have our members who aren't ninja-masters of WoW along without it become a frustrating wipefest. We had successful runs of AQ20 and ZG with 3-5 people PUG'd and 3-5 of our more clueless guildies (who have improved and gotten better gear since), so I'm hoping we should be okay.

I'm an officer in the guild and we're mostly trying to figure out how to have all our members enjoy all the content together without excluding people just because they aren't the min/maxing types that spend hours reading class forums and spoiler sites.

1 - I think it's very well done. The layout and and aesthetics feel right, like a unified concept. It sort of feels like BWL did, in terms of the physical layout. It seems crammed together in multiple stories, so it feels small and big at the same time. Very well done.

2 - For the most part I think they did a great job. They did a great job ramping up the difficulty from dumb-easy to extremely very hard. I do see a lot of more casual people hitting a brick wall on Aran and I think we'll see some complaints there. I also see problems stemming from the changes they made to Maiden of Virtue and Terestrian Illhoof. The difficulty with Maiden seems to already be addressed in the beta patch notes for 1.0.10 but I see no mention of toning down Illhoof. They were too easy before but I think Maiden is too hard now and Illhoof is way too hard.

3 - The gear reminds me a hell of a lot of AQ40, but the situation is worse. The problem is also not limited to Karazhan but seems to be the theme for the entire expansion. Really good 5 man and quest gear, really small upgrades in the raid instances. 80% of the loot in Karazhan will be sidegrades or minor upgrades to the gear you already have assuming you've done lots of quests and ran the hell out of the 5 mans (not even heroic). The remaining 20% are items that will keep people coming back for a while.

4 - The respawn time, in my opinion is pretty stupid. Once you learn the instance it's a non-issue but it really puts a downer on learning the harder encounters. The biggest onces you'll have problems with trash respawns while learning are Aran and Prince (if you kill him before you do Netherspite). If you're willing to bite the bullet and learn Netherspite before Prince then you'll save yourself some pain on trash respawns assuming it takes you longer than three hours to learn him.

As for the amount and difficulty of trash, I think it's fine. The trash difficulty really isn't that hard. There's a few that have some abilities that may cause some wipes but overall I really don't think it's bad. If it wasn't for the respawns I'd say the quantity of trash is also fine. It seems daunting when you first see the videos of the size of Karazhan or whatever but the time to clear really isn't bad at all. There's still some longer jaunts though, but nothing longer than we've seen in previous raids.

5 - Assuming you didn't have a bunch of tier 3 going into the expansion you really need to be gearing up from the long quest chains and 5 mans. Better DPS of course will make everything easier. Decent amounts of stamina are an absolute requirement for some of the fights, especially Aran. Everyone in your raid needs a minimum of 8000 hp buffed if you don't want to see people one shotted out of the sheep/pyroblast.

6 - There's no ideal setup really. I've heard of so many different group combos. It really comes down to the ability of the players in the raid. There are obviously a few specific requirements though. You can do the entire instance with three healers but I seriously recommend having four or three and a hybrid who knows how to heal and has a healing set. Some of the later fights are made much easier with four people healing and I haven't heard of too many people doing Nightbane with three healers. I've never done Aran without a warlock but I'd imagine you'll be in for a lot of pain if you try to do him with no warlock. And finally,  a druid tank for Prince could be painful because of crushing blows. Otherwise I think the skies the limit. Also, Paladins are always awesome in every way and if you can get one I suggest bringing him.

7 - There are a number of changes going in the next patch that I would have guessed were coming along the pipe. A small nerf to Maiden and a change to Nightbane which will most likely make it easier and also make it melee-friendly. For unannounced changes, I don't think we'll see too many. I think we'll see trash respawn time nerfed at some point. I think we'll see Illhoof's hitpoints nerfed, he has way the hell too many right now. I think there's a number of bugs that will be fixed at some point. Netherspite has a number of odd bugs, such as sometimes moving around when banished, sometimes the beams go away before he gets banished, sometimes the beams don't stack the debuff on people, sometimes the beams take a lot longer than they should to show up. There's also a clipping bug with Nightbane where you can be feared through the ceiling and end up in Moroes's room after which Nightbane will start slamming you with fireballs for being out of range/LoS.

Clueless people have a MUCH bigger influence in Karazhan than the 20 mans. You could easily not notice someone not doing their job in ZG or AQ20. This will NOT be true in Karazhan. You will get through a single boss without feeling pain: Attumen. After that you will be gritting your teeth the entire way, assuming you can get through any of the bosses at all. If you have a good healer team you can count Maiden dead after some work. Beyond that you're going to have serious problems.

as of right now, sure I agree, overall i agree the focus on the small 5 man groups, 10 man raids really seperates the wheat from the chaff so to speak.

in a few months when people are all T4 with new Epic Noodlers of Wang Extension, it will be like UBRS, and you will be able to bring along a number of clueless people.

Some kind soul has made some really nice videos detailing nearly all the bosses in Karazhan. Holy shit the Prince looks ANNOYING. I hate any fight that random.


Boss #1: Attumen The Huntsman
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_g_mlxTdSHw

Boss #2: Moroes
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwcCODurf50

Boss #3: Maiden of Virtue
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntukPabEZZc

Boss #4: "Romeo and Juliet" in the Opera House. (1 of 3 potential fights.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2R-wVIqYmHA

Boss #5: "Little Red Riding Hood" in the Opera House (1 of 3 potential fights.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZabWScnavI

[Missing: "Wizard of Oz" play in The Opera House]

Boss #6: The Curator
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sy59cqiuFRc

Boss #6: The Shade of Aran
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3stGNiLOyo

Boss #7: The Chess Game
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Li7Dv_MPlGs

Boss #8: Netherspite
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBMcaL_t-Ig

[Missing: Illhoof]

Boss #10: Prince Malchazzar
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4ybFCiCoTs

[Missing: Nightbane]

Ok I've spent some more time in here, and the repops are infuriating. Hell, if you aren't hauling ass killing horses in the very first room on the way to the boss, one will repop at the very front and aggro you during the Midnight pull. We had this happen to us twice in one run because those are on like 10-15 minute timers, and I was leading a new group of people who were learning the place. Finally, we had to sit back for 10 minutes and just let the whole thing repop so we didn't get stuck in a horrible loop.

Learning the Moroes fight is no party either. You get 3 shots, and then you're boned if you try for a 4th because the room will pop on you. Turns out that in Karazhan the reason most people spend so much freaking time there is that learning a boss requires you to hack and slash through the same trash 2-3 times if you want to get a good amount of tries in on it. It's BS.

And all that work for loot that's mostly either sidegrades from non-Heroic 5-mans, or, in some cases, flat-out shittier.

The Entirety of BC raid progression is just one giant, shitty cockblock.  To keep the >1% of the DnT/Cutting-Edge Raider population 'happy', they've thrown progression for every other raider under the bus.

Right now, the raid difficulty meter in WoW is set to "unemployed 19 yr old"; if you're a raider that has a job/life, or are simply in a casual raiding guild primarily composes of such individuals, then BC is Not For You.

To all the retards comparing Kara to UBRS:  not even fucking close.  Hell, the trash in Karazhan is comparatively more difficult than any boss in UBRS.  Even 3500 hp fresh-60's could take a couple crit hits from Drak; there are trash mobs in Karazhan that can and will 1-shot Tier-5 geared non-tanks.

Not really. The post-karazhan high-end stuff is abysmal as well. Hourly trash respawns regardless of whether you kill a boss or not, terrible loot, and top-end consumables required for the entire raid. Tons of high-end guilds are burning out. Karazhan is in fact Blizzard's best TBC raid instance, by far. Not that this says very much. My best prediction is that Blizz simply hasn't been testing the concept of "playability" or fun so much as whether the mechanics are working properly.

2.1.0 is supposedly going to bring a lot of changes to the shitty itemization (there is a rumor that they've been using the old stamina weighting on a lot of new items) and retune the entire concept of consumables. It has been pretty dumb, and there has been a lot of bitching.

My assumption is that Blizzard decided they would focus on the casual gamer with TBC.  Casual gamers are not in Kara yet.  If you are going through and have completed Kara, you are not casual.

Blizzard is basing their timeline of improvements/additions on the casual gamer progression through the content.  Those of you that got to the end are just now realizing this.  Broken instances, bad itemization, crazy trash and respawn, etc.  They just threw those higher end content areas together to place that carrot out there for everyone.  They are just playing catch-up now.

However, the vast majority of their players are not even close to starting up Caverns of Time (my opinion.)  Their sights aren't even close to where you are at.  From their perspective, everything is just grand.  By the time they get to Kara level content, it will all be balanced and fun and they'll still think everything is just grand.

They are just balancing market segments against resources, time, and money.  From a project management perspective, it makes a lot of sense to me.  You know you cannot satisfy everyone, so satsify your biggest segment and do what you can to string the rest along.

I'm admittedly not casual at all anymore. I play about 20 hours a week now, and I play usually one instance a day if I'm feeling up to it. There are some in my alliance who spent 4 days of the last 7 in Karazhan, and they only got to the Chess event. Granted that's the furthest they've gone, but they spent well over 12 hours in the place in a week. That's not even a full clear. IMO, that pure insanity and I could never put up with what they do, but I'm not going to either. We're running Karazhan with my group one day a week, killing the first boss, and either getting annoyed or tired because of the trash.

I'm sorry you suck so bad.  My group of 26-and-older gamers with jobs, who raid only on Friday, Saturday and early Sunday nights have gotten past Curator in a little under a month.

Yeah, we're not exactly 'casual' but hardly the 'hark0re 19-year-olds'.  

I agree with you, Dren.  Most folks aren't even running CoT yet.   There's plenty of folks still grinding that first character to 70, while others are getting their 4th+ character there.  The legacy of 2-years w/o a cap raise is that nobody really knew how slowly other folks in their guild leveled.  It's pretty damn slow, for some.

Really, I don't get a lot of the bitching. I just don't.  It is what it is, deal with it or don't.  The stuff between the back door to Curator, Curator himself, Aran and Chess wasn't that difficult. It's all my bastard of a raid leader has taken me in for, tho, so maybe I'm missing the 'hard' stuff up front.  I don't buy that at the moment, though.  The times we've had problems are the times we've dragged under-equipped people who want to skip the L70 5-mans along... or the folks who insist on keeping their T2 crap 'because the bonuses are uber!'.

I'd say Moroes is the cockblock fight of the place. Once he's down, the rest is a cakewalk up to Aran.

Hasn't Tigole said something about them wanting to tweak the epic itemization and fixing the raid encounters (both respawns and consumable use)?

Yes, he has mentioned that he wants to do that, but the changes will be glacial. Also, whatever changes they make might inherantly break continuity in an instance (ie- the first boss of Gruul's Lair now actually being harder than Gruul himself because of a Nerf).