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Title: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Rendakor on January 28, 2011, 08:36:24 AM I know we've got a bunch of raiders here, so I figured we should have a thread to discuss strategies, brag about loot, etc.
So based on a completely arbitrary decision my guild decided to start our raiding with BWD. Magmaw was annoying at first until we realized to put all the ranged/healers in melee and just have one person deal with the adds; he's been on farm since we figured that out a few weeks ago. The Omni council, on the other hand, gave us some trouble. Before the latest update DBM didn't announce the slime targets in raid, so (since my guild is not stellar at watching debuffs) someone had to call out who they were on by clicking them and watching their target. This would have worked, except only one of our tanks (me) has a mic. The latest DBM update fixed that by spamming it in raid chat, so I can just yell it in vent. The other problem we're having is how often the tanks get targeted with the primary abilities of the other boss; Magmatron's laser is the worst, although a Power Generator boosted Arcane Annihilator is rough too. We did manage to get them down last night after 5 wipes or so (including one where we got them to ~140k) but it wasn't easy. That's all we've done so far other than BH; a couple of us are going to check out Throne tonite with a friend's guild, and we plan to start working on Bastion on our 2nd raid day next week. Is there a clear next boss in BWD or is it non-linear? How's everyone else doing as far as progression? Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: kildorn on January 28, 2011, 08:53:16 AM Haven't started yet. I was tempted last night to put up a trial BWD night next week and see if I can get some bites.
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Paelos on January 28, 2011, 09:03:15 AM So based on a completely arbitrary decision my guild decided to start our raiding with BWD. Magmaw was annoying at first until we realized to put all the ranged/healers in melee and just have one person deal with the adds; he's been on farm since we figured that out a few weeks ago. We started in BWD as well, but only did some speculative tries to get strats right. I'm interested in your technique on Magmaw with the ranged in on the melee. Was this 10 or 25? Which person did you elect to put out on the edge? What class was he/she and how much dps was required by that person to get the adds down single-handed? It's an interesting technique. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Rendakor on January 28, 2011, 09:21:02 AM 10m, we put our OT out there. As the adds popped, he got threat on them and our mage AOE'd them down. If the mage got behind our Shadow Priest helped out. Ideally I believe a hunter or mage could handle it solo by kiting, but neither of our tanks have good DPS sets and it's only a 1 tank fight.
The other reason this helps is that everyone doesn't have to move every phase transition (where he slams his head into the ground), since half the time it'll hit where the MT was. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Hutch on January 28, 2011, 09:22:38 AM Our guild does Magmaw in a similar way -- the hunter (me) stands at range, thereby determining where the adds will spawn.
But, all ranged (and sometimes melee) dps are expected to help out with the adds. DPS money time is during the exposed head phase, and there's no (new) adds then. For Omnitron, we use one tank. One of his many jobs is to keep the trons out of the Arcanotron puddle. The biggest challenge on this fight is to avoid/compensate for all of the aoe damage from magmatron and electron, and interrupt arcanotron's arcane bolt as much as possible. The adds can be tricky but I almost always get a frost patch down to keep them slowed. We've gotten Maloriak down once so far. It's another fight that requires a lot of movement and coordination. And it's a DPS race, although Blizzard has announced that they're nerfing it from a 6-minute enrage to 7 minutes. We've peeked into the other two raids, but nothing completed there yet. Edit: we run 1 or 2 10-man raids depending on attendance. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Paelos on January 28, 2011, 09:30:37 AM How are yall dealing with people getting hit by the adds if you have melee involved? Also, what kind of healers are you bringing to the fight? There is some common raid damage from what I've seen from spits or something.
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Hutch on January 28, 2011, 11:06:38 AM How are yall dealing with people getting hit by the adds if you have melee involved? Also, what kind of healers are you bringing to the fight? There is some common raid damage from what I've seen from spits or something. For the Magmaw adds, it's usually just ranged dps. If the melee gets involved, they don't get infested unless they pull aggro. Avoiding aggro is tricky of course, but it is possible. The current raid group includes a holy priest, a disc priest, and a shaman as healers. Magmaw has lots of raid damage, in addition to the stunts he pulls with the tanks, so healing is a challenge. Of the half dozen times we've finished the fight so far, we've ended the fight with one or two people dead more than once. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Paelos on January 28, 2011, 11:08:58 AM What are currently the best class/specs for healers in dealing with the raid damage? I'm wondering how when they nerfed aoe healing that we're supposed to combat those higher levels of damage.
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: kildorn on January 28, 2011, 11:18:51 AM Priests. PoH is pretty bullshit. With resto shamans to fuel the priests.
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Merusk on January 28, 2011, 11:26:37 AM Except PoH is getting nerfed 15%.. so that'll be fun.
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Maledict on January 28, 2011, 11:29:26 AM Note for those interested - the trick of having one person at range does not work on Magmaw 25 player. If you do that, things will go horribly (but hilariously) wrong.
In tems of difficulty, I would say you'd be fine going to BoT as well. Although there is quite a bit more trash there, Halfus is not that difficult, and both the Twin Drakes and the Elemental Council afterwards are significantly easier in 10 player than 25, so they should be possible to take down with your current gear levels. After that take your pick from Atramades / Conclave of Wind. Chimeron is the trickiest boss before the final end bosses, so I'd leave him till last. One piece of advice though - don't farm all the easy bosses first. It's a mistake I've seen so many guilds make, and it really hurts moral and attendance in the long run. If you kill all the "easy" bosses, you then have 3 hard end of dungeon boss fights to learn through all in a row, at the same time as farming stuff. I would advise picking one instance (BoT would be my recommendation), and sticking with it till it's complete. Then, work on getting the farm time down on BoT whilst you go back to some easier bosses in BWD. That way you aren;t faced with 3 difficult bosses in a row, and you're players won't end up absolutely sick of being in "hard learning" mode every week. Plus, by the time you get to Nefarion, you should be able to clear BoT in 2 hours or so so your farm time will be substantially reduced. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: kildorn on January 28, 2011, 11:30:00 AM Still outright the best AE heal around. A 15% nerf is pretty much nothing to how great it is. Targetable, spammable, and mana efficient if even 3 people in the group needed it.
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Rendakor on January 28, 2011, 02:04:52 PM All the infest does is spawn more worms, which just means our tank has worms forever. As for healers, we bring a holy pally, resto druid and pug a third since our other heals went dps or quit in Cata.
Good call on not leaving all the hard bosses for last. We had morale issues in LK trying to down h pp and h sindy at the same time. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Hutch on January 28, 2011, 02:55:41 PM The infest spawns worms and the worms cause further damage, which is why we try to avoid infestation.
Saves work for the healers. Our priests have made a point of saying "click on the lightwell" whenever they have one up. I've even seen that as a logon tip. Our guild's very first raid attempt was on Halfus. (Well, the very first raid boss was the Tol Barad guy, but that's just a dps check.) Anyway, the Halfus attempt was back before Christmas, when we were just barely able to scrape together a full raid group, mostly consisting of people who were barely geared enough for cata heroics. So we wiped a few times in there, rejoiced over the purples that dropped from the trash that night, and have been working Blackwing ever since. I think if we were to go back now, we'd have more success. But there's only so much time in a week to do raids, so once we have Magmaw and Omnitron down, it's a choice between the further bosses in BWD, or getting started learning the other instances. We did pop in on the Council fight the other night, just to see what it was like. We wiped a bunch, but it was a good learning experience. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Evildrider on January 28, 2011, 03:08:23 PM We are only a few weeks into raiding as we were waiting for some of our people to get geared up.
We have Halfus on farm now, although we haven't had all drake combinations. So far we seem to be doing pretty good. We are working on BWD now though. Magmaw has been kinda glitchy on us and the Omnitron council usually goes pretty well, but Toxitron seems to be my guild's nemesis. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Rendakor on January 28, 2011, 03:21:28 PM Tox is annoying, yeah. Moreso when you're not targetting him and don't notice the slime spawns. As for infest doing damage, my healers haven't complained about it so I assume they can handle it.
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Threash on January 29, 2011, 08:14:28 PM The small cut scene before Atremedes made me feel bad about killing him, poor little blind baby dragon :(
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Rendakor on February 04, 2011, 11:11:08 AM Got in one half hearted attempt at Atramedes last night after easily clearing Mag and Omnitron. The trash before Atra is fucking PAINFUL though. We spent half an hour wiping on the 4 ability-sharing dwarves before we figured them out. We had to have our OT take one alone while I tanked the other 3 with CDs up and our lusted DPS burned them down.
Then we took a break to watch the video for the fight, after which our mage never came back. :oh_i_see: So we gave it a shot with 9 just to see the encounter, and wiped to the first Searing Flames and called it a night. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Selby on February 04, 2011, 05:15:09 PM ...and our lusted DPS burned them down. Yeah a friend's guild is running into this problem. They are slightly short on DPS #s and it's making fights extremely painful.Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Rendakor on February 04, 2011, 05:28:31 PM Well our DPS is usually good*, we had no problem on the right side pack. However, the guy with Burden of the Crown kept roflstomping our OT. I don't know if he was spamming skills, or what was going on (and didn't bother calling him out, since he was a PUG replacing our standard OT for the night), but he could NOT handle two dwarves at a time. I only called for the lust because I wasn't sure how long I could handle 3 of them.
At least, I think they're doing ok. IIRC most are in the 11k range, with at least one pushing 16k. Granted, this is on Magmaw and Council who both have damage increases built into their mechanics, but still. How do those numbers sound to you? Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Arinon on February 04, 2011, 07:15:09 PM Sounds like we're about 2-3 weeks ahead of what you're describing and 11k seems a little low given the fights but not bad at all. Having your top DPSer run around 16k does seem low though so you'd feel a few 11k or 12k people more for some fights.
We actually lust the double pull just before Magmaw regularly or it can go south fast. Don't have the trouble you're describing on Atremedes trash. Sounds more like a tank/healer issue to me or maybe a bad spread of abilities as those guys can usually be held indefinitely. If you have solid interrupts I'd recommend Halfus and the rest of BoT up to Cho'gall before tackling the BWD bosses after the elevator. The Atremedes fight is twitchy as shit and Chimeron requires rock solid healing but is super boring for everyone else. Maloriak isn't as bad but has multiple AoE burndown phases as well as a 25%-0% burndown so you can't use lust to shore up DPS weaknesses. Biggest problem we've been having is managing interrupts. Lots of encounters now punish you hard for missing punches. A good DPS shaman trivializes a lot of it but other than that you have to rotate. Can't wait for 4.0.6. DK interrupts will be hit capped again and pally tanks get one baseline. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Rendakor on February 04, 2011, 07:34:34 PM We had a LOT of trouble with Halfus. Most attempts lasted less than a minute, and the entire fight was really frustrating. I think we got one of the drakes to half, once. My general thoughts were "fuck this zone" after two hours of wiping with no progress at all.
We've never had any problems with the stuff before Magmaw; maybe our OT was just gimpy. Our raid comp as far as buff synergy is probably less than ideal; DK/Warrior tanks, Pally/Druid healers, Spriest (our top DPS), Mage, DK, Rogue dps, plus a PUG heal and one random dps who happens to be online, usually another melee. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Lightstalker on February 07, 2011, 03:40:42 PM Halfus difficulty varies wildly week to week based on what drakes are up.
As the DK in a DK/Warrior tanking pair in our 10-man I can't wait for 4.0.6 so I can go back to general interrupting duties. The big 'gotcha' in the Halfus fight is that the Drakes hit 2x as hard as Halfus and a missed shadow-nova interrupt is probably going to cause your healers to lose range and heal themselves - causing a missed and necessary drake tank healing event. Because of the huge incoming damage from having 2 drakes active at the same time you need your strongest tank with the adds and your interruptingest tank on Halfus. The surprise of a missed shadow nova forces you to have a plan for the healers in order to prevent them from all healing themselves at the same time (leaving your drake tank to take 4x 40k hits in the interim). If you are determined you can just activate one drake at the start, tank well away from Halfus, and push on to get the mechanics down by hitting the enrage regularly. This will cover most of the healing/tank swapping/interrupting nonsense portions of this fight. Once you can do that regularly, wake two drakes up on the pull, stack everything on Halfus and the kill should come quickly. The fight is a deliberate attempt to overload a players ability to do the right thing by presenting loads of information all at the same time (forcing decisions). If you don't know who has the next interrupt or who is responsible for keeping the healers alive the decisions will just come too slow to save the raid. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Rokal on February 07, 2011, 04:22:32 PM As the DK in a DK/Warrior tanking pair in our 10-man I can't wait for 4.0.6 so I can go back to general interrupting duties. The big 'gotcha' in the Halfus fight is that the Drakes hit 2x as hard as Halfus and a missed shadow-nova interrupt is probably going to cause your healers to lose range and heal themselves - causing a missed and necessary drake tank healing event. Because of the huge incoming damage from having 2 drakes active at the same time you need your strongest tank with the adds and your interruptingest tank on Halfus. Or, since the drakes hit 2x as hard as Halfus, you could just have one tank on one drake, the other on halfus/2nd drake. This is what we do , and it works fairly well. DPS burns the drake that is being tanked alone, and then kills halfus or the 2nd drake depending on what drake that is. Obvious solution to shadow-nova problems is not to miss a shadow nova interrupt, which is pretty easy with any two interrupters (or one spell hit capped shaman). Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Rendakor on February 07, 2011, 06:32:29 PM We tried one tank on one drake, one tank on Halfus/2nd drake and it was working ok until we had to tank swap; I taunted the drake before he got Halfus off me and died almost instantly.
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Maledict on February 08, 2011, 02:11:38 PM We tried the heroic mode for an hour last night - best go was 15%, but helaing the tanks throuh the stuns is brutal.
Absolutely no idea how to do it once the patch hits though, given how mages and smite priests wont be able to dps Halfus from the start. the healing rquirements for the fight go up insanely without smite priests, so will be interesting to see how we do it. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Threash on February 08, 2011, 08:52:26 PM Halfus is a joke now, the drakes die a lot faster and you get a 300% dps buff when they drop. This is on regular but i imagine it's the same on heroic.
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Rendakor on February 08, 2011, 10:25:46 PM One shot Halfus tonite; not having to do that stupid tank swap shit made the fight MUCH easier.
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: SurfD on February 08, 2011, 11:21:42 PM As far as i can tell, with old halfus, there were really only 2 easily effective ways to do the fight if you had the Mortal Strike debuff Drake as one of your random dragons (especially if one of your other random drakes needed to be brought up and killed first)
1- Make sure you have a Paladin and Bloodlust. This let you lust and burn the first kill drake, while your halfus tank could simply take the MS debuff up to max stacks and then get bubbled / click bubble off to reset his stacks. 2- Bring a 3rd "Dps tank" such as a Feral druid or blood dk who can help soak up MS Stacks in the beginning, so you dont end up with someone swapping to a dake (which hit WAY harder then halfus) when they have 10 stacks and gettign raped. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Lakov_Sanite on February 09, 2011, 05:05:07 AM Actually a warrior tank with shield block could effectively "avoid" the mortal strike debuff long enough for stacks to fall off.
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Hutch on February 09, 2011, 06:13:53 AM Halfus is a joke now, the drakes die a lot faster and you get a 300% dps buff when they drop. This is on regular but i imagine it's the same on heroic. Oh *that's* what happened? We got Halfus down last night, and I glanced at my recount and saw crazy numbers for all our dps, like 10k higher dps each than what we got on Magmaw. Now it makes sense, thank you. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Rendakor on February 09, 2011, 08:19:13 AM Our kill had crazy dps numbers too, makes sense now. I was getting 150k+ Death Strike crits, it was silly.
After Halfus we went to play with the two dragons for the first time; that fight doesn't seem so bad, but it's one of those where a single fuckup even by a DPS can be a wipe. Got them to about 40% or so a couple times but called it. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Maledict on February 09, 2011, 10:29:18 AM The two dragons are unfortunately, along with magmaw, the only relics of Wrath raiding. That is, the entire fight says "Melee dps a target dummy, ranged go fuck yourself". Most of wrath, especially in ICC, was based aroun d the model of melee doing the damage whilst ranged had to spread out and avoid all kinds of garbage to stay alive, and these two fights both have that same horrible feel to them. Fortunately they are the only two.
(It's why I laugh when peopel moan about a bias against melee in wow raiding. Sure, for the first few months of TBC they did. Since then it's been melee all the way for the majority of fights). Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Azuredream on February 10, 2011, 03:41:17 AM Random tidbit of info on Halfus drakes if people didn't know: http://www.mmo-champion.com/content/2168-Halfus-Wyrmbreaker-spawn-cycle-Al-akir-25-HC-Video-The-Daily-Blink (http://www.mmo-champion.com/content/2168-Halfus-Wyrmbreaker-spawn-cycle-Al-akir-25-HC-Video-The-Daily-Blink)
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Maledict on February 10, 2011, 12:17:00 PM Heroic Halfus is *extremely* easy now. We did him with 7healers, 4 tanks, and forgot to bloodlust on the first drake. Still got him down with 45 seconds to spare on the enrage and no deaths. Just burn each target down one by one, don't ever activate the slate dragon, and then he melts with a 400% damage debuff on him.
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Paelos on February 22, 2011, 06:06:03 AM Simple question:
Exactly how punative is bringing melee dps to encounters from what you have seen? Overall, is ranged preferred on any fights where not on others? What is your raids ranged to melee split and the class divisions? Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Rendakor on February 22, 2011, 08:19:22 AM My raids generally run 3 melee (Rogue, Enh Sham, DK) and 2 ranged (Spriest, Mage/Hunter) and we haven't had any major issues because of it. Atramedes is the only one I've seen* that you would be better served having all ranged. Most fights generally reward a balanced comp.
*Everything but the final boss of each instance. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Hutch on February 22, 2011, 08:19:50 AM Current raid dps:
Melee: DK, Rogue, plus our druid tank switches to Cat form on fights like Omnotron Ranged: Hunter (me), Mage, Warlock We've got Magmaw, Halfus, and Omnotron "on farm", and I put that in quotes because we're occasionally still lackadaisical enough to wipe/flee on the trash. We recently got the twin dragons learnt well enough to get it down after only a couple of wipes. Last week's big learning experience was the elementium monstrosity. (An encounter that I'm hoping we'll get knocked out this week.) Why am I telling you this? Because I think our progression has been more a matter of getting everyone into the dungeons, seeing the encounters a few times, and then learning them well enough so that at least a few of us are alive when the boss dies. We're not being "punished" by the fact that some of our dps comes from melee toons. It might be "punative" in a cutting-edge progression guild, but that doesn't really describe my guild. These encounters can be beaten by a group that's got some gear and sufficient situational awareness. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Ironwood on February 22, 2011, 08:29:58 AM Yum.
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Paelos on February 22, 2011, 10:48:48 AM Follow up question then, in regards to Magmaw do you do anything different with your setup of melee/ranged. What is your ranged doing in that fight, and what's the minimum amount of dps they can do on the adds to be effective?
I want to get a benchmark for our own group to see where we're ranking. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Hutch on February 22, 2011, 11:59:50 AM I've described my group's general Magmaw tactic earlier in this thread, i.e. hunters (me and sometimes one other guy) stand at range, everyone else stacks up in melee range.
For the "minimum dps" question, the minimum dps is to have all ranged attack the adds until they're gone, then go back to the boss. I sometimes think to look at recount after a Magmaw fight, and I'm usually at/near the top, and the biggest piece of my personal (non-pet) damage is vs adds. Like in the neighborhood of 40 to 45 percent. My second-highest damage target is the exposed head of magmaw, also in the 40% range. My dps (pet included) on the fight is usually in the mid teens, i.e. 13 to 16 k. We usually have 3-4 dps toons in that neighborhood. Your dps on this fight is influenced by how much time you spend attacking the adds, I think. Being SV and having Serpent Spread is the reason that so much of my damage applied is on the adds, and why I get so high on the meter. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Ironwood on February 22, 2011, 12:35:13 PM Oh God, yum.
Stop posting. It's so wonderfully distracting. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Paelos on February 22, 2011, 12:40:32 PM Oh God, yum. Stop posting. It's so wonderfully distracting. What are you talking about? EDIT: Oh the avatar. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Lakov_Sanite on February 22, 2011, 12:46:20 PM Oh God, yum. Stop posting. It's so wonderfully distracting. What are you talking about? EDIT: Oh the avatar. Yum. :why_so_serious: Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Merusk on February 22, 2011, 01:08:05 PM It looks like Miranda w/ Blonde hair.
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Rasix on February 22, 2011, 01:11:57 PM It looks like Miranda w/ Blonde hair. (http://dl.dropbox.com/u/82533/Futurama_Fry_Looking_Squint.jpg) Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Hutch on February 22, 2011, 01:17:48 PM We've trekked out into the hinterlands of
We've secretly replaced the contents of this post in the raid thread, with meaningless expository drivel. Let's see if he notices. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Merusk on February 22, 2011, 01:21:41 PM It looks like Miranda w/ Blonde hair. imageOoooh. See, I don't watch Chuck. I had no idea. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Ironwood on February 22, 2011, 01:31:45 PM I literally have a whole folder dedicated to that woman and that's the finest head shot (no jokes please) I've seen yet.
God, she's pretty. I'll stop. Carry on. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Evildrider on February 22, 2011, 01:37:42 PM Why does Katy Perry get her own thread but Yvonne Strahotski is ignored? :uhrr:
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Lantyssa on February 22, 2011, 02:38:45 PM See, I don't watch Chuck. I had no idea. I didn't know either, Merusk. I thought she'd looked familiar but I didn't think 'Miranda' until today either. I guess it comes from not watching any TV.Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Rendakor on February 22, 2011, 07:14:57 PM Follow up question then, in regards to Magmaw do you do anything different with your setup of melee/ranged. What is your ranged doing in that fight, and what's the minimum amount of dps they can do on the adds to be effective? Our ranged sit in melee, our OT handles the adds with occasional assistance AOEing them down. I want to get a benchmark for our own group to see where we're ranking. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Evildrider on February 22, 2011, 09:48:22 PM I play a rogue as my main raiding toon... so far there isn't anything too bad about being a melee. I'm still top dps most of the time over the ranged.
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Ingmar on February 22, 2011, 10:34:00 PM I want to say the crying about melee 'punishment' was all from guilds doing heroic modes.
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Paelos on February 23, 2011, 06:41:50 AM I want to say the crying about melee 'punishment' was all from guilds doing heroic modes. Probably, I just wondered what people's translations to the regular 10 man game were. From what I gather, the dps in my group are simply not doing enough. I think they put out like 10k when they need to be doing 12, and one hunter is doing like 9. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Rendakor on February 23, 2011, 09:18:25 AM Most of our DPS are in the 12-13k range, with one or two usually doing 15k+.
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Paelos on February 23, 2011, 11:43:28 AM Most of our DPS are in the 12-13k range, with one or two usually doing 15k+. Reinforcing the idea that yes, my team in fact "doesn't get it" :oh_i_see: Oh well. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Koyasha on February 23, 2011, 03:47:34 PM Is it really being significant? I mean, are you running into enrage timers or something? Cause otherwise, as long as people don't screw up by standing in fire or other encounter screwups, it seems ok to let DPS be a little low. Now if they're standing in fires and pulling that low DPS, then they have some real problems.
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Ingmar on February 23, 2011, 03:59:20 PM If DPS is too crappy, healers go OOM.
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Merusk on February 23, 2011, 04:45:04 PM Yep. One or two low dps is ok so long as you've got a few superior DPS to carry their weight, making the average what it needs to be. When everyone's 2-3k below that's a half million hit points per minute you're behind. When bosses have 32.6 million hitpoints, that's an additional 2 mins at least. 2 mins is a LOT of mana.
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Rokal on February 23, 2011, 04:55:11 PM I think when we started raids, the average dps in our guild was around 10k. As people have gotten more gear and more familiar with their class in cataclysm, that number is more like 13k on average now. Point is: if your group hasn't been downing raid bosses for weeks, your group-mates might be where they need to be for dps
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Paelos on February 23, 2011, 08:32:43 PM My main problem is we have a hunter, a mage, and an elemental shaman, and we're still not getting the worms down on Magmaw. Something is wrong.
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Rendakor on February 23, 2011, 08:49:50 PM Are you having someone tank the worms, or are your DPS just running around like idiots trying to kite them?
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: caladein on February 23, 2011, 09:45:13 PM (Please note, I've only ever done this fight on normal.) Ideally what you'd want is either:
- Hunter is only person at range on the opposite side of where the rest of your group is stacked at. They drop Ice and Explosive Traps at their feet and when Pillar is cast, the Hunter moves parallel to the boss towards the group. Hunter and your other AOE DPS clean them up. The Hunter moves back to original spot and repeat. This is the method I usually see in PUGs, and it works relatively well as long as the other DPS quickly switch to the parasites and they're mindful about staying in melee range (so as to not get a pillar directly behind the group). - Have all your ranged AOE and their healer stack out at range. Pillar is cast, group moves to other side of room, and kills add. Second pillar they just move to their initial position. This is the way my guild does it and the risks are mostly that one of your ranged either doesn't move or runs around like a chicken with their head cut off. In either case you could also bring out any of your AOE-capable melee to help out, usually the ranged will have enough of a headstart that they're not at risk of pulling off. The main thing is just to get the parasites down before the next pillar spawns, as a bonus with some wiggle room to get your positioning worked out. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Rendakor on February 23, 2011, 09:59:09 PM My guild does it like your first strategy, except we use an OT because none of our tanks do good DPS as an offspec, and we don't have a hunter. We tried having a mage do it, but either its not doable that way, or our mage was mediocre (more likely). The OT just picks up the worms and tanks them, while the ranged DPS stack in melee and AOE them down.
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Paelos on February 24, 2011, 05:57:56 AM My guild does it like your first strategy, except we use an OT because none of our tanks do good DPS as an offspec, and we don't have a hunter. We tried having a mage do it, but either its not doable that way, or our mage was mediocre (more likely). The OT just picks up the worms and tanks them, while the ranged DPS stack in melee and AOE them down. We had our best successes with me out there as an OT on the adds, but I'm still not pleased with our hunter's output on them. I think he's doing something really wrong and I have to parse his actions this week to figure it out. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Hutch on February 24, 2011, 07:35:20 AM Magmaw doesn't have an enrage timer (or else it's so long that we either wipe or get the boss down long before it's up).
But, there's a cooldown on the Pillar. Best practice is to get the worms down, and get your people back into position, traps down etc, before that second pillar comes. (If you get a third consecutive pillar, then someone screwed up trying to put Magmaw's leash on). Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Paelos on March 18, 2011, 11:59:54 AM Ghostcrawler's take on the current raiding situation:
Quote from: Ghostcrawler We addressed our views on dungeon difficulty several weeks ago, and in the interim many players have asked for us to comment on raid difficulty. I chose to use the word "progress" in the title for this blog quite intentionally. We think progression is the key to players having fun. When groups stop making progress, the members get frustrated. When individuals feel like they are stuck, that’s when they start to lose interest. I don’t think it strictly has to do with the flow of loot being shut off. A big part of it is the sense that as you climb up that mountain, you are getting closer and closer to the summit instead of just sliding back down to base camp at the end of each day. Let’s consider two extremes. If you complete the raid content very quickly and have Sinestra on farm and everyone has acquired their best in slot items, then you’re probably ready to take a break from raiding. If you worked really hard to get to that point, as many of the current “finished” guilds did, then you’re probably pretty happy about resting until Firelands becomes available. However, if that break point happens too soon, too easily, for too many guilds, then the raiding game can feel empty. Players run out of content before they are ready to run out of content, if that makes sense. Now let’s consider the other extreme, where a guild just has no realistic chance of ever beating a boss. This can be particularly demoralizing if it’s the first boss, but it can happen at any time. That guild might not feel like they are making progress. Many guilds are willing to put in a few weeks trying to master a new encounter, but if it gets to the point where they are wiping for months, there’s a good chance they’ll start to see burnout and thinning ranks. The sweet spot in raid balance for us to hit is that everyone feels like they can still make progress. Content that is too hard or too easy doesn’t meet that goal. Raid encounters, to some extent, nerf themselves. This is because every week, the raid members acquire more and more gear. Secondarily, the community acquires more and more knowledge and experience, which translates into better videos, strategy guides, or even UI mods, as well as just more players who have experienced the encounters firsthand. Each week that you are able to kill any bosses, your group’s gear improves overall, through Valor points if nothing else. When Firelands is available, everyone’s gear will quickly take a step up in quality. This will give you an even better chance to beat those bosses that are blocking you now. We wouldn’t be surprised to see some guilds try the first few Firelands bosses one night, while using the next night to go back to get the head and chests from Nef and Cho’gall in order to complete their set bonuses, that is until acquiring new set bonuses becomes feasible. On some bosses, though, better armor and weapons may not be enough because some mechanics just can’t easily be outgeared. To mitigate that problem, our tendency is to nerf content over time just to make sure a wide variety of players see it. The trailblazers get to see the fights before anyone else, but we don’t lock the dungeon door behind them. Having said all of that, there are some encounters that still need adjustment. Heroic 10-player modes can often be the hardest to balance, because those groups just don’t have access to the sheer number of tools in one group that the larger raids have. You’ve probably seen some hotfixes go out recently and we might make more adjustments in 4.1. We’ll continue to monitor progress and make adjustments when we feel the time is right. Overall, we are pretty happy with our current raid balance. Most guilds that are trying seem to be making some progress. On some realms, we’re seeing pickup groups for at least the earlier bosses, which seems appropriate for where we are in the content cycle. The Heroic versions are particularly challenging, though even in that case, there is a gradient with easier and very difficult bosses. For those of you who feel like you are stuck on progression, we’d like to hear more about why. Are you trying to PUG the encounters? Do you have a very casual guild with a lot of different players each night? Is the problem that you’re undergeared or that the mechanics are too unforgiving? What are the mechanics that are really hard for raid leadership to explain or even understand? Are your tanks exploding, or are your healers running out of mana, or are you failing the berserk timers? We have data on all of this, but it’s useful to hear it from your point of view as well. Remember, our goal is that you beat the fight because you understood the mechanics and executed your tanking, DPS, and healing around those constraints. If you’re just kind of powering through a boss ability or phase that you don’t really understand, then it’s going to be a lot harder for you. As always, feedback on which encounters you are enjoying and which ones you never want to see again is also appreciated, though we’ve gotten a lot of that already, and are designing your Firelands foes with that in mind. P.S. I am as excited about the Firelands encounters as I am about the current ones. We can’t wait for you to wipe to them, er... see them. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Malakili on March 18, 2011, 12:36:20 PM Ghostcrawler's take on the current raiding situation: Quote from: Ghostcrawler We addressed our views on dungeon difficulty several weeks ago, and in the interim many players have asked for us to comment on raid difficulty. I chose to use the word "progress" in the title for this blog quite intentionally. We think progression is the key to players having fun. When groups stop making progress, the members get frustrated. When individuals feel like they are stuck, that’s when they start to lose interest. I don’t think it strictly has to do with the flow of loot being shut off. A big part of it is the sense that as you climb up that mountain, you are getting closer and closer to the summit instead of just sliding back down to base camp at the end of each day. Let’s consider two extremes. If you complete the raid content very quickly and have Sinestra on farm and everyone has acquired their best in slot items, then you’re probably ready to take a break from raiding. If you worked really hard to get to that point, as many of the current “finished” guilds did, then you’re probably pretty happy about resting until Firelands becomes available. However, if that break point happens too soon, too easily, for too many guilds, then the raiding game can feel empty. Players run out of content before they are ready to run out of content, if that makes sense. Now let’s consider the other extreme, where a guild just has no realistic chance of ever beating a boss. This can be particularly demoralizing if it’s the first boss, but it can happen at any time. That guild might not feel like they are making progress. Many guilds are willing to put in a few weeks trying to master a new encounter, but if it gets to the point where they are wiping for months, there’s a good chance they’ll start to see burnout and thinning ranks. The sweet spot in raid balance for us to hit is that everyone feels like they can still make progress. Content that is too hard or too easy doesn’t meet that goal. Raid encounters, to some extent, nerf themselves. This is because every week, the raid members acquire more and more gear. Secondarily, the community acquires more and more knowledge and experience, which translates into better videos, strategy guides, or even UI mods, as well as just more players who have experienced the encounters firsthand. Each week that you are able to kill any bosses, your group’s gear improves overall, through Valor points if nothing else. When Firelands is available, everyone’s gear will quickly take a step up in quality. This will give you an even better chance to beat those bosses that are blocking you now. We wouldn’t be surprised to see some guilds try the first few Firelands bosses one night, while using the next night to go back to get the head and chests from Nef and Cho’gall in order to complete their set bonuses, that is until acquiring new set bonuses becomes feasible. On some bosses, though, better armor and weapons may not be enough because some mechanics just can’t easily be outgeared. To mitigate that problem, our tendency is to nerf content over time just to make sure a wide variety of players see it. The trailblazers get to see the fights before anyone else, but we don’t lock the dungeon door behind them. Having said all of that, there are some encounters that still need adjustment. Heroic 10-player modes can often be the hardest to balance, because those groups just don’t have access to the sheer number of tools in one group that the larger raids have. You’ve probably seen some hotfixes go out recently and we might make more adjustments in 4.1. We’ll continue to monitor progress and make adjustments when we feel the time is right. Overall, we are pretty happy with our current raid balance. Most guilds that are trying seem to be making some progress. On some realms, we’re seeing pickup groups for at least the earlier bosses, which seems appropriate for where we are in the content cycle. The Heroic versions are particularly challenging, though even in that case, there is a gradient with easier and very difficult bosses. For those of you who feel like you are stuck on progression, we’d like to hear more about why. Are you trying to PUG the encounters? Do you have a very casual guild with a lot of different players each night? Is the problem that you’re undergeared or that the mechanics are too unforgiving? What are the mechanics that are really hard for raid leadership to explain or even understand? Are your tanks exploding, or are your healers running out of mana, or are you failing the berserk timers? We have data on all of this, but it’s useful to hear it from your point of view as well. Remember, our goal is that you beat the fight because you understood the mechanics and executed your tanking, DPS, and healing around those constraints. If you’re just kind of powering through a boss ability or phase that you don’t really understand, then it’s going to be a lot harder for you. As always, feedback on which encounters you are enjoying and which ones you never want to see again is also appreciated, though we’ve gotten a lot of that already, and are designing your Firelands foes with that in mind. P.S. I am as excited about the Firelands encounters as I am about the current ones. We can’t wait for you to wipe to them, er... see them. Coming from a non-raider, that sounds fairly reasonable. But I don't have a good idea of how hard this stuff actually is in comparison to any other raids I have done in the past. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Paelos on March 18, 2011, 01:03:40 PM They recently nerfed Magmaw, which I think needed it. People were killing Omitron before him because Magmaw was such a gear check right up front.
People are making progress for sure. I'm not sure I would put as upbeat a face on it from my alliance's perspective, but that's a subsect of the whole. I think GC is being generous when he's saying they are seeing some PUGs for the earlier bosses. If they count the TB stuff, yeah, that's puggable. Omitron or Magmaw? Not so much. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Hutch on March 18, 2011, 01:13:12 PM If I could be arsed to log into their forums and throw in my voice among the throng of feedback his post will generate, I might say something along the lines of: In the next tier of dungeons and heroics, maybe not quite so many fights with swarms of adds.
That's selfish of me. Forcing the DPS to switch from single-target boss action to aoe add action is challenging, and I'm one of the dps in my group, and it frustrates me when I'm the only one switching in a timely manner when we start learning a new fight. But so far in the current raid tier: Council of Wind Magmaw Omnotron (well there's just 3, and they fixate, in a fight that's already all about target switching, so never mind) Maloriak Cho'gall I haven't seen Nefarian yet. There were a lot of bosses who summon adds in the Cata dungeons as well. It's like Blizzard didn't want to let us lol-aoe our way through the heroics like we were doing in LK, so they made aoe both necessary and highly annoying in the expansion. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Hutch on March 18, 2011, 01:17:12 PM They recently nerfed Magmaw, which I think needed it. People were killing Omitron before him because Magmaw was such a gear check right up front. People are making progress for sure. I'm not sure I would put as upbeat a face on it from my alliance's perspective, but that's a subsect of the whole. I think GC is being generous when he's saying they are seeing some PUGs for the earlier bosses. If they count the TB stuff, yeah, that's puggable. Omitron or Magmaw? Not so much. They nerfed Magmaw? I didn't know that. I thought we'd just gotten so good at his encounter that it seems easy. Progress update: my group got down the elementium monstrosity for the second time last night. And this time we started off doing pretty well, and made obvious progress with each successive attempt until we got it. I'd like to think it will only get smoother from here. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Merusk on March 18, 2011, 01:25:28 PM People are making progress for sure. I'm not sure I would put as upbeat a face on it from my alliance's perspective, but that's a subsect of the whole. I think GC is being generous when he's saying they are seeing some PUGs for the earlier bosses. If they count the TB stuff, yeah, that's puggable. Omitron or Magmaw? Not so much. I'm amazed to see any PUGs at all. The shared lockouts killed it for the most part on my server, because the people who'd run the PUGs were top-tier raiders (10 or 25-man) wanting to help their non-guilded friends & acquaintances. They'd simply start a raid for the size their guild didn't focus on, knowing that it wouldn't cause a problem. Nowadays, not so much. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Lakov_Sanite on March 19, 2011, 07:32:31 AM With the new dungeons system in 4.1 if you want to max out your valor point gain from heroics you will be expect to run 14 a week. :uhrr:
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: El Gallo on March 19, 2011, 08:46:11 AM Or just 7 of the new ones.
Quote Hitting the cap with the new dungeon dailies Even with only doing the dungeons (both types), you'll hit the cap before the week is over, without stepping foot into a raid. Nah, you won't. You'll only be able to earn up to 980 VP per week from running random Heroics, not 1470 VP (we're purposefully placing a soft cap on VP from Heroics). If you want to reach the 1250 weekly cap, you'll still need to run raid content. Again, I know it's a bit complicated, so let me give you some examples: Example 1: Player A has a blast on a Friday with his friends and runs seven Rise of the Zandalari Heroics, earning 980 VP (7 x 140 VP). The next day, he helps a friend with a random tier 1 Cataclysm Heroic -- let's say Heroic Deadmines. Because player A has already earned 980 VP from random Heroics, he won't receive any VP from the Saturday's Deadmines run. A massive improvement for weekend warriors and anyone with a job or other responsibility that keeps you from reliably logging in every single evening. I've been asking for this since dailies were invented in TBC, and I hope it will soon spread to all daily quests and trade cooldowns. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Ashamanchill on March 19, 2011, 09:03:43 AM How exactly is this going to effect the daily lockout of specific dungeons though?
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Rendakor on March 19, 2011, 09:04:37 AM I assume they're putting in a random "ZA or ZG" option.
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: caladein on March 19, 2011, 09:24:03 AM How exactly is this going to effect the daily lockout of specific dungeons though? They don't need to change how the dungeon lockouts work as the random queue has always been able to stick you in a dungeon that you were saved to. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Paelos on March 19, 2011, 11:27:53 AM I assume they're putting in a random "ZA or ZG" option. Yes, they say those will be on a difference dungeon tier. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Rendakor on March 19, 2011, 11:38:43 AM Confirmed now, sauce here. (http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/2228415544?page=10#183)
Quote # You'll be able to randomly queue for the Rise of the Zandalari Heroics separately from the tier 1 Cataclysm Heroic dungeons. This is a nice change, and honestly I'm surprised they didn't do this for the three ICC heroics since they were a large step up in difficulty. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Paelos on March 19, 2011, 11:46:20 AM It's part of the Blizzard "immediately learning what was :ye_gods: about their design but only using that knowledge in future designs" philosophy. I give them credit for not repeating horrible mistakes, I just wish they would be more active in fixing them in the current iteration instead of just filing it away in the "that sucks" folder.
Although I think they lost the 2005-06 docs in that folder when they made some of this content. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Simond on March 20, 2011, 08:00:06 AM At some point between WotLK and Cata, Ghostcrawler stopped looking at data and drawing conclusions and started drawing conclusions and looking for data to support them.
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Shrike on April 09, 2011, 09:40:25 AM I'm amazed to see any PUGs at all. The shared lockouts killed it for the most part on my server, because the people who'd run the PUGs were top-tier raiders (10 or 25-man) wanting to help their non-guilded friends & acquaintances. They'd simply start a raid for the size their guild didn't focus on, knowing that it wouldn't cause a problem. Nowadays, not so much. What I've noticed since the great character exodus from Whisperwind is that different server cultures do things differently (big surprise, eh?). On WW, the PuG raid thing is about as dead as dead can be. Very few form and douchebaggery in them is so bad I haven't touched one since midway through ICC. On Uldaman, it's similar, though I have no clue how the server PuG RLs behave--because I haven't seen anyone in /trade or whathaveyou even bother to form anything. Interestingly, though, on Aerie Peak the PuG culture seems pretty lively. Again, I don't know how successful these might be, but /trade is filled with people looking to put things together (also of interest is the fact that /trade on AP is surprisingly free of idiocy). Of course, since my shaman is back to raiding, the lockout will probably keep me out of any PuG regardless. Also, my guild hops from raid target to raid target on a whim, so you never really know what the RL has in mind until you get the raid invite. This makes it diffcult to plan ahead to avoid the lockout. Which might be deliberate, now that I think about it, but regardless it's how they do things. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Lightstalker on April 10, 2011, 01:53:31 PM At some point between WotLK and Cata, Ghostcrawler stopped looking at data and drawing conclusions and started drawing conclusions and looking for data to support them. I don't see that. I don't really see what they are doing as any different than what they've always done. They've always substituted pain for effective bootstrapping at the start of a major version. That's why we start with only blue gems, a rarity of high end enchanting materials, and moaning about how hard the heroics are. Stonecore was obnoxious, the lightning ball maze in Deadmines was obnoxious (due to terrain clipping, ground clutter traps, and the camera), but overall difficulty... isn't. Look, even in the super easy entry raid of wrath until people cleansed Noth was a raid wiper. The difference in this tier is the complete requirement on everyone in the raid doing something at just the right time or wiping the raid. It is hard because you can't carry people like you could before, they've raised the bottom bar and lowered the upper bar... and there are more people being detrimentally impacted to complain. Most of Mount Hyjal was an 8 person instance with 17 ablative players to soak damage. Today you need 8 or 9 of 10 to do the right thing or you wipe. This is again the same mistake behind "bring the player not the class," not every player is worth bringing on their own merits. Basically, this has been a long running emphasis on individual contributions from every contributor - no more raiding with 15 on follow through Molten Core like in the 'good old days.' So, meh. Not a surprise that people aren't as enthusiastic about raiding when they are expected to perform for the duration when previously they could watch TV, cook dinner, read a book, etc. while raiding. The shared lockouts were a bone headed move that limits the ability to help out in normal mode while you progress with your hard mode raid, but people asked for that and complained about running ICC and ToC 4 times a week in the last tier so the only complaint here should be that they dev team should spend more time ignoring the players. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: apocrypha on April 10, 2011, 11:15:34 PM I don't see that. I don't really see what they are doing as any different than what they've always done. They've always substituted pain for effective bootstrapping at the start of a major version. Quote The difference in this tier is the complete requirement on everyone in the raid doing something at just the right time or wiping the raid. It is hard because you can't carry people like you could before, they've raised the bottom bar and lowered the upper bar... and there are more people being detrimentally impacted to complain. This whole "Cata has ruined WoW" argument is just a difference between people who think that your 2nd quote there is just a minor caveat on your 1st quote, and those for whom the 2nd quote is the straw that broke the camel's back. Personally I side with the idea that it's camel's back stuff. You are 100% right when you say this is what they've always done, and mudflation will ease the current difficulty level over time. However plenty of people are simply a bit tired of WoW and are using the current difficulty level to justify their outrage at the game and blame the designers for the fact that they've finally got bored of playing the same game for 5 years. Or maybe the people who are leaving (and going on and on and on about it!) just have too many bad players who are really bad players in their guild instead of bad players who were only pretending to be bad players. :awesome_for_real: Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Lakov_Sanite on April 11, 2011, 06:56:35 AM WOTLK day one was a vast amount easier than cataclysm day one. You remember what the first raiding hotfix was in wotlk? It was making i so only level 80 players could enter naxx because people were going in with groups at 78+ and beating KT. Can you really compare that to anything in cataclysm? We're talking about raids with maybe not all but a good amount of players who didn't even have level 80 blues on and were able to tackle the content.
Then as wotlk progressed they made the instances even EASIER but the baseline for all of them was much much lower. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: SurfD on April 11, 2011, 08:37:33 AM WOTLK day one was a vast amount easier than cataclysm day one. You remember what the first raiding hotfix was in wotlk? It was making i so only level 80 players could enter naxx because people were going in with groups at 78+ and beating KT. Can you really compare that to anything in cataclysm? We're talking about raids with maybe not all but a good amount of players who didn't even have level 80 blues on and were able to tackle the content. The Naxx is easy thing has been done to death though (and it was too). Naxx 3.0 was super fucking easy compared to pretty much every raid released previous to it. I mean, how many level 78's were going into Sartharion and killing that? Much of the Naxx easyness came from the fact that most of the active raiders on most servers going into wrath had probably already cleared at least half of naxx already (either back at 60 as current content, or at 70 before they took it out as a novelty raid). Unfortunately, malygos doesent reallly work as a metric, since you had to kill Sapphiron to get the key, but I dont imagine many level 78 would have been clearing Malygos either.Then as wotlk progressed they made the instances even EASIER but the baseline for all of them was much much lower. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Lakov_Sanite on April 11, 2011, 08:44:26 AM Sartherion was killed within hours of being released by the players who were already there and it was being released for.
It's about difficulty versus your baseline of players. When naxx was released in wotlk it was being beaten within a week of the expansion by quite a few guilds and within a month by most raiding guilds. When each teir of content was released in wotlk it was all conquered fairly quick(with i believe ulduar being the slowest) However in cataclysm the amount of players beating the first tier(and that needs emphasis because this IS the naxx of cataclysm) has gone way, way down. Now some would say that wotlk was easier overall than any expansion and yes, I agree but you can't lower the difficulty down to easy and then raise it to nightmare mode the next expansion either, it had to be a lot more gradual. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Paelos on April 11, 2011, 08:52:32 AM MMO Champion is going into depression mode about how long 4.1 is taking, and the fact that it doesn't even include a raid.
The proposed point of doing 4.1 as a smaller patch was to get it out faster, but right now the best guess is that it won't be out until the end of April if they are lucky. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Ingmar on April 11, 2011, 10:59:06 AM Technically that is probably still faster than if it did have the raid. :why_so_serious:
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Rendakor on April 11, 2011, 12:43:34 PM Ulduar came out mid-April; even accounting for the fact that Cata hit 2 weeks later in the year that WotLK late-April isn't any earlier than last time.
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Lakov_Sanite on April 11, 2011, 01:21:48 PM Ulduar came out mid-April; even accounting for the fact that Cata hit 2 weeks later in the year that WotLK late-April isn't any earlier than last time. :uhrr: I'm talking about within the cycle of the expansion, not the actual calender date. Naxx was the first tier of wotlk raiding, BoT/BRD are the first tier dungeons of cataclysm. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Merusk on April 11, 2011, 02:45:00 PM He was addressing the MMO-Champion whines Paelos was relaying to us, I believe.
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Lakov_Sanite on April 11, 2011, 03:09:28 PM Ah that would make more sense, though ulduar was a raid dungeon(was there other content that patch?) and this is two more heroics which are already recycled content.
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Paelos on April 11, 2011, 03:41:56 PM Ah that would make more sense, though ulduar was a raid dungeon(was there other content that patch?) and this is two more heroics which are already recycled content. There general feel of the populace that watches this stuff closely seems to be a mix of boredom, tossing in the rehashed comments, questioning whether the next raid will be out before July, and insulting people for not being 12/12 heroic and complaining about the lack of content. Personally, I believe that Blizzard should never have used "smaller patches = more frequency!" as their tagline for why a raid wasn't coming with the 4.1 patch. Hell, we all know Blizzard doesn't do anything fast. However, I think the people would have raged less at a "it's not done yet, and you fuckers haven't even scraped half of what we've given you" in PR speak rather than anything that was mildly related to speed. That's a check Blizzard simply can't cash. EDIT: To further the point, though, why isn't a raid ready at the end of this month? If it comes out in July, that's another quarter where we wait for their sub numbers to take a nose-dive. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Ingmar on April 11, 2011, 03:46:29 PM Because Blizzard is goddamn slow at everything. Why is Heart of the Swarm not coming out until 2012? Etc.
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Paelos on April 11, 2011, 03:49:18 PM Because Blizzard is goddamn slow at everything. Why is Heart of the Swarm not coming out until 2012? Etc. Yeah, but being slow compared to yourself is just silly. We at least have comparable points at this juncture for expansion release, patch release, etc. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Rendakor on April 12, 2011, 12:05:59 AM That was my point as well. Relative to WotLK the new raid zone should be hitting at about the end of April; instead we're getting two recycled heroics. :oh_i_see:
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Simond on April 12, 2011, 12:22:01 AM Because they're saving 4.2 until the SWTOR beta.
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: apocrypha on April 17, 2011, 10:59:17 PM So, last week we wiped repeatedly on both Maloriak and Omnotron... this week we 1-shot both of them and then wipe 6+ times on Atramades. Got him down to 9% on our penultimate try though! Felt like the fight had finally clicked for most people. We'd have stayed to try again but our raid end times are fairly strictly adhered to because lots of the guild have family commitments. Felt good though, lot of fun, really nice bunch of people we've ended up with.
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Samprimary on April 18, 2011, 05:58:08 PM I'm still trying to decipher, through video, the best ways to improve our raid group's dismal performance on Cho'Gall, who is considered by many others to be easy but who we cannot, for the life of us, beat. I am not the raid leader but I want to be able to impact the outcome through education and monitoring what's happening to others.
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: caladein on April 18, 2011, 07:12:37 PM What's getting you guys? Tank deaths? Overwhelmed by bloods at one point? Overwhelmed by the last phase?
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Samprimary on April 18, 2011, 07:44:39 PM damned if I could figure out a specific pattern. sometimes a tank urks out. sometimes a healer gets squished in the back. sometimes blood overwhelms us. sometimes corruption overtakes someone and it spirals out from there. It is like a roulette wheel of something going wrong each time with no consistency, and no progression to phase two. Sometimes someone pukes on someone else. Yet they say he's not really a gear check, or that it should be easy. Each time I just end up standing there watching names go grey, going WELP and waiting for my turn.
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Rokal on April 18, 2011, 09:27:14 PM If people are throwing up long before phase 2, that's your problem. There are only three things that cause corruption p1:
People getting hit by depravity. People getting hit by corrupting crash. People getting hit by blood of the old god. If you look at recount (or any DM) after a wipe, you should be able to take a look at Damage Taken on someone who had high corruption and see which of those three things caused them to get high corruption. I'm guessing they were getting hit by corrupting crash. Unfortunately the only fix for that is to pay better attention to your character so that you see the spell effect warning when crash is about to hit you. You could also turn on some sort of yell/whisper warning for it using DBM or another boss mod, but the warning spell effect is fairly large so I'd just emphasize that people need to look out for that in order to succeed on the fight If it turns out it was depravity, work on getting your interrupts on corrupting adherent down. On 10 man you should probably have the tank and at least one other person dedicated to interrupting the adherent. I've never done the 25 man version of the fight, but I suspect you'd just want one a tank and an interrupter on each. They'll cast depravity roughly every 10-11 seconds, so one person can solo the interrupts but it helps to have some insurance (or someone to interrupt the interrupter if they start worshiping Cho'gall). It also helps to make sure the interrupter knows how frequent the spell is cast. From personal experience, the Adherent's hitbox is kind of small so knowing that depravity is about to be cast really helps me focus on being in position for the interrupt, especially if the add is moving. If blood of the old gods is getting your corruption up, it would be helpful to know where your guild is killing adherents, and what your class comp is for your raid. If melee dps is trying to help out on blood, this could be another source of high corruption. On a good attempt everyone will go into p2 with 10-20 corruption at most. If someone does pass 25 corruption, make sure you dispel them asap to make sure they don't continue to stack corruption. That said, whether you win or lose on the first depends almost completely on how well you avoid stacking corruption, so you'll need to figure out how people are getting high corruption and fix that. It took my guild longer to get a Cho'gall kill than a Nef kill, so I wouldn't get too discouraged: learning the fight is harder than most guilds would have you believe (though once you do win the fight, every week after that seems to be a cakewalk). Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: SurfD on April 18, 2011, 09:30:20 PM damned if I could figure out a specific pattern. sometimes a tank urks out. sometimes a healer gets squished in the back. sometimes blood overwhelms us. sometimes corruption overtakes someone and it spirals out from there. It is like a roulette wheel of something going wrong each time with no consistency, and no progression to phase two. Sometimes someone pukes on someone else. Yet they say he's not really a gear check, or that it should be easy. Each time I just end up standing there watching names go grey, going WELP and waiting for my turn. I have only DPS'd Cho as boomkin in my guild's 25 runs, so I am not super familiar with how difficult the fight can be from other perspectives but important things to watch out for:First off, you are 10 man group, right? What is your raid comp? - If bloods are getting you: Do you have any AoE slows (hunter traps, boomkins who can spec into SlowShrooms)? Just not enough dps on the last one? - Tank deaths can be a pain, as Cho does have the ability to put some nasty hurt spikes on the tanks (especially if you are even a fraction slow interupting worshippers). Again, group composition could help here. A prot warrior is AWESOME for interupting worship if everyone stacks right behind Cho so shockwave can hit them. - One thing that sticks out would be Corruption tho. Unless something is going very wrong, no one but the tanks should be getting corruption untill phase 2. If dps are ending up with raid wiping stacks of corruption, that means they are standing in stuff they shouldnt be standing in (shadow missiles from adds, fire from Fire Cho) or geting hit by AoE from the Dead Add Pools, or the Adds themselves are getting off the AoE that happens if you dont kill them fast enough. --------------------------------------------- Also, a fun Phase 2 Cho trick that my guild recently started doing (not sure how viable it is on 10 man, but it makes 25 man Cake). When phase 2 starts, have the tank drag Cho as far back into his throne as he can get him. Appearently, the corrupting tentacles that Cho summons periodically durring the fight work a lot like placing Shaman totems, and are range blocked by close walls, so since the Throne is a very tight box, the tentacles all spawn practically ontop of eachother, and can be aoe'd down by mele literally in seconds. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Merusk on April 19, 2011, 03:25:22 AM Each time I just end up standing there watching names go grey, going WELP and waiting for my turn. I think you'll find that this attitude is occurring throughout your raid and its a large part of what's killing you all. When you fail enough at something, it just becomes expected that you'll fail which is largely self-fulfilling because of mental attitude. It would serve you all some good to take a break or perhaps just stand in a big room while someone yells effects over vent so you can all walk through it. My guild had the same problem with Yogg and it was all mental attitude. We never got the 25-man kill, but the 10m always went smoothly when the few defeatists whose attitude was "we'll never make it" weren't there. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Samprimary on April 19, 2011, 05:21:45 AM I think you'll find that this attitude is occurring throughout your raid and its a large part of what's killing you all. When you fail enough at something, it just becomes expected that you'll fail which is largely self-fulfilling because of mental attitude. Out of the problems we do seem to have, defeatism isn't one of them. I am saying this in terms of looking at the raid bars and knowing that it is suddenly now already an assured wipe, I just haven't died yet. From what I'm getting, we need more AoE slows action going on. We have a (1) hunter now, that should help with the bloods. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: caladein on April 19, 2011, 02:55:52 PM (This is all for Normal 10s.)
In general people shouldn't be getting corruption unless they're the add tank and their interrupter is messing up or they're eating long worships. In general, no more than one person in your raid should be getting Corruption: Accelerated before entering the last phase. If you're getting more than that on a consistent basis, people just need to not stand in crap (or, they're getting hit by the bloods and aren't noticing it). On our kills, our Mage as Fire and my Hunter as Survival can take care of both each other for worships and the first two waves of bloods. The Corrupted Adherents are killed at the stairs and between an Ice Trap and Frost Nova (maybe a Ring of Frost if we were going slow) we can get them down. For the third set we'll call in the rest of the ranged DPS and they'll pop their knockbacks and such. The important thing with the Adherent/blood group aside from getting Depravity interrupted is that they have to watch each other. You will get worships when the bloods are out so getting each other out quickly makes every other part of that easier. If these people are bit slow on it or have trouble with targeting, have them make variations on this macro: Quote #showtooltip Scatter Shot /targetenemyplayer /cast [raid] Scatter Shot /targetlasttarget /targetenemyplayer and /targetlasttarget should be clear. The [raid] conditional means that you won't blow the ability auto-casting on the boss if the person's already been broken out. Defining the ability name in #showtooltip is just a preference thing so it will show the ability cooldown even when I'm not targeting a raid member. Cutting down on Twisted Devotion stacks and corruption gained from Worshipping is going to make the whole fight go a lot smoother. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Rokal on April 19, 2011, 04:38:10 PM Our guild kills the adds in the small alcoves where the trash originally spawns in Cho'gall's room. First adherent is killed pretty deep into the NW corner of the Western alcove, the rest are killled further out each time, but never further than the small corner at the northern lip of the alcove. Since our raid stands slightly NE of that alcove, most adds congregate around that small corner and it gives the ranged dps a nice place to throw down aoe and snares. Since this is nowhere near Cho'gall, melee/tanks don't have to risk getting corruption from blood melee. Survival hunters really help on this fight and they should take Entrapment if possible. That 4 second root on frost trap really helps you buy more time for aoe. Balance druids (with the typhoon knock-back and ton of burst aoe) are also really great for this fight, but we don't usually run with one. We usually have 3 ranged dps who handle bloods, and our prot warrior throws shockwave out after the frost trap roots fade, for another 4 second stun on all of the bloods. Depending on who you use for tanks, and what order they tank Cho'gall, this might not be possible but it's another thing to think about if you do have a prot warrior.
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Samprimary on April 21, 2011, 03:05:15 AM Thanks, duders — I'm taking all this in and I'll see if it'll be able to show me what the hangup is. on tuesday we slogged our way through chimaeron and i'm watching everyone improve in certain ways.
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: caladein on September 19, 2011, 11:42:02 PM Not sure how many folks here are in heroic 10s guilds, but it's worth a punt. My group's 3/7 right now and if the nerf wasn't happening we'd probably be looking at starting work on Alysrazor (going by Wowtrack (http://www.wowtrack.org/encounters.lua)) this week.
Assuming the nerfs are on the scale they've announced and evenly distributed, I think it would make sense to try the more gear-check-y fights like Beth'tilac and Baleroc first as Alysrazor's got like 3-4 hard failure points on us (one of tank's damage, one side's interrupts, tornadoes, and line-of-sight hilarity). On the other hand, Beth'tilac just seems to be asking a lot in the throughput department and of the Spiderlings/Broodling person (me). Thoughts? Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Miasma on September 20, 2011, 10:05:16 AM Nerfs are in. (http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/3196343006)
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Paelos on September 20, 2011, 10:47:14 AM Health and damage reduced by 15-25% across the board???
Wow, that's gotten by unprecedented. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Ingmar on September 20, 2011, 11:03:48 AM Health and damage reduced by 15-25% across the board??? Wow, that's gotten by unprecedented. Roughly the same magnitude as the nerfs to the T11 stuff, and also the difference between ICC with and without the 30% boost to players. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Hutch on September 20, 2011, 11:31:56 AM Reducing Alysrazor's health by 25% isn't going to help my group get past phase 1, so we still have to get some reps in :grin:
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Rokal on September 20, 2011, 12:52:12 PM The nerfs will help you on phase 1 because the adds will also have 25% less health/damage. The fight will end faster and Alysrazor will do less damage. Fire tornados will also be moving slower. Should be a pretty faceroll fight now.
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Paelos on September 20, 2011, 03:20:40 PM Roughly the same magnitude as the nerfs to the T11 stuff, and also the difference between ICC with and without the 30% boost to players. ICC was gradual though. These last two have just been a sort of cutoff from the rest of the previous content. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: caladein on September 20, 2011, 04:21:46 PM I don't think that's accurate. If you go through the hotfix threads, there were a lot of little nerfs here and there throughout both T11 and T12.
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Paelos on September 20, 2011, 04:22:55 PM I don't think that's accurate. If you go through the hotfix threads, there were a lot of little nerfs here and there throughout both T11 and T12. So in essence, this nerf is indeed unprecedented? Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Ingmar on September 20, 2011, 04:44:29 PM We didn't make significant progress in ICC til at least 20%, so I don't know that it felt all that gradual to me.
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: caladein on September 20, 2011, 04:59:24 PM I don't think that's accurate. If you go through the hotfix threads, there were a lot of little nerfs here and there throughout both T11 and T12. So in essence, this nerf is indeed unprecedented?In the sense that it's "the big nerf" happening while T12 is still current, yes it is without precedent. In terms of scale in comparison to other "big nerfs" though, not really. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Paelos on September 20, 2011, 06:11:47 PM I meant moreso where you read in the patch notes, fuck it we're nerfing everything across the board X%
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Rendakor on September 20, 2011, 06:31:17 PM That's exactly what they did before 4.1 hit to the Cata launch raids. 20% across the board, right in the patch notes.
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Wolf on November 17, 2011, 05:42:39 AM so what do people that raid 10m think about LFR and the whole "token for each tier piece" deal? I find it incredibly silly that I either have to get lucky or raid 25m with randoms to have a shot at getting 2/4p in any reasonable amount of time.
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Miasma on November 17, 2011, 06:49:43 AM I think it's a cynical ploy to get people to raid either in their own guild or in the LFR system. Everything else they are doing points to them realizing their mistake in making the game too hard core in cataclysm but then they go and do the exact opposite here. They want to force people to raid so that they have something to do during the long dry spell before pandamania expansion.
If they make the LFR encounters easy enough that they actually succeed it might work but I wouldn't hold my breath. The LFR system will make or break 4.3 for most people but it would be incredibly hard to make work right, I hope they manage it... Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Rendakor on November 17, 2011, 07:22:15 AM so what do people that raid 10m think about LFR and the whole "token for each tier piece" deal? I find it incredibly silly that I either have to get lucky or raid 25m with randoms to have a shot at getting 2/4p in any reasonable amount of time. 2p will still be easy because you'll still be able to get legs and gloves from BH. I run a 10m raiding guild (4/7 H FL) and the removal of tier from the valor vendor doesn't bother me at all. Maybe my perspective is skewed but as a tank, the 2p is usually garbage (read: a dps improvement) so I never bothered buying it early. The 4p is usually solid, but half our raid is on my Vanquisher tier (DK Tank, Resto Druid, Rogue, Mage, and either another Mage or a DK DPS) so getting it takes forever.Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Wolf on November 17, 2011, 08:40:05 AM I don't know, we have 1 druid, 1 DK, 1 mage and 1 rogue and at times it seems like we're getting only vanquisher. Rogue has both tokens, mage has 4 in total (2/2), DK has 4 in total (2/2) and the druid has 3 heads and 2 shoulders. It gets very frustrating at times, and now you don't even have to only get 1 drop. I think Miasma is right and they're forcing people from raiding guilds into LFR so they can ensure some sort of success rate on raids there.
And if BH10 is dropping pve loot for you, I'd suggest buying a lottery ticket :) Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Miasma on November 17, 2011, 10:05:52 AM Yeah I could count on one hand the number of times BH has dropped PvE set pieces for us.
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Rokal on November 17, 2011, 11:35:26 AM BH drops PvE gear quite a bit more often now. They intentionally upped the drop rate a while back, and now we usually see 1 PvE piece every time we run BH (10m). I don't really think tier pieces dropping from raids only will slow us down much. It just means that an earlier boss in Dragon Soul will drop a tier piece every raid.
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Phunked on November 17, 2011, 12:38:46 PM Not to sound like a dick, but I'm not sure if gear progression is really the bottleneck for 10 man guilds, given the tuning. Class balance, maybe. Gear optimality? Probably not, unless, again, you want to gear up 4 moonkin in parallel or something.
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Rokal on November 17, 2011, 01:26:08 PM Composition is definitely the biggest hindrance to our 10m guild. I can't tell you how many raids we've randomly been missing something like heroism/bloodlust, fortitude, or fire resist. It becomes a huge problem for us on heroic fights.
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Sheepherder on November 17, 2011, 03:23:30 PM The tier gear set bonus shit wouldn't be a problem if Blizzard didn't insist on using the set bonuses to test new talents and fuck with class balance.
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: caladein on November 17, 2011, 06:09:01 PM so what do people that raid 10m think about LFR and the whole "token for each tier piece" deal? I find it incredibly silly that I either have to get lucky or raid 25m with randoms to have a shot at getting 2/4p in any reasonable amount of time. I don't see what the deal is. Most of the raid bosses in DS will have to drop tier tokens now and the LFR-level stuff will be lower ilvl anyway. It's a nice secondary lockout (much like 10-man was to 25-man last expansion) but it's not something I'll get too wound up about min/max'ing. Unless I'm switching characters, I don't see myself bothering with it past the first couple weeks if it isn't fun. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Rendakor on November 18, 2011, 04:43:28 AM Not to sound like a dick, but I'm not sure if gear progression is really the bottleneck for 10 man guilds, given the tuning. Class balance, maybe. Gear optimality? Probably not, unless, again, you want to gear up 4 moonkin in parallel or something. The complaint wasn't that it's hard to gear up, just that it's difficult to actually assemble tier sets. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Shrike on November 18, 2011, 10:04:14 AM Composition is definitely the biggest hindrance to our 10m guild. This has been our biggest hurdle lately. Getting the right people to show up for the right fights. I've noticed more and more wanting to go melee so what used to be my own little spot on the boss is now crowded by rogues, paladins, DKS, warriors, and even other shaman. It's like a friggin' parade now. Get off my lawn! Hell, the guild has practically dragooned my paladin for healing. I might delete her this weekend... Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Rokal on November 18, 2011, 01:29:10 PM This has been our biggest hurdle lately. Getting the right people to show up for the right fights. I've noticed more and more wanting to go melee so what used to be my own little spot on the boss is now crowded by rogues, paladins, DKS, warriors, and even other shaman. It's like a friggin' parade now. Get off my lawn! Hell, the guild has practically dragooned my paladin for healing. I might delete her this weekend... It's stupid how many fights in T12 outright favor ranged dps, and it makes it rough for a 10m guild with a shifting composition. In T11 I was the only melee dps that consistently raided in our guild. In T12 there's now two of us and sometimes that seems like one too many for some heroic fights. I can't even imagine how much it sucks for your guild. Examples: The solution isn't to give melee more dps like they're planning. The solution is to not make fights like Beth'tilac or Staghelm. Giving melee more dps just means that guilds will stack them for fights like Baleroc, but will still favor ranged dps for pretty much everything else. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Rendakor on November 18, 2011, 02:09:14 PM There's a spot you can stand on Staghelm and still eat the cleave while also being "behind" for parry/backstab purposes.
On H Bethtilac, melee are actually very good at the spinners because most of them have a taunt so they can help bring them down. Although honestly there should be no problem getting 5/6 of them down instantly. The 2nd one on the 3rd set is the only one that a DPS would need to help with, provided you do the encounter correctly. Baleroc would be a nightmare ranged heavy, because then your healers have to dodge crystals. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: caladein on November 18, 2011, 02:21:37 PM Outside of Beth'tilac, my group has found it pretty easy to run with 2-3 melee through 6/7H.
Heroic Beth'tilac-10 is really tight composition-wise in a lot of ways because of the need for three healers and strong AOE damage on the bottom. The majority of classes have taunts so unless you're running tons of clothies you shouldn't have a problem getting Spinners down. On the other end of the spectrum, Heroic Majordomo-10 is an incredibly strong fight for melee because of cleaves and not having to dodge the pounce leading to high Concentration uptimes. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Evildrider on November 18, 2011, 02:48:55 PM I had to switch from my Rogue, which I had played all the way up to Cata as my main, to my Mage because we had too many melee. They just made it a total pain in the ass to play as a melee class.
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Sheepherder on November 18, 2011, 03:20:15 PM This has been our biggest hurdle lately. Getting the right people to show up for the right fights. I've noticed more and more wanting to go melee so what used to be my own little spot on the boss is now crowded by rogues, paladins, DKS, warriors, and even other shaman. It's like a friggin' parade now. Get off my lawn! I've been of the opinion since the end of TBC that they should take the thematically appropriate melee DPS (i.e. Warrior, Paladin, Shaman) and give them the ability to stand toe to toe with the boss without eating one-shotting cleaves or losing DPS, possibly at the cost of losing the ability to DPS from the rear effectively. Gruul is entirely blameless in this matter. :oh_i_see: Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Rokal on November 19, 2011, 12:56:15 AM There's a spot you can stand on Staghelm and still eat the cleave while also being "behind" for parry/backstab purposes. On H Bethtilac, melee are actually very good at the spinners because most of them have a taunt so they can help bring them down. Although honestly there should be no problem getting 5/6 of them down instantly. The 2nd one on the 3rd set is the only one that a DPS would need to help with, provided you do the encounter correctly. Baleroc would be a nightmare ranged heavy, because then your healers have to dodge crystals. I know about the spot on Staghelm, but using it always makes me feel a little worried that I'll reduce the effectiveness of some aoe heals. Usually I'm one of the dps that stands behind him for heroic, so it's not something I've had to deal with much. As a rogue, I don't have a taunt, but it's true that every other melee dps does. The crystals will target whoever is in melee range, so in this case you'd just have your ranged dps stand closer than everyone else and they should be picked. I know this because our demo warlock kept running into melee range for free hellfire damage on normal mode a few months ago, and he was getting picked for crystals and pissing us all off. If you're having ranged dps do that, you obviously lose some of the positional benefit for beams that ranged dps gave you though. You could adjust raid positioning slightly to still benefit from it though. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Setanta on November 19, 2011, 01:25:40 AM Hunters can pull spinners down with distracting shot too. We usually run warrior/DK tanks, 2x pally, 1x shaman heals, rogue and dk melee, 2 hunters and a mage or shadow priest - makeup really doesn't seem to matter as sometimes someone cant make it and we sub in others including boomkins, ferals, locks etc. Quite often we are missing MoTW or Fort or Int but we have still managed 6/7 heroic. I really wanted to take my enhance shammy there but got told no by the RL so originally took my Boomkin then switched to my hunter as I wasn't comfortable as boomkin. Of course, my hunter got heroic domo's staff which results in much tears from druids in the AH :D Ranged is still FoTM
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Wolf on November 21, 2011, 08:15:01 AM the only melee specs that are hurting are the ones that _have_ to be in the back and don't do expertise - which is muti rogue and cat. Everyone else is fine. Most of the fights require 2 healers and all are 2 healable, so a 3 melee comp is not hurting you. The only fight you were forced into a 4 ranged comp was Rhyolith, but that's easily doable with 3 after the nerfs.
My pet peevs are CoE and DI in particular. We're lucky enough to have a warlock. I'd be super rage-y if we didn't. No one is playing unholy or muti this tier, so you're stuck with Boomkin, Warlock & the buggy dragonhawk (or forcing people into suboptimal specs they don't want to play). CoE is the only ability that sticks, the others all have to be refreshed - so Beth for example if you don't have a lock, and you're running with frost DK, enhancment shaman or retri paladin, they're instantly losing DPS even if you have some other sort of increased magic damage debuff in the raid, because they don't get it upstairs. Same to a lesser extent on alys. And the debuff in particular is too powerful - it's 8% of all dmg on all casters and a good portion of the DPS on a bunch of melees. Like I said it's not very hard to imagine raids that don't have CoE or are stuck with a hunter with a retarded pet that requires you to macro its ability to ensure any meaningful uptime. On top of that you have DI that's 1700 personal DPS when cast on me. How do I bring the player and not the class in this particular case? Especially with DPS checks like Ragnaros P3 in place. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Setanta on November 21, 2011, 11:45:32 AM Weird, we rarely have a lock or boomkin yet the 2 hunters run a wolf for howl and hyena (ugh) for bleed debuff (2xMM hunters). Resto Shaman/Holy Pallies (2) and Frost and Blood DKs make up the buffs along with whatever else comes along for the ride. Not sure why you'd use CoE or dragonhawk.
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: caladein on November 21, 2011, 05:15:05 PM My pet peevs are CoE and DI in particular. We're lucky enough to have a warlock. I'd be super rage-y if we didn't. No one is playing unholy or muti this tier, so you're stuck with Boomkin, Warlock & the buggy dragonhawk (or forcing people into suboptimal specs they don't want to play). CoE is the only ability that sticks, the others all have to be refreshed - so Beth for example if you don't have a lock, and you're running with frost DK, enhancment shaman or retri paladin, they're instantly losing DPS even if you have some other sort of increased magic damage debuff in the raid, because they don't get it upstairs. Same to a lesser extent on alys. And the debuff in particular is too powerful - it's 8% of all dmg on all casters and a good portion of the DPS on a bunch of melees. Like I said it's not very hard to imagine raids that don't have CoE or are stuck with a hunter with a retarded pet that requires you to macro its ability to ensure any meaningful uptime. On top of that you have DI that's 1700 personal DPS when cast on me. How do I bring the player and not the class in this particular case? Especially with DPS checks like Ragnaros P3 in place. You'll run into that problem any time you split a 10m raid up like you do on Beth'tilac. The Armor debuff is in the same boat as Spell Damage (if you don't send a Warrior/Druid up), where Faerie Fire lasts five minutes and the other options don't. There's a couple of combinations that can leave your top team with everything they need but then you're usually looking at all 100yd buffs and/or getting debuffs up on the pull. As for the Dragonhawk, unless there's some issue particular to it (I use a Wind Serpent to cover that buff when I have to), just leaving a debuff on auto-cast should get 90% or higher uptime on a boss the pet can just stay on. If you need even more than that, you can certainly micromanage it. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Wolf on November 22, 2011, 12:12:26 AM Setanta, you don't have magic damage debuff (CoE) in this setup. Plus 8% magic dmg straight is a lot more damage than 12% armor. We always have a warrior anyway, so we have that covered. As an aside covering bleed damage and not having magic damage is silly and selfish. Piercing shots is _at most_ ~10% of a hunter's damage on a straight single target fight. So bleed would give them ~3% dmg, while all of your casters lose 8% damage and your frost DK loses 4%.
They work the same way Cal, you get about 75-80 uptime on single target if you don't micromanage it, look at your logs. The silly pet triggers it's own global with bite and doesn't refresh it on time, ever. If you got adds on the fight, you're stuck micromanaging anyway. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Setanta on November 22, 2011, 02:53:48 AM Look at the group config:
2 MM Hunters. Frost DK Rogue Shadow Priest/mage/whatever fills in if someone is away Warrior MT Blood DK OT Pally healer x2 (sometimes a Disc Priest for one) Resto Shaman DPS usually results in more geared hunter pulling 32-36K+ followed by geared DPS DK followed by rogue and second hunter (me) at 26-32K plus SP. Casters be dammed :) I'm not saying we are an optimal caster group - the point being that we didn't need to cover every base with raid composition - it just worked using the pets we used to maximise our DPS. We didn't need "Boomkin, Warlock & the buggy dragonhawk (or forcing people into suboptimal specs they don't want to play)". Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Wolf on November 22, 2011, 03:26:40 AM it works on nerfed firelands, that setup has no hope of killing pre-nerf rhyolith unless you rotate alts in. Or pre-nerf bale, unless you make your rogue go muti and it'll still be iffy (too much of a chance for unlucky debuffs on the longer fight and having to have hunters stack, which is a direct dps loss). Pretty sure pre-nerf Beth will gib you on the burn with two paladins, to be honest.
And that setup will go nowhere on rags. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Rendakor on November 22, 2011, 04:04:03 AM Except that was the POINT of the nerfs, so you can raid with your friends and the classes/specs/pets you like, instead of having to swap to the single ideal configuration. I also assume you're talking about pre-nerf heroic fights, else you're just blatantly wrong.
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Wolf on November 22, 2011, 04:40:06 AM Obviously talking about heroic fights, aren't we all?
Since my point is getting lost across specifics - CoE (or rather 8% Increased Magical Damage debuff, CoE for short) is relatively too strong for the classes that have it available and the relative way it works across said classes. That's bad design, that is skewed towards taking warlocks to raids. Dark Intent is part of that same problem, as it is a unique and extremely powerful buff, that once again makes you have a warlock in the raid or raid sub-optimally. That was all I was saying. And since we're on the topic of the nerfs - I'm not that happy about that bit too. First of all - 6/7 is just too easy now and requires very little effort. Ragnaros is an insane jump in difficulty. Nerfed Ragnaros difficulty wise is in line with pre-nerf 6/7. It makes the fight doable in less than 250 wipes, with suboptimal gear and drops some of the requirments to your comp. Not all though, it still is a bring a geared resto druid or go home fight. We were chugging along nicely before the nerfs and they straight up robbed us of the 2 kills we had left so we've been stuck banging our collective head against the firey wall for two months now. On the point of playing with your friends - wasn't the whole point of the raid design for some time now "bring the player, not the class". Via dropping the ball on class balance and encounter design, you're very much required to bring the class on any sort of meaningfully hard content this whole tier. I like the harder stuff in my raids and blizzard is struggling very hard to find the balance they're looking for. Right now, with the rate nerfs are coming, it's a bit of a "raid 5 days 20hrs a week, or do the nerfed content" which I really don't agree with. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: caladein on November 22, 2011, 05:05:30 AM They work the same way Cal, you get about 75-80 uptime on single target if you don't micromanage it, look at your logs. The silly pet triggers it's own global with bite and doesn't refresh it on time, ever. If you got adds on the fight, you're stuck micromanaging anyway. I looked before I posted. The only time this month my pet has had less than 89% uptime on the boss on a Shannox or Baleroc kill was a Shannox kill where someone got ice trapped, and even then it was 86%. H Shannox-10, Tendon Rip @ 89.7% (http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/1hd8fry9lgn0r0pz/details/66/?s=3075&e=3295) H Baleroc-10, Tendon Rip @ 89.3% (http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/1hd8fry9lgn0r0pz/details/127/?s=9389&e=9747) H Shannox-10, Ravage @ 86.1% (http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/orizn1ip1qpymkzl/details/49/?s=1082&e=1345) H Shannox-10, Ravage @ 90.3% (http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/60ly7c600hibjwby/details/44/?s=2096&e=2337) H Baleroc-10, Tendon Rip @ 89.7% (http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/60ly7c600hibjwby/details/115/?s=10397&e=10745) Something like H Beth'tilac-10 P2 has the same behavior in the buff details (http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/1hd8fry9lgn0r0pz/details/45/?s=1241&e=1646) (Tendon Rip again). Application, small gap, re-application. A Wind Serpent or Dragonhawk, on auto-cast, should be slightly higher because it'll have less of those 1-2 GCD gaps as their debuffs last 45s instead of 15s (Tendon Rip) or 25s (Ravage). Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Wolf on November 22, 2011, 06:21:37 AM http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/1hd8fry9lgn0r0pz/details/8/?s=1516&e=1647&target=45 that's the beth burn. It's 85.
Last time I looked was when I had to use dragonhawk on our alt raid, and it was on ragnaros. I'll give you that it's ~90% on a straight single target boss without micromanaging. It still is a far cry from any class applied coe/sunder/whatever. It's especially silly with Ravage, as it lets the stack drop. It's just silly that they give you the buff and it doesn't work. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: caladein on November 22, 2011, 06:58:54 AM http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/1hd8fry9lgn0r0pz/details/8/?s=1516&e=1647&target=45 that's the beth burn. It's 85. Last time I looked was when I had to use dragonhawk on our alt raid, and it was on ragnaros. I'll give you that it's ~90% on a straight single target boss without micromanaging. It still is a far cry from any class applied coe/sunder/whatever. It's especially silly with Ravage, as it lets the stack drop. It's just silly that they give you the buff and it doesn't work. Ravage hasn't been on stun DR since February (http://www.wowpedia.org/Patch_4.0.6#Hunters) if that's what you're referring to. Or do you mean Tear Arrmor? That'll just get spammed on CD to keep its stack up, different logic. Ragnaros is a problem though because he has possibly the slowest debuff application time I've ever experienced. You can easily add 2-3s on each of those little gaps. (You might also have the pet Growling to stay ahead of the melee in case the tanks are slow getting back in, although I don't know if that auto-cast resolves before the special.) Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Wolf on November 22, 2011, 07:08:04 AM Yeah I meant tear armor. Does that no longer drop off? I've not played my hunter seriously all expand, but I seem to remember having issues with tear armor dropping off because the pet wouldn't reapply it after getting 3 stacks, and would only start reapplying after the 3stack drops off. I even wrote a ticket about that. I never really got over focus if I have to be perfectly honest :)
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: caladein on November 22, 2011, 07:22:42 AM I've used a Raptor in a raid all of once and it was pretty recent so I don't know if that logic is new or not. I remember it staying up then (Majordomo I think) and he definitely spams it on the dummy when I tried it now.
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Rendakor on November 29, 2011, 10:51:30 PM Doing Dragon Soul now, regular 10m. Warlord Zon'ozz was pretty challenging with his orb mechanic; otherwise the first 4 were pretty easy. Working on Ultraxion now; got him down to 10% but the final phase damage was too high.
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Wolf on November 29, 2011, 11:17:38 PM How much trash is there?
the orc lady was easy? Did people derp on charging the lightning totems, sorta worried about that. Did you 3 heal everything? What healers and how did you separate the buffs on ultraxion? Also what sort of gear are you running in? 6/7 firelands hc bisish? Zon'ozz was Vezzax with the bouncy cloud? Did you 2 tank 3 heal it and what was the issue? Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Rendakor on November 29, 2011, 11:23:38 PM Orc lady was easy, yes. The lightning totems were the easy part, we had people run into the ice crystals to death a few times. 3 healers, 2 resto druids (our regular and a pug) and a holy pally. We gave our pro resto druid the red buff, holy pally the green buff, and the pug the blue buff. Got him to 1% and wiped! Gave it another shot and 2 people derped up the Hour of Twilight and we were already 20m after quitting time so we said fuck it. We'll get him tomorrow.
We're 4/7 H FL, so not quite as geared as you guys. My biggest complaint with the zone is that too many of the fights are 1 tank; it sucks for our OT having to do mediocre ret dps so often. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Wolf on November 29, 2011, 11:33:59 PM how about the trash? Is it a time waster?
That's the bonus of running with 14 raiders, I tell my tanks/healers to perform on their os or they're getting replaced by a MS. Yes, I'm that asshole. :why_so_serious: Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Wolf on November 30, 2011, 04:50:26 AM looks like they ninja nerfed heroic ragnaros. Removed magma gaiser in p4, which basically removes the hardest part of the phase. Basically if you push 1 meteor you get /sadf
I hate the patch timing, we needed another week to kill him, 20ish wipes most. We were getting stable in p4. If they had announced the patch on time, we could've extended last week and gotten a couple more hours. pfft. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: caladein on November 30, 2011, 09:10:54 AM Ultraxion's trash is the only one that felt like it took a long time, probably because we were standing in one spot the whole time. Otherwise it's 3-4 pulls per boss.
For Ultraxion's buffs we ran three healers (we ran three the whole night except for a few Gunship II attempts) and it was Disc Priest=Arcane, Resto Shaman=Dreams, Resto Druid=Life I think. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Wolf on November 30, 2011, 02:30:22 PM bosses are way easy, but they. are. fun.
Way, way, way better than firelands. And i don't think it's new shiny, the mechanics are fun. We cleared up to and including Ultraxion in 2.5 hours, ran 3 healers to be safe on everything but not-ozruk, but it looks like Ultraxion, Hagara and not-vezzax will be two healable. Kinda rng-y on hagara, since you can get frost tombs on two healers. Hope we can finish up this week so we can do the fun ones next week :awesome_for_real: Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Rendakor on November 30, 2011, 11:24:05 PM Got Ultraxion and Lootship 2.0 tonite. One shot Ultraxion this time with a different pug healer (disc priest this time) than yesterday; I chalk most of our success to being awake this time.
Lootship gave us a lot of trouble, but we got it right at the end of our raid time. The adds are just messy, lots of shit going on, and people kept dying to random shit. We hit his 8 minute enrage timer once because only 1 dps made it to phase 2 alive. Once we made it to phase 2 with (nearly) everyone up, we got it. Probably my least favorite fight in there so far, just because it's a messy adds fight. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Wolf on November 30, 2011, 11:29:51 PM did your ship ever die?
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Rendakor on November 30, 2011, 11:40:32 PM Yes, 10 times?
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Wolf on December 01, 2011, 12:38:22 AM I meant not you wiping, but the ship dying because people don't stand in the void zones?
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Rendakor on December 01, 2011, 08:05:00 AM First couple times we didn't realize the small void zones were actually soakable (because people were running in alone and getting one shotted). We missed the sappers a couple times, etc. Yes, the boat blew up on us about 10 times. We only actually wiped to the boss (aka phase 2) once or twice, most wipes were the boat dying or key players dying and me calling a wipe.
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Outlawedprod on December 02, 2011, 04:28:08 PM LFR is officially a success. Top guilds already exploited it and it was hotfixed.
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/3657278530?page=5#97 Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Ironwood on December 03, 2011, 08:43:43 AM I've read and read that thread and I still don't really understand what they did.
Except it's bad. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Evildrider on December 03, 2011, 08:47:04 AM Something to the effect that one person was master looter and it involved everyone disconnecting and the master looter giving the item to whoever I think.
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: caladein on December 03, 2011, 09:12:24 AM It's not based on an ML, just on having the one loot-eligible person trade the items around.
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Drubear on December 03, 2011, 09:19:20 AM So the check for "looting from this boss" flag is separate from the "oops i looted by accident does anyone else want this?" flag.
Bliz keeps forgetting that "the client is in the hands of the enemy" and apparently doesn't quite think about "worse case scenarios" much. I wonder if they have any QA at all? Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Miasma on December 03, 2011, 09:57:08 AM Ran the LFR and got all four available bosses down without too much trouble, it was fun. Fun.
As a word of caution it seems like sometimes the loot won't auto distribute if someone disconnects and the rolling system has to wait for the timer so don't leave the corpse because you will have to manually loot if you win. Most people run off to the next boss and once you do that you can't get back to the corpse sometimes. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: caladein on December 03, 2011, 10:23:33 AM So the check for "looting from this boss" flag is separate from the "oops i looted by accident does anyone else want this?" flag. Bliz keeps forgetting that "the client is in the hands of the enemy" and apparently doesn't quite think about "worse case scenarios" much. I wonder if they have any QA at all? A "disconnect at the appropriate time" exploit gets by everyone sometimes. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Merusk on December 03, 2011, 12:48:15 PM I've read and read that thread and I still don't really understand what they did. Except it's bad. Ok, I'll break it down. Everyone is only allowed to loot once per week in a raid. That doesn't matter if it's LFR or a normal guild run, once you've killed a boss you're ineligible to loot from it until the following reset. You can, however, run a raid as many times as you want via LFR because there is no shared lockout now, just individual flags. So you can kill Deathwing on your uberguild then runa PUG or two with your friends for kicks or to help them flesh-out a LFR. What Paragon did is create a raid of entirely alt characters + 1 "Primary Raider." They then used LFR to destroy the encounters. They already know and have beaten all of the encounters on Normal or Heroic mode, so LFR mode is "LOLEZMODE X4" and easily done with less-equipped alts. In this raid, they gave all the loot to the primary raid character with no hassle. They then swapped one alt to a Primary Raider and did it again. Same deal, that Raider gets a full instance's loot to themselves. Repeat until your entire raid core is equipped with all the loot they can haul that week from the lowest raid tier - which apparently is still a higher iLevel than the Heroic Tier gear from the previous raid (Big mistake.) So now they've got some toons (who got lucky with the randomizer, honestly) who have full newb-tier gear. It could have worked against them as well, as we've all come across that raid where nothing but plate drops and your tanks are already fully equipped and you really need a few pieces for your healers. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Rendakor on December 03, 2011, 01:03:13 PM A couple things you got incorrect. First, you're eligible to receive loot from a boss twice a week: Once from a normal (10 or 25, regular or heroic) raid, and once from LFR. Also, LFR gear is 384, which is lower than heroic FL's 391.
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Merusk on December 03, 2011, 01:04:40 PM Well that makes more sense, but completely baffles me as to why on earth they bothered. Just to prove you could exploit the system?
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Evildrider on December 03, 2011, 01:09:09 PM Well that makes more sense, but completely baffles me as to why on earth they bothered. Just to prove you could exploit the system? From what I gather some of the 4 piece bonuses allow some extra raid cooldowns to be used? I think it's on the druid sets or something. So they were farming the gear to help with heroic attempts. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: SurfD on December 03, 2011, 01:15:40 PM Well that makes more sense, but completely baffles me as to why on earth they bothered. Just to prove you could exploit the system? From what I gather some of the 4 piece bonuses allow some extra raid cooldowns to be used? I think it's on the druid sets or something. So they were farming the gear to help with heroic attempts. http://www.wowhead.com/item=77013 = Druid http://www.wowhead.com/item=76988 = Warrior http://www.wowhead.com/item=77003 = Paladin http://www.wowhead.com/item=77008 = Deathknight. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Ingmar on December 03, 2011, 04:07:52 PM I'm pretty sure that's not what they did exactly - there was something about disconnecting at some point that lets you loot the same boss more than once in a week.
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Paelos on December 03, 2011, 07:56:20 PM Yeah I think it's more exploity than using LFR that way. I think it had to do with looting bosses over and over.
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: SurfD on December 03, 2011, 11:05:09 PM From what i understand, the exploit worked in the following manner:
You are only supposed to be able to get one shot at loot per boss per lockout in a Raid Environment. Once you have killed a boss in LFR, you are flagged as having killed it, and can not get loot from it again untill the LFR lockout resets. However, if you have 24 people who are already "loot locked" and one person who is not, then everyone passes on any loot that drops, and the 24 loot locked peopl all ALT-F4 disconnect. This essentially auto passes the raid leader position to the one person who was not loot locked, effectively makeing him masterlooter or something, and can just loot everything off the boss because everything was passed on and it is free to grab or something. Then when everyone else loggs back in, something wonky happened that bypassed the LFR loot lockout, allowing the guy who picked up the loot that dropped to freely pass it to anyone who was present for the kill. So you just get 24 loot locked guild raiders, one alt, faceroll the 4 bosses, give loot to whoever you want, grab a new alt, and repeat untill you either run out of alts, or all 24 raiders have everything they need. Was bascily sort of exploiting the "tradable soulbound items" system that they implimented. Their idea that no one is supposed to get multiple shots at loot off the same raid boss in one lockout broke down when you could get multiple kills of the same boss in different groups where loot still dropped. There was a warrior on my server who was offering people 5k per item if they would run the LFR bosses with him, roll on warrior loot, and pass the loot to him if they won something he wanted. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Wolf on December 04, 2011, 06:49:33 AM I don't know if anybody from the top guilds did it that way. I know exactly how Paragon did it, a friend of mine is friends with Baltha and he asked. All they did was sign up for LFR with 22 mains or alts that need the loot and 3 people on the 3 tokens that were eligible to loot. The 3 fresh alts need on all the loot and redistribute it to the people that are actually going to use it. No disconnects, reconnects or anything so exploity. It's just a hole in Blizzard's system that was never caught because there isn't a single person with "FIRSTKILLRACE" mentality on their QA team. They ended up removing items off of some people and telling them to behave, but did not ban anyone. Top guilds did it for the retarded good 4p bonuses for some classes (mage, hunter, holy paladin). People playing in the top 20 guilds are not stupid and they'll never do anything remotely risky and get bans on key people the week before the real race starts.
It's just another instance of the complete disconnect between blizzard and the very top raiders - like the Dragonwrath drop rate nerf, and the actual nerf of the staff in this patch. I can imagine the conversation - um, hey, Paragon are actually clearing 4 25m fireland raids on their farm day to get more staffs, we should probably do something about that. Wait? Can they DO that? Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: caladein on December 04, 2011, 10:46:14 AM It's just another instance of the complete disconnect between blizzard and the very top raiders - like the Dragonwrath drop rate nerf, and the actual nerf of the staff in this patch. I can imagine the conversation - um, hey, Paragon are actually clearing 4 25m fireland raids on their farm day to get more staffs, we should probably do something about that. Wait? Can they DO that? It's not so much a disconnect as an acceptance that one simply can't design around a group of players that will never abide by the spirit of the systems one makes at all times. Or, more germanely, that doing so makes the game worse for the vast majority of one's player base. Any collection quest is going to benefit from having the recipients split off into their own instances. The important thing is to make it so the temptation for the "average" 25-man (which is still pretty hardcore by this forum's standards) to split into 2-3 10-man groups doesn't exist, which I think they did for the most part. If a top-end guild wants use its enormous bench to run multiple heroic 25-man groups, then there's really no way to stop them outside of some really stupid (unique-ish per server) or annoying (unique per raid) systems. And the solutions to stopping the poaching of legendary wielders are even less palatable. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Ironwood on December 04, 2011, 12:51:57 PM I'm sorry, Wolf, I still don't get it.
Slower, little words ? Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Wolf on December 04, 2011, 02:14:08 PM not sure if making fun of me, but i'll bite :oh_i_see:
The design behind LFR is that once you kill a boss and get to the loot bit, it doesn't matter if you roll on items or not, you're locked out from getting items from that boss for that raid reset. You can still queue and kill the bosses if you need to help out guildies, or "for fun", but you can't get any loot. Since Blizzard's QA is amazing, they missed a pretty glaring hole - even if you're locked out, someone else can roll for that item and trade it to you. There are several insane 4 piece set bonuses this tier, namely the hunter, mage and paladin ones. These bonuses will give the guilds that have as many characters as possible with them in the raid a leg up on the "race to the world first". The LFR allows 25 people from the same guild to sign up for it and roflstomp the instance. What Paragon did was the following - they sign up with 22 geared characters to make the run fast and they get 3 "fresh" characters in the raid - one on each token. These characters than need on all the tokens, and redistribute (trade) them among the "mains" that would normally be locked out, since they have killed the raid before. Rince and repeat, untill you have 4p on all the people that need them. The way I see it is the following - if it's on live, it's fair game. I don't see that as an exploit, and in fact all top guilds sent a ticket to make sure they have a green light before they started doing this. As I said - they're not stupid, and if this was considered an exploit, there would be bans. If blizzard had a single employe on their QA team that had the mentality and thinking of a top wow player - they weren't going to be in the position they were in when the playerbase got wind of this. As it is the whole "bad progression guild, bad" bit blizzard is doing right now is laughable. Whatever item removal they did, was manual, as I have a set of gloves on my paladin alt I shouldn't have if they did some automatic purge :) Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Wolf on December 04, 2011, 02:25:03 PM It's just another instance of the complete disconnect between blizzard and the very top raiders - like the Dragonwrath drop rate nerf, and the actual nerf of the staff in this patch. I can imagine the conversation - um, hey, Paragon are actually clearing 4 25m fireland raids on their farm day to get more staffs, we should probably do something about that. Wait? Can they DO that? It's not so much a disconnect as an acceptance that one simply can't design around a group of players that will never abide by the spirit of the systems one makes at all times. Or, more germanely, that doing so makes the game worse for the vast majority of one's player base. Any collection quest is going to benefit from having the recipients split off into their own instances. The important thing is to make it so the temptation for the "average" 25-man (which is still pretty hardcore by this forum's standards) to split into 2-3 10-man groups doesn't exist, which I think they did for the most part. If a top-end guild wants use its enormous bench to run multiple heroic 25-man groups, then there's really no way to stop them outside of some really stupid (unique-ish per server) or annoying (unique per raid) systems. And the solutions to stopping the poaching of legendary wielders are even less palatable. That is just not correct. You have a group of people who's behaviour is entirely predictable. They will do whatever is necessary to have the best gear available at all times. You can always design systems having that in mind - Dragonwrath is a very good example. After it got nerfed the staff is still very much BIS, just not retardedly overpowered. The heroic deathwing weapons will get very close to it's performance. That's the way the staff should have looked initially. Instead we had the following happen: Dragonwrath makes it to live in it's very overpowered form. After the race is over and top guilds are sitting on their hands 6 days a week, they start raiding an extra day and making up to 4 25m clears to get as many staffs as possible. That's surprising to noone - they want the best gear available for the next tier of content. Blizzard gets wind of this, a couple of months after it's happened, and ninja implements a knee-jerk fix by nerfing drop rates on the quests. Of course in the processs they fuck 10m guilds sideways and get a shitstorm on their hands. They revert the fix and instead nerf the actual staff a couple of months down the line. How do you avoid that whole thing without the messing up the game of the more casual players? I said that at the top - think and don't introduce such a powerful weapon into the middle of the expansion. Balance it as it is now - and release it like that. But, no, legendaries must be INSANE. No, they need to be orange and turn you into a lady dragon, while staying barely BIS for the rest of the expansion. That's enough for everyone. As an aside don't tell me that the insane grind that Dragonwrath was is accesible to any casual player. I did not miss a single raid from the first week of July, up to the middle of November to get that staff. Yeah, our progress is more akin to a bunch of firends getting together a couple nights a week, because that's what we mostly are, but we are still nowhere near casual. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Rendakor on December 04, 2011, 04:11:47 PM We've done 10m FL every week since it went live, and we'll be getting our first staff next week. :oh_i_see:
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Ironwood on December 05, 2011, 05:09:18 AM not sure if making fun of me, Nope. I'm really having that hard a time getting my head around it. I shall now read. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Ironwood on December 05, 2011, 05:10:40 AM not sure if making fun of me, but i'll bite :oh_i_see: The design behind LFR is that once you kill a boss and get to the loot bit, it doesn't matter if you roll on items or not, you're locked out from getting items from that boss for that raid reset. You can still queue and kill the bosses if you need to help out guildies, or "for fun", but you can't get any loot. Since Blizzard's QA is amazing, they missed a pretty glaring hole - even if you're locked out, someone else can roll for that item and trade it to you. Right. That explains it all perfectly. My problem here was that I thought it locked you to an instance that was now empty of bosses. Did they change that or is LFR different ? Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Miasma on December 05, 2011, 05:56:27 AM The bosses return with each new raid so you can run them over and over again. Same as the dungeons.
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Wolf on December 05, 2011, 06:07:22 AM not sure if making fun of me, but i'll bite :oh_i_see: The design behind LFR is that once you kill a boss and get to the loot bit, it doesn't matter if you roll on items or not, you're locked out from getting items from that boss for that raid reset. You can still queue and kill the bosses if you need to help out guildies, or "for fun", but you can't get any loot. Since Blizzard's QA is amazing, they missed a pretty glaring hole - even if you're locked out, someone else can roll for that item and trade it to you. Right. That explains it all perfectly. My problem here was that I thought it locked you to an instance that was now empty of bosses. Did they change that or is LFR different ? It's different. 10 & 25 regular raids still work as before, LFR lockout is only based on bosses. So you could kill Morchok with one raid, and drop group, resign, kill Morchok again (but not get any loot from it) and then kill Zonozz and roll on loot there. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Rendakor on December 05, 2011, 07:31:48 AM Got the Spine down last night after only 3 (2 real) attempts. Good, fun fight although the loot sort of blows as a DK tank. Put in a couple attempts on Madness but Sun isn't a usual raid night so we didn't hang too late. Going back again tonight and hopefully we'll get it.
The key seems to be figuring out the order you take out the buffs. We watched the Fatboss guide (because they're one of the best 10m strategy makers) and the order they suggested was Green (G), Blue (B), Bronze (Y), Red (R) but we were having a lot of problems killing the slimes with Blue down. I didn't expect a kill last night since we only had time for a few attempts, but tonight we're going to try GRYB or GRBY and see what works. I can't imagine dealing with the bolt without the slow aura which is why I'm inclined to leave Bronze for last. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Wolf on December 05, 2011, 07:42:59 AM This is coming from not reasearching the fight enough and "tacticing" on our own, at which we suck ass, so I strongly suggest you take my advice, so you don't have to leave it for next week like we had to :-P
3healers/2tanks/5dps - Green - Red - Bronze - Blue. Blood blobs are IMPOSSIBLE to do without blue. I watched the quantum guide and I agree they're normally really good about reckognizing the best possible tactic, but they droped the ball on this one. Handling the blobs without Kalecgos is insanely hard. We lost 2 hours developing a workable tactic with 2 healers that we'll never use :uhrr: Our biggest problem and what probably ended up costing us the kill was actually having too much dps. We didn't have enough to do a tentacle in one impale, but we ended up killing the DW tentacle too fast and tank/raid CDs didn't have time to reset. Meh, I'm in no hurry tbh, we'll get it ez on Weds or early on Thursday. And will have time to finish off Ragnaros :oh_i_see: Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Rendakor on December 05, 2011, 08:00:10 AM 3 heal/2 tank/5 DPS is the setup we were using too. How hard are the mini tentacles (the ones Red usually kills) to deal with? We never switched the strat last night so we never actually had to deal with them. Also, what do you do for the one Bolt that will hit because Bronze isn't up? Run away and pop all raid CDs?
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Wolf on December 05, 2011, 08:16:34 AM we were mostly running 6dps, but the little tentacles were never an issue, they straight up disappeared as soon as they poped. Just make sure everyone is single targeting them down. We tried to aoe down the bloods without kalecgos with heroism up and weren't even close, though.
The bolt is the hardest thing to deal with. The way it works is - as soon as the circle appears it will drop within 2-3 seconds, after it drops it will still have all its health and tick for about 18k to everyone on the platform every second (tooltip says 5, but it's every second) and since you still have the side-tentacle (Corruption or whatever) up, you need to spread out so it doesnt stomp the whole raid. Should be slightly easier to deal with with 3 healers, but the bolt needs to die yesterday, it hurts quite a bit and combined with the tentacle stomp, you might lose someone. Spread CDs to have some preventive/stacking up before it hits (rallying cry/barrier/AMZ) and some after it hits (divine guardian/tranquility/tree/aura mastery). I took it like a man, with dispersion, DK also didnt move with Bubble, so keep that in mind - some classes with really major personal CDs can take the hit even from a couple of yards. After that all you have to deal with is make the cataclysm DPS check, don't be afraid to use hero on that - if you get into p2, you'll probably kill it. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Rendakor on December 05, 2011, 08:54:36 AM Alright, thanks. Sounds like your comp has a few more CDs than us (No Rallying Cry or AMZ) but we'll do what we can.
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Rokal on December 05, 2011, 03:25:50 PM We had a couple composition problems this week (one of our main tanks unavailable, one of our better healers without power), but we're 5/8 on 10m normal. For comparison we were 6/7 on H FL (after nerfs of course) before 4.3. Mor'chok we one-shot, but everything else took ~3 attempts. We only put 3 attempts into Blackhorn, but people were dying to shockwave in P2. Nothing quite like assigning rdps/healers to groups of two, and then watching three people die to one shockwave when the boss is at 40% :oh_i_see:
It's hard to judge the balance of these fights given that we all have a decent amount of H FL gear. Yor'sahj and Zon'ozz might have felt pretty demanding on healers in flat 378 gear. Mor'chok and Hagara would have been chumps even with bad gear. Ultraxion I'm not sure we'd have been able to do without H FL gear, though I think the fight would have been easier with an extra dps instead of a third healer (especially since our third healer this week was new to healing). The raid zone overall is disappointing. It's a boss gauntlet through boring re-hashed areas. The tuning of the bosses probably would have felt much better if there were more bosses in the zone so that things could have ramped up appropriately after the first 4. I'm curious to see how the tuning of the heroics is. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Rendakor on December 05, 2011, 10:15:36 PM Got him after about an hour of attempts! Snagged his 2h sword for my DK tank, even though it's terrible with it's lack of mastery. We ended up doing Green, Bronze, Red, Blue because the Blistering Tentacles were a huge pain in the ass. Had to save lust for phase 2; we hit it just when the first fragments came up so we could burn them and the other adds quickly, then push Deathwing. We got a third set of fragments right at the end, but just ignored them (popping Dream when targetted) and burned him to death.
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Wolf on December 06, 2011, 12:28:06 AM Grats, it's a cool title :)
And I stand corrected on the LFR thing, super disappointed in Paragon, they normally know better. I hope some lower end guild snags the madness first, though I seriously doubt it. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Outlawedprod on December 06, 2011, 06:04:56 AM Grats, it's a cool title :) And I stand corrected on the LFR thing, super disappointed in Paragon, they normally know better. I hope some lower end guild snags the madness first, though I seriously doubt it. Supposedly blizz is unloading 8 day bans today. http://media.mmo-champion.com/images/news/2011/december/LFRExploitBan.png Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Wolf on December 06, 2011, 01:38:58 PM had 10 raiders online, cobbled together a raid, and managed to take him in 3 attempts, first time we got to phase 2. Yay heroics tomorrow.
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Ironwood on December 06, 2011, 02:13:43 PM An eight day suspension.
Fuck off. :oh_i_see: Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Rendakor on December 06, 2011, 02:21:35 PM That's a week of no Heroic progression for all guilds involved, giving others a shot at the world firsts. I'm not sure what else you could expect to happen; they're not going to perma-ban the entirety of their hardcore raiding scene.
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Rokal on December 06, 2011, 02:51:05 PM They're also losing all the extra LFR gear. So they'll be over a week behind on heroic progress/gear, and they don't even get to keep the gear they did get from LFR. Seems like a pretty substantial punishment to me.
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Paelos on December 06, 2011, 03:38:02 PM It's a slap on the wrist, but most of them are buddies with the devs during the testing cycles, so they aren't going to fuck with them.
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: El Gallo on December 06, 2011, 05:03:13 PM Jesus, they didn't interfere with anyone else's gaming, an 8-day suspension is more than enough for a first-time offender.
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Ingmar on December 06, 2011, 05:04:44 PM Yeah it strikes me as a pretty hefty punishment really.
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Paelos on December 06, 2011, 05:13:54 PM Jesus, they didn't interfere with anyone else's gaming, an 8-day suspension is more than enough for a first-time offender. Even for guys like Ensidia who were banned? They exploited the Lich King and got a 3 day banned for that when they claimed a first kill. http://wow.joystiq.com/2010/02/04/ensidia-temporarily-banned-for-exploits/ (http://wow.joystiq.com/2010/02/04/ensidia-temporarily-banned-for-exploits/) EDIT: I'm not saying automatically perma-ban them, but it seems sort of limp-dicked response from the good ole-day when they banned entire guilds for exploiting walls in AQ40. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Ingmar on December 06, 2011, 05:20:33 PM Except this wasn't Ensidia? Did they also do something this time?
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Paelos on December 06, 2011, 05:36:45 PM Except this wasn't Ensidia? Did they also do something this time? They got the 8 day ban too. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Rendakor on December 06, 2011, 05:54:54 PM Most of the hardcore guilds got the ban: Paragon, Ensidia, vodka, Blood Legion, etc.
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Ingmar on December 06, 2011, 06:26:52 PM Gotcha. I would probably have given specific accounts (not guilds) that had prior bans for raid exploit shenanigans a longer ban, yes.
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Wolf on December 06, 2011, 10:23:59 PM the ban is on single people I think. Most guilds will have the manpower to still do heroics today. Also from what I understood both Vodka and Blood Legion didn't exploit.
The race is a pretty big deal, that they did something as drastic as this is pretty surprising to me. Paragon have consistently gotten kills 1 reset before Method, and Method at least a couple before everyone else. We'll see how it goes, I certainly hope some lower end guild like Envy or For the Horde didn't exploit and can snatch the kill with an extra reset of gear. Certainly makes it interesting :) Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Wolf on December 09, 2011, 04:15:16 AM apparently dimitri got recruited in Blood Legion (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IGf2Hfncbc) :drill:
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Fordel on December 09, 2011, 02:01:50 PM So what are they actually talking about in that video, I've seen it a few times now and I'm curious.
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Outlawedprod on December 09, 2011, 07:08:38 PM So what are they actually talking about in that video, I've seen it a few times now and I'm curious. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xZkl9pznIc Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Wolf on December 20, 2011, 03:06:53 AM Koreans (the 25m ones) got Madness. General consensus is the fight wasn't ready in some way and blizzard weren't fast enough on the trigger to hotfix 30% health onto everything untill they get it done.
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Miasma on December 20, 2011, 07:04:41 AM Don't they also have a 3day lockout or is that not the case for heroic?
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Wolf on December 20, 2011, 07:20:44 AM that's firelands and before, so yeah they had a bit of an advantage in that they had double resets since october. They did field 10 or so dragonwraths for their spine kill and have 17 total, but any guild in the top 10 can do that.
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Rendakor on January 11, 2012, 07:34:35 AM Right Click > Report Spam
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Wolf on January 18, 2012, 11:55:35 PM Dragon Soul is getting an ICC treatment nerf. 5% Dmg and health on everything, stacking over time. I'm personally happy with that.
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Fabricated on January 19, 2012, 04:31:17 AM I really wonder if they secretly fired Ghostcrawler or something because the CM's are flat out smashing the grognards now.
Quote Bashiok: I don't know, man. How is it good for the game to have 1% of players parading around for months and months and a 99% sitting around with nothing to do because they're sick and tired of wiping? Your solution is "Well then they should get better or quit." and that's just not reasonable for a video game comprised of millions of people looking to just have some fun. It's still a computer game. http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/3932904229?page=6 This puts a smile in my heart. This is about as close as a "we're so fucking sorry for Cataclysm" as we're likely going to get. A few more CMs telling the shitsockers to shut up and I may make myself a hypocrite and resub when I grow bored of SWTOR. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Merusk on January 19, 2012, 04:41:34 AM Holy crap. His responses in that entire thread are something they should have done YEARS ago. Even when I was a hardcore raider I still felt that way and hated the way other raiders thought it made them better than the rest of the player base. Most it was simply because they were dragged-through by better players or had time to play the wipe fest until they lucked out and won. (And those were usually the first to sling the "you have to EARN IT" argument.)
Now that it's a month out from TOR's release they must not be seeing the usual uptick in subs to begin bashing their 3% like this. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Fabricated on January 19, 2012, 04:49:47 AM The reaction to LFR is really unexpected to me. I was expecting there to basically be ONLY rage about loot ninjas or bad players. I mean, there's a lot of that still but my friends who still play WoW all love LFR, and the ones that didn't raid before are now organizing 10-man normal raids in their more-casual-than-casual guilds so they can hit the content with just their friends and guildmates.
Of course, a couple of my better friends actually ninja loot and trade it to the raid members they like (people who're nice, patient, seem to actually be trying) in LFR for the purpose of pissing off asshole players. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Wolf on January 19, 2012, 04:50:51 AM The funny thing is that the only people railing against this are the herpderp vanilla & BC was the BESTEST :uhrr: crowd. Everyone with a brain realises it's a very ellegant design to solve what is obviously a problem for them. People like me and my guild get to do the legitimately hard content, without having the rug pulled under our feet with a 20% NERF TO ALL THE THINGS TOMORROW, and people that are not interested in doing the fight just right but still get bored running normals and want a bit of a challenge get shit gradually nerfed by gear aquisition and the stacking buff. At the same time the encounter design team gets to do heroics right and give a challenge to the paragon level and all the different tiers below that. All three fights we've done so far in Dragon Soul are pretty much the best fights they've done ever. Both of the harder ones have pretty steep comp requirments, but let's say they're going to be fighting that with the new talents if they do them right.
Now wouldn't it be nice if they itterated a tiny bit and gave unique titles/tier armor hues to the people that chose to turn off the buff so I have a legitimate case to turning it off in my raids? I'd be the happiest :drill: Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: luckton on January 19, 2012, 04:55:01 AM The way they took to handling loot in LFR, by assigning the loot to be rolled on by particular classes...had they done that with LFD when that came out, we would have had some great times before I kicked this game to the curb.
I still may come back someday...but TOR still has me enthralled for now. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Rokal on January 19, 2012, 06:41:04 AM I'd be completely satisfied with an achievement for doing the fights without the buff. As it is, it seems a little too soon. My guild just finally beat normal Deathwing and we haven't gotten a chance to start heroics yet. True, we can turn the buff off, and I appreciate that, but turning it off would probably create conflict in our raid group. Some people reach that 'wall' faster than others where they feel like they aren't progressing, and that frustration would be turned on other players if we refused to use the buff.
The achievement seems like a perfect solution, but it would require a real patch from Blizzard so it probably won't happen. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Ironwood on January 19, 2012, 06:41:15 AM What's wrong with that system ?
To be frank, if they put in a check as to if they already had the item, it'd be a godsend. As it is, I quite like it. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Paelos on January 19, 2012, 06:56:15 AM I really wonder if they secretly fired Ghostcrawler or something because the CM's are flat out smashing the grognards now. Quote Bashiok: I don't know, man. How is it good for the game to have 1% of players parading around for months and months and a 99% sitting around with nothing to do because they're sick and tired of wiping? Your solution is "Well then they should get better or quit." and that's just not reasonable for a video game comprised of millions of people looking to just have some fun. It's still a computer game. http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/3932904229?page=6 This puts a smile in my heart. This is about as close as a "we're so fucking sorry for Cataclysm" as we're likely going to get. A few more CMs telling the shitsockers to shut up and I may make myself a hypocrite and resub when I grow bored of SWTOR. Wow, you're right. That is about as close to my dream of a public apology that we're going to get. Good for them on recognzing it now. I may resub for Pandatown now if they keep heading down that path and recognizing how they fucked us over in favor of the shitshow raider crews. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Ironwood on January 19, 2012, 07:00:12 AM Good for them for recognising it the minute serious competition launches.
:oh_i_see: Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Paelos on January 19, 2012, 07:08:24 AM Good for them for recognising it the minute serious competition launches. :oh_i_see: Time is money, friend! Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Ironwood on January 19, 2012, 07:09:13 AM heh.
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Fabricated on January 19, 2012, 07:12:32 AM Good for them for recognising it the minute serious competition launches. Funny how that works.:oh_i_see: Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Simond on January 19, 2012, 04:24:42 PM Good for them for recognising it the minute serious competition launches. I wouldn't call STO going f2p serious competition, and GW2 doesn't launch until later. :grin::oh_i_see: Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: caladein on January 19, 2012, 05:26:24 PM I don't understand some of your responses. Were you not expecting Dragon Soul to get a scaling raid buff, especially after they said there wasn't going to be another raid pre-MoP build-up?
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Rokal on January 19, 2012, 06:13:39 PM I wasn't sure whether it would. As many have already said, I thought LFR would possibly be a replacement for nerfing content. People that want to do easy raid content have easy raid content, etc. Dragon Soul felt pretty under-tuned so it also didn't seem like it needed a nerf. It has pretty much always felt on-par with post-nerf Firelands.
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Wolf on January 20, 2012, 12:39:09 AM only because you started it in 391s. With a legendary in the raid, probably. People had shit gear at the start of firelands, they had pretty much bis when they started dragon soul.
Anyway, I expected the retarded sweeping 20% nerfs, that's why I'm much happier with the stacking nerf. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Ironwood on January 20, 2012, 02:01:25 AM I just like content. I like seeing content. My wife likes killing internet dragons and shiny purples get her wet.
As far as I'm concerned, the Dev comments are in line with my thinking and should have been done AGES ago. The Cataclysm Hardness was a huge fucking mistake. That said, I'm still not sure what would be difficult about ramping up everything by 200% and saying to the 1% : go for it chaps. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Wolf on January 20, 2012, 04:26:47 AM that's not the point. The point is spending enough time balancing an encounter, so it's increased by 171% and that's just the ammount reachable with the bis gear available on week 1, or 2, or 5. So by the time everyone is in full bis available and get there (my guild 3 or 4 or 8 weeks later) it can still be doable and only be 150% harder. And now the stacking buff will lower the difficulty further, so more people can see the fights and have a shot at doing them.
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: caladein on January 20, 2012, 06:43:12 AM I wasn't sure whether it would. As many have already said, I thought LFR would possibly be a replacement for nerfing content. People that want to do easy raid content have easy raid content, etc. Dragon Soul felt pretty under-tuned so it also didn't seem like it needed a nerf. It has pretty much always felt on-par with post-nerf Firelands. LFR addressed an entirely different issue, that up until it came out Cata didn't have an easy mode for fresh content like Wrath had with non-strict 10s. They still had to deal with the usual problem that the last instance of an expansion doesn't get nerfed organically until the new expansion comes out. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Ironwood on January 20, 2012, 07:05:02 AM that's not the point. The point is spending enough time balancing an encounter, so it's increased by 171% and that's just the ammount reachable with the bis gear available on week 1, or 2, or 5. So by the time everyone is in full bis available and get there (my guild 3 or 4 or 8 weeks later) it can still be doable and only be 150% harder. And now the stacking buff will lower the difficulty further, so more people can see the fights and have a shot at doing them. Eh ? Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Rokal on January 20, 2012, 07:16:42 AM only because you started it in 391s. With a legendary in the raid, probably. People had shit gear at the start of firelands, they had pretty much bis when they started dragon soul. Anyway, I expected the retarded sweeping 20% nerfs, that's why I'm much happier with the stacking nerf. We started with most people in half 391 gear, if not less. We only managed to go 6/7H Firelands ~2 weeks before 4.3. We also had attendance problems and took a 3 week break for the holidays. When we came back, we were filling out raids with PuGs or non-raider guild members that were either awful or poorly geared. We are about 2 months from getting our first legendary staff, which we're really only bothering with for the guild-wide pet, because our mage quit the game right after beginning step 3. The raid still felt way too easy up until the last two bosses, of which only madness really gave us any trouble. Unlike T11 or T12, there is only one fight were people really have strict individual accountability (Ultraxion), otherwise players can be carried. It's an easy raid zone. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Wolf on January 20, 2012, 07:55:23 AM that's not the point. The point is spending enough time balancing an encounter, so it's increased by 171% and that's just the ammount reachable with the bis gear available on week 1, or 2, or 5. So by the time everyone is in full bis available and get there (my guild 3 or 4 or 8 weeks later) it can still be doable and only be 150% harder. And now the stacking buff will lower the difficulty further, so more people can see the fights and have a shot at doing them. Eh ? Directly commenting on the point about ramping up everything by 200% and saying go for it. That's not the point, the point is for an encounter to be balanced and doable, while still requiring very tight execution. Rokal - how many 372 weapons did you have at the start of firelands? We were fairly succesful in t11 and we had zero. I'm not saying Dragon Soul is especially hard, but gear plays quite a big role in it being as easy as it is. We're pretty bad as far as srsbzns guilds go and we cleared it on week 1, without having to schedule extra raids (so in less than 7 hours) and especially preparing for fights - and that was mainly because we had a legendary in the raid and everyone was in close to bis gear. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Ironwood on January 20, 2012, 07:58:16 AM Directly commenting on the point about ramping up everything by 200% and saying go for it. That's not the point, the point is for an encounter to be balanced and doable, while still requiring very tight execution. For whom ? You're not going to please all the people all of the time. Which is the central argument and, in fact, THE point. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Wolf on January 20, 2012, 08:56:18 AM Why are we arguing? I'm saying the same thing, the stacking buff is the best way to ensure you're pleasing everyone. You can tune the heroic encounter for the highest end, gear and the stacking buff nerf it until it's doable by most everyone that would attempt it. Everyone is happy.
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Ironwood on January 20, 2012, 09:09:43 AM I don't think we are arguing.
Prove me wrong. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Rokal on January 20, 2012, 09:26:04 AM Why are we arguing? What else are you going to talk about on the WoW sub-forum? :-P Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Rendakor on January 20, 2012, 09:33:53 AM only because you started it in 391s. With a legendary in the raid, probably. People had shit gear at the start of firelands, they had pretty much bis when they started dragon soul. Our guild was also in about half 391s, and we didn't get our legendary until 3 weeks after DS came out. We were 4/7 H FL, and we got DS the first week with only 1 extra day of raiding. Warmaster Blackhorn gave us more trouble than anyone else, although Ultraxion was annoying too. Once we figured out our ideal kill order Madness went down pretty quick. DS really was much easier than FL.Anyway, I expected the retarded sweeping 20% nerfs, that's why I'm much happier with the stacking nerf. Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Simond on January 20, 2012, 10:19:25 AM Why are we arguing? What else are you going to talk about on the WoW sub-forum? :-P (Current Blizzard line is still "We want to do it, but we want to do it right"). Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Fordel on January 20, 2012, 01:08:41 PM So that's when, 2022 then? :why_so_serious:
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Wolf on February 02, 2012, 10:05:09 AM (http://i.imgur.com/VqrBH.jpg)
:drill: Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Ironwood on February 02, 2012, 10:29:06 AM What am I looking at and why should I care ?
Clearly a Mage has managed something that mostly Paladins do. What exactly ? Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Wolf on February 02, 2012, 10:40:19 AM they broke ret yesterday, like really, really broke. It's fixed already, and you're loking at worldoflog's top 10s on all DS fights, lfr difficulty.
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Ironwood on February 02, 2012, 10:48:22 AM :grin:
Title: Re: Cataclysm Raiding Post by: Shrike on February 03, 2012, 03:14:44 AM That's the best numbers they could come up with? Ahh, now I see: LFR. :roll:
After we saw the "issue" our protection pally switched to ret and pulled down 850K on Yor'sahj. I don't think we had a log running, though. Amusing, but meaningless. More importantly (from my point of view) was the breaking of proc effects on white damage. While our pally was enjoying himself, I lost about 15kdps right off the top. Annoying as hell (although par for the course for shamans). At least I finally got my 397 gloves. |