Ulduar

[Ingmar]

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

[Paelos]

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

[Phunked]

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

They've never recycled VC. So sad too.

[K9]

Deadmines was merely a setback

[Vash]

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

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

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

[K9]

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

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

[Ingmar]

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

[Vash]

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

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

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

[Ingmar]

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

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

[Vash]

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

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

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

[kildorn]

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

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

[Ingmar]

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

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

[K9]

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

[Ingmar]

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

[K9]

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

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

[Phunked]

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

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

[SurfD]

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

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

This.

Storm power > Toasty Fires > Moonbeams.

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