Ulduar

[Phred]

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

It also doesn't land just anywhere.

[kildorn]

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

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

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

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

[bhodi]

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

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

[Soulflame]

Just wait til you see Hodir.   

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

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

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

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

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

[Hindenburg]

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

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

[bhodi]

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

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

[K9]

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

[Lakov_Sanite]

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

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

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

[Mazakiel]

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

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

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

[El Gallo]

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

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

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

[Lakov_Sanite]

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

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

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

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

Except hunters, they can diaf.

[Rasix]

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

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

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

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

[K9]

Kologarn or Ignis first?

[Rasix]

Kologarn or Ignis first?

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

[Ingmar]

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

[K9]

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

[kildorn]

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

Was that a 10 or 25 man run?

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

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

[Nonentity]

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

[Lakov_Sanite]

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

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

[Nonentity]

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

[Lakov_Sanite]

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

[Nonentity]

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

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

[kildorn]

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

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

Raid forums, as expected, are hilarious.

[ironic]

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

[kildorn]

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

[K9]

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

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

Raid forums, as expected, are hilarious.

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

[Vash]

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

[Hindenburg]

*coughonycloakscough*

Lern2Throne, nub.

[Merusk]

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

[kildorn]

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

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

[bhodi]

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

[Vash]

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

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

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

[Ingmar]

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

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

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

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

[Fordel]

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

[proudft]

I expect there are other more normal ones that find them hard to deal with as well. Nerfs don't exactly surprise me.

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