Ulduar

[Sjofn]

BOO HOO PRIESTS



(That is mostly sarcastic, it is a bummer when stuff like that fights.)

[bhodi]

But those are the fights I can totally cheat as Disc and whore out rapture for half a dozen 60ish mana PW:Shields.

The true whoring begins when you abuse the rapture bug on oblivion, flame jets, scream, tantrum, etc.

God I love disc. With my SP now over 3k, my shields have shifted into ludicrous size. 7k shield for an instant cast plus a 2-3.5k heal is completely broken. Oh, we also beat yogg 25 tonight. Flawless P1 by keeping everyone away from clouds and shuttling mobs in, p2 by killing tentacles within 20 seconds, and p3 by having good tanks. 14 shards!

[Musashi]

grats!

[K9]

With my SP now over 3k,

Really? Wow. I thought I was doing well with ~2350ish raidbuffed and flasked as Disc. Don't know how I'd make up an extra 600ish SP, even with hardmode gear.

Grats on the shards.

[bhodi]

Armory. Haven't done a single hardmode; Only have 2216 without buffs. I'm counting raid buffed and flasked, plus my T8 bonus, plus inner fire, etc.

I'm still missing some key items, like a good weapon, shoulders wrists need updating as well. I desperately need illustration of the dragon soul, and I pug OS every week but so far I haven't won it.

At this point, it's looking like I won't be able to complete the mace until the new content is out. That is immensely frustrating.

You might get a laugh, our first 25 yogg kill dropped this thing and was almost instantly DE'd. Thanks, RNG! Actually, fuck you blizzard for putting a head on the last boss of the end dungeon that is wildly inferior to every single person's T8 piece that they can buy with tokens AND that has a blue gem slot. The best thing that people can say about it is "Well, at least it has a nice model".

[kildorn]

But those are the fights I can totally cheat as Disc and whore out rapture for half a dozen 60ish mana PW:Shields.

The true whoring begins when you abuse the rapture bug on oblivion, flame jets, scream, tantrum, etc.

God I love disc. With my SP now over 3k, my shields have shifted into ludicrous size. 7k shield for an instant cast plus a 2-3.5k heal is completely broken. Oh, we also beat yogg 25 tonight. Flawless P1 by keeping everyone away from clouds and shuttling mobs in, p2 by killing tentacles within 20 seconds, and p3 by having good tanks. 14 shards!

Any of the predictable "will barely eat shield" hits do that. I was laughing at Hodir attempts, where I could time it and get 8 shields back. Oh how I love rapture bugs.

[Ingmar]

You might get a laugh, our first 25 yogg kill dropped this thing and was almost instantly DE'd. Thanks, RNG! Actually, fuck you blizzard for putting a head on the last boss of the end dungeon that is wildly inferior to every single person's T8 piece that they can buy with tokens AND that has a blue gem slot. The best thing that people can say about it is "Well, at least it has a nice model".

Its nice until they nerf prismatic JC gems I guess.

[Phunked]

Just about every fight in Ulduar is a "HA HA, FUCK YOU" to pally healers since Ulduar thinks the two tastes of "massive tank damage" and "massive raid damage" taste great together. The only fights where it's semi-nice to have a holy pally are in the first half of the instance (XT, Kolo, Iron Council, Razorscale in 25-man but not in 10 since anyone can heal that while asleep). Gigantic tank heals and blessings don't add up to a compelling reason to not just take a Disc Priest instead.

Why do you say that?  We had absolutely no problem getting glory with our holy pally healer; for the 2 healer fights either the resto druid would go moonkin or the disc priest went shadow, but the holy pally always stayed to heal. A good one can keep the tank up solo through near anything, which is very handy on a lot of hardmodes since it leaves the other two healers to cover the raid. You def. want this for freya hard, hodir and very definitely for algalon - high, predictable tank damage phases.

Massive tank damage fights are wonderful for holy pallies (I love doing Iron Council with them since their gigantic heals are perfect for Steelbreaker), but just because you can do it doesn't make it fun or easy (easy meaning not teeth-grindingly frustrating). Just about everything else in Ulduar I'd rather have druid HoTs or Priest prayer of healing/shields.

Also Pally healing is disgustingly boring. To quote my friend who plays our sole holy pally: "Gee, do I want the class that has 5000 tools for healing, or the class where I get to play whack-a-mole with the big hammer or little hammer?"

Problem is, pallies are SO GOOD at single target spam healing, that several hard modes on 10man and almost all 25man ones /require/ pally healers.

Yes they're very niche and have zero healing tools, but massive tank damage seems to be the only way to "test" healer competence these days. Algalon 10 is much, much harder with a non-pally healer, to the extent that I have never completed it using anything else. That isn't to say that it can't be done (I'm sure it has been) but it was pretty obviously tuned for this class in mind. This is pretty bad design, since as you correctly state pally healers are not the best at other fights in the instance. But there's stuff like firefighter, freya +3 (25man), IC hard and thorim hard (25man) which scream "spam that Holy Light". The patch changes will make this no longer possible, but I'm not sure how effective pallies will be at expanding from their niche. The class could well become the worst healer period, instead of just the least versatile one.

[K9]

Armory. Haven't done a single hardmode; Only have 2216 without buffs. I'm counting raid buffed and flasked, plus my T8 bonus, plus inner fire, etc.

I'm still missing some key items, like a good weapon, shoulders wrists need updating as well. I desperately need illustration of the dragon soul, and I pug OS every week but so far I haven't won it.

At this point, it's looking like I won't be able to complete the mace until the new content is out. That is immensely frustrating.

Ah right, that seems closer to what I would expect, I'm at 1984 SP now in mostly 219 gear (although no tier yet; our Mages Druids and DKs are pimped though...) as someone who doesn't really do 25-man uld. Loving Disc and struggling to find a reason to use Holy. I keep a holy spec of sorts for casual NAxx 25 runs and blowing up the meters on the occasional Naxx-25 I do. Yet for all the insane numbers Holy puts up I feel far less useful than as disc. The ONLY things I miss from holy are Body and Soul and Guardian Spirit, the rest is forgettable.

I guess my other gripe with Holy is that making a good Holy spec is pretty difficult and largely unintuitive. Any sensible holy priest will ignore a bunch of the "core" talents that are focused on GHeal because GHeal is useless at 80. However this leaves various parts of the talent tree really lopsided.

You might get a laugh, our first 25 yogg kill dropped this thing and was almost instantly DE'd. Thanks, RNG! Actually, fuck you blizzard for putting a head on the last boss of the end dungeon that is wildly inferior to every single person's T8 piece that they can buy with tokens AND that has a blue gem slot. The best thing that people can say about it is "Well, at least it has a nice model".

Sucks. I'm really struggling to keep my crit down and haste up with Ulduar gear; there's a real shortage of haste cloth and sp gear in all of Ulduar I've seen so far (up to Mimiron). I lost a load more last night when I moved from the Handbook of Obscure Remedies to the Igniter Rod (which is one of the best-looking items in the game ever, so that's a small compensation). My main hope is that, since most T8 has haste I'll be able to shed crit once I get a few pieces of that.

[kildorn]

I feel far more useful in general as disc, but certain fights I feel better as holy (my holy spec right now is entirely for hodir's raid damage)

I tried doing this week's uld as holy until the end (switched back on crazy cat lady), but there were too many times I felt out of control of the incoming damage. Disc gives me a lot more "instantly save YOU, now fully heal YOU, now save YOU" toys.

[Paelos]

I find myself waiting for the next round of content because Ulduar just seems long and pointless. I'm going to get an entire set of gear in the next expansion by doing what I like (running 5 mans), and I don't have to kill 13 bosses in one place. I'm getting really tired of any instance that has more than 6 bosses in it. This expansion has put way too many eggs in one basket with the raiding content.

I'm looking forward to the 5 boss raid in the tournament, and the obvious difference in difficulty. I just really hate linear instances where you kill the same shit over and over, but you kill the last boss a few times before everyone gets completely bored.

[kildorn]

K9: shedding crit? Why?

[K9]

My crit to haste ratio is something like 2:1, which is pretty bad even for holy. For holy I'd aim for 1:1 as crit and haste have relatively even weights. For Disc however, playing a priest who tries to maximise PW:S coverage, crit is a weaker stat as PW:S doesn't really benefit from it. I need more haste to increase my throughput, since 7.29% haste is pretty low, and I never have a shaman in my raid unless I'm playing mine. So I'm looking to shed crit in favour of haste as I move from T7 to T8, however, the intervening pieces are all heavily crit-biased, which isn't helping.

Of the ilvl 219 gear that is useable by a healer priest (cloth, no +hit) there are 7 haste items, and 17 crit items in Ulduar. It's not the most balanced itemisation. Why there are 2 almost identical +crit cloth belts off adjacent bosses and no +haste belt, or no wands or offhands with +haste is a frustration.

[K9]

I find myself waiting for the next round of content because Ulduar just seems long and pointless. I'm going to get an entire set of gear in the next expansion by doing what I like (running 5 mans), and I don't have to kill 13 bosses in one place. I'm getting really tired of any instance that has more than 6 bosses in it. This expansion has put way too many eggs in one basket with the raiding content.

I'm looking forward to the 5 boss raid in the tournament, and the obvious difference in difficulty. I just really hate linear instances where you kill the same shit over and over, but you kill the last boss a few times before everyone gets completely bored.

I'm actually enjoying Ulduar more than any raid instance since Kara myself. The bosses have a very natural progression, and the fact that so many are optional, and the general lack of trash makes raiding more about fun and less about the hassle for me. My guild is very definitely casual, but my Ulduar group cleared 8 bosses (FL -> Thorim) last night for the first time. It seems the best instance in terms of reward vs progression. We're doing 1 new boss a week, and will be clearing the whole place in 2 nights by the end I'm sure. Unlike Naxx where there are long stretches of "fuck me, not more of this" trash, Ulduar seems paced very well.

To each their own though.

[Ingmar]

My crit to haste ratio is something like 2:1, which is pretty bad even for holy. For holy I'd aim for 1:1 as crit and haste have relatively even weights. For Disc however, playing a priest who tries to maximise PW:S coverage, crit is a weaker stat as PW:S doesn't really benefit from it. I need more haste to increase my throughput, since 7.29% haste is pretty low, and I never have a shaman in my raid unless I'm playing mine. So I'm looking to shed crit in favour of haste as I move from T7 to T8, however, the intervening pieces are all heavily crit-biased, which isn't helping.

Of the ilvl 219 gear that is useable by a healer priest (cloth, no +hit) there are 7 haste items, and 17 crit items in Ulduar. It's not the most balanced itemisation. Why there are 2 almost identical +crit cloth belts off adjacent bosses and no +haste belt, or no wands or offhands with +haste is a frustration.

At least you don't have tanking gloves with armor pen! 

[Phunked]

My crit to haste ratio is something like 2:1, which is pretty bad even for holy. For holy I'd aim for 1:1 as crit and haste have relatively even weights. For Disc however, playing a priest who tries to maximise PW:S coverage, crit is a weaker stat as PW:S doesn't really benefit from it. I need more haste to increase my throughput, since 7.29% haste is pretty low, and I never have a shaman in my raid unless I'm playing mine. So I'm looking to shed crit in favour of haste as I move from T7 to T8, however, the intervening pieces are all heavily crit-biased, which isn't helping.

Of the ilvl 219 gear that is useable by a healer priest (cloth, no +hit) there are 7 haste items, and 17 crit items in Ulduar. It's not the most balanced itemisation. Why there are 2 almost identical +crit cloth belts off adjacent bosses and no +haste belt, or no wands or offhands with +haste is a frustration.

Why do you stack so much haste as holy? For most fights in our alt runs, whenever I'm holy about 90% of my healing is renew, CoH, Mending and instant flash heals. Serendipity interacts well with haste, but 99% of the time, the PoH is precast anyways to account for raid damage from predictable sources. I tend to use the same gear for holy and disc, and once I hit the haste cap on disc, I just focus on selecting crit heavy pieces. If I had access to doubles of the same item, I might get a crit gemmed set for disc and an int gemmed set for holy, but that'll be a while coming :S

[Sjofn]

At least you don't have tanking gloves with armor pen! 

Seriously, those are so weird. So are the lol no defense rating tanking pants.

[Phunked]

At least you don't have tanking gloves with armor pen!  

Seriously, those are so weird. So are the lol no defense rating tanking pants.

Those are for tanks who are overcapped on defense (cough DKs) and want to shift to a better stat distribution. Same with this ring from 10man heartbreaker.  The gloves though, I don't know what to tell you. I guess it's more elegant than giving the boss a 15% chance to drop an abyss crystal.

[Vash]

My crit to haste ratio is something like 2:1, which is pretty bad even for holy. For holy I'd aim for 1:1 as crit and haste have relatively even weights. For Disc however, playing a priest who tries to maximise PW:S coverage, crit is a weaker stat as PW:S doesn't really benefit from it. I need more haste to increase my throughput, since 7.29% haste is pretty low, and I never have a shaman in my raid unless I'm playing mine. So I'm looking to shed crit in favour of haste as I move from T7 to T8, however, the intervening pieces are all heavily crit-biased, which isn't helping.

Of the ilvl 219 gear that is useable by a healer priest (cloth, no +hit) there are 7 haste items, and 17 crit items in Ulduar. It's not the most balanced itemisation. Why there are 2 almost identical +crit cloth belts off adjacent bosses and no +haste belt, or no wands or offhands with +haste is a frustration.

Assuming your spec'd into Divine Aegis (no idea why a disc priest wouldn't be), stacking crit is the way to go for maximizing it's potential benefit.  I mean for PW:S all you care about is spell power, but assuming you spend your Penance mostly on the tanks when it's off cd divine aegis is great.

Also, the PW:S glyph heal can crit so crit will benefit you there.  Haste will only really help you with lowering the gcd and you need to stack pretty significant amounts for it to be more than negligible.  Plus thanks to the haste you get from casting PW:S, going for haste doesn't even seem all that necessary as disc.

Even as holy now I find myself favoring crit and enjoying it's benefits (increased mana regen, mana free instant cast flashes, better uptime on inspiration, getting even more out of Circle of healing).

The only time I even find myself wanting a bit more haste is if I feel like a lot of my heals are getting sniped, but typically that is just a timing issue and doesn't happen very often with so many tools at your disposal (many instant cast).  Not to mention, sniping usually only happens to a significant degree when there's much more healing available than necessary.

[K9]

It's impossible to keep PW:S up on everyone in even a 10-man raid without any haste. Since the largest part of my time is spent casting PW:S I need haste to fit penance and PrOM in between PW:S casts. There are no fights in Ulduar where having PW:S on everyone is not beneficial. Also, 1.8s PoH with borrowed time is pretty sick if you need some AoE healing. I'm not saying crit is totally useless, but since I spend most of my time casting PW:S, having haste helps burst heal when needed.

Divine Aegis is such a tiny portion of my effective healing that it's not really worth stacking crit for. I guess if I was doing pure tank healing I would get more mileage, but for raid-healing as disc crit is fairly weak.

For Holy I aim for 1:1 crit:haste. Overstacking either is sub-optimal in my view. Since holy casts so many heals, it's pretty easy to maintain a very high uptime on Holy Conc and SoL even without high crit. You want to keep haste up to improve throughput, mainly though stacking serendipity faster.

That said, Holy is such a wierd mixed bag I could happily concede that there are a bunch of ways to play it well. As an aggressive raid healer I don't find much need for excess crit. For my part I'll stick to disc for most of the time since it's more fun overall for me.

[kildorn]

I honestly only spam shield people to prevent expected raid damage. If I can't exploit rapture with a known big hit across the raid, it's not worth it to overspam for me. But I heal funny, and love crit due to DA.

[Ingmar]

At least you don't have tanking gloves with armor pen!  

Seriously, those are so weird. So are the lol no defense rating tanking pants.

Those are for tanks who are overcapped on defense (cough DKs) and want to shift to a better stat distribution. Same with this ring from 10man heartbreaker.  The gloves though, I don't know what to tell you. I guess it's more elegant than giving the boss a 15% chance to drop an abyss crystal.

Yeah the pants are actually useful - I'm using them myself. Still kind of odd, but I still haven't found anything worth replacing my Thaddius trinket with yet, so I have plenty of defense to spare.

[Fabricated]

My guild generally likes Ulduar but what little trash there is, is very fucking annoying after Auriya. We're just coming up against our available raid times a lot. We only have 2 nights tops we can work on Ulduar with our capable players and even one-shotting everything on farm (everything up to Mimiron) we still run out of time a lot on Vezax/Yogg.

The lockout extension is great but that comes with new content that's a boss rush with gear that's a full Tier and a half better than Uld10 gear, and gives badges that can buy gear over 2 tiers better. My guild has been poking at hardmodes but the general consensus is that no one really thinks the hardmodes are fun, or that they're worth doing just to see Algalon.

[K9]

The Flame Leviathan intermediate hard modes are decent effort-reward.

[Soulflame]

My guild has cleared 10 man normal, and is working on hard.  We've done pretty much everything up to the keepers, but can't manage to do a single keeper hardmode as of yet.  That should hopefully change this weekend.  We would have done Thorim last week, but we'd lose a couple DPS to the lightning every time we pulled him.     Hodir, not enough DPS.  Haven't tried Freya or Mimiron hard yet, and I'm completely baffled by the idea of doing Vezax hard.

25 man, we can oneshot everything up to Vezax (and oddly, Ignis is still a two or three tries before downing boss as well) but we spent three hours last night working on phase 1 (got it down) and phase 2 (... not so much) of Yogg.  Vezax only took a couple of tries this week, so we're probably three weeks or less from consistently oneshotting him as well.  I'm not certain we'll try any hardmodes in 25 man, other than FL of course.  We do two towers for the pattern, which speeds the run up, as you don't have to run off to demolish those two towers.  We keep kicking around the idea of doing 3 towers, but haven't bothered, mostly to give us more time on Yogg.

[Vash]

The Flame Leviathan intermediate hard modes are decent effort-reward.

Yeah, but assuming your already strapped for time to finish the place, blowing through the first half as fast as possible often seems like a more sensible option.

My 10 man group only does two nights a week, 3 hours max each night and we've been stuck on Mimiron for 3 or so weeks now mostly due to time limitations.

This week we finally got all the other Keepers on lockdown and 1 shot all of them (in the same night/week) giving us a full hour+ to practice Mimiron.  Typically we'd only have 30 min or so left on the second night to try him which really isn't enough.

Even if we get Mimiron down and can 1 shot everything consistently I'm not sure I see us progressing very quickly on General V or Yoggy simply because we'll have less than an hour even on a good week.

I find myself in agreement with Paelos that 10+ bosses in a single raid is getting pretty ridiculous, and although the lockout extension is nice, I'd rather they give more raids with slightly fewer bosses each so there's horizontal choices instead of just extending the trudge through one really long raid out over two weeks.

[Sjofn]

We're trapped on Hodir at the moment. I think I've finally cursed at our failboaters enough that they're finally NOT getting flash freezed (seriously, our first night on it, we'd have some asshole get flash freezed EVERY TIME). Unfortunately we haven't really gotten to take all our A-team DPSers in there, so even when we're not sucking, our DPS just isn't there yet.

On the other hand, I tank it like a pro.  

EDIT: Oh right, I was going to comment on the size of Ulduar. I MOSTLY like how many bosses there are in there, but only because there's hardly any trash in there, but I do see how even once my guild can brute force its way through it, I doubt we'd be able to clear it in our usual two nights, which is unfortunate. On the other hand, I really, really hope they continue on the "less trash, but it requires you to pay attention" model, because it's just so much better that way. We're still dealing with a pacing mechanic, but it's actually interesting rather than "zzzzzzzzzzz AE AE AE AE, next pack" like Naxx or Kara.

[Fordel]

We'll Abandon Uludar once the big Argent Arena is released!

[Paelos]

We'll Abandon Uludar once the big Argent Arena is released!

Lots of people will. I don't think Blizzard is happy with Ulduar given how quickly they are going to cannibalize the content. In all seriousness, you won't have to even bother with Naxx or Ulduar as a new 80 to be gtg for the tournament. We're basically getting a mini-reset-button 10 months after expansion release. I like the idea of giving a leg up to other toons, and doing it through badges and heroic rewards. However, Blizzard is pretty much admitting that they fucked up the badge system, are giving it a restart, but they aren't fixing the underlying problem. There should still only be ONE SET OF BADGES. The two/three/four badge is vastly inferior to the inflationary system of old. It might take forever, but you could get cool rewards by running heroics. That's very key in keeping the gear gap close for people that take breaks and want to raid, or those that really hated a particular tier of content.

[Sheepherder]

They should also be significantly stepping up the drop rates on all of the old content, so that they actually are a good way to get alts geared fast without having to convince your guild that it would be in their best interest to run you several weeks.  Along the same line, they should have drops that attract raiders to the old content without handing out cutting-edge gear, like (old) recipes at high drop rates, trade skill ingredients, BoA gear (maybe BoA gear tokens?), weekly gold quests (one per wing completion) etc.

Also, nerf the fuck out of the trash.  Seriously, that shit needs to get cut.

[Rasix]

However, Blizzard is pretty much admitting that they fucked up the badge system, are giving it a restart, but they aren't fixing the underlying problem. There should still only be ONE SET OF BADGES. The two/three/four badge is vastly inferior to the inflationary system of old. It might take forever, but you could get cool rewards by running heroics. That's very key in keeping the gear gap close for people that take breaks and want to raid, or those that really hated a particular tier of content.

I've been saying this forever.  Really helped keep Karazhan and heroics viable until the expansion in TBC.  When Sunwell badges came out, everyone was super pumped, even though some of the crap was 6+ Kara runs worth of badges.

[Fordel]

They were once again trying to cater to that wonderful minority of people whose 'achievements' were diminished because all the scrubs could just farm badges for 'equivalent' loot.


Seems to be a running theme, Blizzard screws something up in an effort to make that small part of their base happy.

[Merusk]

We'll Abandon Uludar once the big Argent Arena is released!

Lots of people will. I don't think Blizzard is happy with Ulduar given how quickly they are going to cannibalize the content.

I'd agree.  They keep a close metric on who's killed what and Ulduar seems to be behind compared to the Classic and BC progression curves.  One of the guys in my guild was discussing it in vent a few days ago, I'll have to find the stats link he was using.  Only something like 7% of all raiding guilds have gotten to the point of attempting Yogg.  That's nutty considering the combination of 10 and 25s out there.   

The instance also seems to be killing a lot more guilds than the previous expansions did, even accounting for the usual summer lull in playing. 

[kildorn]

I'm entirely running on anecdotal history here, but uld seems to be following the same crap we saw in BWL. Essentially it's a highly technical raid right after a highly accessible raid. Uld doesn't want you to DPS harder, it wants you to DPS roughly the same as you were, but while paying attention to and understanding a lot of moving parts during said DPSing.

The easy fights in Uld are the ones where the phases are clearly marked, and are essentially the quick gear check fights (XT, Kologarn), the things people seem to get stuck on (at least from personal experiences) are the many moving parts fights. Ignis and Hodir both just have a lot of crap going on you need to pay attention to. Hodir moreso then Ignis, Ignis just likes to pretend he's got a lot going on that's important to everyone.

That and the addition of a few race fights is my main beef. Hodir has no reason to have a short enough enrage to burn you on normal 10. Everyone else has stupidly long enrages (besides old XT), they just tagged a short one onto what should have been a technical fight, not a race.

Anywho, long and short of it: we've seen guilds shatter on sudden introduction of highly technical content before. You waste Naxx, think you're the best there ever was, and proceed to wipe to XT repeatedly. If your guild is based on the mental idea that "we rock, woooooo!", repeated wipes on progression content will murder your guild attendance rates.

[Sjofn]

Yeah, the enrage on Hodir seems shorter than it needs to be, given all the other crap flying around.

Although at the same time, if he didn't have one at all, we'd probably still be fighting him with four people.