Dungeon Blather

[Ingmar]

I never found Nightbane to be very complicated - there are a LOT of 2 phase bosses of similar complexity in WoW. XT is basically the same as Nightbane, for example; phase 1 kill boss phase 2 kill adds repeat. Netherspite I am with you, though I don't think it is especially more complicated than, say, the construct wing bosses other than Patch.

[Rasix]

I thought ZA was a better raid than Kara.

Never did ZA.  There was kind of an elitist attitude about ZA on my server.  Both of my characters were easily geared for it, but it was serious business.

[Ingmar]

The only problem with ZA was it was frankly a little too hard to progress straight out of Kara into it. We had to farm a lot of badges to get the higher Sunwell-ish badge gear and stuff before we started seeing any success in there. And then they nerfed it just as we were really starting to do better so it turned easy.

[K9]

The only problem with ZA was it was frankly a little too hard to progress straight out of Kara into it. We had to farm a lot of badges to get the higher Sunwell-ish badge gear and stuff before we started seeing any success in there. And then they nerfed it just as we were really starting to do better so it turned easy.

This was the story for my guild too. Walking in to ZA you had Nalorakk as a significant Tank/Healer check for guilds in Kara/Crafted/Heroic gear. Without badge gear it would have been impossible for the majority of 10-man guilds to make any dent in ZA.

The only slight downside to ZA was that it was pretty short. I realise that was part of the point, but it didn't feel as epic as the bigger raid zones. On the plus side, the ZA quests were nicely done, and offered nice rewards. I don't know why Blizz gave up on raid quests and reps, as I feel that they offer a nice small sense of parallel progression; the Violet Eye being the example of a perfectly done raid rep.

[Soulflame]

Netherspite is easy.
- Have tanks trade off red/green beam
- Have two ranged trade off blue beam
- One healer on blue beam person
- One healer on raid
- One hybrid helping to heal raid as necessary
- Don't stand in anti-shiny
- Run to windows or run out of nether breath, whichever strat you were using


Nightbane isn't terribly complicated
- Don't stand in shiny
- Melee must stand on the side of the dragon
- Tank has to be good at picking up dragon on landing (alternatively, don't have your mage pop a manastone on landing)
- Don't stand in shiny
- Have a warrior tank it.  Or bring a shadow priest, and beat him until he l2fearward.
- Gather up adds and kill them with great vigor.

Nalorakk was very much doable with Kara gear.  I was in a 10 man group that managed to get 12+ bears in badge/kara gear.  Only the prot paladin had a piece of T6, and that was the trash mace drop from Hyjal.

By comparison - Hodir
- MTs must swap on Frozen Blows beginning and end (you can get away with a druid or dk tank in frost resist gear for the entire fight in 10 man)
- Snowflakes are bad, run
- Perform two actions, move to remove debuff
- Move further to remove stacked debuffs
- Watch for the freezing thingy, move by shiny on floor, move on top of snow
- Stand in the shiny that the NPCs cast
- Pray you live through Frozen Blows
- Free up anyone who gets frozen

[Fordel]

badge gear and kara gear were not the same thing.

[Soulflame]

My point was more that we did Nalorakk in Kara gear initially, and moved up to doing 45 minute runs of the first four bosses when we were ZA/kara/badge geared up.

[K9]

I don't think anyone is trying to compare Netherspite to Hodir. It would be best compared to something like Hex Lord, if you really wanted to make wierd comparisons.

[Soulflame]

I was trying to compare complexities of the fights, not outright compare them as examples of a "type" of fight.

Hodir is a very technical fight, your success is based on successful execution on the part of everyone in your raid.  And not just "don't stand in shiny" type of execution, but "don't stand in this or you'll get beaned in the head for 12k damage, do stand in that to increase your dps and we need that, do stand on top of that but only after it falls down, pop healthstones/potions/mitigation during frozen blows to help out healers.  Oh, and don't forget to move every 5s or you'll die horribly.  Plus, bring a priest to dispel magic, or bring a very sad paladin to do it one at a time."

Malacrass should be compared to Moroes, if anything.

[Chimpy]

The only thing Malacrass should ever be compared to is a stab in the yans with a rusty knife.

[WindupAtheist]

Newbie update: Ripping through Scholomance seems to be THE way to powerlevel someone from 45 to Outland. The other instances in that range tend to be too sprawling and too patrolled for really efficient farming, but in Scholo I can grab a whole room, AOE it down, and start gathering up the next while she loots. Between greens, runecloth, blue recipies, and the BOE pieces of the old tier zero sets there's healthy AH money to be made too. She's level 52 now and has more money than I do.

 

[Paelos]

Scholo is a farmer's paradise to be sure. Full clears netted me 150g a shot as a warrior.

[Malakili]

Its really about a balance of lore/setting and playability.  The old dungeons were heavy on the former, and the expense of the latter.  In fact, Lich King is the first time I've felt like I have a chance at doing max level content with non-guild mates and still have a shot at having a good time.  I still have the occasional just plain terrible group, but I'd say I have a least a 75% success rate.  Compare that to vanilla WoW, or even BC, where the thought of doing pick ups in those dungeons just made me log off and do something else.  The new dungeons ARE a little ho hum compared to the old ones in terms of feeling, but I've also yet to be pushed to the same sort of rage that I would in some of the older dungeons. 

The new ones scream: Oh hai, I am a dungeon, please come complete me for fun and profit.  the old ones scream: Haha, you are gonna spend 3 hours here and your group isn't even going to kill the last boss.  For christ's sake, BRD wasn't so much an instanced DUNGEON as it was a instanced NPC CITY!  Thats awesome in its own right, but it doesn't make for a very good experience.

The other thing to take into consideration is the drastic changes in game mechanics.  Before classes were super pigeon holed.  Paladins were Holy, druids were resto, your tank was a warrior, almost 100% of the time.  Paladin tanks ran into big time mana problems, and druid itemization was just so bad that feral was not really viable except in some specific circumstances and/or by people who spent an enormous amount of time acquiring JUST the right set of gear.  Now warriors, paladins, deathknights and druids can all easily tank any instance in the game.  There isn't a huge difference between them in effectiveness given = player skill level.  Now all these classes have AoE tanking abilities as well.  Before you were going to want to bring some CC to ANY instance, and you also wanted to bring a warrior you knew well and weren't worried about.   

It isn't just that people are better at the game now, its that they've made it a hell of a lot easier.  Hell, I pugged Heroic Halls of Lightning today for the heroic daily and we went start to finish in 25 minutes.  Given the old world instances at level 60, I don't think there was an instance in the game I would have expected to pug in 4 times that.

Its such a radically different game now than it was then.

[Musashi]

wut?

All I'm saying is that if you take every trash mob out of Kharazan, then lots of problems with TBC are insta-solved. 

-Splitting up your 25-man raid with 5 guys left to pug?  No biggie, it's a loot pinata now.
-Grueling 4 hour clears on pre-nerfed kharazan drilling explosion size holes in your guild?  Pfft.  There's no trash now.  Wheeee.
-Key requirements shooting your guild in the dick?  Meh, it's easy now, just go do it noob.

Now expand our little philosophy to SSC, and pretty much all the problems with TBC are solved.  In fact, I think it would have been pretty awesome.

I understand that living in a WoW with no trash is a pipe dream, but the whole 'pacing' dungeon-crawl bullshit is just insane.  I think what I've seen of LK strikes a pretty good balance, but it is still trash heavy imo. They seem to be slowly ramping up the content difficulty, and that's fine.  YMMV.

[kildorn]

Average trash pulls between bosses right now is what, 4-5?

The longest trash pack I can think of off the top of my head raid wise would be the crap before Patch. And that's mostly pacing due to the lack of crap between Grob and Gluth.

[K9]

Entrance -> Raz or Entry -> Patch are probably the longest, although it's debatable which is the most unenjoyable.

[Merusk]

Raz sucks the most.  Whirlwinds of melee death + immune-to-everything DKs where you have to keep reminding people to dispel because they keep putting it up ("I did and it doesn't work!" "Use the AE one you knob, and spam it.") are much bigger headaches than a few Aboms that stun and some mildly annoying AOE packs.

[Sjofn]

The military wing in general could use less trash, really. Even after Raz there's an awful lot of trash between bosses in that wing.

[Ingmar]

It just needs another boss!

[Nonentity]

I dunno - I remember running BRD in beta on my night elf prot warrior. I witnessed the first ever drop of the epic hammer that the king in there drops, and lost the roll on it to a holy paladin (hah).

They were pretty epic in beta. One of my favorite instances in classic era was Sunken Temple. Something about the whole rock puzzle, and the dragons all over the place - it was neat!

But yeah, BRD was basically a city. I remember having to go in there all the time to use that damn anvil and forge for Dark Iron gear. That's one aspect I don't really miss, but for the purposes of flavor, was actually pretty neat. Same with the alchemy tables in Scholo.

I don't mind the Ulduar trash, really. My 10 man casual group I run on the weekends wipes more on the trash than they do on the bosses, though, heh.

[Musashi]

Ironfoe?  Man I dreamed many dreams of that thing.

[K9]

I don't mind the Ulduar trash, really. My 10 man casual group I run on the weekends wipes more on the trash than they do on the bosses, though, heh.

Most Ulduar trash pulls are harder than almost any fight in Naxx.

[WindupAtheist]

Welp, those Outland monster-tunnels may not have atmosphere, but they're some awesome grinding. I can whip through Ramparts in just about 15 minutes and the trash mobs are each worth 500+ experience to an unrested level 59, even after the "Hey you're grouped with someone too high!" penalty. Going from the end of 58 to the beginning of 60 took less than an hour.

I'm having more fun than I expected powering through all this stuff. Especially since it's almost all instances neither of us have done before, so inevitably something happens that we're not expecting and I end up frantically trying to pull half the instance off her while she frantically tries to stay alive. The arena in UBRS where you fight all those waves of stuff and then Rend was... interesting... the first time. I told her to just stay up on the edge while I dealt with it, not knowing that an NPC would come along and boot her into the middle of the fray.

Killing stuff by the dozens feels sort of Diabloish, while having to keep a newbie alive through patrols or whatever in unfamiliar territory is surprisingly entertaining. Makes me wish the game was a bit more fast-paced in general.

[Fabricated]

The Rend fight was about the only good thing about UBRS. That and the first pull into the room before it, where the charging melee mobs would often body check shitty tanks clean over the ledge into the whelp eggs.

[Malakili]

Killing stuff by the dozens feels sort of Diabloish, while having to keep a newbie alive through patrols or whatever in unfamiliar territory is surprisingly entertaining. Makes me wish the game was a bit more fast-paced in general.

If you haven't powered someone through a lot of the stuff before, it definitely is fun, and it can even be profitable.   I will say though, I don't think its something that could really carry the game by itself.  The fun wears off after you've run this stuff so many times.

[Hindenburg]

The fun wears off after you've run this stuff so many times.

That can be applied to nearly everything, tbqh.

[Lantyssa]

Welp, those Outland monster-tunnels may not have atmosphere, but they're some awesome grinding. I can whip through Ramparts in just about 15 minutes and the trash mobs are each worth 500+ experience to an unrested level 59, even after the "Hey you're grouped with someone too high!" penalty. Going from the end of 58 to the beginning of 60 took less than an hour.

Yeah.  I gained about a level by having Never power me through ZF so I could get the quests completed, which got me another half a level.

[Gunzwei]

Maradon and Sunken Temple are stilll probably my two favorite dungeon crawls in WoW when done at the appropiate level.

For powerleveling a great scheme I've found is WC-SM-ZF/ST-Scholo and if you have access to recruit a friend you can level to 60 in a day from level 1, or in a few days at a more casual pace. Afterwards just get a bunch of low 60+ gear with lots of gem slots and fill them up with cheapo Northrend gems to have an outland killing machine.

[Simond]

Maradon and Sunken Temple are stilll probably my two favorite dungeon crawls in WoW when done at the appropiate level.

You are a terrible person and probably broken in some fundamental way.

[Sjofn]

Maradon and Sunken Temple are stilll probably my two favorite dungeon crawls in WoW when done at the appropiate level.

You are a terrible person and probably broken in some fundamental way.

I'm glad someone said it. 

[Soulflame]

I wandered through Maradon for some seasonal achievement, and I have to say, that place is miserable.  Full of trash, meandering, wandering, non-linear, and multi-dimensional.  I can't even imagine how little fun that place would be if done by a level appropriate group.

ST seems to be more of the same.

[Selby]

I went back and did Mara too.  I know where the areas are and the general structure (since I ran it so many damn times years ago) and while it isn't horrible, it sure as hell is long.  Level appropriate runs would take 2.5-3 hours years ago.  Get a geared 60 running you through and it took about half that.  The biggest problem with it is that if you wanted to get all of the quests done for leveling (which at the time helped alot) you had to convince your group to go through the orange AND the purple wing, when all of that stuff was elite and hard, then ALSO go through and do the respective wings of the dungeon and THEN go to the falls and take out the princess.  Long fricking instance.  Once you got the rod though, just portal to the falls and take out princess, get gear upgrades, etc.  Some of those old world dungeons were very epic in feel and while doing them now is fun and can be nostalgic for some people, the sheer amount of difficult you had to deal with years ago when they were new really brings me back down to earth.

[WindupAtheist]

A few questions for anyone who can answer:

How far up the list of 5 man dungeons can a ret pally in full honor purples solo? I'm up to Mana Tombs and I'm not even breathing hard, but then I'm not grabbing two dozen mobs at a time like I used to either. I'd like to at least get out of Outland before having to resort to grouping. I never really did these on the way up, so I don't know how steeply they scale.

Heroic Magister's Terrace. My ret in honor purples, plus another ret pally in Naxx purples. How difficult?

How easy if we add a 78 or 80 holy pally in crafted PVP blues?

[Ashamanchill]

If I can I'd like to add a small addendum to WUA's question, since I have been wondering basically the same thing with my pally that I have left at 74.  Which would be better for soloing all those BC dungeons on heroic, ret or prot?

[Ingmar]

I can't answer for paladins, but if they're anything like warriors then protection will be a better solo-the-dungeons spec. Given that your specs can all heal themselves though I'm not sure the comparison will hold.