Here comes the next content patch (3.2)

[Paelos]

I think this patch is top-notch for an intermediate addition. The new 5 man is fun and easy in my view. The new 10 man is very accessible and has some interesting strategic elements. The loot is great across the board, bringing up the undergeared. The conquest tokens revitalized pointless heroics. The triumph dailies did as well. I'm logging in more and having a good time hanging out with people who were previously very bored. Also, I HATED Ulduar with a passion, so it's nice to do something else.

[DraconianOne]

Don't tell me this. I'm too busy to resub at the moment.

[K9]

I'm going to broadly agree with Paelos, accept for the fact that I have so-far loved Ulduar. For 10-man content it's the best thing since Kara. Heroic ulduar sucks balls though.

[Fordel]

Most of my guild loves Uludar, it's just quite clearly kicking our collective asses and the wear is starting to show.

So the new stuff is a nice diversion and helps smooth out some bumps.

[Paelos]

I think more serious/better raiders would probably enjoy Ulduar, but I just don't like long, linear raids. I also don't like that Ulduar was the expected kneejerk "fuck you" response to the people that complained Naxx was too easy.

The new stuff is much better tuned to difficulty in my view. The normal stuff should be fairly easy to work through once you understand the fights. You should expect some wipes, but it shouldn't take you longer than a raid session to kill a new boss. I fully expect the heroic version to be more on par with if not harder than the Ulduar fights. That kind of stratification is much better than the all-or-nothing raid difficulty approach of old.

[Fabricated]

Yeah, the hardmodes are prolly going to be insanely punishing to make up for the relative ease of the normal modes.

Ulduar we still haven't killed Yogg10. Not because we can't kill him, but because we keep running up against our raid times before we can get used to him. Even if we rush keepers and get everything down fast it still takes too long. We'll probably extend a raid lockout now until we kill him just for the sake of killing him, then never do it again since his loot is shit.

[Paelos]

That's sort of been my problem with Ulduar. We'll kill 8 bosses in there, but it takes forever to do, it's messy and in many cases it's very boring to me. The Auriya fight, for example, utilizes mechanics I would never want to see again. That's not a fight, it's a random clusterfuck using LOS bullshit and in many cases simple luck. It's just stuff like that.

[Rendakor]

I agree with the sentiments about Ulduar. The zone just feels really long; maybe that's because we still wipe a lot to keepers, but I've never even seen Yogg. It's not like Naxx where you can roll through most of the bosses in a PUG but only a few are difficult (Thaddius, KT); almost every boss in Ulduar is really really annoying. Ignis is such a cockstab that we don't even bother with him anymore.

[Sjofn]

I enjoy most of Ulduar, I just don't enjoy that ... well, some of our most consistant raiders attendance-wise are also our most consistant "derp I accidently hit heroism on the trash pack before the boss... AGAIN" people, too. I can tell Ulduar is harder for my guild than it has to be because we never get all our really good people in the raid at the same time, and it frustrates me sometimes.


EDIT: It IS a little too long for our twice a week for a few hours schedule if we do the extra bosses ... but we kinda need to do the extra bosses for gear purposes and shit. Although maybe not as much with heroic ToC now. But while I'd be perfectly happy to skip every single optional boss in order to actually learn a watcher besides Hodir, it's pretty hard to justify spending a night wiping to Thorim when there are all those bosses! Right there! That we can already beat!

[Paelos]

I enjoy most of Ulduar, I just don't enjoy that ... well, some of our most consistant raiders attendance-wise are also our most consistant "derp I accidently hit heroism on the trash pack before the boss... AGAIN" people, too. I can tell Ulduar is harder for my guild than it has to be because we never get all our really good people in the raid at the same time, and it frustrates me sometimes.

I think part of the issue is that your better players probably don't want to put up with it every week. This plays into my "It's not a great raid" theory. They are good but they know it so they don't feel like grinding it out like the loot-whoring morons. I sure as shit know that my A-players have lives, while my facepalmers seem to never miss a raid.

[Selby]

I sure as shit know that my A-players have lives, while my facepalmers seem to never miss a raid.

Which is the exact opposite of my guild.  Those who show up regularly (consistently, as in almost all the time) are good.  Those who miss alot always come and do things like stand in the fire and afk during boss fights.

But everyone has lives and most people get out quite often.

[Paelos]

Obviously no small system can generalize the entire population. I have casual raiders, as am I, that raid 4 hours a week. Anything beyond that is going to be really pushing into our schedules. Blizzard has seemed to move toward that demographic many times, with small setbacks in-between. I consider Ulduar a setback.

[Selby]

I consider Ulduar a setback.

I do concur.  It's okay and all right, I just don't feel the need to spend hours and hours banging my head against the wall on those fights.

[Gobbeldygook]

The Auriya fight, for example, utilizes mechanics I would never want to see again.  That's not a fight, it's a random clusterfuck using LOS bullshit and in many cases simple luck.

I have no idea what you're talking about.  From my perspective as melee DPS, I just stand behind her, run in front when she casts a particular spell, berserker the fear, interrupt the follow-up cast, and AOE the kitties.  Is there some bullshit that only casters have to put up with or what?

[Fordel]

The Feral Defender is a real bitch about fucking up casts. Lots of little stuns and interrupts.

[Rendakor]

I was wondering this myself. As a tank, there are fights in Ulduar that make me RAGE but Catlady isn't one of them.

[K9]

Get a disc priest in your raid; shields on everyone smoothes out spellcasting woes.

From my point of view Ulduar is far more interesting than Naxx, and is challenging enough withouth being cockstabby. The only truly terrible boss is Ignis, and his trash can fuck right off; but he drops crap loot so who cares. For my guild we were able to progress at around 1 boss a week up to Mimiron and this felt like a good pace. With our a-team we can clear 9 or 10 bosses in three hours, and the b-team does 6 or so. Other than ignis there isn't a fight that I don't find interesting, and the sense of achievement at progressing through the content was much higher. Also it was nice to see how the challenge of Ulduar improved our play.

Also, I disagree that Ulduar is some immensely linear 'fuck-you' raid. While it is long, there are only four required bosses in the main part of the instance, and after killing each of those (except for Kologarn) you get access to a couple more bosses. I guess adjusting Auriaya such that she only patrolled between Mimiron and Freya would be a sensible adjustment, since then killing Kologarn would open up Auriaya, Thorim and Hodir, rather than just Auriaya. However compared to Naxx where there were cockblocks in every wing and a ton of annoying fights Ulduar is brilliant. The art is great, the setting is more convincing, the lack of trash is welcome and the fights are varied and interesting. The other thing I find with Ulduar is that most fights become a lot easier once you know them and your raid calms down and is less frantic.

I'd agree with Sofjn that perhaps 13(14) bosses is too long. On the flip side, five bosses is too short. My guild can do everything up to 3/4 keepers in one night though, so that's not too bad. It's better than naxx where by the time you'd done your second or third wing, the image of having to start again through another wing was less and less exciting. Naxx just makes me want to gouge my eyeballs out right now.

[Merusk]

I don't get the hate for Ignis.. He's one of the simpler fights in there.  Someone here best explained it a while back.  It's two separate fights, the adds and the boss.  Don't worry about the fight you're not a part of and you're golden.   The fight I've always thought was a pain in the ass is Hodir.  Too much movement and, "don't stand in this, wait now run over and stand in it. Ok now get near that and this guy and this beam of light while not standing in the other things."   That and Yogg are my least favorite fights in the entire place.

I'll agree there's a trend to add too many bosses to make a place fun right now.  Folks loved Kara not for the number of bosses but for the ease of some of the fights.  Folks hated TK and SSC not for the length but because some of the mechanics were a real bitch for the non-dedicated raiders.  Blizz hasn't seemed to understand that yet.

I agree on Nax burnout due to length of the wings.  I haven't set foot in there since I first entered Ulduar, which is a stark contrast from the weekly Kara runs I did up until Sunwell. Even the conquest badge gear for my alts won't get me back in because I'm so sick of the place.  I'm quickly approaching the same for Ulduar, it's all because I know it'll take me too damn long.

[kildorn]

I enjoy most of Ulduar, I just don't enjoy that ... well, some of our most consistant raiders attendance-wise are also our most consistant "derp I accidently hit heroism on the trash pack before the boss... AGAIN" people, too. I can tell Ulduar is harder for my guild than it has to be because we never get all our really good people in the raid at the same time, and it frustrates me sometimes.

I think part of the issue is that your better players probably don't want to put up with it every week. This plays into my "It's not a great raid" theory. They are good but they know it so they don't feel like grinding it out like the loot-whoring morons. I sure as shit know that my A-players have lives, while my facepalmers seem to never miss a raid.

I don't personally have any "I don't want to drag THEM through this" moments, I can get a little frustrated at times (healing hodir, NOT FUN in general, LESS FUN when people make trivial mistakes), but I will say I get more prone to saying yes to going out drinking for the evening rather than run the same 4-5 bosses every tuesday type thing.

As for cat lady: Shields help the swarms pushbacks. The royal bitch of that fight is that any time the defender himself goes all "RAAAR POUNCE EVERYONE", it's a school lockout. And occasionally that will through sheer luck mean every healer is suddenly unable to heal for two seconds. Mostly I think that fight is bullshit because the entire thing is decided by the pull. Did anyone get a bullshit bleed? Is one cat down before the first fear? Okay, you win!

The hate for Ignis is mostly that it's cluttered and seems stressful. Imagine Patchwerk, with dickloads of particle effects and ground effects going off like it's a Michael Bay directed fight. He's Hodir, without the particle effects pretty much being required raid wide moves.

[Paelos]

I was wondering this myself. As a tank, there are fights in Ulduar that make me RAGE but Catlady isn't one of them.

I hate setup fights. I hate fights where 90% of the fight is having people not fuck up the pull. Lastly, I hate any fight that lives and dies on setting everyone up in some odd LOS bullshit situation in order to complete it.

I don't hate that fight because it's difficult. I hate it because of what it stands for. I may find the Iron Council hard on our tanks and unforgiving to the healers, but I at least like the design of the fight. I like fights that have actual transitions in phases, that demand different things from the raid at different times, and that have an escalating sense of difficulty.

[AutomaticZen]

As for cat lady: Shields help the swarms pushbacks. The royal bitch of that fight is that any time the defender himself goes all "RAAAR POUNCE EVERYONE", it's a school lockout. And occasionally that will through sheer luck mean every healer is suddenly unable to heal for two seconds.

When Kara was progression, I hate Prince for this fact.  You had to hope that the Infernals didn't drop in a pattern that fucked you up.

[Rendakor]

Ahh I see your point about the LOSing on pull; I didn't get what you were talking about with the LOS issues before. I still think Ignis is annoying because of the large luck factor too. In 10m, if your OT gets put in the pot it's pretty much a guaranteed wipe; adds rampage around killing healers until he gets out, and then its a clusterfuck of him trying to drag TWO adds into fire, then into water, etc. It's reminiscent of Naxx for being harder on 10m than 25m.

[Fabricated]

Catlady in 10-man is a joke and boring, 25-man she's incredibly boring but has a retardedly awful pull you can't fuck up.

Ingis is about the only fight in the first 6 that really irritates me as a tank but to be honest it's really easy as long as you can control the adds properly. I learned you just need to keep your full rotation going for the whole time you're dragging an add out of the fire into the water and save your taunts if it decides to bolt.

I think my hate for Ingis is how noisy the fight is. He literally screams the entire fucking fight.

Hodir is a stupid fight just because of it being a resist fight. Fuck resist fights.

Thorim/Freya/Mimiron are fun though, but not enough to make up for the shit-sandwich of boring and gimmicks that is Vezax.

[K9]

I hate setup fights. I hate fights where 90% of the fight is having people not fuck up the pull. Lastly, I hate any fight that lives and dies on setting everyone up in some odd LOS bullshit situation in order to complete it.

Could you list any other boss fights which fit this description please. This seems more applicable to trash than bosses, and even then the days of spending 5-minutes setting up trash pulls is long gone. Maybe you just have a bad arrangement of players and classes in your raid, but we never have any issues with Auriaya now, and most of the time we spend on her is waiting for her to patrol round to us.

[Sjofn]

I hate setup fights. I hate fights where 90% of the fight is having people not fuck up the pull. Lastly, I hate any fight that lives and dies on setting everyone up in some odd LOS bullshit situation in order to complete it.

Could you list any other boss fights which fit this description please. This seems more applicable to trash than bosses, and even then the days of spending 5-minutes setting up trash pulls is long gone. Maybe you just have a bad arrangement of players and classes in your raid, but we never have any issues with Auriaya now, and most of the time we spend on her is waiting for her to patrol round to us.

Yeah, she reminds me of Patchwerk with how long she takes to path her ass back to where I can pull her. I fucked up the pull for that fight this week because I had a tard moment (I put down my D&D too early and then cleverly face pulled her), but generally we don't have any problems with her. I hate faketanking the stupid defender though.

Also, I must be weird, but I love the Hodir fight (assuming my raid is not being dum). I love tanking it and I love DPSing it. I have never had to heal it, though, and I can tell I would probably really dislike trying to do so on anything not a druid.

[K9]

For healing I'd rank the bosses like XT, Thorim, Freya, Iron Council and Mimiron as really fun. Hodir isn't too bad really, although I'm a disc priest, so I can run around with almost no penalty to my healing. Frozen blows is really nasty when you learn the encounter, then gets better as people get a bit of frost resist, and you get better gear. Thorim is a fight which really keeps you on your toes as a healer, as does Mimiron; both fights expect you to be using all the tools you have and also give you a lot of damage to counter. Freya has lots going on, and is a very interactive healing fight. Iron Council is interesting to heal as the fight changes and your role changes as you progress through the phases.

Ignis and Kologarn are dull as shit to heal. Kologarn is just big spikes of damage every few seconds with little variety other than having to run from the beams. Ignis is basically a single 15-30 second phase repeated about ten times. I think the repetitiveness of the fight, coupled with the annoying noise (*nods to Fabricated for mentioing that*) makes it so shite.

Razorscale is fairly meh, but it's also pretty painless, so I don't mind. Auriaya is much the same; provided everyone stacks up in front of her there's really no challenge to healing.

However, almost all these fights are better than Naxx. 4hm and Sapphiron are really the only interesting healing fights in there.

[Paelos]

I hate setup fights. I hate fights where 90% of the fight is having people not fuck up the pull. Lastly, I hate any fight that lives and dies on setting everyone up in some odd LOS bullshit situation in order to complete it.

Could you list any other boss fights which fit this description please. This seems more applicable to trash than bosses, and even then the days of spending 5-minutes setting up trash pulls is long gone. Maybe you just have a bad arrangement of players and classes in your raid, but we never have any issues with Auriaya now, and most of the time we spend on her is waiting for her to patrol round to us.

Of course we have bad players in our raid. Everyone has degrees of bad players. Also, we've beaten it 5 times, but I don't give a fuck how easy she is. I am talking about the mechanic. If you want me to go from the beginning on fights that use either a shitty LOS or "don't-fuck-the-pull" mechanic, I will. Geddon, Shazzrah, Sulfuron, Majordomo, Firemaw, Chromaggus, King Maulgar, Moroes, Fathom-Lord Karathress, Instructor Razuvious, The Four Horsemen, and Auriya.

I don't like fights where you have to deal with a bunch of odd adds and mitigate them to weird positions on the map so they don't gain LOS buffs or heals. I also don't like fights where if you get past the first 20 seconds alive, you win. There are exceptions to the rule like Kael for example, though. Some people may love the shit out of those fights, but I simply don't like them. I think they are a copout on an actual "boss" fight.

[Fabricated]

I think most of Ulduar is fun but it's just tiring between the trash and the sheer amount of bosses.

Ulduar feels really well paced until you get past the antechamber and then it's timesink city between every boss but Thorim. Ingis' trash is annoying but there's only 4 pulls now thank god, and they don't take long. 6 pulls in the Antechamber gets you access to 2 bosses, which is nice.

But after the Antechamber? Jesus. 1 pull of the instagib-brothers to start each keeper area, boring AoE/Anti-AoE fodder for Hodir, a goddamn mountain of trash (even post nerf) that needs heavy CC for Freya, lots of trash to Mimiron (yeah, it's funny the little guys are literally named "trash", but post nerf it's still boring), and holky fuck at the shit between you and Vezax.

As for the boss fights, the only ones I really dread every week are Hodir (it's murder on our raiders with shitty computers), Ingis (we never wipe on him anymore, the fight just bores me to tears), and Vezax (long and boring, and dependent entirely on the healers and ranged so long as our interrupts are good. I just sit there and rotate cooldowns like a monkey). The rest are pretty fun all things said (Freya is the fun kind of organized chaos), but I just feel tired by the end.

[Selby]

If you want me to go from the beginning on fights that use either a shitty LOS or "don't-fuck-the-pull" mechanic, I will. Geddon, Shazzrah, Sulfuron, Majordomo...

I just want to say fuck Molten Core.  Those who didn't do it years ago just don't understand how bad it was ;-)

[Ingmar]

Hodir and Auriaya are my two favorite fights to tank in there so far, but I haven't seen any of the other keepers.

Our main problem in terms of making progress is we have like 17 people or so who sign up for raids. Its not enough that I'd feel comfortable finding 8 PUGs every week and taking on 25s, but its so many that we can't take a consistent lineup of the best players as due to the nature of the guild I can't just tell people "no sorry you can't go" once they're adequately geared, so we rotate people in and out week by week. It means that we spend a lot of time explaining fights to people who haven't seen them, more time wiping on things because people are out of practice cause the last time they went was three weeks ago, etc. Given a 4 week lockout period I'm sure we could clear the place.  We also have a wide variety in terms of diligence people have in really trying to master their character, squeeze every bit out of gems and enchants, farm specific needed pieces of gear, etc. I am probably the far "OCD overgearing/spreadsheet wanking" end of the spectrum but there is a wide wide distance to the other end for us.

Basically its the trade-off for having a generally cheerful and friendly and low-stress guild, so I'm willing to make it, but it does mean that we always struggle with raids after the first one it seems. (Same sort of issues in Zul'Aman, although that was a bigger gear/difficulty hop than Naxx to Ulduar, IMO, and the amount of loot/badges that dropped was discouragingly poor on top of it.)

[Sjofn]

Yeah, in Ulduar I at least feel like we make progress in, Zul'Aman was basically "ha ha, fuck you, here's one badge for your two hours of effort."

[kildorn]

due to the nature of the guild I can't just tell people "no sorry you can't go" once they're adequately geared,

So quoting this when I sign my lock up for Uld. 

[AutomaticZen]

What server and side are you guys on?

[Lantyssa]

So quoting this when I sign my lock up for Uld. 

Sorry, they need a healer.

[Selby]

but its so many that we can't take a consistent lineup of the best players as due to the nature of the guild I can't just tell people "no sorry you can't go" once they're adequately geared,

Our guild is friendly and low stress too, but our guild leader made it apparent from day one that if you want to raid the top tier content, he expects you to put effort into keeping your character the best geared as it possibly can be (farming heroics, doing dailies for money to get gems and enchants, etc).  If you haven't gemmed or enchanted any of your gear or are still in blues and we are trying new content, you get to sit out if a more geared person is online.  It hasn't been much of an issue, but we're starting to get 15-16 people on a night, which is potentially going to be an issue.  Although when several of us have multiple decently geared 80's, we can at least have variety in who we choose ;-)