Cataclysm

[Paelos]

I'm with Azazel; doing the whole cc thing and making heroics a challenge is fun, the first few times around. But we all know what purpose heroics serve in this game once you raid: they are grinds to be tolerated to pick up your justice/valor points. They aren't progression, so once they have been completed and run a few times they quickly become a pain in the ass.

A few pages back Lantyssa said something about designing the game for the audience you have, not the one you want. If most people want to burn through heroics, and treat them as essentially one giant punching bag, why change it? Because let me tell you, if  Ghostcrawler thinks that people are going to pay 15 bucks a month to run through regular Lost City, Grim Batol, and Halls then he is smoking some real sticky shit.

Well how much of the game is comprised of end game raiders vs the rest of the pop?

More than half the population raids in some form now. Probably more given that 10 man = 25 man loot.

[Ingmar]

I'm finding I actually can AE tank a lot of things with a decent healer. Warriors seem to have been missed by the great AE nerfbat. I'm pushing 12k dps on packs of 4-5.

[Threash]

I'm finding I actually can AE tank a lot of things with a decent healer. Warriors seem to have been missed by the great AE nerfbat. I'm pushing 12k dps on packs of 4-5.

For most things ae tanking isn't really that big an issue, it is just a lot more inefficient and the groups that do it aren't the ones that are good enough to pull it off but the ones who don't know any better.  In guild runs we are basically back to wotlk style heroics now.

[K9]

Most AoE skills didn't scale very well as far as I can tell.

I'm with Azazel; doing the whole cc thing and making heroics a challenge is fun, the first few times around. But we all know what purpose heroics serve in this game once you raid: they are grinds to be tolerated to pick up your justice/valor points. They aren't progression, so once they have been completed and run a few times they quickly become a pain in the ass.

A few pages back Lantyssa said something about designing the game for the audience you have, not the one you want. If most people want to burn through heroics, and treat them as essentially one giant punching bag, why change it? Because let me tell you, if  Ghostcrawler thinks that people are going to pay 15 bucks a month to run through regular Lost City, Grim Batol, and Halls then he is smoking some real sticky shit.

Well, for now they are progression, and by the time we're onto the next tier they will be soft-nerfed to an extent through gear. I also feel that although heroics are taking a bit longer, the rate you acquire JP seems pretty generous, and there's not a ton of gear to spend it on. So unlike TBC and WoTLK you're not looking to run multiple heroics each day. I do the daily and that's enough.

[Ashamanchill]

I also find it really weird that they have redesigned the old world to be even more idiot proof, and hold players hands even more, with dungeons not even being the difficulty of a WotLK heroic, and then at 85 they pull the rug out from under them. And of course the fall out hits those like me, who's guild is three members.

[Tannhauser]

I've lost a lot of interest in playing Cats.  The Steam holiday sale didn't help and now I'm happily backlogged with good games to play.  I like the new 5 man's well enough, but not enough to bother doing them much less the heroics.  A big change from WotLK.

[Paelos]

I did my first heroic today. 

I'm wondering if there is some obvious easier one I should be doing first, because Deadmines was not it.

[koro]

So tonight was my guild's first night of raiding and I went with my Disc Priest. Raid is Blackwing Descent, trying Magmaw first. Unavoidable damage. Lots of unavoidable damage. Single lava spits that hit two party members at a time for 30-40k, followed up by an AoE spit that hits 3-4 more for about 60k, and can easily hit the people just affected by the single spits. This leads to a situation where you have to scramble and keep the raid essentially topped off, or they have a very high chance of dying the next time he spits.

After an hour and a half of wiping on that we move over to the other boss we can access, the Omnitron Defense System. It starts going far better, and we actually get the encounter down a good ways. Then Magmatron comes out...

...and promptly does large, unavoidable, raid-wide AoE damage that, when combined with all the other incidental damage, kills people easily.

It's goddamn Wrath raid healing all over again, except all the healers are less effective at AoE.

[Lantyssa]

Maybe the raid designers don't talk to the class designers...

[caladein]

They're really not the same.

A fight like Mimiron was "Spam heals hard or we all die."  The fights I've done (first two each in Bastion of Twilight and Blackwing Descent) feature raid-wide or AOE damage prominently, but the emphasis is more on spikes and recovery instead of needing to stay at full blast the whole time.

[koro]

Right, but in my experience the spikes come hard and fast enough that it's still similar enough to be stressful and unfun. It's nothing like healing people in classic or TBC, which is what they kept talking about wanting to turn the clock back to; there's no triage, just "keep everyone at 80% health or higher, or else the boss is liable to kill them within a couple of GCDs."

And from what I've been hearing, the other raids are just as bad about it.

[apocrypha]

Heroic pugs have now become mostly routine for me, already. Maybe 1 in 5 groups we struggle, but mostly they're fine. Not WOTLK-who-cares-who-has-agro easy but people know what to do and even if you get a wipe or two on a boss people generally stick it out and get it in the end.

Nothing left to spend JPs on, not enough VPs to get anything useful. TB win-trading means I'm in almost full 352 honor gear and am now just waiting for BH pugs and for the next tier of gear to come out.

Seems like it's happened way too fast really. Onto alts already. 

[Ironwood]

I have no fucking idea how you've managed that.  I suspect it's more to do with you than with the content.  The Guild and I are still running scared of the absolute suck fest that is getting sodomised in heroics.

[Ingmar]

I'm finding I actually can AE tank a lot of things with a decent healer. Warriors seem to have been missed by the great AE nerfbat. I'm pushing 12k dps on packs of 4-5.

For most things ae tanking isn't really that big an issue, it is just a lot more inefficient and the groups that do it aren't the ones that are good enough to pull it off but the ones who don't know any better.  In guild runs we are basically back to wotlk style heroics now.

There's a nice feedback loop since 5 mobs worth of incoming damage pushes my vengeance pretty high, so as long as the healer can keep up it is all good, seemingly. It wouldn't work as well with a group that had a bunch of mana using dps, but with enhance-feral-hunter it was pretty much fine.

I won't exactly be surprised if warriors eat a nerf. I feel overpowered in just about everything I'm doing right now, arena included.

[K9]

I have no fucking idea how you've managed that.  I suspect it's more to do with you than with the content.  The Guild and I are still running scared of the absolute suck fest that is getting sodomised in heroics.

Heroic HoO and Throne of the Tides are the ones you should probably try, they're really not much above normal in terms of difficulty; maybe Vortex Pinnacle and Deadmines too. The ones you want to avoid are Stonecore, Tol'vir and Grim Batol.

I'm not entirely buying all the hand wringing over heroics. They are tuned a bit tighter than WoTLK, but then people are also coming in off the back of a 2 year expansion where the majority of the population outgeared the heroics by 3-4 tiers of epic gear. If the heroics were as easy now as they had been at the end of Wrath then by the end of Cata they would have been out geared to the point of absolute pointlessness.

[Simond]

I have no fucking idea how you've managed that.  I suspect it's more to do with you than with the content.  The Guild and I are still running scared of the absolute suck fest that is getting sodomised in heroics.

As the average ilvl on gear slowly creeps upwards, heroics go from "guaranteed wipe until everyone is on the ball all the time" to "okay, as long as people pay some attention on the important bits" (and presumable, eventually to WotLK-era "Role face on keyboard to win").

I suspect heroics will be reliably puggable a short while after 4.1, when T11 hits the vendors.

Guild Progression update: Hasty Hearth is 

[apocrypha]

As the average ilvl on gear slowly creeps upwards, heroics go from "guaranteed wipe until everyone is on the ball all the time" to "okay, as long as people pay some attention on the important bits" (and presumable, eventually to WotLK-era "Role face on keyboard to win").

Totally this. Most groups I'm in now we're all doing 10-13k dps, tank pulling in not far behind and healers only needing to drink after bosses. Some AOE packs people hit 25k on, survival hunters, pallies, DKs. I'm an elemental shaman atm and hitting 14k on bosses if I'm lucky.

Gear levels have gone up a LOT in the last week. The number of people with maxed professions and a few exalted reps has gone up dramatically so most people have a couple of bits of 359, and there's loads of 352 honor gear ofc.

[kaid]

I'm finding I actually can AE tank a lot of things with a decent healer. Warriors seem to have been missed by the great AE nerfbat. I'm pushing 12k dps on packs of 4-5.

One other thing when aoe tanking you are getting beat on by more mobs at once and your vengence stacks quicker which really amps the DPS. Most tanks if they aoe tank will start rolling some crazy numbers if the healer can keep them up due to vengence. The rend/blood and thunder thunderclap plus shockwave is some very decent dps now if the dps'ers can hold their fire for a second to let you set it up.

[kaid]

I did my first heroic today.  

I'm wondering if there is some obvious easier one I should be doing first, because Deadmines was not it.

HAHAH dead mines is probably the hardest I have seen so far. Vortex pinacle is about the easiest. Its not much different than non heroic other than the second boss.

I hear halls of origine is similar on heroic mode where not much is changed but given its lenght if you are hunting chaos orbs vortex pinacle is the best target currently for fast and easy even in pugs.

[Furiously]

It's funny I have been getting horrid normal groups, like everyone but me below 5 k dps. My heroic experiences have been mostly good.

[kildorn]

H-HoO is entirely "can you beat the first boss or not", everything else is pretty simple.

[K9]

What are people finding hard about Deadmines? It has some pretty unforgiving retard checks (spinning beams of death, fires and such), but really the only fight which is testing from a healing point of view is probably Ripsnarl.

It's too fucking long though.

[Threash]

I've been in several groups that had zero shot at getting past ripsnarl no matter how good they executed.  Sometimes the dps is just not enough.

[Paelos]

I've been in several groups that had zero shot at getting past ripsnarl no matter how good they executed.  Sometimes the dps is just not enough.

That's the answer. It's not that Deadmines is ridiculously hard. It's all Ripsnarl. That fight is simply not tuned fairly in comparison with the rest of that instance.

[K9]

Yeah, I'd say that's a fair complaint.

[kildorn]

I've been in several groups that had zero shot at getting past ripsnarl no matter how good they executed.  Sometimes the dps is just not enough.

That's the answer. It's not that Deadmines is ridiculously hard. It's all Ripsnarl. That fight is simply not tuned fairly in comparison with the rest of that instance.

He's a DPS check, and a burst/switching DPS check. I ditch my affliction spec just for him, since "I will slowly murder these adds" is not a valid DPS method for him.

The only other complaint I have with deadmines is that it uses the shit out of random secondary targeting mechanics (axe toss, the port/slight damage the rogue adds do) that causes healer headaches. Mostly that freaking axe toss's 17k/tic dot.

[SurfD]

Well, kiss win trading in Tol Barad goodbye.   They bitchslapped the honor that the assaulting team gets for a win down from ~1800 to ~400.  Not that anyone with half a brain in their head didnt see that coming from a mile away.

[Paelos]

He's a DPS check, and a burst/switching DPS check.

There's no reason to have a dps check after you've slogged through buckets of trash in a fucking 5 man.

That's a kick in the balls.

Also, nobody's shocked about the TB changes, that place has a long way to go before it's remotely functional.

[kildorn]

He's a DPS check, and a burst/switching DPS check.

There's no reason to have a dps check after you've slogged through buckets of trash in a fucking 5 man.

That's a kick in the balls.

Also, nobody's shocked about the TB changes, that place has a long way to go before it's remotely functional.

Oh, I agree there's no reason for them to put a DPS check at the end of the instance, but it's what his fight is. We did all of Deadmines but him cheesing it with a paladin healing and my priest smite healing (so lol 3-4k dps), and could not drop him. Subbed in my frost DK and he went down. I joined another pug with my lock who were suffering on him, and just switched to destro spec and pointed out that one of them kills ripsnarl with the tank, the rest of us do nothing but explode adds all day.

I think the issue pugging him is: there are a lot of ramp up time DPS, and a lot of horribly low dps pug players. Those two will bring the entire group to a crashing halt on Ripsnarl, because the adds have about a two second first evolution period where they go from "can be two-shot" to "must burn through 100k hp"

[Ingmar]

The smite priest thing was a stupid idea born out of all the scare posts we'd read about how hard heroics were and failures we'd heard about from other people, though, it was totally unnecessary as it turns out.

[Paelos]

I'll just put it this way. First venture into a heroic random was not pleasing to me. I'm not a fan of that design choice for Deadmines, nor do I think it does anything but piss people off when you backload a dps check.

We'll see how I feel after trying something else heroic.

[kildorn]

Do heroic stonecore next!

Then you can backload a tank positioning check and an interrupt or die check! ;)

[K9]

Don't listen to the crazy man 

Take a group you trust and do Halls of Origination. It's long, but there are no punishing fights in there bar a couple of trash pulls. Long has it's benefits, you get 7 bosses worth of loot, which will help. You'll probably clear it quicker than Deadmines anyway due to it's relative ease.

[Ingmar]

Setesh can be a bit rough.

[Threash]

I think the issue pugging him is: there are a lot of ramp up time DPS, and a lot of horribly low dps pug players. Those two will bring the entire group to a crashing halt on Ripsnarl, because the adds have about a two second first evolution period where they go from "can be two-shot" to "must burn through 100k hp"

This.  My rogue puts out a ton of dps, as long as he can stay on target.  I have to get poison stacks, slice n dice and rupture going before i can start doing serious damage, those adds basically boil down to me doing a low damage mutilate every six seconds.