Patch 3.3

[JWIV]

I am at a complete loss when it comes to what to do with these emblems/badges, I guess I will have to do some research now that I may be collecting a few.

That's exactly my feeling on it.  I had never bothered to look at the Tier 8/Tier 9/emblem turn in system.  However, since it's now so quick to run multiple instances in a single evening, it's a much more achievable goal.

[Fabricated]

Here's what you can get with badges:

triumph - base level tier 9 (ilevel 232, yes all 5 pieces), non-tier but higher level shoulder and/or helmet (245). 245 trinkets, 245 ring for each spec, 245 libram/totem/sigil, 245 ranged slot for warrior tank, dps wand, agi thrown weapon.

Conquest - non-tier legs, belt, gloves (226), tier 8 helm/chestpiece, 226 librams/etc

Valor - cloak/ring (213), boots and bracers (213), tier 7.5 legs/shoulders (213)

Heroism - healer/tank shield (200), offhand sword (200), trinkets (still really fucking good btw), tier 7.0 chest/gloves, uncut epic gems, heirlooms.

I recommend buying 4/5 of your tier 9, then either the 245 shoulders or helm, then rings/trinkets, then whatever else.

[Ingmar]

Re: HHoR, the total amount of group dps required to get through the run away! part is indeed a bit higher than it is for F&M, mostly because of the total hp of the monsters in the last wave, and because the slower you are at killing the first waves, the closer the lich king is to you when you start each of the next ones, and the less time you have before his City of Heroes Tsoo cyclone kills you.

Re: the LFG tool:

I used it for a few leveling dungeons to try it out last night. Had a couple mid 60s runs go very well on my ret pally (Underbog and Slave Pens) but it is worth noting the ilvl on the reward items is sort of bugged in the 60-70 range; both times I got ilvl 64 items which to me says they forgot to build in the Outlands ilvl jump to the rewards. One of these was kind of lolworthy in the fact that me+the tank accounted for 78% of the damage dealt by the group...

I also tried some mid 70s runs on my mage; those went pretty well with the exception of the first one, where our tank ported away to respec, couldn't get back in, and then one of the other people in the group started the event and ported out to Stormwind, leaving the remaining 3 of us to die.   So yes, it is possible to grief people with this system, at least if Violet Hold is the dungeon. If it hadn't been a triggered event with no place to hide it wouldn't really have been an issue. Note that characters in the 70s don't get the 'bag of random blue item' for a reward; you get 2 triumphs for the first run and then just gold, like anyone else doing random normal dungeons.

[Draegan]

So I resubbed about week before this latest patch and RAFd my way up to 25ish.  Now that I'm to far ahead of the trial account I've settled into slowmo leveling with a 10% boost from heirlooms.

This LFD tool is fantastic.  It makes leveling almost bareable again.  I've ran stockades, gnomer, RFK etc today and the exp is pretty good, you get a goodie bag at the end and some other loots.  I usually can't do anything inbetween dungeons because they pop so quickly.

My only problem is do i know use my 3kish gearscore dps DK to grind emblems for my heirloom shoulders?  or don't waste my time and keep leveling via the LFD tool?

Hmmm... Oh well.

fake edit:
I just got an idea where I can grind out my professions in between running dungeons.  This will save me a lot of time I think in the end.  Rather than getting burned out at level 60/70/80 grinding out professions, I'll just do it now. 

I'm thinking inscription.

Also, when do you think we'll see crossserver auction houses?

[Musashi]

Think you can get those heirloom shoulders from the Champion's Seals you get from the Argent Tournament dailys.  I wouldn't waste Triumph badges on heirloom loot unless you really didn't need it or you don't plan on every playing that guy.

[Draegan]

No, I don't plan on playing him anytime soon, at least not in this expansion.

Those dailys though.  It would take way too long for me to do it to make it worth while.

[Simond]

Wait for WG buff, run pugs with DK, use stone keeper tokens to buy WG heirloom shoulders. Voila!

[K9]

We did Marrowgar and Lady Deathwhisper tonight:

Marrowgar - Pretty simple once we had seen the fight; effectively 2-shot this (lost one attempt because of healers getting impaled/dc and not healing the tank). Basically the fight comes down to two things, killing the spikes fast and letting the tanks get Marrowgar under control after bone storm. I was healing on the shaman and basically didn't move much during bone storm unless targeted by flames or such, and so I just spammed riptide and CH. The damage was much more manageable than I had expected.

Deathwhisper - Took us quite a few attempts to get her sorted, mainly due to learning the adds. Switching to 2 healers, 6 DPS helped in the end as we stopped having overlaps of waves (getting the ranged switching onto the physical immune dudes helped). Lost two people due to our OT being shockingly bad and not holding aggro in P2, otherwise pretty straightforward once you have seen it through. It's an interesting fight that demands quick reflexes and thinking on your feet, and damn those lumpy dudes hit like a freight train. Otherwise fun though.

Overall I liked it. The only annying thing were the giant skeletons which spawned when you hit a trap in the trash. Hopefully we can learn where these are to avoid them, but if your raid doesn't have a rogue these seem uneccesarily annoying. Was interesting to see Chill of the Throne, I think the effect works overall. Damage was a bit less spiky (with exceptions), and healing was more interesting.

[Fabricated]

We lost essentially 4 out of 6 hours of total raiding time between Friday and Saturday due to horrific lag.

We got Marrowgar, Deathwhisper, and the Airship Battle down but only got to put in a few good attempts on Deathbringer. :/

[Paelos]

I'm feeling the gap in my full 10 man gear walking into the place. Even with 4-5, 25 man upgrades on my tank, I still feel like they have ramped up the damage a good bit. This is probably a good thing as the upgrades are a pretty huge jump, so there is certainly a challenge with these fights early on.

[Selby]

I'm feeling the gap in my full 10 man gear walking into the place. Even with 4-5, 25 man upgrades on my tank, I still feel like they have ramped up the damage a good bit. This is probably a good thing as the upgrades are a pretty huge jump, so there is certainly a challenge with these fights early on.

Definitely.  The 10-m is not too bad, but the 25-m is a pretty big step up.  I am sure in the coming months once everyone is geared decently in 264 gear, it won't be as much of a challenge as it is now.  Alot of it is also still learning the fights.

[Gobbeldygook]

Marrowgar is mostly patchwerk, it'll become very trivial with better gear.  Deathwhisper is just a tard tank check (I'm downright pissed at our tanks in 25 now that I've tanked it on 10).  Gunship is a snooze fest now and will become a source of increasing rage as the weeks pass (WHOOPS RETARD TANK DIDN'T JUMP BACK IN TIME, WIPE IT UP).  Saurfang is ok, the first half is nap time for everyone but the ranged DPS, then the healers have to pay attention unless you use the 'let two die' strat then they don't.

[K9]

aaaaaaaaaaaaaand nerfed

Lord Marrowgar will now do significantly less melee damage in both the 10 player normal and 10 player heroic difficulty.

[SurfD]

Marrowgar is mostly patchwerk, it'll become very trivial with better gear.  Deathwhisper is just a tard tank check (I'm downright pissed at our tanks in 25 now that I've tanked it on 10).  Gunship is a snooze fest now and will become a source of increasing rage as the weeks pass (WHOOPS RETARD TANK DIDN'T JUMP BACK IN TIME, WIPE IT UP).  Saurfang is ok, the first half is nap time for everyone but the ranged DPS, then the healers have to pay attention unless you use the 'let two die' strat then they don't.

In all Fairness, Lady Deathwhisper is like EASILY 10x harder on 25 man then on 10 man.  In my 10 man group, put together with a bunch of old friends and a couple of pugs, we made our way fairly quickyl through almost everything in 10 (1 shot marrowgar), 2 shot Deathwhisper, 3 shot the airship battle (first wipe due to someone suggesting a strat we heard that only really works in 25 man version, second wipe due to a tank (me) accidently jetpacking into the void between ships), and got Saurfang on about the 3rd shot, after fixing a few issues with positioning and removing my Maul glyph so i wouldnt constantly keep aggroing the Fleshbeast things.

As to deathwhisper, 10 man is a joke.  If you cant manage to kill the 3 adds and still have enough time for about 10-15 seconds of pure dps on the shield, something is wrong.  In 25 man however, shit gets downright chaotic, with 7 adds instead of 3, random Mind Controlls, and adds having a LOT more chances to throw down with empowerments / resurections etc.  Tanking Deathwhisper in 10 is a total snore fest.  In 25, its a nightmare i wouldnt even want to try (I was boomkin for the 25 man attempts the pug i was in did, didnt end well).

[SurfD]

aaaaaaaaaaaaaand nerfed

Lord Marrowgar will now do significantly less melee damage in both the 10 player normal and 10 player heroic difficulty.

Which is pretty stupid, considering that even before the nerf, i could solo tank him with decent success for upwards of 30-40 seconds (very low health DK tank was Offtank in my group, he died once, and i managed to tank Marrowgar for a full cycle between bonestorms untill i could battle-rez him during one storm cast.  Guess for our next 10 man, we will just stack ranged dps and have me solo tank it for the entire fight.

[Merusk]

Airship battle was almost trivially easy in 25 man.  It's amazing how one fight (Deathwhisper) can have you frustrated for a few days before you beat it, then the very next one goes like clockwork on the first attempt.

Saurfang wasn't terribly hard, either.  Managing the blood points he accumulates is the tricky part.  On our 5th attempt we decided to just let the marked people die, and we started chewing him down from 50% on each successive attempt.  

It seems every time the mark deals damage, he gains points, so healing the marked person makes no sense.  If they live, they spam blood points, which lets him mark another person, spamming points 2x as fast, until there's 3, 4, 5.. it gets out of control.  We were hitting 50% then his health would go back up and he'd be spamming that damn mark every 4-5 seconds near the end.

Also, having 2 pally tanks makes the fight a bit tougher than it should be.  When the adds spawn, their Hammer of the Righteous would always pull 2 of the beasts on to them, spamming more blood points for Saurfang.  One of the Warlocks had to spam Shadow Fury/Flame as soon as the adds spawned to counter this.. then run like hell. Tanks w/o AOE abilities as their primary attack will make life easier on their raids.

[K9]

Apparently he doesn't gain blood power from hits that are absorbed, so gogo PW:S

[Merusk]

Yeah we heard that too but had no disc priest on the run on Sunday.   Hell, the only priest we had was a new applicant for Shadow, his holy/ disc set isn't up to par.

WTB Priests.   I blame Alleria formerly being where the #1 us guild was. We've got stupid raid times as a server because of it due to all the former transfers who made a home there.  For a CST server there's a ton of guilds who raid until 2am EST and very few who go only until 11 or 12, which is where all the priests I've known hailed from. 

[SurfD]

Apparently he doesn't gain blood power from hits that are absorbed, so gogo PW:S

I suppose this would make sense, since according to the tool tip he only gains blood power when he or his blood beasts "deals damage" with an ability or spell, so if the damage is fully Absorbed, it probably does not trigger a stack, since no actual damage was taken.

[Lakov_Sanite]

Airship battle was almost trivially easy in 25 man.  It's amazing how one fight (Deathwhisper) can have you frustrated for a few days before you beat it, then the very next one goes like clockwork on the first attempt.

Saurfang wasn't terribly hard, either.  Managing the blood points he accumulates is the tricky part.  On our 5th attempt we decided to just let the marked people die, and we started chewing him down from 50% on each successive attempt.  

It seems every time the mark deals damage, he gains points, so healing the marked person makes no sense.  If they live, they spam blood points, which lets him mark another person, spamming points 2x as fast, until there's 3, 4, 5.. it gets out of control.  We were hitting 50% then his health would go back up and he'd be spamming that damn mark every 4-5 seconds near the end.

Also, having 2 pally tanks makes the fight a bit tougher than it should be.  When the adds spawn, their Hammer of the Righteous would always pull 2 of the beasts on to them, spamming more blood points for Saurfang.  One of the Warlocks had to spam Shadow Fury/Flame as soon as the adds spawned to counter this.. then run like hell. Tanks w/o AOE abilities as their primary attack will make life easier on their raids.

AFAIK he heals like 10% or more when someone with a mark dies, which is why you heal them.  Of course I wasn't paying much attention since as DPS my job is nuke big guy/nuke little guys but I'm pretty sure that is the deal with the marks.

[Selby]

AFAIK he heals like 10% or more when someone with a mark dies, which is why you heal them.  Of course I wasn't paying much attention since as DPS my job is nuke big guy/nuke little guys but I'm pretty sure that is the deal with the marks.

Yeah, that was our problem on 25-m.  We got him to 15% and then like 3-4 people died in rapid succession and he was back at almost 50% health.

[Merusk]

He heals 5% when someone dies.  We have the DPS to get him to 70% or so prior to the first mark, provided we blow heroisim right after the pull.  It was healing through the marks, plus not having a way to absorb them (disc priest) that killed us.  In the exact fashion Selby just mentioned, no less.  3-4 dead very quickly and you wind up losing enough dps or healers on top of him being healed that it's a wipe.

Doing it our way, the first player dies at about 65%, then the next mark is cast when Saur is about 45-50%, then he'll get one more off about 15-20%.  If one happened in the last 10-13% we were going to heal through it, because we would finish him off before he had enough points to cast another.

It works for us, and we'll alter it if we pick up a disc priest, sure, but after we changed the strat it was only 3 more attempts before he was dead.

[Soulflame]

It's (probably) not intended to work that way.  I would not be surprised if Blizzard didn't up the % of health he regains when a player dies, so as to stop that particular tactic.

[Sjofn]

It's an interesting fight that demands quick reflexes and thinking on your feet, and damn those lumpy dudes hit like a freight train.

Nnnnnnnnooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.

That is seriously the thing we lack most in our raids. 

[K9]

Nah, don't worry. Our DPS seemed to get the hang of what to hit and what not to hit after 7 or so wipes :p

[Sjofn]

If one person just straight up is incapable of not sucking or learning or retaining, will the rest of the raid be able to give them a piggyback ride through it?

Basically we have a really sweet man who is on morphine (he's bedridden due to a work-related injury from a long time ago) and he just cannot think fast, and he rarely retains anything. Which is understandable, but makes raiding with him ... exciting. And we're a buncha softies that keep him around in raids anyway.  


EDIT: He is obviously not the only derpderpderp person on our raids (we're all capable of derpage  ) but he OF COURSE has a really high attendance so I always feel like I should factor him in.

[Tannhauser]

Just tell him the wrong time for the raid.  When he asks what's going on tell him he's on drugs and must have mixed up the times.
Then see if he'll mail you some of that morphine.

[Selby]

If one person just straight up is incapable of not sucking or learning or retaining, will the rest of the raid be able to give them a piggyback ride through it?

Until you guys are decked out in gear from the instance or just flat out great at 9 or 24 manning content, no.  There really aren't any ways to piggy back people who can't think quickly or react to get out of situations where problems are caused.  Some fights just flat out end up with someone who can't move or think quickly wiping the raid or causing major issues (think Icehowl on TotC-10\25).

[Sjofn]

He DID manage Icehowl alright. If it's that level of quickness, where we can shriek him into compliance, that would probably be OK. But the twins fight broke his brain completely.

On the one hand, I like that the raids are challenging and that you can't really have any slackers. On the other, MAN it sucks sometimes.

[Selby]

But the twins fight broke his brain completely.

He'd probably be okay on the first boss and the 3rd if you keep him on the gunship.  The 2nd boss and the 4th boss are probably going to be major issues.

[K9]

If one person just straight up is incapable of not sucking or learning or retaining, will the rest of the raid be able to give them a piggyback ride through it?

Basically we have a really sweet man who is on morphine (he's bedridden due to a work-related injury from a long time ago) and he just cannot think fast, and he rarely retains anything. Which is understandable, but makes raiding with him ... exciting. And we're a buncha softies that keep him around in raids anyway.  


EDIT: He is obviously not the only derpderpderp person on our raids (we're all capable of derpage  ) but he OF COURSE has a really high attendance so I always feel like I should factor him in.

If he's DPS just stick him on the boss. With 6 DPS we used a 3/3 split for boss and adds. The hunter stayed on the boss the whole time, the two mages had to switch to kill the big skeleton adds (physical immune) and everything else was handled by the rogue, ret and boomkin. Nuking the boss is probably the easiest thing ever, especially if you're not having to switch. All he has do to is dodge death and decay (which you have about 2-3s to do).

[Sjofn]

He's an enhance shaman. The best thing about his shamaning is you NEVER KNOW when heroism is going to go off.  That there are physical immune adds is probably for the best.

In other news, I have realised another reason the new LFG tool is fucking awesome. Before we had a lot of people who would fuss about wanting to do five mans, but were pretty useless at actually getting their shit together to do them ("We need a tank." "I can tank for you." <five minutes later> "No tanks want to do <dungeon>? :("), so they generally wouldn't actually go. Now they actually grab whoever expresses interest and hop in the queue and off they go! It makes the guild line less fussy. 

[Shrike]

Heck, I'm not on morphine and no one ever has a clue when I'll fire heroism off. I don't even know when I'll fire it off. It just...happens.

[Rasix]

Can't you guys just have him sit the bench until a boss is on farm? I'd think he'd understand given his condition. That way he can mop up once everything is pretty much idiot proof.

I've been in a guild where a similar skill level player meant you were basically doing all of the content with a handicap.  It was so nice when he stopped playing his resto druid and started playing a warlock.  Then of course, he went right back to resto druid in the next expansion.  This was a player we had to summon or res past frogger.  I guy that once died twice to void zones on KT during the same attempt.  However, he didn't have the whole "on drugs" reason for his horribleness, he was just plain bad at WoW.  

Of course, I'm the kind of player that never notices when he buffs wear off, forgets to soulstone, sometimes doesn't notice when his pet's dead, forgets he has a cookie, etc.  Of course, I don't raid, and when I did I was a lot more conscientious about that stuff.

[March]

In other news, I have realised another reason the new LFG tool is fucking awesome. Before we had a lot of people who would fuss about wanting to do five mans, but were pretty useless at actually getting their shit together to do them ("We need a tank." "I can tank for you." <five minutes later> "No tanks want to do <dungeon>? :("), so they generally wouldn't actually go. Now they actually grab whoever expresses interest and hop in the queue and off they go! It makes the guild line less fussy.  

Yeah, as a healer the best runs have been when I complete a guild group.

On a side, side note I'd like to see either a tighter gear check for the harder random heroics (HoR) or a way to self select out of some dungeons... my anecdotal experience is that scarcity seems to pair me and an equally marginally geared tank with 3 high GS dps.  Ironically, this does not work nearly as well as a high GS Tank/Healer combo carrying marginal dps.  Bottom line: I'm the weak link and I'd be perfectly happy to stay the fuck out of HoR until I farm more badges... but the lack of Healers seems to put me in some tough spots.  Just asking for a tiny piece of granularity in my Randomness.

Side note cubed: I'm noticing a lot of DK "tanks" that have a high gearscore but die absurdly fast - see note #2 above.  It's no shock that these DPS'rs are trying to get fast groups by "tanking" in marginal gear - so I'm wondering if the Battlegroup PvP (use highest gear score for equipment _owned_) mechanic is perhaps not the right one for PvE... sure, it prevents exploits in PvP BG, but is sure screws with PvE.

Metaphysical question: is there any design change that would fix the Tank dearth issues?  I've played support roles for almost 10-years now and have no issues with the challenge and stress of healing; I'd tank too, but for the fact that I cannot get past the universal assumption that the Tank is _also_ your official tour-guide for the dungeon.  I'd happily tank if I didn't have to herd the cats and memorize every map/encounter.

edit: spelling