Cataclysm Raiding

[Rendakor]

A couple things you got incorrect. First, you're eligible to receive loot from a boss twice a week: Once from a normal (10 or 25, regular or heroic) raid, and once from LFR. Also, LFR gear is 384, which is lower than heroic FL's 391.

[Merusk]

Well that makes more sense, but completely baffles me as to why on earth they bothered.  Just to prove you could exploit the system?

[Evildrider]

Well that makes more sense, but completely baffles me as to why on earth they bothered.  Just to prove you could exploit the system?

From what I gather some of the 4 piece bonuses allow some extra raid cooldowns to be used?  I think it's on the druid sets or something.  So they were farming the gear to help with heroic attempts.

[SurfD]

Well that makes more sense, but completely baffles me as to why on earth they bothered.  Just to prove you could exploit the system?

From what I gather some of the 4 piece bonuses allow some extra raid cooldowns to be used?  I think it's on the druid sets or something.  So they were farming the gear to help with heroic attempts.

Yeah, the 4 set for most of the Tank pieces are pretty OP.  They basicly cause one of your personal tank cooldowns to apply to the entire raid when used.

http://www.wowhead.com/item=77013 = Druid
http://www.wowhead.com/item=76988 = Warrior
http://www.wowhead.com/item=77003 = Paladin
http://www.wowhead.com/item=77008 = Deathknight.

[Ingmar]

I'm pretty sure that's not what they did exactly - there was something about disconnecting at some point that lets you loot the same boss more than once in a week.

[Paelos]

Yeah I think it's more exploity than using LFR that way. I think it had to do with looting bosses over and over.

[SurfD]

From what i understand, the exploit worked in the following manner:

You are only supposed to be able to get one shot at loot per boss per lockout in a Raid Environment.  Once you have killed a boss in LFR, you are flagged as having killed it, and can not get loot from it again untill the LFR lockout resets.  However, if you have 24 people who are already "loot locked" and one person who is not, then everyone passes on any loot that drops, and the 24 loot locked peopl all ALT-F4 disconnect.  This essentially auto passes the raid leader position to the one person who was not loot locked, effectively makeing him masterlooter or something, and can just loot everything off the boss because everything was passed on and it is free to grab or something.  Then when everyone else loggs back in, something wonky happened that bypassed the LFR loot lockout, allowing the guy who picked up the loot that dropped to freely pass it to anyone who was present for the kill.  

So you just get 24 loot locked guild raiders, one alt, faceroll the 4 bosses, give loot to whoever you want, grab a new alt, and repeat untill you either run out of alts, or all 24 raiders have everything they need.

Was bascily sort of exploiting the "tradable soulbound items" system that they implimented.  Their idea that no one is supposed to get multiple shots at loot off the same raid boss in one lockout broke down when you could get multiple kills of the same boss in different groups where loot still dropped.  There was a warrior on my server who was offering people 5k per item if they would run the LFR bosses with him, roll on warrior loot, and pass the loot to him if they won something he wanted.

[Wolf]

I don't know if anybody from the top guilds did it that way. I know exactly how Paragon did it, a friend of mine is friends with Baltha and he asked. All they did was sign up for LFR with 22 mains or alts that need the loot and 3 people on the 3 tokens that were eligible to loot. The 3 fresh alts need on all the loot and redistribute it to the people that are actually going to use it. No disconnects, reconnects or anything so exploity. It's just a hole in Blizzard's system that was never caught because there isn't a single person with "FIRSTKILLRACE" mentality on their QA team. They ended up removing items off of some people and telling them to behave, but did not ban anyone. Top guilds did it for the retarded good 4p bonuses for some classes (mage, hunter, holy paladin). People playing in the top 20 guilds are not stupid and they'll never do anything remotely risky and get bans on key people the week before the real race starts.

It's just another instance of the complete disconnect between blizzard and the very top raiders - like the Dragonwrath drop rate nerf, and the actual nerf of the staff in this patch. I can imagine the conversation - um, hey, Paragon are actually clearing 4 25m fireland raids on their farm day to get more staffs, we should probably do something about that. Wait? Can they DO that?

[caladein]

It's just another instance of the complete disconnect between blizzard and the very top raiders - like the Dragonwrath drop rate nerf, and the actual nerf of the staff in this patch. I can imagine the conversation - um, hey, Paragon are actually clearing 4 25m fireland raids on their farm day to get more staffs, we should probably do something about that. Wait? Can they DO that?

It's not so much a disconnect as an acceptance that one simply can't design around a group of players that will never abide by the spirit of the systems one makes at all times.  Or, more germanely, that doing so makes the game worse for the vast majority of one's player base.

Any collection quest is going to benefit from having the recipients split off into their own instances.  The important thing is to make it so the temptation for the "average" 25-man (which is still pretty hardcore by this forum's standards) to split into 2-3 10-man groups doesn't exist, which I think they did for the most part.  If a top-end guild wants use its enormous bench to run multiple heroic 25-man groups, then there's really no way to stop them outside of some really stupid (unique-ish per server) or annoying (unique per raid) systems.  And the solutions to stopping the poaching of legendary wielders are even less palatable.

[Ironwood]

I'm sorry, Wolf, I still don't get it.

Slower, little words ?

[Wolf]

not sure if making fun of me, but i'll bite 

The design behind LFR is that once you kill a boss and get to the loot bit, it doesn't matter if you roll on items or not, you're locked out from getting items from that boss for that raid reset. You can still queue and kill the bosses if you need to help out guildies, or "for fun", but you can't get any loot. Since Blizzard's QA is amazing, they missed a pretty glaring hole - even if you're locked out, someone else can roll for that item and trade it to you.

There are several insane 4 piece set bonuses this tier, namely the hunter, mage and paladin ones. These bonuses will give the guilds that have as many characters as possible with them in the raid a leg up on the "race to the world first". The LFR allows 25 people from the same guild to sign up for it and roflstomp the instance. What Paragon did was the following - they sign up with 22 geared characters to make the run fast and they get 3 "fresh" characters in the raid - one on each token. These characters than need on all the tokens, and redistribute (trade) them among the "mains" that would normally be locked out, since they have killed the raid before. Rince and repeat, untill you have 4p on all the people that need them.

The way I see it is the following - if it's on live, it's fair game. I don't see that as an exploit, and in fact all top guilds sent a ticket to make sure they have a green light before they started doing this. As I said - they're not stupid, and if this was considered an exploit, there would be bans. If blizzard had a single employe on their QA team that had the mentality and thinking of a top wow player - they weren't going to be in the position they were in when the playerbase got wind of this. As it is the whole "bad progression guild, bad" bit blizzard is doing right now is laughable. Whatever item removal they did, was manual, as I have a set of gloves on my paladin alt I shouldn't have if they did some automatic purge :)

[Wolf]

It's just another instance of the complete disconnect between blizzard and the very top raiders - like the Dragonwrath drop rate nerf, and the actual nerf of the staff in this patch. I can imagine the conversation - um, hey, Paragon are actually clearing 4 25m fireland raids on their farm day to get more staffs, we should probably do something about that. Wait? Can they DO that?

It's not so much a disconnect as an acceptance that one simply can't design around a group of players that will never abide by the spirit of the systems one makes at all times.  Or, more germanely, that doing so makes the game worse for the vast majority of one's player base.

Any collection quest is going to benefit from having the recipients split off into their own instances.  The important thing is to make it so the temptation for the "average" 25-man (which is still pretty hardcore by this forum's standards) to split into 2-3 10-man groups doesn't exist, which I think they did for the most part.  If a top-end guild wants use its enormous bench to run multiple heroic 25-man groups, then there's really no way to stop them outside of some really stupid (unique-ish per server) or annoying (unique per raid) systems.  And the solutions to stopping the poaching of legendary wielders are even less palatable.

That is just not correct. You have a group of people who's behaviour is entirely predictable. They will do whatever is necessary to have the best gear available at all times. You can always design systems having that in mind - Dragonwrath is a very good example. After it got nerfed the staff is still very much BIS, just not retardedly overpowered. The heroic deathwing weapons will get very close to it's performance. That's the way the staff should have looked initially. Instead we had the following happen: Dragonwrath makes it to live in it's very overpowered form. After the race is over and top guilds are sitting on their hands 6 days a week, they start raiding an extra day and making up to 4 25m clears to get as many staffs as possible. That's surprising to noone - they want the best gear available for the next tier of content. Blizzard gets wind of this, a couple of months after it's happened, and ninja implements a knee-jerk fix by nerfing drop rates on the quests. Of course in the processs they fuck 10m guilds sideways and get a shitstorm on their hands. They revert the fix and instead nerf the actual staff a couple of months down the line.

How do you avoid that whole thing without the messing up the game of the more casual players? I said that at the top - think and don't introduce such a powerful weapon into the middle of the expansion. Balance it as it is now - and release it like that. But, no, legendaries must be INSANE. No, they need to be orange and turn you into a lady dragon, while staying barely BIS for the rest of the expansion. That's enough for everyone.

As an aside don't tell me that the insane grind that Dragonwrath was is accesible to any casual player. I did not miss a single raid from the first week of July, up to the middle of November to get that staff. Yeah, our progress is more akin to a bunch of firends getting together a couple nights a week, because that's what we mostly are, but we are still nowhere near casual.

[Rendakor]

We've done 10m FL every week since it went live, and we'll be getting our first staff next week. 

[Ironwood]

not sure if making fun of me,

Nope.  I'm really having that hard a time getting my head around it.  I shall now read.

[Ironwood]

not sure if making fun of me, but i'll bite 

The design behind LFR is that once you kill a boss and get to the loot bit, it doesn't matter if you roll on items or not, you're locked out from getting items from that boss for that raid reset. You can still queue and kill the bosses if you need to help out guildies, or "for fun", but you can't get any loot. Since Blizzard's QA is amazing, they missed a pretty glaring hole - even if you're locked out, someone else can roll for that item and trade it to you.

Right.  That explains it all perfectly.  My problem here was that I thought it locked you to an instance that was now empty of bosses.  Did they change that or is LFR different ?

[Miasma]

The bosses return with each new raid so you can run them over and over again.  Same as the dungeons.

[Wolf]

not sure if making fun of me, but i'll bite 

The design behind LFR is that once you kill a boss and get to the loot bit, it doesn't matter if you roll on items or not, you're locked out from getting items from that boss for that raid reset. You can still queue and kill the bosses if you need to help out guildies, or "for fun", but you can't get any loot. Since Blizzard's QA is amazing, they missed a pretty glaring hole - even if you're locked out, someone else can roll for that item and trade it to you.

Right.  That explains it all perfectly.  My problem here was that I thought it locked you to an instance that was now empty of bosses.  Did they change that or is LFR different ?

It's different. 10 & 25 regular raids still work as before, LFR lockout is only based on bosses. So you could kill Morchok with one raid, and drop group, resign, kill Morchok again (but not get any loot from it) and then kill Zonozz and roll on loot there.

[Rendakor]

Got the Spine down last night after only 3 (2 real) attempts. Good, fun fight although the loot sort of blows as a DK tank. Put in a couple attempts on Madness but Sun isn't a usual raid night so we didn't hang too late. Going back again tonight and hopefully we'll get it.

The key seems to be figuring out the order you take out the buffs. We watched the Fatboss guide (because they're one of the best 10m strategy makers) and the order they suggested was Green (G), Blue (B), Bronze (Y), Red (R) but we were having a lot of problems killing the slimes with Blue down. I didn't expect a kill last night since we only had time for a few attempts, but tonight we're going to try GRYB or GRBY and see what works. I can't imagine dealing with the bolt without the slow aura which is why I'm inclined to leave Bronze for last.

[Wolf]

This is coming from not reasearching the fight enough and "tacticing" on our own, at which we suck ass, so I strongly suggest you take my advice, so you don't have to leave it for next week like we had to

3healers/2tanks/5dps - Green - Red - Bronze - Blue. Blood blobs are IMPOSSIBLE to do without blue. I watched the quantum guide and I agree they're normally really good about reckognizing the best possible tactic, but they droped the ball on this one. Handling the blobs without Kalecgos is insanely hard. We lost 2 hours developing a workable tactic with 2 healers that we'll never use  

Our biggest problem and what probably ended up costing us the kill was actually having too much dps. We didn't have enough to do a tentacle in one impale, but we ended up killing the DW tentacle too fast and tank/raid CDs didn't have time to reset.

Meh, I'm in no hurry tbh, we'll get it ez on Weds or early on Thursday. And will have time to finish off Ragnaros  

[Rendakor]

3 heal/2 tank/5 DPS is the setup we were using too. How hard are the mini tentacles (the ones Red usually kills) to deal with? We never switched the strat last night so we never actually had to deal with them. Also, what do you do for the one Bolt that will hit because Bronze isn't up? Run away and pop all raid CDs?

[Wolf]

we were mostly running 6dps, but the little tentacles were never an issue, they straight up disappeared as soon as they poped. Just make sure everyone is single targeting them down. We tried to aoe down the bloods without kalecgos with heroism up and weren't even close, though.

The bolt is the hardest thing to deal with. The way it works is - as soon as the circle appears it will drop within 2-3 seconds, after it drops it will still have all its health and tick for about 18k to everyone on the platform every second (tooltip says 5, but it's every second) and since you still have the side-tentacle (Corruption or whatever) up, you need to spread out so it doesnt stomp the whole raid. Should be slightly easier to deal with with 3 healers, but the bolt needs to die yesterday, it hurts quite a bit and combined with the tentacle stomp, you might lose someone. Spread CDs to have some preventive/stacking up before it hits (rallying cry/barrier/AMZ) and some after it hits (divine guardian/tranquility/tree/aura mastery). I took it like a man, with dispersion, DK also didnt move with Bubble, so keep that in mind - some classes with really major personal CDs can take the hit even from a couple of yards.

After that all you have to deal with is make the cataclysm DPS check, don't be afraid to use hero on that - if you get into p2, you'll probably kill it.

[Rendakor]

Alright, thanks. Sounds like your comp has a few more CDs than us (No Rallying Cry or AMZ) but we'll do what we can.

[Rokal]

We had a couple composition problems this week (one of our main tanks unavailable, one of our better healers without power), but we're 5/8 on 10m normal. For comparison we were 6/7 on H FL (after nerfs of course) before 4.3. Mor'chok we one-shot, but everything else took ~3 attempts. We only put 3 attempts into Blackhorn, but people were dying to shockwave in P2. Nothing quite like assigning rdps/healers to groups of two, and then watching three people die to one shockwave when the boss is at 40% 

It's hard to judge the balance of these fights given that we all have a decent amount of H FL gear. Yor'sahj and Zon'ozz might have felt pretty demanding on healers in flat 378 gear. Mor'chok and Hagara would have been chumps even with bad gear. Ultraxion I'm not sure we'd have been able to do without H FL gear, though I think the fight would have been easier with an extra dps instead of a third healer (especially since our third healer this week was new to healing).

The raid zone overall is disappointing. It's a boss gauntlet through boring re-hashed areas. The tuning of the bosses probably would have felt much better if there were more bosses in the zone so that things could have ramped up appropriately after the first 4.

I'm curious to see how the tuning of the heroics is.

[Rendakor]

Got him after about an hour of attempts! Snagged his 2h sword for my DK tank, even though it's terrible with it's lack of mastery. We ended up doing Green, Bronze, Red, Blue because the Blistering Tentacles were a huge pain in the ass. Had to save lust for phase 2; we hit it just when the first fragments came up so we could burn them and the other adds quickly, then push Deathwing. We got a third set of fragments right at the end, but just ignored them (popping Dream when targetted) and burned him to death.

[Wolf]

Grats, it's a cool title :)

And I stand corrected on the LFR thing, super disappointed in Paragon, they normally know better. I hope some lower end guild snags the madness first, though I seriously doubt it.

[Outlawedprod]

Grats, it's a cool title :)

And I stand corrected on the LFR thing, super disappointed in Paragon, they normally know better. I hope some lower end guild snags the madness first, though I seriously doubt it.

Supposedly blizz is unloading 8 day bans today. http://media.mmo-champion.com/images/news/2011/december/LFRExploitBan.png

[Wolf]

had 10 raiders online, cobbled together a raid, and managed to take him in 3 attempts, first time we got to phase 2. Yay heroics tomorrow.

[Ironwood]

An eight day suspension.

Fuck off.

 

[Rendakor]

That's a week of no Heroic progression for all guilds involved, giving others a shot at the world firsts. I'm not sure what else you could expect to happen; they're not going to perma-ban the entirety of their hardcore raiding scene.

[Rokal]

They're also losing all the extra LFR gear. So they'll be over a week behind on heroic progress/gear, and they don't even get to keep the gear they did get from LFR. Seems like a pretty substantial punishment to me.

[Paelos]

It's a slap on the wrist, but most of them are buddies with the devs during the testing cycles, so they aren't going to fuck with them.

[El Gallo]

Jesus, they didn't interfere with anyone else's gaming, an 8-day suspension is more than enough for a first-time offender. 

[Ingmar]

Yeah it strikes me as a pretty hefty punishment really.

[Paelos]

Jesus, they didn't interfere with anyone else's gaming, an 8-day suspension is more than enough for a first-time offender.  

Even for guys like Ensidia who were banned? They exploited the Lich King and got a 3 day banned for that when they claimed a first kill.

http://wow.joystiq.com/2010/02/04/ensidia-temporarily-banned-for-exploits/

EDIT: I'm not saying automatically perma-ban them, but it seems sort of limp-dicked response from the good ole-day when they banned entire guilds for exploiting walls in AQ40.

[Ingmar]

Except this wasn't Ensidia? Did they also do something this time?