WoW - more cotninuation

[Mack Kilimaro]

[quote name='PhelanArcetus' post='1288984' date='Mar 26 2008, 11.35']Obviously we're not nearly as awesome. In fairness, the healer is an alt, so he's not as geared as he could have been. We had... two wipes due simply to me not pulling far enough back. For example, I unwittingly aggroed the first boss doing the first of three pulls in his room. And two people were stuck outside the room and thus useless as well. That's a guaranteed wipe. I've gotten out of the habit of seriously doing LoS pulls, and that cost us in a spot or two.[/quote]

I went in MrT (terminology ganked from WoWinsider) last night and had a similarly unfortunate experience. Basically I went in and I was like, "Fuck it, I don't need to look anything up, how hard can it be?" and then proceeded to make pretty much every mistake that you could possibly make, not having known any of the shit ahead of time.

Had four of my guildies with me and one healer who was someone's friend, I didn't inspect his gear at the time but when he later asked if he could need on something to upgrade his green healing bracers (and what he rolled on was spell damage bracers) I had the inkling it was going to be interesting.

At this point, we'd already wiped on the first boss because I didn't know the door was going to lock out behind me, so it was only me and another DPSer in there. HAHA, I FAIL.

Killed all the wyrms to get to the second boss, and the healer is like, "Yeah, I've done this instance before, it's just a tank and spank." OK, so I take his word for it. The boss did his "summons pure energy" and I my knee-jerk reaction was "I guess it's like the guy in Crypts where it'll bomb everyone." So I tried to move, except then he summoned like 4 more in a row and killed everyone. As I died, I realized I could target the "pure energy" and in fact it was more of a Curator kind of situation.

Incidentally, the whole Scrying Orb thing is the coolest thing that I have ever seen in World of Warcraft to date. If you haven't viewed that thing with the music on, you're really missing out.

Third boss... I look at the mobs and I can see what's going on. We had the shaman, the rogue, the naga warlord and the hunter, and for CC we had a rogue (sapped the shaman) and a hunter (trapping the rogue). I ask the healer if there's anything else I need to know. "Nope, just kill the warlord first, have the pet OT it, and just MT focus on the priestess". I should have known better at this point than to listen to him, but we pulled. I discover to my great horror that the mobs are entirely immune to taunt. Fail.

Second try, everyone died again, except for me, and I had the rogue add, hunter add (pet dead) and boss left, each with varying amounts of damage... and I killed them all by myself. Alright, that was a pretty cool tank moment. It got down to just me and the hunter add and I had about 700 health, having already potted and done Last Stand, but I did Concussion Blow + bandage to get the last bit of his health down. There are times, not many, but a few times, where it's good to have rolled into a normal instance with T5 tank gear.

So one pull before Kael'thas, we're bound to make it, right? Except I looked at the healer's gear finally and I see he's in all blues and greens (with a few welfare epics) and some of his gear isn't even healing, it's still spell damage. First we ended up wiping because we were fighting on those steps and he was out of LOS from me, and the second time he was doing AOE heals when I was the only person taking damage. Yeah, that's what I get for running with a pugger, and not checking his gear out from the start, I guess.

Tonight hopefully I will get back in there with a little more CC (maybe a mage or a warlock instead of having an arms warrior in almost all welfare epics; since this was the guy who brought in the healer, I should have known better) and not to mention a healer who is actually capable of healing.

EDIT:

BTW, where are your assorted servers at for the whole Shattered Sun Offensive? Mine was sitting at about 44% complete of the first phase when I left for class, which represented about 24 hours of server uptime. Faster than I figured we'd be moving, although I'm sure the other phases will take a lot longer than 2.25 days.

[PhelanArcetus]

AD US was at 44% about 2AM server time last night. I haven't looked since then.

I saw a blue post (I was actually looking for word on the messed up chat log stuff, and didn't find that) stating the expectation of completing the Anvil (which I guess is the state granting access to the new badge items) as something that would take most servers a month. I wonder how legit that is.

On the second boss, my instinct was to target the pure energy. Somehow, as the tank, I got the killing blow on all four of the ones that spawned. +200% damage for me :)

[Starkimus]

[quote name='PhelanArcetus' post='1287799' date='Mar 25 2008, 15.39']The lowest two non-tank, non-healer people in my 25-man when it comes to damage output are both mages. It's rather sad; they shouldn't be ineffective at all. In their case, I'm pretty sure it's skill/playstyle, rather than gear. At least, rather than gear quality. They may have no clue how to gear up.[/quote]

Phelan / all:

Damage from mages. The first question to ask your mages is...what is their Spell Hit. Even if they have +800 spell damage...if the spell hit is low, their damage is going to blow. I know for our Kara and Gruul runs, I put on my spell hit gear to get over 100 Spell hit. My damage drops from 797 to 745 but without the spell hit, my actual damage suffers badly.

Of course, I am sure you guys have already thought of this, but just wanted to bring it up. Spell Hit is one of the more overlooked stats by alot of mages.

In other news, I finally got the PvP chest piece. Go me!! Two more blues to replace (gloves and a trinket). Need 40 badges for the really nice gloves. Or, I could save up for the PvP ones. Don't know yet. I get to run Kara this week, so maybe Ill get lucky and get the T4 gloves. Already have the shoulders. Next piece to upgrade will be my Battlecast Hood. The S3 hood looks nice, or I could try for the T4 one. However, with my erratic raiding availability, I will most likely get the S3 one first...

Guild downed Gruul 3 weeks in a row now, so that instance is officially on farm. 3 bosses downed in ZA so far, but only started running that one a few weeks ago. Working on getting Tanks geared for SSC fights and this weekend I think the 25 man group is headed to The Eye. Good luck Obsidian Fists!!

Hasta!
Stark Out!

[Lyanna Stark]

Well, as for his spell hit, I have no clue. I'll check his gear later. Good advice all around tho, thanks.


Magisters Terrace: We once shotted everything up to Kael'thas without breaking a sweat. Got to Kael'thas and wiped maybe 7-8 times before we gave up. Everytime I got airborne I got utterly, utterly two shotted. I equipped my PvP gear, with bloodpact that puts me on 10.1k. Same still.

My AOE heals were inefficient. Have they been stealthnerfed or something? PoH used to be my favourite heal. Now....is it even worth using? It didn't seem to do anything. Maybe it was a range issue, but Kael'thas room is tiny!

I just have no fucking clue how people do it. How do you do it? Group setup me (priest, 1800ish healing), warrior tank, affl lock, rogue, BM hunter.

We tried kiting the phoenixes around the ledges, around the room, to the door, tried ignoring them, nuking them, all kinds of shit, nothing did any difference. Bring on phase two and BAM I was fairy in 3 sec flat. And yes. I did try to stay away from the orbs. With my 10k HP I should be able to take a bit of a beating as well, but no.

I mean, fuck me, I'd rather take gauntlet in heroic SH instead of this. Actually, I'd take heroic SH without the mortal striking horror mobs instead of this.

It's a normal bloody instance that was piss easy up to the last boss, what is the bloody issue?


EDIT: Shattered sun offensive progression: when we did our quests, around 7 pm, prime time, the server had been up since....3 pm maybe. Progression stood at 27%. I suppose horde and alliance share the progression as well?

Lots of pvp enabled alliance idiots too standing on the questgivers.

[BlueRose]

[quote name='PhelanArcetus' post='1289503' date='Mar 26 2008, 13.43']AD US was at 44% about 2AM server time last night. I haven't looked since then.[/quote]
Phelan I didnt know you were on AD too!

A new video card kept me out of the game last night but I'm hoping to get in a Magister's terrace run tonight. Sounds like I will have the new badge chest piece sooner than I thought.

[Third Knight on the Left]

[quote name='Stego' post='1288950' date='Mar 26 2008, 10.13']I'm having a hard time understanding why people think Terrace is hard. In my group we had CC, granted, but we also had a tank and a healer who have been 70 for 3 weeks and are in lots of blues. People who have been 70 since last summer should be able to 3 man it, no problem.[/quote]


Yeah maybe your right. I did it again and it went smooth... then again T6 tank this time. *shrug* Will try heroic tommorow if i can.

[Stego]

Maggy down, Gruul on farm. SSC this weekend.

Breakneck pace.

[Arataniello]

[quote name='Mack Kilimaro' post='1289438' date='Mar 26 2008, 18.04']BTW, where are your assorted servers at for the whole Shattered Sun Offensive? Mine was sitting at about 44% complete of the first phase when I left for class, which represented about 24 hours of server uptime. Faster than I figured we'd be moving, although I'm sure the other phases will take a lot longer than 2.25 days.[/quote]

Malfurion was at 99% this morning before the damn rolling restarts took it down for too long - so I had to leave for work. I read somewhere (MMO champion website I think) that one of the subsequent phases/stages should take about a MONTH to unlock. The stage that opens up the badge vendor in Sunwell Isle.

Aratan

[PhelanArcetus]

Well I didn't know what mages actually need. My mage retains the need only for teleport & portal reagents. And he can't do Shatt. But he does look spiffy in his junky old Arcane Robe and ... level 25ish green of fiery wrath hat. That's his job, to look good on character selection.

For these two mages, assuming what I caught them in on the armory is their normal gear. The higher one is arcane and has 115 hit rating and does not have Elemental Precision. The one who comes out lower has 89 and likewise does not have Elemental Precision. And even I can tell there's a couple things wrong in that spec. Doesn't surprise me, the player's wife/girlfriend is famous in my guild for nonsense specs. (She's also the person who played a priest, healing ZG/AQ20, and thought that power word: shield was a paladin spell.) Looking at her hunter's spec, 17/41/3, she has... 10 talents that are only partially filled in. Her Holy/Disc priest has 5... including a single point in Spirit Tap. Has she, perhaps, not heard of respec'ing? Is one point in Spirit Tap for soloing (or maybe because the talent has a nice icon?) worth having only 1/2 Improved Divine Spirit?

Didn't do anything but some dailies yesterday; had a D&D game. I did a total of 8 SSO supplies drops, bringing me to 17 (turns out you can't get the Destroy the Gateway again until you've been to the island and back through the gateway, and my rogue hadn't done so), and got one badge on each character.

We were at around 94% when I logged off, 8:30 PM server time; I assume we completed sometime before I went to bed, but I didn't log back in to check how we were doing on the next phase.

BlueRose, what faction/guild on AD? Any that my guild doesn't get along with? I'm in Pirates of Janeiro, alliance side.

[Third Knight on the Left]

Rant On!

We go to do Heroic MgT, I start popping my elixers, food and oil, then the other mage.... "oh I'm saved catch you later." Okay sucks but lookie there's a hunter in the queue. Hunter joins... "Oh I did this ealier when does it reset...". *slap forhead* After that I was okay well it won't be hard getting a dps. Priest, oh this other group needs a healer, gfy, and she's gone. Hurray I spent 10g on an instance I didn't even get to do. :cry:

[Lyanna Stark]

Wha? a healing priest with points in spirit tap? 0.o

I mean, meditation OWNS spirit tap. 30% mana regen continues while casting (every sane healing priest has this awesome talent in the early stages of the disc tree). Together with imp DS is is pwnage. I grind in my primal mooncloth set and it works really well. At some +1800 healing I have more spell damage than most mages in our guild. :lol:

To be honest, the first time I respecced my priest at 70, I forgot to calculate with imp DS, but in my defence I had some 10 min to do it all before the raid, and I was getting tells all over the place. :lol:

Anyways, I sobered up a bit later and respecced to a proper PvE raiding spec a bit later. :P


EDIT: Oh, one thing tho about 2.4: the mana regen. Wow. I gained some 30 mp5 while casting I think, just from the patch. Sweet!

[PhelanArcetus]

Not points :) Point. Yes, one point. It was actually a rhetorical question :) Of course it's not worth it by any sane estimation, but her talent trees make you wonder what the hell she's thinking. Fortunately she hasn't been around much, which saves me having one more bad healer.

I honestly don't know what spells the arcane mage casts; assuming I've gotten a 2.4-compatible version of Recap, or picked out another combat monitoring add-on (I tried YACL which a friend was interested in looking at, but it kept getting me disconnected mid-fight) by Monday I'll probably know. The fire mage... he's not in my guild and I'd have no faith in my ability to talk him into spec'ing (or playing) smart. I assume he just does fireball spam; I know the fire mages all got a damage boost when the one from my guild got back from a vacation/heavy workload/whatever, since he's the only one who actually puts up the scorch debuff. Yeah, there's nobody saying "hey guys, why isn't anyone putting up improved scorch?". The mages normally don't get a draenei; we often put 4 mages and 1 boomkin in one group. We've got no elemental shammies (one or two resto and an enhancement depending on the day), so that's out.

Top damage in that group tends to be the rogue from my guild, followed by the mage from my guild. Sometimes the other rogue is up there, sometimes he's well behind. The boomkin is rather low on damage, and we're wondering why, since we're pretty sure she's competent, and her gear looks about equal to a boomkin who was utterly destroying me in a furnace run over the weekend. I'm hoping with a new recap I can look at her combat time and casting to figure out why she's so low.

I've heard complaints about the spirit change; I can't say whether it buffed my paladin or nerfedt, but apparently a lot of hunters find they have less regen. Especially the ones who wear leather for damage output.

[Lyanna Stark]

Hunters and mana regen? Does not compute :P

Maybe the ones insisting on using Aspect of the Viper a lot? My hunter has a fair chunk of leather gear, and is definitely focused far more towards agi, AP and crit than any other stat, and she does suffer from no mana regen. However, that is normally made up by consumables. Or a quick FD with AotV up and drinking.

My record is having to FD and drink twice on Prince since I totally mistimed my mana pots. Ouch.

Re spirit buff/nerf...my character sheet says I have more mana regen in combat now than before, but it actually feels like less. Which is weird.

MM: thanks for the number crunching. I'll make sure to pass that on to our mages and hope they take it to heart. :)

[Third Knight on the Left]

[quote name='PhelanArcetus' post='1290484' date='Mar 27 2008, 09.59']Not points :) Point. Yes, one point. It was actually a rhetorical question :) Of course it's not worth it by any sane estimation, but her talent trees make you wonder what the hell she's thinking. Fortunately she hasn't been around much, which saves me having one more bad healer.

I honestly don't know what spells the arcane mage casts; assuming I've gotten a 2.4-compatible version of Recap, or picked out another combat monitoring add-on (I tried YACL which a friend was interested in looking at, but it kept getting me disconnected mid-fight) by Monday I'll probably know. The fire mage... he's not in my guild and I'd have no faith in my ability to talk him into spec'ing (or playing) smart. I assume he just does fireball spam; I know the fire mages all got a damage boost when the one from my guild got back from a vacation/heavy workload/whatever, since he's the only one who actually puts up the scorch debuff. Yeah, there's nobody saying "hey guys, why isn't anyone putting up improved scorch?". The mages normally don't get a draenei; we often put 4 mages and 1 boomkin in one group. We've got no elemental shammies (one or two resto and an enhancement depending on the day), so that's out.

Top damage in that group tends to be the rogue from my guild, followed by the mage from my guild. Sometimes the other rogue is up there, sometimes he's well behind. The boomkin is rather low on damage, and we're wondering why, since we're pretty sure she's competent, and her gear looks about equal to a boomkin who was utterly destroying me in a furnace run over the weekend. I'm hoping with a new recap I can look at her combat time and casting to figure out why she's so low.

I've heard complaints about the spirit change; I can't say whether it buffed my paladin or nerfedt, but apparently a lot of hunters find they have less regen. Especially the ones who wear leather for damage output.[/quote]

Full Arcane can be viable if you stack a ton of intell and then use Arcane Blast as your main nuke. In fact its the best dps if you can somehow keep from going OOM all the time.

[Relic]

[quote name='Third Knight on the Left' post='1290579' date='Mar 27 2008, 12.50']Full Arcane can be viable if you stack a ton of intell and then use Arcane Blast as your main nuke. In fact its the best dps if you can somehow keep from going OOM all the time.[/quote]


my friend plays full arcane (he's probably the best mage on our server) and holds the wowstat record for mage dps on Illidan. he's a ridiculous min/maxer and an even better micromanager.

[BlueRose]

[quote name='PhelanArcetus' post='1290313' date='Mar 27 2008, 05.27']BlueRose, what faction/guild on AD? Any that my guild doesn't get along with? I'm in Pirates of Janeiro, alliance side.[/quote]

I'm Alliance too, human warrior, her name is Rhaenerys and my guild is the Disciples of Sarcasm.
Look me up next time you are on, we should be friends :)

[TerraPrime]

Druid healing is getting a shake-up:

[quote]Empowered Rejuvenation: This talent now properly affects the final heal from Lifebloom.

Lifebloom: The bonus coefficient on the final bloom effect has been reduced by 20%. This spell will no longer cause error messages when interacting with Spellsteal or while the Druid is under the effects of Mind Control.

Regrowth: The mana cost of this spell has been reduced by approximately 20%.[/quote]

Since Emp. Rejuv. is standard for all resto Druids, it iss nice to have that boost added to Lifebloom, but at the same time, they are reducing the bonus coefficient by 20%. I don't know how that's going to work out in terms of the final heal total. Have to try and see.

The mana reduction in Regrowth may actually make the spell useable. As it stands, most ToL druids seem to cast it only as backups, because it's the least mana-efficient HoT (Lifebloom > Rejuv > Regrwoth).

In the items, they finally removed the improved movement speed from the boomkin and healer set and replaced it with bonus to wrath and starfire and with regrowth. Seems like they want to push Regrowth. I wonder if it'll work? The problem with Regrowth is that it has a casting time, and it is mana inefficient compared to other HoTs. Suppose the new change makes it mana efficient? *shrugs*

I'm also not clear on what they mean about tagging mana regen from spirit onto intellect. [quote]Spirit-Based Mana Regeneration: This system has been adjusted so that as your intellect rises, you will regenerate more mana per point of spirit.[/quote]

It seems that this is good for Mages and Warlocks, whose mana regen will improve because they get more regen per spirit due to high intellect. What about for priests and druids? Used to be that stacking spirits is good, so now does it mean that we need to stack some intellect as well? Is there a talk on this over in ElitistJerk? I don't typically follow that site, so if some of you come across a discussion on that, please link. :)



Nothing major for hunters as far as I can see, though I am emo that they did this: [quote]Hunters will no longer spin around if they cast Aimed Shot or Steady Shot while facing away from their target.[/quote]

Being able to turn while aiming was a bit cool, and you can track moving targets, to avoid wasting cast time as your target moves. So this is a bit of a nerf, really.

[Relic]

terra, all the druid changes are due to pvp concerns. not much should change pve wise for a resto drood. they also nerfed the range on cyclone by 10 yards. and druids will still be the best 2/3's healers.

priests and mages got a sweet buff with that int/spirit thing.

[PhelanArcetus]

All classes (with mana) use the same formula for regen, and it involves their Int, Spi, and level, rather than Class, Spi, and level.

Apparently the new formula is ManaRegen(SPI, INT, LEVEL) = (0.001+SPI*BASE_REGEN[LEVEL]*(INT^0.5))*5. For level 70, BASE_REGEN[LEVEL] is 0.009327. That's in terms of mana per 5 seconds.

[PhelanArcetus]

Well, we did Gruul's. Maulgar got one-shotted, and Gruul himself took a couple; really, I think we were looking at problems with a paladin tank on him. I didn't look at detail on the first, and I'm not sure how we made it through the second time the MT died... but the MT died because he didn't get Holy Shield back up and got crushed. Presumably he was silenced when he tried to refresh it, and didn't actually note that.

I picked up a Hammer of the Naaru that... I'm honestly not sure what to do with. Simply put, it's like my Gorehowl, except it trades the crit for intellect. I'm not sure it's actually useful to me, but nobody else wanted it. Maybe I'll use it for when I need a bigger mana pool. The interesting news is that with Judgment of Wisdom, Blessing of Wisdom, and a shaman with Mana Spring totem, and a few heals on me, I honestly didn't have any mana issues at all. To the extent that in that sort of situation, I can definitely give up intellect on gear for more hit/crit/AP. (I was also categorically the highest melee damage, despite there being two rogues, an enhancement shaman, and a feral druid.) The top damage was an elemental shaman and the four hunters.

We went after Magtheridon as well, and we almost got him on our second try. First try, tank didn't pick him up, and then got destroyed when he did. Second, we had him around 10% when at least one of the cube clickers screwed up, and most of the raid got blast waved to death. I would have saved myself, but I had just popped my wings so I couldn't bubble. I was running so close on the MT's threat I was generally not using Exorcism despite the fact that I could have. He's a very straightforward fight now.

There, I ended up as #3 on damage. As a ret paladin. We almost got him, we'll get him next week. And maybe by then I'll be able to use the Vent server.

The newly opened daily in Blade's Edge, Intercepting the Mana Cells, is terrible. Kill ethereals until a device drops. Use that device to turn everything black and fight phase wyrms instead of ethereals while looking for mana cells. Ugh. On the plus side, you do get motes of mana.

Tonight I plan to do a lot of dailies, possibly hit a MgT for keying on the rogue or paladin, and then go to Badgezhan relatively late.