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GoN

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I don't think 3k is completely unreasonable just starting out in Hellfire. Luckily with quest rewards alone, Fen will be able to really boost that with ease. It will only get better!

Had a surprisingly successful afternoon yesterday in ICC10 with our alts. It really opened my eyes to how much tunnel vision I have as a healer, tanking it made it seem like an entirely new instance, one in which I had no clue what was going on.

Also, queues back up on AD-EU. 420 when I tried to log in at like 9pm last night. Not acceptable. Its really tempting to just transfer to a low pop server at this point.

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went into an ICC 10 with alts from a friends guild and had a bad bad time on Marrowgar - to the point that as a tank I had more damage on the bone spikes than 2 of the DPS. But, the bright side of it was that in order to make it easier for the lolspin phase I tanked him on the ramp to the right of the entrance. Wow - what a difference, cockroaches can only run in a few directions (aiding healing and survivability) and Marrowgar WILL send his blue flame into the wall so that we don't need to care about it sometimes.

short bus moment of the night for me: running at the brown ooze. and need to use a better way to seal twist, lost way too much damage.

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Yeah, when I played my rogue it was a huge pain to put up Expose Armor on those rare times when I didn't have a warrior to do it. Actually, most of those times, I didn't do it, because when I had a bear or paladin tank (never played the rogue in Wrath, so no DKs, and hunters didn't have the option yet), the first thing I would do was look at the group makeup. 5 man, me and two mages? No way Expose is worth it. 10-man, me, 1 warlock, the rest of the group doing primarily physical? Ok, we'll Expose.

But as a warrior tank, aside from shifting my priority queue a little early in the fight to establish the 5-stack, I just keep the armor reduction active almost passively. At least in Wrath Expose doesn't need 5 combo points to do the full expose, but if Combat, say, is otherwise like it was in BC, using Expose Armor could eat at least 15% of my damage potential. (Going on white 50%, sinister strike 25%, rupture or eviscerate 25% as the rough breakdown, and assuming that popping regular expose would preclude most of my rupture/eviscerate.)

Blizzard does need to address the major armor reduction debuff; as a prot warrior I bring it for free, as part of holding aggro, but any other source needs to give up at least some damage output. How much varies by the class and spec, I guess... I gather assassination rogues can do it more easily than combat, but only BM hunters can, I believe, and I gather that BM is rather lackluster in general.

We used to have a real problem with our main rogue on fights like Aran in Karazhan. The dedicated interrupt skills all being off the global cooldown now helps, but back in the day he would almost never get his interrupt off because he was too focused on doing damage. Having been in the rotation, I know how easy it was to become stuck in GCD and not be able to interrupt, so I suspect it was less an energy levels issue and more of a "I am spamming my damage moves oh damn there's a frostbolt I'm meant to interrupt it but I hit sinister strike before my brain registered the frostbolt cast and by the time this comes back from GCD it'll be too late".

Pretty productive weekend for me. Didn't get a Jaraxxus for my DK, but did get it for my paladin, so the important characters got their emblems. Might be able to get the DK in one tonight. No luck with hilts, though a guildie got his second; he passed it on to his buddy the healer (though given that said healer picked up a 251 dagger yesterday...). We didn't get to even start on Plagueworks trash in the alt-ICC, unfortunately, owing mostly to starting a full hour late. For once I got to dps. Of course, given our group makeup, 4/8 drops were hunter/enh shaman gear; all went to the resto shaman with enh offspec that he never plays. I'd feel worse about that if random heroics weren't a source of nigh-infinite crystals now.

My metered dps wasn't as high as I had expected it to be, either. I'm not sure how much of that is the 232 weapon, how much might be the particular way I was handling my skills, how much is the particular mix of buffs I did or did not have (and I didn't remember to check which totems the two shamans were dropping), and how much is the fact that the last time I seriously dps'd on my paladin, I was using a different meter, which I know calculated dps differently. I'm assuming the difference between recount and skada is how they calculate combat time, since total damage they match on.

Buffs... I definitely had Mark, Kings, Battle Shout (not sure how good the uptime on that was), and I believe I had unboosted Windfury. I might have had unboosted Strength of Earth. Definitely did not have Rampage/LotP, or the % AP boost. I bring the 3% crit and 3% haste and 3% damage myself. So I was definitely missing a couple of big buffs, and probably some others I'm not thinking of... but I also want to look over the two meters. Skada has some features I like, Recount has some I like... neither has both.

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Things I don't especially like with Skada are mostly in terms of how it provides breakdowns.

For example, it'll tell me min, max, average on an attack. And it will tell me how many hits, crits, glances I have. Being hit-capped, I don't see misses, but I also don't see an entry for them, so I'm not sure if it neglects this information or just hides the data if there are zero. However, it will not give me, say, the min/max/average hit vs. min/max/average crit. They're all lumped together.

Sometimes it refuses to let me change between total and individual fights. I haven't figured out why that is.

I'm not sure how good it's absorb estimation is, but it has that feature. Hopefully Blizzard will revise the combat log API to make that fully available as they've mentioned.

It lets me see debuff uptimes, but not buff uptimes.

It has a threat module, which is nice because using Skada means I don't need Omen, and I get a more consistent look between the various mods.

It definitely calculates different dps than Recount; I ran them side by side for a week or so and I believe it consistently shows lower dps numbers. The total damage numbers sync up perfectly, as expected, so it's either some sort of methodology difference or, more likely, how they each compute the denominator of dps. Skada seems to count more time as in combat, perhaps.

I haven't checked how much memory it actually consumes, though. Unlike Recount, it doesn't have character-specific data sets, so you see the same data when on the AH alt as on the guy who was just raiding.

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That's part of it.

The other part is that if your role is to kill stuff, well, you'd want to know how well you're doing your job, no? As a tank, the effect is immediate: if you're a crap tank, you lose aggro and people die. If you're crap healer, your tank dies, and then you wipe. As a damage dealer, the feedback is not as immediate because there're 2 other people doing damages (assuming a 5-people dungeon). So you do have to pay attention to how well you're performing in a group so you know you are contributing to the group.

That said, the damage that you deal personally is not the whole story. There are things that you might do that does not add to the damage you do, but will enable others to do their jobs more effectively. For example, mages may need to cast counter-spells, and warlocks may need to dominate elementals, etc. These things do not add to the direct damage dealt, but can be essential, nonetheless.

The tricky situation is that for most random groups, you only see them once, and so there's no incentive to sacrifice your own dps too much to help others. If the mage doesn't counter-spell, well, the other dps people will just have to hit harder, for instance. Also, not everyone is aware of these things and there are enough douchebags out there that will say "lol you only have 2.5k dps. fail."

Okay, that makes perfect sense. So unless you happen to luck out, and get someone who truly wants to help out a group and doesn't give a damn about the bottom line for numbers, people are, generally speaking, all about the dps. Fair enough. Thanks for explaining; I appreciate it.

I don't think 3k is completely unreasonable just starting out in Hellfire. Luckily with quest rewards alone, Fen will be able to really boost that with ease. It will only get better!

That is good to know; even though I know my gear is nowhere what it could be, I figure that there have to be other people out there like me to some extent.

And health aside, I am starting to appreciate my damage more and more, now. I am happy simply by the fact that I am starting to consistently cause 1300 damage a shot. It doesn't take much to make me happy in this game. :-)

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Got Putricide down in 10-man. More importantly, it looks like we figured out how to do him in 25 man thanks to that success, so hopefully next week we'll be able to down him so that the following week we can all become Of The Night.

Though I'm really looking forward to when I don't have to run 10 mans to get badges for 25; spending almost twice the time to do the same instance is somewhat draining.

Also got my 2pT10, which is fun. I love going as a tank in my cat gear and getting 11k maul crits.

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Got Putricide down in 10-man. More importantly, it looks like we figured out how to do him in 25 man thanks to that success, so hopefully next week we'll be able to down him so that the following week we can all become Of The Night.

We ended up taking like 2 hours getting Rotface down on 10 man last night. I was the ooze kiting tank and that was pretty frustrating for me. I felt like I was fucking stuff up half the time and there was no good way to tell. Having the ability to cleanse meant I could control when the small oozes were spawning to an extent, so that did help - I think I picked that up quicker than our other paladin tank would have.

Now I get to be the abomination on Putricide. We have 6 attempts remaining and we're probably going to try again tonight. We got to phase 2 yesterday but never to phase 3. Once again, I feel kind of off on my own with the abomination thing and I'm not totally clear on what I need to try to do. They were telling me to only bother using the slow spray on the orange ooze, and otherwise just eat up slime puddles. But I feel like I should be able to sneak in some uses of the armor debuff and auto-attack damage too. Do you happen to have any abomination tips?

I get to tank the raids for the next few weeks because a couple of the others are taking a break. I don't mind doing that but I wish people would have given me more warning so I could have spent my emblems of frost on getting tank items rather than healing items initially.

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We got to P3 on our final attempt. Felt like we made good progress, and I know I felt a lot better about what I was supposed to be doing on the fight. We just need to up our DPS at this point. It was the enrage that got us.

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They were telling me to only bother using the slow spray on the orange ooze, and otherwise just eat up slime puddles. But I feel like I should be able to sneak in some uses of the armor debuff and auto-attack damage too. Do you happen to have any abomination tips?
God, no! NO NO NO. A thousand times no on this.

You need to slow both. If you don't slow the volatile ooze you won't have a good amount of DPS time on it; it'll get to do multiple explosions. There's more than enough time to eat slime and then get the oozes slowed on each and every attempt provided that you're not idiotic about placement of slime puddles (making the abom run way far away to eat slimes and then slow the target sucks).

So make sure that your slime puddles are near the place where the adds spawn. eat them, then slow. You should ideally slow the add just as its choosing its first target; note that the slow has a travel time, so you'll need to cast it a couple seconds before it starts choosing.

Your first priority is absolutely slime eating. Then one slow per ooze. Then you can DPS if you happen to be near the thing. The debuff is exactly sunder, so it doesn't stack with sunder/expose if you have it.

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That was definitely a useful video as far as seeing how the fight is supposed to flow. Not surprising they were bringing sick DPS to bear for a guild to have done that fight on 25s already. I know there is no way that we got the phase 2 right as the first orange ooze was coming out. Nor could we if we were firing on all cylinders.

The abomination in the video doesn't have to run as much to get slime as I feel like I was last night. Maybe our raid was too spread out. I think we were yelling at some ranged about that so that may be something that can go better. Eat slime, spray ooze, help DPS ooze until there is new slime. Simple enough. I guess.

I'd been given the impression that the "soft enrage" was the increasing shadow damage on the raid but it looks like that it's the slime puddles. That's a little scary. 35% for the start of phase 3 and that's 3.4 million HP still to burn at that point, with the slime puddles spawning... man. So, for phase 3, if the stack falls off of either tank then he heals? Or is it more of a 3 stack/other tank taunts til it drops and the first tank picks it back up at that point?

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There are two soft enrages - the slime puddles (which can be somewhat dealt with) and the shadow damage (which requires rapid tank swaps every 10 seconds or so).

On slime movement - again it's about where the raid is prior to the slime puddles. The puddles always are formed underneath a player. So what you want to do, ideally, is do something like this:

1. Have raid move to the opposite side of the add spawn (left/brown for volatile, right/green for gas).

2. Hang out mostly close to each other and that side, avoiding malleable oozes as needed.

3. Tank that's tanking PP waits around there until PP drops slimes

4. When he drops slimes, PP tank kites him to the other side, everyone else follows.

5. Abom eats slimes

Repeat.

The first part should start with everyone in the middle. As soon as the slime puddles spawn, move to the left/brown side. Wait a second or two before eating the slimes, as you'll not have enough energy to slow the mob if you eat it right away; you get 4 energy per consumption and it requires 50 energy. After that you should be more than set for the remainder of the fight.

Another advantage of this strat (as the video shows) is that the abom can do some DPS too. It's not a lot, but everything counts.

Again, a lot of this fight is about not freaking out and doing your own thing. Do not go off into the middle of the room (as one of the other raiders) when the green ooze spawns. Don't kite the wrong way; always kite PP one way and the brown ooze the other so that your DPS knows where to go and what to do. Always try and blow yourself up on the green ooze the right direction (towards the green spigot). Make sure to not stand in stuff and blow yourself up. And be mindful of the phase transitions so you don't have an ooze up at this time.

Here's a link of our 10 man video doing basically that strat:

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Missed the 25 last night so I could crash early. I think whatever stupid cold I had a month ago is coming back, and that coupled with having been unable to sleep on Sunday... yeah.

They got Deathwhisper down, at least, and Gunship as well. I'm assuming they didn't down Saurfang. Those I spoke to were pretty annoyed though... seeing as how weapons that would have been big upgrades for them dropped, and went to pug'd dps we'll probably never see again. Of course, not that I'm in charge, but I just don't see a way to fill up the group while restricting gear to regulars. Too many people would refuse to join if they were told they couldn't roll on anything unless no regular wanted it, and not enough would be willing to come consistently for the chance the next week, and so on.

Amusingly, the claim is that they got DW down "because this method works for us", not because she got nerfed.

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Last night was highly productive, while at the same time highly frustrating.

The early crew, with my Shaman, managed to down Deathbringer, which means we now have two solid 10 man crews. I would love this to become a solid 25 man crew, but as I said previously, we are keeping a 10 strict rating.

The late crew got Festergut down to 4% and wiped on the berserk. We had 9 tries, the first 7 were due to stupid spore placement for the melee. None of the ranged understood where to stand when they ran in until I said "The spore on your head should look like Festergut's testicle" go figure it worked. The most single dissapointing part of the night was when our tank left, we re-arranged the group to only need a healer and one of our best healers was roaming around the guild website. After bombarding him with PM's and (from a few other members) phone calls, he declined to sign on. So we ported and broke up the raid only to have him sign on and say "You guys sound desperate, here I am." We just went to bed.

Hopefully tomorrow night we'll get ourselves a new boss down. I'm still worried about Rotface, he's casting Mutated Infection so frequently that we can't handle all the slimes while maintaining DPS on the boss. He kind of looks like he's having aggro problems because he gets so twitchy.

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Picked up 140 achievement points in Ulduar 10 last night. :/

There went 8 months of avoiding that place shot to hell.

I guess that will teach me to log on when we have a raid night off. Between that run and the need to do the random daily for badges, I've completely ruined my rep for not doing achievements. I spammed like 8 chieves at once when I got Oculus as my daily last week.

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