World of Warcraft

[Stego]

If you are wiping on Saph and KT, your tank not wearing FR gear is criminal. I stand by that.

All that said, even Sarth with drakes and Malygos are freaking cake. This content is a joke. Making ridiculous achievements does not make the content last any longer. The entire raid community is bored of this shit and has been for over a month.

Everything that was appealing about this game to me is gone. If your group is competent, there is no need to min/max or to flask or eat food buffs. Hell, there is no need for upgrades or loot or enchants/gems/glyphs. I would argue there is no need for buffs at all to clear any of this content.

And Ulduuar is not going to be hard. I would imagine something along the lines of nerfed SSC content from their descriptions. Raiding 102 they say. Too bad I learned raiding 102 years ago lie every other raider. Hell, GoN taught me raiding 102 before I ever stepped foot in a raid. Don't stand in shit. Do everything you can to improve your toon. Follow the RL' instructions. Sometimes you have to think [i]quickly[/i]. Ooooooh.

[Lyanna Stark]

Awesome Ness, which drake are you keeping up as the second?

We've done Sarth normal with one drake up, which was great fun. I think we kept Tenebron (the add one it was anyway) and had a DPS specced DK offtank the drake adds and the flame elementals. It was his first attempt ever at tanking so took him a little while to get it working. I assume the flame one is the best to take second as the HP one seems a bit more like a PITA?

Are you doing it with two healers as well? We found two healer comps to be far better for tighter raid performance. Unfortunately our RLs are more focused on dragging everyone through the 25 man content right now, so I doubt we'll be doing Sarth +2 any time soon in normal. (I wanted to really give Disc a good try, and Sarth +1 made it shine.)

It's really crazy how undertuned part of the 25 man Naxx is. We 17 manned Sarth-25, plague wing and spider wing with 3 healers as well and I completely misstimed my MC on Faerlina, so she partly enraged anyway. ( I R teh suck at MC :o )
Only Patchwerk stopped us there (and Raz as we only have healery priests) but our paladin is already comtemplating how to do Patchwerk with 4 or less healers. :lol:
He is nuts. If you manage let him know, he is bound to want to try it.

[TerraPrime]

Re: Sapph

Thanks all for the pointers.

For non-druid healers, what's your mana pool and mana regen, roughly, when you first downed Sapphiron? Alternatively, what do you think those ought to be to be able to heal through this fight with 3 healers? With 2 healers? I suspect that our priests' mana regen may be too low, and maybe so is our shaman's. The two priests have 1.56k mana 700/100 regen and 1.68k mana 675/225 regen. Those sound reasonable? I checked their gears and noticed that one of the priests doesn't have a lot of mp5 gear on, and he got a few gems with spell power instead of spirit. Is that the right way to gear a healing priest these days? The shaman has 1.86k mana, 405/202 regen. How's that sound?

Overall, I know we need better DPS, but I am not sure whether our healers need work too or not. It just doesn't seem right that after 1 air phase that our healers are down to 50% of their mana. Even if we kill it in 3 transitions, which is fast iirc, that will still mean that the healers will be oom before the end. I'd like to sort it out to see whether it's the dps AND healers or just the dps that needs work.

Which is the one frustrating part of our guild. The GL is too enamored with raiding. I just don't think half of the people are ready (gear wise) yet. I see his point that we need to learn these fights, and we will get drops to gear up. But just rushing in like that is not the best use of time, imo. We do not lack in spirit or preserverance, but we could use a more disciplined approach. I mean, there's literally no class balancing in forming the raid group. I just don't think that our people are at a stage where class balance is not important any more.

As far as replenishment goes, how does the mindblast from spriest work compared to the hunter/pally version? The spell text says that for spriest, vampiric touch will give 0.25% of max mana to 10 ppl in raid group when the priest uses mindblast. Is that 0.25% per mindblast, then? As compared to the hunter/pally proc which is a 15s proc? I also noticed that the language is very specific for 10 ppl. How does it work in 25-man raids then? 10 random folks? 10 random folks with a mana bar?

[Lyanna Stark]

TP: Ideally, you want your priests to hit at least 300 mp5 in combat. When I started Naxx ten I had around 18k mana raidbuffed and almost 1700 spellpower. When we hit Sapph I had a little bit more spellpower, not much more regen, bit more mana but not yet 19k.

Tell your priests to gem for int/spi mostly. If you always have at least one replenishment, consider regemming for int/spellpower/crit instead. Lack of replenishment forces you down to spirit regen, which also makes it obvious who are "good priests" and who are "bad priests" (i.e. good at abusing the 5 sec rule).

It is ABSOLUTELY IMPERATIVE your priest have the Meditation talent in the Disc tree. If they haven't, they must take it. The numpty with 100 mp5 in combat, I can almost guarantee he hasn't got it. While they are gearing, tell them to grab mp5 flasks and mp5 food. It does help. Also, tell your priests to stop spamming AoE heals. That's for LOLling through 25-mans, not if you are struggling for mana. They need to know which are their highest HPM spells (ProM, ProH and FH) and use that info. Also, belfs can use Arcane Torrent once every 2 minutes for more mana.

Get your priests to grab some of the spirit/regen trinkets as well. The spirit trinket from Drak'Tharon is almost as good as the Spirit World Glass. Tell them to use it in conjunction with Holy Concentration and Inner Focus and you can regen huge chunks of mana. Also, if they are Holy and haven't specced Surge of Light they are bloody idiots, frankly. It is an imba talent. :) (Plus a Holy priest makes it proc for a Disc priest as well, altho I don't have it :P )

You want your Holy priests to sit on at least 900 spirit raid buffed.

Cookie cutter Holy build is 14/57/0, cookie cutter Disc is 57/14/0.

Ideally, you want your DPS to take him down fast enough so you don't have him take off more than 3 times. Our slowest was 6 take offs, but then we had a couple of DPS die early and it really sucks to heal through that damage.

It doesn't matter if you have an spriest, a surv hunter or a ret paladin. The replenishment they add are more or less the same (a percentage of base mana, which is also why int is the new black for all healers :P ).

EDIT: If you are having issues with the way your priests (and shamans) are healing and what spells they are using, here is a WWS with me and a shammy two manning everything in there. We have a ret pally for replenishment.

[url="http://wowwebstats.com/31x6fz1lmx36o"]http://wowwebstats.com/31x6fz1lmx36o[/url]

If the breakdown of spells used differ a LOT it may be useful to grab your healers and sit them down and go through it.


EDIT2: Seconding what Ness said below. Good DPS is a must and almost more important than healer gear. Nuking things quickly often means you can drop a spare healer, which is a bit different to TBC raiding where healer stacking was rather FotM. :)

[Relic]

[quote name='Stego' post='1641540' date='Jan 8 2009, 11.00']If you are wiping on Saph and KT, your tank not wearing FR gear is criminal. I stand by that.

All that said, even Sarth with drakes and Malygos are freaking cake. This content is a joke. Making ridiculous achievements does not make the content last any longer. The entire raid community is bored of this shit and has been for over a month.

Everything that was appealing about this game to me is gone. If your group is competent, there is no need to min/max or to flask or eat food buffs. Hell, there is no need for upgrades or loot or enchants/gems/glyphs. I would argue there is no need for buffs at all to clear any of this content.[/quote]


That's what happens when you have 12 million people playing a game. Just lke everyone and their mom was doing BT by the end of B.C. If you want a challenge you can learn to pvp =P

[GoN]

[quote]If you are wiping on Saph and KT, your tank not wearing FR gear is criminal. I stand by that.[/quote]

Sure. I didn't mean to sound like I was arguing the point. If FR helps you get through the fight then you should be all means use it. Its not that expensive to craft. I was just sharing our experiences so far.

The content is undertuned for sure. I think it reflects an overall change in Blizzard's philosophy. I don't think we will ever see another Sunwell-like tuned instance. I think Blizz has decided to go for the common man approach. Great for a small guild of what I'd call casual veterns, not so great for people like yourself who enjoy the more hardcore aspects of the game.


[quote]Awesome Ness, which drake are you keeping up as the second?[/quote]

We kill Shadron, gives us more time to kill Tenebron before Vesperon lands. We do only run with 2 healers, we've found it works best to run with the nuke shit quickly philosophy. I've read that Sarth+3 isn't doable in 10 man gear, but I'm sure we won't let that stop us when we do get past +2.

TP- I haven't played a priest as a healer in a long time, so I couldn't tell you about their numbers. As for the shaman, his numbers sound about what I was rocking the first time we did Sapph. Water shield is so overpowered, its extremely hard to go OOM, even without replenishment.

Mind Blast starts the replenish effect once it lands on a target that has vampiric touch on it. Any mind blast after that just refreshes the effect, IIRC. It will only effect people with a mana bar, and it will allegedly effect the people with the lowest mana as priority.

While your healers probably need a little work, with gear and what have you, I cannot underline how trivial good DPS makes any encounter.

[PhelanArcetus]

I do feel like the heroics are too easy, but compared to how much hell heroics were starting out in BC, I prefer too easy to "we spent all night, got a 35g repair bill each before there were substantial dailies, and got a whopping 3 badges. In almost two weeks I can buy an item."

Hell I remember going into Heroic Sethekk Halls and simply being unable to survive the first pull in blues and 1-2 epics.

All the raids I've done with the exception of the one Naxx pug that didn't down a single boss have been pretty easy. But I prefer that to where we spent a couple of weeks getting Moroes down so we could continue.

Even if Ulduar is too easy for the raiding community, and nothing that appeals to the really hardcore is provided, it's probably better for Blizzard overall to work more with the casuals. There's what, 12 million people playing, roughly? To my knowledge, a substantial portion of them never did 40 man raids in vanilla. A bunch didn't do 25 man raids. I don't like doing 25s, because I have never found a group of 25 that I liked more than 8 or so of. The 10/25 split is a very good thing. Whether the 25s are too easy, or both are too easy, I don't know. It's definitely better for Blizzard development to be able to make a 10 and 25 raid and not have to create 5-mans because half the population can't get through the 10 man content, though. Not that new 5 mans aren't a good idea, but needing to provide them so that half the population has something new and thus a reason to continue playing their mains (while the other half are working on the hardcore raids) is problematic.

[Kalbear]

[quote]It's really crazy how undertuned part of the 25 man Naxx is. We 17 manned Sarth-25, plague wing and spider wing with 3 healers as well and I completely misstimed my MC on Faerlina, so she partly enraged anyway. ( I R teh suck at MC shocked.gif )
Only Patchwerk stopped us there (and Raz as we only have healery priests) but our paladin is already comtemplating how to do Patchwerk with 4 or less healers. lol.gif
He is nuts. If you manage let him know, he is bound to want to try it.[/quote]Given last night's debacle on Patchwerk I definitely think you could 4-heal Patch, at least eventually. Gods. That's the second time in a row that fight has caused issues. This time, it's because I did the following:
missed with faerie fire
melee swing crit
lacerate crit
lacerate crit
maul crit
mangle crit

That + the hateful threat (and no misdirect, bah)was all it took to get me to the top of the threat list. 4.5 seconds. Sigh. I guess it's time to...uh...not hit him at all, or maybe put a lacerate on him. Stupid construct quarter...

That was the second week in a row where I ended up successfully (in the sense that we didn't wipe) one-OTing patch. After weathering the storm of swapping tanks on roles, no one else died. That's nice and all, but I'm going to have to figure out a better way to start that fight. This is kind of silly.

[Stego]

The best way is to make melee stand with ranged until you tell them they can come in. Then you can wait to get on the aggro table and still have a huge lead on melee. The enrage timer is a joke.

[Kalbear]

[quote]The best way is to make melee stand with ranged until you tell them they can come in. Then you can wait to get on the aggro table and still have a huge lead on melee. The enrage timer is a joke.[/quote]Melee on it wasn't the problem. The problem was (the first time) Tyy going off and getting himself killed by body-pulling it when no one else was aware he was going to do that and taking both hatefuls and normal attacks, and (this time) by me pulling main threat after only a few seconds of a threat-light rotation. Melee's didn't factor into it at all. The threat looked like me, banneth, tyy. Melee only died while we were trying to stabilize a bit and tyy was the OT. As soon as I was OT, melee got hit I think once that fight, and not at all the previous one.

In both cases we didn't pull by using a MD. The first case it was because we didn't have a hunter. This time it was because the hunter didn't do it in time, I guess. For me, the challenge is getting enough threat to beat the melee but not enough threat to beat the other tanks, and as it turns out this is a really touch and go situation for me; a couple of unlucky crits (or in this case, 5 in a row) is enough to pull sometimes.

Maybe next time I'll ask for vigilance.

[PhelanArcetus]

Yeah, a friend was talking about that. He's a pally tank OTing Patchwerk (due to better gear), and with a bunch of pugs, and I think the Patchwerk MT being one, he actually had to Hand of Salvation himself to avoid taking main threat.

Looks like we're starting in plague wing. Safety Dance should be relatively easy to pick up.

[Lyanna Stark]

We are normally sadistic and let the melee die unless they wait long enough. :P Since we once again had crazy lag, they had to learn how it felt to get gibbed :P

After that was sorted, we downed him despite the crazy lag spikes. Had to work around it with pain suppression, shield wall, Guardian Spirit etc. which is a bit sucky, but we downed him comfortably anyway.

Same with Gluth, Loatheb and Thaddius. Pretty awful lag with the entire raid constantly above 1k ms, but we didn't relent and kept at it, with eventual success. Everyone in Naxx General were moaning about the lag. I kept spamming binding heals on the tank during Loatheb and still died first :( None of them actually landed. Well "spamming" more like "mashing my button hoping for a castbar eventually".

[dajamieson]

Odd that, we were in Naxx heroic at the same time as you guys tonight and didn't have any lag issues, though we saw the complaints in general. What I did have was a terrible framerate at one point on the trash fights which we think was down to something to do with the DK spell effects maybe - at any rate turning down my spell details helped and a relog eventually fixed it.

[Stego]

[quote name='Mandy' post='1642284' date='Jan 8 2009, 23.17']I'm still half way to 69 and haven't been involved in any raids[/quote]


I got to max level, was there for months, grinding heroics over and over and over to gear up before I got my first chance to [i]see[/i] a raid. (One boss) [i]As a pug with another guild[/i]. I had to earn a spot.

Color me not impressed with your dire circumstance, Dingo. :P

Get some freakin levels.

[Lyanna Stark]

The lag is really odd. It comes and goes and often spikes on boss fights with a lot of adds and stuff (we all had a total freeze during out first Gluth attempt. He ate all his zombies since nobody could move.) The next time around it was a little slow, but totally manageable. I don't know what it is tbh. You can be fine for maybe 4-5 bosses and then things just completely goes tits up.

We filed a couple of tickets and spoke to a GM who said they knew about it, he was sorry for any inconvenience etc. and then added "Try tanking with that lag, it is awful, I know". :lol:

Think we ended up 5 manning Loatheb since everyone else died early. After the mass death, it wasn't laggy anymore and the remainig 5 people could finish off the rest of his 50% HP. I could have made dinner in the time it took. :P

[RaceBannon42]

[quote name='Stego' post='1642469' date='Jan 9 2009, 06.48']I got to max level, was there for months, grinding heroics over and over and over to gear up before I got my first chance to [i]see[/i] a raid. (One boss) [i]As a pug with another guild[/i]. I had to earn a spot.

Color me not impressed with your dire circumstance, Dingo. :P

Get some freakin levels.[/quote]

And it was soooo worth it. The RedComet Stories will last you a lifetime.

[PhelanArcetus]

Well, we exceeded our expectations last night.

Cleared 3 wings of Naxx without major issues. Sure, we wiped on a trio of gargoyles (if you're going to tell me to back up, do it sooner so I actually can), helped in part by one mage refusing to hit the skull. I think if he had focused we might have gotten all three, almost certainly two of them. Wipe on Heigan, as expected with multiple Heigan-noobs, and then took her down. A few of the fights ended with me dead and the OT finishing it off. Wiped on 4H as well, then got it when we switched which mage was in the back. Specifically, we switched out the arrogant jerk mage for the PvP-spec'd mage who put on his PvP gear and actually used Mana Shield. So we got Plague, Military, and Spider all down, with I think two more wipes; one actual fail on Maexnna, and one where a couple of people were afk, including arrogant jerk mage... when his friend decided to grab the keyboard, run forward, and icelance the boss.

He got gkicked for that. (The friend who actually did it was gkicked a couple of months ago.) Unfortunately we did reinvite the guy, but I'm not going to be surprised if we boot him for good. He's generally good at dps, but he whines and complains whenever we don't do things his way (which often means going for achievements even before we know we can do it sans-achievement), and keeps trying to rush. He's also been known to pull the next group to avoid wasting a hot streak proc.

Group makeup was Prot Warrior, Prot Paladin, Resto Druid, Holy Priest, Resto Shaman, Combat Rogue, Fury Warrior, Fire Mage, Fire Mage, Arcane Mage. Yeah, three mages. The Arcane mage was not doing good damage, but honestly I'd rather lose the jerk mage (one of the two fires) than him.

I walked out with T7 shoulders and the Cloak of Armed Strife. Fury warrior, who is normally prot, walked out with a couple of plate dps pieces (unless he decides to switch things up seriously, he'll be bringing his DK once that character is leveled and somewhat geared). Prot pally walked out with a ring, T7 chest, and some healing plate. I forget where the rest went, honestly.

Sunday we should get in and do Construct and hopefully also Sapph & Kel.

Stayed up after to do Sons dailies; I believe I'll be exalted on Sunday. At which point my warrior will never do them again... but in a week or so I'll probably be starting on the paladin.

[Greywolf2375]

[quote name='Stego' post='1637776' date='Jan 4 2009, 18.49']-Start farming the Red Sword


These things will probably get you to 450 or so defense. You can probably do them all in a day or two.[/quote]
So exactly how does one do this? Can not get past Skadi, actually...can't get past the gauntlet for some reason. Tried waiting for waves, going to the waves, meeting the waves in the middle. Typical group has been prot pally, holy pally & combos of the following DPS: boomkin, enh shammy, 2 arcane mages, surv hunter.

For a ranged based DPS, is it better to spawn the waves and wait at the start of the run for them to come to us? Wait? Are we just missing something simple with dealing with the waves and witch Drs?

Don't think it will make much difference, I don't believe gear is an issue, but this is the level we're at: [url="http://www.wow-heroes.com/index.php?zone=us&server=Baelgun&name=Tarann"]WoW Heroes link[/url]. Any advice for different enchanting, etc is always welcome. Still working on the pants from VH. no luck from the dragon.

[Cuellar]

Mandy - I wouldn't worry about it. You really have to consistently play 20+ hours a week to be a raider, and upwards of 40 if you want to be really hardcore. Not to mention most raiders are addicts, and aren't going to quit WoW in droves anytime soon.

You gotta enjoy the ride to L80... and not just run through content just so you can sit and grind the same shit for 6 months. Also, plenty of the dungeons are cool from 60 all the way to 80. If you skipped the outlands dungeon, I'd go and do them on easy.

[Kalbear]

How do you mean, you're not getting past the waves? What's causing problems? I've always gone to where they spawn and take them there; you can't really easily kite them, but you can at least start beating on them immediately. Try and interrupt the warlock ones. How are you handling the harpoons?