World of Warcraft

[Greywolf2375]

Athough this may seem like nothing to some raiders, I finally managed to down KT last weekend, which was a pleasant surprise. Given the size of our pool of 80s in the guild, it can be a total crap shoot who ends up in your raid on any given week, on the weeks where we are doing our 10 man raids. Even more so given dual speccing, and tanks wanting to try healing and vice versa.

Grats Aratan, I'm still awaiting my 25 man KT kill - hopefully this week. The guild alliance is working OK so far - main problem has been that since it hasn't really been well coordinated we're pugging some, starting an hour late, getting lots of AFK/rr fast breaks that are wasting way to much time. In total, lost probably a night and a half to wait time this past week.

Thankfully we're starting fresh and planning/prepping a little this week. Maybe have a little balance...not 7 mages for DPS or 5 trees for healing.

[Imp]

Oh god the trash leading up to vezax & yogg is stupid, a few too many packs for my liking. Reminded me of c'thun. Was a little stupid... I dunno, it's a little overboard imo.

Got vezax after a few attempts, he wasn't too bad. Had some fun messing around with yogg phase 1 and 2. It's a pretty harsh idiot test... Pretty fun though.

[Greywolf2375]

great...another reset of talent points. Thankfully I have no imagination and go cookie cutter build or else this might get annoying...

[BlueRose]

great...another reset of talent points. Thankfully I have no imagination and go cookie cutter build or else this might get annoying...

Really? Wow that's annoying. I dont have a cookie cutter build for one spec and the other spec is so new to me that I can never remember it.

I'm still a bench warmer for raids though so I guess it isnt a big deal :(

[RaceBannon42]

great...another reset of talent points. Thankfully I have no imagination and go cookie cutter build or else this might get annoying...

http://blue.mmo-champion.com/1/16474155114-311a-respec.html

There is no respec.

[Greywolf2375]

http://blue.mmo-champion.com/1/16474155114-311a-respec.html

There is no respec.

good - thanks for posting that, it's not the biggest thing ever, but was just getting to be a pain.

[PhelanArcetus]

Yeah it was.

Over the weekend I ended up redoing my Holy talents on my paladin. In a desperate attempt to figure out why my heals were so small.

It wasn't the talents. (Though the initial test of Flash of Light where it took about 15 casts to get a crit, with 25% crit made me wonder; that's about a 1.3% chance of happening.)

Turns out the problem was that Clique, the mod I use to click-cast Holy Light & Flash of Light, had accidentally been bound to specific ranks rather than max rank. So I was throwing out level 70 Holy Light. 5.5k big heals were not happy. Max rank with my gear is more like 8.5k.

Also banged out a couple dps upgrades for my warrior. Despite the fact that I haven't dps'd anything on him yet, unless massive hordes of stupid gorlocs count. Spiked Titansteel Helm over the Naxx 10 drop I'd been carrying, and Titanium Impact Choker over some other Naxx drop. Only a couple points over hit cap and one expertise over cap for that, though I could drop a few more given Weapon Mastery.

[TerraPrime]

Re: WWS

I figured out what went wrong.

The 3.1 allows Unstable Affliction and Corruption to crit now. So on the display, it showed only the non-crit ticks. Since before 3.1 they cannot crit, what you see is what you get. Now, not so much. My DoT up time went from 50% to 88% once I got that figured out, which is a lot closer to what I know is the case. Whewww!

Also, turns out the crit chance for the two DoTs were 34% and 42% respectively. Which is pretty impressive, considering that I only have about 18% crit, plus 5% from boomkin aura. The RNG loves me? We'll see when I compare that from fight to fight.

Still, having to manually add in Doomguard on every WWS parse is a bit tedious. I'll check out the one GoN posted earlier to see.

[PhelanArcetus]

Ah pugging.

I found my way into tanking H-CoS, which was fine. Didn't really need it but was good to grab a few emblems and do a little bit of tanking. Would kind of have preferred giving it a shot as Arms dps, but eh.

Ended up ret-dpsing H-HoL, and I'm not sure if I should be glad I wasn't healing or wish I was. The healer was good, no complaints there. The problem was the tank, whose threat was laughable. And his spec was worse, 27/36/8 or something as a DK. Might have worked pre-3.1, with Howling Blast less deep in the tree, but I have no idea what he was trying to do, only that he was failing at it. I was holding back a lot, and I still did the most damage by a large margin.

And since the guildies were done in their Ulduar 25 (I think they got FL and Ignis done), I got one of them to tank H-VH quickly, brought in a guildie who was a pretty new 80, and I healed it. Learned a few lessons:

1. I need to pay more attention to keeping Bacon of Light up

2. I need to pay more attention to keeping Sacred Shield up

3. I need to make more use of Holy Shock, including making a mouseover macro for it so I can target it as I want more easily. A few times I ended up healing the wrong person or shocking a mob.

Added onto the "I need more spellpower and crit" knowledge that I already knew.

[Mack Kilimaro]

And since the guildies were done in their Ulduar 25 (I think they got FL and Ignis done), I got one of them to tank H-VH quickly, brought in a guildie who was a pretty new 80, and I healed it. Learned a few lessons:

1. I need to pay more attention to keeping Bacon of Light up

2. I need to pay more attention to keeping Sacred Shield up

3. I need to make more use of Holy Shock, including making a mouseover macro for it so I can target it as I want more easily. A few times I ended up healing the wrong person or shocking a mob.

Added onto the "I need more spellpower and crit" knowledge that I already knew.

I haven't really been enamored with Bacon lately. It just feels like there are funny issues sometimes with range or something where the heal does not get applied, enough that it's eroded my confidence in it working the way I think it's supposed to work. I only end up using it in situations where I know I'm about to have to heal the whole raid anyway - such as, for instance, after a Gluth Decimate or during Deconstructor's Tympanic Tantrum. You and I are in the same place on Sacred Shield. It's way too easy to forget about.

I love Holy Shock. I have about 30% holy crit chance from gear and 5% from talents, then you get 6% to holy shock specifically from a talent and your 2-piece T7 is 10% crit chance to holy shock. To say nothing of how high the crit jacks up with all the appropriate buffs like a moonkin, mage/druid and kings. Instant spell with a more than 50% chance to crit, a crit of which procs an instant Flash of Light, and you can do this every 6 seconds? Awesome. As to how I use it, just watch the health bars, click on the raid frame and hit the holy shock button. Plus when I'm bored I toss it out on mobs for DPS, along with Exorcism.

[PhelanArcetus]

Yeah I'm only at 25% crit, and likely to be doing more 5-man than 10- or 25-man healing, but the crit rate is good. 30% FoL, 31% HL & HS.

The problem with Holy Shock was that since I do most of my healing with mouseover, normally my target is irrelevant. Then I got someone targeted and hit them with Holy Shock because I was going "3, click", expecting to be asked to target someone for it. Or I'd get a mob targeted from having thrown a Judgment out to get the haste.

Sacred Shield, part of the problem is that it's way over where I originally placed it for Ret. I don't think of reaching over to there. I think I'll just reposition it in both to be next to Cleanse, and then I can maneuver a few other things around for easy access.

Bacon I just feel is worth keeping up. Takes some of the pressure and fear off. If nothing else, it's a self-confidence boost while it's up; I don't feel afraid to heal someone other than the tank because in a 5-man I expect everyone to be within range.

Using Holy Shock is just this matter of... I "grew up" in a situation where Holy Shock was an instant Flash of Light with a substantial cooldown. It became something I mixed in with a Vial of the Sunwell for an emergency burst heal, because alone it was almost too weak to bother with. Now it heals for enough to count and crits proc a very nice buff. So I want to use it some more.

[Stego]

Ulduar 25 man has been nerfed to bloody hell. The first few bosses are all puggable now, IMO.

[GoN]

I feel you, man. Ulduar 10 -which already wasn't quite what I was hoping for- seems to get nerfed about every 3 days. We did out first hard mode last night, by accident (Thorim). We didn't realise we had activated it until we get the achievement. Nice loot though and an emblem of conquest to boot.

[Yagathai]

How can one be bad at DPS? I mean, OK, I get how you can be not Hard-mode raidworthy DPS, but how can you be so bad at DPS that even though you're in level-appropriate blues, the prot-warrior tank (me) is doing 31% of the party's DPS? I mean, Jesus, autoattack alone ought to make that impossible, no?

[PhelanArcetus]

AFK? You can be that bad, trust me.

Related, while the bulk of the guild was in ulduar, they were noting that one one bossfight, Razorscale, I think, one of the healers was outhealed by a ret paladin's JoL. And based on numbers, that's less than 200,000 healing, with only Flash Heal and... now I forget what other little heal, but small numbers. Though I wonder if this was lots and lots of shielding instead of healing?

I decided to pug Emalon again. First group, well, we started disbanding after the first Emalon trash mob. The dps was so bad (actually the dpsers were fine, but we apparently had 3 tanks tank-spec'd and 3 healers) that the mob blew up and wiped the raid.

So I left with some priest, who formed up a new group. We wiped once, mostly due to the tree druid standing waaay too close to Emalon and getting nova'd to death, then killed him. Lost the tank gloves to the other warrior. Then formed up a 25-man with about half that raid and a big chunk from one of the big raiding guilds. No useful loot there, the main surprise was that they kept me tanking and that I didn't die.

And while that was finishing up, the guildmate who I'd offered to heal through CoS instead went to Ulduar... again. Out of Ulduar 25 on his priest for under 30 minutes and he and two others are into Ulduar 10.

Blizzard actually posted on the difficulty yesterday, it seems. Let me bring it back up. Ah, here.

Daelo summed it up pretty well in his post on the Raid and Dungeon forum: "We want to allow additional players to experience more of the cool Ulduar content."

We want dungeons, including Ulduar, to be accessible for players. If everything is difficult then few players will experience the content that we have been working on for several months now. At the same time a lot of the hard modes have been increased in difficulty to give players something more challenging to work toward.

So basically, they want completing the instance to not be especially challenging, but for that to be the various hard modes. They want the bulk of the server to be able to see Yogg-Saron, not the situation where most players never set foot in Black Temple or AQ40. And all the better loot is on the hard modes rather than the final boss, at least.

[Greywolf2375]

How can one be bad at DPS? I mean, OK, I get how you can be not Hard-mode raidworthy DPS, but how can you be so bad at DPS that even though you're in level-appropriate blues, the prot-warrior tank (me) is doing 31% of the party's DPS? I mean, Jesus, autoattack alone ought to make that impossible, no?

I'll get you in contact with the fury warrior we had in 25 Naxx pumping out a solid 1800DPS, he'll explain how.

Was supposed to go into Ulduar 25 with that same group last night, but was just too tired. Needed a break from the pixels so watched Serenity instead.

[RaceBannon42]

Blizzard actually posted on the difficulty yesterday, it seems. Let me bring it back up. Ah, here.

So basically, they want completing the instance to not be especially challenging, but for that to be the various hard modes. They want the bulk of the server to be able to see Yogg-Saron, not the situation where most players never set foot in Black Temple or AQ40. And all the better loot is on the hard modes rather than the final boss, at least.

I'm not a fan. We are by no means an elite raiding guild. We are maybe better than average, and we cleared 8 bosses in under 4 hours on only the 3rd reset. If they want anyone to be able to just waltz in there and collect their purplez just toss a bcuple of trash mobs in each wing and put a chest behind them to loot. Raids should not be a fricking cakewalk. If they have to go that route then do it with 10 mans, and stop ruining 25s too.

Hey but at least I got some fat loots. T8.25 chest and mail bracers off of Thorim. Had to do some serious juggling to keep my 4pc T7 bonus as well as staying hit and exp capped.

Yags the meters you linked were scary bad. I died a little inside.

[Yagathai]

Funny. I died a lot inside the frickin' instance.

[PhelanArcetus]

I'm not a fan. We are by no means an elite raiding guild. We are maybe better than average, and we cleared 8 bosses in under 4 hours on only the 3rd reset. If they want anyone to be able to just waltz in there and collect their purplez just toss a bcuple of trash mobs in each wing and put a chest behind them to loot. Raids should not be a fricking cakewalk. If they have to go that route then do it with 10 mans, and stop ruining 25s too.

Given some of the things I'm hearing from other people, well, here those are.

Friends on the server I might end up transferring to are hoping to get server first 10-man Yogg kill next week. I have no idea how the 25-mans on that server are doing.

To my knowledge nobody on Argent Dawn US has killed Yogg, 10 or 25 man, though I haven't been watching so I may well be wrong. The raiding group most of my guild does 25-mans in does not yet have Flame Leviathan on farm status, so far as I can tell; I don't think they were wiping on trying a hard mode, though I may be wrong. They are what I consider to be a fairly typical raiding group / guild. And they are very much struggling on everything there still. No way they're ready for hard modes.

And I'm just going to stop myself before I get into any discussion about 10 vs. 25, because I definitely don't have time for the stress of that discussion.

[BlueRose]

I got my first taste of 25 man Ulduar last night. They made me DPS Ignis, which is fine with me. I did about 3k DPS, not great, but at least I didnt feel like I needed to hide afterwards. I still have some very crappy blue pieces in my DPS set because there were always 57 DK in every Naxx and I couldnt main roll for DPS gear back then. And now, I cant get into Naxx 25 to save my life unless it's a useless pug.

We also did Thorim, who sucked. I guess my new guild's policy is to go into boss encounters blind, or mostly blind, because no one had any idea what was going on and he took us 10 tries. But we got him at least. I got some tank boots off Ignis, and then we went and did Emalon and Archavon, and Arc was nice enough to finally drop my 7.5 tanking gloves.

I think I may have to find a new guild though. I had to rush home and raid without dinner to make the start time. They are going back tonight for Freya and anything else they get to, but I cant take another night of rushing like mad and starving all night for that.