World of Warcraft

[Shryke]

I'm pretty sure they said they WEREN'T doing anything similar to "Tribute to Insanity" or "Yogg-0" for ICC.

The buff is click-off-able because it costs them nothing to make it so and less people bitch about it then.

[Weak With The Dawn]

Our guild downed LK last night after wiping for a couple weeks. It was funny, cause it seems to be entirely raidcomp-related. The GL and one of the officers weren't playing last night, so there were two other folks filling in. And having a second hunter and rogue really made a huge difference. Went from struggling to a 2-shot. It's funny how folks claim that rogues don't offer raid utility; while they don't offer raid buffs or debuffs to single targets as easily, all their poisons give a lot of AoE utility most other classes lack, and their AOE slow is awesome. Their AOE threat boost is also awesome.

:smug:

Also our debuffs do actually apply easily, it's just that they're only really useful without a specific other class. Savage Combat can be replaced by an Arms Warrior's Blood Frenzy.

I can't remember who else brings the Master Poisoner buff (3% increased crit) but I know there's another "raid constant" class that has it.

But yeah, we're pretty great :-p.

Grats on the Lich King. Get anything good?

[Kalbear]

I'm pretty sure they said they WEREN'T doing anything similar to "Tribute to Insanity" or "Yogg-0" for ICC.

The buff is click-off-able because it costs them nothing to make it so and less people bitch about it then.

I've not seen anything, but they've mentioned that there would be some indicator of success without the buff. And those quests and the quest item are in the game now; only the reward isn't there. Heck, the quests have sound files associated with them.

So either they're an additional reward for killing LK HM, or they're a reward for killing LK HM on hell difficulty.

In any case - I really like the differing versions of hard modes with increased value. I think that was one of the things they really got right with Sarth and Ulduar and totally fucked up with ToC and ICC ( at least so far).

[Kalbear]

Also our debuffs do actually apply easily, it's just that they're only really useful without a specific other class. Savage Combat can be replaced by an Arms Warrior's Blood Frenzy.

I can't remember who else brings the Master Poisoner buff (3% increased crit) but I know there's another "raid constant" class that has it.

Right. Ret gives 3% crit, and everyone loves ret so there's almost always at least one. Any rogue can do EA but warriors don't take the hit to do it. Rogues can do MS but arms warriors do it better. Same with blood frenzy.

But FoK is ridiculously useful when dealing with any amount of adds, and ToTT combined with it gives utility no one else has. Plus for Valks on LK, rogues have a ton of stuns/disables AND slows that work against them; no other melee comes close to that utility.

We noticed it on heroic Anub and Yogg0 too; having one rogue was hard, but having two rogues made it way easier. Threat wasn't as big a deal, adds got to their targets and things got debuffed really fast.

[Tongue Stuck to Wall]

Thanks again all for your helpful advice earlier. I've got the proper Ret spec, my rotation down, and I've found an excellent guild whose veteran members are very patient and have been giving me the low-down on the various randoms as we go through them. My gear is still a mish-mash, but I'm focusing on getting my score up to be eligible for the better instances.

I've been PvPing in AV, and I suspect this argument is age-old, but more and more the battles I've been involved in are going like this:

[Player 1]: evry1 blitz

[Player 2]: blitz is for fagets

[Player 3]: no, cap towers, play d then Drek

[Player 1]: you all are n00bs, we can win in like 5 mins.

[Player 3]: more honor if we turtle

[Player 1]: ally suckz, I am rolling horde next

So 10 play defence at Dun Baldar, 20 get Galv, 10 go to Drek. After Galv, two each take Iceblood Tower and Tower Point which inevitably get recapped. The initial group at Drek gets impatient and wipes, and the rest from Galv get held up in those hills between TP and Frostwolf Cemetery. Then it's death by attrition or Vann (if the gods are merciful). For the record, I've seen blitz work once and I can see how you can get more honor/time if you do it consistently, but it's too difficult getting everyone on the same page.

[PhelanArcetus]

CS never kicks someone midraid for the reason that cooler heads should prevail. But I'd kick the guy. Poison players are never worth it.

Grats, Phelan, on Putricide. Glad the strat helped some :) Ironically we're still doing it the 'old' way of kiting back and forth, because that's what worked for us.

On the buff: my guess is that at the same time it shows up you'll see those weird LK quest rewards as actually in the game, and the rewards will come from not enabling the buff for any mode for any fight in ICC and killing LK. This will make it similiar to Yogg-1 vs Yogg-0; you can do LK HM with the buff and get 'normal' credit, but if you're truly hardcore you'll get it with no buffs and get the ultimate reward. Which I'd really like.

Our guild downed LK last night after wiping for a couple weeks. It was funny, cause it seems to be entirely raidcomp-related. The GL and one of the officers weren't playing last night, so there were two other folks filling in. And having a second hunter and rogue really made a huge difference. Went from struggling to a 2-shot. It's funny how folks claim that rogues don't offer raid utility; while they don't offer raid buffs or debuffs to single targets as easily, all their poisons give a lot of AoE utility most other classes lack, and their AOE slow is awesome. Their AOE threat boost is also awesome.

Thanks. Yeah, grouping up on the green's spawn point really helped. Kiting back & forth, or staying nearish the orange, as we had been, allowed us to get too scattered and didn't prevent the green from exploding at least once. By grouping up we accepted the explosion, reduced massively the chances of a scatter and someone being one-shot, allowed a little more damage on Putricide during the green ooze, and stopped the 3 melee from spending nearly half the fight running back & forth. (With a mutilate rogue and a ret paladin, that hurts a lot.) We did send the combat rogue to help with the orange ooze; I thought it was taking too long with just the two ranged.

I really think Blizzard needs to do something about the Sundering; one of the reasons the OT never MTs is because I bring Sunder for free as tank. It's going to go up, maybe not ASAP, on the boss, and it's going to stay up. Though I've gotten bad about relying on him to do the slow, so that's been nerfing the mage on Putricide. I don't dps often on my warrior, but when I was, I was either terrible at remembering to sunder, or I made it too high a priority. In theory, if you only sunder bosses who will stay up, you're blowing, after the beginning, one GCD and 15 rage every 30 seconds. Doesn't seem too terrible. In practice, it sucks. And so if you don't have a warrior tank, either someone needs to be the sunder monkey and give up meaningful dps, or you need to go without sunders (the cost depending on your raid makeup).

Ret is totally awesome, though. I'll never argue that one. Not since we stopped being lolret, at least.

[Weak With The Dawn]

Thanks again all for your helpful advice earlier. I've got the proper Ret spec, my rotation down, and I've found an excellent guild whose veteran members are very patient and have been giving me the low-down on the various randoms as we go through them. My gear is still a mish-mash, but I'm focusing on getting my score up to be eligible for the better instances.

I've been PvPing in AV, and I suspect this argument is age-old, but more and more the battles I've been involved in are going like this:

[Player 1]: evry1 blitz

[Player 2]: blitz is for fagets

[Player 3]: no, cap towers, play d then Drek

[Player 1]: you all are n00bs, we can win in like 5 mins.

[Player 3]: more honor if we turtle

[Player 1]: ally suckz, I am rolling horde next

So 10 play defence at Dun Baldar, 20 get Galv, 10 go to Drek. After Galv, two each take Iceblood Tower and Tower Point which get recapped in five minutes. The initial group at Drek gets impatient and wipes, and the rest from Galv get held up in those hills between TP and Frostwolf Cemetery. Then it's death by attrition or Vann (if the gods are merciful). For the record, I've seen blitz work once and I can see how you can get more honor/time if you do it consistently, but it's too difficult getting everyone on the same page.

That's marginally better then horde chat for AV.

"We have to blitz we'll lose otherwise"

"Yeah ally always win!"

"I only won 2 games all day!"

Everyone is so hung up on the "Ally have it easier" excuse that no one does anything constructive. At least, that's how it is on the Shadowburn realm group.

[Poobah]

I've not seen anything, but they've mentioned that there would be some indicator of success without the buff. And those quests and the quest item are in the game now; only the reward isn't there. Heck, the quests have sound files associated with them.

What are the quest items? I haven't heard anything about them. :o

Edit : I did hear the sound files and have been wondering for a good while.

[Weak With The Dawn]

I really don't understand the mentality. Just go and spend 10 minutes filling in a fucking form!

I love when that happens. Not even in the guild yet but already trying to break the rules. What kind of impression does that give off?

[Kalbear]

That's the first step. It makes it much easier to reject if they don't want to fill out a form.

Namely, if they're not willing to make the people's lives who are evaluating them easier, there's no reason to believe that that attitude won't carry on when playing with them.

[Inigima]

I came (holds fingers 1/4" apart) to g kicking someone last night. This player has been fairly annoying for ahwile. E-peens healing meters, argues about tactics during raids, whines about having to flask, so I'm not happy with him to start with, but then as we are buffing up for maly he ninja pulls hims. We are like WTF? who pulled. He's like what?everyone is here. I think I told him it wasnt his job to pull you fucking asshole, or something like that. I wanted to wait until I'd cooled off before I tell him he needs to check himself or he's gone.

I like having meters for a reference, and to know if someone's not pulling their weight, but anyone who e-peens any meter is obnoxious. And healing meters are almost completely useless anyway. Healing isn't a one-dimensional job that can be boiled down to a number. What a douche.

A good friend of mine is in a guild that forbids the posting of meters, full stop. The RL runs them so he can know if there's a problem, and anyone is welcome to run them as well, but no posting it in /raid, /guild, /party, etc. That sounds so nice to me.

[Weak With The Dawn]

Apparently I missed a guild first, realm sixth Algalon kill last night.

WTB Starcaller title from the B-team member they took instead. :-(

[Angeleyes]

Well I've recently fallen off the wagon, and my on again off again relationship with WoW continues.

Finally got a chance to move past Saurfang Jr. (Plagueworks wasn't released when I stopped playing)

Definitely got pwned by the second to last steam vent :D.

Downed Festergut and Rotface with some random crew who wanted one more DPS for ICC 10, so I went as shadow. I'm starting to really get back into it. It was quite funny, we had the raid quest to mix both strains of blight at once... After we killed Rotface I looked to see my debuff. It was missing, and I was wondering wtf? When the raid leader kindly whispered me that you had to get hit by his AoE ooze spray to get it, so he was impressed that I did such a good job avoiding it :P.

I really wish disc priests didn't step on each other's toes so much, especially in 10 man. While most groups look for 2-3 healers and some class overlap is okay, Disc just does not play well.

[TerraPrime]

I really wish disc priests didn't step on each other's toes so much, especially in 10 man. While most groups look for 2-3 healers and some class overlap is okay, Disc just does not play well.

I would have asked one of the disc. priests to go holy instead. Many (most?) healing-focused priests are dual-spec holy/disc for that reason.

[Angeleyes]

I would have asked one of the disc. priests to go holy instead. Many (most?) healing-focused priests are dual-spec holy/disc for that reason.

Yup. In the world of pugs things aren't quite that pretty though. I've been toying with the idea of going holy for a while, but in the end I don't think my pure throughput disc set could support it, and I'm already behind on gearscore as it is. *Shows off all his ilvl 232 Tier pieces*

[TerraPrime]

Bah, gear score can eat my poop.

At any rate, I want to solicit some suggestions.

We're on Rotface, and the bastard just won't die. We've been consistent in getting him to 20-30% each try, but just can't finish it.

The major problem is that the people with the mutated disease get sprayed by slime as they kite the blob to the big blob. We've somewhat mitigated this by putting a healer to heal the people and we have a disc priest to bubble.

Another problem we have is the small blobs will randomly drop aggro. Say the mage gets the mutated disease, and he starts to run towards the blob. Frequently, the small blob will leave him and chase someone else. The mage didn't ice-block or blink. This creates problem, because now the small blob is running through the melee cluster, and often, it gets merged with another small blob instead of with the bigger blob. We've also had cases where two blobs will just sit there for 5 seconds or more instead of merging. This is especially bad, I noticed, when you have a full blob, and it's about to explode, and you get a new blob. This new blob tends to then merge very slowly with the next new blob.

Our current strat is to lust on first contact and burn as much as possible, and we usually survive 2 explosions. It's when it gets to 3rd one that things fall apart. We have 3 heals (pally shamy disc priest), 2 tanks, and 5 dps. I would like to try this with 2 heals and 6 dps next time.

Any other suggestions?

[Kalbear]

The major problem is that the people with the mutated disease get sprayed by slime as they kite the blob to the big blob. We've somewhat mitigated this by putting a healer to heal the people and we have a disc priest to bubble.

One of the easiest and 'safest' ways to deal with this is to...not. Basically, let the little blobs spawn in the middle and leave them there, and heal through it. When they form a big blob, have the kiter taunt the big blob to draw him away. This has a couple advantages - you get less explosions (since a big blob joining with another big blob only increases the stack size by one) and it's much less complex. You will need to heal through the big blob damage, but it's predictable.

[TerraPrime]

Oh I see.

So everyone just let the blob fall, until first 2 form a big blob (2). Then kiter taunts and kites. When blob #3 comes, leave it alone. When blob #4 comes, it will merge with #3 to form another bigger blob (2). Taunt the second bigger blob, and it will join with the first bigger blob and form a big blob (3). Repeat. So instead of one explosion every 5, we will get one explosion every 10.

Any idea on the random drop aggro thing? I suppose if we use this strat it's not an issue anymore.

[Poobah]

Lich King down!

[Inigima]

Lich King down!

Grats!

My tree just hit 58 and is off to Outlands. I'm doing the intro quests since the gear there is better than vanilla blues. I did shite damage with spells in Azeroth, but my Starfire knocks the shit out of stuff here. Dunno why.