World of Warcraft

[Kalbear]

Nefarian is a hard fight by any measure. It doesn't have the evil that things like LK or Kael or other multiphase fights have where the first couple phases take forever and will occasionally wipe you; you should be able to progress consistently on it. But it's hard.

It requires a lot of coordination on healers, DPS and tanks.

Positioning is a big deal.

Standing in fires is a big deal (or lack thereof)

Coordination on who is on what column is a big deal.

Controlling DPS so that you're doing a lot AND you're doing it at the right time is a big deal.

Plus it has a soft enrage between the adds and Nef's damage increase, so you can't just bring more healers.

Most of the other fights aren't that bad from that perspective. There just aren't that many moving parts and a lot of it is simply 'don't stand in shit and move here when the boss mod tells you to'. In terms of ranking them, here's how I'd do it:

Nef >>>>>>>>> Al'Akir >> Council > Atramedes > Cho'gall, Chim, Maloriak, Twin Dragons > Magmaw, Omnotron, Council, Halfus with a small argument that you could put Halfus slightly ahead of the other three in his group depending on the dragons.

It's certainly not as faceroll as Naxx or even ToC or large parts of ICC where someone who has never been there is likely to be okay with a quick speech at the beginning of a fight. But once you're aware of the mechanics most everything shouldn't be a surprise.

[Arakasi]

People need to learn to be less defensive about the content they're doing. Just because other content might be harder does not mean the content you're doing is worthless. It just makes it less difficult. That's all.

[Shryke]

I'd put Maloriak and Twin Dragons in the easy category and definitely move Halfus up to harder.

[Kalbear]

Atramedes was way, way harder for us than Cho'gall was; I think we 3-shot Chogall and wiped multiple times on Atra, even after farm. Cho'gall was pretty simple and it's a very repetitive fight with really predictable behavior - and honestly, any fight that has you stand on the ass of the mob most of the fight with almost no movement is going to be easier. Atra can easily be a Teron Gorefiend kinda thing, where one person gets noisy and then gets pulped and then Atra breathes. It's much harder to fuck up that spectacularly on Cho'gall. Plus on Cho'gall you don't care about the 'special' meter. You really do with Atra, and that is yet another fun time.

I think Maloriak is harder than Magmaw/Omnotron/Conclave because of the enrage requirements. The others don't really have anything special in that regard, but Maloriak is something of a gear/skill check. Plus on the first week it was much easier to figure out what to do on the others; we had no idea what we were doing on Maloriak and ended up interrupting every add until they all exploded in a burst of wackiness at the end and we tried to zerg the boss. Fun times.

With Theralion/Valiona, I can see lots of people having problems with the sheer amount of not standing in stuff. The Felmyst/Ony breath wave doesn't make things easier either. While it's not that difficult it requires much more coordination than Omnotron or Magmaw.

[Shryke]

We 2 shot Maloriak the first time, with just a quick read of the strat on wowhead.

Once you see the fight once, it's dead easy.

[Kalbear]

Yeah - when we tried it the strat on wowhead didn't exist, I believe. Or we didn't bother looking it up. Hell, we undermanned it.

I still think Maloriak's slightly harder than Magmaw or Omnotron or Conclave. It's really not that much though. The harder fights are Council, Al'akir and Nef. Anything else is pretty well easy, though atramedes can be annoying if people aren't on the ball.

[Shryke]

Heh, one of the original strats for Maloriak I saw was to interrupt the add cast throughout the fight, and offtank them during P2. Good luck with that! :lol:

Holy shit I'm scared just thinking about that.

[jurble]

My guild still hasn't gotten Cho'gall down and we've done like 60 attempts at this point. Ascendant Council was actually one of the easier fights for us. On Cho'gall, our ranged DPS are just bad and can't handle adds, so we end up dying before hitting P2. Seriously, I'm a mut rogue, but I'm sitting at the top of the Cho'gall attempt charts with 16k dps, even though I have to run all around chasing the adherents, and thus lose time on Cho'gall. The ranged just have to kill those oozes and they fail miserably at it.

[Kalbear]

All dps should be on adds. Ranged and melee. It shouldn't be just ranged dps. You can have melee dps on the oozes too in a pinch. There's nothing bad about it, just a bit more healing. And most of the time they evaporate if the whole melee group gets into it.

[Solmyr]

It started getting annoying wiping on Nefarian because people can't swim out of the lava fast enough ... so yesterday I went and killed him. 2x mage robes, Neltharion's Tear and some other crap.

Looking forward to next week's Baron kill tho, 1/2 Bindings, go Baron!

[Inigima]

Livebloggin dis shit

Halfus down, took a few attempts, nothing awful

EDIT: That's it, lots of problems on Valiona and Theralion. Maybe next time.

EDIT again: My warlock is demo. That fight is filled with movement. Any suggestions on minimizing how much that fucks my DPS?

[Solmyr]

EDIT again: My warlock is demo. That fight is filled with movement. Any suggestions on minimizing how much that fucks my DPS?

Use your secondary spec and go affliction. Use your demo spec for pvp, if you need to cap arena rating and so on, pve demo is good enough for casual pvp. You will need affliction for other fights in cata raid content, for some it's an absolute must: Council, Atramedes, Chimaeron, Nefarian, Omnitron, Valiona, Halfus* (*if you do Halfus with whelps go demo). Affliction is not only superior to demo and destro on these but can sometimes benefit the raid as well (chimaeron for example - you dont require healing at all and in phase2 your dots can be the difference between a kill and a wipe while kiting).

Keep your demo spec tho, on fights which require AoE demo is king, at least until patch comes. Magmaw, Maloriak, Cho'Gall all favour demo. On the rest of the fights (conclave, al'akir) pick whatever you like best, the results are relatively the same.

After patch comes there is a high chance destro will surface as king once again, save for some of the heavy affliction fights like council.

P.S. Now I think about it Cho'gall can be done as affliction too, because there are adds to dps. But since AoE is the most important part you need to spec improved SoC and I don't like affliction AoE so I pass on this one :).

[Mack Kilimaro]

So after our 51k health wipe on Maloriak at the end of the last night, everyone tried to squeeze out some extra min/max points. A couple of people power-leveled alchemy to get a boost to their flask, everyone made sure they had blue quality gems, and so on. Somehow it still took us like four attempts to kill him, because we still had some dumb problems. But no more berserk, so that was good. And the loot actually went to people's main specs this time, also good.

Popped over to Bastion of Twilight after that, because I've heard Halfus is supposed to be pretty easy. We had Storm, Time and Nether, and it took us like an hour's worth of wipes to figure out that two rogues were apparently incapable of interrupting all Shadow Novas, even with the slowed cast. Healers would get knocked around and then the drake tank (i.e. me) would go splat due to them being unable to cast. So, we switched a shaman over and told him to not worry about doing much DPS, and hardly had a Shadow Nova go off the rest of the time, at least until we got below 50%. The Shadow Nova right after the roar, we never did interrupt, but that turned out to not really matter at that point.

It feels like so far Cata raiding is really a lot more punishing as far as isolating one person in the raid who can't do what they need to do. I mean, you had fights like that in Wrath but it was more "run away from this at the right time" rather than like, "manage your GCDs and latency so you can kick/purge/whatever instantly". I would guess a lot of the angst about 10 man difficulty is for a number of guilds who have a couple of spots in their group that's like, what would be F&F in a serious raiding guild, and they were always able to carry those people before and right now they aren't while everyone's learning the encounters. I don't think there's much to be done about it. It'll sort itself out on its own but for now it is like banging your head against a wall.

I don't even want to think about heroic modes. Jesus.

[Kalbear]

There are a significant larger amount of fights in Cataclysm that have 'interrupt this or die' mechanics where DPS has to do something reliably in order for the fight to succeed. Omnotron, Magmaw, Maloriak, Atramedes, Cho'Gall, Council, Conclave (in many ways), Nef all have similar mechanics.

Whereas in Ulduar, it was what - Vezax and if you're feeling charitable, Freya and vaguely IC?

I don't think the fights are particularly that much harder, but yeah - there's a lot more individual points of failure and fewer general ambiguous fail. It's an interesting design decision and one that will fuck over raids that have a wide disparity of talent.

[Inigima]

Popped over to Bastion of Twilight after that, because I've heard Halfus is supposed to be pretty easy. We had Storm, Time and Nether, and it took us like an hour's worth of wipes to figure out that two rogues were apparently incapable of interrupting all Shadow Novas, even with the slowed cast. Healers would get knocked around and then the drake tank (i.e. me) would go splat due to them being unable to cast. So, we switched a shaman over and told him to not worry about doing much DPS, and hardly had a Shadow Nova go off the rest of the time, at least until we got below 50%. The Shadow Nova right after the roar, we never did interrupt, but that turned out to not really matter at that point.

You may wish to consider having a rogue glyph Kick. IIRC, it increases the CD of Kick, but if they successfully interrupt with it, the CD is instantly reset. We did the roar one by having a mage blink out and counterspell it; you might be able to use that or similar tricks.

Use your secondary spec and go affliction. Use your demo spec for pvp, if you need to cap arena rating and so on, pve demo is good enough for casual pvp. You will need affliction for other fights in cata raid content, for some it's an absolute must: Council, Atramedes, Chimaeron, Nefarian, Omnitron, Valiona, Halfus* (*if you do Halfus with whelps go demo). Affliction is not only superior to demo and destro on these but can sometimes benefit the raid as well (chimaeron for example - you dont require healing at all and in phase2 your dots can be the difference between a kill and a wipe while kiting).

Keep your demo spec tho, on fights which require AoE demo is king, at least until patch comes. Magmaw, Maloriak, Cho'Gall all favour demo. On the rest of the fights (conclave, al'akir) pick whatever you like best, the results are relatively the same.

After patch comes there is a high chance destro will surface as king once again, save for some of the heavy affliction fights like council.

P.S. Now I think about it Cho'gall can be done as affliction too, because there are adds to dps. But since AoE is the most important part you need to spec improved SoC and I don't like affliction AoE so I pass on this one :).

Thanks. Yeah, I was thinking about going afflic for the reasons you describe. Never really done any serious afflic PvE, so there'd be a bit of a learning curve, but no reason I can't do it.

I am on a 2s team and a PvP realm, so I don't like the idea of PvPing as demo, though maybe I can swing it. I am hoping to avoid having to constantly respec, that shit gets expensive. We have enough AOE that I can probably live with afflic for those fights.

[Mack Kilimaro]

You may wish to consider having a rogue glyph Kick. IIRC, it increases the CD of Kick, but if they successfully interrupt with it, the CD is instantly reset. We did the roar one by having a mage blink out and counterspell it; you might be able to use that or similar tricks.

We actually had someone try this because he read it on EJ and it was not successful at all. And that's easily our best DPS player. If he can't manage that, then I don't think that's the way that is meant to be done.

Whereas in Ulduar, it was what - Vezax and if you're feeling charitable, Freya and vaguely IC?

I don't remember any interrupt mechanic on Freya. Someone had to kill the trees, but other than that it was your standard get out of shit and DPS the right targets at the right time. Hmm... what other serious interrupt mechanics were there to contend with? Lord Jaraxxus, Anub'arak (H, with the Shadow Strike), and like... lich adds in H-Valithria.

Meanwhile, we've killed four bosses in Cata, and two of them required ultra-precision interrupts, and Arcanotron is sure good to have a solid interrupt on in Omnitron as well.

[Kalbear]

It was good to keep stuns and interrupts on the smaller adds on Freya as well as being responsible for switching targets fast.

And while Jarraxus had interrupts, it wasn't actually a wipe if you didn't. Hell, the poison/fire spew of the worms was more individual fail than Jarraxus.

I like it, honestly; I think that DPS should have more personal responsibility for the success of fights. I liked and hated Gorefiend because of that. I liked RoS because of that and still think that's one of the best designed fights they've ever done. It's a good move. But it also makes it a lot more difficult for some guilds.

[RaceBannon42]

I don't mind interupting, I kinda like it in fact. What I don't like are interupt rotations. I mean I'm fine interupting a certain spell everytime I see it cast. What ends up sucking is making sure its every other or every third cast you are interupting. I end up having to tunnel vision so much. I also hate that my interupt has a shorter lock out than anyone elses.

[Solmyr]

Speaking of interrupts ... just had another merry evening of Nefarian wiping. All I can say to those who are yet to start the learning curve on him - if you think the content is interrupt-demanding, wait till you reach Nef. Especially on 10man.

Our guild is blessed(cursed) with more ranged than melee dps. We don't have a rogue, dk or retri pala. We only have 1 fury warrior and 1 enh shaman. Our main tank is paladin (no reliable interrupt) OT is druid, not hit capped.

With these givens phase2 was a nightmare. Miss chance on the druid's part, if any of the 3 interrupters die, we wipe before the combat res can be used, if any of the interrupters doesn't get on the platform fast enough we wipe ... you get the idea.

All I can say is, nurture your melee dpsers, you're gonna need 'em :).

Inigma, if you don't wanna give up your pvp spec, go aoe affliction. You will still shine on all the fights that I mentioned and on the ones where demo is king, you will do pretty well, but don't expect cheers of delight.

I cap my conquest points in 3v3 arena and I'm fine with demo there, since we play 3xdps. In 2v2, especially if you play with healer, demo is not good, obviously.

End of the day you have to decide if you want to be hardcore PvE player or play both pve and pvp. The top raiding guilds all have 2xPvE specs for a reason. Check the warlocks from Paragon for example, there is a lot to be learned from their choice of talents and glyphs (only today did I learn that succu with glyph of lash of pain outdmges felhunter with glyph of bane of agony, despite the demon soul effect, which favours felhunter). Once new patch comes and destro is buffed, Fel armor starts healing on single target spells, and improved soul fire is moved to tier3, making it exclusive property of destro locks, you will see all warlocks going destro and affliction. Demo will suffer, since they are nerfing felstorm, immolation aura and the range of hellfire - the aoe current breadwinners.

P.S. From a personal standpoint, I am destro4life. It shames me that atm I play demo/affliction and I can't wait for next patch's destro to balance things out. Affliction I hate the most, since it does not suit my playstyle, but at the moment it's a necessary evil.

[Inigima]

Oddly, I don't care about PvP on most of my toons. This one, though, I do. :( I'm trying afflic right now, thanks for the advice.