World of Warcraft

[jurble]

Finally hit 525 on Archaeology. Bout a minute later I get the troll two handed sword as the next item in my queue - it was the 10th item I crafted from troll artifacts. I think my guild hates me, especially since it's offspec for me.

there's a man in my guild with like 600 troll solves at this point and no zin'rokh

[Arataniello]

Latest patch notes for the patch on the PTR indicate that they are finally reverting the Chaotic meta gemming requirement back to a much more sensible 'needs 3 red gems to acitvate'. New meta gem recipes that have worldwide drop rates are also being added -

Agile Shadowspirit Diamond (Agility/3% critical damage),

Reverberating Shadowspirit Diamond (Strength/3% critical damage), and

Burning Shadowspirit Diamond (Intellect/3% critical damage).

All require 3 red gems to activate, and are worldwide drops.

[Greywolf2375]

Latest patch notes for the patch on the PTR indicate that they are finally reverting the Chaotic meta gemming requirement back to a much more sensible 'needs 3 red gems to acitvate'. New meta gem recipes that have worldwide drop rates are also being added -

Agile Shadowspirit Diamond (Agility/3% critical damage),

Reverberating Shadowspirit Diamond (Strength/3% critical damage), and

Burning Shadowspirit Diamond (Intellect/3% critical damage).

All require 3 red gems to activate, and are worldwide drops.

thankfully. 1% spell reflect can now go away

[Inigima]

Thank god.

I guess I should tell my guild implosion story as I promised I would. Basically, about half of the officer corps ninja transferred to Alliance, including the GM. Two of them went together (GM was one) and invited the rest of us (officers) and some of the raiders. No one was consulted in advance, and when I asked why they left, they said it was because people weren't taking raiding seriously enough. One other officer went; the other three of us refused, partly because we didn't want to go, and partly because we didn't approve of how they did it. Several non-officers who were Navy buddies of the GM also went over; two of them were good tanks. The GM also stole 12,000 gold from the guild bank, along with several enchants and a lot of gems,

He didn't transfer GM to anyone at first, either. He left one of his toons in as GM, until one of the remaining officers bullied him into giving it to her.

Since then I've been concerned about stanching the flow of blood and preventing people from fleeing. The new GM, an old friend of mine, wasn't on for almost two days immediately after, which is maybe not a huge deal with a full deck of officers when there isn't a huge crisis going on, but it had a severe negative effect on morale in this case. I did what I could with the help of a levelheaded friend in the guild, and demoted the ex-officers' alts to a rank where they couldn't take anything else out of the bank (or talk in guild chat, fuck those guys).

After all this reassuring I didn't feel like I was being backed up by the GM or that she was taking it seriously even though she was the one who was so gung ho about saving the guild, and last night I yelled at her for it. Eventually I got fed up and asked to be demoted from officer because I was sick of it.

We talked a little today but I'm still not sure how things are going to shake out with the guild. I moved my shaman to Duskwood to hang out with <What> and they are pretty cool so that might become my new home, and I still have a couple characters on Maelstrom. Got a good guild there too with some friends in but I don't really feel like part of the family so at the moment I'm not planning to full-time there.

[Lyanna Stark]

Wow Ini, that is full of suck :( Hope you manage to find a new home soon.

Transferring and then telling people to join seems really odd. We transferred alliance > horde, but at least we let the people we'd like to join know beforehand.

We had a successful night of raiding yesterday. Got Halfus and Valiona/Theralion down within 4 hours. On Halfus we had Slate + Time + Whelps. Nuked Slate, then Time and released whelps, nuked them and nuked boss. He hit enrage at around 5% left, but we manage to just nuke him in the phase. When he hit 0.1% we had a feral druid standing, and he basically ran like a little girl and Halfus died of dots. Bit of an "unclean" kill, but it worked.

Storm + Whelps made us have some...interesting raid damage in the beginning :P All three healers were basically running on empty when Halfus was alone, but once he is out alone the damage is far lower, although being Horde with no mages, we had to get our shaman and warrior to equip PvP trinkets to break the stund and interrupt his nova.

Then we got cockblocked on Valiona and Theralion for a bit before we figured out how to position the blackout collapse/expand and the twilight bomb movements. Once it clicked, we killed them with everyone alive after having struggled with people dying early on lots of attempts.

Not sure where to go next. Maloriak? Twilight Council?

[Inigima]

Wow Ini, that is full of suck :( Hope you manage to find a new home soon.

Thanks. I am probably just gonna go casual with my old guild and play my shaman, maybe move some people, if <What> works out in the long-term.

[Angeleyes]

That really sucks Ini. Did I know any of these people from our time in LoL?

[Inigima]

Yep, Sevryn, Zamamee, possibly Weedle

[Kalbear]

Council is probably the hardest fight in Bastion and one of the harder fights overall. Maloriak, Chim and Atramedess are all significantly easier. Chogall is significantly easier.

[Inkdaub]

Had a pretty odd time playing this morning. I played my 74 rogue for while and did probably five Nexus runs in a row. I like the Nexus to be honest but my groups were just bizarre. Just strange behavior by other players. There was a mage who wouldn't stop spamming arcane blast whether we were in combat or not. We're standing there between pulls and he's running in circles blasting away. Stuff like that. Then I played on my 85 hunter for a bit and managed a heroic Shadowfang Keep and a heroic Deadmines. Pretty typical runs for both except the groups broke up easier, faster and more often than I am normally used to. In Deadmines we spent about an hour and a half on the Reaper because people were so impatient. I blame it on impatience but who knows.

[jurble]

I haven't done heroics in 2 days.

Too busy with archaeology.

I got the mecha-gnome pet.

I'm at 12 rares.

Only epic 85 gear so far is ring of the boy emperawr.

Stopped doing dailies since I finally got my L/W to 525 (I dropped engineering for it) and got my Tol Barad DRAKE OF THE WEST WIND. Took me roughly 50k gold to powerlevel it.

As of last count I am at 173 artifacts made. I still haven't gotten Diggerest because it only counts the first time a common item is made.

There is a guy in my guild with Professor. I believe he died on his PC and is now undead.

[Solmyr]

Council is probably the hardest fight in Bastion and one of the harder fights overall. Maloriak, Chim and Atramedess are all significantly easier. Chogall is significantly easier.

Dunno about that, maybe my opinion is a bit biased since I haven't seen all fights in BoT, but I have been wiping on Halfus with 2 guilds while killing council for ~1h after learning the encounter. I have to say I liked council fight very much (maybe because I'm a lock and one of my PvE specs is affliction :P), apart from phase3, where you start losing a grip on the situation and it's a race against time. Many of cata raid encounters include this element, but the Elementium Monstrosity is one of the most extreme examples.

[Kalbear]

Halfus is all about the first 20 seconds and handling it. After that it's cake. Council is hard, especially on 25 man with so much less room to spread.

[Lyanna Stark]

Dunno about Halfus. Our combo gave us some crazy AoE damage in the beginning with both me (holy priest) and our two pallys hard ooming by the time we had the drakes down, and as we didn't have any mages and we're horde, we had to get a DPS warrior and a shammy equip PvP trinkets. Once they did, we downed him, but before we just could not interrupt enough shadow novas.

We only had some 2 hours of raiding on Sat, but got Ascendant Council to 17%. Had issues mostly with one person being undergeared and about half the raid having massive issues with DBM and or lag. I got a few errors popping up during P1 and 2, but in P3 I just could not get them off my screen. So we ended up running without, and did better. We have a very good P1, need some more practise and cleaning up in P2. Our main issue was having 3-4 people dead when starting P3 cos of DBM issues/lag/oops what is this I am standing in?/where was I supposed to stand again? in P2, so a bit of clearing up and it should be fine. Overall, really fun fight.

Also tanked some normals on my DK and had some amazing PUGs. Seriously, I would like to recruit some of these pugs for our guild! Made a really nice change from the normal LOLboi faceroll ninjalooting pugs.

I really think I should race change to goblin tho for ROCKET JUMP OF IMBANESS. Although I love undeads, they don't get enough love. My healer is only a belf cos of the leet healing racial. Or I'd go troll inna second. What is your favourite race? I am really keen on levelling my orc shamans. Orcs are <3 !!!

On alliance, I keep seeing dwarf shammies (and DKs) and above all worgen druids everywhere. It's like half of the alliance population just race changed this expansion. :P Worgens look so nice tho I can absolutely understand why people race change to worgens.

[Inigima]

I've been having a discussion on another forum about the current state of heroics and I'm wondering what you guys think about it.

One side feels that heroics need to be changed, and the other side thinks they're fine and the first side is a bunch of whiny babies. I'm in the first group. Initially the complaint was that they're too hard, but I don't think that's really the problem, exactly. I think they are hard enough that I don't want to pug them at all if I don't have to and I definitely don't want to pug more than one member, especially since there's incentive to do at least 4/5 guild so it counts as a "guild run." I think the problem is twofold.

One, unless you are already geared with the stuff you need from heroics, they are really long -- my first time in heroic Halls of Origination, we had two wipes on Anphanet (before we got rid of the pugged ret paladin doing 3k DPS and standing in fire) but no other issues, and it still took almost two hours (we did all the bosses because we all need the gear and rep, and since we don't have heroic gear we don't have the DPS to just blast through everything in seconds). I'm sure that will go down as we get more familiar with everything, but it is still a really long dungeon. Anyway, spending 90-120 minutes a day is a huge time commitment and starts to feel more like a small raid than a dungeon, and I don't really have that kind of time. Especially if I am solo queueing as DPS, where the run is likely to take even longer, and where I will have a 40 minute queue and maybe the group isn't good and breaks up after two trash pulls and then I get to have another 40 minute queue! Awesome.

Two, items are still priced as if dungeons aren't that way. When you need thousands of JP/VP to buy a single item, and you can maybe get through one a day, it doesn't feel like you're making much progress when you finally do emerge.

I like that Cata heroics are challenging, I like that CC is required and I like that you have to be awake, but I just feel like it's too much time and too little reward. What do you guys think?

[Lyanna Stark]

Yeah, the Shadow Nova drake does make things a lot trickier. We didn't have him up so the stuns at 50% were harmless.

With Council, you really need everyone alive going into P3. The dps requirements are pretty tight for guilds without too much 359 gear (ie. us), so every little thing helps. Getting the bosses down low in P1 and P2 really helps here too. If you manage the debuffs well in P1, you can have both bosses at around 20% by the time P2 starts, and if you time it right on the earth boss in P2, you can burst his shield and take him down to around 15% to start P3. Valuable seconds.

On our Council kill, only the tanks were alive at the end. (Though we had managed to screw the health up in P2 a bit).

Good advice. Yeah P3 seemed kinda crazy with the AoE damage going through the roof completely. I think we borked our positioning massively as well which didn't help.

Ini,

With regards to heroics, until you are in mostly 346, you will struggle with anything but a very good PUG or a guild group. It also depends which one you get and which setup. As someone on MMO champion I think said: huge difference with joining a pug with DPS warrior, DPS DK and a boomkin than joining a group with mage, rogue and hunter, for instance. The first has virtually no CC (if you don't go Grim Batol for dragonkin) and the second has loads.

One thing people in my guild has done is try and advertise via trade to find non retarded people to group with. Put good ones on friends list and try to hook up with them to run pugs with.

Also: some dungeons induce far more wipes than others: I am looking your way HC Stonecore (worst), Grim Batol and Deadmines. HoOr and Tol'Vir are normally ok. Especially if you skip some bosses in HoOr to make it go faster.

Lots of dungeons also have skippable bosses. HoOr has loads of them. SFK has a few and even Grim Batol has some. I also think the time requirements can get really sick sometimes, but with good DPS and some skips, it can go much faster.

I'm actually finding even part pugs faster and better these days than they used to be. People seem to have got the hang of the need to CC, a lot of people are not in the HCs for the first time anymore, and most people know more or less what to do.

As for making it faster, I'd be fine with reducing the number of trash pulls in some HCs, like Grim Batol and DM (I think they are reducing the DM trash) cos trash takes a lot of time. Unless we are running GB HC without CC, I hardly need to drink much anymore either so we can speed through fast if I am healing.

If you don't mind my asking, what class are you playing? If you run pala or druid, queueing as tank or healer is super fast.

Only dungeon that is made of shite is Vortex bloody Pinnacle. What a piece of utter tosh that place is. Yuck.

[RaceBannon42]

Council is probably the hardest fight in Bastion and one of the harder fights overall. Maloriak, Chim and Atramedess are all significantly easier. Chogall is significantly easier.

This.

We went to Cho'gall for the forst time in 25's last night. Took us 3 tries. As melee its incredibly easy. Dont stand in fire, move out of shadow crash... win. I think it was easier than all of the other bosses Kal named. Its probaly more difficult for ranged though.

I think atramedes is harder since they change the swirls coming from his tail to his torso. Still not hard to move.

After Cho'gall we spent the rest of the night wiping on Al'Akir. Chain lightning kept gibbing people, and apparently moving out of tornados is hard.

[Angeleyes]

I hit the "Ini Wall of Meatheads" yesterday. Regular GB and Lost City, both only got two bosses down. Tanks who have no idea what to do and don't mark. DPS using AoEs on the pull instead of single target... DPS pulling threat off the tank.

It is ugly in regular land. Everyone with any ability to play the game has gotten into Heroics, and the mental masses are left in the queues with me. It is horrible.

I have never seen such utter fail play.

It makes me upset. The number of specific examples I can go into is staggering, but when I am using Greater Earth Elemental on cooldown to prevent trash wipes... Something is gonna have to give. Also, DPS does not know how to kite adds in boss fights in GB, nor focus them in Lost city. Very very frustrating. It is normal people, the mage should not be doing 3.7k single target, and not switching to adds... I would have complained about that level of dps in Wrath heroics. ugh.

[Lyanna Stark]

It is ugly in regular land. Everyone with any ability to play the game has gotten into Heroics, and the mental masses are left in the queues with me. It is horrible.

That's awful :(

Strangely, I was having the opposite happen to me. The people I got grouped with in normals were either on alts, or people just a smidgeon under HC gear level. I ended up using only one- max two CC in Tol'Vir on my shit geared DK tank cos the healer was awesome, and I just lined up CDs and used all my buttons, kited, interrupted etc. I can also tank stuff pretty well cos I know which mobs cause healer frenzy and which ones are cake.

But yeah, sometimes you just run into these horrible 2.5k DPS plate melee DPS who nuke the wrong target, ninja tank gear, couldn't find their interrupt buttons if their life depended on it and stand in fire constantly. Or even better: taunt mobs off you (that really makes me nerd rage). I find the main offenders on the "bad" lists are DK DPS, warrior DPS and ret pallies. Totally over represented in the "terribad" categories. I can live with half arsed DPS as long as they CC, don't break CC, move out of fire and at least shoot/stab the correct target most of the time, but the aforemented fails on this a lot.

My fave "idiot checker" is the third boss in HoOr (Anraphet? The guy you get to after the Trogg bit) cos people ALWAYS stand in shadow crashes and never manage to hear that it's Omega stance and hug healer for AoE heals. Husam is pretty good too. If people insist on sitting on mines and standing in shockwave, leave group ASAP.

[saint777]

I've been having a discussion on another forum about the current state of heroics and I'm wondering what you guys think about it.

I like that Cata heroics are challenging, I like that CC is required and I like that you have to be awake, but I just feel like it's too much time and too little reward. What do you guys think?

The only problem I have is the lack of reward upon completing a heroic. The first time you complete one that is a reward on its' own, but after multiple runs and no gear drops it starts to get frustrating. I'm buying almost all my gear through JP because the gear drops that I need are so rare that I can't actually count on them dropping even after 5 runs through the same dungeon to kill the boss that drops what I need(yes I did this and it didn't drop). The new dungeons need to be grinded into the ground because I figure the drop rate is 3 to 14% even though the gear isn't epic. I think this is a cover over the real problem I have with the expansion. Not nearly enough endgame content. The only thing to do after doing the quests in the new zones is reg dungeons then heroics. Raiding is last but I can't raid yet because I have to keep spamming heroics to get gear which can lead to burnout.

The funny thing is it is the difficulty that is prolonging burnout. They remain challenging because of pugs. There are also several ways to down a boss depending on party makeup. This keeps it a bit fresh. I love the various raid like mechanics of the bosses. I treat the heroics for what they really are: 5 man raids. Just wished there were more dungeons out of the box.