Rather than decline raid invites, why not just read up a little on the bosses? Wowhead, Wowwiki, Bosskillers, all these sites and more have information on the bosses, from their abilities and common strategies, to highly detailed (and often class specific) information. Sure, any given raid will probably do things differently based on their experience and composition, but being forwarned is forarmed, or something like that.
I doubt anyone expects you to have every boss ability of every instance memorized, but like studying anything, reading over it once or twice will fill in a lot of what you need to know, and then the particulars are picked up by doing it yourself.
I'm lucky enough to have a second monitor, so I cheated and had Bosskillers up to read/peruse while in the midst of said raids (of course, split attention during the boss fight itself is a bad idea, but it was a handy cheat sheet during the pre-fight setup).
If they keep wanting you back, I say take the opportunities presented to you, if you have the time to tag along. 2 1/2 weeks from now, that content will likely remain untouched for a fairly long while until we've had our fill of WLK content (speaking from experience with TBC, that is. Some guilds and groups do indeed keep running 'old' content for the fun, challenge or experience).
Out of curiosity, what class do you raid with?
I do actually have a second monitor.... it'd just be very difficult to use. I've got a laptop and the monitor is off my old desktop machine and when I'm raiding I sit at my desk and the monitor is stood behind the laptop. Spose I should look at using that again sometime soon.
Yeah, I deffinately should look the bosses up and I used to do it alot but work has gotten alot busier lately and has seriously eaten into my time. So when I used to look up strats for when I was just about to start raiding Kara. I'm currently writing this post while I'm walking a customer through a router setup over the phone. Not the most fun/easiest of tasks =p
I'm running as a ret pally right now. I used to be prot before the 3.0 hit but respecced to ret with the patch. The reason I did this was because I liked the look of the ammount of support I could give. I could aide in healing and I could increase raid DPS. And as far as I'm aware I'm the only ret pally in our raiding group (we're not all in the same guild) that has actually taken the 3% speed increase with ret aura.
I think they're off to BT tonight for the first time. If I get an invite I might decline and see how they do without me. Alternatively I'll try and read up on what I can before everything starts.
Eh, I'm not all that jazzed about stripping an instance of all challenge to let people push over the final boss. I agree with in it spirit, but think putting in the ability to cut straight to Illidan would've been more useful, like they did with Vashj and Kael. That, on top of the DPS increase, would've been more than enough to make the end of the game accessible without stripping away all of the cool things about the BT encounters that Blizzard put into the game.
To each their own though - I certainly prefer the content post patch rather than pre patch as we would've had had to rush to kill Illidan and I doubt we would've had time for Archimonde.
My point isn't that people shouldn't be able to see Black Temple - my point is that the nerf is so significant that you really don't capture a lot of the mechanics that made the bosses what they were.
Naj'entus - One Tidal Shield, maybe 3 spines
Supremus - Eh, he was a loot pinata anyway
Akama - See Supremus
Gorefiend - 1 set of constructs popped. 1.
BloodBoil - 1 Fel Rage. 1.
RoS - Don't have to deflect Deaden, fight was over in 4 minutes.
Sharazz - Actually still a tough fight as you need HoD, which means that any guild entering BT for the first time is stuck here, as there's no way you could kit a raid in the time the patch dropped (given how unstable servers have been, at least on our realm) til LK hit to clear her
Council - probably the biggest nerf I've seen. A complete snoozefest from what was a sweet fight
Illidan - still tough, requires good coordination / FR / etc.
We did BT for the first time last night post-3.0 and yeah it was sad. I agree with what you've said here, making it a faster clear and allowing more guilds to see the content before it's set aside is nice. But are you really experiencing the content if not a single person in the raid gets ghosted on Teron? What about when Illidan doesn't even hit a single demon phase? I found that sort of depressing. Poor Illidan.
Also I actually question whether you'd need SR for Shahraz anymore. If you stay in normal gear, she'll die so fast that few people will even get FA. Maybe a tiny bit of SR? But certainly not 300+ per person. I think I did 200 last night including shadow prot and I got FA twice and was not even in danger of dying.
Edit: And not to mention that most guilds like ours who have been clearing BT for months probably have piles of useless HoDs sitting in the bank, so a guild who's just hitting the end of BT now could buy those for a token sum, I bet. We have like three stacks and nothing to do with them.
My guild bank has nearly 100. I won a random roll for one during an alt Hyjal on Saturday night, and won another roll (without much competition) for the caster dps tailoring shoulders, which I learned on my warlock (who attended that raid). Told the other officers I was ninja'ing the second Heart I'd need to make 'em, asked how much I should put in the guild bank for it, and the guild leader said not to sweat it as we had so many and were unlikely to be moving that many anytime soon.
And I'm somewhat surprised you'd have anything bad to say about the massive raid nerf, Riz. Would your guild have killed KJ without it? Would you have?
I know mine wouldn't have. So I suspect that's at least 2 guilds under our very noses with a number of bosses down that would have either been stuck chewing glass, or would've just given up raiding at some point before WLK came out.
Rather than everyone being all "look, fuck this shit, I'm out" like they were pre-TBC, by making raiding so much less painful and time consuming, we've seen an explosion of interest. Sure, it's easy to be interested when you're clearing Sunwell and BT in ~2 nights combined (more like 3 or so, but that's because of server shenanigans), but it's significantly more of a morale boost than "Okay, so... 18 people online. Raid cancelled, have a good night all."
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We did Mother last night with half the raid no having any extra SR and the other half having full SR (the half without are people brought in to fill the raid, including me). As long as I didn't get FA or no one nearby got it I'd live the fight. Now we got cockblocked on Council, where the mage tank or his healer kept dying at some point: should they be inching their way up the ramp so they end up being alone with no one to help them or what? The other three's damage output was so low we didn't have to heal the tanks generally unless an AoE dropped on them so maybe we should have two healers on the mage next time.
Illidan doesn't even hit a single demon phase? I found that sort of depressing. Poor Illidan.
Me and my guild did BT last night again and we managed to do that too. It was very, very sad. What was even worse is that we had a few newer folks that we recruited for WotLK. Still... our regular DPSers were so on the ball it wasn't even funny. We only got 1 eye beam in Phase 2. No demon forms.
Then we went to Hyjal cause the kill took only 5 minutes. The two warrior tanks were doing 1.8K DPS on the trash, I was doing 1.6K (Drood)... and a Balance Druid was doing 2.9K DPS on Trash/Boss combined. It was just sick. The whole night made me nostalgic and eager to raid at level 80 where things will be hard again.
And I'm somewhat surprised you'd have anything bad to say about the massive raid nerf, Riz. Would your guild have killed KJ without it? Would you have?
I know mine wouldn't have. So I suspect that's at least 2 guilds under our very noses with a number of bosses down that would have either been stuck chewing glass, or would've just given up raiding at some point before WLK came out.
Oh we surely would not have, probably would have killed Twins but I doubt we'd have gotten M'uru. I don't think it was a bad decision on their part and it's at least letting people have fun and sort of experience fights they never would have. But I do think it's sad that some of the fights bear no resemblance to what they were pre-nerf. When we were doing KJ, we at least had to actually do the mechanics. You can't (well, we can't, I don't know about guilds who have been farming him for months) just zerg him down fast enough to ignore all of his abilities like you can with Teron Gorefiend, for instance. It was a ton easier than pre-3.0 but people still experienced all of his abilities and phases. Illidan with no demon phase?
See, but what people do now has no reflection on what you did weeks/months ago. So, it's sad for you, but that doesn't make it sad for those saps like me that would never otherwise see a boss in any iteration except on youtube. There are some bosses that could have been tweaked more to include more of the original mechanics, but it was a good, cheap, easy solution to open up content.
Hopefully more attention was paid when designing the 10 man vs 25 man versions of bosses in WOTLK.
I'm just saying it's kind of sad that you'll never get to do Teron ghosts. Don't get me wrong, I think the nerfs were a good thing, better to see two-thirds of a boss than never see the boss at all, and give people a break in general, but it's like when we went to do Naxx 40 at level 70. A few fights you still needed to pay attention to the mechanics (Thaddius, Kel'thuzad), but others were just a zerg. Then again I'm happy to have missed out on farming shadow prot potions for endless hours like the people who did Naxx at 60. :P
Well, unlike TBC, there's a proper introductory 25 man for WLK, which will be nice (2 "Onyxia Style" encounters don't count), and supposedly Naxx 10 and 25 man are both significantly easier/more forgiving starter instances for people looking to get into/back into raiding.
Considering the time and effort that'll be required to get everyone on the same page (especially with a new class and potentially 30 specs to sort through) I think this is a wise choice, at least as long as it's delivered upon.
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ThomamelasOnly one man can kill this many Russians. Bring his guitar to me! Registered Userregular
Well, unlike TBC, there's a proper introductory 25 man for WLK, which will be nice (2 "Onyxia Style" encounters don't count), and supposedly Naxx 10 and 25 man are both significantly easier/more forgiving starter instances for people looking to get into/back into raiding.
Considering the time and effort that'll be required to get everyone on the same page (especially with a new class and potentially 30 specs to sort through) I think this is a wise choice, at least as long as it's delivered upon.
Mags wasn't much of an introductory raid anyway. The cube clicking difficulty definitely removes it from an introductory raid.
The first actually easy 25 man bosses were Lurker/VR until they began nerfing things. Just thinking about the retard check that was Magtheridon makes me shudder.
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ThomamelasOnly one man can kill this many Russians. Bring his guitar to me! Registered Userregular
Wasn't Gruul practically unkillable at first too? Early BC was silly.
Kinda. He had more HP, so DPS really had to push a lot harder. But I was really thinking in terms of mechanic evolution. I'm trying to think of anything like the cube-clicking pre-TBC and I can't think of any. It presents another change in slope on the learning curve. I remember thinking the bastard would never be farmable for that reason. Fortunately I kept my mouth shut and didn't give Murphy a reason to smack me.
Wasn't Gruul practically unkillable at first too? Early BC was silly.
Kinda. He had more HP, so DPS really had to push a lot harder. But I was really thinking in terms of mechanic evolution. I'm trying to think of anything like the cube-clicking pre-TBC and I can't think of any. It presents another change in slope on the learning curve. I remember thinking the bastard would never be farmable for that reason. Fortunately I kept my mouth shut and didn't give Murphy a reason to smack me.
Also shatter was much more dangerous. Something like 4-5k per person shattered, instead of the ~2k it is now.
Wasn't Gruul practically unkillable at first too? Early BC was silly.
Kinda. He had more HP, so DPS really had to push a lot harder. But I was really thinking in terms of mechanic evolution. I'm trying to think of anything like the cube-clicking pre-TBC and I can't think of any. It presents another change in slope on the learning curve. I remember thinking the bastard would never be farmable for that reason. Fortunately I kept my mouth shut and didn't give Murphy a reason to smack me.
Also shatter was much more dangerous. Something like 4-5k per person shattered, instead of the ~2k it is now.
and of course people did a lot less dps
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Munkus BeaverYou don't have to attend every argument you are invited to.Philosophy: Stoicism. Politics: Democratic SocialistRegistered User, ClubPAregular
We had general officers who were proficient in a number of classes. Every class was represented, so we'd defer to each other on the judgment of one who had expertise.
Having one class, one class officer is, however, an arbitrary system enforced by dunces who have zero experience in leadership.
Munkus Beaver on
Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but dies in the process.
We had general officers who were proficient in a number of classes. Every class was represented, so we'd defer to each other on the judgment of one who had expertise.
Having one class, one class officer is, however, an arbitrary system enforced by dunces who have zero experience in leadership.
Back in vanilla days Obsidian Spur/ Team eXecute had class officers more in the model of a representative in congress. They didn't so much reign over us, but brought our interests/concerns to the officers as a whole. This was different obviously since we had 5 or so of every class.
We had general officers who were proficient in a number of classes. Every class was represented, so we'd defer to each other on the judgment of one who had expertise.
Having one class, one class officer is, however, an arbitrary system enforced by dunces who have zero experience in leadership.
Back in vanilla days Obsidian Spur/ Team eXecute had class officers more in the model of a representative in congress. They didn't so much reign over us, but brought our interests/concerns to the officers as a whole. This was different obviously since we had 5 or so of every class.
Unless you were a warrior, in which case there were 50.
But yeah, the OS/team eX model worked out really well for the most part. I'm actually trying to bring a lot of that structure over to the guild my friend and I started, seems to be working so far.
We had general officers who were proficient in a number of classes. Every class was represented, so we'd defer to each other on the judgment of one who had expertise.
Having one class, one class officer is, however, an arbitrary system enforced by dunces who have zero experience in leadership.
Back in vanilla days Obsidian Spur/ Team eXecute had class officers more in the model of a representative in congress. They didn't so much reign over us, but brought our interests/concerns to the officers as a whole. This was different obviously since we had 5 or so of every class.
Unless you were a warrior, in which case there were 50.
But yeah, the OS/team eX model worked out really well for the most part. I'm actually trying to bring a lot of that structure over to the guild my friend and I started, seems to be working so far.
We had general officers who were proficient in a number of classes. Every class was represented, so we'd defer to each other on the judgment of one who had expertise.
Having one class, one class officer is, however, an arbitrary system enforced by dunces who have zero experience in leadership.
Back in vanilla days Obsidian Spur/ Team eXecute had class officers more in the model of a representative in congress. They didn't so much reign over us, but brought our interests/concerns to the officers as a whole. This was different obviously since we had 5 or so of every class.
Unless you were a warrior, in which case there were 50.
But yeah, the OS/team eX model worked out really well for the most part. I'm actually trying to bring a lot of that structure over to the guild my friend and I started, seems to be working so far.
wait, who are you?
Kendiar, UD rogue. Was, anyway. I rerolled with some friends for BC, and have now rerolled again for wrath.
Wasn't Gruul practically unkillable at first too? Early BC was silly.
Kinda. He had more HP, so DPS really had to push a lot harder. But I was really thinking in terms of mechanic evolution. I'm trying to think of anything like the cube-clicking pre-TBC and I can't think of any. It presents another change in slope on the learning curve. I remember thinking the bastard would never be farmable for that reason. Fortunately I kept my mouth shut and didn't give Murphy a reason to smack me.
Also shatter was much more dangerous. Something like 4-5k per person shattered, instead of the ~2k it is now.
and of course people did a lot less dps
IIRC, his shatter and cave in did a lot more damage and shatter had a much higher danger radius. Being melee dps during BC release was not very fun with all the heroic and raid encounters that went out of their way to punish melee for standing in melee.
Charus on
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ThomamelasOnly one man can kill this many Russians. Bring his guitar to me! Registered Userregular
Wasn't Gruul practically unkillable at first too? Early BC was silly.
Kinda. He had more HP, so DPS really had to push a lot harder. But I was really thinking in terms of mechanic evolution. I'm trying to think of anything like the cube-clicking pre-TBC and I can't think of any. It presents another change in slope on the learning curve. I remember thinking the bastard would never be farmable for that reason. Fortunately I kept my mouth shut and didn't give Murphy a reason to smack me.
Also shatter was much more dangerous. Something like 4-5k per person shattered, instead of the ~2k it is now.
and of course people did a lot less dps
IIRC, his shatter and cave in did a lot more damage and shatter had a much higher danger radius. Being melee dps during BC release was not very fun with all the heroic and raid encounters that went out of their way to punish melee for standing in melee.
It was pretty bad. At one point early in our heroic attempts we had a run in which the rogue died on almost every pull. Not be cause she sucked but "lolchaincleave". It was very, very messy back then.
Yeah, it was bad. Melee tends to have better scaling, so I can understand the slightly higher penalty for trying to be in melee, but that way it was..well, was just retarded.
End on
I wish that someway, somehow, that I could save every one of us
I still don't know how something like that got through 'beta' testing.
Scale of data collection. 500 people run heroics. 200 might submit feedback. Removing ranged casters, healers and tanks...figure 40 or so melee might submit feedback. Factor in that rogues tend to have a high percentage of dumb asses.....and their complaints get lost as statistical noise. Issues like this don't always show up very well without large scale focused testing.
I still don't know how something like that got through 'beta' testing.
Scale of data collection. 500 people run heroics. 200 might submit feedback. Removing ranged casters, healers and tanks...figure 40 or so melee might submit feedback. Factor in that rogues tend to have a high percentage of dumb asses.....and their complaints get lost as statistical noise. Issues like this don't always show up very well without large scale focused testing.
Forget that level of beta, I'm astounded they didn't have an internal team run a few heroics with a rogue and notice that, whelp, poor 'ol Jimmy died like 14 times on trash alone.
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ThomamelasOnly one man can kill this many Russians. Bring his guitar to me! Registered Userregular
I still don't know how something like that got through 'beta' testing.
Scale of data collection. 500 people run heroics. 200 might submit feedback. Removing ranged casters, healers and tanks...figure 40 or so melee might submit feedback. Factor in that rogues tend to have a high percentage of dumb asses.....and their complaints get lost as statistical noise. Issues like this don't always show up very well without large scale focused testing.
Forget that level of beta, I'm astounded they didn't have an internal team run a few heroics with a rogue and notice that, whelp, poor 'ol Jimmy died like 14 times on trash alone.
Jimmy: "Dude this trash sucks. I'm not doing anything wrong and I'm dieing."
Team: "Stupid rogue, l2p."
And it tended to vary a little bit by instance. SH and SP were the two worst offenders by far. I don't remember it being as much of an issue in crypts or mana tombs.
I still don't know how something like that got through 'beta' testing.
Scale of data collection. 500 people run heroics. 200 might submit feedback. Removing ranged casters, healers and tanks...figure 40 or so melee might submit feedback. Factor in that rogues tend to have a high percentage of dumb asses.....and their complaints get lost as statistical noise. Issues like this don't always show up very well without large scale focused testing.
Forget that level of beta, I'm astounded they didn't have an internal team run a few heroics with a rogue and notice that, whelp, poor 'ol Jimmy died like 14 times on trash alone.
Jimmy: "Dude this trash sucks. I'm not doing anything wrong and I'm dieing."
Team: "Stupid rogue, l2p."
And it tended to vary a little bit by instance. SH and SP were the two worst offenders by far. I don't remember it being as much of an issue in crypts or mana tombs.
Oh man, i remember doing a heroic Blood Furnace on my warlock before any of the heroic nerfs. It was pretty hilarious. The rogue we brought along got 2-shotted on pretty much every pull. He didn't pull aggro, in many cases he didn't even get in more than one or two auto-attacks, he didn't even stand in front of the mobs, he just stood in melee without being specced and geared to tank. And then right after the first boss, some jackass drove into a utility pole and knocked out my entire neighborhood's power for like two hours and I didn't get to finish.
My old alliance guild would bring a maximum of one melee dps to pre-nerf Gruul.
Charus on
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Dhalphirdon't you open that trapdooryou're a fool if you dareRegistered Userregular
Illidan doesn't even hit a single demon phase? I found that sort of depressing. Poor Illidan.
Me and my guild did BT last night again and we managed to do that too. It was very, very sad. What was even worse is that we had a few newer folks that we recruited for WotLK. Still... our regular DPSers were so on the ball it wasn't even funny. We only got 1 eye beam in Phase 2. No demon forms.
Then we went to Hyjal cause the kill took only 5 minutes. The two warrior tanks were doing 1.8K DPS on the trash, I was doing 1.6K (Drood)... and a Balance Druid was doing 2.9K DPS on Trash/Boss combined. It was just sick. The whole night made me nostalgic and eager to raid at level 80 where things will be hard again.
While I agree that Illidan is much easier, we still saw a demon phase or two, and we killed Illidan a fair few weeks before the nerf. While with your guild with its Brutallus level of DPS can probably burn him from 65% in the minute before the first demon phase, most guilds who are only killing Illidan since the nerf probably won't have that kind of DPS and will still see several demon phases.
That said, phase 5 will be significantly less challenging as he will probably only get 1 enrage/trap combo instead of two, and the MT can just coordinate all their cooldowns to coincide with it.
Oh man, i remember doing a heroic Blood Furnace on my warlock before any of the heroic nerfs. It was pretty hilarious. The rogue we brought along got 2-shotted on pretty much every pull. He didn't pull aggro, in many cases he didn't even get in more than one or two auto-attacks, he didn't even stand in front of the mobs, he just stood in melee without being specced and geared to tank. And then right after the first boss, some jackass drove into a utility pole and knocked out my entire neighborhood's power for like two hours and I didn't get to finish.
My old alliance guild would bring a maximum of one melee dps to pre-nerf Gruul.
Heh, reminds me of schemes to sneak rogues in to the end of heroic SH for TK attunement because fuck if people thought we could complete the timed trial with rogues along.
Not to be a bragging douchebag... but to brag a little (in a douchebaggy form) I did all of those quests pre-nerf. 360 degree cleaves did indeed suck, and sometimes it got me killed. More often, it involved being extremely careful, extremely lucky, and accepting that sometimes the game would just frown upon me for doing nothing wrong whatsoever.
Stacking some Agility and Stamina (without hurting my hit, AP and crit too badly) helped for a while, and luckily they cut back on a bunch of them eventually, but surviving things like heroic Shattered Halls as a rogue was a small point of pride on my end.
Current achievements are a pittance. Doing some of those quests/instances pre-nerf was a real achievement.
[/braggingdouchebag]
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ThomamelasOnly one man can kill this many Russians. Bring his guitar to me! Registered Userregular
Oh man, i remember doing a heroic Blood Furnace on my warlock before any of the heroic nerfs. It was pretty hilarious. The rogue we brought along got 2-shotted on pretty much every pull. He didn't pull aggro, in many cases he didn't even get in more than one or two auto-attacks, he didn't even stand in front of the mobs, he just stood in melee without being specced and geared to tank. And then right after the first boss, some jackass drove into a utility pole and knocked out my entire neighborhood's power for like two hours and I didn't get to finish.
My old alliance guild would bring a maximum of one melee dps to pre-nerf Gruul.
Heh, reminds me of schemes to sneak rogues in to the end of heroic SH for TK attunement because fuck if people thought we could complete the timed trial with rogues along.
It was doable to get them through. It just wasn't fun. I wouldn't have wanted to try to do it with a warrior tank however simply because of the speed differences. It was a lot of fun doing things in a way that I'm sure Blizzard didn't expect to see.
Oh we DID it, we had enough people keyed for TK before they opened the attunement, but it was not fun for some of the tanks and healers (and ranged DPS, cough) who had to do those runs over and over to get people through.
I remember bringing limited invulnerability potions to my first heroic SH. People thought it couldn't be done without a pally healer to BoP the clothies on the ogre boss. I did my runs with our warrior MT, too. No pally tanks for us back then (well, our GM tanked for awhile in SSC, but he was still leveling up his blood elf paladin while a lot of us had already hit 70 on our pre-BC characters).
Oh we DID it, we had enough people keyed for TK before they opened the attunement, but it was not fun for some of the tanks and healers (and ranged DPS, cough) who had to do those runs over and over to get people through.
I remember bringing limited invulnerability potions to my first heroic SH. People thought it couldn't be done without a pally healer to BoP the clothies on the ogre boss. I did my runs with our warrior MT, too. No pally tanks for us back then (well, our GM tanked for awhile in SSC, but he was still leveling up his blood elf paladin while a lot of us had already hit 70 on our pre-BC characters).
Holy crap, I wish I'd have thought of that back then. >.<
Pre-nerf Heroic SH was good times, and where a Pally buddy of mine actually earned respect as a tank. Sortof.
They still made him go Holy for SSC/TK. But they sure did love him for 5 mans!
Oh we DID it, we had enough people keyed for TK before they opened the attunement, but it was not fun for some of the tanks and healers (and ranged DPS, cough) who had to do those runs over and over to get people through.
I remember bringing limited invulnerability potions to my first heroic SH. People thought it couldn't be done without a pally healer to BoP the clothies on the ogre boss. I did my runs with our warrior MT, too. No pally tanks for us back then (well, our GM tanked for awhile in SSC, but he was still leveling up his blood elf paladin while a lot of us had already hit 70 on our pre-BC characters).
It boggled my mind that people weren't exalted with Honor Hold or CE when we started TK/SSC. I ran through it so many times that it became impossible for me to imagine a universe where I wasn't exalted with those faction. But HH is what won me my spurs as a tank. Everyone in our guild hated that place. My GM refuses to set foot in there on his warrior to this day. And one day I did a run that was me, three locks and a priest. Everyone expected us to wipe a lot without "real" cc in such a brutal instance. But we went through it like a hot chainsaw through butter. Between that and Kara, the guild became convinced that there might be something to this whole Paladin tanking thing.
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I do actually have a second monitor.... it'd just be very difficult to use. I've got a laptop and the monitor is off my old desktop machine and when I'm raiding I sit at my desk and the monitor is stood behind the laptop. Spose I should look at using that again sometime soon.
Yeah, I deffinately should look the bosses up and I used to do it alot but work has gotten alot busier lately and has seriously eaten into my time. So when I used to look up strats for when I was just about to start raiding Kara. I'm currently writing this post while I'm walking a customer through a router setup over the phone. Not the most fun/easiest of tasks =p
I'm running as a ret pally right now. I used to be prot before the 3.0 hit but respecced to ret with the patch. The reason I did this was because I liked the look of the ammount of support I could give. I could aide in healing and I could increase raid DPS. And as far as I'm aware I'm the only ret pally in our raiding group (we're not all in the same guild) that has actually taken the 3% speed increase with ret aura.
I think they're off to BT tonight for the first time. If I get an invite I might decline and see how they do without me. Alternatively I'll try and read up on what I can before everything starts.
To each their own though - I certainly prefer the content post patch rather than pre patch as we would've had had to rush to kill Illidan and I doubt we would've had time for Archimonde.
We did BT for the first time last night post-3.0 and yeah it was sad. I agree with what you've said here, making it a faster clear and allowing more guilds to see the content before it's set aside is nice. But are you really experiencing the content if not a single person in the raid gets ghosted on Teron? What about when Illidan doesn't even hit a single demon phase? I found that sort of depressing. Poor Illidan.
Also I actually question whether you'd need SR for Shahraz anymore. If you stay in normal gear, she'll die so fast that few people will even get FA. Maybe a tiny bit of SR? But certainly not 300+ per person. I think I did 200 last night including shadow prot and I got FA twice and was not even in danger of dying.
Edit: And not to mention that most guilds like ours who have been clearing BT for months probably have piles of useless HoDs sitting in the bank, so a guild who's just hitting the end of BT now could buy those for a token sum, I bet. We have like three stacks and nothing to do with them.
And I'm somewhat surprised you'd have anything bad to say about the massive raid nerf, Riz. Would your guild have killed KJ without it? Would you have?
I know mine wouldn't have. So I suspect that's at least 2 guilds under our very noses with a number of bosses down that would have either been stuck chewing glass, or would've just given up raiding at some point before WLK came out.
Rather than everyone being all "look, fuck this shit, I'm out" like they were pre-TBC, by making raiding so much less painful and time consuming, we've seen an explosion of interest. Sure, it's easy to be interested when you're clearing Sunwell and BT in ~2 nights combined (more like 3 or so, but that's because of server shenanigans), but it's significantly more of a morale boost than "Okay, so... 18 people online. Raid cancelled, have a good night all."
Me and my guild did BT last night again and we managed to do that too. It was very, very sad. What was even worse is that we had a few newer folks that we recruited for WotLK. Still... our regular DPSers were so on the ball it wasn't even funny. We only got 1 eye beam in Phase 2. No demon forms.
Then we went to Hyjal cause the kill took only 5 minutes. The two warrior tanks were doing 1.8K DPS on the trash, I was doing 1.6K (Drood)... and a Balance Druid was doing 2.9K DPS on Trash/Boss combined. It was just sick. The whole night made me nostalgic and eager to raid at level 80 where things will be hard again.
Oh we surely would not have, probably would have killed Twins but I doubt we'd have gotten M'uru. I don't think it was a bad decision on their part and it's at least letting people have fun and sort of experience fights they never would have. But I do think it's sad that some of the fights bear no resemblance to what they were pre-nerf. When we were doing KJ, we at least had to actually do the mechanics. You can't (well, we can't, I don't know about guilds who have been farming him for months) just zerg him down fast enough to ignore all of his abilities like you can with Teron Gorefiend, for instance. It was a ton easier than pre-3.0 but people still experienced all of his abilities and phases. Illidan with no demon phase?
Hopefully more attention was paid when designing the 10 man vs 25 man versions of bosses in WOTLK.
Considering the time and effort that'll be required to get everyone on the same page (especially with a new class and potentially 30 specs to sort through) I think this is a wise choice, at least as long as it's delivered upon.
Mags wasn't much of an introductory raid anyway. The cube clicking difficulty definitely removes it from an introductory raid.
but then again..
Kinda. He had more HP, so DPS really had to push a lot harder. But I was really thinking in terms of mechanic evolution. I'm trying to think of anything like the cube-clicking pre-TBC and I can't think of any. It presents another change in slope on the learning curve. I remember thinking the bastard would never be farmable for that reason. Fortunately I kept my mouth shut and didn't give Murphy a reason to smack me.
Also shatter was much more dangerous. Something like 4-5k per person shattered, instead of the ~2k it is now.
I want to correct this a smidge.
We had general officers who were proficient in a number of classes. Every class was represented, so we'd defer to each other on the judgment of one who had expertise.
Having one class, one class officer is, however, an arbitrary system enforced by dunces who have zero experience in leadership.
Back in vanilla days Obsidian Spur/ Team eXecute had class officers more in the model of a representative in congress. They didn't so much reign over us, but brought our interests/concerns to the officers as a whole. This was different obviously since we had 5 or so of every class.
Unless you were a warrior, in which case there were 50.
But yeah, the OS/team eX model worked out really well for the most part. I'm actually trying to bring a lot of that structure over to the guild my friend and I started, seems to be working so far.
wait, who are you?
Kendiar, UD rogue. Was, anyway. I rerolled with some friends for BC, and have now rerolled again for wrath.
IIRC, his shatter and cave in did a lot more damage and shatter had a much higher danger radius. Being melee dps during BC release was not very fun with all the heroic and raid encounters that went out of their way to punish melee for standing in melee.
It was pretty bad. At one point early in our heroic attempts we had a run in which the rogue died on almost every pull. Not be cause she sucked but "lolchaincleave". It was very, very messy back then.
Scale of data collection. 500 people run heroics. 200 might submit feedback. Removing ranged casters, healers and tanks...figure 40 or so melee might submit feedback. Factor in that rogues tend to have a high percentage of dumb asses.....and their complaints get lost as statistical noise. Issues like this don't always show up very well without large scale focused testing.
Forget that level of beta, I'm astounded they didn't have an internal team run a few heroics with a rogue and notice that, whelp, poor 'ol Jimmy died like 14 times on trash alone.
Jimmy: "Dude this trash sucks. I'm not doing anything wrong and I'm dieing."
Team: "Stupid rogue, l2p."
And it tended to vary a little bit by instance. SH and SP were the two worst offenders by far. I don't remember it being as much of an issue in crypts or mana tombs.
Oh man, i remember doing a heroic Blood Furnace on my warlock before any of the heroic nerfs. It was pretty hilarious. The rogue we brought along got 2-shotted on pretty much every pull. He didn't pull aggro, in many cases he didn't even get in more than one or two auto-attacks, he didn't even stand in front of the mobs, he just stood in melee without being specced and geared to tank. And then right after the first boss, some jackass drove into a utility pole and knocked out my entire neighborhood's power for like two hours and I didn't get to finish.
My old alliance guild would bring a maximum of one melee dps to pre-nerf Gruul.
While I agree that Illidan is much easier, we still saw a demon phase or two, and we killed Illidan a fair few weeks before the nerf. While with your guild with its Brutallus level of DPS can probably burn him from 65% in the minute before the first demon phase, most guilds who are only killing Illidan since the nerf probably won't have that kind of DPS and will still see several demon phases.
That said, phase 5 will be significantly less challenging as he will probably only get 1 enrage/trap combo instead of two, and the MT can just coordinate all their cooldowns to coincide with it.
Heh, reminds me of schemes to sneak rogues in to the end of heroic SH for TK attunement because fuck if people thought we could complete the timed trial with rogues along.
Stacking some Agility and Stamina (without hurting my hit, AP and crit too badly) helped for a while, and luckily they cut back on a bunch of them eventually, but surviving things like heroic Shattered Halls as a rogue was a small point of pride on my end.
Current achievements are a pittance. Doing some of those quests/instances pre-nerf was a real achievement.
[/braggingdouchebag]
It was doable to get them through. It just wasn't fun. I wouldn't have wanted to try to do it with a warrior tank however simply because of the speed differences. It was a lot of fun doing things in a way that I'm sure Blizzard didn't expect to see.
I remember bringing limited invulnerability potions to my first heroic SH. People thought it couldn't be done without a pally healer to BoP the clothies on the ogre boss. I did my runs with our warrior MT, too. No pally tanks for us back then (well, our GM tanked for awhile in SSC, but he was still leveling up his blood elf paladin while a lot of us had already hit 70 on our pre-BC characters).
Holy crap, I wish I'd have thought of that back then. >.<
Pre-nerf Heroic SH was good times, and where a Pally buddy of mine actually earned respect as a tank. Sortof.
It boggled my mind that people weren't exalted with Honor Hold or CE when we started TK/SSC. I ran through it so many times that it became impossible for me to imagine a universe where I wasn't exalted with those faction. But HH is what won me my spurs as a tank. Everyone in our guild hated that place. My GM refuses to set foot in there on his warrior to this day. And one day I did a run that was me, three locks and a priest. Everyone expected us to wipe a lot without "real" cc in such a brutal instance. But we went through it like a hot chainsaw through butter. Between that and Kara, the guild became convinced that there might be something to this whole Paladin tanking thing.