It's felt like the fun has been sucked out of our guild ever since we finally killed LK25. Now, we're just doing the same dungeon again for more loot. Oh, and drakes.
If there was another dungeon after Icecrown, then I might care. But, we know there won't be a raid with loot better than 277/284 gear. We also know that Cataclysm is going to re-do everything, and unless the stat inflation works its way backward to current gear, quest reward greens will overshadow all of our hard-earned green-texted loots.
The fights themselves don't feel epic at all. The hard modes really don't feel like hard modes--they just feel like changing the way some of the mechanics work to make it slightly harder, like preventing you from stacking up on a fight where that was the original strategy. Compared to Ulduar, which I think everybody agrees totally nailed hard modes, it's just terrible. The fight that changes the most is Putricide, and all that happens is that he double-spawns adds instead of stunning the raid and throws out a plague that you have to spread around carefully. Compare it to Thorim, in which the hard mode is actually LORE.
In Ulduar, it felt like hard mode was the removal of a limiter from the bosses. You left towers up to allow Flame Leviathan to utilize all of his abilities. You broke XT's heart, which removed his limiter. You pushed the self-destruct button, which made Mimiron want to kill you faster. Hell, even the Iron Council had a unique hard mode--kill the bosses in a different order. Not a single fight in ToC or ICC has utilized hard modes properly. It's simply altering mechanics a bit and giving the boss a new ability.
Long story short, the bosses are fun on normal and relentlessly dumb in heroic. The biggest example of a terribly-designed heroic fight is Deathwhisper. Adds spawn on a faster timer, have more health, deform/reincarnate more often, and continue to spawn in phase 2. She has more health, more mana, and MCs more people in your raid. Ghosts kill anyone they touch and anyone within 10 yards of that person (which is FUN with a capital FU because they're untargetable NPCs and damn-near impossible to see). Is it harder? Sure. Is it pointlessly harder? You bet.
Oh, and another thing heroic difficulties do: they force you to stack your raid one way over another. Think Heroic Anub'arak. You literally could not complete this fight without at least 4 Paladins and two geared Block tanks. The current incarnation of LK10HM -requires- a Discipline Priest and no more than one melee class, which is most likely going to be a death knight. The raid stacking is unbelievably frustrating. What's more frustrating is when the hard mode is designed with 25-man in mind, which makes 10-man incredibly hard because it's not scaled correctly (Blood Prince Council comes to mind). In an expansion touting "bring the player, not the class", heroic difficulties completely contradict the concept.
I would like to see them go back to the Ulduar design scheme. Not every fight has a hard mode, hard mode doesn't necessarily mean more health/more damage, multiple levels of hard modes ala OS/FL/Yogg, and hard-mode only bosses.
Loremaster is not that bad, really. You run around, pick up some quests, do them, turn them in, etc. You will only feel limited by the 25 quest limit in your log as you hold onto some quests from weird places. If you start with Northrend/Outland/Eastern Kingdoms, it will feel like a breeze. Then you hit Kalimdor.
You need either 685 or 700 quests in Kalimdor, and it honestly doesn't sound that bad. You'll go through each zone one at a time and do some old, somewhat fun quests. You'll hold quests that ask you to go across the freakin' world and do them when you get to that zone. And when you finish the last zone, which is probably going to be Silithus, you'll look at your achievement tracker and it will say this:
585/685 quests completed.
How can this be, you ask? I did every quest! It turns out you didn't. You missed everything. How could you miss everything? Because Kalimdor is a terrible, terrible place. Quest NPCs are off in god-knows-where, sometimes not even where they're supposed to be. Some quest NPCs don't even bother to let you know they have quests until you "talk" to them first. Real friendly. A bunch of quests are done or located inside dungeons. In fact, I don't think this achievement is even possible without visiting every dungeon on Kalimdor. Hope you like Wailing Caverns, Dire Maul, and Maraudon.
We Had it All Along *cough*
Hooray for RNG achievements being part of the meta! Hope you randomly get this one while working on your 100-victory achievement. I'm about 25 wins away with all the other achievements but this one and Perfection/Let's get this done.
Ironman
"Hey, I've capped two flags, I'm right behind you, and there are no alliance in sight. Can you please drop it so I can get Ironman?"
Try spamming that 30 times while running behind someone you viciously protected on the way back to the base only to have them plant that flag right in the hole and leave the battleground right after your team wins.
Then repeat that process forever.
Wintergrasp Ranger
Seems easy enough, right? Kill 10 enemy players at some location in Wintergrasp. There are a bunch of people in wintergrasp, and you don't even need the killing blow--just the HK! How hard could it be?!
Oh, you mean to tell me that nobody bothers going to half of the locations on that list? Bummer.
Less-Rabi
Question 1: Do you have a shaman specced into Reverberation? y/n Question 2: Do you have a rogue and a death knight combo? y/n
If the answer to either of those questions is no, you have less than a 1% chance of earning this achievement.
Yeah, sounds easy. Interrupt his cast of Transformation. It's a four-second cast!... at first. Then it becomes a 0.5 second cast and you can't interrupt it and he transforms and then he falls over dead from dots. What a wonderful achievement.
That's it off the top of my head. Good article so far =)
The way current dot-tick-reduction skills work currently is that the overall time of the dot is reduced, much like a channeled ability. If, say, haste made each tick half a second faster, then it becomes a 18-(0.5*6)= 15 second dot. You're shortening the overall time of the dot with the more haste you get.
It remains to be seen if the 4pc will add 6 seconds or two ticks, since it's a big difference. In my mind, if they decide not to change it (which would be a dumb move), it will err on the side of two ticks. Why? Because specific timing of dot ticks is impossible to predict. If you add 6 seconds onto the above example, it will tick two more times, but it will last an extra second and do nothing, since it ticks at 2.5 and 5.0 seconds. That doesn't make sense. So, in reality, you're only adding 5 seconds onto the timer.
So, while your t9 2pc added 9 seconds onto the timer, allowing you to do a dot-and-forget on heavy add fights like Putricide and TLK, this one requires focusing solely on one target for the entire duration just for an additional 10 seconds. While this is four ticks instead of three (six at best), it's still fairly lackluster considering that the t9 bonus wasn't all that great in the first place, and was just a 2pc. Also, with our current haste levels, the values I've listed here are actually lower than you'll see in reality. You're looking at about 12-14 seconds on a raid-buffed Flame Shock duration.
What I'm trying to say here is that if you're looking at the 4pc bonus in terms of giving you a free global cooldown since you don't have to refresh flame shock as often, this isn't going to do you any good. Since flame shock is ticking faster, more ticks will go by while you wait for lava burst to come off cooldown.
To summarize, this further reduces the value of the 4pc t10 bonus, especially if you blow all your haste right from the get-go. That methodology would only work if the 4pc bonus was to fully refresh the timer of Flame Shock every time you cast a Lava Burst. Even then, with ICC fights being so heavy on movement and target switching, this ideal situation wouldn't last long. The worst part about all of this is that the timer of Flame Shock becomes variable. Your rotation changes dramatically based on how much haste you had when you applied Flame Shock, and it can easily lead to a situation where you attempt to fire off a Lava Burst that won't crit.
The saddest part is that we're forced to rely on these super-ideal situations just to make our 4pc worthwhile. In my mind, the entire thing needs to be scrapped as it's just a terrible idea. Either make the dot refresh without wasting a tick or just make an entirely new bonus--something good like the bonuses of the other caster classes that already beat us in DPS. Yes, this is a nice DPS increase in terms of Flame Shock itself, but it still doesn't give me any incentive whatsoever to go for the 4pc bonus. Most Elementals weren't going for it before, and even fewer will now.
Much better this week, but still a lot of missing things.
Valanar:
Kinetic Bombs are not just handled by DPS. They only go up by taking direct damage. DoTs will not keep it up. One strategy to handle these are pets. Stick any pet on the orb and keep it healed and it'll handle the orb when it comes into range.
You missed his Empowered ability: Empowered Shock Vortex. This ability forces your raid to think about positioning carefully. While this is being cast, your melee DPS need to run. Your healers and ranged DPS should already be 10-ish yards apart from one another, and the Keleseth tank needs to watch his positioning during this cast as well as he'll be running around collecting orbs.
In 10-man, it's easy to have your melee spread out, even if you're in a melee-heavy raid. We just assign one to each of the portals in the back of the room. In 25-man, it's a lot harder. We never got a completely foolproof strategy for this as our 25-mans are melee-stacked, so we have pairs of people going to specific places and only knocking back each other. As long as it's only two people being hit, they likely won't die, unless they also have Sparks on them.
Be extremely careful when the Orb jumps BACK to Valanar. Once he has it again, he will cast Empowered Shock Vortex immediately after getting it. Melee should not run in to attack him until after he does it.
TL;DR: spread out formation, don't stand next to anyone else, especially healers.
Taldaram:
This well-written, but I just want to make some comments about the flame sphere. The first is how you 'eat' stacks off the orb. You just have to be near it. If you're specifically assigned to be a soaker (aka not a melee dps), follow it as best you can to soak as many as you can. When I'm on my tank, I'm usually assigned to Valanar. Since he doesn't do anything during this phase other than drop vortex zones and such, I tank him in the path of the orb.
The second thing I'll mention here is to not spread out. In my raid, I tell everybody to shift into the "column" formation when this guy gets the orb. It looks like this:
MT T MELEE ----------- RANGED
Think of it like a column and don't let people stray to the sides. If nobody is between Taldaram and the target, the target will die. Also, melee should do their best to stick to the boss. If you get knocked back by an unnoticed Shock Vortex or a Kinetic Bomb hitting the floor, it may be best to not run back in until after he throws out a sphere. It can target anyone outside of melee range, and you may eat an explosion on your way in and kill all your melee dps.
The last comment here is that if you're the target, don't stand next to other people when it's about to hit you. It has splash damage.
TL;DR: Form up in a big line with space between melee and ranged, watch out for vortex zones, run away if you get the sphere chasing you.
Keleseth:
Not much else to mention here. The ranged tank should be mindful of his positioning and threat when the DPS switch to this guy. Don't stand on top of Keleseth, as the dps may cleave off orbs from you, which will kill you. Watch vortex zones. Don't die.
This is a pretty technical fight that is actually easier in 25-man than it is in 10 due to the crazy raid composition required in 10-man. A lot of things can kill you, so keep your raid aware of all of them at all times. Call out void zones positioning, kinetic bombs positioning, and formations on target swaps.
If it was as easy as this makes it sound, everybody would have killed this guy week 1.
Here's what wasn't mentioned:
Oozes re-link. When the green ooze reaches its target, it will explode, but it won't despawn. You have to continue DPSing. The most important part about the three seconds of re-link time is that nobody should be anywhere near it. This is the rule of thumb for the entire encounter, actually. If one of the oozes is casting its link, you need to get the hell away from it.
The same goes for the orange one. The orange one will find a new link when the 10-stack debuff on its target wears off, so be far away from it when it does that.
These links can also drop off via Feign Death, Divine Shield, Vanish, and any other aggro-dropping abilities. So be careful using them.
The trick to these Oozes is to keep Putricide on the opposite side of the one that will spawn next. Green is always first, so tank him on the Orange side of the room. When the Green one is dead or near dead, your tank should be moving him toward the Green side of the room to prepare for the next Ooze spawn. Our group likes to have all ranged DPS stand at their estimated max range and lay into the oozes as they spawn. Even the green one. You can burn down a green ooze before it even gets to its link unless it's one of your ranged DPS, and if it is one of your ranged DPS, you can usually kill it after one explosion. Just make sure melee is following the green ooze in to the linked person to soak the explosion damage. Green is definitely the hardest one to deal with, but orange can be an issue if your dps isn't high enough to kill it before the debuff wears off.
Also, try not to have an Ooze alive going into a phase transition. It causes a lot of problems. Just stop DPS on him to get the timing down properly. 82% is a good place to stop if you know a new ooze will be spawning in the next 5 seconds.
Phase 2: Malleable Goo is definitely the most important aspect of Phase 2, and I'm gonna let you finish, but Choking Gas Bombs... also exist. Choking Gas Bombs are small orange bombs on the floor that explode after a few seconds of being placed down. They also explode if you touch them. Therefore, they're timed mines and proximity mines. Either way, if you touch them, you get a delicious -75% hit chance. So, don't touch them. The best way to avoid this is to just move the boss 10 yards or so every time he drops the bombs.
Malleable Goo is another story entirely. This is the primary reason that the tanks and melee should be about 20-25 yards away from the ranged DPS and healers. If you are not a melee attacker in one form or another, you should never ever be near the boss. Malleable Goo bounces across the floor and it's very difficult to predict where it will actually explode. Basically, it chooses a target, gets the X/Y coordinates for that target's current position, and bounces toward that. If you don't know where that person was standing before he/she moved, it'll be hard to tell where it will hit. Pay close attention to the Goo and just stay as far away from the line it's traveling. Don't be on that line, at all.
Then you approach phase 3. Again, make sure there's no ooze alive. Except this time, it's absolutely imperative that no ooze is alive. If your DPS have to kill the ooze and fail (because it isn't debuffed), you wipe. If your DPS have to kite it around, that's time lost DPSing Putricide, which is time that the stacks on the tank build up. You'll wipe.
Ideally, you want to do a 2-stack switch. The MT has 2 stacks, the OT taunts. When the OT hits 2 stacks, you can taunt back, or you can wait until he builds to 4 and then have the MT taunt. Putricide will get one tank to 4 stacks at the same time, and reducing the number of tank swaps is ideal for your healers. Therefore, we do a 2-4-4 rotation in our taunts. OT taunts when MT is at 2, MT taunts when OT is at 4, OT taunts when MT is at 4, and if you're going past this point, you've likely wiped.
Bloodlust should be used when the OT is tanking. The ideal time is when both tanks have 2 stacks, but if your DPS is high enough, then use it sooner. You want bloodlust to be up for the most painful part of the fight, which is the time right before he dies. Everybody in the raid will be taking insane damage.
As for the debuff itself, the only way it's going to fall off is if your tank dies. If you're fighting him to the point where it's expiring, you're already dead. The absolute most important thing about p3 is keeping the tanks alive. If a tank dies, he heals for too much and you wipe.
The other important thing to realize is that there is a soft enrage in addition to the hard enrage and the other soft enrage. Aside from the 10-minute 500% damage increase and the tank debuffs doing thousands of damage to your raid every second, the floor will fill with Ooze. Plan a kiting path during the 35% Tear Gas based on any slime pools that are up. Remember to stay 20+ yards away if you're in the ranged group. You want to be clustered for this phase, as the Slime Pools are targeted abilities. If you're spread out, the Slime Pools will land in places you don't want them. Stay together and you'll have a lot more room to work with before the room fills up.
As for the abomination driver, it's very important to keep yourself at 50+ energy the entire time. If an ooze is spawning and you have no pools to eat and plenty of energy, run over to it and start stacking Sunders (Mutated Slash) on it when it spawns and watch its cast bar carefully. Since you're in melee range of it, the Regurgitated ability will not have a travel time, and you should therefore debuff it right when the link cast time is at 2.5 seconds out of 3. If you cannot get to the ooze in time for whatever reason, take flight time into account when debuffing. It takes practice to get this flight time down.
If there is no ooze, you must spend all of your time gaining energy. Once you have 50+, you can just focus on clearing pools as fast as possible. If you're below 50 energy, you want to eat the pools slowly (aka not mashing 1) to let them grow slightly, giving you more energy.
If you're completely out of things to do, feel free to Slash the boss himself. This should be rare. At best, you might be able to eat a slime pool that is next to the boss. All 3 abilities are off the GCD, so you can Slash and Eat at the same time.
This fight takes practice. The abomination driver needs to get practice on timing and energy balancing. The tank needs to get practice moving the boss back and forth for oozes and 10 yards for bombs. The melee DPS need to get practice switching targets only when necessary and watching out for Goo and Bombs on their way back in to the boss. The ranged group needs practice on avoiding Malleable Goo and target switching right as an ooze spawns.
Definitely a great introductory guide to the class, though if we're going to mention shortcomings, there's one more. We're the only caster class that has to run into melee range to do our AOE DPS.
It's an archaic mechanic that has needed to be fixed forever, but we doubt it ever will be.
As for page 2. You mention we shouldn't get Eye of the Storm. I couldn't disagree more, especially since there's nothing else worth getting. There are numerous boss fights where you will suffer pushback from uninterruptable AOEs. Off the top of my head, in just the first wing of ICC alone, Marrowgar, Deathwhisper, Gunship, and some of the trash all have abilities that affect your cast times. Bone Storm hits will add to your timer, Frost Bolt Volley will add to your timer, random arrows from hunters on the enemy ship will add to your timer, etc.
You also don't really talk about the tiny variance in specs between shaman who get Convection and shaman who spec into Warding. Both skills have pros and cons, but the "cookie-cutter" build has 5/5 Convection.
Nobody will have mana problems in Elemental, but that doesn't mean we should remove EVERY mana-saving talent from our tree. Even with all of the mana regen talents, I notice my mana dropping in heroics that don't have a Replenishment user, solely because of all the chain lightning use. That -10% really does help, and it's not like we'll get a DPS gain from speccing anywhere else.
And page 3, one minor thing. The boot enchant most people will have is Icewalker for 12 hit and 12 crit. Even if you're hit-capped, 12 crit is a DPS gain, whereas Tuskarr's is not.
This is a pretty short-and-simple explanation of the fight, but you miss a lot.
First, and most importantly, this doesn't quite explain how Blood Power works properly.
Blood Power is gained from Saurfang using any ability that causes any damage. This excepts melee swings, since that's not an ability. Blood Nova, Blood Boil, Blood Beasts, Mark of the Fallen Champion, etc. If he causes non-melee damage, it's +1BP.
This means that even if your raid is perfect and you kill the blood beasts fast enough, he will still inevitably generate blood power. Did he target melee with Blood Nova? That's BP. Did the tanks not taunt fast enough and let him get one hit in while they were marked with the Rune? That's BP. Is Blood Boil on anyone? That's BP.
Next is what Blood Power does. It's not solely used for Marks. It's also a buff, making him to x% more damage per BP. Tanks need to consider cooldowns for when he's in the higher numbers. The damage isn't that severe, but anything to help your healers out on this fight helps. One cooldown for every time he breaks into the 80s range should do fine.
The easiest way to avoid Saurfang from getting excessive BP is to be smart. Yes, he will get some, but even without a disc priest, you can prevent him from even reaching 100 BP in 10-man just by playing smart. First and foremost, choose your positions. You should have clear paths for hunters to run in and drop frost traps. You should have clear kiting paths for those killing the beasts. You should maintain your positioning for the entire fight, never allowing yourself to run next to anyone else unless it's an emergency. You should never out-range your healers.
If you don't have hunters, any slowing effect will suffice. Just do what works for your raid. Earthbind totem, Typhoon, etc. When I'm on my feral tank, I make sure the beasts have been aggro'd by the range group and Swipe them before they leave to apply the movement speed debuff on them. Whatever works.
Try not to use root abilities such as Entangling Roots, Frost Nova, etc. unless you're absolutely certain the blood beasts are more than 5 yards away from everybody else. Rooted enemies ignore aggro and melee anything next to them.
The fight is significantly harder in 25-man, and it has everything to do with limited movement area. The arena is the same size, but now you have to accommodate your ranged, casters, and healers all 12 yards apart from one another. Again, position your kiters on the outside, leaving a clear path for trap-dropping and such. Your healers should be toward the middle left and middle right so they can reach any Marked players. One trick you can do is stack all your frost traps in a line leading to a holy paladin running Righteous Fury to generate a lot of threat, then having a moonkin in front of him to Typhoon them all back toward Saurfang. This gives you roughly ten seconds of full-on DPS to kill the beasts before they reach the paladin.
One other mention here is the power of Discipline in this fight. If you'll notice, I said that any ability that does damage generates 1 BP. If you fully Absorb a hit, he generates 0 BP. Disc priests can bubble someone with Blood Boil and take the BP generated from 5 to 4. You can fully Absorb at least one hit from a cleaved Mark target. You can even fully absorb Blood Nova, though this requires just having bubbles on everybody at all times. These Absorbs add up over time, and you can think of it as making him generate 20% less BP for the duration of the fight, which can be the difference between a wipe and a kill for your raid.
There have been strategies to let Marks die, but honestly, you shouldn't need to do this. It's a loss of a DPS or healer, which would make the fight go much more smoothly if you just kept them alive. Just note that BP is generated exponentially. When he Marks a target, he'll be generating 1 BP for every melee swing that successfully lands on a tank. When he Marks 2 targets, he'll be generating 2 BP each. It adds up faster and faster.
At 30%, he Frenzies. If someone has a Mark on them, they're also affected by this Frenzy. Tank avoidance plays a huge role in Marks, as fully avoided hits will not affect the Marked target. This is a good time to use Bloodlust. Remember that he dies at 1.5% HP, so if you see him about to use Blood Beasts around that time, consider ignoring them, as they won't get to anyone before Saurfang dies if you just keep the DPS up. The #1 most important thing about the Frenzy phase is that nobody can die. If someone dies, you've made the fight twice as hard. Suddenly you're down a DPS or healer, Saurfang has healed for 5% of his health, and he's still generating BP at an accelerated rate.
All in all, like most fights, this fight will become much easier as your raid gets geared. He'll go down faster, generate less BP, and eventually your healers will think this fight is a complete joke because nobody will get a single Mark on them.
First and foremost, thank you for helping our AOE DPS. Those 20 geists before Festergut and Rotface provided our hunters with 21,000 DPS, but I wasn't that far behind with 15,000 dps! Damn explosive trap + volley combo...
Second, thank you for providing at least a tiny 'on the move' spell to our repertoire. I've almost never used it, but 'almost never' and 'never' are two different things!
Third, and most importantly, thank you for supplying us with a tag. Running old content involving AOEing lots of little things has become so much easier since we no longer have to rely solely on chain lightning or thunderstorm to tag everything as a player kill and not a pet kill. It was a nightmare to tag casters or hunters with thunderstorm and attempt to pull them all back to you for magma to burn them down.
However, I do hate you for removing our only worthwhile CC in pvp. It was so handy just dropping my set with Fire Nova included as I saw some melee head my way to kick my ass, then watch as he got stunned while I was stunlocked. It was the perfect totem for us for pvp, and now it's gone and been replaced with something entirely worthless to pvp, other than for spamming it to unstealth someone, which will just drain your mana pool instantly.
There is a very simple explanation for all of the long cooldown bugs that were implemented in 3.3, and it's all about looking at the number of days and how it's been variable based on another timer that has a very similar countdown.
Call Stabled Pet bug was first. We found out about it roughly three days into 3.3, and the cooldown was reported to be 25 days.
I've heard reports of Guardian Spirit being bugged too, but I have yet to see visual evidence of that.
Then, exactly when Tier 10 2pc became available, we hear reports of another bugged cooldown, set for 7 days. Think about when Tier 10 2p was first available. Every week, the maximum number of Emblems of Frost you could get was 5+14+16 = 35. The beginning of the fourth week of patch 3.3 (last week) was the earliest.
And no, this has nothing to do with the random dungeon finder. The guy who first found out about it equipped it as soon as he could and downed Marrowgar with it, which was when the problem first arose.
Give up? The answer.... they're tied into the cooldown on the opening of the plagueworks. Why? I don't know! But that's how it is. It's like the game is forcing these cooldowns to synchronize with the door's cooldown.
As for the rest of the matter, first of all, there is no fix for it. There won't be a fix for it. They're just waiting to see if waiting it out will solve it. If it doesn't, then there will be some heads scratching. Also, for everybody who complains about it, there's absolutely no reason to complain. Elemental Mastery was nothing like those damn Mage cooldowns anyway. 15% haste for 15 seconds is essentially a 50 DPS increase. A drop in the bucket. If this thing bugged Bloodlust, then we'd have a right to be pissed. But, our Tier 10 is just bad all around, and most Elementals won't even be using it at all, since cloth gear has better stats than the set and bonuses combined.
Prepare to see a lot of shaman dressed like mages.
Not a QQ post, just reporting the news. Back to you.
Not all fights require a hard mode
May 15th 2010 7:14PM (WoW)It's felt like the fun has been sucked out of our guild ever since we finally killed LK25. Now, we're just doing the same dungeon again for more loot. Oh, and drakes.
If there was another dungeon after Icecrown, then I might care. But, we know there won't be a raid with loot better than 277/284 gear. We also know that Cataclysm is going to re-do everything, and unless the stat inflation works its way backward to current gear, quest reward greens will overshadow all of our hard-earned green-texted loots.
The fights themselves don't feel epic at all. The hard modes really don't feel like hard modes--they just feel like changing the way some of the mechanics work to make it slightly harder, like preventing you from stacking up on a fight where that was the original strategy. Compared to Ulduar, which I think everybody agrees totally nailed hard modes, it's just terrible. The fight that changes the most is Putricide, and all that happens is that he double-spawns adds instead of stunning the raid and throws out a plague that you have to spread around carefully. Compare it to Thorim, in which the hard mode is actually LORE.
In Ulduar, it felt like hard mode was the removal of a limiter from the bosses. You left towers up to allow Flame Leviathan to utilize all of his abilities. You broke XT's heart, which removed his limiter. You pushed the self-destruct button, which made Mimiron want to kill you faster. Hell, even the Iron Council had a unique hard mode--kill the bosses in a different order. Not a single fight in ToC or ICC has utilized hard modes properly. It's simply altering mechanics a bit and giving the boss a new ability.
Long story short, the bosses are fun on normal and relentlessly dumb in heroic. The biggest example of a terribly-designed heroic fight is Deathwhisper. Adds spawn on a faster timer, have more health, deform/reincarnate more often, and continue to spawn in phase 2. She has more health, more mana, and MCs more people in your raid. Ghosts kill anyone they touch and anyone within 10 yards of that person (which is FUN with a capital FU because they're untargetable NPCs and damn-near impossible to see). Is it harder? Sure. Is it pointlessly harder? You bet.
Oh, and another thing heroic difficulties do: they force you to stack your raid one way over another. Think Heroic Anub'arak. You literally could not complete this fight without at least 4 Paladins and two geared Block tanks. The current incarnation of LK10HM -requires- a Discipline Priest and no more than one melee class, which is most likely going to be a death knight. The raid stacking is unbelievably frustrating. What's more frustrating is when the hard mode is designed with 25-man in mind, which makes 10-man incredibly hard because it's not scaled correctly (Blood Prince Council comes to mind). In an expansion touting "bring the player, not the class", heroic difficulties completely contradict the concept.
I would like to see them go back to the Ulduar design scheme. Not every fight has a hard mode, hard mode doesn't necessarily mean more health/more damage, multiple levels of hard modes ala OS/FL/Yogg, and hard-mode only bosses.
The OverAchiever: Evil achievements
Apr 8th 2010 3:48PM (WoW)Loremaster of Kalimdor.
Loremaster is not that bad, really. You run around, pick up some quests, do them, turn them in, etc. You will only feel limited by the 25 quest limit in your log as you hold onto some quests from weird places. If you start with Northrend/Outland/Eastern Kingdoms, it will feel like a breeze. Then you hit Kalimdor.
You need either 685 or 700 quests in Kalimdor, and it honestly doesn't sound that bad. You'll go through each zone one at a time and do some old, somewhat fun quests. You'll hold quests that ask you to go across the freakin' world and do them when you get to that zone. And when you finish the last zone, which is probably going to be Silithus, you'll look at your achievement tracker and it will say this:
585/685 quests completed.
How can this be, you ask? I did every quest! It turns out you didn't. You missed everything. How could you miss everything? Because Kalimdor is a terrible, terrible place. Quest NPCs are off in god-knows-where, sometimes not even where they're supposed to be. Some quest NPCs don't even bother to let you know they have quests until you "talk" to them first. Real friendly. A bunch of quests are done or located inside dungeons. In fact, I don't think this achievement is even possible without visiting every dungeon on Kalimdor. Hope you like Wailing Caverns, Dire Maul, and Maraudon.
We Had it All Along *cough*
Hooray for RNG achievements being part of the meta! Hope you randomly get this one while working on your 100-victory achievement. I'm about 25 wins away with all the other achievements but this one and Perfection/Let's get this done.
Ironman
"Hey, I've capped two flags, I'm right behind you, and there are no alliance in sight. Can you please drop it so I can get Ironman?"
Try spamming that 30 times while running behind someone you viciously protected on the way back to the base only to have them plant that flag right in the hole and leave the battleground right after your team wins.
Then repeat that process forever.
Wintergrasp Ranger
Seems easy enough, right? Kill 10 enemy players at some location in Wintergrasp. There are a bunch of people in wintergrasp, and you don't even need the killing blow--just the HK! How hard could it be?!
Oh, you mean to tell me that nobody bothers going to half of the locations on that list? Bummer.
Less-Rabi
Question 1: Do you have a shaman specced into Reverberation? y/n
Question 2: Do you have a rogue and a death knight combo? y/n
If the answer to either of those questions is no, you have less than a 1% chance of earning this achievement.
Yeah, sounds easy. Interrupt his cast of Transformation. It's a four-second cast!... at first. Then it becomes a 0.5 second cast and you can't interrupt it and he transforms and then he falls over dead from dots. What a wonderful achievement.
That's it off the top of my head. Good article so far =)
The Queue: Not getting distracted
Mar 23rd 2010 3:44PM (WoW)/script PlaySoundFile("Sound\\Spells\\bloodlust_player_cast_head.wav")
/script PlaySoundFile("Sound\\Spells\\Heroism_Cast.wav")
Wowwiki has a ton of these. It has all the spells, all the boss quotes, everything.
http://www.wowwiki.com/PlaySoundFile_macros_-_other_spells_sounds
(here's hoping the comment system doesn't obliterate my post :
Patch 3.3.3 PTR: Shaman changes
Feb 20th 2010 6:20AM (WoW)The way current dot-tick-reduction skills work currently is that the overall time of the dot is reduced, much like a channeled ability. If, say, haste made each tick half a second faster, then it becomes a 18-(0.5*6)= 15 second dot. You're shortening the overall time of the dot with the more haste you get.
It remains to be seen if the 4pc will add 6 seconds or two ticks, since it's a big difference. In my mind, if they decide not to change it (which would be a dumb move), it will err on the side of two ticks. Why? Because specific timing of dot ticks is impossible to predict. If you add 6 seconds onto the above example, it will tick two more times, but it will last an extra second and do nothing, since it ticks at 2.5 and 5.0 seconds. That doesn't make sense. So, in reality, you're only adding 5 seconds onto the timer.
So, while your t9 2pc added 9 seconds onto the timer, allowing you to do a dot-and-forget on heavy add fights like Putricide and TLK, this one requires focusing solely on one target for the entire duration just for an additional 10 seconds. While this is four ticks instead of three (six at best), it's still fairly lackluster considering that the t9 bonus wasn't all that great in the first place, and was just a 2pc. Also, with our current haste levels, the values I've listed here are actually lower than you'll see in reality. You're looking at about 12-14 seconds on a raid-buffed Flame Shock duration.
What I'm trying to say here is that if you're looking at the 4pc bonus in terms of giving you a free global cooldown since you don't have to refresh flame shock as often, this isn't going to do you any good. Since flame shock is ticking faster, more ticks will go by while you wait for lava burst to come off cooldown.
To summarize, this further reduces the value of the 4pc t10 bonus, especially if you blow all your haste right from the get-go. That methodology would only work if the 4pc bonus was to fully refresh the timer of Flame Shock every time you cast a Lava Burst. Even then, with ICC fights being so heavy on movement and target switching, this ideal situation wouldn't last long. The worst part about all of this is that the timer of Flame Shock becomes variable. Your rotation changes dramatically based on how much haste you had when you applied Flame Shock, and it can easily lead to a situation where you attempt to fire off a Lava Burst that won't crit.
The saddest part is that we're forced to rely on these super-ideal situations just to make our 4pc worthwhile. In my mind, the entire thing needs to be scrapped as it's just a terrible idea. Either make the dot refresh without wasting a tick or just make an entirely new bonus--something good like the bonuses of the other caster classes that already beat us in DPS. Yes, this is a nice DPS increase in terms of Flame Shock itself, but it still doesn't give me any incentive whatsoever to go for the 4pc bonus. Most Elementals weren't going for it before, and even fewer will now.
Ready Check: Blood Princes
Feb 19th 2010 5:33PM (WoW)Valanar:
Kinetic Bombs are not just handled by DPS. They only go up by taking direct damage. DoTs will not keep it up. One strategy to handle these are pets. Stick any pet on the orb and keep it healed and it'll handle the orb when it comes into range.
You missed his Empowered ability: Empowered Shock Vortex. This ability forces your raid to think about positioning carefully. While this is being cast, your melee DPS need to run. Your healers and ranged DPS should already be 10-ish yards apart from one another, and the Keleseth tank needs to watch his positioning during this cast as well as he'll be running around collecting orbs.
In 10-man, it's easy to have your melee spread out, even if you're in a melee-heavy raid. We just assign one to each of the portals in the back of the room. In 25-man, it's a lot harder. We never got a completely foolproof strategy for this as our 25-mans are melee-stacked, so we have pairs of people going to specific places and only knocking back each other. As long as it's only two people being hit, they likely won't die, unless they also have Sparks on them.
Be extremely careful when the Orb jumps BACK to Valanar. Once he has it again, he will cast Empowered Shock Vortex immediately after getting it. Melee should not run in to attack him until after he does it.
TL;DR: spread out formation, don't stand next to anyone else, especially healers.
Taldaram:
This well-written, but I just want to make some comments about the flame sphere. The first is how you 'eat' stacks off the orb. You just have to be near it. If you're specifically assigned to be a soaker (aka not a melee dps), follow it as best you can to soak as many as you can. When I'm on my tank, I'm usually assigned to Valanar. Since he doesn't do anything during this phase other than drop vortex zones and such, I tank him in the path of the orb.
The second thing I'll mention here is to not spread out. In my raid, I tell everybody to shift into the "column" formation when this guy gets the orb. It looks like this:
MT T MELEE ----------- RANGED
Think of it like a column and don't let people stray to the sides. If nobody is between Taldaram and the target, the target will die. Also, melee should do their best to stick to the boss. If you get knocked back by an unnoticed Shock Vortex or a Kinetic Bomb hitting the floor, it may be best to not run back in until after he throws out a sphere. It can target anyone outside of melee range, and you may eat an explosion on your way in and kill all your melee dps.
The last comment here is that if you're the target, don't stand next to other people when it's about to hit you. It has splash damage.
TL;DR: Form up in a big line with space between melee and ranged, watch out for vortex zones, run away if you get the sphere chasing you.
Keleseth:
Not much else to mention here. The ranged tank should be mindful of his positioning and threat when the DPS switch to this guy. Don't stand on top of Keleseth, as the dps may cleave off orbs from you, which will kill you. Watch vortex zones. Don't die.
This is a pretty technical fight that is actually easier in 25-man than it is in 10 due to the crazy raid composition required in 10-man. A lot of things can kill you, so keep your raid aware of all of them at all times. Call out void zones positioning, kinetic bombs positioning, and formations on target swaps.
Ready Check: Professor Putricide
Feb 5th 2010 6:44PM (WoW)Here's what wasn't mentioned:
Oozes re-link. When the green ooze reaches its target, it will explode, but it won't despawn. You have to continue DPSing. The most important part about the three seconds of re-link time is that nobody should be anywhere near it. This is the rule of thumb for the entire encounter, actually. If one of the oozes is casting its link, you need to get the hell away from it.
The same goes for the orange one. The orange one will find a new link when the 10-stack debuff on its target wears off, so be far away from it when it does that.
These links can also drop off via Feign Death, Divine Shield, Vanish, and any other aggro-dropping abilities. So be careful using them.
The trick to these Oozes is to keep Putricide on the opposite side of the one that will spawn next. Green is always first, so tank him on the Orange side of the room. When the Green one is dead or near dead, your tank should be moving him toward the Green side of the room to prepare for the next Ooze spawn. Our group likes to have all ranged DPS stand at their estimated max range and lay into the oozes as they spawn. Even the green one. You can burn down a green ooze before it even gets to its link unless it's one of your ranged DPS, and if it is one of your ranged DPS, you can usually kill it after one explosion. Just make sure melee is following the green ooze in to the linked person to soak the explosion damage. Green is definitely the hardest one to deal with, but orange can be an issue if your dps isn't high enough to kill it before the debuff wears off.
Also, try not to have an Ooze alive going into a phase transition. It causes a lot of problems. Just stop DPS on him to get the timing down properly. 82% is a good place to stop if you know a new ooze will be spawning in the next 5 seconds.
Phase 2: Malleable Goo is definitely the most important aspect of Phase 2, and I'm gonna let you finish, but Choking Gas Bombs... also exist. Choking Gas Bombs are small orange bombs on the floor that explode after a few seconds of being placed down. They also explode if you touch them. Therefore, they're timed mines and proximity mines. Either way, if you touch them, you get a delicious -75% hit chance. So, don't touch them. The best way to avoid this is to just move the boss 10 yards or so every time he drops the bombs.
Malleable Goo is another story entirely. This is the primary reason that the tanks and melee should be about 20-25 yards away from the ranged DPS and healers. If you are not a melee attacker in one form or another, you should never ever be near the boss. Malleable Goo bounces across the floor and it's very difficult to predict where it will actually explode. Basically, it chooses a target, gets the X/Y coordinates for that target's current position, and bounces toward that. If you don't know where that person was standing before he/she moved, it'll be hard to tell where it will hit. Pay close attention to the Goo and just stay as far away from the line it's traveling. Don't be on that line, at all.
Then you approach phase 3. Again, make sure there's no ooze alive. Except this time, it's absolutely imperative that no ooze is alive. If your DPS have to kill the ooze and fail (because it isn't debuffed), you wipe. If your DPS have to kite it around, that's time lost DPSing Putricide, which is time that the stacks on the tank build up. You'll wipe.
Ideally, you want to do a 2-stack switch. The MT has 2 stacks, the OT taunts. When the OT hits 2 stacks, you can taunt back, or you can wait until he builds to 4 and then have the MT taunt. Putricide will get one tank to 4 stacks at the same time, and reducing the number of tank swaps is ideal for your healers. Therefore, we do a 2-4-4 rotation in our taunts. OT taunts when MT is at 2, MT taunts when OT is at 4, OT taunts when MT is at 4, and if you're going past this point, you've likely wiped.
Bloodlust should be used when the OT is tanking. The ideal time is when both tanks have 2 stacks, but if your DPS is high enough, then use it sooner. You want bloodlust to be up for the most painful part of the fight, which is the time right before he dies. Everybody in the raid will be taking insane damage.
As for the debuff itself, the only way it's going to fall off is if your tank dies. If you're fighting him to the point where it's expiring, you're already dead. The absolute most important thing about p3 is keeping the tanks alive. If a tank dies, he heals for too much and you wipe.
The other important thing to realize is that there is a soft enrage in addition to the hard enrage and the other soft enrage. Aside from the 10-minute 500% damage increase and the tank debuffs doing thousands of damage to your raid every second, the floor will fill with Ooze. Plan a kiting path during the 35% Tear Gas based on any slime pools that are up. Remember to stay 20+ yards away if you're in the ranged group. You want to be clustered for this phase, as the Slime Pools are targeted abilities. If you're spread out, the Slime Pools will land in places you don't want them. Stay together and you'll have a lot more room to work with before the room fills up.
As for the abomination driver, it's very important to keep yourself at 50+ energy the entire time. If an ooze is spawning and you have no pools to eat and plenty of energy, run over to it and start stacking Sunders (Mutated Slash) on it when it spawns and watch its cast bar carefully. Since you're in melee range of it, the Regurgitated ability will not have a travel time, and you should therefore debuff it right when the link cast time is at 2.5 seconds out of 3. If you cannot get to the ooze in time for whatever reason, take flight time into account when debuffing. It takes practice to get this flight time down.
If there is no ooze, you must spend all of your time gaining energy. Once you have 50+, you can just focus on clearing pools as fast as possible. If you're below 50 energy, you want to eat the pools slowly (aka not mashing 1) to let them grow slightly, giving you more energy.
If you're completely out of things to do, feel free to Slash the boss himself. This should be rare. At best, you might be able to eat a slime pool that is next to the boss. All 3 abilities are off the GCD, so you can Slash and Eat at the same time.
This fight takes practice. The abomination driver needs to get practice on timing and energy balancing. The tank needs to get practice moving the boss back and forth for oozes and 10 yards for bombs. The melee DPS need to get practice switching targets only when necessary and watching out for Goo and Bombs on their way back in to the boss. The ranged group needs practice on avoiding Malleable Goo and target switching right as an ooze spawns.
Totem Talk: Elemental 101, Part 3
Jan 19th 2010 3:23PM (WoW)It's an archaic mechanic that has needed to be fixed forever, but we doubt it ever will be.
As for page 2. You mention we shouldn't get Eye of the Storm. I couldn't disagree more, especially since there's nothing else worth getting. There are numerous boss fights where you will suffer pushback from uninterruptable AOEs. Off the top of my head, in just the first wing of ICC alone, Marrowgar, Deathwhisper, Gunship, and some of the trash all have abilities that affect your cast times. Bone Storm hits will add to your timer, Frost Bolt Volley will add to your timer, random arrows from hunters on the enemy ship will add to your timer, etc.
You also don't really talk about the tiny variance in specs between shaman who get Convection and shaman who spec into Warding. Both skills have pros and cons, but the "cookie-cutter" build has 5/5 Convection.
Nobody will have mana problems in Elemental, but that doesn't mean we should remove EVERY mana-saving talent from our tree. Even with all of the mana regen talents, I notice my mana dropping in heroics that don't have a Replenishment user, solely because of all the chain lightning use. That -10% really does help, and it's not like we'll get a DPS gain from speccing anywhere else.
And page 3, one minor thing. The boot enchant most people will have is Icewalker for 12 hit and 12 crit. Even if you're hit-capped, 12 crit is a DPS gain, whereas Tuskarr's is not.
Ready Check: Deathbringer Saurfang
Jan 15th 2010 4:15PM (WoW)First, and most importantly, this doesn't quite explain how Blood Power works properly.
Blood Power is gained from Saurfang using any ability that causes any damage. This excepts melee swings, since that's not an ability. Blood Nova, Blood Boil, Blood Beasts, Mark of the Fallen Champion, etc. If he causes non-melee damage, it's +1BP.
This means that even if your raid is perfect and you kill the blood beasts fast enough, he will still inevitably generate blood power. Did he target melee with Blood Nova? That's BP. Did the tanks not taunt fast enough and let him get one hit in while they were marked with the Rune? That's BP. Is Blood Boil on anyone? That's BP.
Next is what Blood Power does. It's not solely used for Marks. It's also a buff, making him to x% more damage per BP. Tanks need to consider cooldowns for when he's in the higher numbers. The damage isn't that severe, but anything to help your healers out on this fight helps. One cooldown for every time he breaks into the 80s range should do fine.
The easiest way to avoid Saurfang from getting excessive BP is to be smart. Yes, he will get some, but even without a disc priest, you can prevent him from even reaching 100 BP in 10-man just by playing smart. First and foremost, choose your positions. You should have clear paths for hunters to run in and drop frost traps. You should have clear kiting paths for those killing the beasts. You should maintain your positioning for the entire fight, never allowing yourself to run next to anyone else unless it's an emergency. You should never out-range your healers.
If you don't have hunters, any slowing effect will suffice. Just do what works for your raid. Earthbind totem, Typhoon, etc. When I'm on my feral tank, I make sure the beasts have been aggro'd by the range group and Swipe them before they leave to apply the movement speed debuff on them. Whatever works.
Try not to use root abilities such as Entangling Roots, Frost Nova, etc. unless you're absolutely certain the blood beasts are more than 5 yards away from everybody else. Rooted enemies ignore aggro and melee anything next to them.
The fight is significantly harder in 25-man, and it has everything to do with limited movement area. The arena is the same size, but now you have to accommodate your ranged, casters, and healers all 12 yards apart from one another. Again, position your kiters on the outside, leaving a clear path for trap-dropping and such. Your healers should be toward the middle left and middle right so they can reach any Marked players. One trick you can do is stack all your frost traps in a line leading to a holy paladin running Righteous Fury to generate a lot of threat, then having a moonkin in front of him to Typhoon them all back toward Saurfang. This gives you roughly ten seconds of full-on DPS to kill the beasts before they reach the paladin.
One other mention here is the power of Discipline in this fight. If you'll notice, I said that any ability that does damage generates 1 BP. If you fully Absorb a hit, he generates 0 BP. Disc priests can bubble someone with Blood Boil and take the BP generated from 5 to 4. You can fully Absorb at least one hit from a cleaved Mark target. You can even fully absorb Blood Nova, though this requires just having bubbles on everybody at all times. These Absorbs add up over time, and you can think of it as making him generate 20% less BP for the duration of the fight, which can be the difference between a wipe and a kill for your raid.
There have been strategies to let Marks die, but honestly, you shouldn't need to do this. It's a loss of a DPS or healer, which would make the fight go much more smoothly if you just kept them alive. Just note that BP is generated exponentially. When he Marks a target, he'll be generating 1 BP for every melee swing that successfully lands on a tank. When he Marks 2 targets, he'll be generating 2 BP each. It adds up faster and faster.
At 30%, he Frenzies. If someone has a Mark on them, they're also affected by this Frenzy. Tank avoidance plays a huge role in Marks, as fully avoided hits will not affect the Marked target. This is a good time to use Bloodlust. Remember that he dies at 1.5% HP, so if you see him about to use Blood Beasts around that time, consider ignoring them, as they won't get to anyone before Saurfang dies if you just keep the DPS up. The #1 most important thing about the Frenzy phase is that nobody can die. If someone dies, you've made the fight twice as hard. Suddenly you're down a DPS or healer, Saurfang has healed for 5% of his health, and he's still generating BP at an accelerated rate.
All in all, like most fights, this fight will become much easier as your raid gets geared. He'll go down faster, generate less BP, and eventually your healers will think this fight is a complete joke because nobody will get a single Mark on them.
Totem Talk: Fire Nova
Jan 14th 2010 7:24PM (WoW)First and foremost, thank you for helping our AOE DPS. Those 20 geists before Festergut and Rotface provided our hunters with 21,000 DPS, but I wasn't that far behind with 15,000 dps! Damn explosive trap + volley combo...
Second, thank you for providing at least a tiny 'on the move' spell to our repertoire. I've almost never used it, but 'almost never' and 'never' are two different things!
Third, and most importantly, thank you for supplying us with a tag. Running old content involving AOEing lots of little things has become so much easier since we no longer have to rely solely on chain lightning or thunderstorm to tag everything as a player kill and not a pet kill. It was a nightmare to tag casters or hunters with thunderstorm and attempt to pull them all back to you for magma to burn them down.
However, I do hate you for removing our only worthwhile CC in pvp. It was so handy just dropping my set with Fire Nova included as I saw some melee head my way to kick my ass, then watch as he got stunned while I was stunlocked. It was the perfect totem for us for pvp, and now it's gone and been replaced with something entirely worthless to pvp, other than for spamming it to unstealth someone, which will just drain your mana pool instantly.
Elemental Shaman Tier 10 bug causes 7-day lockout
Jan 4th 2010 2:34PM (WoW)Call Stabled Pet bug was first. We found out about it roughly three days into 3.3, and the cooldown was reported to be 25 days.
I've heard reports of Guardian Spirit being bugged too, but I have yet to see visual evidence of that.
Then, exactly when Tier 10 2pc became available, we hear reports of another bugged cooldown, set for 7 days. Think about when Tier 10 2p was first available. Every week, the maximum number of Emblems of Frost you could get was 5+14+16 = 35. The beginning of the fourth week of patch 3.3 (last week) was the earliest.
And no, this has nothing to do with the random dungeon finder. The guy who first found out about it equipped it as soon as he could and downed Marrowgar with it, which was when the problem first arose.
Give up? The answer.... they're tied into the cooldown on the opening of the plagueworks. Why? I don't know! But that's how it is. It's like the game is forcing these cooldowns to synchronize with the door's cooldown.
As for the rest of the matter, first of all, there is no fix for it. There won't be a fix for it. They're just waiting to see if waiting it out will solve it. If it doesn't, then there will be some heads scratching. Also, for everybody who complains about it, there's absolutely no reason to complain. Elemental Mastery was nothing like those damn Mage cooldowns anyway. 15% haste for 15 seconds is essentially a 50 DPS increase. A drop in the bucket. If this thing bugged Bloodlust, then we'd have a right to be pissed. But, our Tier 10 is just bad all around, and most Elementals won't even be using it at all, since cloth gear has better stats than the set and bonuses combined.
Prepare to see a lot of shaman dressed like mages.
Not a QQ post, just reporting the news. Back to you.