AKA, this is where the shit hits the fan.
We got our first taste of heroics last night and...well, it went pretty miserably. In about 2 hours, we managed to down all of one boss. We had countless wipes and some attempts that were nowhere even close.
My priest hit 85 last week and I've spent quite a bit of effort getting her geared up. Within a few days I had her tricked out in a mix of rep gear/JP gear and some BoEs to get an item level of 346, just the minimum for the Zandalari heroics. Of course I wasn't about to set foot in there with the bare minimum, but I was able to heal through two heroics dungeons without any problems. Perhaps I had a good group, but I the characters I inspected mostly had the same ilvl as I did. My mana only dipped about halfway during boss fights. DPS knew the mechanics and everyone was pulling 10k or so, and both runs went very smoothly with only one wipe (hunter pet pulled boss while we were on trash).
So I felt pretty good about my healing and felt prepared for heroics. I really should have remembered that you can certainly carry one undergeared/bad player through a heroic. You MIGHT be able to carry two with a really good tank and exceptional single DPS. But you certainly cannot carry three undergeared players who do not know mechanics.
I think my friends were in for a rude awakening during the first boss in throne of the tides when they both stood in the geyser and promptly found themselves dead. Sure, you can stand in bad stuff in normal and it's really not a big deal, you can heal through that. But you do that in heroics and it WILL one-shot you.
This is exactly the thing that I'd been harping on and on about ever since our first dungeon crawl. I've been trying to teach the mechanics to them because I knew that while mechanics seem trivial at first, they will wipe the group in end-game. I knew from personal experience that the step-up in difficulty from normal to heroic is HUGE. This isn't wrath anymore and heroics aren't a joke anymore. This is Cata, where heroics are, in fact, heroic mode difficulty. The mechanics are brutal and very, very unforgiving. You can screw up once, maybe twice, but more than that and chances are the group wipes.
Even after the mechanics issue was more or less sorted out (people finally learning not to break CC or stand in bad shit), we kept wiping because the fights were dragging on too long. Cata is also very hard on healers in general; we can't just spam our biggest heals on tanks anymore because mana management is a big part of cata healing. We can't afford to top everyone off to full all the time, healers need to conserve mana as much as possible and mainly do triage. Even with meticulous management if the DPS requirement isn't there, the group will inevitably wipe as the healer's mana ticks down to zero. After about 5 attempts it was clear it just wasn't going to work. The adds were eating up everyone's HP because they weren't being killed fast enough, no one was interrupting a damn thing, and CC kept getting broken. The fight was going well past its normal duration and I was completely oom even after shadowfiend and hymn.
Next we tried Lost City, which went no better to be honest. We wiped twice on the first boss because people weren't watching their feet and stepping all over bombs. When you step in one bomb it tosses you into - you guessed it! - more bombs. It was like learning how to do that boss all over again, this time on heroic difficulty where you REALLY cannot step on any bombs. You know, kind of like normal mode where you can sort of step on a couple bombs, but this time you REALLY REALLY can't step on ANY bombs. Sigh.
After a bit of struggle we did down him, but Lockmaw proved too much for us. People seemed to be doing better with mechanics (although do be honest I was too busy healing to really notice), but the DPS simply wasn't there. The baby crocodiles need to die very quickly otherwise it will chew up whoever it's fixated on, and they just weren't getting killed quickly enough. The AoE DPS just wasn't there (in which case they should've been focused down one by one, which was also not happening).
At the end of the night two problems were very obvious to me:
1. Mechanics are not being followed. This excuse is valid on the first attempt, but not the second. You should know by the second try to get out of the fire, to avoid tornadoes/bombs, to NOT break CC on adds, etc. The culprit is confusion, panic, and tunnel vision.
2. DPS is just not there. People generally consider 7k to be minimum for heroics, but that's assuming all THREE DPS are pulling 7k. And just because you pull 7k on a target dummy, it doesn't mean that you will on a boss. During these movement-heavy fights, your sustained DPS is likely well below 7k, which is what the group needs to make sure the healer doesn't go OOM or beat the enrage timers. If two guys are barely sustaining 6k and one isn't even doing 4k, then it just won't happen. The culprit? I could write a whole blog post on why your DPS is low, but I'll refrain since I don't know every single class inside and out. I do know this:
Bad Spec: the difference between a good DPS spec and a jumbled, crazy weird spec can be as much as 1-2k. The more talent points are wasted, the larger the gap gets. Those 2% DPS boosts really add up as you put more and more points into a spec.
Bad itemization: Seriously, this shouldn't be hard. If you're 85 you should know what stats you want and what to avoid. The whole "OMG it's an upgrade because it's blue and I can wear it" mentality has to go out the window. Know your class, know your stats. So often I see bad players saying "well this isn't technically for my class but it's a lot better since I'm only wearing a green ilvl 308 and this one is blue and is ilvl 333." Ignore the item level and see what you're gaining versus losing. If you're a warrior do you really think you're upgrading anything by gaining 100 intellect at the cost of 100 strength? All you're doing is upgrading your item level so you can cause more wipes in heroics.
Subpar or no glyphs/reforge/gems/enchants: A fully gemmed, chanted and reforged character can pull a few thousand more DPS over the same exact character in the same exact gear with none of these things. One of the biggest reasons DPS is low as a fresh 85 is that you're not getting hit capped. If 20% of your attacks are missing, you can be doing 20% more DPS by reforging/gemming/chanting until you get hit capped.
Rotation, rotation, rotation: This is SO important. If your rotation is perfect, you can most definitely pull 7k even in shitty cata greens. You know how I know this? I was pulling 7k in wrath dungeons when I was 80. And my gear back then had nowhere the stats as the gear in the cataclysm starter zone. You can, for a fact, be decked out in ilvl 282 gear just from the Mt. Hyjal quest rewards and still pull 7k. It is doable, but requires perfect execution. So if your ilvl is good enough for heroics, and your itemization is correct, it is a rotation problem. Go research your class. Go read what your moves should be (some classes have a set rotation, others have a priority list). Set your action bars to reflect what the rotation should be and go practice at a test dummy.
Ack, I'm getting horrible images of bashing my head against the wall trying to clear heroics back at cata launch. It was awful, just awful. So many people who were all so collectively confused...
Monday, August 22, 2011
Thursday, August 18, 2011
Don't stand in the fire!
Honestly people. If you can manage to do this one thing and one thing only, that already makes you better than 50% of the players in wow.
It took me a while to learn this important fact: if you stand in something, 99% of the time it hurts you. Back when I was a noob I stood in all sorts of things - poison pools, fire, lava, void zones, ominous circles that are surely a sign that something will fall on you. I didn't know better, and to be honest I rarely ever noticed what was under my feet. I was too busy looking at my DPS and looking at my next cooldown.
When I began raiding was when the concept of moving out of fire was drilled into my head by the raid leader screaming "GET OUT OF THE FIRE" several times over the course of a boss fight. Because in dungeons, you can still stand in fire and not die. The healer will heal you through it, or you might just die and wonder what happened. It's not until you hear a 17 year old nerdraging at you over vent that you really get it. Fire is bad, don't stand in it.
The most dangerous thing that can happen to you in a fight is getting tunnel vision. God knows I've wiped my share of raid bosses by getting too excited about using my cooldown, too excited about seeing my DPS climb up on recount, too excited about nearing the last 10% of the bosses' HP, too excited about DPSing hard to pay attention to anything else. And before I realized it, I was dead, or worse yet, I had killed the raid by standing in some kind of explosion.
This is what really separates a noob from a quality player. A noob only cares about DPS. A noob only looks at the number and only cares who did the most damage. A noob will constantly link recount info and /flex, never mind that fact that he drained the healer's mana completely by ignoring fire circles and poison pools. A noob doesn't even realize how bad he is for standing in all sorts of baddie pools of bad.
A quality player on the other hand, is always vigilant and aware. A quality raider knows where he should be and where he shouldn't, when he should re-position and when he needs to step around a fire patch to get there. A quality raider is watching when the next poison pool will drop and watching his feet. A quality raider knows that he's contributing his best to the team not when his DPS is amazingly high, but when he doesn't take avoidable damage, gets the interrupts, and brings down the boss without anyone dying or triggering a heart attack from the healers. A quality raider has flawless situational awareness.
Now that's not to say that I'm the latter. Far from it, I still get tunnel visioned from time to time and stand in the bad. But usually after one or two deaths I get it, and I'm able to focus again. I could care less that everyone is out-dpsing me. If that hunter pulling 25k dies halfway through the fight and I stay alive while pulling 18k through the whole fight, I've won.
As the levels get higher and dungeons and raids get tougher and tougher, it's not so much about killing things as much as staying alive. Things will die sooner or later, but everyone has to stay alive long enough to make that happen. Unless you're dealing with a strict enrage timer (which is most often just a gear check anyways), survival trumps DPS. A dead DPS is useless to the group. That scrappy guy who's pulling 8k but never taking a tick of poison and interrupting like clockwork, that's the guy you want in your raid.
I feel like a broken record but I see so many stupid DPS who refuse to strafe two yards to avoid fire. I didn't notice it so much until I started playing a healer, and it would send me into a rage spiral to see dumbass DPS just standing in bubbling poison or a ground tremor. Sure, I could heal them, but that is effectively just me carrying a bad player. Once I get into heroics I'll be too busy doing triage healing to be topping off every bad player who wants to stand in fire.
Just to drive my point home (not that I think I really need to, it's just fun to flex my wow knowledge), here is a list of all the times where standing in something is bad (and can kill you!) in cataclysm. I'm sure there's many more but this is all I can muster off the top of my head:
Almost every boss in ZA/ZG has a ground mechanic:
High Priest Venoxis - breath of hethiss, poison maze
Bloodlord Mandokir - devastating slam
High Priestess Kil'nara - wave of agony
Zanzil - zanzil fire
Jindo the Godbreaker - shadow spike
Akil'zon - lightning cloud
Jan'alai - fire bombs, flame breath
Hex Lord Malacrass - D&D, consecrate
Tier11 raids:
Omnotron Defense System - fire, poison, arcane pools
Atramedes - fire, sonic rings
Nefarian - um, how about that thing where the entire room FILL WITH LAVA
Valiona & Theralion - twilight swirls, twilight fire, twilight meteor
Ascendant Council - fire pools, glaciate patches, ground/air debuff mechanic
Cho'gall - that black shit that makes you puke if you stand in it, yeah, that thing. It hurts.
And of course, Firelands:
Shannox - immolation traps, crystalline traps, ring of fire
Rhyolith - fire pizza of doom!
Alysrazor - Swirling fire tornadoes of death, brushfire, worms' firebreath
Majordomo - seeds of fire
Ragnaros - Sulfuron smash, engulfing flames, magma traps
The mother of all "don't stand in that shit" mechanics has got to be the lich king's defile. It's probably the single reason why it took the top guild on my server a month to down heroic 25man LK. The damning thing about defile is that the longer you stand in it, the bigger it gets and the more damage it does. If you don't move out of it literally the moment it happens, you'll find that it's covering the entire little platform your raid is standing in and everyone is dead.
But seriously folks, just watch your damn feet!
It took me a while to learn this important fact: if you stand in something, 99% of the time it hurts you. Back when I was a noob I stood in all sorts of things - poison pools, fire, lava, void zones, ominous circles that are surely a sign that something will fall on you. I didn't know better, and to be honest I rarely ever noticed what was under my feet. I was too busy looking at my DPS and looking at my next cooldown.
When I began raiding was when the concept of moving out of fire was drilled into my head by the raid leader screaming "GET OUT OF THE FIRE" several times over the course of a boss fight. Because in dungeons, you can still stand in fire and not die. The healer will heal you through it, or you might just die and wonder what happened. It's not until you hear a 17 year old nerdraging at you over vent that you really get it. Fire is bad, don't stand in it.
The most dangerous thing that can happen to you in a fight is getting tunnel vision. God knows I've wiped my share of raid bosses by getting too excited about using my cooldown, too excited about seeing my DPS climb up on recount, too excited about nearing the last 10% of the bosses' HP, too excited about DPSing hard to pay attention to anything else. And before I realized it, I was dead, or worse yet, I had killed the raid by standing in some kind of explosion.
This is what really separates a noob from a quality player. A noob only cares about DPS. A noob only looks at the number and only cares who did the most damage. A noob will constantly link recount info and /flex, never mind that fact that he drained the healer's mana completely by ignoring fire circles and poison pools. A noob doesn't even realize how bad he is for standing in all sorts of baddie pools of bad.
A quality player on the other hand, is always vigilant and aware. A quality raider knows where he should be and where he shouldn't, when he should re-position and when he needs to step around a fire patch to get there. A quality raider is watching when the next poison pool will drop and watching his feet. A quality raider knows that he's contributing his best to the team not when his DPS is amazingly high, but when he doesn't take avoidable damage, gets the interrupts, and brings down the boss without anyone dying or triggering a heart attack from the healers. A quality raider has flawless situational awareness.
Now that's not to say that I'm the latter. Far from it, I still get tunnel visioned from time to time and stand in the bad. But usually after one or two deaths I get it, and I'm able to focus again. I could care less that everyone is out-dpsing me. If that hunter pulling 25k dies halfway through the fight and I stay alive while pulling 18k through the whole fight, I've won.
As the levels get higher and dungeons and raids get tougher and tougher, it's not so much about killing things as much as staying alive. Things will die sooner or later, but everyone has to stay alive long enough to make that happen. Unless you're dealing with a strict enrage timer (which is most often just a gear check anyways), survival trumps DPS. A dead DPS is useless to the group. That scrappy guy who's pulling 8k but never taking a tick of poison and interrupting like clockwork, that's the guy you want in your raid.
I feel like a broken record but I see so many stupid DPS who refuse to strafe two yards to avoid fire. I didn't notice it so much until I started playing a healer, and it would send me into a rage spiral to see dumbass DPS just standing in bubbling poison or a ground tremor. Sure, I could heal them, but that is effectively just me carrying a bad player. Once I get into heroics I'll be too busy doing triage healing to be topping off every bad player who wants to stand in fire.
Just to drive my point home (not that I think I really need to, it's just fun to flex my wow knowledge), here is a list of all the times where standing in something is bad (and can kill you!) in cataclysm. I'm sure there's many more but this is all I can muster off the top of my head:
Almost every boss in ZA/ZG has a ground mechanic:
High Priest Venoxis - breath of hethiss, poison maze
Bloodlord Mandokir - devastating slam
High Priestess Kil'nara - wave of agony
Zanzil - zanzil fire
Jindo the Godbreaker - shadow spike
Akil'zon - lightning cloud
Jan'alai - fire bombs, flame breath
Hex Lord Malacrass - D&D, consecrate
Tier11 raids:
Omnotron Defense System - fire, poison, arcane pools
Atramedes - fire, sonic rings
Nefarian - um, how about that thing where the entire room FILL WITH LAVA
Valiona & Theralion - twilight swirls, twilight fire, twilight meteor
Ascendant Council - fire pools, glaciate patches, ground/air debuff mechanic
Cho'gall - that black shit that makes you puke if you stand in it, yeah, that thing. It hurts.
And of course, Firelands:
Shannox - immolation traps, crystalline traps, ring of fire
Rhyolith - fire pizza of doom!
Alysrazor - Swirling fire tornadoes of death, brushfire, worms' firebreath
Majordomo - seeds of fire
Ragnaros - Sulfuron smash, engulfing flames, magma traps
The mother of all "don't stand in that shit" mechanics has got to be the lich king's defile. It's probably the single reason why it took the top guild on my server a month to down heroic 25man LK. The damning thing about defile is that the longer you stand in it, the bigger it gets and the more damage it does. If you don't move out of it literally the moment it happens, you'll find that it's covering the entire little platform your raid is standing in and everyone is dead.
But seriously folks, just watch your damn feet!
Sweet sweet new gear
I have a pet peeve about matching my armor sets to my hair color and tabard color. I have so many tabards actually that I usually just pick one that goes the best with my armor color, then dye my hair to match. For the past six months I'd been sporting the tier11 set which comes with gigantic swirly blue shoulderpads.
Oh dear god how I hated those shoulderpads. I was so excited when shoulders finally dropped for me, even if it was non-tier. Then when I equipped it...my jaw just dropped. It was so ugly. And so disproportionately huge! I looked ridiculous, and from certain angles it just looked like I had some bizarre mummy bandages floating above my torso. Just plain hideous.
But anyways, they were blue so I dyed my hair to match, and dug up some tabards. I had several choices to pull from my collection of tabards (30+ and counting):
Darkspear (light blue/gray with red motif) - not quite the right shade of blue
Undercity (Dark blue/black) - creepy looking face in the middle
Alliance (blue/gole) - I'll never wear alliance scum gear! How did I even buy this in the first place??
Sporeggar (dark blue/purple) - not quite the right shade. Also not a fan of a mushroom logo.
Ebon Blade (navy/black) - too dark and emo
Ramkahen (blue/gold) - reminds me too much of the alliance tabard
The one I picked, which was the exact perfect shade of blue as well as being pretty bad-ass looking, was the frostwolf tabard. It's blue/white and matches perfectly with the shoulderpad, and the touch of white is a nice contrast to the general bleakness of the rest of the armor set. I dyed my hair blue and voila - I was a coordinated (and pretty!) troll once more!
Then of course, I switched guilds, meaning that I started back from 0/3000 neutral rep. I decided to wear the tabard to speed up the rep gain, which meant having to re-coordinate my outfit once more. I dyed my hair red to match and luckily the new tabard was exactly the same shade so that looked quite nice. But those big ugly blue shoulderpads! I just couldn't look at them without cringing, especially when they contrasted so hideously with the new hair and tabard!
But then yesterday, after we one-shotted majordomo (a really fun fight in my opinion), the vanquishers shoulder token dropped! And as luck would have it, I was the only person in the entire raid who could use them!
With the new tier shoulder upgrade (can't remember the last time I had tier shoulders...I think it was back in ICC), I could finally equip my new tier chestpiece I had bought two weeks ago but hadn't been able to use because I didn't want to lose my set bonus. So BAM, that's two new tier pieces which comes with a sweet fire damage proc set bonus! And now I could also equip the gloves from the molten front dailies since I didn't have to worry about the tier 11 set bonus anymore! Gear gets really complicated sometimes...
AND just as icing on the cake, the Domo also dropped some sexy rogue boots! So now pretty much everything I'm wearing is either tier 12 or off-set, which are of course all matching in design and color (except the helm, which I never show anyways). It's not red, per se, but it's a dark brown-rusty color with red bits which goes very nicely with the new red hair and tabard. The point is, I look great once more!
The game is way more fun to play (not to mention I keep checking out armory to admire my awesome gear) when your character looks great. That's the worst part of leveling, is that you generally look like some sort of clown in all sorts of mismatched weird crap.
The latest news is that you will be able to customize what your armor looks like in the upcoming patch, so while you keep the same stats, you can look like you're wearing tier 2 or pvp season 5 or whatever you want! I can't wait till I can strut about in full nightslayer or bloodfang...I'm gonna look SO. FREAKING. BAD. ASS.
Oh dear god how I hated those shoulderpads. I was so excited when shoulders finally dropped for me, even if it was non-tier. Then when I equipped it...my jaw just dropped. It was so ugly. And so disproportionately huge! I looked ridiculous, and from certain angles it just looked like I had some bizarre mummy bandages floating above my torso. Just plain hideous.
But anyways, they were blue so I dyed my hair to match, and dug up some tabards. I had several choices to pull from my collection of tabards (30+ and counting):
Darkspear (light blue/gray with red motif) - not quite the right shade of blue
Undercity (Dark blue/black) - creepy looking face in the middle
Alliance (blue/gole) - I'll never wear alliance scum gear! How did I even buy this in the first place??
Sporeggar (dark blue/purple) - not quite the right shade. Also not a fan of a mushroom logo.
Ebon Blade (navy/black) - too dark and emo
Ramkahen (blue/gold) - reminds me too much of the alliance tabard
The one I picked, which was the exact perfect shade of blue as well as being pretty bad-ass looking, was the frostwolf tabard. It's blue/white and matches perfectly with the shoulderpad, and the touch of white is a nice contrast to the general bleakness of the rest of the armor set. I dyed my hair blue and voila - I was a coordinated (and pretty!) troll once more!
Then of course, I switched guilds, meaning that I started back from 0/3000 neutral rep. I decided to wear the tabard to speed up the rep gain, which meant having to re-coordinate my outfit once more. I dyed my hair red to match and luckily the new tabard was exactly the same shade so that looked quite nice. But those big ugly blue shoulderpads! I just couldn't look at them without cringing, especially when they contrasted so hideously with the new hair and tabard!
But then yesterday, after we one-shotted majordomo (a really fun fight in my opinion), the vanquishers shoulder token dropped! And as luck would have it, I was the only person in the entire raid who could use them!
With the new tier shoulder upgrade (can't remember the last time I had tier shoulders...I think it was back in ICC), I could finally equip my new tier chestpiece I had bought two weeks ago but hadn't been able to use because I didn't want to lose my set bonus. So BAM, that's two new tier pieces which comes with a sweet fire damage proc set bonus! And now I could also equip the gloves from the molten front dailies since I didn't have to worry about the tier 11 set bonus anymore! Gear gets really complicated sometimes...
AND just as icing on the cake, the Domo also dropped some sexy rogue boots! So now pretty much everything I'm wearing is either tier 12 or off-set, which are of course all matching in design and color (except the helm, which I never show anyways). It's not red, per se, but it's a dark brown-rusty color with red bits which goes very nicely with the new red hair and tabard. The point is, I look great once more!
The game is way more fun to play (not to mention I keep checking out armory to admire my awesome gear) when your character looks great. That's the worst part of leveling, is that you generally look like some sort of clown in all sorts of mismatched weird crap.
The latest news is that you will be able to customize what your armor looks like in the upcoming patch, so while you keep the same stats, you can look like you're wearing tier 2 or pvp season 5 or whatever you want! I can't wait till I can strut about in full nightslayer or bloodfang...I'm gonna look SO. FREAKING. BAD. ASS.
Tuesday, August 16, 2011
Oh herro priest
Ah, time for a new background. I went with a tried-and-true flames motif, to fit in with all this fire in the latest wow patch. I honestly feel so sorry for fire mages. I don't think all the mobs are immune to fire damage (or maybe they are, I don't know) but everyone is pretty sick of fire at the moment. Just like how we were all really sick of frost damage back in ICC...
So my latest project (oh I have so many) is a priest alt. My alt projects have a tendency to fizzle out a lot, but this one has managed to keep the momentum going for a few months. She's 84, and it looks like I'll have my third 85 in a matter of days.
I haven't really carried through with my lofty goals for my other alt, my prot pally, the way I had intended. I wanted to deck her out in tanking gear and become an off-tank for raids, but that never really happened. Tanking wasn't so much a challenge as finding the time to do anything with alts. There was always some achievement, some rare mount, an old-school raid to pug, city raids, holiday events that I wanted to do on my main and by the time I was done with those, I never really had time to chain-run dungeons on my alts the way I had planned.
But this priest has been coming along quickly thanks to the RAF friends we've been leveling with. I had made a druid to heal our little 4 man group, but switched to a priest when we had to start from scratch due to tank swapping issues (this is why you should roll a hybrid...).
I picked shadow to level and holy as off-spec to heal dungeons. The beauty of it was that I didn't need a whole new set of gear like I had with my resto/feral druid. I mean, I know I'm supposed to prioritize hit for shadow and spirit for holy, but shadow priests gain hit rating from spirit anyways, so we're a pretty unique hybrid in terms of itemization. Hit and spirit are both good stats for me whether I'm holy or shadow. And besides, intellect trumps both hit/spirit anyways so my itemization is pretty simple. Best of all, I'm not constantly carrying around extra gear for an OS or swapping out all the time.
The shadow priest rotation seemed pretty simple for single-target. Once I learned how to manage my mana using glyphed shadow word: death and shadowfiend, things were pretty easy. It was only in aoe situations that I was at a loss, at least until I picked up mind sear. Spreading DoTs around on everyone was a bit annoying but overall I had respectable multi-target DPS and pretty damn good single-target DPS.
Now as for holy spec - it's been amazing. My aoe heals are off the charts. One moment everyone in party is bleeding health and their bars are dropping into the red zone, and the next minute they're back up to full. All I have to do is spam flash heal on the lowest (or tank) to proc prayer of healing, cast that followed by circle of healing and everyone's topped off. EJ tells me I shouldn't be worrying about PW:shield but I find in 5 man parties it's a nice way to crank out some extra DPS. Just pop a shield + renew on the tank, and I have like 10 solid seconds to heal other people or smite away at the mob. I even almost out-dpsed a pally as a holy spec healer! Now that's pretty pro.
It's been a lot of fun and really different from the melee characters I usually play. I'm halfway to 84 and I can't wait - I have a bunch of BoE epics I can wear at 85 and I'm planning to jump right into heroics!
So my latest project (oh I have so many) is a priest alt. My alt projects have a tendency to fizzle out a lot, but this one has managed to keep the momentum going for a few months. She's 84, and it looks like I'll have my third 85 in a matter of days.
I haven't really carried through with my lofty goals for my other alt, my prot pally, the way I had intended. I wanted to deck her out in tanking gear and become an off-tank for raids, but that never really happened. Tanking wasn't so much a challenge as finding the time to do anything with alts. There was always some achievement, some rare mount, an old-school raid to pug, city raids, holiday events that I wanted to do on my main and by the time I was done with those, I never really had time to chain-run dungeons on my alts the way I had planned.
But this priest has been coming along quickly thanks to the RAF friends we've been leveling with. I had made a druid to heal our little 4 man group, but switched to a priest when we had to start from scratch due to tank swapping issues (this is why you should roll a hybrid...).
I picked shadow to level and holy as off-spec to heal dungeons. The beauty of it was that I didn't need a whole new set of gear like I had with my resto/feral druid. I mean, I know I'm supposed to prioritize hit for shadow and spirit for holy, but shadow priests gain hit rating from spirit anyways, so we're a pretty unique hybrid in terms of itemization. Hit and spirit are both good stats for me whether I'm holy or shadow. And besides, intellect trumps both hit/spirit anyways so my itemization is pretty simple. Best of all, I'm not constantly carrying around extra gear for an OS or swapping out all the time.
The shadow priest rotation seemed pretty simple for single-target. Once I learned how to manage my mana using glyphed shadow word: death and shadowfiend, things were pretty easy. It was only in aoe situations that I was at a loss, at least until I picked up mind sear. Spreading DoTs around on everyone was a bit annoying but overall I had respectable multi-target DPS and pretty damn good single-target DPS.
Now as for holy spec - it's been amazing. My aoe heals are off the charts. One moment everyone in party is bleeding health and their bars are dropping into the red zone, and the next minute they're back up to full. All I have to do is spam flash heal on the lowest (or tank) to proc prayer of healing, cast that followed by circle of healing and everyone's topped off. EJ tells me I shouldn't be worrying about PW:shield but I find in 5 man parties it's a nice way to crank out some extra DPS. Just pop a shield + renew on the tank, and I have like 10 solid seconds to heal other people or smite away at the mob. I even almost out-dpsed a pally as a holy spec healer! Now that's pretty pro.
It's been a lot of fun and really different from the melee characters I usually play. I'm halfway to 84 and I can't wait - I have a bunch of BoE epics I can wear at 85 and I'm planning to jump right into heroics!
Monday, August 15, 2011
Back home again
For the past three weeks or so raiding has been a real bust. One week we had 15 people on, but only 2 healers and not one person had an off spec or an alt that we could bring. Some guilds can down Firelands content with 2 healers, but we knew we had no chance with our setup and gear.
Luckily I still have good relationships with my old guild, so when the GM asked if I could come in to raid with them (filling in for a cancellation) I immediately accepted the invite. They were on Rhyolith, which was a fight I'd only attempted a few times but luckily for melee DPS the job is pretty simple (stab right leg...now left...back to right...rinse repeat) and we downed him in 2 attempts. Might I add that the fight isn't so easy for an assassination rogue since our damage builds up over time, and getting that first turn was a bit difficult. But after the first 10 seconds of the fight it was no problem.
We then spent a couple hours wiping on Alysrazor. I made a few mistakes, never having seen the fight before and also due to the fight being sort of, um, INSANE. Phase 1 is fine, then phase 2 is something I can only describe as OMG GIANT FIRE TORNADOES ARE ALL OVER THE PLACE AMG THEY ARE CHASING ME HELP HELP HELP IM ON FIRE.
Once I figured out how to zoom out my camera all the way and also learned to pick up the feathers for the speed boosts, I had it down pat. The first few wipes you can blame on me, but the last few were certainly not from my mistakes.
We did not down Alysrazor sadly and called it a night, but I was still happy to have gotten some good experience on two bosses my guild had never downed. I was ready to start raids up next week and attempt Rhyolith with my own guildies, not as a borrowed PuG. But I was in for a huge letdown...again, no-shows and lack of healers. We had a new recruit that we were able to bring in and scrap together 10 people for a really unbalanced raid composition (melee heavy, new tanks and new healers). It went downhill reeeeeal quick.
The new healer was clueless, and was obviously 12 years old and had a bad attitude. We wiped over and over on Shannox (come on! Shannox! He's like the marrowgar of Firelands) until we finally had another healer come online and we swapped him out. Then we had a soul-crushing series of wipes on Beth-tilac. We literally were banging our heads against the wall, not even able to get to phase 3 and losing people left and right during phase 1 and 2. DPS got aggro, accidentally went up in phase 2, got cleaved, healers got chewed up by adds, couldn't keep up with the damage output, tanks lost aggro, wouldn't taunt down adds, you name it. It seemed like a different thing went wrong each time until we finally sat out a melee DPS in favor of a hunter and finally downed the damn spider. After that we were all too tired to do anything else.
Later in the week I got invited to run with my old guild again - this time for Baleroc and Majordomo. Not being saved to those bosses of course I accepted, and had a blast. I did not screw up once for Baleroc - a very simple fight that just requires you to watch your stacks and put out good DPS. We didn't make the enrage timer once but got it the second time. Majordomo also went exceptionally smoothly. Despite never having seen the fight and only hearing a 2-sentence explanation (Stand with the tank and face the scorpion except when your seed pops. Oh, and kill adds) we 2-shotted it. My DPS was on the low side but what do you expect, bringing an assassination rogue who's not allowed to stand behind the boss? I don't stack expertise and I can't do much about 30% of my attacks getting dodged.
We put in an hour's worth of solid attempts on Ragnaros. It's a tough fight but it's really encouraging when you see the wipes start to pay off and you make a bit of progress, little by little. The first few pulls people couldn't avoid the lava waves and we couldn't make it past phase 1, but after some practice we were getting to phase 2, and by the end of the night we were starting to make it to phase 3 (unfortunately we kept wiping right at the phase transition). But hey, that's progression!
After the raid I asked the GM if I could rejoin the guild. I'd actually been considering switching guilds for some time due to the lack of quality raids at the current guild. We have some good people, but they were also not reliable in terms of raid commitments and scheduling. We had some reliable people, who were in turn not the best at learning new mechanics. I didn't want to spend 3 months of Firelands clearing only 2/7. I wanted to see a Rag kill before the next patch. Besides, I had noticed a long time ago that the overall maturity level in the new guild was not on par with the old one. I just didn't fit in quite as perfectly as I had.
I waited till the next day to tell the old GM's girlfriend in person (well, in whispers) exactly why I was leaving and where I was going, and that I really enjoyed getting to know her. We had bonded a bit during the few months I was there and I was genuinely sorry to say goodbye to her - she was a nice person and a quality raider and I knew I would miss her. She was sad too but she understood, we had cordial, friendly words and I announced in guild chat I was leaving. I mentioned I was going back to my old guild to raid with old friends, that everyone had been great and that I would miss them. In my opinion it was a lot more cordial than how some other members had quit - typing in /gquit without a single word of explanation.
I saw some sad faces in gchat after I said goodbye, but I was absolutely stunned at what the other rogue said to me in whisper after I quit. "You suck I hate you now". There was no smiley face, no JK - he was dead serious.
I was in total shock over this. I mean, what was so horrible about what I had done? I no longer enjoyed raiding with this guild, is it so wrong that I want to leave? I hadn't done a disservie to the guild in any way - I never took anything out of the guild bank, I always showed up on time for raids, I stayed through painful wipe sessions without complaining, I helped others in the guild, I never swore at anyone, I was nice, I made jokes, I helped them progress. It's not as if I joined the guild, raided for two weeks and won a bunch of items then quit. I stuck around for 8 months, helping their progression and being active and dedicated.
What also kind of flabbergasted me is that this rogue has applied to a more hardcore raiding guild on our server. I know this because I've seen his app - I was considering applying as well! He hasn't switched guilds, but the fact that he apped shows that he's not all Mr. Loyal to the guild either! What right does he have to criticize me for switching?
Anyways, I'm not terribly concerned with all that anymore. It was upsetting to hear that from someone you've been on good terms with (we used to discuss rogue strategy and help each other out with enchants, flasks, etc). But now I'm in a better guild with better people, and I've decided that raiding isn't going to become a huge priority anymore. I have a very serious alt these days that I'm spending a lot of time on, and I've decided raiding is fun occasionally, but it's not something to obsess over or make a fuss over. If I get to raid a lot, that's great, and if not, I can do other things.
Though I'd still love to down Rag before the next patch...he's down to 40% and we're still pushing!
Luckily I still have good relationships with my old guild, so when the GM asked if I could come in to raid with them (filling in for a cancellation) I immediately accepted the invite. They were on Rhyolith, which was a fight I'd only attempted a few times but luckily for melee DPS the job is pretty simple (stab right leg...now left...back to right...rinse repeat) and we downed him in 2 attempts. Might I add that the fight isn't so easy for an assassination rogue since our damage builds up over time, and getting that first turn was a bit difficult. But after the first 10 seconds of the fight it was no problem.
We then spent a couple hours wiping on Alysrazor. I made a few mistakes, never having seen the fight before and also due to the fight being sort of, um, INSANE. Phase 1 is fine, then phase 2 is something I can only describe as OMG GIANT FIRE TORNADOES ARE ALL OVER THE PLACE AMG THEY ARE CHASING ME HELP HELP HELP IM ON FIRE.
Once I figured out how to zoom out my camera all the way and also learned to pick up the feathers for the speed boosts, I had it down pat. The first few wipes you can blame on me, but the last few were certainly not from my mistakes.
We did not down Alysrazor sadly and called it a night, but I was still happy to have gotten some good experience on two bosses my guild had never downed. I was ready to start raids up next week and attempt Rhyolith with my own guildies, not as a borrowed PuG. But I was in for a huge letdown...again, no-shows and lack of healers. We had a new recruit that we were able to bring in and scrap together 10 people for a really unbalanced raid composition (melee heavy, new tanks and new healers). It went downhill reeeeeal quick.
The new healer was clueless, and was obviously 12 years old and had a bad attitude. We wiped over and over on Shannox (come on! Shannox! He's like the marrowgar of Firelands) until we finally had another healer come online and we swapped him out. Then we had a soul-crushing series of wipes on Beth-tilac. We literally were banging our heads against the wall, not even able to get to phase 3 and losing people left and right during phase 1 and 2. DPS got aggro, accidentally went up in phase 2, got cleaved, healers got chewed up by adds, couldn't keep up with the damage output, tanks lost aggro, wouldn't taunt down adds, you name it. It seemed like a different thing went wrong each time until we finally sat out a melee DPS in favor of a hunter and finally downed the damn spider. After that we were all too tired to do anything else.
Later in the week I got invited to run with my old guild again - this time for Baleroc and Majordomo. Not being saved to those bosses of course I accepted, and had a blast. I did not screw up once for Baleroc - a very simple fight that just requires you to watch your stacks and put out good DPS. We didn't make the enrage timer once but got it the second time. Majordomo also went exceptionally smoothly. Despite never having seen the fight and only hearing a 2-sentence explanation (Stand with the tank and face the scorpion except when your seed pops. Oh, and kill adds) we 2-shotted it. My DPS was on the low side but what do you expect, bringing an assassination rogue who's not allowed to stand behind the boss? I don't stack expertise and I can't do much about 30% of my attacks getting dodged.
We put in an hour's worth of solid attempts on Ragnaros. It's a tough fight but it's really encouraging when you see the wipes start to pay off and you make a bit of progress, little by little. The first few pulls people couldn't avoid the lava waves and we couldn't make it past phase 1, but after some practice we were getting to phase 2, and by the end of the night we were starting to make it to phase 3 (unfortunately we kept wiping right at the phase transition). But hey, that's progression!
After the raid I asked the GM if I could rejoin the guild. I'd actually been considering switching guilds for some time due to the lack of quality raids at the current guild. We have some good people, but they were also not reliable in terms of raid commitments and scheduling. We had some reliable people, who were in turn not the best at learning new mechanics. I didn't want to spend 3 months of Firelands clearing only 2/7. I wanted to see a Rag kill before the next patch. Besides, I had noticed a long time ago that the overall maturity level in the new guild was not on par with the old one. I just didn't fit in quite as perfectly as I had.
I waited till the next day to tell the old GM's girlfriend in person (well, in whispers) exactly why I was leaving and where I was going, and that I really enjoyed getting to know her. We had bonded a bit during the few months I was there and I was genuinely sorry to say goodbye to her - she was a nice person and a quality raider and I knew I would miss her. She was sad too but she understood, we had cordial, friendly words and I announced in guild chat I was leaving. I mentioned I was going back to my old guild to raid with old friends, that everyone had been great and that I would miss them. In my opinion it was a lot more cordial than how some other members had quit - typing in /gquit without a single word of explanation.
I saw some sad faces in gchat after I said goodbye, but I was absolutely stunned at what the other rogue said to me in whisper after I quit. "You suck I hate you now". There was no smiley face, no JK - he was dead serious.
I was in total shock over this. I mean, what was so horrible about what I had done? I no longer enjoyed raiding with this guild, is it so wrong that I want to leave? I hadn't done a disservie to the guild in any way - I never took anything out of the guild bank, I always showed up on time for raids, I stayed through painful wipe sessions without complaining, I helped others in the guild, I never swore at anyone, I was nice, I made jokes, I helped them progress. It's not as if I joined the guild, raided for two weeks and won a bunch of items then quit. I stuck around for 8 months, helping their progression and being active and dedicated.
What also kind of flabbergasted me is that this rogue has applied to a more hardcore raiding guild on our server. I know this because I've seen his app - I was considering applying as well! He hasn't switched guilds, but the fact that he apped shows that he's not all Mr. Loyal to the guild either! What right does he have to criticize me for switching?
Anyways, I'm not terribly concerned with all that anymore. It was upsetting to hear that from someone you've been on good terms with (we used to discuss rogue strategy and help each other out with enchants, flasks, etc). But now I'm in a better guild with better people, and I've decided that raiding isn't going to become a huge priority anymore. I have a very serious alt these days that I'm spending a lot of time on, and I've decided raiding is fun occasionally, but it's not something to obsess over or make a fuss over. If I get to raid a lot, that's great, and if not, I can do other things.
Though I'd still love to down Rag before the next patch...he's down to 40% and we're still pushing!
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
The Straggler
Leveling with other people can be such a pain in the butt. It sounds like a great idea in the beginning - hey we can do quests together! We can do dungeons! We will be invincible!
But inevitably level gaps start happening. Either someone charges off into a much higher level and complains that no one else is catching up, or someone just falls behind and everyone else has to wait for them to catch up.
The problem gets exacerbated when you try to play with someone who has fallen behind. Most quests have a level requirement, and chances are if you're tackling a quest that is orange or yellow, that person who is 2-3 levels behind you will not be able to pick up that quest. Experience is also capped by your level and thus if you're doing dungeons that are too much beyond your level, your experience gain will be slower compared to the other people. All of this means that if you're behind, you will likely stay that way or even fall further behind.
What do you do in that situation? There's nothing to do except catch up!
The best way to level quickly in my opinion, is without a doubt questing. If you hate questing, too bad. It's the quickest and most reliable. Some say dungeons, but that's only if you're a beast tank leveling with a beast healer. Otherwise there's a fair chance you'll get stuck with a bad group and end up spending a long time in a dungeon with very little to show for it. There's also a good chance you'll get stuck in some low level dungeon and not get much xp out of it compared to what you would get if you had spent that time questing.
The best place to quest are where there are a large number of generic "kill this many of that" type quests in one hub. The worst thing you can do is do one-off quests over and over - you'll waste a lot of time just travelling back and forth. You want to be able to do at least 3-4 quests in one round without having to go back to turn them in.
It takes some experience to figure out where the best questing zones are. Some of my personal favorites are (in no particular order): Feralas, Un'goro Crater, Western Plaguelands, Stranglethorn Vale, the Hinterlands, Nagrand, and Borean Tundra. You will find a big cluster of quests in one questing hub and be able to knock out at least a couple levels in an hour.
And let me just take the time to say that if you're a completionist and feel like you have to do every single quest, even ones that have fallen beyond your level, then save that energy for when you hit level cap. When you're pre-85, your biggest goal should be to get to 85, not to dawdle here and there and try to get the loremaster title or whatever. Quests in the Azeroth zones take a mere fraction of the time when you're 85 than when you were level 45. If you really want that stupid loremaster, focus on leveling to cap then going back. Trust me, you will save yourself so much time that way and I honestly don't know anyone who actually got loremaster during the leveling process.
Some things that give absolutely garbage experience relative to the time you would spend doing them:
- gray level quests that you couldn't do 10 levels ago
- daily quests (most dailies are meant to be a level-cap grind anyways)
- escort quests
- any azeroth quests once you're past 60
- any outland quests once you're past 70
- any northrend quests once you're past 80
Some things you should be actively doing to speed up xp gain:
- gathering tradeskills - mining, herbing, skinning all give xp now, so when you see that node, go get it. It's usually 1.5-2x the xp you'd get for a creature kill, plus you get something nice out of it. Don't ignore nodes.
- always logging out at an inn
- skipping a quest if you just can't solo it, or if some ally is camping you. It wastes time, just don't do it.
- have a spec that minimizes downtime - you can always respec to raid if you're so inclined later on. Pick talents that maximize self-healing, mana conservation, burst damage and what have you so you can glide effortlessly from mob to mob getting your shit done.
- try to level your cooking - not because it helps you level faster, but it's one of those things that's a bitch to try to go back and do later on. At the least save all the meats and mats you're collecting.
Again, these are things you don't learn until you've leveled a toon up to 85 and kind of get a feel for what works and what doesn't. Just as a comparison, my rogue took over 6 months to get to 80, whereas my 2nd character paladin took less than 2 months. You just know better the second time around.
But inevitably level gaps start happening. Either someone charges off into a much higher level and complains that no one else is catching up, or someone just falls behind and everyone else has to wait for them to catch up.
The problem gets exacerbated when you try to play with someone who has fallen behind. Most quests have a level requirement, and chances are if you're tackling a quest that is orange or yellow, that person who is 2-3 levels behind you will not be able to pick up that quest. Experience is also capped by your level and thus if you're doing dungeons that are too much beyond your level, your experience gain will be slower compared to the other people. All of this means that if you're behind, you will likely stay that way or even fall further behind.
What do you do in that situation? There's nothing to do except catch up!
The best way to level quickly in my opinion, is without a doubt questing. If you hate questing, too bad. It's the quickest and most reliable. Some say dungeons, but that's only if you're a beast tank leveling with a beast healer. Otherwise there's a fair chance you'll get stuck with a bad group and end up spending a long time in a dungeon with very little to show for it. There's also a good chance you'll get stuck in some low level dungeon and not get much xp out of it compared to what you would get if you had spent that time questing.
The best place to quest are where there are a large number of generic "kill this many of that" type quests in one hub. The worst thing you can do is do one-off quests over and over - you'll waste a lot of time just travelling back and forth. You want to be able to do at least 3-4 quests in one round without having to go back to turn them in.
It takes some experience to figure out where the best questing zones are. Some of my personal favorites are (in no particular order): Feralas, Un'goro Crater, Western Plaguelands, Stranglethorn Vale, the Hinterlands, Nagrand, and Borean Tundra. You will find a big cluster of quests in one questing hub and be able to knock out at least a couple levels in an hour.
And let me just take the time to say that if you're a completionist and feel like you have to do every single quest, even ones that have fallen beyond your level, then save that energy for when you hit level cap. When you're pre-85, your biggest goal should be to get to 85, not to dawdle here and there and try to get the loremaster title or whatever. Quests in the Azeroth zones take a mere fraction of the time when you're 85 than when you were level 45. If you really want that stupid loremaster, focus on leveling to cap then going back. Trust me, you will save yourself so much time that way and I honestly don't know anyone who actually got loremaster during the leveling process.
Some things that give absolutely garbage experience relative to the time you would spend doing them:
- gray level quests that you couldn't do 10 levels ago
- daily quests (most dailies are meant to be a level-cap grind anyways)
- escort quests
- any azeroth quests once you're past 60
- any outland quests once you're past 70
- any northrend quests once you're past 80
Some things you should be actively doing to speed up xp gain:
- gathering tradeskills - mining, herbing, skinning all give xp now, so when you see that node, go get it. It's usually 1.5-2x the xp you'd get for a creature kill, plus you get something nice out of it. Don't ignore nodes.
- always logging out at an inn
- skipping a quest if you just can't solo it, or if some ally is camping you. It wastes time, just don't do it.
- have a spec that minimizes downtime - you can always respec to raid if you're so inclined later on. Pick talents that maximize self-healing, mana conservation, burst damage and what have you so you can glide effortlessly from mob to mob getting your shit done.
- try to level your cooking - not because it helps you level faster, but it's one of those things that's a bitch to try to go back and do later on. At the least save all the meats and mats you're collecting.
Again, these are things you don't learn until you've leveled a toon up to 85 and kind of get a feel for what works and what doesn't. Just as a comparison, my rogue took over 6 months to get to 80, whereas my 2nd character paladin took less than 2 months. You just know better the second time around.
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
Rise of the Zandalari
Since the recent valor to justice point conversion, dungeons have gotten much easier. Before Patch 4.2, I tried the Zandalari dungeons once, and swore I'd never go back in there until it was nerfed to wrath level.
I beat each dungeon exactly once just to get the damn achievement and stayed far, far away from them since. Every time I even thought about queuing up for one, I recalled the nightmarish run of Zul'Gurub I did with 4 people from the same guild who were constantly laughing at me over my numerous deaths (although they weren't jerks to me nor did they kick me - they just lol'ed at me a lot).
It was a really, really horrible run. I had read up on the encounters and came prepared with potions and foods and whatnot, but I was far from ready for this place. The damage output was off the charts - most special abilities were simply one-shot mechanics where if you don't move a split second fast enough, you will die. I mean, there is just no way to survive a ~40k damage tick without moving out of the fire pre-emptively.
All in all, I think I died around ~20 times or so. Thank god there was a repair NPC right at the entrance. Every single boss fight I got 2 b-rezzes - one from the druid then another from the DK. I managed to stay alive for a whole whopping 30 seconds on the panther boss but on all the other ones I was pretty much dead as soon as the fight started. The fights were lightning fast-paced, the damage was practically unhealable, and the mechanics were unforgiving and relentlessly brutal.
Zul'Aman wasn't nearly as bad, but we did go through about 4 different tanks and healers just to clear it. After spending 2 hours in that place I also had no desire to go back in there.
Besides, I didn't need the extra valor points anyhow - my guild was clearing enough raid content for me to cap out my VP every week, and my gear was already full 359. The only use I had for VP was to buy the BoE boots and give them to my paladin, or sell them. Heck, towards the end I was trading them in for conquest points to buy epic PvP gear.
With the new patch came the conversion, and everyone could now buy tier 11 gear with justice points. It also brought tier 12 gear which I desperately wanted, and in order to buy them I knew I would have to repeat the gruelling dungeon crawls to cap out my VP every week. But I did notice everyone's ilvl was generally higher than they had been pre-patch, and heroic dungeons were getting noticeably easier. People weren't CC'ing meticulously like they used to, and more often than not a beast tank would come in and chain-pull an instance in about 30 minutes.
I figured I'd stick to regular heroics, but in the end I wasn't happy with earning half the VP cap for the week and decided to give the Zandalar dungeons one more try. My first attempt went badly when I died during the boulder toss gauntlet. In fact, I kept dying to it and finally left out of frustration and embarrassment. I mean, come on, what kind of bullshit mechanic is that? Is this frogger or is this WoW?
My next attempt went quite smoothly, however. I managed to get dropped in right at the Bloodlord Mandokir fight, thankfully having skipped the dreaded venomancer (in my opinion he's there to weed out people right at the start) and the stupid boulder toss. One person died here and there but overall no wipes occurred for the rest of the fight. With the help of DBM screaming at me and telling me where to go, and by watching what everyone else was doing, I managed to stumble my way through all the encounters and even put out some decent damage.
I marveled at the fact that as long as you just avoid that single one-shot mechanic every boss has, the rest of the fight becomes more or less trivial (with the exception of the venomancer). For instance with the Bloodlord, as long as you avoid the devastating slam rupture lines, you're fine. the bloodletting mechanic ticks off a lot of hp, but it's unavoidable and it CAN be healed through, whereas the slam damage is a bona-fide one-shot. For the Zanzil encounter, as long as you grab the poison resist buff cauldron before he does the poison spray, you're good to go - the rest of the phases are easily healable.
As I mentioned, the venomancer is an exception - you need to avoid ALL his abilities because all of them are more or less one-shot killers. Everything is poison-based, so if you get hit you'll be taking a few ticks which can be lethal. The toxic link can certainly be a one-shotter if you're unlucky and get linked with another melee right next to you. His breath is particularly dangerous in that he can cast it in any direction, not necessarily at the tank. Combine that with the fact that stepping in any of the myriad of poison pools on the ground which start exploding throughout the fight - you'd better have a hair trigger on your mouse.
Anyways, I gained some confidence from clearing ZG relatively easy. Zul'Aman was also much easier with everyone having better gear and better knowledge of the encounters. There also aren't quite as many one-shot mechanics in ZA - mainly the ones to watch out for are the flame breath during the dragonhawk encounter (you can survive one or two ticks, or three with a great healer who's on the ball), and getting the proper charge order set up during the bear encounter. Other than that the only part of ZA that might be tricky is if the final boss Daakara decides to shapeshift into the Lynx. But as long as the tank knows when to taunt it's not a big deal.
Now I know I can cap my VP each week running a combination of ZG/ZA and a few heroics (maybe toss in a couple raid bosses too). But it still has me missing the good old days of wrath when a dungeon would take 15 min from start to finish...
I beat each dungeon exactly once just to get the damn achievement and stayed far, far away from them since. Every time I even thought about queuing up for one, I recalled the nightmarish run of Zul'Gurub I did with 4 people from the same guild who were constantly laughing at me over my numerous deaths (although they weren't jerks to me nor did they kick me - they just lol'ed at me a lot).
It was a really, really horrible run. I had read up on the encounters and came prepared with potions and foods and whatnot, but I was far from ready for this place. The damage output was off the charts - most special abilities were simply one-shot mechanics where if you don't move a split second fast enough, you will die. I mean, there is just no way to survive a ~40k damage tick without moving out of the fire pre-emptively.
All in all, I think I died around ~20 times or so. Thank god there was a repair NPC right at the entrance. Every single boss fight I got 2 b-rezzes - one from the druid then another from the DK. I managed to stay alive for a whole whopping 30 seconds on the panther boss but on all the other ones I was pretty much dead as soon as the fight started. The fights were lightning fast-paced, the damage was practically unhealable, and the mechanics were unforgiving and relentlessly brutal.
Zul'Aman wasn't nearly as bad, but we did go through about 4 different tanks and healers just to clear it. After spending 2 hours in that place I also had no desire to go back in there.
Besides, I didn't need the extra valor points anyhow - my guild was clearing enough raid content for me to cap out my VP every week, and my gear was already full 359. The only use I had for VP was to buy the BoE boots and give them to my paladin, or sell them. Heck, towards the end I was trading them in for conquest points to buy epic PvP gear.
With the new patch came the conversion, and everyone could now buy tier 11 gear with justice points. It also brought tier 12 gear which I desperately wanted, and in order to buy them I knew I would have to repeat the gruelling dungeon crawls to cap out my VP every week. But I did notice everyone's ilvl was generally higher than they had been pre-patch, and heroic dungeons were getting noticeably easier. People weren't CC'ing meticulously like they used to, and more often than not a beast tank would come in and chain-pull an instance in about 30 minutes.
I figured I'd stick to regular heroics, but in the end I wasn't happy with earning half the VP cap for the week and decided to give the Zandalar dungeons one more try. My first attempt went badly when I died during the boulder toss gauntlet. In fact, I kept dying to it and finally left out of frustration and embarrassment. I mean, come on, what kind of bullshit mechanic is that? Is this frogger or is this WoW?
My next attempt went quite smoothly, however. I managed to get dropped in right at the Bloodlord Mandokir fight, thankfully having skipped the dreaded venomancer (in my opinion he's there to weed out people right at the start) and the stupid boulder toss. One person died here and there but overall no wipes occurred for the rest of the fight. With the help of DBM screaming at me and telling me where to go, and by watching what everyone else was doing, I managed to stumble my way through all the encounters and even put out some decent damage.
I marveled at the fact that as long as you just avoid that single one-shot mechanic every boss has, the rest of the fight becomes more or less trivial (with the exception of the venomancer). For instance with the Bloodlord, as long as you avoid the devastating slam rupture lines, you're fine. the bloodletting mechanic ticks off a lot of hp, but it's unavoidable and it CAN be healed through, whereas the slam damage is a bona-fide one-shot. For the Zanzil encounter, as long as you grab the poison resist buff cauldron before he does the poison spray, you're good to go - the rest of the phases are easily healable.
As I mentioned, the venomancer is an exception - you need to avoid ALL his abilities because all of them are more or less one-shot killers. Everything is poison-based, so if you get hit you'll be taking a few ticks which can be lethal. The toxic link can certainly be a one-shotter if you're unlucky and get linked with another melee right next to you. His breath is particularly dangerous in that he can cast it in any direction, not necessarily at the tank. Combine that with the fact that stepping in any of the myriad of poison pools on the ground which start exploding throughout the fight - you'd better have a hair trigger on your mouse.
Anyways, I gained some confidence from clearing ZG relatively easy. Zul'Aman was also much easier with everyone having better gear and better knowledge of the encounters. There also aren't quite as many one-shot mechanics in ZA - mainly the ones to watch out for are the flame breath during the dragonhawk encounter (you can survive one or two ticks, or three with a great healer who's on the ball), and getting the proper charge order set up during the bear encounter. Other than that the only part of ZA that might be tricky is if the final boss Daakara decides to shapeshift into the Lynx. But as long as the tank knows when to taunt it's not a big deal.
Now I know I can cap my VP each week running a combination of ZG/ZA and a few heroics (maybe toss in a couple raid bosses too). But it still has me missing the good old days of wrath when a dungeon would take 15 min from start to finish...
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