Yeah, that one bit in the cathedral for the Worgen was over the top. Poorly thought out. The goblin stuff was wicked cool.
Heroic Grim Batol is wicked hard. I haven’t seen the other Heroics yet, but we’re wiping a lot to take every boss down; I don’t think we’ve had a clean Heroic run yet, even on the second time.
I’m sure that’ll change once we’re all in 333+ gear, but for now, we’re working hard for our blues!
I loved the underwater in DAOC. It really felt like I was underwater. Open but claustrophobic and dark. Loved it.
Sorry, super busy at work so couldn’t respond. Yeah, there were parts of the Worgen introduction that were brutal – insane spawn (especially in that village with the mine), early aggro monster encounters, etc.). Also I don’t know if the final objective was bugged but once we got on the (not trying to give too much away) contraption I couldn’t rappel and ended up just waiting for the NPCs to blow it up – is that normal?
I did find the Worgen story pretty interesting and liked the way they handled it, just disappointed by the tie in to the NEs. Anyhow, yep, looking forward to trying the Goblin area (may play it tonight).
I’m really looking forward to dabbling in Archaeology, but I’m waiting to do that on my Dwarf. Because that’s what Dwarves do! I’m REALLY, really looking forward to Uldum – I love Egyptian / Archaeology stuff. Just is so far away…
As far as underwater – Kedge Keep forever! I still sometimes here the “glub glub”.
It’s not just in the worgen area. It appears to be a quirk with how respawns are handled everywhere in the new Cataclysm content, but when you’re level 4, it’s harder to deal with.
TheJare
3646
My biggest problem with the zone when I went with my mage, was that targeted spells (specifically, the Water Elemental’s freeze) need solid ground to work. (did I already say this?)
They first added the increased respawn rates based on local player population back before Wrath, as I recall. It does seem higher than ever though, and I completed some of the kill quests without moving.
Heirlooms really turn the difficulty on its head. My worgen rogue feels overgeared with an heirloom set - chest, shoulders, trinket, and daggers (with Lifestealing enchants to keep him alive until Recuperate is available). There was a retrieval quest that was killing a lot of people, but he was able to take on an 8:1 fight & win. My daughter is playing a worgen mage, also in full heirlooms, and we’re a ridiculous killing machine together.
Mordrak
3648
I was in a group with an Heirloom shaman (Violet Hold), geared up in caster cloth versions. The guy did 40% of the group’s DPS. I know I’m not a good player, but jesus that seems awfully high. I was just in various greens and blues from quests and the occasional instance.
Yikes, I know this is new expansion, but heroic modes are utterly brutal. Not just with the gear check, but the mechanics are things you saw on raid fights previously.
Goes to show, WotLK made us horrible players.
There appears to be a serious bug or design error with the Random Dungeon Finder. It appears that the game checks your item level and compares it with all dungeons that are available at your character level. If you don’t meet the ilevel requirement, it refuses to queue you for a random dungeon. It may also not queue you if you haven’t discovered all the dungeons for your level; I’ll need to jump ahead of the quests to discover the entrances and see if I am able to queue.
A better system would have been to queue you for any random for which you meet the requirements, but that’s not happening.
Andrew
3651
That would allow you to only queue for a particular dungeon by not discovering the others, but still getting the random bonuses. Maybe that was the idea? In Wrath you could certainly queue for heroics without qualifying for all of them.
hong
3652
Apropos of nothing, “Deathwing and the Destroyers” is an AWESOME name for a rock band.
Heroic SFK is like doing Karazhan all over again, but harder…
And Heroic Grim Batol is brutal. I’ve done most of the instances on Heroic, and none of them compares.
The issue I’m finding is my ICC-25 gear when gemmed up still is better than the new stuff (from quests) with a higher iLevel. However, even the stuff from brc is amazing.
The Auctioneer site seems down for me, is that addon dead? Curse client shows it last updated late October.
Heh, my Mage, at 81, and still in the emblem gear from the last expansion (at around 240-ish) can’t qualify for any of the Cata dungeons. But the greens I’m getting from quests seem to have higher scores than my fancy-shmancy stuff from WotLK, so maybe I should downgrade to upgrade!
Andrew
3657
You can’t just compare ilevel, compare stats. Epic gear gets more points of stats per ilevel, and things like gems and enchants also boost how good a piece of gear is (you aren’t going to enchant a piece of green leveling gear, after all). I have mostly 277 gear, and generally it hasn’t seemed worth replacing things until around 308ish blue gear. On the other hand, the green gear you get may have mastery, and for some specs mastery is really good.
I’ve seen it a lot in both starting areas. Several times last night, I’d kill something only to have something spawn in the exact same spot just as I finished the first one off (or just before).
It’s annoying but I think it only killed me once.
Now I can’t wait to do Shadow Fang Keep Heroic.
And you’re very right about Heroic Grim Batol. I did two heroics tonight right after hitting 85 (my item level was 329), Vortex Pinnacle and Grim Batol.
Vortex Pinnacle was tricky, caused my group a few wipes, had some fun mechanics, but overall it wasn’t too bad and we got through it pretty smoothly.
Grim Batol on the other hand pushed our skills to the limit. It is a 5-man raid in every sense of the word. You have to be on point for those bosses or they will kill you. Tons and tons of fun though. Figuring out the mechanics of a fight and then slowly overcoming them is my favorite part of WoW, and this shined in Grim Batol.
So I take it that this was one of the harder Heroics, but I’m really hoping that some have comparable levels of difficulty. Anyone here done Heroic Stonecore? From what I’ve seen it seems like that may measure up.
Rywill
3660
Same thing happened to me, and also a random stranger who happened to be doing the same quest at the same time. All of the Worgen-specific stuff seems pretty rushed and prone to breaking.
[Spoilers follow]
For example, when I did the Battle of Gilneas, no friendly army spawned. I went in through a different gate thinking that I was supposed to SNEAK to the prince, and ended up walking through totally empty city while the battle and big death scene happened off-screen. I eventually walked up to find everything over. Then in the hunt for Sylvanas, Tobias took off without me and I never found him again, which totally broke the quest. I ended up wandering around Gilneas killing random Forsaken, but the Forsaken General was un-attackable and wouldn’t activate his cutscene. Strangely, if I walked outside the city walls Gilneas would change to some other phase and I could look back and see a bunch of Gilnean citizens inside. But if I walked back into the city it would change to the previous phase, and the citizens would disappear and Forsaken would appear in their place. About five or ten other people were there with me, all in the same situation. I eventually abandoned the quest and re-started it to get it to work.
And then for the Dreadnought battle, at first it wouldn’t start for a long time, and when it did I had the same issue as BigWeather. Me and some random dude got flown up to the upper deck, killed everyone there. Then the NPC leader told us to kill everyone on the deck, which we had already done. Then we stood around for a minute going “Uh, are we supposed to be doing something?” to each other, then the NPC told everyone to rappel down to the deck. But we couldn’t figure out how to do it and the railings were too high to jump over, so we just stood around on the top deck going “wtf” and “lol” until the NPCs destroyed the ship.
It really seems like the Worgen stuff wasn’t QA’d very well, unfortunately.
