Heroics will undoubtedly get easier as people get better gear, but for now, they’re really challenging. I personally enjoy it (as does the rest of my guild), but I can see many people crying for nerfs.
We ran Heroic Deadmines last night. Did we encounter a bug, or do you only get one attempt at the Vanessa Van Cleef event? Our tank read the note and started the event while the healer was OOM from the previous fight (he didn’t know reading the note would instantly put us in combat), so naturally we wiped. When we ran back in, we couldn’t get back to the ship. Is that a bug or the intended functionality?
One other thing most of my guild (including myself) is doing that is making things harder for us is not enchanting/reforging our gear yet. I think many people are waiting to acquire a full “pre-raid” set (blues of ilvl 346 or maybe 333) before investing the gold. I wonder how much of a difference it would make to run heroics with fully-enchanted gear.
Lorini
3863
Also are you switching out glyphs for fights? Since glyphs are permanent now, that’s more viable than it was before. That was mentioned on EJ the other day.
Well…that pretty much kills any interest I had in returning to my Priest any time soon.
Question: How is this affecting lower-level content? My friends and I are planning to start running some new characters through instances together. Next Monday will be our first night - do I need to warn everybody about anything?
The vancleef fight is a gauntlet after you engage her. If you wipe, you need to return to that portion of the gauntlet and start it up again.
I believe in beta it was a 1 time thing, but now it doesn’t matter. If you wipe, run back to the start of that particular gauntlet event and give it another go.
Athryn
3866
None of this stuff affects lower level instances.
Lorini
3867
They just buffed Priests at the same time they nerfed Holy Pallies.
You’re not reforging your stuff? Heck, it’s so cheap, I haven’t seen any reason to not reforge. And I’m an enchanter, and jewelcrafter, so I enchant and gem my stuff as I’m skilling up, which most of the time is good (though for a while my DK had +30 intellect on his cloak!).
Athryn
3869
Yeah, because of the scarcity of healing relics out there so far, I had to make a Manual of the Planes and reforged the hit into spirit.
Honestly, I just haven’t bothered yet – shameful I know! I play for a few hours after work each night, and usually I get asked to join a guild run of something within seconds of logging in or I just want to hammer out some quests, so I haven’t spent the time reading up on things like how much hit and expertise rating I need and if I should reforge Stat A to Stat B. When we start raiding again and I’ve collected a full set of decent blue items, then I’ll spend a few hours researching all that stuff.
Andrew
3871
The built in UI now tells you what your chance of missing mobs of various levels, so you can at least easily tell when you have enough without resorting to external research.
I play a Rogue, so there are three different hit caps I need to worry about. First is the cap for my special yellow attacks (Mutilate, Envenom, etc.), second is the spell cap for my poisons, and third is the cap for regular white melee swings. Below the yellow and poison caps, Hit Rating is of vital importance, but it becomes less valuable compared to other stats as each of those numbers is reached. Does the in-game UI reflect all three of those numbers?
I’m sure there’s a FAQ post on Elitist Jerks detailing all this, but I haven’t been motivated enough to look into it yet since we only started running heroics a few days ago.
Yeah same here.
I read that the rogue hit is 9% for Cata for raiding.
I’m a bit over 10% now (a lot of hit on my blues) and miss 0% yellow attacks and around 12% on white damage according to Blizzard’s UI.
Concerning other stats I don’t have a damn clue what to prio now besides AGI. Mastery / Crit / Haste no idea.
There aren’t even decent gear guides out yet so right now I grab what might be useful (Player score 335 now without having hit a HC yet).
I put the rep enchants on head and shoulders and bought 2 blue +40 AGI gems on my JP bought chest and rep bought belt (incl. ebonsteel belt buckle).
As gems / enchants / buckles are pretty expensive right now I will not go all out until I have raid-ready gear and guides from people that did the math…
On lock for leveling up I focus on the old vanilla combination of +Sta +Int.
I hope there are guides out there once I hit 85 with her (probably this weekend). If not I will go with hit and haste (affliction).
rei
3874
I use this for best-in-slot gearing up as a holy paladin: http://bis.vilepickle.com/
I used to use Kaliban’s WoW loot lists at http://www.wow-loot.com but it is currently being updated for Cataclysm.
For assassination, you’ll likely want to follow this guide.
Athryn
3876
Thanks for the link, rei! Me likey!
TheJare
3877
Yeah regen was much better this morning, finished a full Lost City without a single drink or pot. The group was decent, not great but not idiots either.
Lorini
3878
Hey guys, how is the need for CC meshing with the LFD? Back in the day (in TBC) you’d just advertise for CC if you had an incomplete group that didn’t have CC. With the LFD, you can no longer do that, meaning that certain LFD makeups may have a distinct advantage over other makeups, just by class alone. Also do you guys think there will be more interest in leveling mages/rogues now?
My DK is 82 and has zero CC :( The 81 mage I left behind on Arathor is beginning to look more attractive but I don’t want to spend the bucks to bring her over to Moonrunner. So I was curious regarding folks’ thoughts.
That place was a wakeup call for me, too. I went there with the guild’s MT and we wiped twice to the very first pull, and it only became somewhat manageable when we CCed four of the mobs in the first pull of 5. Even then you have to keep track of what the big guy is doing or the party damage rapidly gets out of hand
I play a DK and the spell interrupts, chains, and Deathgrip are all useful abilities to have (not to mention that AMS and/or the various frost armor buffs are a boon to survivability). I don’t find people rejecting LFD group members due to lack of CC (in my experience you can do fine on most trash pulls even if you only CC one mob, and CC-ing 2 is gravy). So I don’t think the DK is at a horrible disadvantage.
