4121

Don’t give up Sinnick. The challenge is just good enough. You should have blue gear from the 3 85 dungeons, lost city/halls/grim batol.

Crowd control is also needed.

4122

I’ve done random pickup groups for heroic Blackrock Caverns nearly every day (for an item that never drops) and most are successful. If you are wiping on Karsh, you’re probably doing it wrong. Really the only heroic I would call difficult is Grim Batol.

4123

Oh, my iLevel is like 331 - I’m basically heroic-ready, and we were CC’ing the trash mobs with no trouble.

It’s the bosses. They are just extremely unforgiving. On Rom we wiped twice because one person or another didn’t run away from his massive AOE in time. On Corla, we wiped twice because of misjudging the debuff. On Karsh, we wiped twice because I don’t know why … tank wasn’t dunking him in the lava long enough? Who knows.

Six wipes for half the dungeon. That’s a lot of time burned. A single wrong step from someone is all it takes, even if you know what to do. Very frustrating.

4124

Ah, I misread you as doing it on regular. Yes, the heroics are a wakeup call from Wrath heroics where overgeared people used the following cheesy strat the entire year:

  1. tank pulls entire group
  2. DPS AOEs entire group of mobs down

Seriously, that’s all most of the Wrath instances took. Catac heroics just now have introduced raid-link “gimmicks” or “tricks” such as positioning, turning away etc. I quite enjoy this. Yes, it’s incredibly frustrating if DPS-tank-heals don’t synchronize (I ran out of mana each and every fight, and cut it close each boss fight, often having to pop a runic mana pot) leading to a wipe but if you figure out the puzzle, it’s immensely gratifying.

I’ve managed to pull it out of the fire if one misbehaving DPS dies but most times if one person dies, it’s a wipe.

It’s a learning experience. At the start, as people geared up, Burning Crusade had unforgiving 2 hour instances where Crowd Control was mandatory and classes were turned away because they didn’t have CC. This was aggravated by a lot of trash mobs and runners.

Catac, I find, is a compromise between Burning Crusade and Wrath.

Marking is crucial now, kill order, not breaking CC and figuring out the boss gimmicks ahead of time or getting the entire group’s buy-in on the strategy. I’ve left groups where the tank blames me for not healing when he insists on pulling the entire group or a DPS keeps trying to top the DPS meters, aggro be damned or if the tank keeps trying to pull before all the casters have recovered their mana/buffs.

4125

I REALLY REALLY hate Heroic Stonecore, Grim Batol and SFK + Deadmines. I find the bosses there (Ozruk, Erudax etc.) are more unforgiving with their patterns/gimmicks. The others are now “easier” with a good competent group. SFK + Deadmines I find too cramped because they’re the old dungeon corridors, refurbished.

I love the new 5-mans, and 5-man dungeoneering is my bread and butter. I hated the complexity and all the instructions of 25-40 man raiding and the crazy learning/dying/relearning of progression raiding.

The new 5-mans are really a nice compromise for me, a non-raider. I started out heroics 2 weeks ago with 40-50k mana, and now i have 80k mana (caster spec, 150k hp as tank offspec)

4126

Yup. Sounds about right for your first run in the instance. That was what they all were like for me (though mostly it was 0-1 wipes on the bosses because, well, we’re all tryhard raiders).

Grim Batol, though. Oh man. I think our first Grim Batol run, when we couldn’t even queue for dungeons yet due to low ilevel? Yeah, that was like five or six hours.

Fun times. And I don’t mean that sarcastically. I enjoy the new wave of dungeons rather more than the old.

4127

I’m really liking the difficulty of the new heroics. Guild runs are a blast. The only thing that sucks is, as a dps player, having to wait 40 minutes in the LFD only to be put in a may-or-may-not finish group. Surprisingly, lousy dps players aren’t typically the culprits in my experience. I’ve mostly gotten terrible tanks who still think they can rush through everything and pull bosses without clearing properly and then blame the healer for not keeping them up. I was in a group recently that wiped twice in a row on the first boss in BRC because the tank was in such a hurry that he wouldn’t pull the last group in the room that aggros with the boss. Heroic difficulty is one thing, but these frustratingly stubborn people make things way harder.

4128

Oh, just wait until you queue into Heroic Grim Batol with a pug before you talk about pug DPSers not being the reason you wipe.

;)

4129

The minimum gear ilvl (329) is hugely misleading too I think.

329 leaves no margin for error. If the DPS is a touch slow or does something wrong requiring extra healing, then the healer is going to run out of mana.

Overall, I think the 5-man heroic dungeons are overtuned for their required gear level. It shouldn’t take 3 hours to clear a dungeon except for exceptional circumstances, and you’ll find a lot more groups taking 3 hours than those clearing an instance in 40 minutes.

It’s hugely unfun for the most part to be healer or tank for a lot of these heroic dungeons. Which probably has something to do with the queue times for DPS classes being so long.

4130

What gave you the impression that you were good ? The heroics just require that you have done the quests and then the normals a few times, got a ilevel 333 gear set. I’m by no means anywhere a good player myself, but I find the heroics to be great fun, like in the old days when it was more to wow than just aoe every pack.

4131

Not least because it’s your “best possible gear”, so if you’re a hybrid with a few good healing pieces in your bags but are playing as Enhancement it boosts your ilvl. Doh.

Incidentally, I love heroic Grim Batol. Those boss fights are just right.

4132

I am absolutely in love with everything that Cataclysm has done for WoW. I have leveled a character further in 3 weeks than I did in nearly a year after vanilla release. In every way it’s a better game.

I’m into Burning Crusade content now, and gee, I do not care for the Outlands at all.

4133

I like Deadmines as a dungeon. I just wish that a) I wasn’t melee for Cookie (stupid poison under the cauldron where you can’t click it) and b) it wasn’t three damn hours long with a decent group. Oh, and c) Foe Reaver would ever drop for me.

Is Netherspite in BRC skippable? That broke up a pug of mine yesterday.

4134

Hehe. Welcome to the club. :)

Just a simple tweak to reduce the grind is all the Outlands really needs. Instead of picking up 30 widgets off the ground, make it 15. Instead of collecting an item that only drops on one out of every 10 MOB’s, make it drop on every MOB. The underwater quests need the same fast-walking as the Cataclysm ones have. You really come to expect these things when in any of the newer content.

My only other general complaint about leveling up in WoW is that its a bit too easy. Its making me a sloppy player. The only time I died in 64 levels is from falling. I died more times in the first hour of the Rift beta than I did in the last month of WoW. But aside from that, all the Cataclysm content has been really awesome and I don’t regret resubing at all. Silverpine Forest alone was worth the $15.00.

4135

They already made some tweaks like that to BC content during Wrath. For instance, there was this awful quest in HFP where you had a chance of getting tainted boar meat off of boars, which then had a chance of being successfully cleansed, but it was changed so that it always drops and always cleanses. Similarly, the kill quests for Nessingwary in Nagrand had their numbers trimmed down to a more reasonable level. This hasn’t been done everywhere (I think when I did the eel meat quest in the swamp, the drop rate was still awful), but it helps.

Fast swimming is only present in Vash, not in any other Cata zone.

4136

I think the other thing is not having the quest hubs so FAR from the quests really would help make it less tedious. I have 6 quests all over the Hellfire peninsula, with 4 different turn-in areas. Even with flight its tedious!

4137

You can walk fast on the floor of the water on all water quests now in the old world. At least I can confirm that its true for Thousand Needles and Swamp of Sorrows which are the only zones I have done that have swimming quests. It makes the Outlands water quests feel like you’re pushing through cold molasses.

4138

Interesting. One thing I’ve noticed is that you can mount up on a flying mount, on the surface of the water, and just take off. That makes water quests with spaced out goals that you can see above the surface (such as the crabs in the canal cooking quest) much more pleasant for me. I think that’s new.

4139

I like how heroics are much harder, but I will say that some bosses seem overtuned a bit.

The first boss in SFK for example, requires solid inturupts to stop 3 different casts and specific times. Any failure generally leads to a wipe via a slow downward spiral. Coordination is key here, and unless someone steps up and takes charge, pugs just don’t make it past this guy.

Sinnick, don’t give up on them. The heroics are going to beat the shit out of you until you get them down. My guild did guild runs similar to yours when we could first go through heroics, and had similar results. Most dungeons took us about 2-4 hours to complete the first time or so.

Now that we know what to expect (and better gear), there isn’t an instance that takes longer than an hour. Pugging it of course lengthens the time unless the pugger is well geared.

4140

The hit cap was substantially changed today. Anyone have the pure numbers? (Either that or my guildies are drunk but since I just met them, who knows)