4181

Then, it should be patch 4.1 and your JP-purchasable items should be ilevel 359 raid gear, heh.

4182

Heroic Ozruk is a stupidly overtuned boss encounter.

First, it places entirely too much burden on the tank. It’s a several minute fight and if the tank blinks or sneezes at the wrong time because he didn’t run away quick enough, he dies in 1-shot and it’s a wipe. One shot kills are the MMO equivalent of a jumping puzzle over lava. There shouldn’t be any in Cataclysm and they are all over the place. Stupid.

Second, the healers have to continually place a dot of some kind on the boss so that the dot will be reflected and break paralyze. Oh yeah, unless you are wearing hit gear you are probably going to miss a few times which means you are going to be spending more than 1 GCD trying to land a moonfire on a heroic boss. Stupid.

Leaving that encounter aside, the minimum ilvl for queuing for all random heroic dungeon should probably be raised up from 329 particulary for healers. First timers need more wriggle room, and a party full of strangers in 329 gear is just in for a world of hurt if they get something like Heroic Grim Batol.

4183

Ozruk doesn’t hit that hard, though, so missing a GCD shouldn’t be a huge drama. And even if you do screw up and eat a Paralyze, it’s not going to kill you unless you’re in range of shatter (and if you are, you are a strange healer indeed).

Agreed that it’s tough on the tank, but certainly doable.

4184

Sure, it’s doable. That doesn’t mean it makes a lot of sense.

Yeah, one missed GCD doesn’t sound like much. Each moonfire costs a little over 3k. That’s expensive, it’s more than a lifebloom or nourish. If you have to cast two in a row because of a miss, that begins to hurt.

Each missed GCD also increases the risk of that lifebloom blooming when you don’t want it. That means I need to build up another three-stack which means even more wasted mana. And, of course, the game severely penalizes a healer that wastes too much mana.

I’m not feeling too charitable about a mechanic that makes me waste mana because I don’t own hit gear (can you imagine me rolling need on a hit trinket against a DPS class?).

Given the streakiness of the RNG, the number of moonfire misses can be alarming. Sometimes it’s zero. My highest is 11 (Recount confirmed). That was a wipe of course.

I think it’s dumb. Healers don’t wear hit gear and that boss mechanic penalizes you for not wearing it.

4185

I’m all for heroics bringing consequenses for failing, and not just for tanks, Needing to kite, bring CC’s out and keep them maintained, positioning properly, inturrupts, etc. It brings a nice piece of challenge to the game before raids, and it feels like the gear that I have earned just that much sweeter.

Also,I don’t think that the difficulty will change much as the playerbase gets more gear. Most of the mechanics that make the bosses hard either hit for a percentage of health per tick or damn near instant kill. Ozruk, for example, isn’t get any easier, both ground slam and shatter will one shot the tank regardless of health if they don’t pay attention.

4186

Doesn’t spirit also translate to hit for most caster classes (I know it does for priests) to help cut down on the need for separate outfits as much?

Also: for everyone complaining about the difficulty of heroics, please explain what is wrong with running normals. Why do you feel the need to run heroics the moment you hit 85/have the minimum ilvl? I know part of that question is rhetorical, as anyone who joined the game post wrath was trained that way.

I almost think the gating was done better during BC, where you had to be revered with the dungeon faction before you could run the heroic version, which meant that people generally had a lot of practice on the normal versions.

And fights with no margin of error? How about the 3rd boss of Magister’s Terrace, where if you didn’t have the right combo of cc for the random group of bosses, you were totally screwed, heh.

4187

Yes, that’s a fair point. I hadn’t considered the mana side of things.

Given the streakiness of the RNG, the number of moonfire misses can be alarming. Sometimes it’s zero. My highest is 11 (Recount confirmed). That was a wipe of course.

You ought to be able to eat one Paralyze, surely - it’s “only” 50k damage and you won’t be in Shatter range. As long as the rest of the party isn’t getting themselves into trouble I don’t see why it would be a wipe.

4188

For druids, priests and shaman, it requires talents you wouldn’t take as a healer.
For paladins, the talent is in holy, so it looks decent for healers. Of course, paladin healers don’t really have a DoT they can easily apply. (Mages and warlocks are casters but I believe that they don’t have such a talent, which isn’t really what you were talking about since they can’t be healers, but I thought I’d mention that in the name of completeness.)

4189

What Andrew said - you don’t take the hit talent as a Priest that drive off of your Spirit statistic (and is under the only specifically non-healing talent tree anyway) because it would be largely wasted in any fight other than that specific one. You do get an instant damage spell from Holy for some reason that I don’t comprehend, but that doesn’t help with the hit situation.

Edit: This is the only non-gear alternative that I can find for increasing hit that you would be able to swap around before the fight. I know that they’re trying to get people to glyph specifically for certain encounters, so maybe that’s their intended solution.

4190

WoW end game is all about loot once you beat every encounter at least one time.
Normal instances offer nothing besides rep after a while as you picked up / bought the loot that were an upgrade for you already.
So Heroic is the next step and then raiding.

In WoTLK casuals could do Heroics and then PUG Naxx relatively fast as the raid was easy enough to see PUGS progress and get shinies.
Same with ToC and ICC (ULD was harder for PUGs until a couple of nerfs).

Right now you can’t do anything as casual / non-guilded once you did normals as the PUGs usually are too shitty to do Heroics (even normal instances are not guaranteed yet as there is a lot of shitty tanks in there). No Heroic loot = no PUG raids for the forseeable future.
Apart from leveling alts there is nothing to do (outside of PVP and doing some fishing achievements or something equal).

Sure I could join some hardcore raiding guild and simply not caring about LFD anymore (after all I was in one that competed for server first / Horde first in vanilla a lot) but frankly WoW taught me that I don’t have to spend that much time on one game and I’m (and many more former MC / BWL raiders) are used to this now.
Going back to 3-4 hours for running an instance?
No way in hell!

I’m pretty close to canceling my subscription and coming back in 6 months to see if shit changed. With 70k on my chars in gold there is no need to farm etc.
6 months less $20 from me for Blizzard / Bobby Kotick.
If that is a trend you will see some huge nerfs of Heroics in a few weeks and this blue guy shut up.

4191

By now it’s easy to have all the gear you may possibly want from quests, factions and normal instances. And how many normals are there at 85, 5?

4192

If you use random dungeon you get 3:

Lost City
Halls of Origination
Grim Batol

4193

If you have all that gear I am genuinely surprised you’re struggling so much with heroics. We’re simply not taking 3-4 hours per run - it’s around an hour for each at this point, and it’s not like we’re chain-running them.

AndrewM

Of course, paladin healers don’t really have a DoT they can easily apply.

No, but they have an extended range Judgement that counts as a melee attack, so they get the Bulwark dot.

4194

So, don’t stand in the fire … except for the third boss of BRC, where the tank needs to kite the boss into the fire in order to beat him. Dispel obvious debuffs … except for the second boss of BRC where three people need to deliberately allow a debuff on themselves to stack up to some arbitrary number before removing it. etc. All those things you said, no, I don’t have a problem with them, but the Heroic bosses I encountered have tricks that are more obscure than those.

No I don’t. I want a failure state which doesn’t require me to stay up until 2am in the morning to finish a dungeon when I have work the next day. It’s about time for me, not difficulty - I’m not averse to challenge.

It’s perfectly possible for people to run a dungeon for the first time on Heroic, especially BRC and ToT, which become unavailable to you on Normal when you hit 83 or so.

Anyway, sorry for the snarkiness of my rant last night, guys. Yes, I am frustrated by Heroics, but it was mainly the tone of that Blizzard guy’s post which ticked me off - the arrogant idea that if you aren’t having fun in Heroics it’s indicative of some kind of character flaw. Like Brian Seiler, it seems counter-intuitive to me to try to open up Heroic Dungeons to casual players and then take that attitude with them.

I totally appreciate why you folks who feel nostalgic for the Classic / BC days will enjoy these new dungeons more, if they are closer to that old style ;). I just don’t have the time to put into them.

4195

I’m totally in the ‘make it hard’ camp. One thing that really turned me off in LK was the zerg through all the instances.

4196

If you have already maxed out all your dungeon reps, and gotten every optimal piece of normal gear for your slot, then you are probably not a typical casual player, and I would wonder why you’d be complaining about heroics.

4197

Lich King heroics were definitely NOT easy in December 2008.

They were easy the day Blizzard released the dungeon finder, when everyone was in T9 gear already.

There are several fights right now that are too hard. That doesn’t mean that difficult isn’t good, but unforgiving isn’t cool.

4198

As Athryn mentioned, the build up to heroics in BC was much slower than two weeks after the release. You had to unlock a bunch of dungeons to get to the heroics. Personally I think they should look at trying something like that again. Trying to use ilevel to determine whether or not you should be in a heroic is a real fail, at least at the levels they are using. I’m surprised they went to that but I guess the lure of Gearscore was too much. My suspicion is that the GS people were requiring in WotLK were higher relatively than the ilevel Blizzard is requiring in Cata and that’s also leading to problems. See I wish they would make it relatively easy at release and then more challenging as the expansion wears on, but they do the opposite. I guess they feel they have a ‘trapped audience’ when people first buy an expansion.

4199

I like that we’ve got tactics and thought back in running 5 man content again. Yes I’m a healer, yes it’s pretty disheartening to see the array of high mana wet noodles I’ve got to chuck around but in some respects it’s no longer my job to keep you on your feet while you wildly mash whatever attack it is you use while you stand in the fire and take damage from the boss.

Start carrying bandages and using them, even health pots, crappy as they are at the moment when most people are on 100k+ health let alone the tanks. Start standing in that green circle that, as a druid, is about the limit of regular heals that I’m prepared to expend on you, stop standing in the fire and maybe consider that if you’re health is going down and you’ve just received a HoT that maybe this would be a good time to move out of whatever is hitting you for a few seconds and get some health back because you ain’t getting another one anytime soon and I’m certainly not going to try and outheal damage going onto DPS.

I can keep a Tank up until the cows come home but once the melee guys especially start to take damage I’ve got a choice, run out of mana in the next 10-15 seconds or let you die and then see if it’s worth using a battle res (hint, if it’s the second boss you’ve got yourself killed on, you’re staying dead).

It’s pretty clear how Blizz have prioritised things at the moment, you can take small amounts of damage and get a heal, you can’t receive a sustained number of big heals for any length of time, the days of just piling into a raid or instance and zerging the bosses while overgeared healers spam whatever group and AOE heals they have are gone.

I’m sure as I gear up it’ll start to get easier as my mana regen and base pool improves but even then I just don’t see a point anytime soon where I’ll be chucking out heals with gay abandon. Technically I’m geared for Heroics, but I’m still blasting through Mana, Pots, innervates and Tree of Life on Normal boss fights and with all due respects to my guildies that’s not down to me being a crap healer.

As for people getting bored, that amazes me to be honest. I’m not rushing heroics though. I want more and better gear (338ish at the moment) before I start them and I’m not going near Heroic PuGs for a while yet, normal is an excercise in taking abuse for letting people who can’t be arsed to pay attention die at the expense of keeping the tank up.

That and the first couple of normal runs I did as healer was a bit of an eye opener and I want to make sure I’ve got the new rotations/Priorities down pat before I go near them.

After a year of massively overgeared spods able to sleepwalk through 5man heroics I’m not surprised it’s come as a bit of a shock but overall I’m loving this expansion so far.

4200

I hear reading tooltips help, but then again, I’m a fast reader. Also, the second boss of BRC isn’t about stacking to some arbitrary number; you take the beam until the guy’s debuff falls off, then get off the beam until yours falls off. The margin of error is about ten seconds; that’s an eternity in a fight.

This is exactly what I’m talking about; you talk about “no margin of error”, but the margin of error in the second boss of BRC is about ten seconds before you personally fail, and if only one person fails, you can still tank the mob and either kill it or just interrupt its Shadow Strike and down the boss.

(Also, you still don’t want to stand in the fire in the Forgemaster fight. That fire will kill your ass dead. So your point there is invalid.)

No I don’t. I want a failure state which doesn’t require me to stay up until 2am in the morning to finish a dungeon when I have work the next day. It’s about time for me, not difficulty - I’m not averse to challenge.

I don’t share your experience with pugs. Or intruder’s. I’ve been pugging Heroics since my Shaman hit 85, and I’d say I complete 85% of them without more than a couple of wipes, and about half of them I complete with no deaths. So no, pugs are not too shitty to do Heroics.

It helps that I mark things for CC (and use my CC), I interrupt, I purge, I dispel curses. I explain fights before we do them (usually I can explain a fight in 15 words or less).

I honestly don’t think I’m in some sort of super-secret LFD system that you’re not, because some of the players I get are utterly terrible. But I can still manage. Maybe it’s because I focus less on complaining about how hard they are and more on making sure we clear the place so I can get my Valors and log off.

Also, fuck the Heroic Ozruk fight. I’ve been saying that since forever.