Somewhat related, I just finished a guild run of heroic Stonecore with a group consisting of Prot Paladin, Holy Paladin, Assassination Rogue, Enhancement Shaman, and Fury Warrior. There was some conversation a few pages ago that the first boss was “impossible” with an all-melee group. Clearly that isn’t the case if you have skilled players who know what they’re doing.
I agree, the average level of play is terrible now, and that is the problem. With a guild group, all people I know from raids, we can waltz through stuff because we do things correctly. Pugs are a total gamble.
I’ve been kind of shocked by the low DPS I keep seeing. People are doing 2.5-4k, and the tank is doing 5k. They also love to attack their own private target. No tough guy, that elite trash is going to kick your ass, and I won’t be able to heal you fast enough, so kill the ones the tank has under control.
The other problem with the lack of CC is that when you do get it, people break it constantly. Everyone see the monster that looks like a harmless animal right now? Got it? Ok, leave it alone until the tank breaks it! No AOE skills on single targets surrounded by controlled mobs!
On the healing front, I’m really tired of tanks running off without me. Make sure I have lots of mana and am nearby before you pull, please! I’m easily burning 50,000 mana on a trash pull when the group sucks, so I need to have an espresso or a mana cake before we move on. I keep trying to make people understand that a big sprawling melee with trash is actually slower, since nobody will sit and eat or use a bandage, and I need to refill my 90k mana when we are done. On a normal Halls of Origination run the other night, I did eleven million in effective healing. That’s more than I did on ICC runs!
Again in SFK, Commander Springvale is next to impossible without a very specific group composition.
That “very specific group composition” being at least two interrupts across five people? Bearing in mind that every tank has an interrupt, that means that your healer is a Priest or Druid, and all three of your DPSers are…
Shadow Priests who don’t spec into silence, and Balance Druids who don’t spec into Solar Beam.
If that’s the case, skip the boss, by all means.
Player Gear + Player Skill = Player Output. You can argue about how you should weigh gear vs skill, but both matter.
If you up the gear requirement, you up the output. You also indirectly force the player to either do a bunch of questing (which probably means they’re going to have even more gear from rep vendors) and/or a bunch of normal dungeon runs (which is the ideal situation). CC still helps immensely in normals, and it only takes a few times doing aggressive CC to realize how much easier and faster it makes your run. Give more players more opportunities to have that epiphany in a safer environment, and you’ll likely end up with better players when they make it to heroics. Likewise with decursing, etc.
Quite frankly, I wish the game required ilvl 333 for heroics, Honor gear was counted as ilvl 333 for LFD calculations (though the Tol Barad debacle would have fucked this up too), and that Heroic gear was better, like ilvl 352 (which is what Honor gear is atm). Epics are at 359 right now, right?
idk, whatever makes sap a minute instead of 30 seconds? It used to be called Improved Sap.
idk, whatever makes sap a minute instead of 30 seconds? It used to be called Improved Sap.
Improved Sap was a talent that allowed rogues to stay in stealth after sapping a target. That was removed from the game years ago and is now a baseline ability.
By default, Sap lasts for a minute, not 30 seconds. The Sap glyph increases its duration by an extra 80s, but if your group isn’t capable of killing the skull and X in under a minute before a non-glyphed sap wears off, you’ve got bigger problems.
[Edit]
The Sap glyph does have one very strong use: controlling one of the dogs in the Beauty fight. For normal trash packs, it’s not needed.
JM1
4266
Player skill can make up for player gear. At the minimum heroic gear level a player can comfortably pull his weight. However, a shitty player with the same gear as me is still going to be a shitty player.
The problem is not the gear level. The problem is, as you and others have accurately stated, that people are idiots and don’t CC, don’t learn/remember/understand game mechanics, have terrible DPS because they don’t know how to play their class, etc. Raising their gear ilvl by 10 points will not help that.
Incidentally I don’t think raising to 333 would be such a great idea. It’d be no problem for hybrids (because of the stupid way in which it detects any valid gear as being a possibility, i.e. tank gear on an arms warrior) but you’d be forcing several classes into obnoxious situations where they’d be relying on one item dropping…
I maintain that it’s next to impossible with a LFD pug. There are too many distractions. Do I kill the adds? Which one first? Do I DPS the boss? Do I interrupt? When do I interrupt? Which one do I interrupt? Am I standing in Desecration? Does my healer mind, or should I run away and potentially miss an interrupt?
Roll a full premade and I’m sure hes ez ur a noob l2p lol. However, he seems next to impossible when you’re trying to herd cats at the same time as everything else in that fight.
Oh, and I think it’s safe to put “interrupting” under the list of “things DPS don’t know how to do.”
Corboros or whatever is impossible with full melee? Why? Do you mean the Shatter dude?
Yes, the one with a skull that I put on it as soon as they spawned, not until the adds are dead, always, whenever a mob casts a spell, the one you’re targeting, (I’m ranged, fuck if I know), never stand in ground effect damage is a good default option.
I’ve done it in LFD pugs repeatedly, but then again, as an Elemental Shaman, all I need is one person out of the other two DPSers + tank to interrupt the one they’re DPSing, and I’ll Wind Shock the other add.
JM1
4270
Springvale is horrible for the tank and horrible for melee. Sorry. :)
People are “idiots,” yes, but the game’s design has enabled them to be. There is no reason to CC before 80 at minimum. In fact, you get yelled at in LFD groups if you CC before 80. It must be very confusing to a casual/new player to get yelled at for doing something for 80 levels and then get yelled at for NOT doing the very same thing.
I just think it’s a strange design choice to remake 1-60 in the Wrath philosophy, then making 80-85 basically massively singleplayer questing, which is the next logical step of Wrath design, then… taking three steps back and making heroics in the vein of Classic, where most players that joined at the time were EQ vets that knew all about CC/Utility/whatever?
It’s an incredibly jarring transition and it shows through the number of “idiots” we see. But even then, “idiot” is an unfair misnomer. These are often perfectly intelligent people who just rationally assume the game will get “harder” in Heroics, but not completely change from what they’ve seen for the past 85 levels.
I was thinking about the four-pulls in the Uldum instances with LFD pug DPS.
jeffd
4272
Just ran heroic BRC with a guild group. Having lots of CC really makes a huge difference on trash pulls. As does having people willing to talk through fight mechanics to figure out what’s going wrong. The molten armor dude was downright fun; we wiped two or three times on him but every time we got a better grasp on the mechanics and were able to improve. Things we learned:
- You can refresh the molten armor by dragging him through the fire again and again. However he pulses a raidwide AOE and hits harder every time he gains a stack. However however he also takes more damage with more stacks. The tank can survive up to 8 stacks, more is iffy.
- The adds should be killed well away from the boss, outside the fire ring thing. This gives the tank more room to move him.
- The tank should kite him through the fire tangentially to the fire itself; so that he only takes one or at least two stacks of molten armor. Do not kite him straight through the fire.
- If you really want to get fancy and ensure that he only get one stack per dip (which is the most efficient way to do it) watch his swing animation and dip him immediately after he swings; the most common thing that causes him to get multiple stacks per dip (assuming you’re kiting him on the correct path) is that he pauses mid-dip to swing at you.
Figuring all this shit out with my group was downright fun. However I can see that in a PUG full of relative idiots that this would have been an exercise in frustration.
Lorini
4273
The thing that I find interesting is that everyone thinks that every other player is stupid. You guys think so, the guilds I’m in think so, and chat thinks so. So where are the stupid players? It’s confusing to me. I don’t do great DPS but I’m not stupid or an idiot. And I’m sorry, if you are going to do heroics within three weeks of release of the expansion then expect to explain them. Otherwise go find a guild or something. Geezus. I think if some people had their way about 10 people total would ever play the game because that’s about the number of people they could count on as perfect.
I have yet to meet a Shaman that uses Wind Shock (or whatever it’s called now).
No offense, but you’re starting to sound like a prick again. Friendly heads up.
the sap glyph makes it last 80 seconds, I don’t think there is one to shorten cooldown.
I definitely use Wind Shear all the time. It’s pretty impressive. Have a macro with /stopcasting and wind shear to make sure it works.
JM1
4276
Well, everyone else seems to be on board with exactly the sort of player we’re talking about - the guy who doesn’t understand CC, who doesn’t understand focus fire, who doesn’t understand “move out of the hurty patch”, who doesn’t listen to tactics, who trashtalks people, who gears his hunter with leather spirit gear, etc etc. These aren’t mythical people - they exist and there’s plenty of them. Some are worse than others, of course.
How would you know, exactly? Unless you’re actively checking mods for interrupt statistics… There’s two Shamans actively posting in this thread and we both use Wind Shock as a matter of course, because that’s what it’s there for (and as it’s decoupled from the GCD it’s not even remotely annoying to use).
It’s an incredibly jarring transition and it shows through the number of “idiots” we see. But even then, “idiot” is an unfair misnomer. These are often perfectly intelligent people who just rationally assume the game will get “harder” in Heroics, but not completely change from what they’ve seen for the past 85 levels.
Well, if you’ve managed to get 85 levels without ever using your CC, fair enough. But if someone marks up mobs and says “Hey, <charname>, can you sheep/hex/whatever the blue square?”, precisely how much of an expert do you need to be? Normal people learn pretty quickly because it’s not that hard. Advanced CCing, i.e. doing it off the cuff and knowing when you can and can’t do it, comes with experience. Doing it because you’ve been asked to do it is not some sort of super-elite test that’s really hard to pass.
And any Shaman who’s gone 85 levels without using Wind Shock is an idiot by the definition I’m using.
Stupid players stand in the wrong stuff or don’t stand in the right stuff. Stupid players don’t speak up and say “hey, I’ve never done this boss or instance.” Stupid players don’t know the basics of their class, don’t know which gear helps them, and can’t dps/heal/tank at acceptable levels because of this. Cata is not forgiving to stupid players the way that WoLK or TBC were. I could heal through stupidity in those expansions. I cannot now.
Probably the biggest problem is that stupid players don’t know that they are stupid and don’t ask questions. And when you point out that you, in fact, probably need to CC mobs in instances, they ignore you because they don’t know any better. I’ve had great runs with lower level (under 85) normals because the pugs ask questions about what they are doing and people explain things to them.
JM1
4278
Wind shear, even. Duh. ABILITY BOUND TO V is how I know it :(
Add me to this list of wind shear fans. I use wind shear a lot when leveling. During raids, that is a different story. If I was ele or enhance I probably would be using it (and our shaman do get assigned to the spell interrupt rotation) but I don’t as resto too much.
ShivaX
4280
Probably because nothing ever gets interrupted.
Well, if you’ve managed to get 85 levels without ever using your CC, fair enough. But if someone marks up mobs and says “Hey, <charname>, can you sheep/hex/whatever the blue square?”, precisely how much of an expert do you need to be? Normal people learn pretty quickly because it’s not that hard. Advanced CCing, i.e. doing it off the cuff and knowing when you can and can’t do it, comes with experience. Doing it because you’ve been asked to do it is not some sort of super-elite test that’s really hard to pass.
Exactly.
Kind of like on a line-of-sight pull just… sitting there. Instead of casting chain lightning at the casters as they run in or the hundred other stupid things I’ve seen people do.
Theres stupid people out there and lots of them. Giving them better gear wont change the stupid. They’ll still suck. The only options are 1) punish sucking or 2) make the entire run fool-proof. I’d rather have a challenge than just walk into every instance and tank everything at once and AoE it down, lest someone get butthurt cause they don’t understand how to cast polymorph.
