To go along with what Shimarenda said, I’ve had those runs as well, but whenever that term is used to describe that person, it’s by someone who typically says “LOLOL, lrn2ply noob UR baddie” rather than try to help them or see what’s up? Sure, if the guy still can’t get his act together and won’t respond you have a problem, but again, almost every time I see those terms in game it’s attached to someone just auto-swinging an epeen instead of being friendly.
And I can totally see someone wiping on the worgen phase if it wasn’t explained and you went in cold. Healing his family members is in the big text that pops up, but it’s still wacky.
anarch
4462
I agree, I don’t think you should ever be a jerk to someone that is, as you pointed out, incompetent or lazy. However, I do use it in the reason for kicking someone from a PUG.
jeffd
4463
I tanked a couple of heroics today with guild groups and they were noticably easier than the guild groups I had two or three weeks ago. Obviously this has nothing to do with PUGs, but it seems like the content does get significantly easier once you’ve gotten yourself some gear. Whereas once I routinely had my low health warning chirping at me constantly during trash pulls, now I’m mostly OK except for bosses with deliberately intense tank damage and/or circumstances where I stupidly stand in fire.
I really wish some of the heroics weren’t so fucking long though. They’re a real time commitment, which can be rough if you don’t have 2.5+ hours to set aside. Deadmines is the worst offender of course; but even some of the others are over 90 minutes.
ShivaX
4464
My favorite quote from a random Heroic (me as the tank):
Guildie Healer: “So does anyone know this instance?”
Random DPS: “As long as the tank knows it wont we be fine?”
Guildie Healer: “…”
Even better it was SFK iirc and like my second time ever there (last time I was there we couldn’t beat the first boss because the dps couldn’t interrupt).
People still expect the tank to do it all. The funny reality is that most fights are actually about the DPS doing things correctly. Don’t get me wrong, half the time the tank has to do those things as well, while dealing with the boss and its positioning, but taking on that orc boss in Heroic Grim Batol with clueless DPS is just funny to watch (not that you’ll ever get there since you’ll die on the first boss when the DPS doesn’t kill the adds that kill you anyway). Whats even funnier is knowing dps probably waited 20-30 minutes and they leave after the first wipe - which was their fault.
How does the difficulty of the new raids compare to T7 content in Wrath? I’m assuming they’re more challenging than Sarth/Naxx/Maly were in the early days of WotLK; are they on par with Ulduar bosses when that zone was newly released? Easier? Harder?
Answering my own question: early T11 raiding in Cata is significantly harder than early T7 raiding in Wrath. We went to Bastion of Twilight last night and it took us about a dozen attempts to down Halfus Wyrmbreaker (the first boss). From reading the TankSpot forums, it sounds like we got one of the worst possible combinations; thanks, RNG!
For those who don’t know, he has five possible buffs, and each week your raid will randomly get three of them. One is a Mortal Strike style attack which stacks to 90% healing reduction on your tank. Another of his possible abilities is a melee haste speed buff. We got both, so he was doing a much greater amount of damage to the tank while simultaneously applying a healing reduction debuff. Ugh.
The encounter also has up to three adds you can choose to either kill or ignore (they’re idle until you manually activate them). Releasing them reduces the potency of his buffs slightly, and downing each one gives the boss a +50% damage taken debuff, which stacks to 150% if you kill all three. Our raid leader figured we’d need the full 150% bonus and then use Heroism/Time Warp for maximum damage on the boss to beat his six minute enrage timer. It turns out this wasn’t the winning strategy. Instead, we only activated two of the three adds and blew Heroism early to kill them both ASAP. With the adds down quickly, we could then have the tanks taunt Halfus off each other when the MS debuff got too high.
Very fun night overall; I liked that we had to figure out some things on our own because the content is still new and specific strategies for every permutation of Halfus’s buffs aren’t available yet. I also liked that it wasn’t a repeat of Naxx where we killed (IIRC) seven or eight bosses our first night there. This content should keep us busy much longer. :)
Lorini
4466
From WoWInsider:
…The most upsetting technique I’ve read about is two hybrid DPS in cahoots with a third DPS queuing as a tank/healer duo, getting an instant invite to dungeons, and then pressuring the two other members of the party to shoulder the tank or healer job. If they don’t or can’t fill these roles – kick 'em after the 15 min grace period and requeue themselves as straight DPS. Voilà – they are now at the head of the dungeon queue for the next tank or healer! Is it any wonder that players find this enraging?
Why would people do this? I’m clearly missing something here.
They get picked up by the dungeon finder within 30 seconds instead of 45 minutes.
They do that because you can enter the queue originally as Tank/Healer/DPS and you only need two DPS, which puts you toward the front of the line. Then, if you get two other members who can’t or won’t do the job, you kick them (because you have the majority votes), change your specification to whatever you want (DPS/DPS/DPS even), and you’re at the front of the line for the next tank and healer. It’s a dishonest way to game the system that makes it harder for both DPS singletons and groups that need to fill one of those roles to fill out.
Lorini
4469
I think you ought to be able to leave a group where the others are in the same guild. Actually someone came up with the idea of having invisible social ratings, so that if you didn’t get kicked or do a lot of kicking, you would have a higher social rating then if you were kicked a lot or initiated a lot of kicking. That could work if people are going to insist on gaming the LFD system.
sinnick
4470
I had a DPS who did something similar in a PUG I was in recently. He queued as tank, and then upon entering the dungeon said: “pally can you tank I forgot my gear”. Maybe not realizing I was the healer in nothing but Int plate. When I said no, he said: “comon you have shield youll be fine”. I just left. A group with a dude like that doesn’t bode well anyway.
idrisz
4471
Then, if you get two other members who can’t or won’t do the job, you kick them (because you have the majority votes)
you can’t do multiple kick votes in an group for some reason, even if it’s started by different person in the group.
it might have something to do with in same guild, both when I was in group with both tank/healer from same guild, we could only kick 1 person in one run, we wait for the out of combat timer as well as timer for in between kicks, but they would only allow you to kick one person, so we end up basically 4 man heroic Throne of tide since our other dps was almost as dumb as the first one.
Athryn
4472
Blizzard does monitor some of this behavior supposedly, and makes it so that if you’re someone who initiates a lot of kick votes, you can’t keep doing it.
Lorini
4473
The problem is though that they are clearly allowing role assignments to overrule this. So if you kick every five minutes or whatever, if you’re a tank it doesn’t matter. They need to change that so the fact you kick overrides the role you pick at least at some point. If you kick people 20 times a day, you should have to wait max time no matter what you pick as a role.
But dude, Deadmines is completely fine*. It’s all your fault, clearly. You’re hallucinating and full of confirmation bias and CLEARLY don’t know what you’re talking about. Deathtouching lightning bars are totally a fun challenge and the nightmare section works as intended every single time never falls apart into a buggy wreck when someone dies and runs back.
Do you want to go back to Wrath facerolling? You do, don’t you. I knew it.
- This, and the rest of this post, is sarcastic.
C’mon now, James. I and the others who are largely in favor of Cataclysm’s dungeon paradigm have repeatedly stated that it isn’t perfect – to wit, Deadmines is too goddamn long and GB is overtuned. Constructing a strawman to argue against isn’t actually helping your point.
“Deathtouching lightning bars are totally a fun challenge” If you aren’t able to handle a mechanic like this, you’re not ready for heroics. Mistakes actually having consequences was the model for hard content at every time but Wrath. It sounds like you DO want to go back to Wrath facerolling. Do things bug out sometimes? Sure. But the occasional bug, while frustrating, is not preventing you from completing the content.
We did the first two in BWD and did the first in the twighlight dungeon. We’re working on the third boss in BWD. Just check out WoWProgress and you’ll see that guilds are jmping around raiding dungeons.
sinnick
4478
I think James’ post was right on target actually. I smiled.
Can we all agree that the game is incredibly complex and that when people post their annoyances about part of the game, it doesn’t mean that they want to undo everything that Cataclysm has brought in? It’s not a binary state: “Good, challenging dungeons that require CC and multiple wipes” vs. “Facerolling WOTLK dungeons for idiots”. There’s a gray area, there must be. There are a million design choices that can be tweaked in this game, and part of the fun of discussing WoW is playing armchair designer and thinking about what those little changes would mean.
I actually think that bitching about the game is something that WoW players are predisposed to do. After all, we’re the people who willing spend hours of time doing tedious levelling in order to get small in-game rewards like Titles or Pets. And yet we keep playing. Why not bitch about it while we’re at it ;).
That said, I’d love to see more posts like Aaron’s awesome hunter strategy post from a few pages back. More of those!
So I’m gearing up my DK tank and I’m noticing a problem. There are only three level 85 dungeons from which to gain upgrades from. I’m getting real sick of them.
Faction also increases at a crawl, and I’m only getting 70 measly justice points a day.
WTF.
DPS can switch to heroics easily at 329 item level. Tanks (and possibly healers)? Forget it, you’ll get creamed.
I totally agree, though I’d characterize some of the posts in this thread differently than you do ;)
Balasarius: Heroics are very doable at 329 as a tank, but they’re freakin’ hard and you’ll want a good healer. My biggest piece of advice is to reforge, gem, and enchant everything for survival (stam/dodge/parry/mastery) and ignore threat completely on your gear setup. The EJ threadon DK tanking is very good for basic info on strike priorities and such as well. Oh, and runeforge Swordshattering instead of Stoneskin Gargoyle IMO. Also, finish up Hyjal questing for the rep and wear that tabard up to exalted first; the cloak and belt at exalted are both fantastic.
