4541

I thiink the problem for a casual player is that they’re not going to read all of the strategies for all of the bosses in all of the dungeons ahead of time and memorize them all, and then when they get dumped into a random dungeon by the LFD tool, are they really going to scramble to their web browser and try to find the strategies they need before the rest of the group charges ahead?

I certainly didn’t memorize all the boss strategies ahead of time. Granted, normally I play in a full guild group where we’re all communicating on vent, so obviously there’s a big difference between that and a random LFD PUG, but when we get to a new boss, we’ll stop for a minute while someone looks it up on wowhead and reads the strategy to the group.

Even now, after successfully running every heroic multiple times, I’ll still sometimes forget the specifics of certain bosses. It takes about 20s to type, “Quickly remind me what this boss does.” Then someone replies, “When she splits into three, kill them in alphabetical order: Astral first, Celestial second.” And off we go.

If PUGs aren’t willing to briefly stop to explain encounters to people who ask in party chat, that’s a failure of the players to be good team members, not a problem with the game design.

4542

Yep, and it gives 250, whereas the pygmy one only gives 150.

I had actually already moved on from Uldum and earned a bunch of rep from the tabard, so I only wound up having to do that daily twice, once I got around to going back to Uldum to finish up the quest lines.

4543

Just as an aside, it’s not just heroics & raids the tabards work with, it’s the level 85 normals as well.

4544

Without being able to look at tooltips without doing it in real time while you are being killed, when you throw something that’s never happened before (purging a needed buff with shield slam, at least since Jeff and I have been playing) and then say “It’s a simple fight” you come off like the kind of dick MarchHare thought he might be.

4545

For the record, these are Halls of Origination, Lost City of Tol’vir, and Grim Batol.

4546

Yeah, I find it extremely challenging to try to read and understand debuffs as they tick by, constantly jumping around as others pop in and out, while I’m also trying to heal everyone. Not least because healing usually requires me to target something other than where the buff is :).

4547

I’m nervous about my chances as a resto druid in the new patch coming down the pipe.

I’ve pretty successfully made the transition to using less HoTs and more cast time spells required of me by Cataclysm, even with the terrible mana costs that I’m hit with during any boss encounter.

Now they’re taking away Omen of Clarity from me, making it only proc on damage spells. While they’re reducing the cost of Rejuvenation by 10%, I don’t know that it will help, since I’m only using that as an emergency heal right now anyway. Add to that the change where they’re encouraging me to have 3 rejuvs out to get a bonus to nourish cast speed(at a cost of 48% of my base mana), I’m not really sure where they’re going with this.

4548

The flip side is that Hyjal leaves you a couple thousand rep above revered (or perhaps right below, I didn’t do it until the guild was level 4) on the zone run through. ER leaves you one dungeon tabard run below revered. (This I do know because I did Vash/Deep on my first character before the guild was level 4.)

Also it’s worth pointing out that tabards work in level 85 dungeons; it doesn’t have to be a heroic. Which means if you really care about faction you can run the lower level dungeons which are far more likely to get completed.

4549

Didn’t Blizzard announce that they are planning to add boss info (including ability descriptions and loot tables) to the dungeon map? That would pretty much eliminate the need to check external sites because the required info would be presented in-game.

Am I misremembering this? Is that still in the pipeline, or did Blizzard scrap the idea because it would trivialize learning the fights even more than looking them up on a third-party website like wowhead.

4550

Two of them are boss buffs, which realistically someone ought to look at at some point just to see what they do if no-one in the party knows what the deal is with this boss.

The other is Paralyze, which is an 8 second debuff where you can’t move or do anything. Saying you don’t have the opportunity to look at it doesn’t wash in this case.

I’m talking from experience here - we do fights and we try and work out where we went wrong and what happened. We keep an eye out for buffs and debuffs that can provide us with information or give us the secret to the fight.

And yes, Ozruk is a simple fight. You’ve completely missed my point - people have been complaining that it’s too hard a fight to execute, not that they didn’t understand how it worked. That’s where the majority of complaints about heroic Ozruk have been coming from. In this case, the tank needs to position the boss a certain way (true for almost all bosses), avoid a large attack (can be tricky but nothing too special, you basically move at the right time), and the Big Trick is to get yourself a dot so you can escape the paralyze and run out of range of the following AOE.

It’s not the world’s most complicated encounter, particularly if you’re not the tank. I can understand groups wiping on it and I can understand the initial confusion, but once you know how it’s supposed to work it is not difficult to execute it.

4551

They’re taking away fear immunity from Ferals with Berserk! Blasphemy!

4552

Last I heard they still wanted to do that.

And taking the time to read buff/debuff tooltips is absolutely worth it. Especially in 5-mans, you can often improve the “accepted” strategy for your particular group comp if you note what the buff/debuff actually does and what type it is for purging/dispelling purposes.

4553

Agreed that the difficulty is lower, but the queue for a dps is still 25-45 min, and I have had several normal runs fail lately, thanks to that great MMO combo of cluelessness and unwillingness to listen to advice.

4554

I figured the fight out in about 3 pulls.

Strangely the rest of my group took 3 more pulls to not die. Lack of DoTs or something they said.

That said it can be kinda buggy at times. Like when you just die to his ground slam as the tank even though you were well clear of it.

4555

Just to provide an example of what I’m talking about, we were doing Heroic Halls of Origination and we were getting one-shotted by flame spouts on a fire elemental sub-boss. I thought this was just me being lame and not noticing my health being low, but it happened to other people as well. So we started to actually pay attention, and discovered that the fire AOE that the guy does - which doesn’t hurt that much - also hits you with a stacking debuff that increases fire damage taken. Hence the lava eruptions suddenly one-shotting us.

So we learned the lesson: avoid the AOE regardless of the fact that it doesn’t hurt.

4556

we would consider doing it last night instead double dragon, but for some odd reason the BWD instance is bugged, and no one can zone in.

so we spent about 20 minutes killing alliance at entrance and went back to BT, one thing I notice about BT is that, trash drop epic quite often, we got 1 epic a day from trash.

4557

You need to DPS those flame guys first and Shadowlancers immediately after.

It helps to not have more than 1 (or any) Shadowlancers up as their damage is multiplied for much more pain if 2 ar eup.

4558

This is the Flame Warden. Think you mean something else:)

4559

Shadowlancers are fine as long as you interrupt them. It’s the channeled AE that hurts.

4560

The three most important stats for Balance are, in order, Int > Hit/Spirit > Haste. Crit and Mastery (and people are still fighting over which is better) are a somewhat distant 4th and 5th.

So yay I’m hitcapped for raiding and OOM is something I’ve never considered but I’m doing relatively low DPS compared to the rest of the group in Heroics (6-8kDPS at 339 level gear on boss fights) especially when looking at trash, which I don’t care about.

8k should be on the low end for you if you’re playing well. What glyphs/spec are you using? Do you have an addon that gives you DoT timers (I use Quartz for this) to help you with DoT refreshing? The last tick of a DoT no longer clips, and is added onto a new cast, so you should aim to refresh Moonfire and Insect Swarm between the second-to-last and last ticks.

With regards to your earlier post, I was under the impression that instant cast starsurge > everything else followed by starsurge when off cooldown

Largely true, but what if you’re at 25 Lunar and in mid-Starfire cast when Shooting Stars procs? You hold the proc for one more cast, because you cast one more Starfire and queue up your Starsurge. Both land with Eclipse’s effect, giving you an “extra” Eclipse cast (if you used your SS proc and then cast Starfire, your Starfire would be un-Eclipse’d). Something similar applies to Wrath.

This is just one example. Balance might be the most complicated DPS spec out there to play perfectly; I’m waiting for the guys who built the Shadow Priest simulation software to get on the job, because there are simply too many variables for me to model it.

Also, I only today realized that Nature’s Grace’s 1-minute cooldown resets every time you hit an Eclipse, which dramatically changes things (among other things, it means that Glyph of Starfire may actually be terrible, and I should probably switch it for Glyph of Starsurge). There’s another factor to consider…

There’s an awful lot to do now as a balance druid (decurse this, root that, hibernate the other and keep your DPS up ffs!) and I’m not helping myself on that front at the moment.

I’ll be honest, I’m terrible at keeping adds rooted/hibernated consistently unless it’s absolutely necessary (Beauty’s adds, for example). Usually, I’ll just throw one root or one Hibernate and then let it lapse and have the tank pick it up, because by that time, a couple mobs will be dead.