4741

Correction: tonight I had the opportunity to go to heroic Deadmines with guildies, and healing the bosses there was a lot of fun.

4742

Yeah I think there’s an overestimation of how bad heroics are. I was very nervous, ran my first heroics yesterday (didn’t get Cata until after Christmas). We had a few wipes but you know what? It was fine. Partly I think I missed a lot of undergeared fail and learning the encounters fail early on. Partly I think people have been spoiled by Wrath and don’t expect to wipe a few times even if they have a good group, nor do they expect to bounce completely if they have 1 bad player.

I’m really enjoying druid healing. I actually don’t like the buffs in the pipeline, as they strengthen using spammy HoTs. I’d rather they buffed regrowth and healing touch, but I guess that would tread on other healers toes too much in terms of direct heal power.

4743

My point was not so much about the difficulty of heroics (that’s a separate topic) as to how fun the new healing model is - I mostly find it dull and uninteresting. However, the boss design in Deadmines made the fights very fun to heal, probably because there’s more movement, random agro, and everyone is taking damage all the time. In some fights I probably never cast my basic Heal twice in a row on the same target.

It’s a pity the dungeon is so long, I won’t have many opportunities to run it, but it has been by far the most fun I’ve had in Cata so far. If Bliz decided to split it in two (Mines and Boat I guess) it would be awesome.

4744

If you think Deadmines is long now, you should have seen it a month ago, when it had twice as much trash…

If they had split heroics into two tiers, like one of the theoretical possibilities in that Ghostcrawler post, heroic SFK and Deadmines would definitely have been put into the harder tier. It’s fun to have some very interesting heroics like that; hopefully they’ll add more heroics in that vein with future patches. (Without the horrible old-school “You are in a low-ceiling dungeon and can’t see more than 4 feet in front of you” motif, though.)

4745

SFK, really? Springvale is the only fight in there I’d call exceptionally challenging, and that’s only if you have a bad group comp for it. DPS who know the fight and are decent at interrupts make even him fairly trivial.

4746

The druid changes this time round are making me sooo mad.

4747

They should just give everyone who is capable of doing heroics access to all the dungeons. I’m so sick of getting Deadmines and SFK. I’ve never even SEEN Throne of Tides for the same reason.

4748

Looking at Recount, I’m finding my dot uptime is horrible and I’m wondering if anyone has helpful mods they’d suggest? Right now I’m using tellmewhen, as its giant icons are basically signs that say to me, “Hey stupid, cast this!”

What I’m finding is my dots often run out in the middle of a filler cast and given the insane haste, by the time I register I need to refresh, it seems more beneficial to finish my cast then cast the dot(s) rather than interrupt the current cast. I think that’d have the least impact on my dots… but I’m getting dot uptimes in the 50% range in my recount. According to elitist jerks, 70% is pathetic… so 50% I guess is faceroll play territory.

Is there a way to configure tellmewhen to put the icon up one or two ticks before the buff disappears? Is there another mod you would suggest?

4749

Is there another mod you would suggest?

I use SexyCooldown to create bars to track the status of my temporary buffs and DoTs. NeedToKnow will also do this. PowerAuras is pretty cool and has similar functionality but is a real PITA to configure.

4750

Uh, what is preventing you from going to the dungeon and zoning in once?

People who find themselves in the Heroic version should at least know the regular version. There is also nothing stopping you from queuing for a specific heroic.

If you want the 70 valor points by randoming, you get a random heroic.

4751

How do you learn the regular version when you cannot queue for it?

4752

You go discover the entrance, which means you go to the place it is in the world where you’d go before the LFD system went in.

4753

You can’t queue for the beginner Cataclysm dungeons when you’re 85 - they won’t show up in the list at all until 4.06.

4754

But yeah, just go to the entrance of the dungeons it says you can’t queue for. It won’t take all that long.

4755

I think he’s saying that because a number of people haven’t unlocked TotT or Blackrock, it means the ones that are automatically unlocked for everyone - i.e. SFK/Deadmines - are more likely to pop up.

Which makes sense.

4756

Oh, I see. I assumed people would go unlock the dungeons themselves and do them while they were level appropriate at least once like I did.

4757

Yeah, you can setup something similar to that with tellmewhen, like have the icon mimic the duration icon on your target or have a bar that ticks down layered over the icon. I was more interested in basically only having the icon appear with a few ticks left, than trying to monitor an active duration bar or something like that. Yes, I want to turn WoW into a game of simon says, but I’m that dumb. Heh.

4758

I’m not 100% sure, but I think you can configure SexyCooldown so it only displays your abilities when they have a user-defined duration remaining (i.e. 2s for what you want).

4759

Also, bear in mind that refreshing dots early is no longer nearly as much of a dps loss. (and is not a dps loss at all if you refresh it during the last tick).

4760

Note: all of my characters are out of the Arathor Horde QuarterToThree guild except the GL, Arisse, who is my bank alt. So the guild is dead. If you have suggestions on how to revive it, leave an in-game mail to Arisse or pm/post me here. My characters are now part of Savage Darkness, a casual raiding guild whose officers are from Quebec. The guild is pretty good, level 10 I think now.