5701

These are the twilight years of WoW. I expect Blizzard will bring forward the “Titan” hype and release date. Of course WoW will still be profitable but I bet a large portion of the WoW development team has already been moved to Titan development. This is reinforced by the lack of content being released in WoW post-Cataclysm.

5702

And the fact that the Blizz CEO(?) already stated that’s exactly where all the devs have gone :)

5703

Are they really being that slow with content, relative to LK? I don’t recall Ulduar going live 'til around what… May? June of 2009?

My look at wowpedia says Ulduar was April 14, 2009. So I guess they’re a bit behind the LK curve, since we probably won’t see Firelands 'til June. otoh guild progress in the current raids seems much slower.

5704

It’s only been three months since Cataclysm came out and they’re giving us the two “new” 5 mans pretty soon. There’s really no need for a new raid yet, in my opinion, since most guild still have a ways to go in the current ones. I figure if Firelands comes out in June or so, that should be just about on pace with my guild finishing all the heroic modes. For me, being able to quickly gear up my army of alts in 4.1 will likely stave off any boredom in the event Firelands is late.

5705

What’d they do to the Easter Dress?

My guild has pretty much died as well. To the point we can’t even get five together for dungeons or even three for old school achievements. I log in to do my two Ramakhan dailies, the fishing and cooking dailies, see if Glop or Pebbles is up (I’m 7/10 on each), and solo old crap for fun. But it’s less and less. And given another expansion is over a year away I don’t expect many of my friends to return soon.

5706

Eh? I dunno about you, but I’m perfectly happy with the pace of content. The only reason Ulduar had to come out so fast in Wrath was that the entire first raiding tier was incredibly easy, with the only hardmode fight being moderately hard.

5707

I’m waiting for a second confirmation on this, Wowinsider in the past has proven themselves to be a somewhat untrustworthy source of info.

However, if it’s true, it’s pretty cool I guess, but I have no room left for any new characters on my current server. Oh well!+

5708

Yes, confirmation on… something.

5709

Yes but I believe they’ve gone the opposite direction. Its too hard now in many areas. Combine that with an older game and lots of folks just can’t get motivated to run round that hamster wheel yet again. I don’t mind tough raids but that with 5man heroics as they are now… its just not fun anymore. Which leads to a dearth of interested, geared and motivated raiders who are willing to raid as long as some progress is made. My guild is 6/12 across the 3 10man raids. 25s… they killed those for all but the serious hardcore guilds who had numbers to make it work. We’d be farther along if it was possible to have a stable raid team. I went to a 3-4 day a week raiding schedule just to try and make sure we had 2 productive days since usually one day got cancelled to lack of availability. I’ve got people I know from dead/dying guilds looking for spots but few healers/tanks. Pugs aren’t really possible right now except for BoT trash farming runs.

Ghostcrawlers latest blog post screed on raiding progress amuses me. He gets a fair amount of undue flack but he often just walks right into it due to his stupidity and arrogance. My favorites of the past year would be “triage healing” explanation and his “we never meant for prot warriors to spam tclap to hold aggro” notion.

5710

I guess we’ll just have to agree to disagree, then. I don’t find the new 5man schema to be particularly difficult and I rather like that you can’t carry more than one terrible player at a time through Heroics.

I’m also happy with this tier of raiding content; it’s challenging but not impossible, and while a few of the fights do make me want to tear my hair out at times (Council, Chim, and Al’akir), on the whole I even enjoy those fights.

As a healer, I’m happy to tell you that his “triage healing” stance is pretty accurate on a lot of fights. Take Cho’gall for example: When the raid is taking AoE damage from Cho’galls weapon ability, we just let AoE healing heal it back up. Sure, people are low, but they’re not going to die, so whatever… Wild Growth, Efflorescence, and Healing Rain will handle it.

5711

You can, actually, but it depends on the dungeon and which roles the terrible people have. A healer and I carried three 5kish dps (who would also bunch up in front of cone attacks, that sort of thing) through heroic VP without too much difficulty. Something like Shadowfang, though, not happening.

5712

The main problem I have with the current heroic raid bosses is that success relies so heavily on interrupting, which tends to make 10man raids are even more punishing than 25s. It’s just not fun to have to wipe continuously simply because someone didn’t get their split-second timing just perfectly. Even the normal modes are made harder because of it, though not to the same extent.

Add to that the fact that Blizz has yet again continued with their “sucks to be melee” theme, which goes directly against the “bring the player” deal, and this raid tier is probably my least favorite so far. I’m still having fun raiding, but that’s mostly due to the people in my guild and not the content itself. I really miss Ulduar.

5713

They nerfed that though, didn’t they? I mean, I was on interrupt duty most of the time so I was pretty goddamn unhappy with the 1.3s interrupt time but I’m sure they made it a lot easier on most bosses that needed it.

5714

They nerfed a few of the fights in that the boss performs the interruptable ability less often, but the consequences of missing one are still pretty bad in most cases, especially in heroic modes.

5715

Missing one tick of a Storm interrupt on Maloriak - which I assume is the fight you’re talking about - isn’t necessarily going to wipe your raid. It is going to force you to blow extra cooldowns, though.

And Ulduar? Really? I have yet to see any Heroic encounter in Cataclysm as frustrating as Hodir hardmode or as incredibly, mind-bogglingly, headdesk-level challenging as Mimiron’s hardmode.

Also,

Ghostcrawlers latest blog post screed on raiding progress amuses me. He gets a fair amount of undue flack but he often just walks right into it due to his stupidity and arrogance.

What? His latest blog post was spot-on, if utterly obvious and self-evident, but some people apparently need basic concepts explained to them.

5716

Maloriak isn’t the only fight with super-important interrupts. In heroic, a tick of arcane storm during the red phase is pretty much a wipe every time, though. I’m more talking about the whole “interrupt or die” mechanic in general. It’s just not fun. Blowing extra cooldowns in a 10 man raid is a fairly big deal most of the time.

And going back to Ulduar, I’m mostly referring to that raid in a general sense. It just felt epic and huge and had a ton of character to it. BWD, BoT and Throne are pretty dull in comparison.

As for the Ulduar hardmodes, those fights were all difficult, yes, but they were mostly difficult in ways that were easy to improve upon. Even Firefighter, which I agree was super-tough, always gave a sense of “if we can improve on X, we got this”. I don’t get that feeling as much in the current raids. I mean, we always know what we can do better to improve, but I just hate that one of those things is often “interrupt quicker and more”. Getting an interrupt off for Arcane Storm often comes down to latency, which is just bad design. Someone even wrote an addon to help click the gong during Atramedes, which won’t matter come 4.1.

5717

That’s a fair statement, I guess. It just never really bothered me, except when people fucked up on Blast Wave interrupts (I mean seriously, that one’s a slow cast, even).

5718

All I gotta say is, as a healer, I don’t like the chimaeron fight.

5719

You probably are already, but healing assignments work well on this fight. We don’t normally bother with them, but otherwise 1 of the people knocked to 1 health will get 2 or 3 heals, and other other person won’t get any.

5720

Played last night doing retro content and got annoyed by something. We tried BWL (four of us, all 85, a Priest, Mage, Warlock, and Hunter) and couldn’t get past Razorgore. It kept bugging out (and others have noticed similar problems on WoWHead). Finally gave up and went to AQ40 (with just three of us now, the Hunter was locked out for some reason, I’ll go into detail on that below) and couldn’t get past Prophet due to MCs (we only tried a time or two but were sufficiently annoyed by then).

Ok, I’ll allow that we probably weren’t the best prepared, and I’m sure some people still beat these encounters with such small numbers, but… Why can’t Blizz just change some of these gimmick fights to tank and spank so they aren’t blocks on swaths of retro content? Razorgore, Vael, Prophet, maybe Twin Emps, and maybe Nef come to mind.

I ended up trying to solo with my Warlock after the group disbanded (I formed a raid with someone else) and came very close, but Earthshock sucked (though most of my stuff is instant the GCD refresh was cutting into my casting). I actually came closer with my 85 Rogue, ilevel 327 (Lock is 347), but just didn’t have enough oooomph to win it. If my Rogue had my Lock’s HPs it would’ve been doable, but 15k less is a ton for that fight. I never could quite get past the third split.

My Hunter friend… We wiped in BWL but he wasn’t keyed (I had summoned him in). We couldn’t rez him (corpse in an aggro position) so I had him attempt to enter BRS, become alive, and then summoned. Seemed fine, until we tried to enter AQ40 later. Kept saying he couldn’t enter the instance. So he tried to bring his Druid – same issue. What the heck is going on there, and why does it seem to be Account-wide?

Finally, while still in raid (hadn’t finished disbanding and saying our goodbyes) I started up Fire in the Sky and noted after a while I wasn’t getting kill credit. Really?! How long has this game been out?!

So in all a pretty frustrating night. Well until I later went back with my Lock and solo’d AQ20 – I had NO idea how good the money was in there (boss drops of 25 - 50g, TONS of the class spell books that sell for 10g each, like 15 of those, copious purples and blues to vendor sell – sadly Nexus and Small Prismatics don’t sell for anything at all anymore). That was fun!

But still, I’d love to finish AQ40. It’s the only vanilla Dungeon & Raid achievement I don’t have (that I can’t easily get – there are one or two dungeons I haven’t bothered with yet).