For the first major report I’m going to take a quick look at Blackrock Caverns
Welcome to Blackrock Mountain (BRM), the feel of the place ties firmly in with the existing BRM instances, lots of stone, metal and solid dwarven construction. Healing is more interesting at the moment due to the lack of addons which therefore require more effort / pre-planning to get right. I’ll be coming back to this when I transfer over my main healing toon (Druid).
First thoughts, it hurts. The mobs hit seriously hard and with the current nameplate bugs it’s difficult to keep track of them properly. As ever with a new instance the pull gets slightly interesting while the tank (me) works out what does what, where the casters are, how to get them close to avoid aggroing the boss etc etc.
The trash hurts, off one of the larger mobs further in ‘wolf was taking 21k hits (approximately half his current 5-man health pool). Ouch. The first boss went down without too much trouble thanks to a quick brief from one of the dps who’d been through before. However, boss#2 is going to take planning. She hits hard, there is a mechanic to control the adds spawning but I suspect it’s too tight on the buff counter at the moment and boss + one add is too much, boss + more than one? Insta-death. That said Paladin tanks are so far from being finished it’s silly and she needs tuning massively either to slow the add generation, give more time for dps to shuffle around and drop the debuff or for me to have better surviability.
If this is a sign of things to come, then it’s going to hurt, we’re going to be focusing on what to bring, execution, crowd control and having to think. LFD PUGs are going to hate this as the dps cannot go hell for leather 2 seconds into the pull and expect to win.
Advice for all players not in the beta, start thinking about what else you can bring to the group, can you stuff, interupt, slow, provide aoe healing as a side effect of dps etc etc. We’re going to need all our tricks.