Author: korenwolf

Wrath, a retrospective… the bits I missed

So, as various commentators have pointed out I missed a few things while writing my last piece on Wrath.

Raiding (or the little ones I forgot)

Obsidian Sanctum

A simple enough raid, kill the mini-bosses, nuke the big boss, control the adds and dodge the (moving) bad.  I like the simplicity of engaging the various hardmodes, which also feeds into making it simple to change direction and go for the easy kill after spending too long working on the hardmode.

Being a single boss raid also helps in that going for the easy mode kill doesn’t cause a lot of extra work for the following week requiring an extension of the lock.

Eye of Eternity

To be honest I think it’s horrible, much like it’s baby brother The Oculus, both were attempts to get the whole “vehicles in raiding” mechanic moving and if I’m feeling generous they were both classic first attempts.  Lots of ideas which the developers wanted to try out but little experience in how they would work in reality.

Both are definitely filler raids, there to give some flavour and a break from the larger progression tunnels full of bosses.  Having more like OS & RS in the expansion would be nice, less of the EoE style encounter please.

Ulduar 10 – Planning

So looking at the team, we have the following U10 capable toons, those I think are the most likely candidates are flagged blue, there are also some combinations which are impossible as there are less people than toons in the list (for example Korenwolf / Unferth / Wubbles are all on the same account)

Tanks

  • Korenwolf (Paladin)
  • Ariciel (Druid)
  • Malfeasant (DK)
  • Unferth (Druid)

Healing

  • Kaylad (Holy Paladin)
  • Baradan (Disc Priest)
  • Meridian (Shaman) / Siyara (Druid)
  • Cresside (Holy Priest)
  • Unferth (Druid)

DPS

  • Keone (Warlock)
  • Sangamon (Hunter)
  • Mardia (DK)
  • Mardek (DK)
  • Brethil (Warrior)
  • Yave (Warlock)
  • Siyara (Druid)
  • Cresside (sPriest) / Bieslook (Mage)
  • Wubbles (Warlock)

I’m reckoning

Tanks – 2
Healing – 3 (pulling one into off-spec dps where it seems good)
DPS – 5 (ideally splitting between ranged and melee)

If any of the team has particular desires for specific roles etc, you know where to find me.

Wrath, a retrospective

There has been some noise out on the intertubes about whether Wrath has been a good or bad expansion, so I reckon it’s time to throw my hat into the ring.  I started in WoW around patch 2.1 or so, and didn’t hit 70 on my first toon until sometime shortly before the Isle of Free Money dropped.  We never pulled enough people together consistently to run anything more than dailies and the occasional 5-man (steamvaults blocked us for ages).

IoQD was vast amounts of fun, there was a real feeling of progress, in pushing back the forces opposing us to regain control of the Island.  It rocked.

So, enter the Lich King, the call is made and we packed our thermals (well everyone else did, I’m a dwarf our home is permanently covered in snow, Northrend.. it’s bloody summer camp by comparision, cold weather my … I digress).

The guild as a whole was a lot more active which meant by the time we all hit 80 and decided to have a proper pop at dungeons there were sufficient warm bodies around.  Of course we were inexperienced having run very few dungeons and went in with Team Tin Can (four pallies and a warrior), two of which were healing and three in prot spec, so killing things got “interesting”.  We learnt a lot, we had (and this is important) fun learning.

Lessons were learnt, respeccing and gearing happened so we moved to a single tank and moved to a more normal tank,heal,dps setup, bosses died, badges dropped, gear dropped and the tarts of the group also …. pugged.  As the druid hit 80 and dual-specced tree I moved to pugging VoA and Naxx, good experience, requiring a certain level of “patience” and thickness of skin, which I have in abundnace thanks to my day job.  Ulduar came and with it full raiding.

So where does that leave us?

Badge mechanics

I think these worked well, gearing to the n-1 tier is simple enough and just requires time, there is no requirement to grind all the previous raids to gain enough gear to pull your weight in the current level of raiding.  It looks like they’re taking this forward in Cata but in a cleaner form.  There are plenty of people who complain about this approach “welfare epics” and so on, however Blizz understandably want the work they put into the raid instances to be available to a much larger pool of players, let’s face it when the focus of the major patches is the raid instance does it make any form of sense to lock 98% of your playerbase out of them?

Raids

Naxxramas

They’ve taken a lot of flak for bringing back Naxx in 10 & 25 man form, “recycling content”, “taking the easy route” and so on, however that does ignore the effort which will have been put in to properly balance this raid for 10 & 25.  That said it does look like the tuning was on the “easy” side with the content being cleared in double quick time, however it was cleared only by the top guilds who drive for those world first positions.  For a lot of the playerbase it did cause some headaches and provided a challenge.

Ulduar

I have to admit I love the look of this raid, the bosses have some interesting mechanics, turning on hardmodes requires some extra thought and focus.  The biggest gripe would have to be size of the raid (though this does help build the whole “epic titan” feel) and the limited number of optional bosses.  Let me expand on that for a moment as it’s particularly important when a guild is working a specific boss or mode, there’s little as depressing or painful as wiping constently on the same boss for weeks, with little or no let up.  One of the most effective ways of breaking this is to have enough optional bosses (or alternate raids) to use to “get something dead dammit!“.

More like this Blizz.

Trial of the Crusader

A disaster, nothing more, nothing less.  No trash, speaking as a tank I love trash, it’s my warm up, it’s random, it remains a challenge, the dps love the pretty numbers from nuking stuff with complete unselfconcious abandon.

Trial… a circular room which contained bosses and no trash, it was boring.

I also do have a certain downer on the place thanks to the five (yes five) weeks wiping on Beasts Heroic, that was a major test for the guild.

Trial was simply put the worse raid in the expansion, I’ll leave other bloggers to comment on how it rates against pre-wrath raids.

Icecrown Citadel

I admit to liking it, not as much as Ulduar but it’s a fun place to tank, the artwork is darker but no less epic than the titan city.  However we’ve been in there a long long time.  ICC opened in December 2009, at the time of writing it’s been open for over eight months, current estimations put Cata dropping in November which will make near as dammit a year of a single raid instance (no I’m not going to count Ruby Sanctum, we had that down in two weeks).

So epic raid, good bosses, LK was a good solid challenge, but guys… we’re seriously starting to hate seeing the inside of that place.

Onyxia

Even those of us who never raided prior to wrath have seen her go down (four manning in heroic gear in her original form).  A filler, nice but nothing special.

Ruby Sanctum

This was a challenge, the trash hurt and required some decent planning to get right.  Halion is a good positioning and control fight in the twilight realm, however it’s nothing massively special and if it was meant to keep the players interested for a significant length of time it failed.

Raiding is too easy

Often heard from the lips of raiders who would prefer that to raid you must commit large amounts of time to a guild, and spend the time not raiding in preparing to raid.  It is massively easier to get into raiding in Wrath, that is true.  However looking at the ICC pug scene there are very few pugs which are looking at heroic, only a slightly higher number which get much further than 6/12 and most fall apart at Deathbringer.

What I take from that is the first bosses are ‘easy’ and accessible to a lot of players, however there are checkpoints within the raid.  Each “mini-endboss” (Deathbringer, Putri, Blood Queen & Sindy) is a gear, skill and general raid competency check which weeds out the bulk of pugs.  Personally I see this as a good balance.  Let the casual raiders see the inside, while keeping a certain level of ‘hardness’ to keep the achievements and access to Arthas limited to those who can spend time and focus on reaching him.

As for those who want a return to raiding for the elite only, tough, it’s not going to happen.

The Tournament

Billed as a IoQD-alike it never really fulfilled it’s potential.  There was no drive to go and work on the tournament and preparing to face the Lich King, IoQD had the gated opening of sections of the Isle based on the number of players going to do the dailies, whereas with the tournament we simply had to wait for the next patch to drop.

Ponies… this is possibly the single most hated part of the whole expansion as far as I’m concerned.  Jousting felt like (and still does) something rammed in to make us love the vehicle mechanic.  Combine ponies with lag and it becomes an exercise in futility and pain.

Please do not do that to us again.

Where does this leave us?

On balance I liked Wrath, there have been some things which were annoying (Ponies, Circular room of boredom, ICC being far far too long), other things have rocked (being able to raid, new 5-man instances and so on).  Do Blizz need to tune things, of course, it’s in the nature of the beast, do I think they got it massively wrong.  No.

The plan…

Yoggie, I have a message for you, the bucanners are coming and we’re going to kick your godly old arse back into the nether where it belongs.

At the moment we’re fielding around eight players (having the two newest guild members around is helping massively, though pretty much everything which drops is an upgrade for them at the moment [was it wrong to take them both into ICC10 with ave iLevel 120 gear?]), Ulduar is a pretty place, with the mix of gearing it’s possible to work through without too much pain.

After spending about 90 minutes being kicked in TotC (weekly) we pootled over to Ulduar and mashed through the first three bosses on the progression line (I’m going to keep razorscale & Ignis back as “we need something to kill after wiping” bosses).

Next week we aim for Crazy Cat Lady, Hodir and possibly a look at Mimi.

So, what can you do for the raid?

  • Enchant / gem / work out your rotation
  • Bring fish! 🙂  [Hell just providing uncooked is enough into the guild bank for someone else to cook up]
  • Bring flasks [or indeed herbs to make flasks, see above]
  • Some fights we can just gear our way through, others we’re going to wipe on, so ponder, contemplate and just think about killing that old god!
  • Youtube, wowwiki and so on, and I’m thinking particularly about the Mimiron fight, it’s a complex one.

So, warm up those DPS cannons, let’s kill us a raid instance.

Edit: Adding Onyxia onto the “when we need something different to die on” boss.

News from the latest build

“Old weather flying” will have a cost, currently pitched at 250g (pretty trivial to reach), so this is more of a “we’re going to make sure you see it as something to aim for” rather than “Gold Sink!”.  It’s almost certain that you’ll only be able to learn this skill with the Cata expansion pack.  No flying for you in Azeroth without shelling out the notes to Blizzard.

http://www.wow.com/2010/09/09/cataclysm-beta-old-weather-flying-will-cost-250g/

MMO Champion has been digging through the latest build and has picked out the current values for the tier 11 set bonuses, I’ve not looked in detail at this yet and to be honest I would expect the number to change anyway as the numbers in general seem very uncertain for the general class builds at the moment.

http://www.wow.com/2010/09/09/cataclsym-beta-tier-11-set-bonuses-revealed/

We wiped on Meathook…

Yes boys and girls, you heard it right.  Meathook kicked us in the collective and we failed on the timed run in CoS Heroic.  “How can this happen” “noobs!” and so on I hear coming over the tangled wires of the interwebs.  Simple enough, we actually went in with a tank which was appropriately geared but one on which I’m still trying to remember where all the buttons are, two dps who had never seen the place before and a healer who is working out which heals to drop and when.

In other words, it was a challenge, none of this “I’ll just go pull half the gauntlet” for this group, careful pulling was the watchword, making sure that the dps were in the right place and tweaking the position of the mobs where necessary.  Thinking about what I was doing rather than relying on having a threat lead equal to that of Ghostcrawler announcing a change to retribution.

Will we be doing that again, hell yes!

Back into the saddle

After a week spent in a hotel in Birmingham being part of the horde which runs the Discworld convention (more on that in another post) I’m back at work and sorting out the normal things which need doing, such as making sure anyone who wanders past has something vaguely interesting to look at.

Not much beta news at the moment, I had a quick look at the update which came in while we were away, I need to spend some quality time with my paladin to see how he’s working out, and to see if the rumours of the increased incoming pain are accurate.  The launcher is now looking like it’s close to being complete, I suspect that the only work left is under the hood in optimising the data flows to make the “it’s still downloading but playable” work even better, and let’s be honest it’s pretty damm good already.

In other news we wandered into ICC10 with a raid of nine, two of which had average iLevels of ~120, we wiped on each of the first three bosses but downed all of them (ok… we wiped on lolship… go on, laugh).  However much gearing was done on the warrior and a little less on the warlock.  I suspect more will be happening.  Which is good news as it means we should be finding it easier to field a full 10 for raiding once a week rather than the failures we’ve been having.

My mage has been moved back home to Earthen Ring, gearing is happening, melting ankles.