Instance Design in Wrath
#21
Quote:Yes, we spent quite a long time working on Vashj. But I never felt we were undergeared for it - just that we needed to coordinate properly. Failures were an issues of strategy and execution. Working on HToC beasts last night, I felt like the tanks were barely on the edge of success. Any little tiny issue with the healers and a tank went -splat- from full to dead. Vashj and Kael and the others never felt that way to me. Vael did, but only because it was a gimmick fight. If you didn't have the resist gear, you were in trouble.

My issue with the way it's designed is that normal-mode TOC is so easy, and heroic is a total wall. On top of that, the first boss in heroic is one of the hardest. It doesn't bother me that we can't finish heroic-10 yet, but we can't even get past the first encounter!

That's my beef as well. Taking in our best geared, best played toons that are ToC25 geared we can squash the first four bosses in heroic ToC10, but with a full raid that got every boss in ToC25 on farm status within 2 pulls the first week they were out, we have not come within 20% of having the first beast down by the time the worms spawned.

I'd rather heroic mode twins have been the big DPS check for us and beasts be more about coordination and learning, so we had something to work hard on each week for the past month or two, whereas now that we are maybe approaching having the gear for heroic mode beasts, attendance has fallen off massively.
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#22
It's just seems wrong that you can take 30k damage in <1s every 10s. (Graci's a Blood DK tank)

[21:28:22.517] Gormok the Impaler Impale Gracile 4073
[21:28:23.330] Gormok the Impaler hits Gracile 15265
[21:28:23.408] Gormok the Impaler Impale Gracile 15845 (O: 5024) (more)

That's a 1 stack of Impale running on me ticking for 4k, he smacks me for 15k and at the same time does Impale, which adds a stack and does 15-22k damage. Both Ziig and I had the same HP last night w/o CS it was 42.9k (if I remember right), that was with BoK, Motw, Fort, Food, Flask. So I guess we might've been near 45k with Commanding Shout up.

I didn't look at my AC during the fight, but unbuffed I'm at 27k and was potting an Indestructible as we pulled, plus Devo, Stoneskin should've put me in the 33k AC range.

So tank wise I think we had just about every buff except BoSanc.

It looks like the 15k hit happens after the 4th Snobold is out. He starts out hitting for like 6-10k.

-WimpySmurf
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#23
Yeah - I had our tanks save cooldowns for after the 4th snobold, since the boss deals +60% physical damage after it comes out, but even so there is a period of time where tanks just flat have to be healed through the incoming damage without any version of shield wall up and running.
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#24
Quote:It's just seems wrong that you can take 30k damage in <1s every 10s. (Graci's a Blood DK tank)

[21:28:22.517] Gormok the Impaler Impale Gracile 4073
[21:28:23.330] Gormok the Impaler hits Gracile 15265
[21:28:23.408] Gormok the Impaler Impale Gracile 15845 (O: 5024) (more)
Defensive cooldowns need to be rotated for impales much like you did for plasma blast on mimron. Blow 2 minute DPS cooldowns at the start of the fight. If you are on target they should come back up in time for the acidmaw burn.
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#25
Quote:Defensive cooldowns need to be rotated for impales much like you did for plasma blast on mimron. Blow 2 minute DPS cooldowns at the start of the fight. If you are on target they should come back up in time for the acidmaw burn.

Another thing people have done, if a snobold is on a melee (not a tank, but a dpser) leave it alone and kill it between Gormok and the Worms (when you can't do damage anyway for 10 seconds). The lost DPS of switching to kill that snobold that doesn't really cause a dps loss to a melee can be the difference.
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#26
Quote:Another thing people have done, if a snobold is on a melee (not a tank, but a dpser) leave it alone and kill it between Gormok and the Worms (when you can't do damage anyway for 10 seconds). The lost DPS of switching to kill that snobold that doesn't really cause a dps loss to a melee can be the difference.
If you have a snobold you don't need to kill right away you should ignore it. Even ranged dps just dot up and deal with it after the boss dies. Also pray to RNG gods that they don't continually land on healers. The fight has 3 phases: 1) dps race, 2) situational awareness, 3) lag check.
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#27
Two issues with the current WotLK scaling raid design:

1) Gear resets with each raid release mean that interest in previous instances drops considerably.
2) Hard modes, which require great gear, can become increasingly inaccessible due to #1.

In short, doing easy-mode raids provides massive benefits with moderately little effort and allows the vast majority of players to see all the content (sans Algalon), which is great. But it's also a curse to those who want to see more, because the reward-to-effort ratio of doing hard modes becomes ever more steep.

In the old days, if you wanted to see AQ40, you had to really work for it. It took ages of raiding and gearing in Molten Core and BWL to field a force that could tackle it. This was the reverse of the problems of WotLK, and I'm not saying that was a better system. Gear never reset in original WoW, so a whole suite of problems arose out of that.

Northrend Beasts in hard mode is like OMFGWTFBBQdairyqueen. It's a lot like the old "block" bosses in instances in the old days that are tests of "you must be this good to enter." But before, where you HAD to beat that boss to continue and see/get new things, now you can just say "why bother?" The gear's going to reset anyway in the next patch...so what happens is that non-cutting-edge guilds have a hard time fielding raids for hard modes, and that just winds up extending from instance to instance.

If Naxx, Ulduar, and ToC worked the old way, there wouldn't BE an easy mode ToC and the only way you'd ever have a prayer of getting past Beasts would be to farm Ulduar hard modes for weeks, maybe months. If you're sitting there thinking "that friggin sucks," well, that was the old original WoW. :)

I wish I had a solution. I like the idea of gear resets so that people aren't locked out of content, but that causes as many problems as it solves. Unless you're in bleeding-edge raid guilds, you're not going to get to fight Algalon 25. Not because it's too hard to get to, but because of a general malaise of "why bother?" from a sizable portion of your raid force. When badge gear from the next raid instance beats the "ultimate" gear from the "super-ultimate" boss of Ulduar...where's the reward for most players? Why would they even want to bother beating Northrend Beasts heroic when the first boss in Icecrown will drop better stuff than in all of heroic ToC?
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#28
Quote:If you have a snobold you don't need to kill right away you should ignore it. Even ranged dps just dot up and deal with it after the boss dies. Also pray to RNG gods that they don't continually land on healers. The fight has 3 phases: 1) dps race, 2) situational awareness, 3) lag check.


I'm sorry, what? How does a ranged DPS who can do basically nothing contribute to the DPS race? With a snobold on your back, you can pretty much cast instants and use your wand - wow, I'm really pouring out the DPS that way!
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#29
Quote:I'm sorry, what? How does a ranged DPS who can do basically nothing contribute to the DPS race? With a snobold on your back, you can pretty much cast instants and use your wand - wow, I'm really pouring out the DPS that way!
I guess you aren't a hunter.:PAnd you can still contribute just not as well. If everyone quickly dots it up and switches back to the boss it can die even before the boss goes down depending on when you got it in the first place. I'm also speaking of 25 man here since I don't do 10 very much. Focused raid dps is wasting a lot of time for only 1 member in 25. Unless that person is absolutely vital having them fend for them self for a minute isn't such a bad thing.
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#30
Quote:Unless that person is absolutely vital having them fend for them self for a minute isn't such a bad thing.
In 10m there is no such thing as a non-vital raid member, specifically when the dps requirements are at the very edge of our ability to reach.

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#31
Quote:I guess you aren't a hunter.:PAnd you can still contribute just not as well. If everyone quickly dots it up and switches back to the boss it can die even before the boss goes down depending on when you got it in the first place. I'm also speaking of 25 man here since I don't do 10 very much. Focused raid dps is wasting a lot of time for only 1 member in 25. Unless that person is absolutely vital having them fend for them self for a minute isn't such a bad thing.

Yeah, not a hunter. Shadow priest. With a snobold on me, I can cast shadow word: pain and devouring plague. And I can use my wand, yay! This cuts my DPS to about 1/4 of normal. With half the raid being tanks and healers, having one DPSer basically out of it means you lose 20% of your dps (for sake of argument - not all DPSers are equal).

I can see the argument for leaving one on a melee DPS or a hunter, where the effect isn't as big (and dots plus incidental AOE will probably kill it anyway) or in a 25 (smaller % impact on the raid), but losing a caster DPS in 10 isn't going to work.
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#32
Quote:Yeah, not a hunter. Shadow priest. With a snobold on me, I can cast shadow word: pain and devouring plague. And I can use my wand, yay! This cuts my DPS to about 1/4 of normal. With half the raid being tanks and healers, having one DPSer basically out of it means you lose 20% of your dps (for sake of argument - not all DPSers are equal).

I can see the argument for leaving one on a melee DPS or a hunter, where the effect isn't as big (and dots plus incidental AOE will probably kill it anyway) or in a 25 (smaller % impact on the raid), but losing a caster DPS in 10 isn't going to work.
Well I'll let you know as I have more experience in 10 man. The one I'm now running with I've only run one week with, though we only lost insanity because the hunter (our source of mortal strike) DCed on anub.:(
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#33
Quote:Well I'll let you know as I have more experience in 10 man. The one I'm now running with I've only run one week with, though we only lost insanity because the hunter (our source of mortal strike) DCed on anub.:(

10 man with 25 man gear or 10 man with 10 man gear? :) That makes a HUGE difference as well.
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#34
I think this is where there's a big difference between the strategy's that 10 & 25 man raids.

In 25 man raid you have enough DoT classes that a snobold will die quickly and you lose maybe 10-20s of 1 DPSer's time. So in a 25man raid that's 1/17 or ~6%, in 10man that's 1/5 or 20% of you DPS and that requires you have enough DoT classes in the raid to kill it quickly.

Our 10m raids tend to have at most 1 DoT class, Klaus. In 10man it may come down to who get's the snobold and making sure any "ramp up" DPS classes never leave Gormok. You probably could leave a snobold on melee DPS, but healers, ranged, tanks need them cleared.

If the snobolds could be hit by AoE, it'd be another story too, then anyone with a snobold could run into melee range and have it killed while DPS continued to burn Gormok down.

-WimpySmurf




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#35
Quote:10 man with 25 man gear or 10 man with 10 man gear? :) That makes a HUGE difference as well.
Not as huge as you think. Case in point we had a tank come back from a lengthy absence. He completely missed ulduar so when he came back he started running 10 man toc normal and heroic to bring himself back up to a point where we could bring him to 25 mans. We tease him now because he is the top gear score on the server.

The guild I'm in has been killing up to twin valks in heroic 25 mode for over a month and I could still use a lot of the gear in 10 man as an upgrade or sidegrade. Half the people in my 10 man group are alts and have never seen heroic 25 toc, including the main tank.
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#36
Quote:Half the people in my 10 man group are alts and have never seen heroic 25 toc, including the main tank.
Have they seen Ulduar 25? Hard modes?

-Jester
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#37
Quote:Have they seen Ulduar 25? Hard modes?

-Jester
http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.x...amp;gn=get+crit

The alt of the 25 man main tank that was away for ulduar who tanks the 10 man. He has a couple pieces from 25 mans but I wouldn't call it significant. Also, again, ulduar hard mode loot is < normal 10 toc loot so I don't find it relevant. Him particularly (like I said) completely missed ulduar and you can check the achievements, the character has never even been inside ulduar in any difficulty let alone doing any hard modes. Even now we have to explain some fights to him the rare times we go back to ulduar as an official raid.

By now everyone who tried should have enough t8, t9 and similar leveled gear to complete heroic 10 toc. Between the heroic daily and heroics dropping conquest badges getting a char geared up enough for regular 10 toc is relatively effortless. The gear from 10 toc is more than good enough to complete hard 10 toc.
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#38
Quote:Also, again, ulduar hard mode loot is < normal 10 toc loot so I don't find it relevant.

You have bumped your head if you think that ToC10 > Uld25 Hard Mode loot.

I'm a 10 man raider. I have 10 man hard mode loot. I'm currently using the 10man Hard Mode hodir bracers and the only upgrade is the 245 crafted. The Loop of the Agile from 10 man Steelbreaker is BiS for me if Hit Capped for me as a 10 man raider. Aesir's Edge, the 2h'd sword from XT 10 man hard mode blows away any weapon that I could get from 10man ToC or Ony until I get to the Tribute Chest axe in Heroic 10 man. Are you then telling me that Uld10 Hard mode Loot > Uld25 Hard Mode Loot?

Quote:By now everyone who tried should have enough t8, t9 and similar leveled gear to complete heroic 10 toc. Between the heroic daily and heroics dropping conquest badges getting a char geared up enough for regular 10 toc is relatively effortless. The gear from 10 toc is more than good enough to complete hard 10 toc.


Then I guess we just fail. On our best attempt at Heroic Beasts 10, Icehowl was coming in, and we weren't even close to having both worms down.
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#39
Quote:If you have a snobold you don't need to kill right away you should ignore it. Even ranged dps just dot up and deal with it after the boss dies. Also pray to RNG gods that they don't continually land on healers. The fight has 3 phases: 1) dps race, 2) situational awareness, 3) lag check.

A) Holy thread hijack, batman.

B)Have you (well not you, the people having trouble with beasts) tried running snobolds onto the boss' butt and just cleaving them to death? If you only have one DoT class, the rest of your DPS is either melee and can cleave, or ranged who can pretty painlessly switch to the snobold.

Although honestly, if you're having trouble with the DPS wall of beasts, I anticipate lots of trouble killing portals/volcanoes on Jaraxxus quickly enough to only get one Mistress/3 Infernos at a time. :whistling:

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#40
Quote:http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.x...amp;gn=get+crit

The alt of the 25 man main tank that was away for ulduar who tanks the 10 man. He has a couple pieces from 25 mans but I wouldn't call it significant. Also, again, ulduar hard mode loot is < normal 10 toc loot so I don't find it relevant. Him particularly (like I said) completely missed ulduar and you can check the achievements, the character has never even been inside ulduar in any difficulty let alone doing any hard modes. Even now we have to explain some fights to him the rare times we go back to ulduar as an official raid.

By now everyone who tried should have enough t8, t9 and similar leveled gear to complete heroic 10 toc. Between the heroic daily and heroics dropping conquest badges getting a char geared up enough for regular 10 toc is relatively effortless. The gear from 10 toc is more than good enough to complete hard 10 toc.


My comments about that armory profile. I see:

Hat from Ony-25 (yeah, OK, that's easily accessible)
2 pieces from ToC 25
6 pieces from ToC-10 heroic
2 pieces that requires a Trophy (so, ToC25 or ToC10-heroic), one of which could have come from the ToC-10 tribute chest (because, y'know, that's easier...<_<).

The two trinkets, libram and cloak are the only things not iLvl245. Libram is 226, cloak is 213. Trinkets are 200.

I don't think I would qualify 11 armor pieces of iLvl 245 as "ToC-10" level gear.

<span style="color:red">Terenas (PvE)
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