The Glade 4.0

I try to do that, but honestly, I can rarely make heads or tails of what's going on in them until I actually try it (sometimes more than once), with a live Q&A available.


Spoken like someone without young children with a somewhat flexible bedtime averaging 8:30 EST.



Yeah.

As for food, fish feats sorta suck unless you happen to need both spellpower and attack power (Enhance Shammies, I'm looking at you), in which case they are godly. Gimme +ArPen or +Crit or +Agi or even +haste food, please.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
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I mean really it's the least you can do to be prepared. I spent a good 20 mins looking at the Deathwhisper fight last night because I knew we'd be doing it today and it's a bit confusing with the Fanatics and Adherants, skeletal, empowered, mutated... whatever. Now I feel like I know wtf I'm doing.

Last raid the officers and raid leader are explaining and one dude emotes the "Zzzzz" falling asleep thing. Raid leader was like hey you wanna just run in without knowing it and fail go join a pug.

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“Strong people are harder to kill than weak people, and more useful in general”. - Mark Rippetoe

I tended to look over the Bosskillers stuff before a raid, and then plot my own actions - I didn't like videos.

Then I'd punch the critter until it died.

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Grenade 3 Sports Drink. It's fire in the hole.. Your hole!

Yes. But you still prepared for the fight.

You knew that X mob did Y ability, and you needed to take Z action if X, Y'd you up.

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Holy shitsnacks!

I don't think that would be ideal. It means that if you could take any raid comp that you had available and still being able to defeat the raid encounters, that would mean that the raid encounters would have to be pathetically easy. Many people don't raid just so they can get epics, they raid because they want/need the challenge. Then again, that's arguably what hard modes are for.

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Los Angeles Kings 2014 Stanley Cup Champions

"I love this **** team right here."
-Jonathan Quick

And any raid is puggable

I like playing with people I know though. They know me, and I know them. I trust they'll be busting their asses to keep me alive, keeping the mobs off of me, and they trust me to output deeps without drawing agro to the best of my ability.

My new favorite trick? Using ToTT to redirect adds to the tank with FoK

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Holy shitsnacks!

That is all high level stuff. I pushed through a lot of content and stuff just so I could be at a level to hang with you and some other friends. But the idea of getting every quest in Zangarmarsh done, or those kinds of achievements... some of us find those fun. But there is such a push to "get to max level so you can raid" it kind of sucks the fun from the game.

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Darksiege
Traveller, Calé, Whisperer
Lead me not into temptation; for I know a shortcut

No, it works for every dungeon in the game

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Holy shitsnacks!

And it makes it possible to finish all the dungeon quests/dungeons at the appropriate level.

But seriously, after you've done every quest in ZM once, what is the push to do it again on a second character?

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Darksiege: You are not a god damned vulcan homie.

ZM is my second favorite area in outland. (After Nagrand.)

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Hm. ZM is my second *least* favorite area. (After BEM).

Eenteresting.

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Holy shitsnacks!

It really shouldn't be that complex and difficult though. It's sort of like "needing" UI mods to do raids; there should never be any raid in the game that requires anything but what you get by default, and it shouldn't take more than a few minutes to explain a raid to a guild raid force (PUG.. maybe longer)

It shouldn't be so easy that any incompetant asshile could beat it whenever they pleased either, but this is too much. I'm already dreading the idea of raids tht involve vehicles.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Remember EQ? Remember PoP? That was *far* worse. Rathe Council? Getting 72 people to perform disparate roles to kill a bunch of mobs all at the same time? Coirnav? Getting 72 people online at a stupid hour of the night because another guild is cockblocking you and keeping the mob permakilled? Xegony? Dirty whore with Butterfly wings?

WoW is cake compared to that. CAKE I TELL YOU!!!!

Which is why its shocking when some people can't do it.

No raids *require* mods. They just make life a lot easier. Blizzard's default UI is pretty asstastic.

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Holy shitsnacks!

None of those raids were as bad as what you guys are describing. I don't consider inter-guild competition a problem either; I'd rather have that than overly-complex raids.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I don't think most raids are that bad. The only problem I've had with complexity is Flame Leviathan. First night of the 3.1 patch that added Ulduar, we're all zoned in and ready to go, and we are met with a wall of vehicles.

When the vast majority of your 25 players won't read up on what to expect, it took a long *** time to get through to everyone what their role is. No zoning in and starting to fight, but zoning in and sorting out assignments and giving instructions for a bit. Very much not how I wanted to start off a new raid zone. Especially when Blizzard got all crafty and made a change from the PTR version of the fight to the Live version, throwing a wrench in the instructions we did manage to impart!

See, we figured that the vehicles were there to blow **** up, and basically did it on the fly. One shot the boss after much amusement. "What's this blue **** for? Hey, it stacks a debuff. Holy crap! I hit for 200k!!!"

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It feels like all the people who want limited government really just want government limited to Republicans.
---The Daily Show

Hindsight is 20/20. We one shot him too (er, kinda. Our first attempt was with all 4 towers up. Whoops :p), and hardly with expert knowledge on the vehicles. I don't think we realized the importance of Blue Pyrite or refueling pyrite or whatever. I certainly didn't expect to one shot it at the time, though, and wanted to prepare the raid to at least a capable level of competence going in.

The fight has always been a pain in terms of complexity, really. Getting all 25 people into vehicles has taken a few minutes each raid, and then we'd end up taking a few minutes more swapping some people around to fit 3 to a demo or two once we got to the boss. While FL was always one of my favorite fights in Ulduar, there was a certain amount of tedium to it. Thinking back on it, it sure is nice in ICC to zone in and just start pulling. :p

Fortunately the fight itself is incredibly easy (at least with no towers up.) On our guild's first attempt on FL back in 3.1, he died before most of us figured out what our buttons did. "Uh, what just happened? Why am I out of my vehicle? Oh...look, it's dead!"

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Some folks in my guild have taken to farming FL with 2-4 people on 10 man, and 6-8 people on 25 man. Once you know the drill, it's a way easy fight.

Maybe this was intentional on Blizzard's part, specifically to counter all the potential complexity. :p Just didn't work for my guild on day 1 because me and another officer are over-preparers and we really expected it to require some basic level of capability.

Then it took extra time with arranging folks in later weeks because we always had an eye towards doing it with 4 towers up, which generally meant having everyone in their place. Made extra fun by having turnover and training new folks!



Yeah it's definitely an easy fight once you know it, but I'm just talking complexity of the fight such that you need to learn a lot before you can do it well. Marrowgar requires about 10 seconds of instruction to cover the important parts of the fight and you can dive right in. Those people 4 manning FL on 25 man (or doing him +4 towers back during Ulduar) have a pretty high degree of understanding of the fight and the various vehicle abilities.

I think FL is a perfect example (and one of the very few) that meet Diamondeye's argument. Unless you just want to flail about like fools like most of us did on day 1 and win cause FL is undertuned, it's going to take awhile to get a raid to know what to do.

I made some long posts back during Ulduar when we were pushing harder and harder difficulty for FL and found it's not too bad breaking it into roles, but even then you kinda need some experience to make sense of it. Such is the case with most vehicle fights. So long as they're kept to a minimum, I'm fine with that. Again, I rather liked FL!

Methinks Deathwhisper 25 needs a slight nerf.

Taken all together, she's just a bit overwhelming to a less than perfect raid composition.

What would I nerf? I would take the bullshit shields off the adherents. Or change them to *not* be a goddamn instant cast.

Or. I would add about 90 seconds or so to her enrage timer.

Or I would have her reanimated minions 50% less vulnerable to magic/physical rather than 99% immune.

Or I'd take out the Curse of Torpor (that's just goddamn annoying.)

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Holy shitsnacks!

I'm going to be useless on the adds in that fight. My damage is split between holy and physical.

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It feels like all the people who want limited government really just want government limited to Republicans.
---The Daily Show

That's only an issue for the *reanimated* mobs. And they don't happen too terribly often.

However, when you have one *almost* dead... and it reanimates or empowers? Its goddamn annoying.

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Holy shitsnacks!

Man. I spent hours and hours after last week's raids looking at our WoL reports for Deathwhisper, seeing what went as planned, what did not go as planned, what was killing us, etc etc. I run the math and find that our current strat, executed properly, should manage.

Then we go there this week and we run the strat with emphasis on adds and... still not working.

We changed some things around. I wasn't really paying attention at the time to details on add assignments likely in despair that my awesome planning was not resulting in a win. And the next attempt we crush her, getting to P2 in under 5 and a half minutes minutes (we were struggling to hit about 7 minutes before) and adds being cleared way faster. If most of our raid didn't die to ghosts (second time ever in P2, and everyone kinda excitable after 892734234 attempts of fail) it would've been an awesome kill.

It still doesn't make sense to me, but alright. :p I'll see if I can find out how we arranged dps!

And as to physical vs spell, it's not a terribly rare thing for physical classes/specs to be pretty heavily invested in spell damage nowadays. In checking my Marrowgar kill this week, I'm seeing Ret Pallies run around 41% of their damage being physical (though Exorcism skews this number lower than it should be, I suppose), which can definitely suck for Deathwhisper. For sake of comparison, I see Blood DKs (the physical-friendly spec of the class) run ~76% physical in single target situations with all their AE damage spell-based, Enhancement Shamans circa 55% physical, Survival Hunters around 50% physical. We don't have any muti Rogues but I think they have a good chunk of their damage through poisons, as well. DPS wars, Marksman hunters, Combat Rogues are pretty heavily all physical, and perhaps you can include Blood DKs since they probably won't be lower than 65% physical damage even in AE situations. Outside that, Blizzard mixes in a hefty dose of spell damage for everyone else. Just something to be dealt with, and not a reason to sit out your Ret Pallies.

Yeah. as far as *pure* physical damage?

There's Me and a Fury Warrior. The other rogue's Mut, and we have a ret and a dk. all of our other DPS is ranged. like 4 hunters, 4 mages, 2-3 locks, a shadow priest or two...

Yeah. Deathwhisper's a pain.

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Holy shitsnacks!