heroics need improvement

I had the fun the other day of participating in some Steamvault runs where we used exactly no Crowd Control on the mobs. The tanks weren't paladins either. We were able to just run in, DPS like hell, and kill everything without drawing aggro off the tank too much, and were able to deal with their special abilities. Our group was full of skilled players that knew what to do, and we didnt even have to mark anything. It was refreshing and fun, and since I needed Cenarion Expedition rep, rewarding as well.

Meanwhile you have Heroic 5-mans, are painful to me still, even with my raiding gear. The problem is that since the trash mobs have been elevated to stupid high levels of power, you can't reliably use offtanks anymore, and too many targets hitting on the tank is right out. You certaintly can't have anything attacking somone in cloth or leather. Ever. And any run with 2 dedicated tanks is going to run into trouble as the DPS will be lacking and the healer will be overstressed. The run then devolves into hoping CC goes as according to plan, and hoping your healer doesnt run out of mana. This also heavily forces thte group to pick DPS based on their CCing abilities alone.

In all, its no longer fun. The moment CC breaks, the monster will run off and probably kill one or two people before there is even time to react. All of the effort in the run is directed at figuring out how to approach and execute the trash pulls, and almost all the wipes are directly due to some mistake during a trash pull. Effectively, the effort the party spends on the boss is shifted over to the trash mobs. It's not that the bosses aren't challenging, its just that usually the trash pulls are far more difficult. The problem with this is that for the entire run, the only thing thats really worth killing are the bosses. They hold the badges, they drop the BoP gems, they drop the items. The only wortwhile thing left to be gained from killing trash is reputation rewards, but by the time you clear a heroic, chances are you could have cleared it twice in normal mode, receiving more reputation.

Itemization wise, most Heroic mode drops are worse than items you can get in Karazhan. While Karazhan trash may be strong, there are enough player slots to allow for multiple Tanks and Healers, and more CC options. The end result is that Karazhan is actually easier to do, and gives better rewards than Heroics, with the only downside of needing an additional 5 people to do it.

To their credit, Heroics do breath in new life to old encounters and bosses, and are good PvE endgame for people who are unwilling or unable to raid. For raiders, they are mostly overlooked, only gaining new life because of the Daily quests to do them. To fix Heroics for me, Blizzard would have to change the Trash from being their current "hits harder, has more life" model and implement something more interesting, by either changing their behavior/abilities, or introducing additional trash mobs to fight entirely.

raid report: reminding myself why i hate ZA

Our guild doesn't really run ZA agressively at all. We've downed the Lynx boss, but we don't take it nearly as seriously as 25-man bosses, where we are required to study strategies before the first pull.

Part of the problem is that we haven't learned the content, so we end up wiping on something that is supposed to be "post Karazhan Level", with a team of people that can flash fry Nightbane and Prince. The bear boss and the trash leading up to him are bearable (PUN!). But then we get to the Eagle boss and our strategy still isnt perfect. His gauntlet is really annoying, and when we do fight him our agreed upon strategy is to collapse just before he launches somone into the air, but this leaves us super wide open for his Static Disruption. Personally I think this might be dealing fatal blows to us, since the debuff from his chain lightning is quite punishing.


We tried not killing the birds the first two times but it wasn't working out at all. While DPS can handle a few interruptions, our healers aren't geared enough to a point where they can handle interruptions and heal the raid.


We were getting ready for our fourth attempt, when we hit the gauntlet respawn timer. 30 minutes is entirely too short for learning the encounter. Thats when we decided to stop the raid and go off to Karazhan, chain pulling our way through Opera before calling it a night.

the raid boss formerly known as prince

Currently known as "that jacakss that will randomly wipe us and theres nothing we can do about it".

Despite the fact we are inches away from breaking into SSC proper, there are still useful items to be found for people in Karazhan. Maybe not gear that they need for boss fights, but Tanks/Healers can always use a DPS set, and DPS can always use a set that isnt saturated with +hit stats when they are just farming or doing 5 mans... and alts need love too!

In a somewhat humbling experience we wiped on Prince.
3 times in a row.
2% 8% and 8%.

On the positive side, when we finally did kill him, we didnt shard a single thing he dropped afterwards.

(This isn't a formal raid report because I was just dragged in on an off day to help some recruits/alts get some gear from Prince before the reset timer.)

bah humbug

I'm all for the holiday season. It's great! Gift giving, spending time with family and loved ones, ridiculous amounts of red and green decorations, pretending that donating $0.37 to the red cross donation buckets will make a difference, but December is really just a black hole of a month where Raiding goes to die.

At the start of December all the school age guild members are busy preparing for finals and studying, or going to parties after finals are done, by Mid december, a lot of people leave behind their WoW computers to go somewhere else for the holidays. I know this is the situation for me, soon I'll have to say goodbye to my WoW computer as I spend 2 weeks at my parents house, and I know a lot of our guild members have already just done this.

We were missing 10 people for attempting Lurker Below, and all of the healers that were saved to the first Karazhan group. I ended up doing 2 heroic dungeon runs instead. Which was kind of nice, because I've felt ever since I got thrust into raiding ("No, we dont care that youre in greens and blues, we need more warm bodies") I have had hardly any time to run 5-mans, much less heroics. But at the same time, raiding turns down the volume on 5-mans. The boss fights -- which at one time seemed at least somewhat dangerous -- are now trivial and easily overcome. But thats probably just because I have twice as much shadow spell damage as I did back then.

But at the same time, it really sucks when you lose raiding momentum. It took us a while to down Gruul, but now that he is on farm we realize the critical mistake we were making in allowing the raid to show up without consumables. Magtheridon took a month for us to kill, but in reality, only one week, as the other weeks we were struggling with just getting people to actually show up to the raids. It'd be a nice Christmas gift to get Lurker and Reaver down before I have to run off, but its probably not happening.

Personally, I'd like to get through all of SSC, TK, MH, BT, and the unreleased Sunwell content before the next expansion pack drops, but guesstimating that we have some 12 months before WotLK drops, we'll be lucky to get through Kael'Thas before we all go running off to Northrend.

why the current arena system is lame

As a player in general - not just a raider - I have an issue with the current Arena gear distribution system.

Its not that I consider them welfare epics. If Arena gear is welfare epics then that makes all reputation reward, crafted, and badge reward items welfare epics. The only real welfare epics were the things Headless Horseman dropped in my opinion, and that new item they added in Scarlet Monastery. And I'm pretty sure the latter only exists because they wanted to fuck around with people who make BG twinks. Back on point: from what I understand, having a set of Arena gear is necessary to compete in there, and I dont want them to change it so only the best teams have the best gear. Thats stupid.

Its not that I'm bitching about the stats. New seasons are necessary to prevent Johnny Q. Raider from coming into Arena's and being unstoppable because stuff he got from the latest instance is too powerful compared to Arena gear. Furthermore, for all of the Arena's +stats, the Arena gear really sucks for raiding. It doesn't have avoidance stats, so you can't tank in it. It doesn't have enough of the required stats for raid healing. And it doesnt have enough +hit to make it useful for DPS on anything beyond Gruuls Lair. It can fill gear gaps a raider might have in the middle of SSC, but with the new badge gear, ZA gear and various professions these gaps should have been filled by now. Similarly if you desire epics for grinding mobs or doing 5-mans, heroics and badge rewards fill out the armor slots quite nicely and easily.

The only Arena gear that can really interest raiders are the weapons, and now that weapons are getting ratings locked, its really more of a problem on Blizzards end with not properly itemizing encounters. One well documented case is that sword rogues pretty much have to PvP to get decent swords for raiding. This is not the fault of the Arena system having too good of items, but the fault of the itemization team for not including enough swords. Its easily fixed: there needs to be more loot tables like Prince Malchezaar, where you are gauranteed an armor token, a nice weapon, and something extra. On a more extreme side, Blizzard could reintroduce raiding weapon quests, where a quest item can drop that multiple classes can use and then assemble tradegoods and raid drops to create a nice weapon.

My problem is the cosmetics. With raiders, having unique looking gear is one of the side benefits of fighting bosses. Dont get me wrong, I'm not "raiding for the items". The items themselves become the battle trophies of the amount of effort you put into raiding. And while WoWJutsu is nice, its not nearly as built in as Arena ratings. I think this "gear as a trophy" mechanic is an important mechanic. Blizzard thinks so too, which is why S3 shoulders are ratings locked.

But in Arena, after a certain point, everyone starts to look the same from all scrambling to get the same, best gear. My proposition is this: allow gladiator/pvp gear to be upgraded stat wise at a discount, while at the same time ratings lock the newer items. The upgrade itself is a special kind of enchantment that takes up a special "arena enchantment" slot the item has, that doesnt overwrite standard enchantments. The discount should be great enough that it is cheaper for a newcomer to grab the oldest season items and upgrade them to the current season. The discount could be at least some sort of Arena point reduction, but perhaps contain a gold and/or honor point component. To not trivialize getting the newest Arena gear entirely, the "arena enchantments" only apply in Battlegrounds and Arenas -- perhaps only a weakened amount in the Battlegrounds.

This has 3 intended effects:
Removes the barrier for new gladiators even more.
Removes gear gaps that shouldnt exist in pure PvP competition faster.
Enhances the "items as trophies" mechanic on the newest season of items.

There also really needs to be a difference between the Arena gear and Raiding gear. I'm not saying Arena gear should look crappy, I'm saying it should look different. Raiding gear should and does look like you ripped it away from whoever was holding onto it and took it for your own use. PvP gear should look like it is worn by battle hardened elite, who are victorious in the field of battle. A good example of PvP gear models are the old High Warlord/Grand Marshal plate armors. They're a little simple compared to todays current super-cool-animated-glowy-armor, but they're a nice starting point.

At the very least, if they are going to recolor raiding tiers for arena gear, at least make them look different enough that you can readily visibly tell if somone is wearing arena gear or a raiding tier. Good: Priest T5/S2 (though honestly I think the shadow set for T5 should look like S2, make S2 have red highlights or something). Bad: Warlock T5/S2.