We had to power through LDW on Heroic. Basically, had to tell the raid we wouldn’t move on until we had killed it on Heroic and people started prioritizing movement over their perceived personal DPS. Took a while, but eventually people got the picture. It does suck having the summer boss to face on top of it, though. We’ve been recruiting our asses off in order to have the right players in for Heroic LK (P3 tonight, hopefully). The thing I like about my guild is that we’re not just hanging back and being complacent even though there’s only about 7 more resets (if MMO is correct) before Cataclysm drops. Good luck on progression.
Before Cata, or before 4.0? Seven resets would put it barely a week or two past Blizzcon.
From MMO-Champion:
Just going off of this post from today. Take it for what it’s worth.
If that’s correct, then we really don’t even have 7 weeks of progression left. Once 4.0 hits everything will be so fucked up that raiding might be impossible. New talents, new resources, new stat ratings and weightings.
Guess it’s almost time to just cut bait on progression and get things lined up for Cata - and maybe take a few weeks off to recharge. I got way more progression out of this expansion (and especially ICC) than I ever dreamed when I started playing.
Now I have to decide if I want to keep my hunter in his 25-man group (which, admittedly, is at best an average “serious” raid) or just move him back to Cairne and focus on 10-mans with players I know and like there. Decisions, decisions…
Had a healing problem over the weekend. As a level 60 druid, in Hellfire Ramparts (first BC dungeon), running with a 60 pally tank. He had 5700 HP, but I could not keep him alive, and I don’t know why. He was taking massive damage. I stacked my HoTs, spammed wild growth, blew Swiftmend and Nature’s Swiftness, and still lost him several times.
Did notice that his gear score was only around 800, which seems low–mine is over 1300, with heirloom gear. Also noticed whenever he went down, another guy in plate would take over tanking, and I had no problem at all keeping the other guy alive–but he was not taking the intial barrage of damage from a full pull, either.
So…bad/under-geared tank, or healer-fail?
If you were having no problem with the other tank, I’d say he’s (the first tank) got lousy gear. But then, I’m not a gear maven, so I may be wrong.
No one was there, so no one can answer the question. The tank’s gear doesn’t sound unreasonable for entry level TBC.
Heh. I did the same thing on Saturday night. Three hours on Sindragosa trying to get “All You Can Eat.” This is the second-to-last one for most of us (last one is LK, but that’s easy comparatively speaking).
Kind of frustrating weekend for me, raid-wise. I don’t know how much of it is just me being paranoid, but I keep feeling like I’m getting mixed messages about my tanking in the main raid. We’ve gone from having not enough tanks to having too many (they took on another DK tank app even though they knew I was main-swapping as soon as I got Shadowmourne, and then last week they took on another paladin tank app, bringing our tank total to 5 (6, really, except one seems to be gravitating toward DPS). We have one warrior (tank lead/officer), three paladins (one veteran, the guy who’s gravitating to DPS, and the app) and two DKs (me and the app they took on the week I main-swapped). Suddenly what’s been a fun raiding experience is starting to feel like an extended audition, and it doesn’t help that the tank lead is very stingy with praise but not with constructive criticism (don’t get me wrong–he’s a good guy and his criticisms are good and useful–but it would be nice to hear a “good job” occasionally). Unfortunately, I’m one of those kinds of people who tend to multiply screw-ups–when I’m confident, I do great. When I mess up, my mess-up calls in friends and they have a party. But I get frustrated because it seems like some folks get away with more mistakes than others, and I seem to be one of those who’s in the “doesn’t” category.
I dunno–just venting. But anybody else in raiding guilds ever had to deal with this? I feel like I’m in constant fear of getting cut (which isn’t even rational, because nobody’s mentioned a word about it) which undermines my confidence. Thing is, I know I’m a good tank. I was fine in the alt raid (which is almost as progressed as the main raid). I’m fine in our 10 man hard mode group. It’s just this raid, where I feel like I’m under a microscope constantly, where it’s causing problems. Advice would be appreciated. Right now my strategy is “plug along until Cataclysm, where hopefully things will shake out.”
We had houseguests this weekend, so I didn’t get much done in WoW except for the daily heroics on my two mains. However, my priest got put in a CoS run that decided to go for the “Zombiefest” achievement and got it 
. It makes me want to go after the half-dozen or so heroic achievements I’m lacking (including, maddeningly, “Less-rabi.”)
Is this really that bad? Is zerging not an option? What type of DPS is required to get her down before 6 stacks (assuming 1 tank and 1 or 2 healers).
That doesn’t sound like much fun. Have you tried having an off-line discussion with the raid lead (which sounds like is also the main tank) about this? You’re playing a game, and it should be fun, not work (IMO). I don’t necessarily agree with the “plug along, it’ll work out” mentality - that type of thinking often just makes things worse. Most likely you’re doing fine, but it’s not coming across that way during the raid. Just asking the main tank after the run “hey, how did I do today?” might give you the type of feedback you need to keep your confidence up.
Also what I’ve seen while tanking is that you almost never get praised, but mistakes are very very noticeable. If I time a cool-down perfectly, or taunt an add right before it kills a DPS, nobody says a thing. If I miss-time the cool-down and die, or miss the taunt and the DPS dies, well, that gets noticed. You also don’t have the immediate feedback that a DPS can get from a meter.
Thanks for the quote–I can’t get to anything WoW-related from work. Veeeeeeery iiiiiiiinteresting.
Something I’m keeping in mind is that they’ve promised to give us a minimum of a month’s warning before removing any meta-achievement mounts from the game. So do we think we’ll get a one-month Cata warning, or will they remove the drakes sometime post-launch? (Or, though I doubt it, leave them in?)
Did you look at what he was actually wearing, and what his talents were? That will tell you way, way more than his GS, in the future.
Same here. I’ve just needed *these two *for quite some time now. If the scheduling genie smiles on us, we should be able to get a solid group this week: a guildie was looking to put together a group, so those interested folks + the good ones from the PUG should = faceroll through everything.
Ugh, I hate that. Six tanks is definitely too many, and even five can be pushing it, depending on your class spread and availability. There’s just no way to efficiently work that many people into a single 25-man raid with any real consistency, at least in ICC, where you’re looking at only two tanks for the majority of the encounters.
Since you asked for advice, here’s mine: talk to your RL and the tank lead about this. Preferably in Vent, all three of you at the same time. Be explicit that you want to know both what you’re doing wrong and what you’re doing right. Tell them that their decision to bring in a new DK tank when you were switching over has made you feel like your position is in question. Give them concrete examples of times that you feel your mistakes were treated harshly while others’ were glossed over.
In the case of the “why am I getting picked on for this,” unfortunately that’s something that happens a lot with tanks. Other people can fuck up and it doesn’t cause a wipe, but we end up getting held to a higher standard than most of the raid because our mistakes are generally (a) way more visible and (b) way more costly. It may not be fair, and it may not be fun, but them’s the breaks, and to an extent, that’s what we signed up for.
But do talk about this with the leadership for your raids. If you’re feeling this way, it’s not healthy to let it fester, and it’s possible they had no idea the impression they were giving off or the kind of feedback that’s helpful for you, personally.
You can zerg it, but it requires 14,000 DPS, which means you pretty much need a Shaman for Hero/BL, which we didn’t have. The timing can also be very tight–if you’re shy by so much as a second and someone ticks over to six stacks, you almost certainly won’t be able to wipe it in time to try again–DOTs will carry her over the edge–burning your chance until next week.
Doing it the traditional way–by everyone just dropping their stacks as you go–shouldn’t really be that hard, especially with the strat I had us using (first block goes to the head and both tanks drop their stacks at it), which eliminates the worst of the RNG (i.e., after that, the tanks should be dropping at anywhere from 2-4 stacks, giving us a nice margin of error). All of our problems came in from people tunneling on boss and not dropping stacks, people failing repeatedly at LOSing, people running the wrong way to drop their ice tombs, people running along with the person getting tombed and spawning extras, people with the tomb not running out of the group, etc.
We tried zerging–apparently it works better with a paladin tank, because they can do a quick bubble and clear stacks, then re-taunt the boss. But as we discovered, having a paladin DI the tank (me, a DK) and then have me click it off and taunt didn’t work. I think next week we’re going to try it with the paladin tanking (he’s not normally a tank but he has a decent offset and he knows what he’s doing). I think DPS is fine–possibly a bit low, but we’ll see.
Yeah, you might be right. I don’t know how much of this stuff is just perception on my part, and how much of it is really there. I’m hypersensitive about it now that we have so many tanks, because I’m constantly measuring myself against the rest of them. I haven’t seen the new pally in action much. The new DK has some issues as well, but nothing horrible. The veteral pally is very good. The warrior is very good but he also makes some real corker mistakes occasionally (like the one last night, where he taunted the Lich King off me accidentally (he was the add tank, I was the MT), which then caused me to have to take a few seconds to find him and get him back (many ghouls, a couple of shambling horrors–tab targeting wasn’t really an option). Nobody died right there, but it threw off our rhythm…and I got sat after that in favor of the veteran pally. But the warrior stayed in. (In all fairness, this might have been the plan all along–give me two or three shots at getting practice and then bring in the experienced tank. But it still felt like a bit of a punishment).
Exactly. If that’s just something I’m going to have to get used to, then that’s fine. I just need to shake this feeling that I’m the only one getting criticized, and everybody else is just skating along either doing fine or not getting called on their blunders.
Just did some math and it seems with 1 tank and 1 healer (pally preferably) it takes about 14k from each DPS to beat that 6th stack. Under BL with pots and not switching for ice tombs that seems reachable with our best comp (I know our fire mage can pretty easily do >20k during an execute, and the hunter, lock, and boomkin should be able to also). Anybody here that can confirm this working for the 10-man achievement? Obviously an ice tomb on the Pally would fuck us over, but that seems less RNG than trying it the “normal” way.
Although, yeah, that strat from SFG is probably pretty safe - the key is for both tanks to clear the first tomb, and have nobody tunnel on the boss… I guess we’ll probably try that first and then try the zerg is people are repeatedly failing the normal way.
So, what’s the key to Full House (probably the only other moderately annoying one).
I kinda think maybe they’ll leave them in. I mean, why not? People will be working on the new mounts anyways. Anything that gets people doing old content has to be considered a plus from Blizz’s perspective - and the only people with grounds to complain are the ones that earned them when they were relevant, which in many ways they’ve already reaped the reward from (flying them while they were relevant).
A friend’s 25-man group was doing ToGC this weekend because apparently someone was scared that the achievement or title or something was going away soon… any idea what they might have been talking about? I didn’t miss a blue post did I? Not that I ever have any intention of going back to ToC anyways…
An alternative that I’ve heard suggested is convert the rarest of them to a rare-drop (Mimi’s head, Invincible).
Full House is a pain in the ass. The way we did it is to burn her down to about 15% shield strength (10 if you can be sure the DoTs won’t take her the rest of the way), then kill all the adds on one side (this was on 25) each time they came out, concentrating on the other side. Each time you get one of the desired types, you assign somebody to CC it (kite it, sheep it, cyclone it, tank it, whatever). Once you have them all, you burn down her shield FAST and hope that she doesn’t empower one of your normals. There’s a certain amount of RNG with it, but if that’s in your favor then that’s the strat that worked for us.
Quoting myself a lot today… but just saw this on MMO:
And, to back up what I said about 4.0 probably breaking ICC progression:
It actually sounds like the 4.0 changes might be such a buff that we’ll get a few more down just from that… 
I’ve been having roughly the same experience trying to get my Glory of the Hero drake. I find myself uncomfortably amazed that our ICC10HM mage can miss that damn mammoth’s interrupt timer no less than a half-dozen times in a row.
Don’t blame the mage too much–that achievement is so RNG dependent. A little too much latency and the fastest reaction time in the world won’t get it for you. The only way we ever got it was by accident–we had several DPS with interrupts and they just hit them when they felt like it was the right time. That last one is a nightmare.
If you have ICC10HM gear, you can just zerg the hell out of Less-Rabi. I did it recently with 4 DPS (1 Ret that had Righteous Fury on) and me healing. He only cast the transformation once before he died, and we didn’t have a shaman. Other times I’ve done it, we just used Heroism/Bloodlust and zerged it down as well.
However, I have gotten multiple PUGs the achievement on the classes I have with an interrupt (mage/paladin/DK/shaman) because there’s a particular timing to the almost instant cast transformation that he’ll cast as his 3rd attempt at transforming or the transformation that he tries to do after reaching 50%. Basically, I just count 3 seconds off in my head (1 one thousand, etc.) and hit the interrupt. Has worked flawlessly for me thus far.
I’ve been trying my hand at leveling a Protection paladin on my RP server. I’m hoping to have better luck with it than I’ve had trying to learn the prot spec via dual-speccing my main paladin. Trying it on my main was, I think, giving me the same problem I have with DKs - too many new abilities all at once and trying to learn how make them all work together at the same time. So I’m trying the “start from level 1 and learn each new ability as I go along” method.
But Dear Og … prot pally killing is very, very, very slow going, at least at these lower levels (this toon is level 28). I attempted to solo Deadmines last night for the pally hammer quest (don’t really need the 2-hander, and I’m about to overlevel it anyway, but I want to complete the quest “just because”). While I was at it I ran through the Westfall quest chain that leads to killing VanCleef. Figured as long as I was entering Deadmines, I may as well do the whole thing. I got as far as Sneed before I finally relented and accepted a guildie’s offer to come help me (he was a lvl 54 prot pally). I was staying alive just fine, but I was getting insanely frustrated with all those non-elite miners in there draining all my mana via all the Consecrations I was having to drop under them (there are passages that are too narrow to sneak through without aggroing those guys, and every time I’d pull an elite mob, he’d drag 2-3 non-elite miners along with him), and also flabbergasted at how long it was taking to kill non-elite mobs that were nine levels lower than me. I’m not accustomed to needing 5-6-7 hits (in addition to Consecration and my Judgement) to kill something that much lower than me. Also, let me just say that elite mobs in dungeons should not be “running away in fear”. Harrumph.
OTOH, thanks to this other guildie, I learned something new about Hand of Reckoning: you can use it on mobs that are running away, and it will damage them. I never knew that - on my main I somehow overlooked HoR until much higher levels, at which point “runners” were no longer an issue, so the only thing I’ve ever used HoR for is pulling (and taunting back those mobs in heroics that get away from the tank and head for the healer). The spell’s description says it only does damage to mobs I’m not already in combat with, and it never occurred to me that a runner is considered “not in combat” for the purpose of HoR. I mean, I can’t sit down and eat/drink while a mob is running away — I’m still considered “in combat” — so I didn’t think it would be any different for HoR.
On the general subject of low-level toons (since I’m leveling several on my RP server), I’ve getting kind of frustrated with the DPS progression of weapon upgrades for lower-level melee characters. You get your starting weapon which does something like 1.1 DPS. Then the first upgrade you get via quest reward increases that weapon DPS by +1. Okay, that’s fine at level 4. But then say I buy a weapon at level 24 that “requires level 24”, and I use that weapon until level 28, whereupon I visit the AH again and find an “upgrade” that “requires level 28”. And I see that weapon’s DPS increase over my existing weapon is … +1. I understand that there’s also the STR increases with each level to factor in, as well as +stats from other gear, but even so, +1 DPS is just so negligible that it doesn’t seem to make any difference at all in combat at that level. At level 5, +1 DPS is massive. At level 28, it’s laughable.