You’ve tanked ICC, I’m pretty sure that you could have done last night’s dungeon with us pretty easily. Except for the fact that none of us would have known anything about what was going on.
I’m getting my comp upgraded so I can buy/install Cata. Once that happens I should be able to jump in and start leveling. I guess I should start with one of my tank-hybrids (druid or pally – druid is harder, right?) instead of my main mage. For the BDL!
The party structure has been a problem for me over the past many months. 1 tank, 1 healer, 3 dps. But dps is so much easier to do moderately well. Especially lately where it’s a total free-for-all. I’d love to know actual numbers for tanks v dps, but the queue times speaks loudly enough. (instant vs 20-35 min) I’m not sure if this is such a large problem that people are leaving the game, but it still bothers me. I wish they had created more variations of tanking or even paired-tanking (imagine a priest fearing and a mage/hunter slowing their running down) or more aggro grabbing effects ala Hand of Reckoning or Growl so people could yoyo a mob between them. Multi-mob pulls would be very interesting in this scenario.
I guess what I’m saying is: The small-unit tactics we are used to, are getting old and I think they need a re-vamp. Even if the only result would be to shorten queue times for me. (The other, simpler, possibility is to make tanking easier so more people could do it without special gear/talents)
/rant
Not necessarily. By and large, the easy-mode rep Paladins have is no longer warranted. Bears also tend to be one of the simpler tanks, although I’m not fully aware of how the game has changed for them.
As for the change-up in party composition, that’s one reason I’ve found renewed interest in City of Heroes. If a party has two front-line fighters, it’s entirely possible to split and do just as well.
A fair bit, the days of two button tanking are gone, I need to use five these days(got Swipe and Thrash in a castsequence macro, or it would’ve been six).
Did they mispell rutters? It’s been a while since I’ve done that quest…but rutters are legitimate sea-faring items. Specifically, they are descriptive maps, giving sailing directions and providing charts showing rhumb lines and the location of ports and various coastal features.
And Oak, yeah, totally didn’t think about Trade Chat - I always turn it off 
Well, that’s my New Thing of the Day to learn. It also explains why the icon is a rolled-up parchment rather than a piece of wood.
To be fair, I only know because of another videogame - Sid Meirs Pirates, in which rutters can be purchased to find new port towns to ransack 
I had to ask my sea-faring father what it meant back then!
Add me to the “Thank you, Mr. Woeg!” contingent. I had NO idea…now I feel like an idiot for spending so long being infuriated every time I started a baby belf.
ETA: No, they spelled “rutters” perfectly fine. What I thought they were misspelling was “rudders”.
My pleasure! 
And hey, don’t feel like an idiot. We aren’t born with encyclopedic knowledge, and really, how often are we to be expected to know 300+ year old nautical terms?
Don’t hold your breath on this one. Not only is the gear curve not skewing at nearly the rate that it was in Wrath, but the heroic mechanics are quite aggressive this time around, more so than in BC. The things that are supposed to kill you are going to kill you regardless of gear, such as a 25k DPS AOE, a 100% healing reduction, a boss getting healed for 5% of his HP every second, or a trio of adds who each have a special strike that hits the tank for 60% of whatever their maximum HP may be. This stuff can’t be brute-forced.
Getting shiny purples will take some of the edge off, but it won’t get groups through the dungeon who otherwise wouldn’t be making it. The biggest difference will be the player base absorbing the new mechanics as a whole. I don’t see it ever getting as faceroll as it was in late BC, much less the joke that WOTLK heroics were even pre-Naxx.
…unless they do like in BC and do a broad spectrum nerf to all the heroics, that is. So far there’s no hint of that even being considered, though.
I’ve also thought recently that the party structure could use a revamp, but i have absolutely no clue how it could be accomplished. Someone way more creative than me will have to find that solution lol
However, if the solution was to make tanking easier i would 100% against it. Easy tanking = boring tanking.
It seems like a heroics nerf is pretty much required. I don’t really understand why they did this design of mechanic/gimmick-heavy fights without a relevant barrier to entry. That’s basically the same design that poisoned the DotA community, which is unanimously agreed to be the worst gaming community.
New content always gets nerfed eventually. That’s been happening since Everquest, happened in EQ2, has happened to previous expansions in WoW, and will happen to Cata sooner or later. I expect some nerfage to happen relatively soon…within a month or two, and probably a more vigorous nerfing within the next year. Possibly in the next content patch.
Re: the difficulty discussion
I’m starting to wonder if maybe they plan on taking the same approach to the raids. As in: the normal modes can be completed with the same execution and gear you get from the normal mode dungeons, but if you want to do heroic you better be able to execute the heroic dungeons. This might actually be a pretty cool way to go about it… that way all content is available to the casuals, and and heroic everything (5mans & raids) is only really an option for the hardcore. I think i like it.
Also, question for those of you in leading edge guilds (mine is relatively casual, though we cleared all wotlk 10 man content on normal modes - the yogg kill probably being the one i’m most proud of because of when we got it in the patch release cycle). Since the loot for 25 mans is now the same as for 10 mans, do you think 25 man raids will die off? Or will your guilds stick together and keep doing it with 25?
Yeah, it can–at least gearing up makes it a lot easier. Having much higher DPS and HPS throughput on your damage dealers and healers makes a huge difference: the former because you kill the boss before it can toss out more than a cycle or two of its gimmicks, and the latter because you can more easily cope with things like DPS who can’t move out of the fire without going OOM. Almost every Heroic wipe I’ve had so far was the result of the healer going OOM, mainly because one or more players took too much avoidable damage.
The “barrier to entry” is the real sticky point as far as I’m concerned. Right now, the RDF queue is crammed full of people who “qualify” based on a sampling of the gear in their bags, but they don’t pump out the right numbers and/or can’t cope with the fight mechanics.
IMO, there should be some sort of requirement to unlock the Heroic version of an instance–e.g., run it a minimum of three times on Normal difficulty. That would help ensure a higher gear level, too.
The DPS in my guild who can’t get other raiding guild members for their randoms have been complaining, and they’re right: it blows to wait in a 40 minute queue for a Heroic, only to have one or more PUGs who have no business being in there yet.
My guild plans to stick with 25s, though we were running 10s this first lockout as people are gearing up. I know a lot of others are, too. IIRC, 25-man drops proportionately more loot, so there’s one incentive. 25-man raids have also carried more cachet than 10-mans, and it might take a while for that to change, if it ever does. We’ll have to see how the new balance of mechanics plays out.
SFG, Unfortunately I DID download the upgraded driver through Windows, but fortunately so far it hasn’t given me any problems.
Thanks
Q
You should be all right–99% of the time it goes fine. It’s just the other 1% can sometimes end up spectacularly bad.
Maybe they can bring back attunement. Or keys…say an “extra” final boss for the normal mode of an instance that is switchable by some player mechanic. If you have the boss switched on, you can make a kill attempt after you clear the normal instance, and the boss would drop the key to heroic.
If I as an alliance player go to a Horde flight point will the flight guy kill me? Is there any benefit to getting a horde flight point? If i do get killed would I resurrect at a Horde graveyard or the nearest Alliance graveyard? Will a horde merchant purchase my stuff and would a Horde armorer repair my stuff or kill me? I am in north Stranglethorn and was just wondering about the different areas.
Even though the flight master cons red, he won’t attack you if you just go near him. But if you click on him as you would with your faction’s flight master, you WILL attack him and he’ll eat your face.
Horde NPCs will not interact with you. Some won’t attack, but you can’t open vendor windows with any of them.