That sure is the truth. Reading your post gave me a flash back to BC: Remember advertising for DPS intead of “LFM DPS Heroic ____” , it was “LFM CC Heroic ______”. Especially if you already had dps without CC capabilities.
And now I have to relate my “OMG I haven’t had to worry about this in SOOOO long…” story.
At one point, the group wanted a second CC (after the mage, who was sheeping like a pro). That would be… me, Marksman Huntard extraordinaire.
Here’s the wrinkle. I haven’t had to worry about CC… at all… since BC. And Blizz changed how hunters deploy traps (Trap Launcher). And therefore I’ve had little practice at using the thing.
I popped launcher, which functions as a modifier for a normal trap drop… and waited for the go signal… which I got just before the Trap Launcher timed out.
“Wait, it times out? <expletive>!” I’m standing there with a freeze trap at my feet and the third mob moving out after the tank.
Yeah. I never had Trap Launcher time out. I didn’t realize it would, although logically it has to; otherwise you’d be committed to launching the next trap you want to drop, at least until you log out… But, bad timing. And I guess, my bad for not realizing the potential for timeout and waiting for the pull signal to enable the thrower.
I am out of practice, indeed, on what was once part of my bread-and-butter. I blush to admit it, but I’m committed to getting better. I’m proud to play a huntard, and I want to bring my unique skills to wherever they’re needed in the group or raid.
(On the upside, I’m proud that my DPS is finally topping 8K reliably, in mostly quest greens and some blues. It’s getting better, and the rotation is starting to feel more natural.)
I finally got Cata and jumped immediately into a random with Muz (Tom Scud). I thought it was really fun. I got some new exercise interrupting the bosses. Thank you DVE! We had a hunter who would out-CC me, so that was ok. And even with only one UG to my gear (thanks Kene) I think I held up my end in dps. Now to put my 10Gobby on the shelf while I catch up to my doggies!
There’s a lot of AOE DPS going out in the new fights, especially on Heroic. Some of it is just there to challenge the healers, but a lot of it is really avoidable. So if you’re taking a lot of damage, it’s probably because (a) a boss ability isn’t getting interrupted, (b) the tank is facing the boss the wrong way, or (c) you’re standing in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The Heroic version of the fight is that he actually summons adds. I’ve never pulled adds along with him on normal, but it’s possible that you could use the same mechanic to dispatch them: have DPS focus on the boss, and then kill the adds using his smash ability after you break out of the chains (by rooting/snaring them close to the boss, and/or having the tank run out at the last second).
ToT for sure is a gorgeous instance, as is VP.
IIRC, their flight speed averages out to about 400%, or maybe peaks at that–if you watch while you fly, you may note that some times you’ll be going very quickly, and other times you’ll be going slowly. The official lore explanation for the taxis is that they’re patrols who are letting you ride along, so they almost never take a direct route anywhere. In any zone where you can fly yourself, even at only 150% speed, they’re really only worthwhile for AFK travel. (And even then, if you’re only going to step away for a minute, you’re better to just aim yourself and hope you don’t overshoot by the time you come back.)
That was my initial impression, but I’m pretty sure that I clarified more recently that it’s actually something you do through your keybinds menu. Oh well.
IMO, you should always do the intro quests for any zone that you intend to quest in, because that’s what unlocks its portal in your faction’s capital city. It seems to me that in order to unlock the portal, you mostly have to get to a point where you have access to an Innkeeper–at least, that was the case with Uldum. For Twilight Highlands, there was an actual quest to open the SW portal.
You *could *just fly to the zones, but that takes a tedious amount of time. Keeping your hearth in the capital with the portals also lets you easily bounce around from zone to zone for faction dailies, as well as keeping you close to Cooking/Fishing/JC dailies, the AH, and the Bank.
Same here–I’d been looking forward to that one. The next couple aren’t that great, though, IIRC. Personally, I’m rather put out that they cut the knees out from under guild leveling. At this rate, everybody is going to hit the same ranks at the same times, and old guilds will have a massive advantage over new ones.
A DK can kite pretty well using Chains of Ice, which is useful on some fights. A Feral Druid would have to shift forms to do it, but they do have a root (Roots) and a CC (Sleep Beast). It’s Warriors who really get the shit end of the stick here. “Ohai gusy, we’re making this expac all about CC, and then we’re not giving you any.”
It’s 5% of everything you loot, right? I’m pretty sure my guild is already pushing the 50k achievment there, so that would be an extra 2500. It’s not a huge amount of money, but it’s nothing to sneeze at. Especially with (so far) lower repair costs–a death was costing me under 7g yesterday, with no rep discount; that’s probably less than half of what it was in mostly 277 gear at 80.
On a Pale Horse is a 20% speed bonus. Mount Up is 10% and it doesn’t stack with other boosts. So if you’re 2/2, you probably want to keep it, but if you’re 1/2, you can drop it if you don’t need the other benefit (I think it does something other than just increase your speed, but I don’t remember what).
Huh. Reading this, I realize that none of my main characters have much of anything in the way of CC - my shadow priest can cc undead, of which I think I have seen precisely zero so far; my DK has, uh, his ghoul can stun stuff for like 2 seconds; my Lock is probably the best off, with the elemental/demon CC plus his succubus’s CC on humanoids.
I do intend to go back to Gadge and start those “Go to Uldum” quests when I’m appropriate-level. I just flew to it first because a) I wanted to see it and b) I was looking for those huge flocks of tender sheep that people were talking about in order to push my guild’s critter killing achievement up. Never did find the sheep. But I did hearth back to Org and start the Vash quests after I dinged “Explore Uldum” (via wyvernback, of course).
ETA: And then, of course, I started a goblin (Dieshorribly) and a worgen (Wurrwilf), so I haven’t been on my 80 since early Tuesday evening…
Interrupts. That’s the OTHER thing that hasn’t been much in demand until this release. However, I’ve always liked doing Silencing Shot, so that’s not such a radical shift for me. The glyph of Silencing Shot, which returns focus for a successful interrupt, makes it gravy. The long CD (20 sec) on SS would have reduced my usefulness as an interrupter a lot, but… I’ve started using Scatter Shot as a second interrupt. It’s not a silence, and it’s not useful against bosses (I don’t think), but it does interrupt an active cast for most trash mobs at least, and allows me to bridge the Silencing Shot CD in those cases. It worked out well last night. I’m happy about this epiphany.
It never ceases to amaze me how much of a difference having good people in your group makes. Yesterday’s Heroics were SFK and BRC: but wheras a previous SFK run broke up on the third boss and a previous BRC was smooth sailing, this time it was completely reversed.
Really, the only problem with SFK was having very few interrupts–there was just mine and the Mage’s, and his was on a pretty long CD. That meant we were taking way more Pain and Suffering damage on the first boss than we should have been, because I had him tasked to watch for Mend Rotting Flesh while I got PnS and his post-Suffocation heal. So when he’d cast a PnS shortly after I’d interrupted the heal, we’d end up just eating the damn thing. But the third boss–the Commander dude–who’d given us so much trouble on my previous run (I was DPSing that one, not tanking) went down pretty easily last night, with only one or two wipes. I think it helped a lot that I very early figured out that I could just tank him up on the stage, switching sides back and forth as he’d drop his ground AOE.
Then came the BRC from hell. First, people weren’t paying attention on the Netherspite fight, so we had different people get CC’d a couple of attempts in a row. (These are smart players, too–Light of Dawn titles they didn’t get carried to. You’d think somebody who could move out of Defile and Shadow Trap could keep an eye on their stacks and not fuck around by trying to push it as high as possible…) The healer “DC’d” after those attempts, probably a stealth log. Everybody behaved themself for the next healer… who then dropped group because apparently they were only interested in the Santa hat. Just as I pulled a big pack of adds. Fortunately, I was able to pop CDs to keep myself alive while someone else requeued us and pulled another healer in. Who was in almost all greens and couldn’t even keep me alive on trash. Sigh. So we pulled in another healer… Also in mostly greens. Who couldn’t deal with the AOE damage going out on the next boss. Argh. So we pulled in a guild healer. But by this time I was getting tired and frustrated, which is not a good way to be on a fight that requires the tank to constantly kite a boss in and out of a tiny area that it’s impossible to see the fucking edges of with a very small margin of error for timing. So I stepped out for a bit to take a breather. I came back in on the way to Beauty, as DPS for a while… but the tank they’d picked up kept breaking CCs, so I offered to take over, and we booted him when he kept going AFK. We also had a new healer at this point, because the guildie had to go. Beauty went down right away once I was tanking, and then it was on to the last boss. Where the healer went OOM from spamming heals on the person kiting the adds while they had the debuff. Facepalm. Fortunately the other DPS were on the ball and picked up the adds so we could finish burning the boss. But it was a brutal run, overall–I don’t know how long it lasted, but we had to re-clear trash in Steelbender’s room at one point on our way to a wipe recovery for one of the last two bosses, so it was probably somewhere in the range of three to four hours.
Shackle is amazing in instances with Undead, like SFK, which is crawling with them.
And still nobody uses them. The only time I tend to see anybody but me on the interrupt list is when I’m running with a guildie, and even then not all of the guildies do it. So damned frustrating.
Oh, yeah, Heroic SFK. Guess I’m just spoiled from Lich King, where every other mob was undead.
And re: interrupts - wonder if I should waste/spend the 3 talent points to get silence on my shadow priest. ponders
Yeah, I’m not going to go back now and try to find it, but it was either worded as, or I read it as, “make an Interact with target keybind macro”. I was a bit :dubious: about one of the comments on that article, where somebody said they just right-click on the NPCs nameplate. In all my time playing the game, right-clicking on a nameplate has been exactly like left-clicking on a nameplate - it simply selects the target — it doesn’t “interact” with the target; you have to right-click on the target’s actual body to interact. Unless this is a place where it works differently for Mac users.
I’m curious as to how it actually determines where the portal in SW sends you. It appears to me that it drops you right back at the last “safe” location you visited. Is it the “most recent” safe location visited, or the “furthest along the chain that you’ve visited” location? Say I’ve progressed through enough of the quest chain to “activate” six “inn” locations. If I take a seahorse “flight” back to the third “inn” and hearth to SW from there, is my next hop through the portal going to send me right back to the “inn” where I hearthed from, or to the sixth “inn” in the chain?
Well, my one-man guild is going to take forever to level 
I finally moved my warrior out of Dalaran and over to Vashj’ir. Whoa, what a difference a week makes, crowd-wise. I can already see one major difference for my warrior going through there: while my paladin has so far only replaced her weapon, a trinket, and I think a ring, my warrior is going to be equipping, for the time being, every single piece of plate she finds, regardless of whether it has DPS stats or Tank stats. Because even against the level 80 mobs, 23k HPs and mostly iLvl 200 gear just isn’t enough. She’s fine one-on-one, but as soon as a second mob joins in, she’s screwed. I was very put out during that early, scripted fight where you’re fighting alongside Captain Taylor against waves of attacking naga because Victory Rush did not work in that situation (because the naga you kill there grant no XP), so she lost her only self-heal for the duration and only survived because I was able to get her “out of combat” long enough to sit down and eat.
She did get lucky and find a “this item starts a quest” that my paladin missed. A crab dropped a treasure map, which gave her a quest to kill that named lobster-man, “Kliklak”, to obtain a key to open a chest. And in the chest was a very nice 2h axe that was a big improvement over her Titansteel Destroyer.
You can also glyph your Fear ability so that the target stays in one place instead of running off to aggro other mobs. It’s not the best CC ever, but it’ll work as long as people don’t break it.
Yeah, we’re pretty good kiters - I think I mentioned in this thread about kiting adds on some boss fights. But for your normal trash pull it’s not that helpful (can’t really kite those PITA casters - at least we have a pretty good silence).
But even kiting is something a hunter can do better (they can still attack the primary target while kiting if they’re good enough) and they also have a kickass CC (two if they’re Survival).
I’m not complaining - but group makeup is still very important, and often determinant if you survive or not in a PuG heroic.
I think it basically is something to sneeze at. That’s 2500g divided amongst how many players? And during a time when you’re all playing like crazy. My guild has 24k looted, according to the new armory (which is pretty buggy, so who knows). We’ve have 37 level 85s, and as far as I know they are all primary toons (maybe one person has two 85s, but I doubt it).
So, in likely our busiest two weeks we would have earned 2,400g (at the Rank 2 10% guild perk) to divide 37 ways. That’s a whopping 33g per person per week. That’s a meaningless amount, IMO.
Dual-wield frost only has one spare point for OaPH (which also provides a shortening of slow effects). Guess I’ll move that point to the reduced-cost interrupt.
Unless you plan to PvP in that spec, I wouldn’t. There should be other people in the group who can interrupt, unless you’re *really *unlucky.
Yeah, that’s how I initially had it explained to me, then when I actually did it, I found out that it was something you keybind through your menu.
IME it seems to be based on your quest progression, though certain portals will always drop you in the same place (in the zones that contain portals back to SW: Deepholm, Twilight Highlands, and Tol Barad).
2500g is 25 wipes in a 10-man raid at 10g per person (which is being very conservative with cost estimates). It’s not like the gold is just going to be split up among all members of the guild: its most useful when targeted at specific things, like grepairs for progression fights, helping specific people level their professions or buy new recipes that the guild needs, etc.
Ooh, thanks. I’d noticed that glyph before, but mentally filed it as a PvP glyph.
Actually, I’d say that making things run all over while feared is *preferable *for PvP. It’s in PvE that you want them to stay put so they don’t pull other things.
I’ve already forgotten what I made for you, but I’ve got a couple of patterns that you’d find useful. I’m at about 480 tailoring if you want to look up what gear can be crafted with that, or I can link it to you next time we’re both online.
I was going to point out that priests have no CC to speak of except on Undead, which Tom pointed out. Heroic SFK is about the only place that is at all useful - but we were spoiled in WotLK.
I talented into both Silence and Psychic Horror. Mainly because I was doing a lot of PvP before Cata came out and I haven’t bothered to respec, but I’ll probably keep them because I’ll probably continue to PvP a bit. So Psychic Horror, Silence and Psychic Scream gives us three interrupts if you want to spend your talents on two of them. (I think PH is a talent but I can’t look right now).
Priests have mind control, which, used correctly, is the best CC in the game. Used poorly, and it’s a dead priest and a lot of angry mobs.
Give me a couple of hours and I’ll have another 85.
That’s why I left my warrior to work on my shaman, all I can really do is interrupt and we have a surplus of tanks and DPS already. Having fun with the shaman though, healing is a lot more intense now.
Just ran through the new Ring of Blood, Crucible of Carnage, in Twilight Highlands. I won’t say too much about it other than it’s something you should check out and the Worgen guy is a beast. No pun intended.