For any DPS who are wondering if they’re geared enough to run Heroics, the new average seems to be 8-9k DPS. Speaking personally, I am also happy to have someone along who does slightly less DPS (7kish) but (a) can avoid damage mechanics that are avoidable; (b) uses their interrupts/CCs/silences properly; and (c) dispels as their class allows.
Also, we’re not the only ones who have noticed that Tol Barad is incredibly poorly designed.
For farming leather, I suggest all you skinners head to Deepholm. There are packs of stone bats that are neutral, aggro-linked, and have only about 5k hp. They’re very easy to AoE down, and skin for a leather each. On my hunter I can often multi-shot them to death before they get in melee range. They can be found from about 1/3 to 2/3 of the way out from the center, from about 8 o’clock to 12 o’clock. It helps if you have a way to drop combat, because there are some large elite mobs, and you will occasionally be attacked by small squads of roving flayers, but the elites can be avoided if you’re careful, and the flayers are pretty weak.
Ventured into my first Cata dungeon today, just normal Blackrock Caverns. Was super lucky on loot rolls though, I got a Santa Hat (??? Yeah I dunno), a very nice Hunter trinket, and a very nice new bow, Amber Messenger. Oh, and I almost hit 4k DPS, I was at 3977 and shaking my fist.
Almost done everything in Hyjal. I’m not entirely sure, but I might hit Loremaster there. Still thinking of whether or not to go to Vash’jir or go on to Deepholm after.
So I’m finding pieces of armour that will up my stats, but don’t have gem slots. Should I still upgrade to those? My GS goes down every time though. So confuzzled.
Oh I told them right at the start that not only was it my first time in heroic BRC–it was my first time healing a heroic. Shoot, I repeatedly told the second group when I later tried to heal Heroic Halls of Origination. This group thought it’d be funny to tell me to stand in the path of the lasers of the Anubis thing after you kill the four elementals to either side of the long room with troggs, saying it’d actually be a powerup. Which I did, and we promptly wiped.
Now, to be fair, before you start chiding me about standing in things, Blizzard DOES have some wonky mechanics like that occasionally–see the previously mentioned standing in front of frickin’ LAZER beams in Heroic BRC and standing in a dark purple whirlpool (but not the light purple one) for protection from Erudax’ coming hurricane in Grim Batol, so being new to Heroics, I trusted them. Later, they blamed me for the wipe on Isiset saying I didn’t use “innervate until 50%”–which still doesn’t make a lot of sense to me since a) mana was not a serious issue for me in those fights (I think I got down to 25% mana the first time) and b) they didn’t warn me to stack on the tank so the light balls that spawn can be picked up off of me. After that second wipe, they booted me. Which is fine, if I wasn’t meeting their healing needs, then so be it. Still, I can understand why people don’t really want to heal anymore.
At the very least, you could post it in the BDL cataclysm thread. I know I’d appreciate it very much since after my experiences in the two different Heroics groups I’d like to know more about what the hell I’m doing before stepping into another one.
I’ve got Vuhdo set up to show that, I just had changed some settings right before the instance and didn’t realize I’d turned that one off facepalm
No, they were just unfortunate enough to be on the far side of the encounter from where the triangle was going down and just barely didn’t make it in.
Sortof–these are rough numbers based on testing on self only, without benefit of 5-man buffs. I have 88k mana, self buffed only. Assuming we’re about to enter a high AOE damage phase of a fight, if I want to benefit from Symbiosis (resto druid mastery), I have to blanket 5 people with Rejuvenation then cast Wild Growth for effective AOE healing–which costs me 22k (25% of my mana) for the Rejuvenation alone plus another 4.5k mana for WG (5% of my mana) for a total cost of almost one-third of my mana to heal one AOE phase. If you add in popping tree first (~900 mana) and finishing up with Tranquility after the rejuv/wg blanket (5.4k mana), and we have a whopping 37% of my mana gone in about 20 seconds. Far more expensive than group healing in Wrath, for sure.
However, that 37% of my mana results in a per person heal of roughly 90.7k each at my present stat level (assuming self buffs only). Even if the AOE is hitting for 5k/sec for 8 secs like the Anraphet encounter, that’s still a net gain of 50k for everyone. We, in limited circumstances, very clearly have the throughput to keep everyone alive.
The problem lies in if you have a fight with more than 1 of those AOE phases. You lose out on a second Tranquility (8 minute cooldown) and maybe even Tree of Life, if it occurs before the 3min cooldown is up. So for phase two AOE, you only output about 23.3k health per person, while everyone LOSES 40k of health (again, Anraphet), for an effective loss of 16.7k health each person. Which cost you another 30% of your mana.
2 8 second AOE phases can cost you 2/3 of your mana in a single fight. Of course, none of this takes into account the amount of heals you’re throwing between AOE phases (nourish/LB with an occasional HT if you’re lucky and only the tank is taking significant damage), or is it taking into account your in combat mana regen rate (1.9k MP5 for me presently, self-buffed), but you get my point.
We’re not ineffective group healers now, but it does cost an arm and a leg to do so now, particularly in longer fights.
Disclaimer: I am not an expert, my math may be wrong, someone is likely about to come along and prove every point I’ve made wrong, etc. 
So all the freshwater fish pools in the past were junk nodes? I’m just remembering having to go to certain zones if I specifically wanted to find Sagefish/Greater Sagefish, and now they seem to be in every single zone that has freshwater.
Ran through a fair bit of Uldum today, and I must say, the Fiery Rolly Ball O’ Death quest is the best damn vehicle quest ever. No challenge whatsoever, but WHEE!
I’ve done Vash all the way through Defend the Rift. Considering how linear Vash is for quests (finish these and we’ll phase you to this new place), what am I missing? I’m only 135 out of 150 for Sinking Into Vashj’ir.
I tried playing healer and liked it, but I was completely out-gunned even by the time I got to stockades. I grant I was playing in feral spec, but that still meant I had an actual mana-increasing talent and was utterly unable to keep up. Maybe I was my gear, but I was still burning my entire mana stock halfway through a boss. I noticed people in heirlooms had between 50% and 100% more mana.
That might have been a problem with the random dungeon system. It seemed to give me access to dungeons I would never have asked to run. Stuff with elites five levels above me, that kind of thing. To my eye, it keeps old content in long after it should be moved out and new content in to early, though that might be so that players can actually find partners to run them with.
I actually stopped playing my druid over this. Even with a respec, I’d be utterly outmatched. Bosses seem to either do no damage, or their burning through my resources so fast it’s madness.
Jayjay, there’s a problem with the Vash’jir achieve last I checked. You’ve got the right number of quests, but they misset the achieve somehow.
You doing it Horde-side? My human paladin hasn’t even done the Defend the Rift thing yet (darn job of mine keeping me away from the important stuff), and she already has the achievement (which requires 160 quests, Alliance-side anyway).
Did you do all the naga Battlemaiden vision quests? There’s a bunch of those.
I got Visions of Vashj’ir Past, so I assume I did all of them. I really can’t imagine what I missed, since I didn’t refuse any quests and they pretty much railroad you through the phases of the zone.
Hmm, I don’t know Jayjay. There are some quests you pick up outside the questhub caves, but they’re not that easy to miss. A couple quests drop from mobs, but no more than a couple.
Have you tried just flying above Vash with your questracker on to find the ones you missed?
I had the same problem in Deepholm and then I found a quest hub I had skipped and had to go back to.
The Vash achievement was bugged for a while, but I know it’s fixed, as my guild had a few Cata Loremasters ding last night. There’s one or two quests you get from item drops and from killing random trash. Most notably, the elite giant near the first or second hub drops an item that begins a chain.
This is what you’re missing by playing in Feral spec:
The days of double-dipping in the early levels are over. While the talent system pre-4.0 meant that the various trees took tens of levels to distinguish themselves and so a Feral could heal passably well until level 30-40, the pile of gimmes at level 10 and the locking into one tree mean a much sharper division early on. Blizzard balanced healing needs around the healing specs of classes, which means you simply will not have the throughput necessary to be effective. You still have enough power that you can assist in healing should it be necessary at critical times, but you really shouldn’t be in the healer role unless you’re Resto spec.
On the upside, Dual Spec no longer requires level 40 and 1000g now, but level 30 and 10g.
It’s not 160, it’s 130 or so for the Vash’jir achieve. The ones I’d initially missed are a quest chain right at the beginning (after setting up in the smuggler’s den, go back to where you stole the gunpowder and you get around five). And there’s another 2-3 from drops near the gilbins in that area, and one from killing the random elite giant patrolling around there. Hope that helps.
The achievement actually says that it’s 150. I have 135. I’ll check out drops, though. Thanks!
Got Sinking, finally. It was the Budd quests that I missed.
Also, that first about 30 seconds flying into Hyjal is both pants-poopingly scary AND amazingly awesome, isn’t it? “Oh, no, it’s You-Know-Who! OMFG! HE JUST SUMMONED THE OTHER YOU-KNOW-WHO! Pedal to the metal, you stupid dragon taxi!”
Hey, I realized that my main, Eilyssana (human paladin) turned 2 on Friday! At least, the earliest achievement I could find in her list, [Shave and a Haircut], was dated 12/17/2008.
I got around to my goblin priest, Quixil, last night, and ran her through the starting area. Anybody else find that zone and the quests as confusing as I did? I had some trouble picking up Izzy (next to the pool), because the in-game quest tracker seemed to be pointing me right back to the questgiver (or rather, inside the building behind the questgiver), instead of to the pool next door. I found the other two pretty easily. On the whole, though, I found the whole area rather difficult to navigate. I also don’t think I’ve ever seen so many quests so close together where you don’t actually use your toon’s class abilities. Too many gadgets and “tricks”. And that “Waltz Right In” quest where you have to steal stuff from Gallywix’s estate is either bugged, or very poorly designed/worded. The questgiver mentions this disguise hat that somebody named Hobart made, and I ended up wandering all over the place looking (unsuccessfully) for this Hobart person, thinking I needed to get the hat from him. I finally resorted to Wowhead, where a commenter said the hat doesn’t appear on your character or in your inventory, it just kicks in when you enter Gallywix’s estate.
OTOH, I was doing this late at night after my second 11-hour work shift in as many days, so maybe my brain just wasn’t in full gear. I loved the cinematic of the “escape” at the end, though. “Aaaaaaaah!” “Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!” (Is it ever clarified later what the Alliance and Horde were fighting over?)
Don’t know if you’ve done the immediate follow-up quests yet, so spoilered…
They captured Thrall. One of the follow-up quests has you take a rocket out to the ships and setting him free from his cage.
I got Merrymaker on my mage, completing step 3 of “What a Long Strange Trip It’s Been”. Haven’t decided if I’m going to do it on the druid or not.
Also noticed some changes to archeology. At first I was getting exactly 2 fragments every find. Now, it’s been upped a bit…seems like a random 3-5 fragments per find. This oughta to speed up grinding through the early stages considerably. I’m still below 100 skill on the mage, but it’s something to do when waiting for a queue to pop. And at 82, I’m getting about 18K experience per find.