Raiding may have to be put off for me for a while – my main rig has started throwing some fairly nasty BSOD errors that could be down to any of a number of causes: bad drivers, bad RAM, dying GPU, fans going bad. Not sure how to narrow it down definitively though, as the error string varies. Is muy boo.
(For the techies among us, it’s either an IRQL_NOT_PAGED_AREA error or DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_PAGED_AREA, 64-bit Vista. Troubleshooting suggestions welcome)
That said, I’m looking forward to the next patch, as they’ll bump hunter damage and priest healing – I can heal reg 5mans okay by now but it’ll be interesting to see what happens once I stick little Arh into Hs.
So. Tanked my first heroic; (Vortex Pinnacle); was not as horrible as I’d feared. The dps were good about suggesting cc’s and volunteering to interrupt and the healer did a pretty good job. We wiped once on the dragon guy - not sure what happened exactly but I think the healer got multiply tornado’d - but everything else went fairly smoothly, including that second-to-last trash pack which I hate with a passion. Final boss was easy as the healer and maybe some of the dps were quick off the mark getting static dispelled. (Didn’t really see who was doing what but I did see that the static went away right fast).
So I don’t know if I got lucky with my pug or if people are getting used to the heroics by now.
Thanks for the continued replies to my post and for that huge list of UI add ons! I’m going to have to track some of them down.
My warlock just hit level 60 last night. He had a pretty decent thing going for a while selling Netherweave Bags, so he had the coin for his flight license and a mount. The last two zones I finished up with him were Ungoro Crater and Winterspring. I have some green quests for the next zone over from UC (Slith-something?) and something for Blasted Lands I think. Any recommendations on where to go at level 60?
I noticed that xp per kill went way down at 60 (like 18xp per kill). I was only fighting greens though. The xp for quests seems to have went down too. Did something get reset on the xp scale at level 60? This is the first time I’ve actually gotten xp at 60.
So, if I wanted to roll up a toon for BDL, are there any current guild needs?
Go to Outland. You can go through the Dark Portal in Blasted Lands (there should be a portal to there at every portal trainer in the capitals). There’s a jump in the XP amounts and reward quality.
ETA: And a jump in the gold rewards from quests, as well.
XP for killing mobs drops off at level caps, which is designed to push you on into the next xpac’s areas.
Oh – SFG reminded me. I love Bartender4 to tiny little bits, and it’s been amazingly stable throughout patches. It’s a bar mod, and their keybinding methodology is a lot better than Blizz’s IMO. It gives you additional bars that you can configure however you want onscreen (conditional visibility, size, placement, etc).
You’ve been luckier than me, then. I tried heroic Grim Batol with a pug yesterday and we only managed to get one boss down. I think the biggest problem was that our dps was not very good (only one of them was over 4.5k I think) When fights last that long, bad things eventually happen.
So somehow my account password stopped working between logging out to go to dinner and coming back 3-4 hours later. So I go in to try and reset my password…only the security question won’t take my correct answer. So I go into account recovery, only none of my CD-Keys were recognized. Finally, I dug out my old original WoW:CE key and that worked–only now I get to wait up to 12 hours before I can log in! I haven’t clicked on any links in or out of game that could be a phisher, I have my account protected with an authenticator, and I have MS Security Essentials installed (and it doesn’t find any viruses). Grrr.
I think the heroic bosses are tuned to be a reasonable challenge if all 3 dps do 7-8k, and while some of them have no real dps checks, VP is pretty much the only heroic dungeon you can actually finish with really low dps. 4.5k is really, really abysmal these days.
Of course, if you can manage to find some people like our guild’s DK who do 16k dps most of the bosses are suddenly very trivial.
It’s funny; I’ve entered 4 heroics with my paladin so far:
SFK: Stalled at Springvale (no one realized he could be skipped)
Deadmines: Came in after two bosses, got the next two down; group fell apart before the final guy. Even that took about two hours.
Lost City: Piece of cake, the only one I’ve finshed
Grim Batol: see above. They were on boss #2 when I got there and we got him down, but couldn’t get past the guy on the dragon.
I’m looking forward to being able to run some heroics with the guild, that should be easier even if we struggle (it will at least be more fun).
Meanwhile I healed WC on my 19 shammy today and between the heirloom pieces and the guild bonus, I was level 21 when we finished
I am in my little boat trying to put out the fires but I can’t see where to aim. I amhaving to use the right mouse key to constantly keep turning the view and can’t get back far enough to really see the fires. I saw a vidio where the camera angle is much further back than I can get with my home and end keys. what do I need to do differntly?
So I decided to poke my head into normal old Blackrock Depths on my 85 pally, pretty much just to scout the place out for a quest my level 50 priest picked up. Priest only needs to go as far as The Domicile, but I decided to press on a bit further just to see the place. I got as far as killing Lord Incendius, then continued on, only to be faced with an immense set of double doors and no apparent way to open them. Any hints on getting those doors open?
Back in control of my account. So I am good to go when I decide I want to try Cata. Was relatively straightforward. They wanted me to set up a new email addy and change my secret question.
I haven’t looked at the pic, but part of the reason to have your trap start the fight is to avoid “clouds” of NPCs. In most instances, the NPCs are either stately patrolling around or standing, sometimes even in neat lines. Once you get to the point of trying to trap something in a free-for-all melee, you can’t aim; you can do two things:
Move away from the melee, drop the trap, use distracting shot to pull a melee-mob away from the rest - and as soon as it starts charging you, aim at anything else or you risk breaking the trap yourself.
Drop the trap in the mess and pray that it doesn’t get broken.
Had a Heroic Deadmines last week which took over 3 hours; we finished it but not before my nerves and those of the mage had been frayed to within one inch of a stroke (well, two, one per); the palatank reckoned that “CC is an abomination” and didn’t believe in explanations either, and he was the only one who’d been there before. Had one yesterday, with three other guildies and a pugged mage (Canadian - why are there so many Canadians in WoW-EU? It isn’t even a French server… those, I understand) which went swimmingly except for two wipes and a link problem for the healer (apparently someone in his route figured it was a good time to restart a server). I got my second Chaos Orb, which means I will have my Big Bad Gun tomorrow night; the rogue got his two weapons and was yelling and giggling so much you could almost hear him without TeamSpeak
Just don’t close them, they’re open when you enter the instance, you only need to close them when you’re ready to go deeper into the city. But if you have closed them you can just head through the gate to the left of the instance entrance and you’ll be on the other side of the big doors.
Decided to work on some achievements last night…got Classic Dungeon Master and headed into UBRS to kill Rend for that new NPC at the entrance to the Spire. It took some planning and work (mostly to make sure I not only opened at least 50 eggs, but aggroed at least 50 whelps so I could just AOE them down), but I am now “Khokhrah Jenkins”!
Ran SKF and Stockades on my shammy yesteray (regular); he went from 21 to 23. Yay for a second healing spell! Although Bird was there with his shammy, so with two healing stream totems my skills were not really taxed in Stockades.
I hadn’t realized Hogger was in the Stockades now; I lol’d at “FOREST ONLY SETBACK!”
I finally got some gear! Seriously; I’d done three heroics, and not a single bit of gear. There was one caster drop in the first one, but I lost the roll. But yesterday. . .robes! Shiny new robes!
Then, after looking at my reputation, I saw that I was justthisclose to hitting Revered with Earthen Ring. So my healer friend and I did a regular 85 dungeon, and I got a new cloak, as well as a sword that dropped. Plus, I got enough JP for new shoulders.
I’m so relieved. I felt woefully undergeared for heroics, even thought I was able to queue for them. This helps a lot.
That being said. . .the game being hard is making me not want to play it. I’m one of those casual coddled children who came in during the last half of Wrath, and I’m used to overgearing the daily content. I’m sure I’ll get used to the way things are, but right now, there’s this weird place where things like CC and the mechanics-heavy fights are new to me, but not new to a lot of the people in heroics. So it feels like there’s a lot of pressure to be really good, and that just makes me freeze up; people have gotten a lot harsher in RDF groups, and, while I’ve not been yelled at yet, I’ve seen others get yelled at. It’s intimidating. I mean, I’m sure I’ll get used to it, but it’s intimidating.
Heroics have not been so good to me after the first one; did H Stonecore and was unable to do the little tank-dance with the big stone guy (Orzuk)… ended up thinking about making sure to get a dot on myself so I wouldn’t be paralyzed and not avoiding the big ground smash thing. Gave up after 5 or 6 wipes; later I did H Grim Batol, where we got through bosses 1 and 2 with no problem, but couldn’t take #3; someone would get caught in front of the dragon when he did his big 180 degree flame thing. So we decided to skip that boss, and made a couple futile efforts at the final boss before I decided it was too late and I had to quit.
On the plus side, I did manage to finally replace my Frost Emblem tanking trinket, which should help my average gear level no end.
Angel, I can’t speak for others, but in my case, “old player” meets “big sister” and I just love explaining stuff in dungeons. I’ll explain things so much that mobs walk over and offer to help us run a simulacrum - well, ok, not that much, but almost.
It helps a lot if you mention the lack of experience early. Worse case scenario is someone goes “omfg a noob imnot grupin wit no noob” and quits… yay, your party’s IQ just increased! Best case scenario, there is someone who, like me, loves explaining.
IME, the ones who yell are also the ones with the frozen brains, as in “completely inflexible ones”. They’re the ones who refuse to consider alternate tactics, or who yell at someone who’s already said “first time here, please explain tacs” because - omg, he’s got the lowest DPS of the group! (No? Srsly? Wow! He’s still figuring out what stuff on the floor should be avoided and which one should be stepped on, d’uh) They’re dumber than my mage’s pet… and I’m reasonably sure that water elementals are brainless.
