Here’s another big change coming in 4.3:
Raid Finder coming in patch 4.3
I’m not sure how I feel about this. On the one hand, if they do it right, it’ll mean I can finally raid this expansion. It’ll also potentially be great for nights when the BDL can’t get a full 10 man group to raid. But…there are a significant number of hurdles they’re gonna have to deal with, like Raid locks and who determines who gets what loot? And what about chat issues (Vent, Mumble, in game?) between different groups?
Hmmm…I wonder if people will be joining the queue for a random raid, or specific raids? Guess they could have a gear check system like the RDF, but I’m not sure this will work out all that well. I think Cata raids, from what I’ve read about them, are just too complex for a random group to have much chance of success unless they are nerfing content.
Oooh, assuming they have an idea to address those issues, I’m excited that it might be easier to get picked up for a raid.
You can actually view sets in 3D via Wowhead. (Or any gear, actually.) Just go to the page for the set or the item and click the “view in 3D” button at the top. You can chose the race and gender of the model it’s displayed on, as well as whether the display is in Flash or Java.
Honestly, what they’ll probably do is the same thing they do with Random DF groups–ie if you have 3 random party members, you get a bonus 15% to damage/healing–only scaled up for the appropriate raid size. This, in addition to the fact they’ve said they plan on nerfing prior tiers when a new tier is introduced (like they did with t11) could actually make Random Cross-realm raids doable in a pug.
Waitaminute. I already have a Raid Finder icon in my UI. It doesn’t work just like the Dungeon Finder, but you can select a raid and try to form a raid group. It never showed any raid groups formed and no one talked about it, so I just assumed no one was using it!
Okay, so I just Googled and it’s an old Raid Finder that already existed that no one uses. Why did they move it onto the default UI bar then? It showed up when they took away the keychain and added the boss strats.
Can’t find the blue post, but one of them stated in the forums that the reason the “old” Raid Finder became so prominent again on the Micro Menu bar was because of their new philosophy of making old raids easier to PuG on your server when they’re no longer progression content. Most people still use Trade to look for groups though, at least on Cairne, so it still goes pretty much unused.
The old raid finder, like the old dungeon finder, was simply a tool whereby you could express your interest and availability for running any specified group of raids or instances. You could mark your desired roles and put in a quick blurb about yourself (e.g., only looking for Heroic versions of raids, your progression, some main stats).
LFG and LFR used to operate out of the same interface. When they updated the LFG interface to actually create groups, LFR was separated out, and they just never bothered to integrate it with anything else. You could still access it via /lfr (and I think a button on your raid tab), but you had to know it was there.
… and no one ever used it. Early in Cata I used to put myself in LFR a couple of times, but I never got any inquiries nor did I ever see anyone else in there.
No one ever used it in Cat, but it got pretty good use in Wrath on my server. Putting yourself in the list for ToC or ICC would usually almost guarantee a few whispers on heavy raid nights.
I was waiting for a queue to pop and looking at some stats in-game, and noticed that some of my BG stats seemed wrong/wonky, and others flat out contradicted each other, so I started looking in other categories.
Apparently, I have an unknown talent for healing.
Under “Largest Heal Cast” it listed:
18,446,744,073,709,543,020
Hmmmm.
Not bad for a Feral Combat Kitty Druid! I guess I need to work on my technique, though, and quit wasting mana overhealing.
There’s a minor scorekeeping bug in BGs where people who end a BG with self-healing effects (like rogues using recuperate, or ferals proccing whateveryoucallit) proc for near-infinite amounts of healing when the final scoreboard goes up.
Ahh–I’d heard about that one, but didn’t connect the dots.
I also don’t believe that I ever dealt a hit for over 3.7 ** million** HP’s, but the armory seems to.
It’s not just BGs. I noticed at level 8 that the achievement board credited me with a high-hit of 20,815. At level 69 the highest I’ve noticed was just above 3,000.
Well, see, it’s like this: I got screwed up on where I was supposed to fish during the tournament and so I started fishing right near the dock at Valiance Keep. Then I remembered you’re supposed to fish where the pygmys and the schools are, so I flew to Kaluak which took me about 5 minutes (during which time I took a shower) and when I started fishing there, that guy called out that some guy won and I guess then the tournament was over, wasn’t it?
So is the best place to fish at Booty Bay still?
A 5 minute shower and I smelled like a fucking rose, I tell you! 
(Used D’s soap by mistake in a hurry)
Thanks
Q
Also, does it help me to have a lure?
Hey Quasi, I think you’re getting the two tournaments messed up. There’s two weekend fishing tournaments - one in Stranglethorn Vale, and one in Northrend (Kalu’ak).
Stranglethorn Vale runs Sunday, 14:00 to 16:00 server time. This is the one where you fish at Booty Bay.
The Kalu’ak one is Saturday, 14:00 to 15:00 and you fish in Northrend.
SFG has talked about El’s Fishing Guide in the thread before, and there are really good instructions there. Here’s the Stranglethorn page which goes into more detail as to where to fish. The Kalu’ak derby page is here. According to that one, you can fish in any pool in Northrend. But it has to be a pool - those little spots that look like spirals in the water.
I don’t know if a lure can help though.
No one mentioned the other side of deemphasising threat for tanks: active management of tank mitigation. Instead of watching our threat the designers are supposedly going to give us a more active role in our own survivability. As in, nerf us so we take more damage but reduce our cooldowns and alter the resource costs of our survival abilities so we have to work to maintain our damage mitigation.
Threat was pretty easy before. I consider myself a pretty average tank but I never had to maximize my rotation to outthreat people. Just getting the 3x bonus was enough. Threat was faceroll and I spent my attention on positioning and anticipating the next move. Now threat is more faceroll but it looks like shortly we’ll have to more important things to worry about. Not things that kill mere DPS or other squishies but that can kill us! :eek:
Actually I’m in favor of a more active mitigation style. So long as they don’t mess up the rest of the tanks like they did with Blood DKs and keep sensible abilities/resources, that is. I don’t see why they couldn’t have done that while maintaining the old threat model. You can’t help but conclude this is all about DPS wait times in dungeon queues. Holding aggro is even easier so people who might tank a random heroic will be less hesitant to do so.
I see potential problems when active mitigation comes along. First, if you weren’t skilled enough before to hold threat when it was easy to then how good are you going to be at managing your mitigation? The influx of tanks in the RDF will stop abruptly when the next patch rolls in if they start dropping like flies. 2nd, the change puts more pressure on healers since they are going to have to pick up the slack when tanks mismanage their mitigation. Before when DPS pulled threat and died they couldn’t blame the heals. Now the tank dies he has an out instead of accepting responsibility for less than stellar active mitigation: “This healer sucks! Lets replace her!”
As for the raid finder… I will be surprised if it works. They might implement it but I don’t see people getting anywhere with using it. Maybe I’m wrong here but so far the random group experience has shown that problems multiply as difficulty increases. Are they going to dumb down the raids? I hope not. What are PUG raids going to run? The other night a few of my guildies were in a PUG heroic ICC run without Vent that couldn’t down the Lich King.
If your threat was never a problem, either your dps were always really attentive with their threat management, or they were undergeared or having problems with their rotation and stat priorities. I, for one, welcome the fact that I no longer have to throttle much, if at all. Kind of defeated the purpose of getting gear upgrades for me – it just meant I had to throttle more.
I was raiding with equally geared DPS, good players, and so long as they were careful at the beginning of the pull they could go all out after I hit a boss a few times. If an enrage timer was an issue or something I could Beserk at the beginning of the pull and hold off any and all of them no matter what they did. Generally the only time I would lose threat was when I was trying to move Archanotron or the Elementium Monstrosity or someone out of the goo and was out of melee range for a bit. I think that’s a workable setup: threat isn’t hard but it’s something people do need to pay attention to. Ghostcrawler was talking about making threat addons obsolete.
In random dungeons I don’t get outgeared. Not because I have a great setup or anything but because my server and the others in our battlegroup are not exactly high on the progression list and there just weren’t very many people with better stuff than me. There still aren’t even though I’m not raiding Firelands. Progression is that slow on Grizzly Hills. So as long as I keep moving and mark a skull on the main target I don’t have trouble. That’s not to say that I never lost aggro, because I did. But it rarely got anyone killed that didn’t deserve it and we didn’t wipe.
I guess I have a biased view of throttling since I never DPS so I’m never in that situation. To me working to help your group succeed is the important thing. If that means not using your best spells as often, so be it. I’d much rather see threat being a DPS responsibility than more stress for healers. But maybe Blizzard will work it out so that we can have the best of both worlds.
Oh, I agree that threat management was totally the DPS responsibility, and it was an important part of being a good DPS. I’m just saying I’m really glad it no longer is. Throttling isn’t fun or interesting at all, it’s just frustrating. Especially when I play a class that doesn’t have a threat dump, and I’m on the verge of ripping aggro off the boss doing 16k dps, while the classes with threat dumps are cresting 20k+ dps and are nowhere near my level of threat. And that’s just with my normal rotation, ignoring my burst cooldowns, and intentionally not reforging new gear to be optimal. At that point it’s just bullshit and makes me want to reroll. Good riddance, I say.