Aw yeah! Got my Core Hound, got my Crown of Power! And I just passed my Silver Trial, so I get to start doing Heroics! Woot! I’m gonna love the extra GRs!
Got my Core Hound last night too! YEEHAW!
The helm was nice, too. iLvl 640.
It was trippy going into Molten Core with 40 people - we wiped on trash 3 times before we got to the first boss (!!) but eventually we got into the groove. Those groups of re-igniting core hounds, holy god, people were having a hard time grasping the concept of “wait til they despawn before we aggro another group”! We got there eventually, though. It was a 3.5 hour run, with about 6 total wipes.
No gear was dropped during the raid, and each boss dropped some gold, which was probably not enough to cover my repair bill. I didn’t get any Hydraxian rep except on boss fights (100 per boss, a bit more for the end boss) because I’m already past Revered with them, but other party members reported getting rep for every trash kill as well.
MC does serve as a nice reminder as to WHY the developers started steering towards dungeons composed of chambers with locking doors during boss fights. Also, it’s easy to see why they got away from 40-man groups in favor of a much more manageable 25 for raids.
Here’s the thing tho: part of the difficulty of a raid SHOULD be trying to get a large number of people together AND manage them. The game SHOULD be somewhat difficult, IMO, and the difficulty (and/or ease) should not come solely from the game mechanics nor the game developers.
There’s little or no sense of accomplishment when things are too easy.
ETA: Part of what made yesterday’s MC raid so much fun for me was that it was like my 5th time trying in just the last few days. I hustled up to 100, geared up to do it, and then BAM! WIPE! WIPE! WIPE! WIPE! WIPE! Non-stop for 2 hours, because people would not settle down and pay attention. That happened to me like 4 times before I finally got in a group that was decently geared and decently attentive, and then we ran the whole place in just over an hour with a couple of deaths but no wipes at all. Opening my mail and getting that mount was literally like opening a package from the gods (or from very rich benefactors, maybe); I know I was grinning ear-to-ear as I checked myself out atop my new Core Hound. If it had come easy, I don’t think I’d have been so satisfied with myself.
Congrats on the mounts, etc. I dinged 100 on my mage tonight. Tried the proving grounds, got through the bronze level, but could not get past the third wave of the silver level.
Upgraded my garrison to level three, but only had enough resources to build one of my buildings…went with the dwarven bunker.
Speaking of dwarves, I started my tankadin in WoD, got his garrison built. So far, he’s way easier than the mage. I can chain pull 4-5 mobs at a time and mow em down.
Question–is the Barracks a mandatory build? I could not find a way to avoid building it, and there are other things I’d rather have.
The questline will make you build the Barracks, but you can replace it after. Just drag a new building on top of it in the architect’s table.
I have to say I’m a little bemused/annoyed about the micro-managing that I have to do with my garrison. There’s a mine, but I’m the one that has to go down into it and actually mine the ore while the miners there don’t seem to do much. I’m the one that has to harvest the herbs from the herb garden, while the NPCs stand around idly.
The micro-managing is one of the reasons why I haven’t run any of my other level 90s over to Draenor – I don’t want to spend all my time doing meaningless tasks at multiple garrisons.
Aye, that and the forced hallway storyline are keeping me from even wanting to play my alts. The thought of doing the exact same thing, with the exact same followers and garrison management, makes me tired and cranky.
Okay, look, I’ll say it here: Blizzard has begun the killing of their cash cow. If this isn’t the start of the demise of World of Warcraft, I’ll be very surprised. The garrison makes the game not so much a RPG anymore and more of a FarmVille kind of thing. Questing is superfluous and interaction with other players is now minimal. They’ve changed the game so much with this pac, it’s not at all the same game anymore and frankly, I don’t think people are going to be nearly as interested or invested in this type of game as they were in the questing MMORPG that WoW used to be. I know I’m not nearly as interested, and from what I hear from other forums, quite a few people are already bored with the xpac or have no real interest in managing a small city & it’s denizens, especially when managing it all also entails doing all the work.
So I tried out Ashran today. Mass confusion. Had no idea what is going on in there. Going to have to read up on it.
The tankadin continues to be an unstoppable killing machine, even with poor gear…my ilvl is about 514 now, after some quest reward upgrades.
What’s up with the blue ! over a map table in my town hall? Looks like each day? I can choose either a solo or a group quest that rewards apexis crystals–which I know I need to upgrade my ring…
Well, Francis has come back home to WoW after a two-year hiatus:
I LOL'd.ETA: Erm, NSFW
Nothing quite like racing a server crash to finish the Anniversary MC raid. We dropped Rags, got my helm and mount, and about 5 minutes later battlenet crashed, along with most of the servers where my toons live.
Whew! After enduring a 3.5 hour raid/ordeal, losing out on the goodies at the end would have sucked.
Tonight’s been horrible for lag and crashes. I died three times in 10 minutes from being completely out of the time loop between hitting my buttons and anything actually happening.
Finally beat the Silver Proving Grounds today after umpteen tries, so I can queue for Heroics.
I was surprised at how long the queue was for LFG Heroics. Over an hour, looks like.
Congrats. I haven’t been able to beat it yet. Made it to the 5th wave, but no further. I’ll try again with a couple more gear upgrades.
I finally beat Silver Proving Grounds by:
[ul]
[li]Using every buff and stat food (there’s a very good one sold right there in the Proving Grounds) and a flask I bought in the AH, too. [/li][li]I had enchants on all the gear that I could. Not the end-game badass ones, just the basic ones for level 600 stuff. [/li][li]I consulted a website for some advice on rotations. (i.e., which combination of abilities and moves was going to produce the absolute maximum amount of DPS for the crowds that Proving Grounds was throwing at me)[/li][li]I watched a YouTube of someone with my class and spec doing Silver Proving Grounds, to prepare for the later waves that I hadn’t seen, yet. [/li][li]I adjusted my glyphs and bought some new, stronger ones in the AH. [/li][/ul]
Even then, it took quite a few tries. But after a while I began to notice longer and longer wait times between the earlier waves, as my attacks became more and more efficient.
Thanks. I actually wound up figuring a lot of this out now. TBH, the quest chains for the legendary are a pretty good guide. I helped cause one wipe on normal Skyreach because I “tl;dr”'d the strat for the last boss. Didn’t notice other party members getting dragged off the combat floor and being dropped to their deaths until it was my turn (“Then they came for me, and there was no one left to DPS for me…”). I apologized and was forgiven by a pleasantly-non-douchebag LFD group and got it right the second time. So I have my 640 ring, plus my leathercrafted 640 bracers (replacing Timeless Isle crap).
Then ran heroic Slag Mines for the Core of Flame for the next part of the legendary. Only one death, caused by misjudging the stupid Burning Slag patches. Got three 630 heroic blues out of it, so I’m eligible for LFR MC now. I’ll try my hand at it this week. (Didn’t feel like the two-hour queue last night.)
Finally laid aside my MoP legendary cloak, replaced by one of those blues. Sigh.
Gonna study the next fight for the legendary quest chain (Grimrail Depot, I guess) in detail and then queue specifically for it, like I did with Slag Mines. I think I’m going to do that with each heroic in turn until I’ve run each one once after having studied it, before I start playing LFD roulette.
MC, on the other hand, looks like it’s the same basic mechanics of the classic, so I think I’m somewhat familiar with it already. Ironic, maybe?
Regarding buffs, you get every reasonable stat buff a raider might expect just by being there. But don’t neglect a flask or elixir (or equivalent… still rockin’ my Crystal of Insanity until something as good or better comes along). And there’s a food vendor in the trial floor selling perfectly good buff food.
The comment about rotation is spot-on, though. You won’t pass silver, and I guarantee you won’t even get a sniff of gold, until you use all your class’ and spec’s tools. My son (who came back into the game because of this xpac) couldn’t get past wave 5 of Silver until I reminded him that his arcane mage wasn’t using Nether Tempest on a strategically placed target in the wave and multidotting everyone around it while solo-burning another mob. You can’t afford to disregard dot damage, when it gives you a nearly-free head start on killing mob “B” while you’re busy killing mob “A”.
The proving grounds are a pretty neat notion. If you can’t queue for randoms without passing it, you can’t inflict your lack of skill on unprepared victims. I like it.
I gotta say, I like it, too. The previous “exclusivity factor” was simply having a certain iLvl gear, and that isn’t REALLY a good representation of skill - and it doesn’t guarantee you know how to play your class & spec.
Mind you, even WITH the Proving Grounds, my LFG Heroics have been pretty painful affairs.
Well, Proving Grounds don’t teach encounter mechanics, and they don’t teach fundamentals like “Don’t stand in fire”. Maybe if there were a tier of Proving Grounds with actual damage…
But who am I kidding. People too lazy to read up on instance strategies are much too lazy to train. Hell, I used to be a raider, and I still wiped a group recently because I neglected a core mechanic. Because we’re all lazy, to some extent.
I just have enough pride to never repeat a stupid mistake. Make a novel stupid mistake, maybe. But not the same one. 
I think the current painful state of the Heroic LFG has more to do with a lack of practice, since many of us learn by doing, and the expansion has really only been out for a few weeks now.
Many classes have seen a lot of changes lately, as well - we’re all still getting comfortable. I expect that things will get better in the next month or so as it become less and less likely that your tank (for instance) has never seen or heard about this fight or that fight.
The first few weeks of learning curve are always the worst!
Coming out of MoP, it was easy for the lazy to faceroll heroic 5s because anyone could outgear the content, and being carried by raiders farming valor meant that most encounters didn’t last long enough for mechanics to matter (or even happen).
From my experience, the level of skill required to execute WoD heroic 5s well seems comparable to MoP endgame LFRing. Plus familiarity with the actual fights, which is pretty much the sine qua non of any early round of heroics. I’d just forgotten how unforgiving a heroic could be. Kind of refreshing, after literally being almost unkillable in world PVE in Draenor or in LFGing/LFRing in MoP.
I ran heroic Grimrail Depot for the 2nd item in the initial legendary quests (Core of Iron). No gear upgrades out of that. We had a few wipes because it looked like no one was particularly experienced in the fights. Tanking errors, lots of positioning/not-avoiding-damage problems, healer missing important stuff. I got so distracted that coming back from the 2nd wipe on Skylord Tovra, I actually left Aspect of the Pack on and caused the next wipe. :smack: I haven’t done that in MONTHS.
But we stuck it out and won, and I got my Core (along with an 80g repair bill :eek:). Fairly fun, I guess, and I know how to fight that fight next time it comes up. I guess the glow of accomplishment and sense of future confidence makes up for the wipes.