Oh god, this just reminded me of my first-ever Oculus run last night.
I went in through the Random LFG and sighed. Figured I’d get it over with, so I asked in Party, “Anyone dropping?” To my surprise, nobody was. All four other people were in one guild, they had just needed a healer. I told them it was my first time in Oc, and they didn’t care.
…They didn’t care because they were insanely overgeared. And also insane. The DPS Shaman ran ahead of the tank and just started pulling. I was going overboard trying to keep everyone alive, but since they had some much gear we were never really in danger of wiping. They didn’t stop for anything.
As it turned out, the only person who died was me. I aggroed a drake just as we landed at a Centrifugal Construct platform, and it killed me. After they killed the Constructs, I expected the pally to rez me, but he just said “run bak bro”. I was a little overwhelmed due to it being my first time and them going at it nonstop, so I just obeyed…right as the Shaman went “WAIT”. Apparently the pally’s a dick. The Shaman rezzed me, but I wound up having to jump off the ledge and ghost back in anyway because I lost my drake. After that, though, things went pretty smoothly.
I can see why people dislike Oculus, though. Vehicle fights in 3D space makes things very confusing and frustrating.
That said: I respecced MM and spent time on a) a target dummy and b) pugging the new ICC heroics with my new spec while finetuning my new and shiny bars before hitting Ony and then our Uld raid from last week. Ony went fine, so I was figuring that I’d be good to go for our Thorim/Mimiron attempts. Wrooooong. I will note that new content raiding (most of us haven’t seen Uld before) with a brand spanking new spec is… interesting. I was noobing it up right, left, and center. Finally the RL and I agreed it’d be better to revert to BM for Thorim, TSA or no TSA. That did the trick, and we were able to get him down the wipe after that one.
Mimiron’s the last boss we have before the end – and may I just say: *holy Mary mother of Og. * Straight up mechanical mofo, that one.
Skammer, I’m trying out Elitist Group, which is a GS alternative that doesn’t crunch the gear ilvls; it just checks to make sure your stuff’s chanted/gemmed/itemized correctly and spits out armory info. I like that picture better than just a single number, imo.
Ah, following up on the Pit of Saron/crowd control discussion of a while ago, I ran it recently with 2 pallies and a mage (and I think a shaman healer); we repentanced two of the undead giants and sheep’d the sheep-able one and it went down sooooo easy.
Oh yeah, and I tanked my first raid fight over the weekend, but it was only Noth the Plaguebringer (for a weekly quest); I was the off-tank and it was stupidly easy, as a guildie told me it would be; basically all I did was spam my AoE attacks while standing over top of the pack of players; I would occasionally Death Grip an add in when I was feeling bored and they hadn’t run up to us fast enough, but that was about it. Some of us wanted to keep on through the plague quarter, but the raid leader said “no” and half of the rest of the raid quit anyway as soon as they had their quest done.
Finally hit Exalted with Wyrmrest over the weekend. Huzzah, no more Wyrmrest dailies! Also, new pants! I’m finally rid of those damned Savage Saronite Legplates.
Found this great webcomic that does a lot of WoW bits. The last couple are great:
Just click the “Next” arrow for the next one, there’s no direct link to it yet.
Hey, anybody here have the Higher Learning achievement? That one sure seems like pure, random luck. The books that don’t count (which are all I’ve found so far) sure are funny, though
Do the tanks know to pop defensive CDs on the third inhale? That’s not a situation where you want to use an ability as a “wait and see” ohshit button–you want to actually pop the CD as soon as he goes into that phase of increased damage, or by the time you realize how low your health is, it will be too late.
Yup. No DPS Warrior *likes *being the sunderbot. It’s a bunch of GCDs with literally no damage other than your autoattacks–Sunder Armor itself doesn’t cause any damage as its applied. And since it’s not part of your normal rotation, you often have to juggle it into a random spot on your bars to make it easy to apply (since a missed application means more lost GCDs restacking it). But good raiders realize that sometimes it’s important to take a personal DPS hit, compared to the group, in order to help yourself and many other players in the raid do more total damage. (It’s also important to have a RL who understands this, so they don’t say, “Sunderbot Bob, why was your DPS so much lower than Warrior Other Dude?”)
Hahaha, that sounds exactly like a VH I got pulled into last week! I showed up right as they were killing the first boss, and I didn’t make it in until he was dead. No clue why that tank left, either–they were great through the rest of the run, as would be indicated for a group that could get through a bunch of portals, including a boss (the voidwalker guy with the phased adds, even), without a dedicated tank.
IIRC, it’s actually a comparatively poor ROI in terms of time:badges. It runs into the same problem as all gauntlet/portal encounters: you have minimal control over the rate at which you move through the encounter, since you have to wait for portal spawns (especially after a boss). It’s a particular pain in the ass for Warriors, since they apparently designed to to go juuuuuust long enough between portals for all of our Rage to tick away.
With no target or with yourself targeted, type /gs. (Doing this with another player targeted will bring up a window showing all of their gear, with an image of that gear on your character.) You can also bring up your character window (“C”), and the number will be below and to the left of the image of your character, but in that same box.
Yup, I ground that sucker out religiously. Wrath has been out long enough that I’m not sure if these exist anymore, but there used to be custom channels on most servers that people would sit in and advertise when books where spawned, and where (you can try asking in Trade or General). Have you checked out the WoWWiki page? IIRC, it has a very good guide as to the exact spawn point for each book. Personally, I just figured out a circuit for all the books I needed, then ran it every time I was in Dal.
The alt-spawn books are definitely worth reading, though, too, IMO. Amusing or interesting. Plus, reading one is how you get it to despawn, making it possible for the achievement book to spawn next time.
Note that after a book has been read, it will continue to exist for three minutes. General rule of thumb is to right-click it ASAP (you don’t have to read the whole thing to get credit, just open it), then advertise in Trade and/or General which book it is and where it’s spawned. You don’t ever want to advertise first, because it’s possible that you weren’t the first person to come across that book that spawn, and you don’t want to miss your chance to read it while typing out an alert.
Yup, it took me a few weeks to run down all the Higher Learning books on and off. There were only two books that I really had to camp, IIRC. Took me most of an afternoon on the last one, but it wasn’t too bad.
The books also all reset right after Tuesday maintenance, so if you’re quick you can run round to see if the ones that spawned are the right ones you need.
And hey, now I can pretend I’m a lock! (ignore the funny color…)
Ah, interesting. The new system seems much better than what was implemented in ToC. Any updates to how ICC is progress would be appreciated. I have to get my fix in somehow.
I don’t know if I could ever get back into full-time “hardcore” raiding. It pretty much dominated my life, and I am one of the unfortunate many that wasn’t able to balance it as well as I thought I could. Especially with the additional pressures of wanting to get US/world firsts, etc. That just became insane, and pushing achievements like “No Lights In The Darkness” led to more than a few shout-fests and burnouts.
Like I said though, I am tempted to find a solid 10-man guild. Not sure I would unless it was through this site or another where I already respected the members. I don’t need to burn the money to server transfer just to join a guild that doesn’t suit me, and ultimately my main goal would be to kill Arthas and I’d need to gear up substantially to do so (still in T8 on my raiding toon).
Thanks for the updates Jas09 and Shot from Guns. I look forward to hearing more about your raiding pursuits.
Last night was bad. No let me rephrase that, last night I was bad.
Queued as a healer for Nexus, got in quite quickly but the tank wasn’t ready. 10 minutes later we kick. While waiting our group of four slowly took out any single mobs we could, did Ok though close to wiping a couple of times. 20 minutes in and I offer to queue as tank and healer to see if that speeds things up and yes we quickly get a priest on board so I change spec and gear and tank my first Lich King dungeon.
I sucked. Not sure what the issue was but I just couldn’t keep mobs off the other players. 2 mobs not so bad but 3 or more and we were in serious trouble. I’d taunt one runner but soon enough there’d be another and the dps would be running all over the place then the healer would be in trouble. Is the learning curve that steep? I managed to tank BC dungeons no problem and my gear is OK, at level 73 I have the crafted cobalt set with gems (I’m a BS) but no enchants.
Maybe tanking isn’t for me and I should stick to trying to learn how to heal 5-mans with my pally as that’s the role for me at end game, I am really enjoying healing as I level my baby priest.
The same thing happened to my wife last night, TWICE! The first was in heroic Azjol-Nerub, they were just about to fight the last boss (the giant tick) and the tank drops. No “gotta go” or “fuck you guys” or anything.
The second time was in heroic CoS. The group got to the drake-drop-boss with just a minute or so to go and the healer is telling the tank to kite the boss down the pathway so they can have more time to kill him. The tank does nothing and the boss despawns. He then immediately drops group with no explanation.
When the tank drops from a random PUG, that’s usually a death sentence for the group. Its not worth standing around for ten minutes waiting for another tank when it would be faster just to re-que, but then you’re locked out of that instance and you’ve missed out on the bonus emblems.
FWIW, if you’re doing randoms, you don’t get locked out of instances. You only get locked out when you queue up specifically, and then only for future specific queuing. I think the LFG system might try to put you in instances you haven’t done already, but it’s not a definite lockout.
The tanks dropping might be either just bad connections and you’re only remembering the tanks instead of the DPS, since DPS are a dime a dozen, but I wonder if it isn’t some new griefing tactic instead.
I logged in on my main, thinking I would just run a couple of random heroics and then switch over to leveling my alt for a while. But I saw a great player I know trying to sign people up for a pug ToC25 run, so I volunteered to heal even though I had never done 25 (I’ve done 10).
We take down the beasts with no problem, and both Belt of the Tenebrous Mist and Flowing Robes of Ascent drop. Both are big upgrades for me. I win the roll for the belt, and then another priests asks me if I would trade her the belt for the robes if she won them. Sure, I said, I need them both. So she won the second roll and I traded, walking away with a nice new chest item. I figured I was done for the night.
So we take down Jaxx who drops some more gear I don’t bother to roll on (the raid rule was no second roll unless no one else needed). For the Trophy and Crusader Orb, the raid leader rolled 1-25 and gave it to the person in that raid slot. I was #9, and won the Trophy. Woo-hoo!
We wipe on the faction champs three or four times but finally get them down. Gear gets handed out. RL rolls to distribute Orb: #9! Wow! Everyone /lols and groans and accuses me of hax but I get the orb. Then the RL rolls again for the Trophy: 9!! I laugh and the RL says, sorry, I can’t do it, and re-rolls. 9 again! I said the Gods clearly want me to have this trophy, but I was j/k and wasn’t bothered when she rolled a third time to give it away.
My only regret was I had to drop out after our first Anub wipe due to wife aggro (it was getting late). But I was pretty happy walking away with a new Robe, Trophy, and Orb!
Were you marking the targets? I’m assuming you’re doing the usual stuff (had the bonus-threat-from-holy-spells thingy up, casting consecrate like there’s no tomorrow, etc), which should give you enough aoe threat to keep the things off of your heals at least; at that point your dps has to make sure and get on your target, and to dial back their aoes if they keep pulling aggro with their attacks; giving 'em a nice skull-x to focus on could help that.
Sorry but that is incorrect. Getting an heroic via random dungeon will still save you, just like queuing for it specifically. You correct that you can still end up in a dungeon you are saved to by queuing up for a random dungeon, the chance of getting is just (supposed to be) lower. So, if you want an item from a specific heroic make sure you run that dungeon specifically before you queue up for any random dungeons that day.
Another thing about tanks leaving the group is that groups that are already in the instance looking for replacements are always at the top of the queue, so getting a new tank usually doesn’t take all that long(at least not as long as it takes to get one when you start from scratch).
In other news, I just forked over 10k gold for a Battered Hilt on my warrior, who is feeling kind of poor right now, but it’s worth it, Quel’Delar here I come.
As far as I know my spec is OK (World of Warcraft) and I always have Righteous Fury up, a huge icon appears in the middle of the screen when I don’t thank you Power Auras.
As for marking I was only marking a skull so next time I will mark two mobs. Saw a post on Tankspot about Nexus and the tank there said he lost aggro (he was a warrior though) due to DPS ignoring his kill order, when he got that sorted it was easy.
One thing outside of the Magister’s (sp?) room there are 4 mobs would you expect CC to be used for them or should an Ok group be able to take all 4 down?
The Shaman rezzed me, but I wound up having to jump off the ledge and ghost back in anyway because I lost my drake. After that, though, things went pretty smoothly.
That did the trick, and we were able to get him down the wipe after that one.
(ignore the funny color…)
