The guild picked up One Light in the Darkness last night. Awesome for them (especially since my pocket healer was in on it), but I got stuck sitting for the later attempts (after two of our DPS finally made it online who were running late), since we only needed two tanks and I’d never even seen ph3 before.
Getting mighty tired of sitting all the time. I’ll be interested to see if the RL follows through on his promise that I’ll get a full clear of ICC25 this week.
Mek, have you ever led raids in a casual guild? I have. And I can tell you that if you require people to have flasks and food to run, they’ll use them. Especially if you provide them from the guild, whether free or at a discount. And if you think somebody who can’t even be bothered to flask for a fight that isn’t on farm is going to watch even one video, even if you link it on the guild’s website, let alone go out to read threads at Tankspot… Ahahahaha.
P.S., weren’t you the person who said that totems are pointless? I asked around, and every single person who responded agreed that you were dead wrong.
Here’s what one of my current guild’s Shamans had to say:
It’s just not worth it. People who don’t know how to switch targets the first time probably aren’t going to switch targets the second time, either. Maybe they’ll figure it out eventually, but nobody wants to pay repair fees for multiple wipes just to get outdated gear.
Wow, we would never replace someone that showed up on time with someone who was late, unless they had a damn good reason or notified the Raid Leader ahead of time. Sucks that you missed out on the fight. Here’s to a good ICC25 this week, eh?
Agreed on all counts. Really the only way to get some “casual” players to flask and eat is to require it, and make it free. It’s sad, but that’s the way it is. They won’t watch a video. They won’t come to fights that don’t drop gear they want, or fights that might require a night or two of wipes to beat. They will bitch and moan and say “this was so easy last week” if you struggle on a boss that you beat before (probably with better players or a better raid makeup). Sometimes they will say “this is an easy fight” even though you haven’t beat it before just 'cause that’s what they heard from a friend in a top-ranked guild.
And, of course, since you’re a casual guild you can’t replace them because you probably don’t have the bodies or have a no-kick policy or just because they’re RL friends.
Yeah, I was annoyed. But (a) I have no idea what reason they had for being late (they’re a couple or something, so that’s why they signed on at the same time) or if they’d notified someone of the delay, (b) their attendance is historically good, (c) they know the fight and I’ve had very little experience with it, not even to ph3 on regular, and here we were on hardmode, and (d) they’re full members and I’m still in my trial period.
Honestly, if I’d been **asked **if I’d mind sitting, I’d have said go ahead and swap me out, because I’m not comfortable with the fight yet (especially having to do portals in ph2) and my DPS in my offspec is way lower than theirs in their mainspecs, but I wasn’t asked. So I just to just grumble to myself and my friends instead.
Since I know I have a history of burning out playing one class too long, and since I have never played a healer before, I decided this last weekend to roll a healer on Cairne, to play around with when I don’t feel like being a rogue. I also wanted to try getting this character to 15 through quests, then to do all of the leveling through the random dungeon finder from there on out. All that in mind, I decided on a belf priest, to gain the aid of an occasional Arcane Torrent for mana regen.
Though I pretty much strictly play my own gender in games (save for my auction alts), I decided to try playing a girl toon this time (at my GF’s suggestion)…and holy crap. I never realized how different girl toons tend to get treated in games. Unless I outwardly announced that I was a guy before running with anyone, it was crazy how much gender bias there was, both positive and negative. The positive is that people seem to want to throw good stuff at you as a female toon - offers to buy me armour, weapons, cloth for my tailoring (I politely refused them all). The negative was that, after some successful randoms, I had one person whisper “you must be a dude, girls don’t play that good”. What a crappy thing to say, as I have run with girls that I knew IRL that could outplay me any day. Another negative, the INSANE number of guys that try to hit on the toon, WITHOUT KNOWING the gender of the player! Crazy! Is this unique to belfs, or do all girl toons get this kinda response?
Despite all that, I never realized healing could be so fun! It’s neat trying to balance the heals with mana management, and though I may not be doing much damage (I wand only, if I’m not actively healing at the moment, to save mana for healing), I got several great compliments on my healing through the dungeons I ran through. And, after a few days of randoms, my priest is at 21!
I’m someone who’s familiar with the logistics for a hardcore 10m raid that doesn’t bat an eye at flasks. We’ve got an effectively limitless supply of gold available to us from selling patterns & orbs from the TOC & Ulduar days. Due to us, and other groups like us, the materials for flasks and feasts are sky-high on the auction house. 60g per frost lotus, to give an example. A single night of flasked raiding runs a total of 3500g. To a casual group, where a decent portion of your raiders are probably still wistfully pining for swift flight training, imposing an entry fee like that is counterproductive, and worse, it’s largely ineffectual. Our alt runs, with their starter 80 epics and a decent amount of blue gear, still stomp through the first four bosses of Icecrown. Gear, which is really all that flasks are, is not the determining factor in raid success until you get into the actual hard content. Surely you wouldn’t enforce flasks for, say, Onyxia or Naxxxramas? The same logic applies to Icecrown.
There are better places to spend the lashing of the raid leading whip - like getting people to sign up on the calendar, stick to their signup, and show up on time. That’s the single biggest hurdle to casual raiding in my experience.
My point, which you seemed to miss, is that totems, due to their fairly unique role as limited buffs, have a threshold required to justify their use, that many people underestimate. I said that in an ideally organized raid, every totem except one (Wrath of Air) already has an equivalent or better version supplied from another class, which is factually indisputable. I also said that they don’t compensate for their combat GCD & mana in short or mobile fights; that’s a simple matter of math, especially if a fire dps totem isn’t in use. In most of my shaman’s vanilla & BC raid time, his contribution was basically just to weave windfury and grace for the melee smash group. I’ve also got the experience of intentionally not using SOE totem on running WOTLK fights (hi Yogg), even though by the numbers it’s slightly better than DK Horn, because my intermittent wiping of horn reduced total raid DPS. I dare say I’m a bit experienced with the totem mechanic, and I’ll back up my original statement with more detail if you really want to debate it, but I’ll take into consideration the advice of some random resto shaman you talked to while sitting out.
Not unique, but not universal either. Belfs, trolls, humans, night elves and draenei tend to get hit on a lot. Orcs, Undead, Tauren, Dwarfs and Gnomes, not so much, unless the other person is REALLY into RP.
I have no idea why female trolls get hit on so much. Yeah, they’re much less GRRRRR than the female orcs, but they DON’T BLINK! EVER! Creepiest goddamn character model in the game…they just stare and stare and stare.
That is weird. I’d expect undead females to get the second-most attention on the horde side, at least if they weren’t horribly disfigured and/or wearing the Marge Simpson 'do.
This may work with perfect execution from an experienced group, but Saurfang is still a fairly high DPS (and healing) check for a casual 10 man. Flasks won’t stop blood power from accumulating when people screw up the mechanics, but it will mean the blood beasts go down that much faster and the ranged DPS can do that much more damage on the boss.
Even if a guild isn’t going to give away flasks, 60g for two hours of flask time is hardly a barrier to entry. Fifteen minutes doing dailies at the Argent Tournament will return that amount easily.
Curiously, for tauren it’s the MALES that get all the attention. You can be questing in the Barrens when some random night elf woman rides by and stops to flirt. It’s really quite bizarre to me, considering how much time tauren guys spend scratching their butt. I -am- on an RP server, so it’s a possibility that factors into it, but there’s really not much RP going on “in the wild”, so I’m more inclined to think there’s just something about the Beef. I’m partial to the tauren femmes myself, which is intensely strange for me considering that I’m a gay male
I have two female toons, an Orc rogue and a Belf warlock, and my Orc seemed to get more attention than my Belf does. But I haven’t really noticed either one getting much special treatment, surprisingly.
So, that’s a no. I’ve raided with everyone from very casual guilds up to server-first hardcore raiding guilds. You can’t always extrapolate how one will work based on your experiences with the other.
That’s because you’re experienced players. This means nothing with regard to the performance of a casual guild. I’m sure you caught the story of the guild who cleared all of Ulduar wearing nothing but blues, just to prove that it could be done. That doesn’t mean that an average player could do the same.
Again, this applies to players who do their research. When you have a casual group, everything you can do to give yourself an extra margin of error is going to help you. People aren’t going to be as good at itemizing their gear, gemming/chanting, or prioritizing their rotations, which means that the slack has to be picked up elsewhere: and a very easy way to do that is with flasks and food. It’s extra performance that they don’t have to do anything to get, other than click a button. Having a Flask of Endless Rage won’t help that inexperienced Ret Paladin switch to the bone spiked player any faster on Marrowgar, but it will make the time they do spend DPSing them out of it count for more with each hit.
I don’t disagree that it won’t be worth your while to drop them on, say, a bunch of five-man trash pulls. But unless there is something that would specifically preclude their use (e.g., the extreme movement and weird positioning on Yogg), it’s the rule that they go down. Not the exception. Excepting absolute world-top raiding guilds, it’s highly unlikely that you’ll have a 100% ideal raid composition for buffs every night. That’s why buff duplication is so important in the current paradigm: sure, most Shaman totems might do the same thing as a lot of other buffs. But some of them are unique, and every duplicated buff means that that raider can be freed up to buff something else. As far as the GCD/mana cost, most fights are so fast that they’re trivial, given that you can often drop the totems and regain the mana cost before the fight even starts. Not to mention, few classes have problems with mana regeneration these days, unless it’s a gimmick fight like Vez. I can hardly remember the last time I heard someone call for an Innervate.
That’s a disgusting low blow and you know it. (Not to mention, completely irrelevant.)
I both believe, and don’t believe this claim. A group that knows the fights very well could probably clear the first wing of ICC10 in pretty low-level gear, but I’m not really buying “starter 80 epics” and blues for all 10 members as being possible… it seems the DPS required on Saurfang alone before getting cascading marks would make that pretty damn difficult…
I keep hearing “ICC is the new Naxx” but I’m just not seeing it. The first four fights, OK (but I’d rate Saurfang as tougher than most of the Naxx fights at-gear-level), but the second wing is quite a bit trickier than Naxx was, IMO. Seems most of the people QQing about ICC10 being really easy are in 25-man ToC gear (and sometimes hard-modes).
Reminds me of when the the second wing opened and folks were complaining that Festergut was over-tuned on 10-man (which Blizz agreed with, IIRC, and corrected). They were shouted down constantly on the forums as being terrible players, etc… almost every single person claiming that the ICC10 fights were tuned correctly had Anub 25HM titles or achievements. :smack:
This I agree with 100%. The first, and most difficult, step for any new raiding group is getting a core group that will sign up and show up. You need more than 10 or you cancel too often, but less than 15 or you have too many sitting out… Oh, and they all have to be at roughly the same gear level and have the same goals, or there could be some serious issues.
I don’t really buy that requiring flasks and buff food is an insurmountable hurdle though. However, a reasonable balance is to put in a method for the group to earn gold (we sell all patterns and BoE epics) and then use those funds to pay for repairs and flasks/food.
This is actually my major example. Mark generation rate on Saurfang is almost entirely a factor of how smoothly the fight is executed. He only generates blood power when a) a beast bites someone, b) he hits a tank who has the rune of blood, c) he deals damage with blood nova and d) deals damage with Mark. If you completely eliminate A, reduce B to at most a single hit, and stay spread out so C is never more than one person at a time, his blood power gain is so slow that the first Mark will come 3/4ths into Saurfang’s enrage timer. If you then let that marked person die immediately to avoid D, then there will be no second Mark - you’ll have hit his enrage timer before then. If you eliminate beast and rune damage, thus eliminating mark damage in the process, it’s actually quite possible for a single healer to keep up with the damage output even in mid-grade gear, which means the DPS check for the enrage timer is incredibly easy to make.
Saurfang is 100% a technical execution fight, not a DPS or healing or tanking race.
That was Rotface, who was using the 25-man slime spawn rate in 10-man…which is turning out to be a frequent error - the first week Marrowgar was using his 25-man saber lash too, and Blood Princes on their empowered fireball. It’s not a gear brute-forcing that’s getting people by it, it’s sheer experience. Those people with the TOGC25 gear? Odds are that they raid a lot, and that’s the bias in itself. Except for two people, my 10-man raid is purely 10-man, and we downed all three of those overtuned bosses their first week, but I’ll admit that Rotface took us some doing, an hour and a half of wiping, with still more than that for Putricide (who’s actually a lot easier on 25) and this for a group with plenty of hardmode experience for all of Wrath. You don’t hear much about “the new Naxx” anymore now that the new wings are out, but when it was just the first four bosses, it was entirely true. IME most raids still have more trouble with, say, Yogg-Saron, even normal mode and with a huge gear quality advantage, than they will with the Lower Spire.
I’ve a got a question, maybe it’s been addressed earlier in the thread, but 174 pages is a bit too much for me to look through. Anyway, my DPS warrior recently got to 80 and I’m wondering weather to spend my EoTs on Furious Gladiator’s Battlegear or non-set things like this. The Furious Gladiator’s Battlegear seems to be more useful for tanks, but it wouldn’t the first thing I got horribly wrong.
That depends. Are you PvPing or PvEing? If the latter, spend your emblems on PvE gear. Both the tier9 and non-tier 245 gear is good for a warrior, and you can even drop back to some of the T8-level gear for the items you can’t get from the T9-level vendors. Also, buy Crusader Orbs and have the crafted pieces made (bracers and boots, I believe).
If you’re just questing and doing heroics you’d probably be okay with some PvP gear, but if you plan to raid, you should be concentrating on PvE gear.
If you’re PvPing, then never mind. Get the PvP gear.
Everything with “Gladiator” in the title is PVP gear. It’s meant for fighting other players, or more specifically, for reducing the damage from enemy players. While it’s passable for DPS, it spends a lot of its stats on high stamina and resilience, and so is going to be inferior, damage-wise, to a normal piece of gear of the same quality.
You can get the PVE warrior DPS set with Emblems of Triumph at the Argent Tournament in Icecrown. Outside the eastern entrance to the Coliseum are two lines of vendors who sell the armor sets. The offset pieces like you linked are individually better than the basic tier pieces, but they just cost more and don’t bring set bonuses. Typically the quick triumph gearing method is to get the offset shoulders and tier hat / chest / gloves / pants.
Oh, I understand the fight - and we never get a second mark on 10-man. My point was merely what you confirmed in this post - you either need a “geared for ICC” healer (in which case your DPS can probably be in “new to 80s epics and blues”) or you need at least somewhat geared DPS. You can’t take a full raid of just-hit-80, no-T9-gear toons, even if they are veteran raiders, and expect to beat Saurfang.
You’re right, I was confusing the Marrowgar “bug” with the tank-crushing in Festergut (which is actually just part of the fight).
Absolutely. Raid awareness and experience are the most important thing you can bring to a fight (way more than flasks, obviously). ToC made that relatively unimportant, and Lower Spire too, to a point (although you can’t really “brute force” Saurfang, as you yourself pointed out).
My only points about the flask question are: 1) gold is sooo easy that it’s really just laziness if you can’t afford flasks, and lazy players aren’t really gonna help the raid, and 2) few things are more demoralizing to a guild than 1% wipes - and often that 1% could have been avoided with proper raid buffing.
Building good raid habits is important, and I strongly think that bringer all of your best self-buffs (flasks, food, ammo) is a good habit to encourage, even for “easy” fights.
Female gamer, playing female toons - I noticed a lot more overt hassles in EQ, actually. It didn’t help that I started as a female half-elf ranger, and in leather, you had your asscheeks hanging out. :smack:
I haven’t been hassled much in WoW, but I do tend to keep my head down and just do what I need to, rather than socializing outside the guild very much. I did run into some huge jerk as my then-newb tauren druid who really wouldn’t take no for an answer on grouping together, and then started sending me harassing, explicit tells. I ignored him and petitioned him, and then since I had such a low-level toon I went ahead and deleted her, then created a new one.
Oh, I did forget about a guildie, who hasn’t played in a while due to RL issues - he had his “acceptability” level of flirty behavior set much higher than mine. He’d call other women in the guild “hon” and “sweetie” and all that, but when I was getting slightly more “affectionate”-type tells, I finally told him to knock it off, and “because I don’t like it” wasn’t an answer he was accepting. Then I grouched about it to my husband, and he didn’t see the big deal, but when I told him that the guy wouldn’t stop after I told him to, then that crossed his line as well, and he blew up all over the guy.
My husband and I have our own assumptions about race/gender/class combos, too. Tauren are (in our limited experience) almost always played by the same gender player as the character. I think NElf chicks flirt with male tauren because they see you as “just a piece of meat.” Male tauren are tall, broad-shouldered, and have a big potential for having a face that isn’t all “scary” compared to what an Alliance player is used to seeing.
Interesting. My experience is different–almost all the female Tauren I know are played by male players (although two of them are gay, so that might or might not be relevant). I only know one woman who plays a male Tauren, though.
Me, I’m female and play exclusively male toons. My mentality seems to be more male anyway (competitive, prefer DPS/tank to healing–I know these are stereotypes, but to some extent they’re true) and there’s very little that annoys me more than being hit on by guys who treat me like a “typical girl”. So I get around it by playing guys. Nobody bothers me. It still bugs me that my guildies refer to my characters as “she,” but I can’t really complain about it now that I’m no longer on an RP server. And I’m in a primarily gay guild now with overwhelmingly male guildies, so that solves the “getting hit on” problem mostly right there.
Honestly, though, it’s only happened to me once in all the time I played WoW (since 2006) and that was when I was running one of my rare female characters (a night elf priest) around the lowbie area. I put the guy on ignore and pretty much stopped running that character. It’s not worth the annoyance factor.
I just tend to get people assuming I’m male, especially on my main, 'cause everybody knows that (a) women don’t play WoW and (b) we *certainly *don’t ever tank.
Regallag_The_Axe, the big stat to watch out for when you’re trying to tell the difference between PvP and PvE gear is Resilience. If an item has Resil, it’s PvP gear, and you should stay the hell away from it for PvE.
For a fresh 80 PvE DPS Warrior, you’re probably going to want to be Arms instead of Fury. Once your gear gets good enough (especially after picking up two good 2H weapons you can DW with Titan’s Grip–note that Polearms won’t work), you’ll want to switch over, but until then, Arms is your best bet. You’ll want to get an Axe or a Polearm and spec into Poleaxe Specialization. You can pick up 2H maces or swords, to keep for when you switch to Fury, but you shouldn’t use them or spec for them as Arms. This is probably a good spec to start with; I can’t check it from here to make sure it’s still ideal, but it’s at least a good starting point. As far as stats to watch for, gem, and chant for: Hit to cap (8%), Expertise to cap (26), then Armor Penetration to soft cap (if you get an ArP proc trinket) or higher if you don’t have a proc trink. Once you’re past that (which you may do with gear alone at some point), go for Strength.
Male tauren are tall, broad-shouldered, and have a big potential for having a face that isn’t all “scary” compared to what an Alliance player is used to seeing.