As cool as the pre-TBC instances may look, from a game play point of view there were…issues.
Pugging those instances could be a pita, first of all people would get lost, not just inside the instance but outside too, and since the mobs outside were elite it was almost impossible to get in on your own. What often happened was that the group didn’t want to fight the trash outside and just rushed straight for the instance portal only to have someone get dazed and killed, so now you had four people inside and one ghost lost in the maze outside.
Getting instance quests done could be difficult because many of them required either multiple runs or simply that you do something that isn’t normally done when all you’re after is loot.
In some cases, you could never be sure of which bosses you were going to kill unless you made it clear when you started the group, yes, people did skip bosses before Emblems of Frost had been invented(this was really bad in BRD, since there are so many of them).
And if someone had to go mid instance(which could take two hours or more) that was it for that instance run, since finding a replacement was next to impossible, and even if you did you had no way to get them to the instance quickly unless you had a warlock in the party.
That doesn’t stop people from trying though, my personal favorite was the warrior who charged and hit Bladestorm before I had even reached the mobs and then blamed the me and the healer when he was transformed into a wet stain on the floor.
Grats! Yup, both Less Is More (10 and 25) and “Twilight Vanquisher” are much easier than the 10-man 3D zerg (which these days isn’t that bad either - but you pretty much have to have someone taunt and kite Tenebron, IME).
Speaking of drakes (and wanting to toot my own horn a bit…), What a Long Strange Trip It’s Been was finally completed by Jagaya this weekend and I am now cruising around in my garishly colored but wicked fast new ride.
Other accomplishments this past weekend - Exalted with Ashen Verdict, Crimson Halls cleared in ICC10 (Blood Queen is pretty damn fun IMO) and Putricide into Phase 3 a few times in ICC25 (only recently got Festergut and Rotface on farm status). Dreamwalker was healed up to 85% or so in ICC10, so hopefully we get that fight down this week and get working on Sindragosa… the Lich King should be getting nervous!
Cheers on the achievement! Did they remove the drake, if not who got it? I got the second one form my guild way back when they first released WotLK. I honestly thought that fight was such a brilliant design, and wished that Blizzard had continued working on fights in this manner (though Freya with 3 trees is similar, and not, at the same time). It sounds like it was pretty intense. I’ve never tried the zerg method myself, but I have to imagine that with all the void zones and portals going off that it must get hectic. And yes, 8-man normal Sarth is a joke. You could probably kill off a couple DPS to let them get their Gonna Go When the Volcano Blows! achievement and still do it in a reasonable amount of time.
Apologies for the multiple posts, my edit timer ran out as I was adding this to my previous post.
Cheers for your achievement(s) as well, Jas09. I never was much of an achievement hound, but I decided to start finishing the seasonal ones, and now I have a lot of catching up to do for that purple proto-drake (is it a 310% speed mount?). BQL is definitely one of the more interesting fights in ICC as is Putricide. From what I’ve seen, the key to Putricide (at least for my guild, YMMV) is to make sure that people are “dancing” well (moving in on green slimes, avoiding choking gas and malleable goo, kiting the orange slimes, etc.), which is obviously, easier said than done. However, it is really solid practice for Sindragosa (where you will be dancing quite a bit) and Lich King (even more). Good luck on your progress, let us know how you’re doing.
My guild spent a few hours last night on the Lich King (we were delayed a bit due to RL issues with a few key players). We consistently got to phase 2 (if you count it as a 3 phase fight, phase 3 if you count it as a 5 phase fight), but were still having trouble killing the Val’kyr in time and “dancing” for Defile. Hopefully, we will clear up to the LK tonight, giving us 2 more raid days this week to get him down (which I think we will if we have our strongest players).
Yup, that’s our problem in a nutshell - too many folks getting hit with avoidable raid damage. I’m guilty of it as well, mainly when trying to kill the Gas Could. I’ll be moving to stay within range and not even notice the Malleable Goo flying at the back of my head. Often we will have a Goo target the mass of melee surrounding the Gas Cloud as it’s being kited - any way of avoiding this? Or do we just need our DPS to be more raid aware (like pulling teeth, eh?)?
On our very best attempts we get to Phase 3 with almost everyone alive, only to have the room fill up with slime too fast or a few folks to die early in the phase. Once we get the movement I think our next step will be making sure most of the ooze puddles are “eaten” before pushing him into Phase 3 - we’re normally so excited just to be getting to that point we forget to consider the state of the fight.
Good luck on the Lich King! Then it’s on to hard modes, right?
Yup, the Violet Proto is a 310, which is why people are so interested in getting it.
Grats on the drake and the bosskills!
The 3D drakes are definitely still there. I keep losing rolls on them. :\
Compared to the original method of doing 3D, zerg is a joke. It’s actually *easier *than Sarth 0D, in some respects, because *all *you’re doing is dumping a crap-ton of damage into Sarth: you spend less time dodging lava waves and void zones because the encounter is over that much faster.
Yeah, adding an OT to the mix made the encounter WAY easier than either of the two other zerg strats we tried, and I wish we’d figured it out earlier. We tried just blowing the hell out of Sarth, but it didn’t work since the MT would literally go from 100 to 0 in a split second at sub-10%. Poor guy was pretty taken aback.
Congratulations!
Thanks! Nope, the black drake still drops, and our tree got it. We figure he’s got hot dice. And yeah, it’s pretty intense, especially for the melee who have to handle all the stuff that spawns or gets thrown at them, all respect to them.
Yeah, I only did 1D before zerging became possible for our groups. We tried 2D a few times and even that was pretty insane. 3D while actually trying to kill the drakes as they drop I can’t even imagine…
lizardling, you don’t really need an OT per se, just someone that can taunt Tenebron off of your main tank when the enrage happens. The best for this is someone good at kiting - the traditional way, I believe, was a feral druid that would taunt, shift to kitty, and dash away. Hunters work as well with Distracting Shot and then kiting (I’ve been on that duty at least once).
And yeah, of course the Druid would get the mount seeing as how he will never use it…
One thing that my guild does is that when you’re kiting the Orange Oozes, instead of having the melee peel off of Putricide and move to the Ooze, we have the kiter run so that the path goes through the melee who can then just turn and destroy it. That way, no issues with them having to avoid Malleable Goo, and if they don’t kill it, then the range will finish it off rather easily.
As for the LK, yes, after him we move to HMs. I’m really hopeful that this week will be the week as we cleared up to Sindra on the first night of the reset. Sindragosa shouldn’t prove to be too much of an issue (though it will only be our 2nd kill this week), and then the rest of the raid week will be focused on LK. Thanks for your good tidings; I’ll keep everyone updated (whether they like it or not!).
I forgot (and just now remembered) that Sarth 3D 10-man was much more difficult than Sarth 3D 25. I remember learning those encounters early on, and it was a LOT of fun, though very difficult. But, resto druids own on movement intensive fights so, I didn’t have as rough of a time as others might have. I never did get the 10-man drake though, maybe I should convince my guild to do it, since Sarth is the weekly raid this week on my server.
Cool, always good to see a fellow tree get ahead. Melee get enough fights where they don’t have to do anything except stand there and DPS, so I’m not too sorry for them, but I also never raided at a high level as a melee character. Glad to see you got the achievement, good luck on the drake roll next time!
Hey! I used my mount for like a month after I got it. Then I used the 310% speed mounts that you get for the Glory of the Raider achievements since they’re faster than Flight Form. But, that is funny, since I think the first 3-4 Twilight Drakes we got from that encounter were won by druids as well in my old guild. Maybe we do get hacked dice… I should look into that.
My druid is the only character of mine who’s seen the blue drake drop in HOculus - and she’s had it drop three times. :smack: The game really needs to take your current mount stable into account; I hate having to delete a purple mount.
This was before 3.2, right? As of 3.2, having a 310% mount increases Swift Flight Form to 310% as well.
It is kind of a shame that Flight Form is hands-down the coolest flying mount in the game. Interesting mounts are exactly the kind of thing I’d jump at, but there’s simply no need to waste my time on any of the flying mounts until I get another high-level character. At least there’s no real Druid analogue to the 100% ground mount, so there’s still value in running around on the raven (in addition to looking totally frickin’ sweet).
Of course, now that I have the raven, there’s not much need to acquire any more ground mounts, either. Hrm.
Burning Dog Legion reminder: tonight, 8:45pm server time, Coilfang Reservoir: Underbog.
The event is up on the guild calendar so feel free to sign up in advance if you know you’ll be coming. If we get through it quickly, we’ll queue for a random afterward like we did last week.
Grats to all and extra grats to lizardling very impressive.
One thing regarding pally tanks and ‘rush-rush’ is that Divine Plea (which returns mana) is refreshed on each melee hit so often you’ll want to get to the next mob before it drops off.
My first experience of Wintergrasp last night no idea what was going on or what to do. Still I found it very enjoyable though the constant shouts of ‘Heal!’ got a tad boring after a while, I know what I have to do chaps but my GCD is the same as yours. My aim to farm Crystallized Fire after the battle was thwarted by every other bugger in the zone having the same idea.
I am about half way through the Icecrown quests and to be honest I am losing a bit of interest, maybe it’s because I have hit 80 now. The story is good but the quests that move the story along are few compared to the usual kill this\plant banner\burn this quests. The money is good mind you only 1k to go before I get my fast flying mount.
Cool. I’ll probably be able to do it tonight, depending on if we get ambitious unpacking. And pretty soon my baby pally will have caught up and I can go ahead and run my priest up through Northrend.
Should’a asked here–I could have told you that every time I’ve zerged it, we’ve used someone (as **Jas09 **mentioned, usually a Feral Druid) to kite the drake. At the same time, though, there’s something kind of awesome about figuring that kind of stuff out yourself, either from just guessing at ideas or from trying an idea that one of the team has researched or heard about.
I got my 25-man 3D before Ulduar dropped, and yeah, it was fucking insane. 10-man, I never even tried until I faceroll zerged it a while back.
Holy shit congrats, and I hate you forever. That’s the sexiest mount in the entire game, right there.
The last guild ended up having most of the melee not even switch for orange oozes. I’d go over to put TC/Sunders on it, and when we were melee-heavy we’d have the other Warriors hop over, too (because of our mobility with Charge/Intercept, so we’d lose the least DPS time).
For your guild, it should be a faceroll. No reason *not *to do 3D every time if you’ve got the DPS for it.
Higher number of mounts = more e-peen.
Whoa hey, did I know that? ET was my original home server. My (Alliance) main is long gone, but my other 80 (Horde) is still there. I still have some Ally alts there in their 20s to 40s, though I hardly ever play them. What guild are you in? My Horde toons are in <Revelation Six Eight>, a small guild of friends, and while these days my Alliance ones are in <La Cosa Nostra>, another small guild of the same friends, back in the day I ran with <Order Of Time>, who while they aren’t big on raiding are generally a great group of people.
BTW, I’ve been cheerfully abusing the rez-at-the-spirit-healer from instances thing since I learned it was possible; did it the other day after completing Mauradon to turn in a quest at Shadowprey and another in Tanaris, when I’d started out in the Badlands. The repair costs aren’t pretty, but it sure saves on taxi time.
Unless you’re some kind of clairvoyant, I don’t think you would know I am on ET. I have an 80 Pally and a stable full of low level alts that mostly keep to themselves.
I’m in <Gibbs Paradox>. Its a vanity guild started by my wife and I so we could share a bank between our alts. I’ve done runs with <Stormwind Assault> but I don’t raid much. When I do raid, its with my wife’s mage. (pew, pew, die)
I’ve seen <Order Of Time> around, but never gave it a second thought until now. I haven’t seen the other two guilds. OTOH, I’m probably not paying very much attention.
…now I feel bad about neglecting my Pally. Poor, undergeared sap.
And yeah, it’s pretty intense, especially for the melee who have to handle all the stuff that spawns or gets thrown at them, all respect to them.
