Hodir, PTR, Strategy, Tactics, Ulduar

The Joys of Testing

We got word late yesterday that Hodir would be available on the PTR at 7PM EST and we quickly rushed to rally the troops. Given the general instability of the PTR and the throngs of people waiting for their shot to tackle some test content, we knew it was going to be painful. And painful it was.

It was more than two hours of disconnects, server crashed, lagging, and bugginess before our first real pulls began. I would assume by this time that many had given up on even trying because the server couldn’t keep itself straight for more than five minutes at a time. This is the downside of PTR testing. You often have to go through a lot of bullshit to get any benefit out of it. But the up side…

Hodir Impressions

First off, if you’re looking for detailed fight information or strategies, check out the Hodir strategy on StratFu. It’s an excellent write up mainly by Kyth by with contributions from many of our excellent strategists. New fights with zero information available are always a flurry of activity and discussion. Also if you want to watch our raiding live streams and listen to our vent streaming check out our Streams Page. Last night we streamed our entire raid and vent which is pretty cool considering 90% of our strategy discussion happens in real time on Ventrilo.

First off, Hodir in his current form is relatively easy. With 35 million HP and a 9 minute enrage the DPS timer is relatively tightly tuned but nothing hair raising. The easy part is that the strategy is very simple and the raid damage isn’t bad at all and highly controllable. Most of the damage on the fight is avoidable once your raiders are trained how to avoid it and are used to the fight.

We got four good attempts in and by the fourth attempt had a complete strategy down and got imh to 60%. If we had another 30-60 minutes to attempt him he probably would have died. It’s not that the fight is drop dead easy, it’s not. It’s just that it’s simple and the raid damage isn’t bad. It is most definitely an endurance and DPS optimization fight because doing 35 million damage in 9 minutes with the amount of movement needed isn’t trivial. There is a ton of room for optimization on the part of your raiders because avoiding the raid damage while maximizing DPS can be greatly improved with both skill and practice.

Hordir Hard Mode Musings

From what we could tell, there’s two potential hard mode avenues. One, there’s some chests which he he breaks every 3 minutes in the fight. They have no function in the fight itself so either they are bugged (and I doubt this) or they simply are extra loot chests. If the “hard mode” of this fight is to beat this fight in less than 3 minutes then that’s going to take some pretty incredible DPS. I hesitate to say anything is impossible because of how much crazy shit I’ve seen done in this game, but I don’t know that 35 million damage in 3 minutes is possible even with full Ulduar gear. This is even given the buffs that the NPCs provide. There may be a gimmick to it or there may be missing mechanics on the PTR though.

The other potential “hard mode” or least an achievement would be to ignore freeing the NPCs. Right now the NPCs honestly don’t do a whole lot and may actually serve as a net DPS loss considering the time it takes to free them and the pitiful buffs they provide.

Anticipated Fight Changes

It’s hard to tell if they want to change anything because it highly depends on the desired difficulty. Right now Hodir is firmly in the “easy” category of fights. Bugginess and completion wise the fight is very good. There’s a few small bugs with it but nothing that hugely impacts the fight. The fight feels complete and feels like all the mechanics are correct and in place.

Difficulty wise and achievement wise, I would say they need to increase his HP and the contribution of the buffs from the NPCs. Right now I see the ideal strategy being to basically ignore the NPCs completely and burn him. Being able to ignore the NPCs and the buffs they provide very much reduces the complexity of the fight and turns it into yet another “avoid the fire/stand in the fire and burn the boss” fight. It’s not very interesting or difficult if the NPCs and their buffs are ignorable.

Significantly buffing the NPCs and his HP and/or the raid damage would make the route towards creating a hard mode of the fight much easier. Using less/no NPCs would be how you would earn the achievements and due to their potency would make the fight much more difficult.

Final Thoughts

The PTR is always a mixed bag. On the one hand it’s frustrating as hell to have you entire guild beating their heads against the server just trying to crash hop to the instance only to have it crash even more and lag out and cause all sorts of weird problems. On the other hand, it is exhilerating to be seeing the boss right as the first eyes in the world are seeing and to be figuring out the strategy for in front of a live audience of over 2000 people. The rush of figuring the fight out in a frenzy of activity on voice chat. The frenetic pace of figuring your own strategy out while keeping in communication with other top guilds on IRC to see their progress and pick up any potential hints to how the fight works. There’s nothing else like it in the game and it’s what we all live for.

News, Patches, PTR, Ulduar

It’s coming fast and furious now. Methinks we’ll see the PTR far sooner than I imagined. Here’s the cliff notes for pertinent information:

• Boss testing will only be allowed during primetime in respective regions.
• Boss testing schedule will be published beforehand so you will know when and what is being tested.
• Some bosses will only be tested in ONE region (US or EU).
• Only a couple bosses will be up for extended testing.
• First set of bosses to be tested are: Freya, Thorim, Hodir, The Iron Council (killing all the good guys eh?).
• Vehicles will mostly only be used in the initial encounter area. Once you’re inside the “meat” of the dungeon there won’t be vehicles (or very few).
• The power of vehicles will scale with your gear (most likely iLevel and quality, not actual stats).

So far the known bosses in Ulduar are as follows:

• Freya
• Thorim
• Hodir

• Tyr
• Mimir

• The Iron Council
• The Flame Leviathan
• Yogg-Saron

I will update this post when and if new information becomes available. Tell your friends to visit if you want Ulduar information distilled down to a need-to-know format!

News, Patches, PTR, Ulduar

Blizzard has released its official Ulduar preview, available here. I’ve distilled down the important points for raiding as well as a reflection on my previous information leak:

• The number of encounters as well as the information about an entry “wing” from my leak source proved almost correct. That means the rest of is most likely close to correct. Check out my original post Preliminary Ulduar Info Leak for the details. Summary: one “arena” style encounter where you fight four bosses at once, a final wing similar to the Frostwyrm lair that won’t be seen on the PTR, one hard-mode-only encounter.
• Ulduar is a prison for an Old God. What this means is that the final area (similar to Frostwyrm lair) will most likely be the actual prison itself, while the rest of it will basically be fighting through the defenses or wardens of the prison (”Iron Army”).
• It’s hard to tell from the wording, but it seems like the initial area will be a large open area in which you will pilot vehicles and have to clear our a lot of trash (Iron Army stuff) to get bosses to spawn. This may be vaguely like Hyjal in that you’re in one fixed area (although probably much bigger with a lot more movement) and the trash and bosses come to you.
• The fact that the initial area is so vehicle dependent means your gear will have very little impact on your ability to progress through it. This is a plus for those guilds who haven’t had as much time to farm up the gear.
• As I suspected, they are heavily leaning on “hard mode” versions of encounters similar to Sartharion to satisfy both the needs of accessibility (easy content for the masses) and challenge (difficult content for power guilds to measure themselves by). From the wording it seems like they have whole-heartedly embraced this as the new paradigm by which all raid content will be designed, and I think this is a huge boon to raiding in WoW.
• They’ve not only embraced “hard mode” content but also more granularity in individual encounters. I suspect that most encounters will either be “easy” or “hard” mode but at least one and probably a few will provide multiple levels of challenge similar to how Sartharion had four difficulty levels (0 drakes, 1, 2, 3).
• “Patch 3.1 will hit the Public Test Realms very soon”. When Blizzard says “very soon” that usually means within 2-3 weeks. If you’ve gotten lax with your raid schedule and you wish to be competitive when 3.1 hits I recommend you begin ramping back up in anticipation of the PTR. Get a post out on your guild forums telling people that they need to be ready to get characters copied to the test realms as soon as the copies come up. Preparation is the key here because if you’re slow out of the gate, getting copied to the PTR can take a very long time.

Get your horses ready! The gates will open soon.

efficiency, Naxxramas, speed run

We did our second speed practice run of Naxxramas in an hour and 23 minutes on Tuesday. The conclusion of the post-run discussion was that with a lot of work we could probably get it down to an hour and 10 minutes or so, but even if we did that it’s just not all that impressive.

The Problem with Naxxramas

Naxxramas has a few problems with regards to doing impressive speed runs.

• The zone just isn’t that hard. The more difficult the content is, the more room there is for improvement. Since Naxx is so easy, even after months of practice and playing our best there simply is less to gain. Even playing absolutely perfectly, we can only shave so much time off.
• There’s no tricks to it. There’s barely any skippable trash, there’s no “creative use of game mechanics” that we can exploit to finish it quicker. It doesn’t matter what order we do the wings in. In SSC there was a few optimizations you could do to boss kill order that saved a good deal of time. There was trash you could skip. Black Temple was FILLED with skippable trash if you took the effort to plan your attack route.
• The zone doesn’t take long enough to complete. Our original SSC video clocked in at just under two hours, and that was a *feat*. Our BT video clocked in at about 2 hours 45 minutes and that was a *feat*. We were clearing Naxx in two hours with no effort. The longer an instance is, the more opportunities there are to find niches to exploit.

Naxx Speed Run We Barely Knew Thee

The overall consensus in the guild is very much a lack of motivation to keep working on speed runs of Naxxramas. It would only be noteworthy if we could get it under an hour and most agree that that’s not possible with current gear. It pains me to say this because I had very much looked forward to having Fusion produce a speed run video but alas it was not meant to be. We’ll check back with Ulduar in about 6 months I suppose.

balance, buffs, nerfs, Patches

3.0.9 is slated to be released tomorrow with no testing time on the PTR. What does this mean? It’s all balance changes that are simple enough to not require any public testing. A lot of the changes look to be targeted mostly at PvP but a handful have PvE implications.

Hunter

• Beast Mastery damage boost. They realized they over-nerfed it and are undoing some of the changes. BM should be close to competitive now, giving hunters a choice of specs in raids.

Mages

• Arcane DPS was nerfed a decent amount (1-2% or so). (Corrected, misundersood the patch notes)

Paladin

• Divine Plea is much less usable for Holy Paladins. It’s still there in a pinch but will most often not be used. This will cause Paladins to have to keep a close watch on their mana versus the nearly limitless mana situation they’re in now.

Rogue

• Significant buffs to DPS. This should bring them up into the range of the rest of the classes, possibly near the top of the list. Rogues were in dire need of this boosting and thankfully Blizzard’s expedited tuning/balancing policy has brought these changes now rather than in 3 months when 3.1 comes out.

Overall a small patch but with some very good balance changes. With all current raid content being so trivial it’s not hugely important to weigh the consequences of all these changes, but I like to stay apprised of what’s going on.

efficiency, Naxxramas, skill

Healers? We don’t need no stinking healers!

Last night we did a preliminary run at Naxxramas with minimal healers. First off, here is the WWS if you want to see it. Overall it was pretty fun and a lot easier than I anticipated. Naxxramas is really just not that hard and last night proved how easy it can be. We plan to do it again next week with a different healer composition and taking it a bit more seriously. This week was mostly a test run. Here was our raid composition for most of it:

• Healers: Shaman, Paladin
• Tanks: Feral, Death Knight
• 2 Mages
• 3 Warlocks
• 3 Hunters
• 3 Rogues
• 3 Warriors
• 2 Balance Druids
• 1 Shadow Priest
• 1 Ret Paladin
• 2 Elemental Shamans
• 1 Enhancement Shaman

Read More…

achievements, balance, buffs, malygos, nerfs, Patches, sartharion, three drakes

Now that we’ve seen the changes in action, I can give a brief summary of our observations raiding this week on how it all panned out. For the guilds out there trying to min/max and stay at the forefront, keeping on top of changes is very important. Not just reading about upcoming changes, but evaluating recent changes and utilizing them to maximize your raid.

DPS

• Hunter: Survival is definitely the top of the pile now. This is  great relief to our hunters who generally much prefer Survival over Beast Mastery. The absolute maximum DPS hunters can put out is maybe 5%-10% lower than it was before, however this high DPS was reliant on pets which are notoriously unreliable. Survival is far less dependent on the pets.
• Mage: At worst, it’s as high as it was before with less variance. Under the right conditions, it can be even higher thanks to the arcane spec becoming top dog in potential damage dealt. If you supply arcane mages with enough mana they will do obscene DPS. This DPS is high enough that my nerf sense is tingling. Exploit it while you can.
• Elemental Shaman: Extremely buffed. They are going from the bottom of the list to near the top. We still need to see this in action in 25 mans, but they are top of the list in 10 mans constantly and doing very well in 25 mans. Blizzard said their intended goal was for them to match Moonkin DPS and it seems like right now that they are exceeding Moonkin DPS by at least a few percent and possibly up to 5-10%. The exact numbers still need to be pinned down, but expect good elemental shamans to be making a strong showing.
• Rogue: Still sucks. I feel for them if Blizzard waits until 3.1 to fix their DPS.

Healing

• Priest: The sky isn’t falling, Holy is still viable and still a strong performer. However, the rest of your raid needs to adapt to not being able to lean on CoH as much as it did before. Most people probably didn’t even realize how much their healing strategy was crafted around relying on CoH to handle the majority of incidental damage. The raid was just *full*. Not so anymore and other heals are having to pick up the slack.
• Druid: Prior to this patch there was two rough camps of druids. Those who spammed the  ever loving shit out of Wild Growth and those who didn’t. Wild Growth is the poor man’s CoH but it could still inflate your healing numbers. For those who relied extensively on Wild Growth you will have to get used to filling a larger percentage of your casts with other heals. For those who didn’t, nothing has changed.
• Shaman: Yaaay you can Chain Heal again without getting your heals sniped left and right by CoH. Chain Heal will once again be in high demand as it remains the main un-cooldown encumbered multi-target heal.

Encounters

• Sartharion with Three Drakes is more difficult. The changes to Twilight Torment put a lot of additional pressure on your raider healing. They also force you into either using a Death Knight tank or using other tanks with a lot of cooldown support from healers to survive the huge breaths. This makes it more difficult from a coordination perspective as well. The Twilight Changes only affect the choke point of the fight but this is also the place where most of the wipes will happen so even though it seems like a minor change it’ll still be a huge factor to contend with for guilds learning the fight.
• Malygos in Six Minutes isn’t as hard as I thought it would be. You basically kill the sparks as they come in. Pop bloodlust 10 seconds after the first vortex and transition him before the second vortex. If you can transition him to phase 2 before the second vortex then you can almost certainly get the achievement. You should be able to get him down below 35% before he flies away. Don’t suck at phase 2 or phase 3 and you’re good to go. We killed him in 5:30 though we didn’t get the achievement because we forgot to wait for the timer to reset from the prior attempt. The strategy page at StratFu - Malygos in [Six] Minutes is updated if you’re looking for more specifics.

Summary

Raid DPS is overall slightly higher, raid healing output is slightly lower, and most everything else is the same. From an individual perspective, things may not have changed or may have changed greatly, but from an overall raid perspective things are mostly the same. We haven’t cleared Naxx this week but that’s not usually a difficult thing to do anything. We’ve done Sartharion 3D, Malygos in 6 minutes, and I personally did an 8 man Naxx that got Undying (priest and shaman healing).

achievements, buffs, malygos, Patches, sartharion, three drakes

As usual, there’s undocumented changes in this patch. Most undocumented changes get dug up elsewhere, but raid changes tend to not be found until the patch actually goes live because no one is testing raid content on the PTR unless it’s a new zone. Here are the changes, I’ll keep this updated with new finds:

• You Don’t Have an Eternity: The timer was increased to 6 minutes but you can only have two sparks at a time. This makes the achievement significantly more difficult just due to DPS requirements. I would say that being overgeared for the encounter is now basically a requirement to get the achievement. I’m not entirely sure how feasible this achievement is with the gear currently available.
• Sartharion with Three Drakes: You can no longer remove Twilight Torment as described in The Twilight Torment Dance. This means you absolutely must handle the huge breaths that can hit for up to 75k with cooldowns. This definitely makes the fight more difficult and places more emphasis on DPS to get Shadron down as soon as possible. This also means that you raid will be taking a lot more damage while Twilight Torment is up because everyone will always have the additional 75% multiplier instead of just having it half the time. This change combined with the nerfs to Wild Growth and CoH should make the fight significantly more difficult.

leak, Ulduar

Note: my post about these changes on MMO Champion were deleted. Perhaps they have a policy against posting leaked info, I don’t know. Send this to your friends if you find it interesting since apparently large WoW sites won’t be allowing it to be posted.

This is a very, very early Ulduar info leak and is completely unverified. This comes as third hand info and doesn’t come from any other sites so take it with a huge grain of salt. However with the price of unreliability, you get the benefit of super early info! Here it is:

• Encounters: 12 + 1 optional (Viscidus like hard mode only boss) in Ulduar.
• There will be multiple levels in Ulduar. The final “level” (underground) will be like Sapphiron + Kel’thuzad, separated from the rest. This section will likely never be seen or tested on the PTR (think Kil’jaeden).
• The beginning is linear and then everything but the final two bosses is linear.
• Arena style encounter. You fight 4 of 8 potential bosses. Two of these can be selected by the raid, at least two are random. Up to all 4 can be random. 6 of the 8 bosses can be chosen, 2 are only available from random picks. There is a Violet Hold type achievement for having killed all 8 bosses.

Sounds extremely interesting! People have been asking for an arena style raid encounter ever since the debut at the BRD arena. It’ll be cool to have to adapt strategies for each set of bosses. I’m sure many early kills will be based off selecting the two easiest bosses and then dealing with whatever two random ones you get. It’s also exciting to see there will be at least an encounter or two which won’t be tested at all on the PTR. Ulduar is already shaping up to be an exciting and new experience.

This info is also available on our partner site, StratFu - Ulduar. Tardfactor and Ulduar.com for all your Ulduar info!

gold, Patches, predictions

With the removal of the Titanguard enchant, the best survival enchant is now Mongoose (so I’ve been told). Outlands enchanting materials are relatively cheap, but that’s because there’s no demand for them. The supply is extremely limited for obvious reasons. If you can get ‘em cheap, buy Void Crystals, Large Prismatic Shards, Arcane Dust, and Greater Planar Essence. This is by no means a guaranteed deal, but if it turns out to be a big profit then I sure as hell am going to gloat over it.