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.

achievements, gear, hardcore/casual, progression, skill, Ulduar

From a reader comment over at Tobold’s MMORPG Blog we get this little gem:

“I think the core of this casual raid vs hardcore raid debacle that WotLK is turning into lies with the age old Gear vs Skill thing. Hardcore raiders prefer to attribute their success to skill. Rather than better geared than casuals, they are better skilled, and the gear is only a symptom of that. The reason that people are reacting so violently to easy Naxx is that it is making it plain to see for all is that gear is really the ONLY thing that matters in WoW.”

“Naxx at 80 has all the same skill requirement as it did at 60 (Plus or minus a very very few changes). You still have to get away from anub’arak, stay out of the slime and behind the boss on grob, change sides on thaddius, dance on Heigan, be smart with healing on Loatheb, and get behind the Iceblock on Saph. If you aren’t “skilled” enough to to those actions, you can still fail in naxx. The ONLY real thing that has changed is the gear requirements (From “Have to have perfect gear” to “You can get by as a fresh level capped character”). Wow is and always has been about the gear treadmill.” click here to read entire article

achievements, malygos

This achievement is a lot easier than would seem to be indicated by our time to get it and also the low number of guilds in the world who have gotten it. It does require a specific strategy and some practice executing it, but it really just isn’t that hard. I’ll revise my previous requirements downand say you only really need 3 Druids and 2 Deathknights to reliably execute it which isn’t that harsh of a requirement. click here to read entire article

achievements, News, progression, wowprogress

WoWProgress added more detailed ratings earlier today. This update includes finer granularity for its main listings and a new second listing that includes most of the heroic dungeon achievements.

Sartharion’s Drakes

For its main listing it will now track Sartharion with one and two drakes, however each of these will be superseded by doing the next higher up one. This is so as to not punish guilds who skipped doing less drakes in order to do the more difficult version first. This does, however, give finer granularity for guilds who have yet to kill Sartharion with three drakes up. Sartharion with one and two drakes is still a primary measure of a guilds progression and it’s a great thing to be tracking. The values are thus:

• Three Drakes - 7
• Two Drakes - 5
• One Drake - 3

This puts one drake equivelent to killing Kel’Thuzad and two drakes just behind killing Malygos. I think this is a pretty good measurement of their difficulty.

Listings With Achievements

They have added a second listing that adds a lot of weightings to the various heroic achievements. People voiced their displeasure of all these achievements counting towards official progression because they aren’t actually boss kills. Still, it’s interesting to track the info and you can discern how much initiative and perhaps how “hardcore” a guild is based on its non-progression achievements. Here is a list of the scoring for achievements:

• 10 - Glory of the Raider
• 10 - The Immortal
• 10 - You Don’t Have an Eternity
• 8 - The Twilight Zone (Normal)
• 7 - The Twilight Zone (Heroic)
• 3 - Make Quick Werk of Him
• 3 - Shocking!
• 3 - Spore Loser
• 2 - The Safety Dance
• 2 - Arachnophobia
• 2 - And They Would All Go Down Together
• 1 - Momma Said Knock You Out
• 1 - The Hundred Club
• 1 - Just Can’t Get Enough

I think these scores are a good start, but they need work. First off, The Immortal is significantly harder than You Don’t Have an Eternity. You can practice killing Malygos in 5 minutes, there are strats and vids available, and it’s honestly not all that hard. In three attempts using the correct strategy we came within 20 seconds of doing it. If we hadn’t accidentally killed him we would have done it within a few more attempts. Something you can knock out in a couple hours should not be worth nearly so much. It’s only valued high because so few have done it, but many will do it in short order as the strategy to do it becomes widely known. The Immortal, on the other hand, cannot be practiced over and over again. There’s no real strategy to it. It simply requires your entire raid to play extremely smart and very conservatively. If I had to score it, I’d put You Don’t Have an Eternity around 5 or 6 points and The Immortal up to like 15 points. Yes, it’s really that hard.

Next, I’d probably up the value on normal mode Twilight Zone to like 10 points. This is a very hard encounter which most agree is harder than the heroic version. There is some debate in the comments of the site as to whether normal mode achievements should be included at all. It is my opinion that the difficult ones should. If the encounter is difficult enough to challenge top guilds then it is worthy of being rated. Just because it only takes 10 people instead of 25 should have no bearing on its inclusion.

The final thing I’d do is reduce the value of all the 2 point achievements to 1 point, and all the 1 points to 0.5. The fact is that all of these achievements are extremely easy and can be done without too much effort on top of normal. The total value of these achievements put together should not be enough to outweigh even a single one of the more difficult achievements.

On the whole I think it’s great to have this more detailed listing available. Personally, I would like these achievements added to the main progression, though probably at a much lower weighting than is listed here compared to actual boss kills. Hopefully in the future WoWProgress will come up with an elegant way to integrate the ratings in.

achievements, sartharion

In an effort to complete Heroic: Glory of the Raider for the majority of the guild, we had a fun time 10 manning Heroic Sartharion. Why did we do this? Because 15 naked people standing in Sartharion’s cleave and flame breath don’t live for very long. Yes, the easiest way to get Heroic: Gonna Go When the Volcano Blows is to commit suicide at the beginning of the fight. We had 15 people in our raid strip down and end themselves at the beginning of the fight to guarantee they’d get the achievement.

We expected it to be a long grueling fight, 10 manning a 25 man boss. However, our crack team of underman specialists managed to kill Sartharion in about 6 minutes. You can view the WWS here. We did it with two healers, two tanks, six DPS, and 15 dead naked people. Our class selection wasn’t really anything special. It was more concerned with who needed the achievement the most (or least) and also recruits got to be the bitches that did our dirty work for us. Sartharion is so laughably easy that he can most likely be two or three manned if you have the patience.

We also spent the night 20 manning Naxx and Malygos. With the gear we have, 20 manning the zones is far easier than it was to 25 man them when we initially hit 80. We managed to have no deaths on bosses for the first two wings but our hopes at a 20 man Immortal were dashed when someone died to the Decimate bug on Gluth. After the achievement festivities of last night, for many of our raiders all that remains on the Glory of the Raider to-do list is a five minute Malygos kill which we will hopefully be doing a week from Tuesday. 310% mounts here we come!

achievements, malygos

With our recent acquisition of The Immortal title, we’ve been looking to polish off our heroic raid achievements and be one of the first guilds to get Heroic: Glory of the Raider. That goal got pushed back a week last night after succeeding so hard that we failed.

In order to kill Malygos in five minutes to get the Heroic: You Don’t Have an Eternity achievement you have to stack your raid with at least four Druids and two Deathknights (hurray for raid stacking). During our initial three attempts while figuring it out I managed to yell at the GM due his criticism of my Entangling Roots skills. From this point on he dejectedly stopped using Ventrilo and used in game chat to communicate.  Despite this, we had exceedingly low Tard Factor and we mastered the strategy by the fourth attempt. Our night came to an end shortly after.

The downside to being on the forefront of World of Warcraft raid progression is that we rarely have any guides to follow or even any tidbits of information to work with. We learn things the hard way most of the time. We learned the hard way with Malygos that you can’t easily get a do-over once you’re past the point of no return. The main part of the strategy involves burning Malygos down to 1 health prior to phase 2 (he can’t be killed in the air). Upon arriving in phase 3, if you anyone does any damage to him he dies and the fight is over. If you’ve gone past the five minute mark then you lose your chance for the week to get the achievement. We did not realize what was happening, and the killing blow of a serpent sting tick came at 5:13 into the fight.

Now we know, and knowing is half the battle.