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.

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!

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

Patches, predictions, Ulduar

I tend to have a knack for predicting future patch release dates pretty accurately, so I figured I’d get a record of my predictions this time around so the world can see how awesome I am.

3.0.8 Release - Next Tuesday, January 13th. Many including me anticipated its release today and in fact I think it may have been planned for today. I’m guessing there was some last minute problem over the last couple days that pushed it back.

3.1 PTR - The moment of truth, when the world gets its first taste of Ulduar and when top raiding guilds begin preparations for the sprint to the end of the next tier of content. My guess is we’ll see it in the first half of February, sometime between Feburary 3rd and February 13th. PTRs usually aren’t launched on Tuesday and are often launched towards the end of the week, so look for it on a Thursday or Friday.

3.1 Release - The sprint begins. Top guilds will get through most of new raid content fairly quickly and begin working on the few encounters left undefeated from the PTR as well as the difficult achievements. Based on comments about the number of encounters, the fact that both 10 and 25 man content is being tested, and Ulduar being the first instance with a large amount of difficult achievements with loot rewards, my guess is the patch will have a longer than usual testing period. I’d expect it to be on the PTR for a bare minimum of a month and probably closer to a full two months. Therefore I place my release predictions in the first half of April, either April 7th or April 14th.

I would be surprised and extremely proud if my predictions were spot on but in all likelihood they’ll be off by a few weeks. Still, the approximate timeframe most likely is correct so you can begin planning around those dates.

Patches, Ulduar

This post is mostly directed at guilds who have already cleared all the content including Sartharion with three drakes, but others may find it useful. If your goal is to be as competitive as possible, you always need to keep an eye towards the future. The first trickles of information about Ulduar are starting to come out, and the patch schedule seems to be lining up for Ulduar to be in testing within 6 weeks, perhaps sooner. The 3.0.8 patch will most likely be released this Tuesday or next Tuesday and the turnaround for testing a large content patch following a minor patch is usually about a month. click here to read entire article