Challenge mode time attack discussion

[Nerthfu]

Hi,
I'm Nerthfu, a brewmaster monk currently focusing on obtaining all the world record runs in every challenge run (you can see my progress here : http://www.wowprogress.com/character/us/lethon/Nerthfu). Bouleau and I enjoy doing challenges from what we now call casual gold runs to world record attempt and neither of us are currently raiding or doing any form of PvP so our main focus in WoW is challenge. We actually don't have enough player in our server interested in challenge mode so we tried various LFG/LFM threads on the wow forums and ended up pugging for a good month or so trying out different player. We've ran with so many dps at some point we had 11 different player (outside of bouleau and myself) for our WR runs(we only did 5 different challenge for WR attempts at that point)

My point is, I like to believe Bouleau and I are pretty knowledgeable of challenge mode and we'd like to share what we know in an attempt to make challenge mode time attack more popular. We're open to any form of discussion/questions about challenge mode and like to give advice to those who try to compete.

Lastly, if you want to know what our runs looks like, I've frapsed our old runs which I'm slowly uploading and I've started streaming not long ago so you can check these out if you want to learn about our strats !

Twitch channel: --REMOVED--

GSS: --REMOVED--
TJS: --REMOVED--
SH: --REMOVED--
Scholo: --REMOVED--
SSB : --REMOVED--

If any of these video are not available in your country you can see them all (except scholo) on my twitch channel.

Any feedback is also welcolmed

[Nairobi]

Props to you. I saw your name when you pugged someone (a rogue) from Spirestone, and your Scholo run got posted as realm best, knocking ours out Since then, the leaderboards on our server got refreshed somehow to remove your name, and we show up as top run for the realm on wow-progress, but our group was a casual gold group, not pushing for records. But glad to see CMs getting more popularity; our run to Gold was the most fun I've had in WOW in a LONG time

Anyway, as I said props to you for helping to dispel the "conventional wisdom" that blood DK > all and is required for golds. Would like to know what you personally view as the easiest and the most difficult CM to get gold on (and why)?

[Nerthfu]

Thanks ^^

I think hardest CM really depends on your comp and also what you define by harder.

For example, although SSB isn't mechanically difficult, getting the timer can prove to be hard for alot of group. I actually think that in term of reaching the target gold time SSB is the CM with the less leeway. On the other hand you have instance like MSP and Scarlet Monastery where if you're not careful your tank can get gibbed within a stun. Those 2 instances are particularly difficult for a brewmaster tank because of how reliant we are on active mitigation. To make it even more painful for me I run with such low health that if I'm not careful (everyone stunned or cooldown stacked on me) I die instantly if I get stunned.

Finally there's the length of the CM, Shado-pan can be longer to learn simply because the instance is longer and it's easier to make a mistake over 21 min than it is over 12 min. On the other hand, shado-pan timer is really forgiving especially when you use invis pots and the 4 purified defender trick.

Personally with our current strat (things also change depending on which strat you use) if I were to put them from easiest to hardest to complete successfully it'd look like this:

-SSB/SH
-Shado-pan
-GSS
-Scholo
-SNT
-TJS
-MSP
-Scarlet Monastery

[Nairobi]

Interesting...SSB was perhaps the hardest for us (Prot pal, MW monk, WW monk, Lock, Hunter) with regards to the gauntlet and barrel room. We tired having the WW go BrM to try kite-tanking, but if anything went wrong at all, it was game over instagib. Eventually, through clever use of rare-spawn drops (Rod, Horn), we made it work with me tanking quite easily. We actually got the "gold" time (12:00.090) on the toast at the end of one practice run, but were awarded silver instead... Found out that Blizz tracks to the millisecond, so aspiring record-breakers should keep that in mind.
We found that doing SM without a DK for cheesing the first boss was also challenging, and that it took some serious strategizing to find best place to pot in MSP (though, once the plan came together, it was cake).

One other question: Thoughts on the monk xmog set?

[Nerthfu]

One other question: Thoughts on the monk xmog set?

Monk xmog is my second biggest disappointment in challenge mode (the biggest one being the control undead cheese strat in SM that blizz doesn't seem to care about).

Well at least for SM we might try some crazy strat that'll net us a really good time, but we won't be able to beat the current best 2 runs without running at least 1 dk.

[Silfury]

big praise with going outside of the norm and running with your monk - when my guys got our golds i was thinking was it possible to get server records on our server without a dk - and at the time you were like 4th or 5th ranked in the world with your points score so i still believe in "bring the player not the class" so you definately were an inspiration to keep going with our bear.

my only bone i got to pick with you, is that you had an ele shaman from an oceanic server for some of your runs and therefore wowprogress has deemed those runs as oceanic records.... oh well - least our group has a yardstick

[Darsithis]

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