[Prot] Challenge Mode Advice

[Deja Thoris]

Regardless of which route you take it will feel like playing in jelly now. I lose over half my haste when I go into a CM and it feels horrid.

I didn't change anything on my raid gear except for taking a helm without the meta and a bit of reforging. I find glyphs and talents had a far bigger effect on my effectiveness. Unglyph DP for heavy magic instances / holy wrath for elemental and the knockdown one are all useful situationally.

[pld]

Regardless of which route you take it will feel like playing in jelly now. I lose over half my haste when I go into a CM and it feels horrid.

I didn't change anything on my raid gear except for taking a helm without the meta and a bit of reforging. I find glyphs and talents had a far bigger effect on my effectiveness. Unglyph DP for heavy magic instances / holy wrath for elemental and the knockdown one are all useful situationally.

Yeah, we did a few attempts on SSB (this is one of the harder ones, correct?) and Mogu'shan Palace. We managed silver on both although I think we need to tweak our SSB strat since even our smoothest runs would have put us 30-45 seconds behind on the gold timer. MSP was a LOT easier, but unfortunately someone aggro'd a pack right before the elevator came down and our healer died. We still managed an easy silver with that set back so I think a few more tries and we have a gold.

Like Nairobi, I'm too cheap/lazy to re-gem and reforge everything so I just threw on my PvP helm (with a tanking meta lolz) and replaced Spark with the 489 stam/mastery trinket. Replacing Feather would obviously be better, but I dropped down to ~5.8% hit without it. Maybe i'll just get LSFO and reforge out some Haste into Hit? (ew) Or I can just change up some reforges/gems and stop being cheap.

But yeah, between using HA and managing my cooldowns, surviving wasn't too bad. I got eaten alive by the monkeys are few times in SSB but I swapped out SoL for LAotL and it helped with the kiting.

[Butler to Baby Sloths]

I definitely agree with ONE on-use Mastery trinket, but since it's a 1min CD, I didn't find that 2x of them was as useful as having a haste-bank (personally).

I also stayed gemmed for haste, and at 15% exp (mostly because I'm cheap/lazy), but it worked just fine for me/us.

That is all to say that both Butler's and my opinions, while different, will yield the same results. Gear in CM's is all about getting you the first 10% and the last 10%, the middle 80% comes from practice/execution and comp. You can do it with full stam gems or full parry gems, etc. Vengeance is the most important thing, and proper CD management allows you to stack V to obscene levels in CMs. That, of course, comes from practice.

And no, I am not advocating gemming stam or parry, but trying to illustrate that you shouldn't stress a ton over getting your gear just right, but rather go put in a few reps of the dungeon and you'll have 9/9 in no time

Yeah, I didn't touch my gems from my raid gear, I grabbed an old ret tier 14 helmet that I stuck an austere gem in (helmet with hit/mastery), stamina flask, stamina food. Your group composition is so much more important though. The right group composition can shave minutes off your time (no exaggeration).

Yeah, we did a few attempts on SSB (this is one of the harder ones, correct?) and Mogu'shan Palace. We managed silver on both although I think we need to tweak our SSB strat since even our smoothest runs would have put us 30-45 seconds behind on the gold timer.

SSB:
You have a 2 pull and a 3 pull of monkeys. When the spirits are dead and the monkeys have lost the 50% health, run on to the room with three. When the spirits are dead, lay a Holy Radiance on the stairs to slow them, Blinding Light them, and scarper. If this takes more than 10 seconds, they'll kill you because you need the cooldowns for the next stage. When everybody is up the stairs, a ranged dps blows up the casks to kill the monkeys. Run up the stairs, the two hostiles will be at about 5% life, pull them, sprint to the boss room, have mass stun CC laid on the ground as you pull neutrals together and hit bloodlust. Use all the CDs you have when the mobs are out of CC, prioritise the hostiles because they stun you. You need to hit bloodlust before 11:30 left on the timer to give you time to kill the end-boss.

Everybody runs up to Hoptallus, use cooldowns to survive the huge mass of mobs. DPS use hammers when the exploding mobs are casting to kill stuff. Do this when the adds come in the boss fight. Taunt the boss when he focusses a dps or the healer.

Run through the next room without adding the 4 elementals. You don't need to sprint, you don't need invisibility potions. Just time it right.

Sprint to end boss room, pull the two guards and the mobs in the room together and trigger the end-boss. Don't stand in yellow stuff. You will need to use cooldowns. Stand behind the pillar for the massive pull and stand in the pack to stop them healing.

Assign positions for the end boss. When you have the beam(s) on you, do not jump for the wave. Bloodlust and nuke the boss before the healing adds overwhelm you.

We thought SSB was easier than the others, although we had a few attempts on the end-boss where he would be healed at ~5% because of a mistake, which will kill your attempt.

[Nairobi]

My original comp in 5.0/5.1 was Protpal, MW, WW, Hunt, Lock. Not bad, but certainly not great.

When we did a carry for some Youtube folks, I was on my DK alt tanking. We had me, my GF's Disc, Rog, and then Hotted (boomkin) and Cartoonz (mage). We utterly smashed some old times, and it was faceroll easy. There were a few times where stream lag caused Hotted to fall behind or otherwise not DPS and we still beat old records. Obviously, 5.3 is different damage tuning than 5.0/5.1, but still...comp means A LOT.

[Butler to Baby Sloths]

We did them with holy paladin, prot paladin, frost mage, 2x elemental shamans. We also did some with a hunter instead of a shaman and a disc priest instead of the holy paladin. One person in the guild had 9/9 gold on 5 characters (his frost mage) which really helped because we didn't have to do much strategising. We even did a couple of them on the "practice" run.

Every class is viable, but getting the right comp is still needed. You won't make many gold times with three melee dps (or even two).

[pld]

@Butler - Thanks for the tips. I think you pointed out a few places where we could shave some time. I'll bring that up when we try again next time.

Our comp was Prot Paladin, Shadow Priest, Resto Druid, Arms Warrior, and BM(?) Hunter. Fortunately only one melee, but I feel like having a mage or a lock (don't they scale well?) would help boost our overall DPS.

[Riemu2k3]

One advice I can give you is, watch "world record" runs on youtube. Watch 3-4 runs for each instance. They have some crazy inventive techniques to skip alot of packs you dont actually need / thing you didnt think was possible. Besides the "we pull everything and survive because we rolled lucky numbers in one of our 300 attempts" tactics.

Might help you out.

[Deleted]

Hey I got my 9/9 Gold Modes on my alt (Prot Pala) last night.

My Paladin.

We're on a bit of a dead realm so decided to go for realm first times.

I pretty much just used my raiding gear, I have 24 sockets in total and stacked as much haste as possible. Make sure you have another helm and use a 'normal' meta, stam & 2% extra armor is what I used. Trinket wise, I used Alch trinket (the proc is brilliant when you have a lot of vengeance and has a fairly short CD) and Horridons Haste Trinket.

Ran with 7.5% hit and 13% expertise.

Used Glyph of Divine Protection, Alabaster Shield and Blinding Light for all challenge modes apart from Stormstout Brewery and Temple of the Jade Serpent, where I swapped Blinding Light for Holy Wrath. Being able to stun the Sha, Alementals, and Elementals makes them quite hilarious, especially when HW is on something like a 7sec CD.

Talentwise, I used Speed of Light, Fist of Justice, Eternal Flame and Holy Avenger as mandatory. I think I used unbreakable spirit for every CM apart from Mogushan Palace, where I took clemency for double BoP, due to the crazy pull we were doing leading up to first boss. Finally, Holy Prism/Lights Hammer both good in their own rights. I was using LH as the amount of Vengeance I was getting just makes it laughable, and when (as we were) doing Scarlet Halls & Scarlet Monastery in 3-4 pulls/packs of mobs, Lights Hammer felt the better option.

I think we spent about 2 hours (mostly waiting for cooldowns after a CM reset >.>) 'perfecting' the first boss in Scarlet Monastery, where we were pulling one pack of mobs to the boss (rogue finishing off the corpse pile), along with both packs of ghosts. As the ghosts lose health, they lose a huge amount of movement speed, which compensates for the huge increase in size and damage they gain. I was balling them up before popping AW, HA, and GoAK, once they were in a nice bundle I'd stun them with Holy Wrath, Knock them down, then use Argent Defender to 'avoid' getting one shot, before moving away. It would leave me with about 700k vengeance when I did it right, which just made the boss drop in seconds.. Ele sham finished the ghosts off before continuing. If I didn't move out in time or screwed up slightly, at last count I took 2.2mil damage in 0.9 seconds !

Depends on your set up really, I was with a Disc Priest, Ele Sham, Hunter & Rogue.

We didn't have a huge amount of stuns so some of the bigger pulls took a lot of practise.

[Butler to Baby Sloths]

I think we spent about 2 hours (mostly waiting for cooldowns after a CM reset >.>) 'perfecting' the first boss in Scarlet Monastery, where we were pulling one pack of mobs to the boss (rogue finishing off the corpse pile), along with both packs of ghosts. As the ghosts lose health, they lose a huge amount of movement speed, which compensates for the huge increase in size and damage they gain. I was balling them up before popping AW, HA, and GoAK, once they were in a nice bundle I'd stun them with Holy Wrath, Knock them down, then use Argent Defender to 'avoid' getting one shot, before moving away. It would leave me with about 700k vengeance when I did it right, which just made the boss drop in seconds.. Ele sham finished the ghosts off before continuing. If I didn't move out in time or screwed up slightly, at last count I took 2.2mil damage in 0.9 seconds !

We just pulled those ghosts together; I laid down a Light's Hammer and hit them with a Holy Wrath, by which point they were so slow I could leave them to the dps and pull the boss.

[Deleted]

We just pulled those ghosts together; I laid down a Light's Hammer and hit them with a Holy Wrath, by which point they were so slow I could leave them to the dps and pull the boss.

Hehe yeah, definitely easier just to move away, we managed to burn the boss down in 23 seconds after I'd got vengeance whoring sorted though! Big crits were big

Rest of the instance was pretty easy, pulling the whole of the cathedral took a few attempts mind you. Like I said, we were going for realm firsts so wanted to ensure we knocked a couple of minutes off the previous time. At the start we just ran straight to the boss pulling one corpse pile, rogue killed that on his own and we killed the scarlet mobs + ghosts + boss together.. Fun numbers.

Most of the waiting was because we had our Ele Shamans 3 min CD's to wait for if I'd got splatted. Really shit how CM's reset invisibility potion CDs, and all CDs over 5 mins. Probably spent about 1hr just waiting for CD's in total..