Challengemodes

[Tuck]

Hello i just wanted to ask you guys who have done all challengemodes or close to all of them on gold if you did it in a premade group of friends or with your guild or if you somehow managed to pug them. I have personally tried to pug them without much success after i realised that the only guys who cared about getting the challengemodes done in the guild were already done with them or had a group of irl friends they did them with.
Thnx for all answers!

[Cantor]

If you're going for Golds, certainly do them in premade groups with friends/guildies; Challenge Modes are pretty hard, and unlikely to be something that most PuGs will be able to do. We found a few that were easier (we one-shot Grimrail Depot and Iron Docks on gold the first time we stepped in there) and may be more pug-friendly, but then you have places like Auchindoun and Everbloom that are either deal a punishing amount of damage (I am never doing Auch as melee ever again) or are very tight on time.

[Roshar]

Did them with friends/guildies, both in Mists and in Warlords. Never tried to pug them so don't know how successful pugs are.

[Deleted]

I pugged all 8 of them through the in-game dungeon finder tool. Expect to go through a few groups before you find one that can do it. Ended up finding a group in the end that completed the harder ones without much effort (oneshot UBRS, Everbloom, Auch, Skyreach and SMBG).

Don't think too much about setup. What matters is that you have competent players. The setup we had was Prot Warrior, Rogue (me), Retri Paladin, Hunter, Holy Paladin, so you can definitely make it work if you have people who pull their own weight in the group.

I was off for a few days and wanted it done so ended up looking for grps pretty much around the clock, took me about three days to get all of them done.

Relationship building is your friend here. If you end up in a group where one or two players are good but you're held back by others, make sure you befriend those people and add them to battletag, then use your contacts to your own advantage.

[Hotsforyou]

If you're going for Golds, certainly do them in premade groups with friends/guildies; Challenge Modes are pretty hard, and unlikely to be something that most PuGs will be able to do. We found a few that were easier (we one-shot Grimrail Depot and Iron Docks on gold the first time we stepped in there) and may be more pug-friendly, but then you have places like Auchindoun and Everbloom that are either deal a punishing amount of damage (I am never doing Auch as melee ever again) or are very tight on time.

Everbloom gives me nightmares. We worked on it 1 night this week for about 3 hours. The timer is the absolute tightest we have came across. we have the mechanics down pat, its just the timer that is the issue. Need to have really good dps. Our best time so far is 20 seconds into silver. Sigh.

[Deleted]

Cant seem to find any or have the group for it :/

[Dasani]

I have sold 23 WOD carries so far as well as literally hundreds of them in MOP.

I find challenge modes to be the most enjoyable content in the game because it is the most challenging. My guild has long since had mythic blackhand on farm and I find CMs to be far more enjoyable and challenging than mythic raids in general because the most challenging part of mythic raiding is just having all 20 people not suck dick.

Because I enjoy CMs so much, on occasion i'll get bored and look for a pug to do them with just for funsies. I find it's very difficult to find a halfway decent group to do them. 9 times out of 10 the DPS are terrible and drastically underperform. When I join a group and am doing 30% more damage than all the DPS on every single trash pull, that group isn't going anywhere and won't get gold.

Sometimes though, i've been pleasantly surprised to get some people who actually know how to play their classes and I can guide them through the dungeons easily enough. Almost always the folks in there have no experience running them so i'll usually take em down to Iron Docks and get a pretty quick and easy gold.

Ultimately you don't need the best players in the world to get gold, but they do have to be at least halfway decent. If any of them are doing shit levels of DPS they need to be replaced.

For group comp you'll want a blood dk tank, any healer will do really but I find resto druids to perform best, and for DPS the buffs they bring aren't that important as long as you have a lust somehow. Instead of trying to maximize your group's buffs, you should focus instead on making sure you have certain things like heavy AOE classes that can also do respectable single target damage and having AOE 5 second stuns is useful as well.

Ele shaman are probably my top pick for a DPS because they bring lust, earthquake is useful as a quasi-interrupt/cc to reduce tank damage, and they have cap totem for that 5 second stun for every pull. Those aoe stuns are insanely useful for killing large groups of enemies before they kill you and can mean the difference between a pull being a pushover or being impossible for your group. Ele shaman also have purge and that can be extremely useful as well because an offensive dispel is pretty rare, limited primarily to shaman and hunters, but hunters with the new tranq shot cost aren't as good at it as they used to be. Offensive dispel is really important for UBRS because if you don't have one you aren't even going to get past the second boss and they're useful in other places as well, auchindoun comes to mind if you pull all 3 groups together at once in there and a void shell gets off, if you don't purge it off your primary kill target it's not gonna die (mass dispel works better, but after you kill the cleric/soulbinder you can just aoe the rest down easily enough without relying on mass)

I'm also fond of Moonkin because the aoe blanket silence is also extremely useful. When used after a cap totem or other 5+ second stun (remorseless winter, leg sweep, etc) it can extend the time you have to kill enemies without their casters shredding you. Pulls like the 2nd pull in everbloom or first pull in shadowmoon after first boss and first pull after second boss and a few others can go from being scarey to piss easy with a stun and blanket silence combo. Starfall is also an extremely useful pulling tool and by coordinating your moonkin with your DK tank you can pull enemies much faster and safer than most other ways. First pull in iron docks is simplified fantastically by starfall, same for first in auchindoun and first in everbloom as well. Starfall is kinda fantastic like that.

Combat rogues also deserve an honorable mention because their AOE damage is off the fucking charts. As I mentioned earlier, i've run many of the new CMs with many classes and comps and I feel safe in saying combat rogue aoe is the highest of anyone by far. If the mobs are all stacked up, which they should be because all good tanks are DKs and can use gorefiends, the combat rogue will absolutely SHIT on them all. Rogues are also useful because you can use their aoe stealth field to skip mobs instead of invis potting, letting you use dps potions. If you want gold, you should pre-pot and pot again for every single pull and certainly every boss, aside from a few exceptions where waiting is needed or preferred for one reason or another (everbloom 1st boss).

Hunters are good jack of all trades types. By shuffling their pets around they can bring any buff you feel you need in your group, can also swap out for a bloodlust pet if your group lacks that (only for the specific pulls/bosses you want to lust on and go back to buff pet the rest of the time) and can also pop out a battle res pet on demand if need be as well. Their traps are useless as you really don't want to CC just about anything but their AOE dps as BM is good and their mobility as ranged is also valuable. Their stun arrow is great for a lot of pulls if you lack any other kind of aoe stun on demand. A good hunter can be a real asset, for example the first boss in shadowmoon you can have all dps stay on boss the entire time and have the hunter keep consussion shot on the summoned add and binding shot it as well. If boss is tanked far enough away, you never have to waste dps killing the add, and all dps can stay on the boss 100% of the time.

Ret pallies and warriors are about the same. They do good aoe damage, especially bursty aoe damage for warrior bladestorm, but nothing to write home about usually. They both can bring damage mitigation cooldowns for your tank if you need that. An extra 30% mitigation cooldown can help sometimes.

DK DPS aren't all that fantastic for most dungeons, but the couple of them where there are really powerful abilities you can dark sim, they can be extremely valuable.

I will say I have yet to see a class that just completely sucks ass in WOD challenge modes. For example, in MOP i hated selling carries to shadow priests and moonkins because both of them were complete garbage for dps in challenge modes. In WOD, I have yet to see any class/spec that is just completely useless like that, so that's good. You can make it work with just about anything if your players are good enough but the aoe stuns/blanket silences, and so on really help. AOE damage is king. Also NEED an offensive dispel for some dungeons.

One last piece of advice, when you do a pull and the tank dies it isn't necessarily the tank or healer's fault. If they die in the first like 10 seconds, sure, it's one or both of their faults and they are bad. However even if you do everything right as a tank or a healer, the tank is GOING to die if they dps aren't doing their jobs. Keeping enemies under control and killing them quickly is vital to success. You cannot survive tanking some of the shit you need to tank indefinitely and if your dps aren't doing their jobs the tank will die.

I'll use Auchindoun as an example. If you pull all 3 groups together at the same time and that soul binder casts more than 1 dominate will or whatever the MC is called, it's because your dps aren't doing their jobs. If the cleric casts void shell, that is very bad. It should be stunned, but aoe and single, to prevent that, but if it DOES cast one, it needs to be purged off him so he dies before casting a second one. If he casts two, your dps are bad. If he casts one, they aren't the cream of the crop but it's doable still as long as they purge quickly. If all those mobs get shelled they aren't dying, and if they aren't dying the damage on the tank never goes down. And once the tank and healer cooldowns are exhausted, the tank will drop like a sack of potatoes and there's nothing anyone else can do about it. If dps do their jobs, the soul binder and cleric will both die in seconds after they are pulled and the rest will melt under heavy sustained aoe damage. If they don't do their job void shells will go off, none of that shit will die, and you will have to reset after your tank turns into a pancake.

- - - Updated - - -

Just as an aside, back in the day when I was bored and wanted to CM for funsies, I used to goto openraid and find a group there in seconds. Nowadays openraid is dead, usually only about 10 folks in a channel at any given time. The in game finder is kind of lackluster because it's pretty rare to see groups listed in there for CMs. Kinda disappointing.

[Tuck]

I have sold 23 WOD carries so far as well as literally hundreds of them in MOP.

I find challenge modes to be the most enjoyable content in the game because it is the most challenging. My guild has long since had mythic blackhand on farm and I find CMs to be far more enjoyable and challenging than mythic raids in general because the most challenging part of mythic raiding is just having all 20 people not suck dick.

Because I enjoy CMs so much, on occasion i'll get bored and look for a pug to do them with just for funsies. I find it's very difficult to find a halfway decent group to do them. 9 times out of 10 the DPS are terrible and drastically underperform. When I join a group and am doing 30% more damage than all the DPS on every single trash pull, that group isn't going anywhere and won't get gold.

Sometimes though, i've been pleasantly surprised to get some people who actually know how to play their classes and I can guide them through the dungeons easily enough. Almost always the folks in there have no experience running them so i'll usually take em down to Iron Docks and get a pretty quick and easy gold.

Ultimately you don't need the best players in the world to get gold, but they do have to be at least halfway decent. If any of them are doing shit levels of DPS they need to be replaced.

For group comp you'll want a blood dk tank, any healer will do really but I find resto druids to perform best, and for DPS the buffs they bring aren't that important as long as you have a lust somehow. Instead of trying to maximize your group's buffs, you should focus instead on making sure you have certain things like heavy AOE classes that can also do respectable single target damage and having AOE 5 second stuns is useful as well.

Ele shaman are probably my top pick for a DPS because they bring lust, earthquake is useful as a quasi-interrupt/cc to reduce tank damage, and they have cap totem for that 5 second stun for every pull. Those aoe stuns are insanely useful for killing large groups of enemies before they kill you and can mean the difference between a pull being a pushover or being impossible for your group. Ele shaman also have purge and that can be extremely useful as well because an offensive dispel is pretty rare, limited primarily to shaman and hunters, but hunters with the new tranq shot cost aren't as good at it as they used to be. Offensive dispel is really important for UBRS because if you don't have one you aren't even going to get past the second boss and they're useful in other places as well, auchindoun comes to mind if you pull all 3 groups together at once in there and a void shell gets off, if you don't purge it off your primary kill target it's not gonna die (mass dispel works better, but after you kill the cleric/soulbinder you can just aoe the rest down easily enough without relying on mass)

I'm also fond of Moonkin because the aoe blanket silence is also extremely useful. When used after a cap totem or other 5+ second stun (remorseless winter, leg sweep, etc) it can extend the time you have to kill enemies without their casters shredding you. Pulls like the 2nd pull in everbloom or first pull in shadowmoon after first boss and first pull after second boss and a few others can go from being scarey to piss easy with a stun and blanket silence combo. Starfall is also an extremely useful pulling tool and by coordinating your moonkin with your DK tank you can pull enemies much faster and safer than most other ways. First pull in iron docks is simplified fantastically by starfall, same for first in auchindoun and first in everbloom as well. Starfall is kinda fantastic like that.

Combat rogues also deserve an honorable mention because their AOE damage is off the fucking charts. As I mentioned earlier, i've run many of the new CMs with many classes and comps and I feel safe in saying combat rogue aoe is the highest of anyone by far. If the mobs are all stacked up, which they should be because all good tanks are DKs and can use gorefiends, the combat rogue will absolutely SHIT on them all. Rogues are also useful because you can use their aoe stealth field to skip mobs instead of invis potting, letting you use dps potions. If you want gold, you should pre-pot and pot again for every single pull and certainly every boss, aside from a few exceptions where waiting is needed or preferred for one reason or another (everbloom 1st boss).

Hunters are good jack of all trades types. By shuffling their pets around they can bring any buff you feel you need in your group, can also swap out for a bloodlust pet if your group lacks that (only for the specific pulls/bosses you want to lust on and go back to buff pet the rest of the time) and can also pop out a battle res pet on demand if need be as well. Their traps are useless as you really don't want to CC just about anything but their AOE dps as BM is good and their mobility as ranged is also valuable. Their stun arrow is great for a lot of pulls if you lack any other kind of aoe stun on demand. A good hunter can be a real asset, for example the first boss in shadowmoon you can have all dps stay on boss the entire time and have the hunter keep consussion shot on the summoned add and binding shot it as well. If boss is tanked far enough away, you never have to waste dps killing the add, and all dps can stay on the boss 100% of the time.

Ret pallies and warriors are about the same. They do good aoe damage, especially bursty aoe damage for warrior bladestorm, but nothing to write home about usually. They both can bring damage mitigation cooldowns for your tank if you need that. An extra 30% mitigation cooldown can help sometimes.

DK DPS aren't all that fantastic for most dungeons, but the couple of them where there are really powerful abilities you can dark sim, they can be extremely valuable.

I will say I have yet to see a class that just completely sucks ass in WOD challenge modes. For example, in MOP i hated selling carries to shadow priests and moonkins because both of them were complete garbage for dps in challenge modes. In WOD, I have yet to see any class/spec that is just completely useless like that, so that's good. You can make it work with just about anything if your players are good enough but the aoe stuns/blanket silences, and so on really help. AOE damage is king. Also NEED an offensive dispel for some dungeons.

One last piece of advice, when you do a pull and the tank dies it isn't necessarily the tank or healer's fault. If they die in the first like 10 seconds, sure, it's one or both of their faults and they are bad. However even if you do everything right as a tank or a healer, the tank is GOING to die if they dps aren't doing their jobs. Keeping enemies under control and killing them quickly is vital to success. You cannot survive tanking some of the shit you need to tank indefinitely and if your dps aren't doing their jobs the tank will die.

I'll use Auchindoun as an example. If you pull all 3 groups together at the same time and that soul binder casts more than 1 dominate will or whatever the MC is called, it's because your dps aren't doing their jobs. If the cleric casts void shell, that is very bad. It should be stunned, but aoe and single, to prevent that, but if it DOES cast one, it needs to be purged off him so he dies before casting a second one. If he casts two, your dps are bad. If he casts one, they aren't the cream of the crop but it's doable still as long as they purge quickly. If all those mobs get shelled they aren't dying, and if they aren't dying the damage on the tank never goes down. And once the tank and healer cooldowns are exhausted, the tank will drop like a sack of potatoes and there's nothing anyone else can do about it. If dps do their jobs, the soul binder and cleric will both die in seconds after they are pulled and the rest will melt under heavy sustained aoe damage. If they don't do their job void shells will go off, none of that shit will die, and you will have to reset after your tank turns into a pancake.

- - - Updated - - -

Just as an aside, back in the day when I was bored and wanted to CM for funsies, I used to goto openraid and find a group there in seconds. Nowadays openraid is dead, usually only about 10 folks in a channel at any given time. The in game finder is kind of lackluster because it's pretty rare to see groups listed in there for CMs. Kinda disappointing.

Ty for a good answer man and helping me out ^^
Feels kind of stupid to quote a wall of text...

[Unclekreepy]

I miss Oqueue .. I used that addon to complete cm's in MOP on 4 characters and it was pretty easy.


wish it still worked id have them done on all my characters by now.

[Hey There Guys its Metro]

I pugged most of them.
It will take a while though.
Best bet is make threads here and on the official forums trying to start a group.
Openraid still has a decent crowd for it as well.

Unfortunately, they are just WAY harder than MoP's were, so I feel its a lot harder to find people that are competent enough.
Most people simply don't know how to maximize their toon at that item level, or simply can't be asked enchanting and preparing a full set with bis stats on it.

[Deleted]

I have sold 23 WOD carries so far as well as literally hundreds of them in MOP.

--snip--

Some good info/perspective in here, thanks ^^

[FurtyIRL]

Unfortunately, they are just WAY harder than MoP's were, so I feel its a lot harder to find people that are competent enough.
Most people simply don't know how to maximize their toon at that item level, or simply can't be asked enchanting and preparing a full set with bis stats on it.

They are actually much more easily tuned, they just have more mechanics that the average player can't/isn't used to dealing with, like frequent interrupting and dispelling, etc. Certainly the timers are a joke and there's no relevant damage checks.

[durrtygoodz]

They are actually much more easily tuned, they just have more mechanics that the average player can't/isn't used to dealing with, like frequent interrupting and dispelling, etc. Certainly the timers are a joke and there's no relevant damage checks.

Well obviously a Midwinter player that runs with a blood DK isn't going to struggle with dps checks The parts that your average group will struggle with are made piss easy with a good dk and some co-ordination. I can't think of anything that made the MoP CMs harder in comparison.

[oepuxuntom]

I was off for a few days and wanted it done so ended up looking for grps pretty much around the clock

[Dasani]

They are actually much more easily tuned, they just have more mechanics that the average player can't/isn't used to dealing with, like frequent interrupting and dispelling, etc. Certainly the timers are a joke and there's no relevant damage checks.

The timers are definitely a lot tighter in the WOD CMs than they were in MOP, although I suppose you could argue when you had 30 sockets worth of gems in your gear in MOP and just pulled far more at once than an appropriately geared tank could maybe that was a factor as well.

In MOP there were numerous dungeons where I pulled literally everything between bosses in one giant super pull and AOE'd the hell out of it all with no problems. WOD doesn't really work like that. Most of the pulls are pretty small with just 1 or 2 groups engaged at a time. There are a few exceptions to this however where you wanna pull tons of shit all at once and use all your cooldowns on it to survive such as first pull iron docks, first pull auchindoun, first pull UBRS, etc. By doing those gigantic super pulls and using ALL defensive and offensive cooldowns to survive it saves you a ton of time to casually stroll through the rest of the dungeon. Alternatively, you could pull them in smaller groups but you wouldn't have that extra time cushion to get through it all that you'd save by killing it all at once. And I can tell you, from years of selling carries, it's always better to have a time cushion and if you're gonna wipe its better to wipe in the first minute of the run instead of toward the end. Generally in those dungeons after you get past those "big pulls" the rest of the run becomes a breeze.

Timers are definitely tighter though. When selling carries in MOP my group routinely had 5-6 minutes to spare in nearly every dungeon. The WOD CMs my group usually has less than a minute of time left when we get the gold. Now this is with a carry who typically isn't contributing a whole lot of DPS, but it was the same case in MOP.

Another factor is tank vengeance. In MOP you could cheese vengeance and your tank could easily outDPS the rest of your group, made getting fast times and carries very easy. Without vengeance, it becomes more about the DPS actually doing their jobs properly now.

I disagree with the "no dps check" idea. While it's true none of the bosses are really DPS checks, a lot of the trash is. If you don't kill the trash in large pulls very quickly before tank and healer cooldowns wear off, your tank is going to get pancaked. More control options in your group like stuns and silences can extend the time you have to kill them by a few seconds each but bottom line is you have a time limit to do each pull or your tank is gonna die.

Like I said in my other post, you don't have to be the best players in the world for gold, but you do have to be halfway decent. You aren't going to get gold if you're a scrub unless you're getting carried.

[bagera66]

CM's are a bit annoying because you need certain classes to make stuff a million times easier. Shame they cant balance it so that any group of good players could work just as good.

[Volitar]

You guys are forgetting that vengeance completely 100000000% broke cms in MOP.

Overall I feel like MOP CM's were better and in general the strats were more creative. Maybe just more bug abuse? Also things like battle horn dks controlling undead were fun. Wod seems to be just pulling 3 packs into a boss blowing all cds and killing them within stuns.

[slime]

CM's are a bit annoying because you need certain classes to make stuff a million times easier. Shame they cant balance it so that any group of good players could work just as good.

This is the sad reality of CMs in WoW.

[Volitar]

CM's are a bit annoying because you need certain classes to make stuff a million times easier. Shame they cant balance it so that any group of good players could work just as good.

You can do that tho..I've done double ret rogue cms last xpac and managed to get gold.

This is the sad reality of CMs in WoW.

Wrong, if you are just going for gold almost any comp will work.

[Manstus]

I've been steadily working away at them with a consistent group for a while now.

I've been running in a guild group with the same five people. We typically go one night a week that we're not raiding or doing other stuff, and try to do one or two gold medals a week, when we can. We run a very mediocre composition - myself as paladin tank, a resto druid, arms warrior, ret paladin and a hunter (forget spec). We're all fairly competent, but not exceptional. I did gold CM's in MoP with the same healer (before ToT, I think, before we had sockets on everything), and am a 3/10 mythic raider, so we know enough about our classes.

The first handful we did, we got fairly quickly - Bloodmaul Slags, Iron Docks, Auchindoun. We struggled a bit with Grimrail, Shadowmoon Burial and Skyreach. We started on UBRS this week and spent a night learning the first room, and first couple bosses. Everbloom is probably going to be a struggle for us as well, but we'll get through it. So far we've finished the first six with times ranging from one second before gold to twenty-thirty seconds ahead of gold. We had a few heartbreakers where we finished a second or two late, but that just comes with the territory. We know we won't be competing for top times with our comp, but we just want to finish them and enjoy them.

The most important thing for CM's is persistence and improvement. As we go through our attempts and wipe in different spots, we strategize around it. Whether it be adding another external tank CD, reassigning interrupts/stuns, etc. Our group doesn't have a DK for the AoE grip, and we have no 5-second stuns, which hurts us, but you can work around that. We improvise with our warrior spec'ing shockwave for a stun, we use Binding Shot, myself and the ret pally use Fist of Justice. We've all built optimized CM gear sets (since everything scales down, you can just start to accumulate blues with the ideal secondary stats).

I find the CM's harder than the MoP ones for timing, but you can adapt and work around damn near anything in them. I think I'd burn out if we tried to do all 8 in a day or two, but going at a nice pace still feels like progress, and I know we'll finish them in another week or three.

I'd say doing them with a group of people you know, and you know are good and willing to wipe/learn with you is your best bet. Pugs are too unpredictable and cost alot of time if someone leaves after one or two wipes. Similarly, potions are incredibly strong in CM's and you need people to be willing to use a tonne of them, depending on where and when you use invis pots. A CM like Grimrail where it's common to invis the first room sucks, because you don't get pots for 10 minutes, but one like UBRS is great because you can use 2-4 potions in the first room depending on your pulls, a couple during the first boss and one on the pre-pull of the second boss (we invis shortly after the second boss to the third boss). Having +1000 AP/SP is huge, and in pugs, sometimes people just don't come prepared. Also, use consumable buffs for whatever you can. Our group was using stam scrolls before we had a warrior, and drums for hero when we were without a heroism class. Even now, we run without spell power, which sucks, but again, they're doable without being entirely optimal.