What Wrath players need to know to not suck at Cata!

[Mister K]

Daetur for president!

Great post

[Venara]

This deserves a sticky. Very nice post. Thank you

[elegen]

Since I haven't been in beta yet I was expecting some kind of revelation about what Cata would bring, but you could have written this during MC and copy and pasted for every xpac.

[Bakis]

* Tank dont break cc
* Let tank pull

Those two are the things people never ever seem to learn, ever.

[Daetur]

I can't believe that this went up on the front page of MMO-Champion.

I know in part I'm preaching to choir here, as many of the people who come to MMO-Champ view this stuff as common sense. That said, if I can get one single player who doesn't have the experience, comfort level, or knowledge that some of us do to read this and take anything at all away from it, I've done my job, and am happy with the effect of this thread.

I am absolutely directing this at Wrath players. However, I am NOT directing this threat at Wrath "babies." That is why I specifically avoided using that term. This thread is not saying that anyone who started in WotLK is bad. What it is saying is that EVERYONE who played during WotLK, regardless of when you started, developed bad habits that may need to be broken in order to survive the beginning of Cataclysm, when we have less knowledge of the fights, and lower quality gear. A Wrath player is not someone, as some people are assuming, who started playing in Wrath, but is someone who played the expansion at all.

[brirrspliff]

good post, Daetur! that's the way we play the game for 6 years now! :-)

i wish good luck to all puggers!

[Drekavac]

This all seems like common sense, but then again I've played since pre-BC =P I do hope people remember they have crowd control abilities. I'm expecting quite alot of people to reply with "what's cc?"

[Deleted]

I think this thread is amazing! So much useful info that players really should be taking into account. It will make my tanking life easier not to mention my offspec healing life.

People saying that Wrath bosses are hard..........yeah right! Granted some are more of a pain than others (Blood Council for one!) but that's usually due to PUG groups containing people who just want to rush or hope that their mistakes can be healed through. Using LK Heroic 25 man is a bit of a silly example, I mean who on earth has even attempted Lich King..........yet alone heroic 10 man..........yet alone heroic 25 man!! I play with friends only, not in a major guild because guilds take the game too far out of enjoyment, so I've never tried Lich King. I'd love to for a laugh even if only on 10man Normal, but the fight will still be entertaining. But only a small group of people will even reach 25 man heroic Lich King, so to use that as a staple across the board would be suicidal.

I just can't wait for the QQing when Cata becomes a much harder experience. Bring it on!!

[Desecration]

Great post! I'm going to throw a link to this on my guild website.

In the past month I've had to tell my guildies over and over "watch your aggro" and "you're not going to survive Cata with reckless DPS like that."

Hopefully this will help "clue" them in. Thank you!

[Ares42]

i hope your right, and wrong, this game NEEDS the above mentioned changes, i am literally hopeing, nay, PRAYING they come into effect. the time of 10 minute aoe blast fests in dungeons needs to pass.

many players myself included see maybe 10 hours gameplay a week now, because everything except raiding is boring. i remember in tbc, the 5 mans were fun. they took a little cc, a little hunter kiting, etc.. but wotlk was all about aoe spamming.

Except for the fact that if you had tier 6 gear in TBC you didn't need to do any of that, and TBC heroics were just as much aoe spamfests as Wrath heroics are today. The only difference is that a very large portion of the players that have high-end loot in Wrath never had it in TBC. Watching the "pre-lude" to this expansion has been a very sad reminder of peoples tendencies to have selective memory. Just think back 2 years, when Wrath launched, did you in any way approach heroics even slightly similar to what you do these days ?

[Plaincow]

i read all of this and am going to show this to my friend i just introduced to wow. hes lvl 30 i think. he should love this. thanks was a good read also even if i knew it all.

[skylla05]

no we didnt get Hlk25 we did get every other fight in this expansion though, and ONLY H25lk fight offered any REAL difficulty, and not because the fight itself was hard, but because the players themselves had been "brainwashed" that they could just sit still and take it and it would be ok throughout all of wotlk.... the mechanices behind the 25 lk fight are stupid easy. and were infact "watered down" versions of tbc and vanilla content.

Player error is the difficulty of any encounter. The mechanics of everything in this game is simple (everything in this game is just situational awareness), it's dependant on how the group handles it that determines the difficulty. Some groups of people are just a better team than others.

Call the rest of the expansion a joke, blame it on Blizzard instead of realizing it's actually the people you play with... HLK was the best representation of how the Heroic encounters should be tuned. Ones that require organization and awareness. Leave normals for guilds like yours.

[Thalack]

Very nice post. For the most part, all of this is common sense but sadly, thats something 95% of the WoW player base does NOT have. So this is very much appreciated.

Oh yeah, STICKY PLEASE!

[nitrokitty]

For all my fellow Affliction locks out there: Curse of Exhaustion! Take it! Now that our damage dealing and debuff curses have been separated, there's no reason not to. If that mob is out to eat your face, kite him! Don't fear him into the next group of mobs and wipe your party!

[uriahworld]

Ignore the trolls Daetur, good post. No more AoE-fest, CC is back! And fear-in-place glyphs are welcomed.

[Cronien]

This is fantastic.

Fact is that people who played Wrath, even though they've been playing since the first beta, will have been affected by the tendencies that's been around in Wrath. And though many of those will automatically adjust now that Cataclysm will hit, it's still a good, refreshing read. I enjoyed it and I've already passed it on to my guild's site.

Good job!

[levanto]

Nice post Daetur.

When I first read it, I thought why would someone take their time to post things that should have been obvious to any serious raider.

Then I thought that it was a good guide for those facerollers that call themselves "raiders" in Wrath.

Finally it all fell into place. Those "facerollers" have all the right in the world to call themselves raiders, specially if all they have known from WoW is Wrath. Yes sometimes I like to think in myself as an experienced player because I lived Vanilla and BC but you know what?, I'm not, I have just experienced a different part of a game. If I put myself in place of someone that saw all the buzz about Wrath, decided to give it a go, and then took it seriously, then all they've known is the Wrath raiding style... that if you were a tank, you could mindless pull everything you got in sight. That if you were a DPS you could just unleash anything you had in stock and if you were a healer, well, just don't worry because your mana pool rivalled to that of a moonwell.

It seems that Cata will bring back those raids where you actually had to consider your options seriously and plan each and every pull because otherwise you would be responsible for a nice and easy wipe. And is as simple as that... think before you act, choose your spell carefully because you will need to CC, interrupt, time your heals and go back to seriously take a look at Omen.

My two cents on the guide from Vanilla / BC marking: skull was normally your main target, cross your secondary (or offtank), then you would like to mark your CCs: square for hunter's frost trap, triangle for spell-control (succ, frost, mc,...) and circle for... well the "nipple" was to annoy the hell out of your favourite overaggroing dps.

Thanks again!

[Krom]

Good post, it gives me hope that there will in fact be more challenge in Cataclysm. Now to see if I can remember how to not faceroll

[mindfulcorvus]

I'd like to add to the OP with my own words of wisdom:

If fire appears at your feet: just keep DPSing. Remember, the boss dying faster means less time the healers have to be healing. It works out, trust me. I know what I'm talking about, I've been playing this game for over a whole year

Remember, DPS is your primary concern. Jam your DPS buttons as hard as you can, as fast as you can. Don't stop for any reason. This way, you can be doing something else while you DPS, like watching porn or anime. Be efficient with your time!

If you die, just ride out the storm of QQ from all the jerks who think they know how your class works. They won't kick you - your DPS is just too valuable!

In closing I think by far the most valuable advice I can give is to carefully read the OP of this thread and do the exact opposite of what he says.

People who want to "progress" and "do things right" are totally boring. Wiping and listening to nerdrage is awesome.

trollface.jpg

Made me giggle

[levanto]

@ uriahworld

what? you don't have an 80 rogue... SLACKER!!!!

;-P