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

[Yooya]

No offense but its fairly obvious to me that you never cleared M'uru or Kil'Jaeden pre nerf...either nerf. and if you didnt know there were 2 nerfs to those two fights, well then you have lost all credibility with your post.

While you're right, you can't discredit the difficulty of fights like: 0 Lights, Mimiron HM, Algalon, and Lich King HM. They were the highlight bosses of this expansion and they were challenging.

Don't take away from great encounters just because we had a lot of easy encounters in Wrath.

[la7eralus]

6.) You are NOT the master of the group. Many tanks in WotLK have become rude and overconfident due largely to their short queue times. I can be guilty of this as well. Many have a tendency to treat the other members of their groups with the expectation that whatever THEY says goes, because the group cannon function without them. Please, I beg of you, if you are one of these tanks, remember that you cannot solo this content. You need your group as much as they need you.

Actually I solo Lk dungeon content/run without a healer all the time on my full 277 blood dk...guess I'm the exception n get to be a dick..YaY!!

[Egeldi]

I'd like to suggest an addition to the healer section:

Learn to manage your cooldowns. I see a lot of discipline priests never use pain supression, and never use power infusion on themselves, or a DPS. Or paladins that never use their utility hand spells.

Edit: one method I found helpful to overcome this problem in my own healer play was to simply force myself to use the cooldowns. No matter what I was healing, I would simply use the external CDs once per boss fight, rather than trying to find the optimal time to do it. By doing this, using the cooldowns has become much more instinctual, rather than going through an entire fight and realizing I'd not used a very helpful button at all.

[Lumb]

No offense but its fairly obvious to me that you never cleared M'uru or Kil'Jaeden pre nerf...either nerf. and if you didnt know there were 2 nerfs to those two fights, well then you have lost all credibility with your post.

Didn't both M'uru and Kil'jaeden get killed in their original state? Unlike Lich King which required the entire raid to have a 5% buff before it fell.

[CenariusTheForestLord]

I just hope Blizzard won't give in to all the QQ'ers who will start whining that everything is too difficult or they didn't get what they want. The game is supposed to be a challenge, you just have to be hard-working and persistent.

[Zeherah]

However, I think there's some rose-colored nostalgia going on here. I remember 5-man PuGs in BC being absolutely atrocious. Not only was finding them a pain amidst dealing with the CC jigsaw puzzle, but there was no guarantee if they were geared or competent. Almost always you asked/begged/pleaded g-chat or friends you knew and trusted. PuG'ing was always the last resort, a torturous blind shot in the dark.

What's very different now from BC is that the LFD system has completely changed the way many people do dungeons. It used to be a lot of work to put together a dungeon group and you'd be far more reliant on your friend list and other means of tracking people down (random whispers to join groups were extremely common for healers and tanks). Now most folks who don't have a reliable group of friends to run dungeons with will use the LFD system. People just don't have the same investment in a group when using LFD the way they did when it took a half hour to track people down for a run. They drop group at the slightest provocation or problem and they tend to treat the others in their group with indifference or outright rudeness. Sometimes I feel when I'm in an LFD group that people think I'm an NPC for the amount of interaction I see.

This sort of play hasn't been a problem since by the time LFD came out most folks were pretty overgeared for the content they were doing or knew it well enough that blundering through wasn't a problem, plus the content was generally fairly easy. But now we're faced with a horde of players who are barely geared enough for the instances joining them with absolutely no idea of what the dungeons are like. Most haven't used their CC buttons in ages if ever (even skilled players will have gotten out of practice). People are also so spoiled by the 15-20 minute dungeon runs that some are going to freak when their first dungeon takes an hour or two and likely run off without a word.

Obviously if you only run dungeons with hand picked experienced players it's going to go a lot smoother. But most folks for convenience reasons will rely on LFD at least part of the time. This thread is mostly for them.

[Oblesidon the Kingslayer]

grats on getting the front page man

[Deleted]

It's a shame that those that are bothered to read the entire first post will already know most of it and learn little, and the ones that need to learn and know this by heart before opening their mouths (or start typing) are the one's that will ignore it, tl;dr, or just outright bitch at it

Nice reading though, can't think of much to add to it, and I really hope that it gets through to some of the idiots in the community that we meet and want to /facepalm to daily.

[bigjenk]

yes it was....you went through many months of aoe spamming, and even the H25LK fight was the same...if you saw lady vashj, or kael in tbc, then you knew hard fights... and before you ask 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. we are finally getting back to that in cata, where bosses dont have to hit for 75k a strike, because the mechanics in place are hard enough that its unnecessary. if youve played beta, you will agree with me im sure.

H lk only hard fight this expac... hmm this means you probably got lk down late and didn't do sindy pp or ldw with no buff as they were legitimately challenging before the lol buffs came rolling in. This also means you probably finally cleared ulduar in toc gear as firefighter for those that tried the fight pre any nerfs, i say try since so few got it before the first nerf and even before the second nerf was one of the hardest fights in wow to date. I would say that firefighter pre any nerfs was as hard as muru pre nerfs or at least in the same category(oh sorry you probably didn't attempt that til 3.0), Freya 3, and the yogg 1 and 0 were both quite hard fights when they were first released as well. I would say algalon but the difficulty ranged greatly on how good your tank drops had been and if what tanks you had at your disposal.

[Brakthir]

Regardless of how you feel, wannabe, the post is still pretty relevant. If you don't like it don't read it if you like it read it. Coming here to bash when guy is just trying to help, makes you look like a clown.

Its pretty easy "man this is just not the post for me" click X on browser or Navigate yourself to another post thats more for you.

Gee that must be hard.

I think you're literally retarded or completely failing to get the point of my post. The post itself is fine, it's general "How not to be a baddie" post. It's just labeled wrong, something that multiple other people in this thread have pointed out. Stop getting indignant over nothing. I'm not fucking bashing either. Stop being stupid.

---------- Post added 2010-11-29 at 12:04 AM ----------

Also, what I find funny are all the veterans saying that fights in Vanilla and BC were harder. I can't speak for Vanilla (but my guild can as they have been around since MC) but other than buggy/impossible to kill encounters, the hardest fights in the game ever to exist were all in Wrath, with maybe the exception of M'uru. My guild has cleared almost all content in every single iteration of WoW (with maybe the exception of level 60 naxx) and Wrath is by far considered the hardest. Sarth 3d 10 man, Firefighter, 3 tree, Yogg-0, Algalon, Anub HM, PP/Sindragosa/LDW with 0-10% buffs, LK HM till 4.0, they were all much, much harder than anything Vanilla and BC ever had to offer. From what my guildies have told me (and there are a large majority in my guild that have been raiding since the beginning), vanilla fights weren't even hard. It was just an organizational challenge. BC fights weren't hard. Black Temple was a joke. MH was a joke.

[Cassidin]

Very good post, full fo great suggestions. Its also a nice change to see a post that has these kind of suggestions from someone that isnt claiming to be perfect themselves. Thanks for your time posting this - its appreciated.

Its going to be very hard for a lot of people to get used to CCing things again - and pulling groups with thought - but its going to have to be done. I dont think it will get back to how it was before but at least SOME thought will have to be done. Personally while I like the fast instances ive got used to - and the fast badges.... I do remember with fondness the CC we had to do in BC. I remember with some pride the feeling I got from successfully chain-trapping mobs in heroic shattered halls on my hunter for example.

People will need to learn patience again in Cata and I think thats a good thing.

BTW - this is addressed to the OP - didnt realise how many posts there were after it lol

[Chillerbill]

Absolutely staggering post, chap!

[Cassidin]

Wrong. Wrath was not watered down HM 25m LK was by far the hardest fight I have ever experienced, and I have experienced every encounter as it was current content.
Everyone who says what you say obviously has not cleared ALL WotLK content.

Blizzard made a lot more accessable to casual players in wrath. As a casual player I am quite pleased about that - but they also made some of the content very hard for the hard core players. Personally with raiding I think they got it about right - they gave content that should keep most people happy. Those that are complaining that raiding was too easy - were doing the easy mode. If they found that too easy - they should have done the hard modes.

As for heroic instances.... yes they were not as hard as for example BC ones. I remember 4 hour runs in Shadow Lab, and wipefests in Shattered Halls - and the last boss event in Arcatraz? All were hard(ish) to start with - they got easier as we geared up - but Heroic Nexus? I dont think that was ever REALLY hard - only wrath heroic (original ones) that was in any way hard imo was AN (becuase of the amount of poison everywhere).

So wrath raiding... both easy and hard depending what you needed.... Wrath 5 mans... pretty easy.

[chrixian]

Thank you for taking the time to write this up

[crakerjack]

Um... This is a PvE thread... It's misleading. IMO and on behalf of all GOOD PvPers, PvE takes no skill, if the you know when a mechanic is going to happen on a consistent basis, there should be no reason to wipe. + There is an addon (DBM) that tells you what to do.

[Brakthir]

No one needs another pvp vs pve argument. Take it to someplace that gives a shit.

[BishopXQ]

I don't know if this has been cross-posted to Blizzard's WoW main forums but it sure as heck should be

Clear,concise fore-warnings about whats coming.

[minty fresh death breath]

nothing new here, if u are not one of the bad players out there. especially if you have sucessfully played pvp u know all about positioning, communication and stuff. there really isnt anything new. makes me so sad, i know most ppl arent capable of this as ive been leading a raid through whole wotlk. maybe 1 out of 50 players isnt bad. its a fact. so sad.

[Deleted]

Wrath had some pretty decent fights to be fair, especially those in Ulduar and a couple of others such as PP or (Dare I say it Faction Champions) They may not be hard, but they were entertaining. But it does not compare to the amount of Hard/Entertaining bosses in BC or Vanilla and it most certainly does not when it comes to Heroic Dungeons. I don't really mind if they Hard or Easy, just make them entertaining and have at least a hint of strategy and forethought. The average time it takes to down a boss in a WOTLK Hc at the moment is probably under 20 seconds. You could say that this only happens if you are in ICC gear, but ICC gear is the first gear you get ATM. Ulduar and Naxx have been made completely redundant, I did not mention ToC because that was redundant from the get go.

Looking forward to Cata, seriously, I had more fun in the new DM on my night elf mage than I have done since Ulduar. I the shattering is any show what is to come I am incredibly excited. GJ Blizzard.

[El Novillo]

I think that the "Be patient" part should be moved to the tank section. Too many tanks will just continue face first into a group of mobs immediately after downing a mob without concern for healer mana or other things.