Heroic experience

[xebtria]

No, I'm not talking about actually getting experience for levelups - but I'm talking about... how you "rate" any heroic instance?

Especially I mean the difficulty of the LK heroics.

My experience is for now:

Azjol Nerub: crazy trash before the first buss. until now, not managed even the 2nd wave.
Gundrak: demanding, but nice. had only 2 wipes at the 2nd boss, remaining was more or less 1st try.
Violet Hold: depends on which of the 6 random mobs you get. someone (e.g. the ethereal) is just crazy and nearly impossible, others are easy. waves itself are a joke.

more heroics I have no experience, so I ask you now: please post your experiences with heroics, and maybe you have actually a suggestion, which heroics are doable for a whole group of blueish quest geared people and which heroics requires almost the best gear you can get out of all quests and non-heroic-instances. would be nice to get a rough overview

thanks in advance,
xeb

[Thanntos]

Violet Holds water boss was by far the most annoying.
Strath is pretty cake on heroic unless Arthas is being a douche.
Other then that, its all pretty cake, and I'm slightly disappointed.
The only real challenge in Gundrak is the hidden boss.

[Sashan]

Violet Holds water boss was by far the most annoying.
Strath is pretty cake on heroic unless Arthas is being a douche.
Other then that, its all pretty cake, and I'm slightly disappointed.
The only real challenge in Gundrak is the hidden boss.

Prime candidate for why people QQ - they look at guys like this saying "everything is easy" when quite frankly the heroics can be and are challenging. (granted some ARE easy)

And yes, SWP raiding guild experience and gear here (pre 3.0 on twins). SO its not like I have rubbish gear or experience.

[xebtria]

The only real challenge in Gundrak is the hidden boss.

er, what? :>
this boss is - maybe - the easiest I've done over all instances... just taunt if he resets threat and fine.
final boss is way more challenging, because he seems to like one-shotting clothies with his impale

maybe you just have still full T6 or equivalents, maybe you have already naxx gear, but I just hit 80 yesterday, went a few non-heroics, saw that they are... cake. all of them. even with my last remaining lvl70 items and rest of it is full blue <80 instance or quest gear. And I have the complete zul drak, stormpeaks and icecrown still to do. (so that you may get some feeling, what my (and most of the people I run instances with) gear is composed of.

maybe your right. if you have better gear, nothing is very difficult. but if you have more or less crap gear like me, It would be nice to know which heroics are doable and which should be avoided at the beginning.

anywhere the gear must come from... or it the way-to-go to farm the shit out of non-heroics and quests and after that farm the shit out again, but this time out of heroics and then you are prepared for naxx or what?
I don't think so.

and this was the intention for this request for an "overview" of heroics. because the statement "other then strath and violet holds is pretty cake" is just a lie if you have gear like me, an more-or-less-casual.

[Sephirote]

My friend in my guild do Gundarak and the last boss was the hardest one in their specially with is impale !! lol

under then that I never experience it lol

I would like to see more opinion here with off corse the lvl of your gear to know where we heading in your answer experience =)

[Eteo]

From my experience, it depends on the group comp. I did halls of stone with three rogue dpsers and a druid healer (I'm a prot warrior). The 2nd boss was probably the most annoying thing I've ever experienced, aka it was hard to keep the rogues alive from the cleaves while attempting to keep all mobs on me.

However, when I had a Ret paladin, 2 hunters (1 bm 1 marks) and a druid healer, We rolled all heroics we did, including halls of lightning, violet hold, utgarde (both instances). Another factor to consider is in this group was, I had a lot more gear from Naxx and one of the hunters was pretty decked out as well. So that might of been the difference maker.

In my opinion I see a lot of people having problems in Heroics without the 5-man or Sunwell loot. I think they arn't retardly easy but, def nothing compared to Heroic Arc or Heroic SH when they first came out, but not easy to the point most people think.

[mickj]

I've done 2 so far.

Halls of Stone: First 2 bosses are kind of blah (do need to pay attention or you'll wipe). Brann event is pretty crazy, pretty challenging to get through it. Last boss is a little easier than the brann event but still fun.

Stratholme: Boss fights are a good challenge. We 1-shot the place, but it was definitely not a cake walk.

[Megatwan]

utgarde keep: easy, skels are a lil harder to kill and not oneshottable anymore to include the ones the first guy spawns. dragons hit hard and the sunder armor or whatever debuff on the first few trash adds up

halls of stone: easy, we wiped on the event near the end of it, mostly because we thought it was the end boss and had dps tanking the adds pouring in the room. so the grp was stacked and the bomb the middle face shoots was hitting everyone. in retrospec we would have spred and pulled non elite adds to the sides, let the tank grab the elites on the stairs.

oh and the 2nd boss is like grull with decieving shatters, in the way that they come often and our melee (including me) was tired and retarded woot death

halls of lightning: lol funny stories here...
-first boss is easy mode
-2nd boss summons adds pretty often from the anvil so we thought it was a good idea to kill them... WRONG... when he gets low he pops golems that explode for about 2k each well the golems are the killed adds. so its double edged, let the adds go nuts and healer works harder OR kill the adds and have golems pop and wipe you. well we didnt wipe. melee died and the boss went down then we got the achivement for killing him with more then 4 golems popped (more like 8 for us lol win at failing)
-3rd boss is pretty much murmur on legs. very healing intensive we had a resto druid although coh priest might be ftw here. gotta stack on the tank and move 20 yards away as a group every 20% or so. pro tip: move in a straight line away, dont try to go back and forth or through him

last was the hardest id say since we were a bunch of swinging dicks doing nub shit

sorry for the rant im at work and bored

[sd78]

Ecks (hidden Gun Drak boss) is probably the single easiest boss, so I don't know what you've been smoking. He hits like a bitch and couldn't even kill the healer when he did his aggro-drop teleport and I thought he had bugged out and reset the first time I tanked him.

The vast majority of heroics are a JOKE and I've been trying to tell you all this since beta.

[Sarevokcz]

from my pov,being healer, shaman, tho im most of the time ele, but we dont have many healers at 80 yet, also note, i was using mostly eleshaman gear with little to none mp5 and with mostly SP and crit, no swp gear, only some old BT/hyjal pieces which didnt get replaced yet and crafted blues together with few blue drops.

halls of stone: pretty easy all of them, tho there are situations, when you can wipe, maiden - not topped tank with this aoe incapacitate and few unlucky hits and minigruul is doing significat damage even when ppl are like 15-20 yards away, more meleers = 3 or 4manning the boss most of the time

halls of lightning: first 3 bosses easy, second one even easy for achievement, loken pretty hard to execute properly and to heal his aura

utgarde keep: easy, tho our tank was virtually oneshotted once on last boss, but it was basically because he wasnt def capped

utgarde pinnacle: first 2 easy as pie, third kinda powerfull and our dps were slacking with taking down those shadow casters fast enough all the time, so i ended up zerged by those almost every time didnge tpast him

nexus: all of them pretty easy, as long as dps are doing their job properly.

gundrak: for our group, snake one was hard, but we were actually tring the achievement, so thats maybe why it was, second one not so tough, eck is a joke, third controller not so hard, last one... well his impale hurts! ouch, not hard, not easy

violet hold: didnt have all of them so far, the bird one with two adds: actually interesting one. didnt read tacts, but it looked like with adds alive, he was using Bloodlust and heal, with adds dead he had supercharged windfury, not easy boss, but certainly not unbeatable, then the caster one with 2 purple orbs, pretty hard if not dne properly, but its just a matter of few tries to learn how to kite him. water one annoying, especially for me as a healer, dragon pretty intensive on mana, other than that not easy, not hard.

stratholme:first boss.. well easy tacts, hard execution with not defcapped tank, pretty intensive on mana, second boss easy, third one tricky with its time stop thingy ala BM last boss, but otherwise doable, just keep the tank topped. malganys pretty easy, but that was probably because we had a tremor for his sleep, i could actually easily see, how hard he could be, if he would constantly sleep healer without having dispeller around. we could maybe do the time thing (for bronze dragon mount?) if we understood how the phase with 10 waves of undead worked.

Azjol nerub: we didnt get past the watchers before first boss, it was around 4 a.m. and we were already pretty tired, so...

draktharon, old kingod, oculus: didnt have a chance yet to look into those.

[Marrakech]

lots of comments about azjol nerub first boss waves, i was the same until a few days ago.

the mobs disorient random members, the first times i went there they disoriented the tank, healer got 1shotted, we wiped; same again, and again and again.

next time i went there a rogue got disoriented and it was a pushover.

[Xombo]

It isn't too too difficult to figure out why these heroics (or even raids) are so easy in WotLK.

The Burning Crusade Sensation

First off, go way back, to pre-bc. That's back when raids were tough, epics were tough to come by (until honor system kicked in) and there were no heroics.
Then, BAM the Burning Crusade expansion pack was released...let's look at most of the player base.
1. Badly geared
a) Raids were more difficult
b) No easy "free" pvp epics
c) Quests didn't really give the greatest rewards, outside raid quests
2. No experience of heroic dungeons
Everyone begins questing, gets the OMGZOR quest items and is very happy because they seem so uber in comparison to lvl 60.

Then people started doing instances. A (non-heroic) lvl 64 instance of BC was created so that leveling players could eneter the instace at level 64 in greens and blues and do pretty well. And at level 70, it was no different. Then people started to do heroics, and o baby, they were damn hard. Why? This was because no one was really rocking pvp epics yet, no one was really used to heroic difficulty and no one was really all too geared yet (if they hadn't done a bunch of lvl 70 non-heroics first).


The WotLK Explosion (....letdown?)

Okay, let's fast-forward the timeline to pre-WotLK. Blizz had set in all the casual-player free rides in the raids, gotten rid of all the pre-reqs to entering raids (and even lowered revered rep to honored for heroics), they were giving out *amazing* epics with almost no cost (come on...10 games a week isn't difficult) and everyone was geared and stocked up with overflowing amounts of heroic badges. Then BAM WotLK was released; let's once again look at most of the player base.
1. Amazingly-well geared
a) Tons of epics from the dumbed-down, no-pre-reqs raids.
b) PVP/Arena epics coming out the A**.
c) Even for new players, the high level lvl 68-70 quests gave some pretty damn good items.
2. Way, way, way too much heroic experience.
Everyone begins questing and is very dissapointed at how bad all the quest items are in comparison to their gear. Even pre-WotLK casuals aren't replacing a huge amount of their gear, because they're uberzor lvl 70 epics are just plain better.

Then people start doing instances. Someone going into a lvl 72 instance wearing all their lvl 70 epics is actually *overgeared* for this instance, thus making it "easy". At level 80, it's somewat different, because they have begun to replace gear, but a large amount of people are still wearing some pieces from lvl 70 because they're just plain better than what quests had offered them; no reason to change gear. Then people begin heroics, they know what to expect in heroics, so they won't go DIRECTLY into a heroic badly geared, because previous heroic entry experience tells them that's retarded. Once finally in a lvl 80 heroic, it's not too too bad because, again, experience and they're more prepared for what to expect.


Long-winded response yes, but for anyone wondering why they're so easy, it's all a relative comparison to what you may have been used to at 70, so you must also take into the account the relative gear/experience you now have at 80.

I'm hungry and I have ribs waiting, so peace and I hope this makes sense becuase I don't feel like proof-reading for non-sensical statements.

[sd78]

lots of comments about azjol nerub first boss waves, i was the same until a few days ago.

the mobs disorient random members, the first times i went there they disoriented the tank, healer got 1shotted, we wiped; same again, and again and again.

next time i went there a rogue got disoriented and it was a pushover.

They are a tricky pull, but they're not THAT bad.

The tank just has to be ready to pick up the runner.

[sd78]

The easiest hands down are UK, Nexus and Old Strat.

[f311]

The oculus - Only joined half way through, but the 3rd from last boss was a kinda stressfull and the last one was very hard too.

Azjol-nerub - As stated before, trash before the first boss is pretty hard, and we also found the last boss quite challenging.

The old kingdom - Found the trash quite tough at first but after that it got easy, last boss caused us major trouble with people not being able to kill the "clones" never got it done.

The violet hold - Only did it once, found it very easy.

Gundrak - First boss can be quite challenging at times other then that we found it pretty easy.

Utgarde keep - Pretty easy.

Utgarde pinacle - Again pretty easy apart from that gauntlet before the 2nd to last boss, which can be quite tough

Old strat - Only done it once, one wipe due to not keeping up with Arthas(rambo) -_- apart from that it was pretty easy.

[Romak]

i wouldnt say old strat is one of the easiest. UK and nexus are tho.

[sd78]

Old Strat is easy as hell.

We cleared it with a crittable DK in blues and greens who had never tanked before and only wiped twice (mobs spawned on him),

[Zealic]

Most of it is easy as long as you have a Good Healer and a few Dps'ers who know how to survive. Comming froma Death Knight Tank in Greens & Blues.
Only problem i have had so far is HoL last boss, the healer didn't move and the other Melee's died on the Lightning thingie..

[sd78]

Loken is a classic example of 'it's easy when you know how!'.

I wiped horribly on him twice with one group before I got everyone on the same page with regard to the strat (UP the stairs! DOWN the stairs! UP the stairs!), then on the third attempt they got the 2min achievement for him.

[iktankniet]

are certain types of reputation lvls needed to do those heroics? like in BC that you need to be honored