Lavode

I have 3 pieces of the badge set, mostly to make a couple of the heroic fights easier to tank - noone else in the raid have that kind of badges to burn tough. One thing I will say. Farming the badge set is, if nothing else. Fun. Highly timeconnsuming, but.. "run a lot of heroics" isnt some tedious chore like "kill umpteen elementals in wizard row" is. It's fun in its own right. which is a wonderful change

Main problem is actually how to break down a 25 man raidgroup into heroic teams..

 

Ochiba

I just looked into putting together a nature resist set for Hydross and lo and behold, there are blacksmithing patterns for nature resist tank gear via Violet Eye faction but nothing in leather.

Maraudon anyone?

 

diospadre

Check out the mats and be thankful making those pieces are not an option for your class.

 

Ochiba

Yes the mats suck. Farming heroic badges for fire gear sucks. But not having even the option as a tank to gear up appropriately for a fight also sucks.

 

Monique

Agreed. At least I can push decent frost resistance numbers with polar/other naxx gear without sacrificing alot of stats... Most likely won't be enough tho, so I'll just stick to the uselesness known as moonkin.

 

Oneiros

The first question I was going to ask was what type of gear should I start collecting for Hydross since he is a frost/nature fight, my question was quickly answered in the above posts and then I went to check up on the materials required to craft these items... 12 primal fire per piece for the frost stuff...

I believe in Harvey Dent.

 

Uziel

I wouldn't say that it takes effort, simply time. Alot of time. From my point of view, the time it would take me to have every resist set I would need for the current raids, I'm looking at always playing my main character and never having an opportunity to play an alt or PVP. I am also locking myself out of other Heroic rewards as well. Huge time sink. Just to raid the mid level instances.

Sorry, but this is not hardcore vs casual. Anyone saying so is in my opinion not understanding the issue here.

The issue is, to quote Lord BEEF, "poopsocks lol".

 

spronk

From what I understand of Tempest Keep, the "first" boss is A'lar the Phoenix God, then there are two side bosses, and a locked door behind which presumably Prince Kaelthas is.

If you only need to clear the two side bosses to get to Kaelthas, and he does not require the entire raid to be FR'd, then IMO its not a big deal. Regular guilds will kill Kaelthas and skip A'lar. Hardcore raiding guilds will farm the badges and kill A'lar. That is, IMO, a great design.

Of course I have no idea if the door unlocks whether you kill just the two side bosses or if A'lar is also required to be down.

 

Melador

Yeah, the fact that the very first boss in SC is a resist fight kind of sucks -- we were all excited to have enough people attuned this week to start work on a new instance, and after sorting out the initial trash and doing a couple Hydross pulls...we basically sent the raid home with a homework assignment of farming materials so we can gear up our tanks. Let me tell you, it was not the morale boost we were hoping for.

Naxx had a nice elegant system of dropping runes you needed for crafting in the instance itself, along with modest other requirements. SC just means going out and farming more primal fires and waters...as if I didn't spend enough of my time farming those already.

 

Trey

I think what some people here aren't realizing is that Tempest Keep is a long ways off for a lot of guilds. If you think it will take you 6 months to get the FR gear for TK, do you really foresee your guild getting there in less time than that? If your guild as a whole doesn't have the time to farm heroics and get the gear in 2-3 weeks, then you probably don't have the time to commit to blow through all the pre-TK content to get to the FR fights. Start now and build up your FR set because you know it will eventually come. Seeing TK in late September seems like a reasonable goal for a more casual guild.

 

Lodi

I found heroic Mech. to be reasonable, but we skipped the penultimate boss, since the loot is the same as normal (i.e. you just give up a badge). One attempt with our usual strategy (linear kiting since the boss is cleared) made it clear that it was just too hard for the reward, so we quit.

So, how do you handle her (Nethermancer Sepethrea) on Heroic? I assume by circular kiting. I've read wowwiki and seen the usual asinine "using fire protection potions trivializes the encounter" comment that some retard posts on every boss topic.

 

Cryect

Afraid you have to get the Green Gear of Nature Protection which kinda sucks but its not hard to get a decent amount.

 

Cryect

It should be a guild project equipping your tanks since your tanks are the only ones who need resist gear and something your guild should be able to acquire in a night or two easily of farming.

 

killets

Umm... as a druid tank on this, I basically pull her to the back of the room, and hope that none of the spawns aggrod on me. the damage on me wasn't too bad. my heroic farm group is mage/lock/pally/priest/druidtank. so it was really easy for the priest to keep me renewed, and stopping to heal only when the adds stop to pbaoe fire.

when the adds target me, this fight becomes exponentially harder hard for me to keep aggro and avoid fire dmg the entire time (no, i don't use resist gear.. yay laziness).

as for everyone else's strategy, the run in random directions seems to work fine as long as i can keep her in in 1 spot.

 

Fiola

The one time I've done Heroic Mech, I was able to taunt two of the adds and basically remove them from the fight (killed Calculator first, so had room to drag them down hallway) - the paladin taunt is ranged, and on that clear, the adds did not switch targets. The boss seemed to go down pretty easily with the other 2.5 people beating on her. (One healer, one full time kiter, one part-time kiter)

Group was:
Resto Shammy
Prot Pally
Ret Pally
Shadow Priest
Affliction Lock


So seems like you could get one tank hybrid to taunt 1~2 of the adds to better control the fight. (so healer/MT don't have to worry about moving around as much)

 

Axanor

The crafted materials + buffs/enchants/totems add up to 325 FrR/NR. Is that enough for Hydross?

 

Cesar2000

dont forget the +8 resist armor kits (if those are worth using?)

 

Axanor

I was using the +170 from the 3 Epic pieces, the +35 ring, +30 necklace, +20 head enchant and the Totem to hit that number,

 

Keline

365 is the new cap, so the difference should hardly be noticable =)

 

songster

So why in the name of SWEET JESUS are they pushing Black Temple in the next patch? It's like putting out Naxxramas the patch after the world first Razorgore kill. Looks to me like the problem is that D&T/Nihilum are just too good for Blizzard to cope with. If they want to keep giving them new content they have to blast it into the game like a firehose, ignoring the fact that the vast majority of their player base are of greatly lower ability, both individual and organisational.

Perhaps one of the factors contributing to the problem is paid character transfers. By which I mean that the top guilds can recruit the best of the best, continent-wide. That in itself acts to vastly expand the differential between the best raiding groups and the worst, leaving Blizzard with an unsquarable circle.

 

◊ Praetorian

You are ranting and speculating. Kindly stop.

They are releasing Black Temple because, shockingly, it's ready. It was slated to be in the game at release, if you'll recall. However they wanted to polish it, so they didn't include it in the retail release. They originally planned on it being part of TBC 2.0, missed their mark, and it got pushed back to 2.1. They didn't sit down in February 2007 and say "Hmm, where should we focus our development energes next? Oh, I know, the game needs a tier 6 raid zone more than anything else!" and then make the whole zone from scratch.

BT is in all likelihood the endpoint of the TBC raiding game (Illidan has been pitched as the "boss" of TBC, basically), so beyond 2.1, I'd expect things to go in a different direction in terms of the content updates.

 

• Falk

I've got an alarmingly silly question regarding Elemental melee damage that's classified in a magic school.

Is it mitigated by armor and THEN checked for the partial resists? Or does armor not negate school-based melee damage at all?

I had the bright idea of bringing some resistance gear to the Elemental Plateau, but if I remember correctly, those guys did straight-out melee damage.

 

Cryect

Not at all if its actually elemental damage and of course though it still depends on defense which is quite annoying trying to reach the defense limit as well.

Heh, a lot of elementals just do physical damage for their melee attacks (including those elementals that run in front of hydross).

 

Cesar2000

Resistance ought to work on those (assuming you are right and its not physical damage), sounds similar to Ragnaros and such fights.

 

Ziggurat

The problem with resist gear now isn't getting to 365, but to keep your defense high.

Naxx frost resist was great because it all had defense, but this new stuff doesn't. Only 2 of 3 new Frost/Nature plate has defense on it, and the Fire has none at all (both aldor crafted and heroic badges).

For Hydross specifically, the main reason for tank death is because we can't shield block his attacks, which leads to a LOT more crushing blows.

3/14 22:18:06.343 Hydross the Unstable hits you for 20184 Frost damage. (crushing) (1919 absorbed)