Eh, Prince is harder than Curator. Nefarian was harder than Broodlord. And so forth. Tiers should have a pinnacle, and Magtheridon is at the top of tier 4 content. Nothing wrong with that.

That's why I said "roughly". He should be a little bit harder, he shouldn't be 2 leagues above the rest of the Tier

And I think Curator is harder than Prince (with the infernal landing on the far side of the ledge)

No true Scotsman hasn't gotten somewhere in Naxx. You had a table of actual raiders, and where they got.

On topic, I thought I had gathered from threads that a significant amount of fire resist was required around the raid for Magtheridon. In the alternative, we presently have no access to Naxx resist gear, so... what's the story here? The three new expansion resist plate items for those two categories (nature and frost) make it look like we're going to be massively timesunk, by means of having to drag blacksmiths to heroics to get enough primal nethers for every tank in the guild.

Not terrible, except I don't believe we have five blacksmiths, and we aren't running heroics like it sounds most readers here are. I believe I read in the "Everything you want to know about Heroics" or some other thread that Underbog was one of the five that was an optimal combination of easy/quick/badgey, and that did not go well at all. Heroic Crypts has been our pinata, when we actually put together to go Heroic.

My understanding, originally, was that we'd need a raid of 100 heroic badges (each) to go to Magtheridon (and not gouge our eyes out). ~10 nethers x tanks (that can be gifted) seems a bit more manageable for SSC, although painful in its own right. Anyone wanna set me straight with some good news, especially post hotfix?

The fire resist is needed for Tempest Keep, or so i'm led to believe. Not Magtheridon. Relax. We haven't put too much time into Magtheridon yet, but even so, we have yet to notice a level of fire damage that would necessitate us wearing fire resist gear in lieu of, say, dps gear

I'm still saving my badges, but i'm waiting to see what I really need it for, how much and on who.

Ugh, this is the worst rumor in I don't know how long.

Zero (0) Fire Resistance is needed or desired for Magtheridon. It is not something that anyone in your raid will wear. The Badge FR is for Tempest Keep.

Also, I think a lot of people don't do heroics much. I've spent a lot of time looking up people in endgame guilds on armory (often people I see topping DMs in the Sustained DPS thread, for pointers to pass along to our own guys), and a shocking number, based on their rep, clearly haven't done any heroics beyond maybe SSC attunement. I've seen lots of casters with +1000 or +1200 damage from full tailored sets, using a green caster trinket because they haven't done enough heroics for an Icon. It's surprisingly, though maybe my own perspective is skewed since I've earned 200ish badges and am spending them on DPS toys now.

I'm not sure I understand you there, you have a problem completing heroic instances for badges in general?

Underbong isn't the best heroic to start, although it does have one of the better time/Badge ratios once you got it down. But for beginning badgegrinders you should do Slave pens with big CC setups or Mechanar

That's what I do as well. I'd rather run the heroics now when they're challenging and may provide me with small gear upgrades, money and enchanting materials as opposed to running them in 2 months for nothing but the badges so I can buy resist gear

I'm not in any kind of uber raiding guild, but I can tell you that I don't do heroics much because I find them obnoxious. Buffing the trash enormously while leaving most of the bosses relatively unchanged is exactly the opposite of what would make heroics enjoyable to do.

I don't mind buffing the trash slightly, but when Underbog Lords are the most significant challenge in an instance you know something is wrong, especially when, two minutes later, you find that you can just utterly ignore the Black Stalker's heroic ability (adds) and kill him as easily as you did when you ran the place at level 64.

In fact Underbog is an interesting example, because the pre-Hungarfen trash is the hardest bit of the instance, and Hungarfen is the hardest boss. After that it's like you're in Heroic Lite. The first time we went in there we were very worried about the Naga pulls because we lacked any kind of humanoid CC. Imagine our surprise when we found out they hardly hit any harder than they do on Normal.

Heroics are just badly implemented at the moment, in my opinion. Tone down the trash, buff the bosses, give them meaningful new abilities. Then they might be more fun.

I disagree with you besides level 70 heroics where the same loot drops.

I think Heroics along with badges provide an excellent time/risk vs reward for 5 man groups. Also, in general, I wouldn't use the term 'hard' for Heroic trash but rather precise. It requires you to CC, assist, tank, and heal. You certainly can't zerg through it without a care like in normal mode.

There are some discrepancies from instance to instance when it comes to tuning but for the most part it's not bad.

I'd tend to agree, I see a lot of folk running around in full Spellfire/Shadoweave sets that don't have icons, gear/gems from heroics or the aforementioned Icon (picked mine up, love it). I think that the risk vs. reward just isn't there, even for the needed FR gear eventually. Personally I'm not that fond of heroics (making trash hit harder doesn't make it "heroic") but I go to help guildies out quite a bit, which is why I have a nice badge collection lying around for various things. On the other hand I hate farming, as an herbalist I spend hours a week farming herbs and don't really want to be bothered farming Primals on top of that so I'm lacking in all the BOE stuff I could have. I wish that Blizzard could at least off similar quality items to tailoring BOEs through Heroics, but I digress.

As for Magtheridon, it doesn't sound like they changed much of the fight other than dropping the heavy DPS requirements off it and making it more of a control fight centered around the big guy himself. After all, it IS Magtheridon's Lair, shouldn't the fight be about Mr. Pit Lord himself and not some dinky Channelers? I dunno, we've yet to really work on it as we've been farming Nightbane and working on Gruul recently (have yet to do the "ezmoad" post hotfix version) so hopefully we'll get to it soon. I can say with certainty that the changes sound more in-line for what the fight should be about though.

Zephro, go Mana Tombs heroic. There the trash is not changed much, but the bosses are fun. I approve of Heroics, they're all different

Yeah be easy to fix him for mid guilds by simply allowing him to be tauntable while whirlwinding and increase the cooldown on whirlwind (currently he can start whirlwinding again like within 10 seconds of whirlwind ending).

It's more likely that they will lower his HP a lot, and fix the still present bugs associated with demonic whispers.

But what annoys me is even if they do stuff like that, melee dps is still largely useless. Casters can dps during whirlwind phase (a large portion of the fight), melee can't. That is dumb. It will always be better to take any ranged class over a melee on that fight, after the bare minimum number of tanks.

It is also worth noting that heroics take quite a bit of time to clear relative to their normal mode counterparts. There is only so much time in a week. When you're running a small group with high attendance rates, raiding 5-6 nights a week, that doesn't leave a lot of time for Heroics. Coupled with the amount of consumables it takes to sustain 5-6 nights a week, Heroics just sorta get put on the back burner.

I recognize that I should be planning for the future with FR and i'd love to get a Brooch. Right now I just can't find the time to fit in the Heroics needed to do it.

This is true for Gruul and half the fights in Kharazan. Blizzard does not like melee.

They should introduce some sort of phase-shifting mechanic, where ranged damage gets substantially reduced based on some shifting range parameter. For example, monster turns blue and takes 50% reduced damage from ranged attacks from over 15 yards away; monster turns red and takes 50% reduced damage from ranged attacks from under 25 yards away.

Gimmicky? Sure. But you know what? So are cleaves and other short-range AoE's.

My problem exactly. Before we ramped up to a full raid schedule, I was running a heroic every night I played. But most heroic runs take 2+ hours where most normal mode runs are under 90 minutes. It just doesn't fit in the same night as a raid. I run a couple on the weekends, and that's all.

If I weren't raiding, I'd love heroics. I usually have a blast running them. But while the time commitment is perfectly manageable for someone sits down and wants to run one as their night's play session, it's just not something you can squeeze in before or after a raid.

I suspect that when badge FR becomes a priority for the guild, we'll need to cancel some raids to form badge-farming teams. For people whose play time doesn't exceed raid time by more than 2 hours a day, heroics are a tough proposition.

Heroic effort vs. reward is generally not there, and therefore there is no demand for them among the general populace (not that you would want to PUG heroics at the moment, but even the future option is unlikely to be there). As such, you need guild/friend scheduled runs, and that's hard to do when there are a billion other things you should be doing with your time such as farming consumables, repping up, and of course - raiding.

Is the trash respawn here still one hour?

Yes the trash respawn is still 1 hour on mag

I have to say after finally trying him in his nerfed state (?), I have muchos higher respect for the guilds that killed him pre-nerf.
We'll kill him tomorrow or whenever we try him next, but its a pretty cool encounter that while not being uber-hard its not uber-easy either, enjoyable

However I believe 5-6 healers is abit too few :<

We did our first tries on Magtheridon today, got 4 adds down when the first nova melted us We still need some practice on keeping the tanks alife throug infernals spawns, but it seems to be entirely doable completely unflasked / pottet. Pretty sure we can kill all adds before the 3 minute mark with a few pots. Now for that clicking...

What I don't unterstand is, why they don't stop trash respawn while the encounter is in progress. I don't mind clearing 4 groups of easy trash every now and then, but having them nuke the raid 5 minutes into the try is just stupid. I am sure this has been stated many times before.