This would be the rebirth in question I assume: http://www.thottbot.com/s34342 ? Only 2 second cast time would match "pretty much instant" and a full heal too.

yes alar is fully immune to fire in any form.

The reasons behind the Improved Fireball/Frostbolt spell damage reductions make a bit more sense now, when you consider frost and fire immune bosses at the same raid progression level.

How does the "parallel" nature of the challenges in frost and fire immune encounters (Al'ar and Hydross) lend credence or "sense" to the Imp FB/FB changes?

Just because they made encounters where both schools were locked out "equally" doesn't make the change make sense to me. What does make sense to me is that they wanted to nerf Mage elemental damage. I can't see how immunity encounters helps the argument....pretty much at all.

I personally have the same mentality as Gurg for this. I dont know about your guild, but my guild is a PvE oriented guild and if you're not willing to do smaller PvE content in preparation for PvE raid content regardless if its needed or not then you should not be in my guild.

With that said, its there, heroics are easy, just get it. You can get 100 badges in like 4-5 days.

I never really understood the purpose of having bosses immune to a specific school of damage. Knowing Blizzard there will be some DPS requirement which will of course require DPS consumables. Obviously a fire mage can dps with frostbolts/arcane blast but if you're already spending 50g per person per attempt what's another 50g to respec?

To piss off mages, obviously. Duh.

"WHERE'S YOUR 10/48/3 NOW BITCH?? WHERE?!?!??"

In the interest of fairness it should be pointed out that not one raid boss in the game is shadow immune.

You missed the point of the conversation - but ill bite anyway. So thats 20 badges a day. Do you think thats possible? Absolutely, U would just have to run roughly 7 different heroics a day. That would take a full day of instancing. Doing five times that to get 100 is almost an entire working week of heroics from the time you wake up to when you go to sleep.

Is it possible in theory? Yes. Is that practical for alot of people? No. There surely are some players, like yourself, who would happily do this. But if the fight calls for entire guilds to outfit players in fire resistance, not everyone would have the desire or luxory to set this amount of time aside to perform that feat.

Looking after those players is important, because we cant all expect everyone in the guild to suddenly drop everything for a week or two. A little advance notice would go a long way to helping players like this in preparing, where it might not be possible for everyone to do the 'easy' task of getting 100 badges in X days.

My conversation starter was only about whether we can give anything more specific on what the 'advance notice' actually is - aside from the very rhetorical/generalised 'You will probably need the fire resistance gear for a boss somewhere down the track'

Or moreover, Navaash:

"WHAT GOOD DOES YOUR SPELLFIRE DO YOU HERE LOL?"

So clearly, we Spellfire Mages need to like...get some generic +dmg pieces for those spots. I'm glad I never D/E'ed my Frostfire Robe...it was just so pretty I couldn't do it.

blizzard , please make a frostfire tailoring set. Your mages will love you for it.

As long as you have some forethought and start running easier heroics, this isn't a Bataan Death March. Mechanar is 1.5 hrs for 5 badges, slave pens and underbog are easily done in 1.5-2 hours. Even on a raid night you can hit the first 3 bosses in Mechanar in under 30 minutes before going to bed. The reason this is probably so painful for the cutting edge guilds is that they're trying to do it "now, now, now" and that means they have to hit the harder heroics.

From a tank's perspective, I don't see how you can justify getting anything but the FR gear first. All the other badge awards are a sidegrade or marginal upgrade to raid drops, and good FR gear doesn't drop anywhere else. I'm going to assume the worst case scenario: I'll need 490 defense and 365 total resistance. That means I go for the maximum amount of FR possible per piece and don't skimp with crafted/socketed blues (and coincidentally, there's only 2 pieces that overlap - pants and gloves).

If you're raiding regularly there's probably only 1-2 items you'd really want from badge turn-ins anyway.

Something like that would be too good for them to impelement.

And your reference to prot warrior isn't the same thing. It's not like 1 fight requires you to be MS and the next requires you to be prot. If anything prot warriors can just be subbed out for DPS. Who are you going to sub out for fire mages? The alt frost mages? I suppose you could just stack shadow priests and walrocks--that would be more dps anyway.

That would be too much of a good idea so they'll never do it.

Getting a proper Frostfire Vest to go around with the rest of my T3 set would be kickin' rad, though. I would totally walk around Shattrath like a pimp with those threads.

A bit of speculation here. I remember that earlier in the beta the Aldor crafted resist gears were shadow resist, not fire. At some point the gear was changed, and the heroic badge turn-ins were given names other than "Level 70 Heroic Badge Healer Cloak", and the epic FR gear was added to the Badge Vendor.

In fact they even forgot to change the name of the set bonus on the Aldor Gear (note it is still called "Shadow Guard"): http://www.wowhead.com/?itemset=564

This is also reflected in the 2 resistance flasks, which correspond to the old resists (arcane and shadow).

Clearly something changed at that point in beta that made them decide that they needed to provide Fire Resist for something, so they (hastily) added it in.

Maybe originally the aldor/scryers resist stuff was originally only for Heroics?

The overlap of even two pieces screams bad design. It would make a lot more sense to have 4-5 epic pieces at 20 or 25 badges apiece and then have craftables cover the remaining 3-4 slots (similar to how the Tier and Gladiator sets work now.) It seems like again the right hand knows not what the left hand doeth.

This is what arcane spells are for.

61 Arcane

Edit:

Herioc Mech = 5 Badges
Herioc SV = 3 Badges
Herioc Ramparts = 2 Badges (Should be 3)
Blood Furnace = 3 Badges
Herioc Crypts = 2 Badges
Herioc Pens = 3 Badges

Thats 18 badges you can earn in about 5 hours.

Aye. If you want to run heroics *and* raid (rather than stopping raiding completely while you grind the heroics to gear up), a more realistic "average" benchmark for an average group would be 2-3 Heroic instances per person per week. So, around 10 badges per week. That means quite a while to get a full FR set.

This is ridiculous, 6 heroic clears in 5 hours, including any travel time, repairs and the occasional wipe? Can you FRAPS this? Because I'd be highly interested in your group makeup and methods.

Why do people insist on making these sorts of claims?

Edit: Seriously, if you are trying to help, and not just flex the EPeen, just try to make up a more reasonable number.

If you got a fixed group of 5 together to do this, without breaks, it's quite easily possible. Hell, I did heroic Arca in 55 minutes last weekend, and I've done Mech in around 30 minutes.

It's not exactly your ordinary or realistic scenario for obtaining badges, however.

A more realistic way of putting it is this: Run every heroic instance twice. That's over 100 badges. Alternately, make sure you get in a Mech run every day. A couple of weeks and you'll be all set in terms of FR.

not likely. even after most groups have been through it once to figure out how to treat certain pulls, bosses, it still will take much longer than 5 hours.

If you wanted to go this route why wouldn't you just do Heroic Mech every night/day. That is very minimal time investment for badge return. that should be an easy 20 badges a week minimum.