Celebrindal

Agree about the ony cloaks and player skill (aka. post-nerf mother?).
But Maraudon? Okay so the gear was rather shitty, making Huhuran quite interresting (I'd actually say it was tuned way better for this than doing it 3 months later in a slow guild with crafted gear), but the concept aint too much worse than farming badges/nethers/whatever off 5mans for resist gear. I don't think we had much cenarion resist gear on anyone even after it got released. We did The Calling, farmed mara and got our kill within 2 weeks of reaching Huhuran, sure we got a few dragons, but none of the guilds still stuck on Skeram interfered. They went trough hell to get any green dragon loot tho, with us and a few other guilds farming them. But this is where the crafted gear came into play. It should have been released earlier, probably along with AQ, but I'd still rather see the server/world first guilds getting a challenge out of fights by limiting the best-in-slot resist gear by time (raid lockouts or w/e), and making the encounter fairly trivial (learn the execution, beat the fight) if you took forever farming gear for it. This would require sub-optimal resist gear from a non-restricted source, given TBC probably crafted with 5man rep and primals, and a CD-restricted set i.e. from frozen runes that required TIME to aquire. Make the encounters doable, but hard, in obtainable gear, and trivial once you've farmed the instance a while. This is how most normal encounters work, theres a "hard part" that gets easier with gear or repetition, and a requirement (x tanks, y CC classes etc.) you can't ignore unless you outgear it badly. Resist fights somehow always eluded this trend by counting gear as a requirement, while the rest of the fights had gear soft out the rough edges.

 

Starfire

I don't think the Onyxia Cloaks were that bad. You really only needed your tank and maybe 1-2 healers to have the cloak. It was just really nice for having the full raid.

 

Addled

I would be furious if I had to waste important badges for resist gear. I need those badges for Heirloom items, Primal-Nether-equivalent, "normal" gear, etc. I'd rather pay through the nose for crafted resist gear than burn badges.

I suppose if the resist gear was ridiculously cheap (say, 5-7 badges tops for a resist piece) I would be sorta okay with it, but it really grinds my gears that my badges were being traded for gear for a single fight.

Which was really the point of my post. Blizzard wants some blocks in their raid designs, to keep you playing (and paying). Sounds cynical, I admit, but it's completely true. And it should be pointed out, you really didn't need to kill Nef to go onto the next tier of raiding (AQ40). I know that my guild started AQ40 immediately after our initial 2-3 Nef kills. With BC, Blizzard changed that by requiring tons of attunements (and those attunements were rightly dropped after Blizzard figured out that they were only retarding the growth of the raid game). I don't think the devs will make that mistake again, or they will be faster to drop attunement requirements at an earlier point in time.

And yes, while people on EJ are the best of the best raiders, sometimes we tend to forget that Ragnaros and Nefarian used to be very hardmode a long time ago. However, Huhuran to me was always "Insert NR for epics". You imply that you were Horde, but I raided as Alliance. Perhaps that is the difference. I remember, as a pally, putting up BoP on our tanks to force a tank transition on Huhu. Plus, our Alliance raid had superior RDPS thanks to Salv.

I personally believe that we'll see more "free epics for having resist gear" fights. Princess Huhu was one (at least for Alliance, now in WotLK Salv will be baked for free onto all tanks) and Mother Shahraz is another (comment earlier in this thread noting that once the raid had enough SR, Mother went down in ~3 pulls).


I notice you have a pre BC pvp title and pieces of t6, so I'm going to assume that you just didn't raid pre BC and aren't joking.

When Nefarian landed, he did a giant aoe fire attack called Shadowflame. Shadowflame dealt an initial damage of ~1000 damage, but also a DoT that dealt ~4000 damage per second for 10 sec. This attack could not be LOSed. The initial fire damage could be resisted, but the DoT was not resistable. The only way to survive the DoT was to be a paladin (bubble through it, difficult to time it correctly), or to have an [Onyxia Scale Cloak]. Note the equip on the item.

Basically, everybody needed the cloak. No exceptions whatsoever. I was a paladin, and I even got a cloak, because the guild master didn't want us paladins to be retarded and try to time our bubbles, we needed to be busy healing!

DO NOT READ THE FOLLOWING IF YOU STILL WANT HARDMODE NEF:

 

Dram

Ony cloak's were terrible the whole raid needed them for Nef.

 

PSGarak

Just to clarify a few details: the guild who got to Nef with 3 Ony kills, I believe was before the release of AQ40, so there wasn't anything else they could have gone onto. Either that or the gates were still closed because the server was so new. Either way, Nef was the endboss, which makes the cockblock much more frustrating.
I was indeed raiding Huhuran as Horde. For the first month or so a shaman's Grounding Totem ate the stacking poison, meaning no tank transition was necessary. That was hotfixed or patched, and the result was that we had to switch agro the old-fashioned way, by out-threating the other tank by 30%, with no Salvation on the DPS (much less a salvation rotation like I heard about on Vael) so we were actually stretched a bit thin getting her down to 35% before the 5 minutes were up. The two things that eased this considerably were a Thunderfury and KTM becoming popular.

Maraudon's grind always struck me as dumb because the content was trivial. Not just that the items were level 45, but that the things I was killing to get them were level 45 as well. It was almost... insulting... to go back to a stupid level 45 leveling dungeon in order to get the gear I needed to do raids, after having plowed through ZG, MC, and BWL. Even if those mobs had dropped ilvl 110 NR epics, it felt really stupid wasn't even on easier content, or outdated content, but on content that had never been intended as endgame in the first place.
That plus my guild got approximately zero green-dragon kills on account of being around number 10 or 12 for progression on the server. As I understand it, most servers did not have 12 guilds get to Huhuran, so that was a bit of an exceptional circumstance.

http://sig.gamerdna.com/quizzes/INFL...erks/Garak.png

 

xiaoxin21

Nope, you can hide behind his throne and not get shadow flame since the beginning. It feel like a good mechanic to me , it proves a good pacing mechanism and it gives the guild a goal to work towards. I feel it is much better than the grind to open AQ gates which involves mindlessly killing bugs for 2 weeks.

I was in a reroll guild in similar situation and we have enough onyxia cloaks when we reach Nef because we know of what is going to happen and we plan towards having enough cloaks right from the start.

Its hard for a reroll guild to get only 3 ony kills under their belt, if I remember correctly, Onyxia resets on a faster timer those days.Also Onyxia can be killed by 20+- man in blues those days which is what my guild did so we get 2 Onyxia kills per reset.

I would think a resist based mechanic is much more frustrating than one like shadowflame because it forces you to carry more gear, wear those gear which often do not have good stats and involves plenty of grinding to get them.

Why are there Brown and Black Polar Bears?

 

Kinv

Uhhh You could do that Pre-BC, we did it all the time when we ran through people who bought epics from us.

 

Oaken

Call me masochistic but I actually enjoyed the Fire Resist scavenging that preceded our first Ragnaros kill. We were the first guild to clear the other bosses in MC on our server and summon Rag. It was clear at the time that even with the UBRS buff you needed some amount of FR so we set the entire guild to running the 5 and 10-man instances. The first time Ragnaros' hammer came crashing down into the lava we felt we had really accomplished something. Its kind of funny but killing Illidan was the only time I came close to that same feeling again.

Having said that, its an experience you only want to go through once. Nefarian cloaks were annoying but doable. But the AQ40 NR debacle was just frustrating and had none of the magic of that first mad rush to gather up enough FR gear to kill Ragnaros before any of the other guilds on the server caught up to us. It isn't an experience that gets better each time it is repeated.

 

Jagiya

This is correct. I ran several pug BWL's to gear up my Warrior alt way back before TBC and the majority of the raid never had a cloak.

 

Jebraltar

Ony scales were purchasable - unless you were a reroll guild and the most progressed guild on your server, it was exceptionally unlikely you'd run into the mechanic. It also wasn't tied to BWL's reset, so guilds who had been farming Ony before the release of BWL could easily have had tonnes to spare.

The achievement is called "The Hundred Club" and it's one of the requirements for the two 310% speed mounts from PvE instances, so I can pretty well guarantee most guilds will go for it. 10-man Sapphiron is also not terribly difficult with just frost resist aura - a guild with good composition and DPS should be able to take him down, FR or no, even without farming Naxx to death.

 

Opioid

I'm also going to confirm that you could LOS the shadowflame and live no-cloaks in the classic Nefarian fight.

There were two ways to do Nef phase 1 I remember, split it 4/4 raidgroups and have half at each doorway, or you could stack everyone on the throne and have all the drakonids wander into a central zone that everyone was AOEing. The fact that you could hide behind the throne and survive the shadowflame with no ony cloaks was the primary reason my guild decided to use the latter strategy, and it worked.

 

sadistic

You are seriously out of touch if you really mean this. Though you do seem confused, you dont cancel a raid, OR farm trash. "Normal" guilds don't have that luxury, they most likely will have to cancel a raid TO farm trash (which I suspect is what you meant), which usually means they trade normal epics for the resistgear.
If you raid 3 times a week and adhere to the skill/gear/dedicationlevel of "normal" guilds, you have a hard enough time to push through all the content you have on farm.
"Normal" guilds do not throw away one of their few raiddays for trashfarming. I've been in several and its hard enough to get people to meet for progress boss-tries, trashfarming is usually out of the question. What happens is that a minority in the guild is hardcore enough to either farm trash themselves (if it can be "iron-manned") or just pay the gold for the BoE's (if they are availible). This helps against stonewalling, but its usually far from enough.



But this is where I'm starting to believe I have misunderstood you all along.

Aren't you saying that you understand its frustrating for an entire guild to push back upgrades to get a resist set they will barely use?

Which is basically saying in one sentence what I've been trying to argue above (and previously).

 

Starfire

You could look at my raiding reps. There's 2-3 spots you can successfully LoS. The throne is the most prominent. I can cede that maybe my memory is fuzzy and this is not how Nefarian 1.0 is, but I promise you could LoS pre-TBC. I certainly remember guilds on "re-roll servers" doing it.

Also, you do need your tanks to have the cloak for some of the drakes, and as I said having it on 1-2 healers is nice, but besides the tanks the raid doesn't need it.

 

Addled

Mea culpa then, I was almost certain that it couldn't be LOSed. I just checked the WoWiki entry and they have no mention that the attack can be LOSed. Weird. Ok, just ignore what I said.

 

Sydane

There's some disjointing because it's in reference to different points. First, the original reply I made was in regards to the guy that said they completely cancelled raiding for a night because they were at Sharaz and didn't have enough hearts, even though the Sharaz trash is quite farmable. If you are willing to sit at 5/5 6/9 and feel put off by something that you can actually do something about, then yes, you deserve to be stonewalled. The HoD requirement for Sharaz is not that extreme, and you'll only be substantially short if you have very fast progression and really terrible luck. There's countless other options as well, from greens to resocketed helms, to buying or borrowing hearts from other guilds.

A guild that progresses through BT/Hyjal at the "normal" rate will have plenty of hearts by the time they get to Sharaz. It was said very specifically that the guild was not willing to farm trash for Hearts. So I have no pity for them. If he had said they had to spend one of their raid nights farming trash for hearts instead of making progression attempts, and that wasn't fun, it would be a more reasonable argument. If you are still killing every boss you have "on farm" each week, and you reach the stonewall short the resist gear, and you still have raid time left, you are not losing out on any upgrades by spending that time raid farming. It's not like the guild should cancel farm killing bosses in order to farm trash, that would obviously be foolish. There are plenty of times guilds get to bosses they can't down yet for gear reasons, group comp reasons, or otherwise. Resist gear needs are no different than that.

However, if you required a non-raid source to be farmed (like green dragons or mara from vanilla), then you would in fact be missing on upgrades if you don't have time to do your farm content as well. That is an argument in favor of the HoD model, not against it. In a guild's normal progression, they will get the appropriate amount of HoD, or close to it. If they progress extremely fast they can choose to either wait ("be stonewalled"), or farm. If the normal progression rate doesn't give enough, then the drop rate needs to be improved (as it was by adding HoD to Hyjal trash). I believe the HoD implementation is the best model they have done thus far. Having raid needs met by raiding, without being a significant impairment to normal gear progression, is ideal. It gives the guild something to build for, makes trash drops slightly more interesting, and does add a sense of accomplishment to the entire process.

My comment about pushing back upgrades was in reference to the idea of badge resist gear. If you spend badges on resist gear, you are not spending those badges on upgrades. If you spend HoD on resist gear, it's not changing the gear drops you get. If you craft resist gear, it's costing you gold and nothing more. In fact, since Naxx-25 badges drop only in 25 mans, it would actually be far more limiting than the current HoD model is. The idea of making it a supplemental drop would work just as well, but that's basically what the HoD drops were. Not only that, but by being on trash they were farmable if guilds chose to, as well as provided some sense of progression on nights where you killed trash before a new boss but didn't get that boss down.

Requiring raiders to farm 5 mans for badges is far worse than a night of raid farming. In my experience, raiders want to spend raid time doing things that progress raiding, whether that means wiping on a progression boss for hours or killing farm bosses yet again to gear up. Many raiders do not want to spend off time doing things that progress raiding, a point which has been made many times in this thread in regards to spec switching, potion sickness, and similar issues. The idea that telling your guild "go farm 20 heroics by the next raid night" is better than "we got here so fast we have to spend one night farming trash, good job guys" strikes me as quite insane.

Empathy does not imply approval.

 

Tunch

I'd say a model where materials are dropped at a regular pace is best, similar to 1.12 Naxx runes, as opposed to the HoD model where the only source is random trash drops. I saw no reason HoD's shouldn't drop from all T6 bosses. It's much less frustrating (imo) to have a steady and planned income than to be at the mercy of the RNG, and possibly feel like you need to do some VERY boring trash farming to catch up.

 

Aditu

I heavily disagree with this statement for two reasons: one, you get badges off of raids and two, can you really call your team a raiding squad if half the people don't want to log on an extra day to farm up the badges needed for resist? If anything, its empowering because you know for a fact that you can run X 5 mans + x 10 man raids spread through out the week on your own time to get your full resist set.

 

Malleus

Perhaps I was not sufficiently clear, because that's exactly what I said.

I didn't say this, either. What I said was that a raider will be required to have completed an average 15-25 heroics (depending on the Orb requirements of the FrR gear) before his guild achieves 13/15 in Naxx. This is a process you can start as soon as you ding 80, and continue doing or even complete as you gear up for Naxx. Many guilds will probably have access to full FrR by the time they reach Sapphiron without even really trying.

 

• alcaras

Tiny question about WotLK release:
Does anyone know if accounts that aren't upgraded to WotLK will get rested XP at 70? Or does the account have to be upgraded to WotLK before it can get rested at 70? I ask because I won't be able to play until a few weeks after release, but I'd like to get rested XP at 70.

 

jackhunter64

Rested experience didn't start building up until you upgraded your account when the Burning Crusade came out, I imagine the same will happen here.

 

MatthewDB

Does rested xp even exist past 70? I know they wipe the slate clean, but the blue post about it seemed to indicate it wouldn't accumulate past 70.

 

Andorien

Yes, in my experience on the beta, rest experience seems to function the same way it ever did.

 

Xelopheris

You need 4 frozen orbs for your resist set. That would be 40 emblems of heroism. Three naxx10 clears if you plan ahead. Or you can buy them off the auction house. Or farm heroics. Then a little bit of material farming, which you had to do for SR set anyways, and from there you're good. It's not subject to RNG like hearts were, and each person can independently farm their own starting the second they hit 80.

 

Douglas

Did anyone else notice that this is true for cloth, leather, and mail, but not for plate? Or is that information out of date?

Check out this search filter:

Armor - Items - World of Warcraft

If I really read that correctly, any paladin, warrior, or death night is going to be able to get their entire crafted frost resist set for one frozen orb.

 

Sydane

I think it's pretty safe to assume that whatever materials requirements one set has, the others will be structured in a similar way. Though it may be worth posting as a bug on the Beta forums in case it has been overlooked.

Empathy does not imply approval.