Ulduar - Page 53

RootBreaker · 08/06/09, 2:25 PM

Originally Posted by Cranberry

With regard to Vezax - if the Animus spawns when the sixth cloud is up, does that mean you can use two clouds on hardmode? Or did they reduce the total number of clouds to six to compensate for his reduced HP?

Clouds stop spawning after the Animus spawns.

PDXMarcos · 08/06/09, 6:40 PM

Originally Posted by Tojara

-Enhancement shamans heal for exactly the same effectiveness that ret paladins use too, so those whacky enhance/resto specs won't work anymore

Can you clarify this a little bit? I have been running vezax hard mode in a hybrid enh/resto spec for the mana gain but using almost my complete resto gear set. Changes to the healing effectiveness of the enhancement spec would be directly correlated to changes in the talents and scaling of spells to spellpower.

Spink · 08/06/09, 6:55 PM

Like Corrupted Wisdom, there is now a debuff called Corrupted Rage

Corrupted Rage
Your insight into Shamanistic Rage is intensified but corrupted by General Vezax's Aura of Despair, hindering your ability to heal.

Tojara · 08/06/09, 6:59 PM

I can't recall the name of the debuff (maybe there isn't) but paladins who were specced into Judgements of the Wise would heal at 10% effectiveness (or something like that). This essentially prevented holy paladins from speccing ret for this encounter and having essentially unlimited mana. It must have been a huge oversight on blizzards part to prevent ret/holy specs from emerging, but allow the use of enhance/resto specs in 3.1.. thus this change.

Somebody else can clarify it a bit more, because I honestly don't play a shaman, but our regular enhancement shaman pointed this out to our typical resto shaman last night (who specs enhancement for unlimited mana for Vezax) asking him to look at how much he was healing. Sure enough he was healing at ~10% effectiveness as opposed to 100%. Makes sense though.

[e] - See above post!

MarcAntony · 08/18/09, 4:45 PM

I'm looking for advice from experienced guilds out there. My guild just downed GV HM last week and is down to Freya and Mimiron HMs. Our leadership seems to be split on what to go after next. My personal opinion is that we go after Mimiron next. We are a very top-end heavy group, with a good 5-7 players who could play for any guild in the world, but are past that point in our lives. Then we have a solid core of players who are very solid, capable players. But then we also have a small consensus of players that, due to one reason or another, are uncapable of picking up basic principles in any semblance of any acceptable time frame. I mean players who are heavily skill-capped.

With us, we have to design our strategies around reduction of mental bandwith needed to execute a given strategy to help mitigate their ability to wipe the raid.

So with that being said, and taking into account all recent changes and/or nerfs to these two encounters, which one of these do you suppose we dedicate our next couple weeks to?

kalbear · 08/18/09, 5:01 PM

I would recommend Freya depending on who your core is. Freya is primarily stressful on healing. The actual mechanics aren't much harder than the normal mode, there's not that much to understand, and the hardest thing is making sure that you're not interrupted or you can react well to bursted down players who got unlucky. If your bad players are the healers, Freya is going to be hard. If they're the good ones, it's probably going to be slightly easier to carry them. Also, you can work on the +1 and +2 modes as practice.

Mimiron, early on, I think really requires everyone to be on a certain level. It's stressful on healers, it's stressful on DPS, and it's sufficiently different than the normal mode that it gets everyone out of their comfort zone. The nerfs do make it easier, and it's probably an overall easier fight than Freya+3 - but it's less able to allow multiple people to be carried.

Tunch · 08/18/09, 8:20 PM

Freya was finally nerfed, I think with those nerfs it might put it back down below Firefighter in total difficulty.

KamPa · 08/19/09, 8:32 AM

"Invisible" Sunbeams do add a lot of difficulty for people still learning the fight, so no, it's not easier until they get fixed. Unless they were in US? I didn't even see them mentioned in patch notes, hopefully it's just undocumented, as minor thing compared to Onyxia.

Copernicus · 08/19/09, 4:00 PM

Originally Posted by KamPa

"Invisible" Sunbeams do add a lot of difficulty for people still learning the fight, so no, it's not easier until they get fixed. Unless they were in US? I didn't even see them mentioned in patch notes, hopefully it's just undocumented, as minor thing compared to Onyxia.

Should be fixed after a minor patch. MMO-Champion BlueTracker - Realm Restarts - Patch 3.2.0a - 8/19/09

* Fixed an art issue with Freya Hard Mode where the light beams were visually too hard to see

---

Freya hard-mode is relatively simple with three or more Paladins. When we went up to four the fight went from difficult to just annoying -- Concentration Aura and Aura Mastery on Conservators and Hand of Freedom on the roots takes away two of the most annoying aspects of the fight.

Jagiya · 08/19/09, 9:25 PM

With the million-and-one ways to break roots now, I wouldn't really regard them as a major component of the fight; especially for Alliance players. Human/Gnome racials can break roots, Shapeshifting for Druids can break roots, Shadow Priests can Fade out of them, and for the very few classes/specs who can't self-break them somehow, you have Blessing of Freedom. Since the patch, I don't think we've killed a single root. The Invisible Sun Beams were literally the only difficult component, and now that it's been fixed, I'd rank Freya at a Thorim/Hodir difficulty.

zaiboss · 08/19/09, 10:14 PM

Originally Posted by Jagiya

Shapeshifting for Druids and Shamen can break roots, .

Unfortunately, that's a no on ghost wolf breaking roots.

Jagiya · 08/19/09, 11:13 PM

EDIT: Delete Post please! I was wrong, wrong, wrong!

Valsh · 08/20/09, 1:07 AM

Originally Posted by Jagiya

Whoops, our Enhancement Shaman was breaking his own Roots so I'd just assumed it was a talent which modified Ghost Wolf, but it seems he's probably using Earthen Power. Apologies!

Earthen power does not break or grant immunity to roots, only to snares/slows. Outside of a PvP trinket and wolves sprint an enhancement shammy has no way to reliably break Strengthened Iron Roots.

Jagiya · 08/20/09, 2:34 AM

Hmmm. Strange. Apologies for the misinformation. I'll stop pretending to know what he's talking about now!

Rhaegal · 08/20/09, 8:55 AM

Originally Posted by Valsh

Earthen power does not break or grant immunity to roots, only to snares/slows. Outside of a PvP trinket an enhancement shammy has no way to break Strengthened Iron Roots.

Spirit walk doesn't work? I admit I haven't done this fight as enhance, only resto, but I imagine if HoFreedom works, there's no reason Spirit Walk wouldn't. If the shaman only got rooted a couple times in the fight, he probably would have been able to break out by saving Feral Spirit until then. Apologies if I'm beating a dead horse here, but I'd like to clarify as I'll probably be going enhance on this fight soon.