Say a guild loots one Rune spawn per week per boss they can kill, and they want to gear up 40 people in full FrR sets (probably the basic outline used to design this system).
If a guild kills one new boss every week, they'll have 91x5=455 Runes when they kill 4H. They then have to clear those bosses 8 more times to reach 960 Runes. A total of 21 weeks in Naxx.
If they add the 8 trash spawns to the weekly farm once all the bosses are down, they're down to 18 weeks.
Does this seems like an inredibly harshly tuned limit on progression? Especially when it looks like there will have been only about 6 months between Naxx and TBC?
What do you think they were hoping to gain by putting in a mechanic like this?
In practice, you can get some extra Runes from bosses you haven't killed (actually, is there a boss you can't loot without killing? I was going to say Heigan, but one of our Rogues pulled it off recently). In practice, you also need to have gear on more than exactly 40 people. The details of this depend on exactly how you go about things, but I don't think the overall picture varies terribly far from what I have above.
What about guilds who are just starting Naxx now, perhaps taking some hope from the TBC delay? No matter how good they are, do they even have a chance if there could be only ~10 weeks to go?
The easy way is for guilds that lag in progression compared to yours to give you a loan of Runes to use. Then you repay them and loan them some extra when they need the FrR gear.
Now that does require cooperation which doesn't happen on all servers.
It seems like it, but in practice you won't be killing a new boss every single week, and early on you may well drop more than one new boss per week (i.e. nobody takes a week after getting Patch to drop Grobbulus, do they?)
And if nothing else, if you're a latecomer on a server, I suspect the excess frozen runes generated by a KT farming guild might well be available to you for a nominal fee.
Melador> Incidentally, these last few pages are why people hate lawyers.
Viator> I really don't want to go all Kalman here.
Bury> Just imagine what the world would be like if you used your powers for good.
I would focus on getting runes from other guilds because you are going to be equiping more than 40 people. Just find a guild thats way behind on progression and ask for some runes this way you don't need to worry about paying them back very fast.
It seems like it, but in practice you won't be killing a new boss every single week, and early on you may well drop more than one new boss per week (i.e. nobody takes a week after getting Patch to drop Grobbulus, do they?)
Heh. We killed Patchwerk 3 times before killing Grobbulus.
And if nothing else, if you're a latecomer on a server, I suspect the excess frozen runes generated by a KT farming guild might well be available to you for a nominal fee.
See, that worked for Lava Cores, and maybe even for Ingots. But for Frozen Runes, even guilds who are quite far ahead will take quite a while to get the point where the honestly don't need them anymore. How many servers actually have a reasonable market for available Runes? A guild who's trying to farm Sapphrion cleanly probably isn't going to stop as soon as they scrounge up enough to get him down.
I think most guilds killed 5 bosses the first week, then 7-8 by week two. So saying one boss per week is not exactly entirely accurate.
You'd have to spend a lot of time in Naxx for that to happen, but not impossible for a hardcore guild.
Like suggested, try to buy them for a nominal fee off KT killing guilds. They're of little value, if at all, once you got the gear you need. Any guild that isn't past Patchwerk now will most likely not see Sapphiron before TBC, unless they manage to take down the 4H in record time.
Edit for reply to later post:
I'm fairly sure you can convince a guild to let you have some of theirs even if they haven't kitted everyone. When they have killed Sapphiron their core has the gear needed, a few weeks after most really should have it and the few odd left are probably not that necessary to kit for that one fight. You kit 3-4 people per week after clearing all the way up to Sapphiron? So 3 weeks after Sapphiron dies you have 49-52 at least kitted?
I think most guilds killed 5 bosses the first week, then 7-8 by week two. So saying one boss per week is not exactly entirely accurate.
That's not entirely accurate, I keep track of progress on my server, which isn't highly advanced but does have about 8 guilds doing Naxx, and it's usually about 1 boss a week. Only Razuvious, Fearlina (Fearlina mostly since they fixed/nerfed Rain of Fire) and Grobbulus usually cause exceptions. So hardcore guilds might work at that speed, but average guilds will probably clear at a lower speed.
buff /bʌf/ Pronunciation[buhf]
–verb (used with object)
- to reduce or deaden the force of
You also can get runes from bosses you can't yet beat, in most cases. If you can kill Heigan you also get Loatheb's rune (and you can jump down to get at least one more rune easily). If you can kill Grobbulus but not Gluth, you can get Gluth's rune. If you can't kill Thad you can still ninja his rune. If you can kill Raz, Gothik's rune is up for grabs too. And so forth. So your supposed rate of rune accumulation is vastly on the low side.
When we got up to Sapphiron, we had 910 Runes banked. Considering that healers often don't need a full 24, that was enough for us to outfit a full raid group right away. We sucked on Sapp for a while, so at this point we have 50 or so people who have crafted FrR. We never borrowed or purchased any outside Runes. So, from late June through late September, we got enough Runes to outfit a full raid group. That's three months. Is that at all unreasonable? I don't think so.
I think it's a perfectly reasonable mechanic. The only problem is that people were able to short-circuit the intended curve by buying/borrowing mass Runes, recruiting people who had Runes, and so forth.
On top of that, if you bother with it, there's also some runes scattered around the instance in the trash pulls on the outer ring right?
There are two per outer ring quadrant.
Naxx has 21 Rune spawns in it. 13 associated with bosses, and 8 outer ring spawns. That's an average of 105 runes for a full clear. At a bare minimum, you'll get one clearing to Maexxna and one clearing to 4H every week. If you really want to take an extra hour you can make sure you get all 8 every week, but it's always worth having a priest MV around to see where the rune in the far portion of the ring quadrant is located. Sometimes it's only a couple of pulls away.
You also can get runes from bosses you can't yet beat, in most cases. If you can kill Heigan you also get Loatheb's rune (and you can jump down to get at least one more rune easily). If you can kill Grobbulus but not Gluth, you can get Gluth's rune. If you can't kill Thad you can still ninja his rune. If you can kill Raz, Gothik's rune is up for grabs too. And so forth. So your supposed rate of rune accumulation is vastly on the low side.
When we got up to Sapphiron, we had 910 Runes banked. Considering that healers often don't need a full 24, that was enough for us to outfit a full raid group right away. We sucked on Sapp for a while, so at this point we have 50 or so people who have crafted FrR. We never borrowed or purchased any outside Runes. So, from late June through late September, we got enough Runes to outfit a full raid group. That's three months. Is that at all unreasonable? I don't think so.
I think it's a perfectly reasonable mechanic. The only problem is that people were able to short-circuit the intended curve by buying/borrowing mass Runes, recruiting people who had Runes, and so forth.
So you like the idea of a guild which cleas through the zone expeditiously simply having to wait before they can try Sapphiron? Now that the zone is more well-known, people still start to work through it more quickly.
You guys cleared to 4H very quickly and were aggressively farming trash Runes. Your Rune generation was about as strong as it possibly could have been. You really would have found it reasonable to not have had enough if you'd killed 4H earlier?
Yes. I think it's a good progression model. There should be, from time to time, breakpoints where you have have to gear up on X before you can attempt Y. Whether it's making FR gear for Ragnaros or FrR gear for Sapphiron or Onyxia Scale Cloaks for Nef, I see nothing wrong with that. Hell, gearing up your tanks so you can kill Patchwerk is much the same. If you kill Nef for the first time you can't go right in and kill Patchwerk -- you just don't have the gear for it, as a raid group, yet. If you kill Nef another 10 times and clear BWL in the process, now you probably can. This isn't much different.
That does make some sense, although it's much more uncomfortable crammed in under the TBC release than it was in those other cases.
It's interesting how your response was that the waiting is a correct part of well-designed progression, while almost everyone else's is something like, "it's fine because you can get around it if you need to."
Yeah, the amount of Frozen Runes that drop is just about the right amount. We had to borrow some but not fully sure really how much frost resist we needed on everyone so we went for full FrR on everyone, but we've already now paid back those Frozen Runes and long before that guild needs them (who gathers extra frozen runes with rogue alts). Really the biggest issues would be for a huge casual guild without much of a central core but guilds that casual are not likely to do Naxx before expansion.
We made deals with other guidls - give us 100 now, we'll give you 120 a month later. We also bought like 5-6k worth - having farmed from the beginning with good early pushes into naxx it was tough having enough. Although we were pretty damn close when it came crafting time.
Also grats on killing Sapphiron Praet :) Like I said it sounded like you were close.
yeah, we borrrowed 150ish runes with interest from other guilds who wouldn't need them in the immediate future. we never did any ring farming, though, so i'm sure we could've had enough when we got to sapph if we had. if you're concerned with the viability of getting the runes you need, look at borrowing them from lesser progressed guilds or even guilds that don't need them anymore, if there are any on your server. i'm sure we'll be selling/trading ours soon.
The easy way is for guilds that lag in progression compared to yours to give you a loan of Runes to use. Then you repay them and loan them some extra when they need the FrR gear.
Now that does require cooperation which doesn't happen on all servers.
Only people runes are of any value to is anybody with a shot at KT before expansion. You can't really borrow the runes because of that, you have to buy them outright, and people are going to want things that are valuable in the expansion if possible.
Only people runes are of any value to is anybody with a shot at KT before expansion. You can't really borrow the runes because of that, you have to buy them outright, and people are going to want things that are valuable in the expansion if possible.
This does mean that rune availability is going to vary an awful lot between servers. Couple of days back when last I checked on Blackrock for example a few different individuals had been dumping runes on the auction house for 15g on average a piece, assumedly a couple of guild banks dumping before TBC on the grounds that while they might not get much now they'd be worth a lot less soon. Indicative of the fact that as a mature server there are quite a few guilds with a couple of Naxx bosses down but realistically no hope of ever really needing that FrR gear. Be interested to see whether the price spikes back up for a while with the expansion delayed or whether the market's already plummeted permanently and saturated the small non Naxx demand for runes and then some.
Was able to do confirm this as possible just after Naxx went live with Anub, had to do a naked death in order to get the door open and once with a screw up with spiders before that but otherwise simple enough, didn't have a word of thawing at the time unfortunately but was able to get right up next to the runes for that particular spawn point.
Do have points in the stealth boosting talent (Feral Instinct) for what it's worth, imagine it should be doable without though.
Gotta agree with Gurg, it's common to have some time sinks here and there; I should say its more likely the 4 horsemen for naxxramas tbh, rather than sapphiron.
About sapphiron, do you really want 23 runes for everyone? I was pretty much ready with 3 runes only, used 9 more for 2 more pieces that allowed me to replace my frost reflector, av trinket, a green ring, and wrath helm with better dps pieces. Had 2 drops from naxx though.
10/24/06, 7:28 PM
