There will be spoilers in the following post and probably in the replies. If you don't want to know about boss fights in the BC ahead of time now is your chance to leave.







That said, over the last week I've started doing the lvl 70 instances, there are some pretty interesting encounters and lots of new gimmicks/mechanics.

So far my favorite has been Warbringer O'mrogg in Shattered Halls. His two heads argue over who to kill and aggro bounces all over the place. For a while I thought I had him figured out:

- Normal threat behavior when right head is in control (also tauntable).
- Picks a random member of your group to beat on for the duration left head is in control (not tauntable).
- Aggro wipes when a different head asserts control and possibly aggro wipes on fears.

This made sense as tanks never seem to be able to pull him off whoever he has targeted when the left head is running the show (if he picked me a feign death wouldn't drop aggro either). However last night, just to see if I could, when the left head took over and he started beating on our shaman I unloaded with everything I could (including taunt shots) and managed to pull him off.

So maybe when the left head takes over it just adds a very large amount of threat and our warriors are slacking? Or has rage/threat generation been so nerfed its just not possible to get him back? Although this doesn't really make sense with him coming right back to me after a feign unless they specifically made him resistant to it and I'm missing the messages.

Anyway, what encounters are you guys fans/not fans of and what kind of experiences have you had so far?

There hasn't been a big jump in Boss complexity, new things to learn and less tank and spank but apart from O'mrogg most stuff makes sense.

Overall difficulty wise, all the dungeons leading up to the lvl 70 ones are really easy if you are the appropriate level. There is a pretty big jump between those and the lvl 70 instances. The lower tier dungeons on heroic are a bit harder than the lvl 70 ones and the lvl 70s on heroic are pretty crazy unless you are well geared (specifically the tank).

One thing I really liked is that trash pulls in the lvl 70 and heroic dungeons can be harder than the bosses. Having 7 level 70 elites to deal with on some shattered halls heroic pulls is probably the most difficult thing I've done in WoW so far. Despite the difficulty and multiple wipes though they are fun because it's hard, not gimmicky, everyone has to be on it, everyone has lots to do.

If you come into TBC with T2+ gear the new dungeons don't seem to difficult. If you don't have that (specifically for your tank at a minimum) some of the encounters you need to get really creative (not so much in Hellfire but as soon as you head over to Coilfang the bosses/trash pulls there can wipe a poorly geared tank). The hunter boss and the double giant trash pull before the final boss in Underbog wiped out a lot of the not so good tanks I went with even with 2 good healers.

The final boss in Slave Pens pretty much requires a NR gear set and I can't think of any of the 1-60 5/10 mans where I'd even pondering using any of my resist gear (maybe you could use some to tank Drak but you really don't -need- it) -- Our whole group drank a Greater NR pot before the fight also to add some buffer in and I can't really ponder using those type of consumables in current 5/10 man content.

I don't expect many "average gamers" to ever see past Tavarok in Mana Tombs (assuming they are in the appropriate level range, L70 "average gamers" shouldn't have any trouble going back to it). The whole Crystal Prison/Earthquake combination is something they aren't really going to grasp how to deal with very well.

I haven't done the L70 content yet but the 5 man stuff up through there is more complex/difficult than what we have now. I think a lot of the folks in beta don't realize how "hard" it is since they're coming from Naxx with a tank that has 8pc Dreadnaught and TF so threat generation and boss damage is somewhat irrelevant. It'll be interesting to see how hard things are for that giant general population out there that has never even been past the first 2 Molten Giants in MC let alone into the testing program to provide their feedback. The marketing guy in me fears that we'll have a TBC 1.1 patch a few weeks after release that significantly dumb down all of the instances on normal mode before Blizzard has a riot out of their general players cancelling tons of subscriptions. They'll tell the raider/hardcore player, "get to L70, turn on heroic mode and you'll have the challenge you want" leaving us to play for 100-200 hours from 60-70 in mindnumbingly easy garbage :((

Poison cleansing totem trivializes that boss.

I've done him with multiple pugs, ranging from guys with mixed tier 3 and pretty much everyone in quest armor. He is pretty easy if you have a backup healer, if you don't you just need a bit of luck or lots of dps. Overall not that terrible.

As I said I've run instances on a daily basis with both pugs and groups of friends with gear across the spectrum. I would say the full T3 folks are in the minority and across the board people have been enjoying themselves. Even the "lolz guyz dis instence is hard" people that managed to sneak into beta somehow.

Really if you know what to expect from the bosses in the instances before lvl 70 they are pretty damn easy, they wouldn't survive a dumb down.

What I'm hoping for future raid instances (25 mans) is that blizzard moves away from the conception that pretty much forces guilds to have 15x healers for nearly all encoutners (talking about 40 mans currently) and that offspecs are just not wanted. I'm hoping that blizzard will implement instances with wildly varying needs that it will make min/max'ing (people sitting outside the instance waiting to step in) so annoying that the offspecs get their chance and people can open their eyes.

I "think" this may be the way they are going after releasing 2.0 and looking at everyone's talent trees. There are so many synergies in the trees of so many classes like:
Priest: Shadow weaving, Misery, Vampyric Touch Vampyric Embrace
Druids: LoTP, Moonkin Aura, Tree form aura
Shaman: Spell crit totem, melee crit AP party buff, mana tide
Hunters: BM-Ferocious Inspiration(increase dmg of party by 3% for 10 sec when pet crit)
ect.

and other classes that would benefit so much from these party effects like the
40/21 arc/frost mage build (http://www.wowhead.com/?talent-bc=Ri...xIziZZVA0coc0o) which would benefit a ton from the moonkin aura and totem of wrath (i think thats its name, spell crit totem) getting 150% bonus damage to frost crits. Along with all the physical DPS party buffs and magical damage increases.

With the shadow priest (I love what blizzard did with them, even though I'll be healbot for life heh), blizzard did such a good job that it simply will make so much sense to bring them to a 25 man raid. They directly increase warlock(and priest shadow damage) damage by 20% and other magical damage by 5%, so say you have 3 mages and 2 warlocks in the raid then 55% of their direct damage (this is neglecting damage they can do from increased mana from VT) is basically the priest's damage. As long as the shadow priest could do 45% the damage of a normal DPS class then he is the better choice if available (as well as the priest would obviously be able to do more than 45% he'd be even more valuable than the normal dps class).


I'm sure I've probably gone off on a tangent, but I really truely hope blizzard mixes up the lvl70 endgame instances tremendously and gives us some entirely brand new orignal content.

I haven't done the newer version fo Tavarok, but the old one was a joke even with the range due to both the Prison and Quake being able to LoS out of. In the new incarnation, can you still get out of LoS?

I think if I had to pick one encounter that just had me at - whoa - was Blackheart the Inciter from Shadow Labs. First time going in..saw the MC go off on the whole party repeatedly, got the "OH CRAP", close second being the ogre from Shattered Halls def. Aggro Dump, Fear, TC - weeeeeee!

On this note but in a more general sense how much use have people found existing resist sets (thinking fire and nature in particular) to be in TBC? Trying to figure out whether it's worth sharding some of my less than optimal resist gear to help level enchanting but would hate to discover it was still well worth having around and could have helped minimise or at least reduce the need to grind resist gear again. Few bits of resist gear I've seen seemed to be following the Naxx trend of a large amount of the resist in question with a chunk of stamina making them far superior choices to a lot of the current itemisation.

Or you can get the NR Buff from the NPC right before the final boss by keeping him alive and then there is no real need for NR gear (I think it was a 150 NR buff but can't quite remember). Tanked him fine with just that buff and MOTW. Wasn't really fond of slave pens though.

Fire looks to be quite important for raiding only issue is do our current FR sets actually have enough stamina. Also there is lots of craftable resist gear and for FR gear you can do Heroic Mode instances and buy the gear with the tokens.

Both Blackheart the Inciter and Murmur hold a special place in my heart, and Shadow Labs in general is perhaps my favourite five-man in the game (excluding SM of course, which is naturally better than anything in the game pve or pvp, for it's level).

The Mechanaar has some new encounter mechanics. First boss has floating bombs that force you to be very mobile (still can't figure out the pattern on those), second boss has walking fire elementals that you must kite while fighting, and the last boss has mana burning wraiths that you can either fear or dps down.

Old mechanics aren't necessarily bad, though, and can be fun. For example,

I tanked the demon boss in Helfire Citadel on Heroic, as a shadow priest. this made me very happy.

re: fire resist, perhaps it would be useful in beating vazruden on heroic. I seem to wipe every time when he lands..it's like the P2->P3 Onyxia mechanic all over again..