Infraction for Shakes: Useless Post

• LodeRunner · 06/12/08, 12:04 AM

Post: Wrath of Lich King Stuff (was 'Blizzcon' thread)
User: Shakes
Infraction: Useless Post
Points: 1

Administrative Note:

Message to User:

More quote-splitting than you can shake a stick at! Please don't do that.

Original Post:

Originally Posted by Sillia

Did you learn ZA with or without 25-man gear?

We had a small amount of 25 man gear, but we were by no means an elite 25 man raiding guild. I think I maybe had 3 T5 level drops. None of our cloth DPS (which we tended to take 4 of per run) had any. We sometimes had people in not full Kara gear.

So on average, we had a T4 geared group I'd say.

Beating the first four bosses is much tougher than beating the last two, yet beating the last two nets you far more useful rewards than beating the first four. That seems broken to me.

I've heard this but it doesn't match my experience. I found the last two bosses to be significantly harder than the first 4, with the possible exception of dragonhawk.

It isn't quite so cut and dry. You're pretty much saying "Instead of clearing Karazhan for 22 badges tonight, we're going to sit and work on this boss. Maybe we'll clear one or two other bosses we've downed before, and if we're lucky (50% chance), we'll get two chests." The comparative return on this is ludicrous.

You can only clear Kara once a week. If you're not a 25 man guild, what else are you going to do? Not log on for the other 6 days? Even most casual guilds raid more than one night a week.

Karazhan nets 22 badges per person and (assuming an 80% shard rate) four usable loots out of the whole thing. Learning Zul'Aman nets you three and a half loots (50% chance on chest #2), and three badges. Five badges, and maybe a fourth loot if you manage to down a hard boss that you happen to be learning. I don't know about you, but those aren't good numbers for trying to progress. I wanted to have more reason to continue in ZA than to go back to Kara. I wanted to push in ZA as far as possible, and then only go back and do Kara because we couldn't get any farther in ZA this reset. However, from an optimization standpoint, we did the exact opposite - we cleared Kara as the top priority each week in order to maximize our earned gear, in order to progress in ZA, because we got so little from ZA while learning it.

I experienced the same thing of having to push people to go there: we had 25 man raids on the two nights when most people could make it, and other nights getting enough people together from the one timezone who would actually go to ZA was an issue. So I understand that some people will drag their feet and want the safety of Kara. However, once we actually got serious about ZA, we knocked it over in a couple of resets. Being a 10 man instance with a very short run back, you really can wipe and be fighting again in less than 5 minutes.

I'm not denying some people will want to hang around in Kara, I'm saying it's really not rational. I mean who cares about the fact you wont get much loot for the first week, in a couple of weeks you'll have it on farm and it'll be better. If people can't delay gratification for a couple of weeks, then you have bigger problems than the difficulty of learning ZA.

Of the loot introduced in patch 2.3, you can look at the warrior tanking gear for a pretty decent example. Shoulders, shoes and shield are the only tanking items available from the first four bosses. Yet there are also legs, waist, gloves, cape and bracers from G'eras. Check it out. 3 items from the animal bosses (and chests). Five from badges. The last two items are the hat and chest, which evens it out at 5:5, but once again... that's going back to the bottom end of ZA, not the top.

See, here's the perfect example:

5 bits of badge loot = ~300 badges = ~15 weeks of Kara
5 bits of ZA loot = ~1/6 drop rate = ~3 weeks of ZA on average (plus offspec gear, plus nearly 80 badge to put towards badge gear)

Even if you take a month to learn ZA, and got absolutely nothing in that first month, you're still better off doing it than doing Kara. Of course I'm working with the view that you do not need post-Kara gear to do ZA, since I don't believe anything other than the timed run is a hard gear check.