Thursday, December 10, 2009

Patch 3.3: First Impressions

Since Patch 3.3 has been out for only a couple of days, I know most of us are still taking it all in and digesting the information, but I wanted to take a minute and give my first impressions.

Icecrown Citadel (raid):

Last night I cleared the first 4 bosses in both the 10man and 25man version. In fact, my guild was one of only two guilds on my server to kill all 4 bosses on their first night of attempts. I know that doesn't mean much, but it's a small victory that makes us happy, and we can spend the rest of the week trying to finish up ToGC. Any, here are my impressions.

Lord Marrowgar: If Leotheras, Supremus, and Naj'entus had a baby, its name would be Lord Marrowgar. I think how you view this fight really depends on how long you've raided. Since I raided quite a bit in TBC I've seen something similar to all of his major mechanics before.

With that in mind, the fight was pretty boring to me. There was no sense of danger or challenge to the fight. The Whirlwind hit like bean back and would only do serious damage if you stood in it. Same for the fires. As for the bone spikes, I spent so much time on one I thought I was going to be rotisserie chicken, but again How many times have we seen this mechanic? All you have to do is create a simple targeting macro and the bone spikes are simple.

All that said, I can see this being a real pain on heroic mode. As a general rule I had hard time avoiding the Whirlwind and fires completely. The room is very small and there just isn't that much room to spread out in and still have range. His abilities may become much more troublesome when they hit harder.

Lady Deathwhisper: I found this fight more satisfying . Maybe it's because we wiped a couple of times, but it didn't feel like as big of a push over as Lord Marrowgar. As I said, we wiped a couple of times. That was mostly due to trying to find the right balance of boss DPS and Add DPS. I don't think it is a hugely difficult fight, I felt like the bosses mechanics were more dangerous. Playing poorly could kill you and cause your raid not to succeed.

Gunship Battle: It may be a victim of high expectations but I was disappointed and bored. It may also be a result of my role in the fight. I was on the ship defense team and the fight consisted of three things for me. 1. Don't get hit by a rocket. 2. DPS the adds. 3. Wait for more adds.

There was no variation in the fight or me, and I didn't feel like there was any real threat. At no point did I feel like we were in danger of being over run by adds. I think this fight could use some of the original Magtheradon mechanics. I think it would be a great idea to have some sort of lock out on how often you can use the cannons or your jet pack. That would at least force a more of a role rotation in the fight.

To make matters worse we were rewarded with no loot. The chest bugged out on us and we were not able to click it. Hopefully, we will be able to recover what was inside with a GM ticket.

Deathbringer Saurfang: In my opinion this is the first truly challenging fight in the instance. I felt the threat that the Boss and the Adds represented very early on and it made the fight more fun.

I also want to talk a little bit about the Typhoon strat presented by Tankspot. I'm sure many of you have read it, but I will explain it in short. You don't want anyone to be hit by the Blood Beasts, so you have a mookin get aggro using Hurricane and force the adds to run through slowing affects like Frost traps. When the adds get close you Typhoon them to knock them back and stun them. While this is going on the ranged single targets them down.

The problem here is that they are highly resistant to AoE attacks, and the resistance seems to be closer to 90% then the 75% that Tankspot reports. As a result I had a ton of trouble getting aggro and/or pulling aggro off of the healers. I now think the best way to manage this fight is with slows, like crippling poison. The adds have fairly low health and will go down quickly as long as they have some sort of slow affect.

Icecrown Citadel (5man):

I ran all three instance on Graylo, and they seemed pretty cool. Its a little hard to judge since I out gear the instance by a mile, but the fights seemed interesting and they looked pretty cool. Ont top of that, the gear is pretty sweet and you get a ton of Frost Emblems the first time you go through it. I can't wait to get the Mage and Priest in there to get some gear.

Looking for Group:

Like everyone I was looking forward to getting a new instance, but it was expected. The new Looking for Group tools is what has me most excited. As a general rule I love running instances. As a raider, it is why I pay the subscription fee each month. My trouble has always been that I hate looking for a group. Usually it took just as long to find a group as it did to do the instance. If you lose a tank or healer midrun, your up a creek with out a paddle. For these reasons, I don't run 5mans that often, and I never run them while leveling.

I've only tried the new LFG tool on Graylo, but so far I think it's awesome. I had some trouble on Tuesday, but I'm chalking that up to patch day craziness. Every time I tried it it found a group fairly quickly, the group was fairly competent, and results were achieved.

The funny thing is I think it might make be a better player. I'm used to having very good tanks at my gear level. Pulling aggro usually isn't as big of a consideration as it should be. Now that I am playing with tanks well below my gear level I am having to learn to pay better attention to my aggro.

I still have some questions about this tool. How well will it work in a couple of months when the interest in it has died down? I also want to see how it will work for my lower level alts, but as it stands right now, I am pleased.

Squawk and Awe:

Just in case you had not seen it before, Squawk and Awe has been updated. You can find it at WoWInterface.com here. The only issue I had with the new version was that the cooldown timer didn't start until after the buff had expired.

24 comments:

Unknown said...

If you manually edit the previous version of Squawk and Awe as is mentioned in its Elitist Jerks thread (just some copy and pasting in the .lua file, not hard), the cooldown bar still functions as it did before.

lissanna said...

They've been working on EJ to work through some of the bugs. Once they have that all settled, you should try downloading the newest version.

lissanna said...

To be more specific, they have been working on a fix for the cooldown bug you are describing.

Monni said...

Have you tryied "Quartz: Procs Module" instead? I havent noticed any difference between that and S&A.

Dawni said...

Personally I enjoyed the freshness of all the new content. I was slightly underwhelmed by the difficulty(i think we wiped once on Saurfang), but I assumed the difficulty would be easy since blizz is on the "let everyone win" kick still in this expansion. Im setting my sights on Hard Modes.

You comment about the typhoon was interesting, our guild just had a couple of strong dps stand in front of the traps each take an add and get it to focus them then I would typhoon them back once they got close. We didn't bother trying to hurricane them

Ballerkin said...

These fights were all easy, but I definitely can see them being very difficult on Heroic. Oh, and we did wipe on the gunship - some guy started the fight before anyone had grabbed their rocket launchers and nobody could go onto the other ship :P

Regarding Typhooning the adds - I just Typhooned them as they spawned, and they seemed to die before they ever reached the ranged. We did have a couple of healers tank a couple, lol.

Dale said...

That Tankspot strat looks overly complicated, I just stood front and center at the bottom of the stairs, 3 hunter frost traps on the stairs.

Pallies with Righteous Fury up stood behind me, I would Typhoon as soon as they spawned. The adds hardly ever made it through the frost trap, if they did they would be knocked back a second time with Thunderstorm.

Diermaker said...

We did Deathbringer on the one night none of our hunters showed up. We did Righteous Fury in the back, earthbinds in the middle and I did Typhoon after the first earthbind.

I really liked the fight the most. Seems like our healers enjoyed it as well.

Anonymous said...

As a moonkin raider of similar raid experience/gear level, I would like to propose another moonkin strategy for Deathbringer Saurfang to you.

Instead of attempting to pull aggro with the Bloodbeasts (a la Tankspot), just stand in the center facing Saurfang, typhoon both adds as soon as they spawn and then root one and have ranged dps burn down the other.

We completely avoided the need for hunter traps and DK chains of ice spamming. This also avoids the issues of trying to pull aggro, hurricane related mana issues and split dps.

Given a lower gear level, melee heavy raid or a 3 healer approach, a second form of slow/cc may be necessary but it is possible with only a moonkin for control.

~Aeon of Dragonmaw

Pucc said...

I actually enjoyed the gunship but I was on a cannon and jumping back in forth from the ships for killing the mage guys.

Another thing we did on Saurfang is that the adds are tauntable on 25man. So if someone pulled agro and were getting close to hitting someone i just shifted and taunted. Normally this bought enough time for the mob to die.

Lilija said...

I'd like to comment a bit on 4th ICC boss. We did in fact use the typhoon method and yes, hurricane doesn't help much (tho when I stopped using it, it somehow was getting even worse). Anyway, I gues the key to success was hunters trap, focused dps on adds and putting paladins with RF on me ... plus other healers not further than 1 group from me. Adds still tend to aggro randomnly in some cases but most of them did go in my dirrection.

Aeiedil said...

I agree with your sentiments on a few bosses.

Deathwhisper we found very simple, easy to beat the enrage timer. That said we did wipe for an hour and a bit, because every time we pulled we would be bent over and spanked by the lag beast, making all dps and healing impossible. Would see a raid dps of 6-7k per person fall to a max 2.5k. Strong win

On the gunship I was also on ship defence. Halfway through I got bored so told the raid leader to stuff it, because DPS on the below zero add was low. I just started jumping around doing what I felt like (being the only Moonkin in the guild means I can often get away with this so long as I don't screw up), and that made the fight a bit more fun :) Just made sure to keep an eye on adds to make sure they weren't overwhelmed.

Saurfang I was moaned at for being unable to hold aggro with Hurricane because "it worked in the video". It took some explanation to point out that hurricane hitting for 90/hit could NOT hold aggro unless all melee stopped aoe (they refused to), and the healers stopped healing entirely. This of course was not possible, so finally we went to single-targetting and people paying attention and goddam moving, like I had been trying to get people to do at the start. Boss fell, cookies were had :)

Qieth said...

I really enjoyed the LFG tool. Last night, i queued up for Pit of Saron (2nd instance) at like 00.30, and it took me 10 minutes to find a group. Not bad, considering its a whole new instance, and most people had probably done it. I did the random heroic for the first time, and i was amazed that i had to wait just a minute, and when we all got ported in, we were all ready. The party didn't stop, everybody knew what they were doing, nobody had time to go AFK because we just went through it.

It was like playing with myself. Gaming. Gaming with myself.

Aeiedil said...

Regarding the LFD tool, it makes me more inclined to run random heroics instead of idling all day as it takes a lot of the headache out of joining a random heroic pug. Among other things, no bickering over deciding where to go!

Anonymous said...

I really like the new LFG tool as well, but have some questions on how the random instances are picked, specific to hybrids. I'm afraid to queue as a healer, since my off-set gear, while adequate for most of the instances, may be behind on the new ones. Any ideas or suggestions on how this works?

I also expect the queue times to lengthen as the novelty wears off. Although the teleport feature helps like it did with the battle grounds since I can queue and go about other things while I wait.

Aeiedil said...

I believe it checks your current gear, so probably not a good idea to queue as healer with ilevel 200 gear if your main set gear is full IC epics :) Maybe swap over to your healer gear before you queue or something, would expect that to prevent you being in a dungeon you can't heal.

Mobus said...

I am glad to see the opinion of another moonkin for the Saurfang fight and know I'm not totally crazy >.< there was absolutely no way I could hold aggro against our mages with hurricane, and most the adds were dead by the time they got in typhoon range of me anyway. I will talk with my raid leader about some of the other strats I heard here :D

Cybac said...

Gray, try Surgetracker for Eclipse Procs, there's a post about it on NoStockUI, I cant access it from work to post the original link soz.

Tis a very nice addon :)

Dale said...

Seems like Squawk and Awe is working again, it is doing sometimes it lags my whole screen when eclipse procs.

I believe it is the work around that they used, it's definitely better than without it.

Aeiedil said...

So what are all your views on weapon choice.

Personally I'm going with Nibelung simply because I'm getting bored of weapon after weapon with the same old stats, I like nice procs :) That and I like a druid with a staff.

I've done an initial wowhead profile with what I am aiming for, working on a post on strayegg about it. Unfortunately wowhead doesn't list all the items I would like to include (i.e. the reverred/exalted rings, and items from bosses not yet ingame), so I've used some EoF items to patch in the gaps (and my trusty Bejeweled Wizards Bracers)

Can view it here : http://www.wowhead.com/?profile=19102924

Any comments? :)

MuShU said...

I liked the LFG tool on the first night only. Since then I have had 15 to 20 minute wait times or more. As a boomy it seems like DPS is a dime a dozen and the limiting factors are tanks and healers. As it always was, yet now it is much more pronounced. Not real happy with it atm, we'll see...

The other problem is when there is a cloth drop that's an upgrade for me, yet everyone else rolls DE and of course that overrides my greed (because I can't Need due to it not being my "type" of gear). I really hate this part and wish Blizz would change it to allow Need on cloth for druids and probably leather for shammys and so on, maybe one level "lower" type of gear if you know what I mean.

Anonymous said...

Other good Eclipse tracking addon:

3.3 broke the addon I was using to track eclipse buffs and cooldowns (EventAlert; was a very good method if it gets fixedt for 3.3), so I gave the updated Squawk/Awe a test run and didn't like it very much. Part of that was subjective, but it kept bugging out on me, keeping the buff icon on the screen and generally being a little awkward.

I gave Quartz a whirl and liked it much better when combined with Quartz: proc module for tracking Eclipse buffs and cooldowns. It's still not perfect (can't seem to make it stop showing earth and moon) but its much more consolidated, more asthetically pleasing and more consistant with showing whats going on with Eclipse.

Fake Nils said...

I'm starting a new blog at:

http://shittygoblin.blogspot.com/

Anonymous said...

I don't know if the typhoon strat change before your posting but I read the strat. It wasn't talking about trying to hold aggro with hurricane but using a holy pally behind you with righteous fury to aggro.