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Challenge mode whiz kids spill their strategies
Taking your challenge modes from gold medal range to world record status represents a whole different mindset and approach. We continue our two-part interview with two young players from Montreal, Canada, the US region realm champs Nerthfu and Bouleau, to explore their speed-demon strategies for challenge mode tanking and healing. WoW Insider: Bouleau, what class and what qualities do you feel make the best healer for CMs? Bouleau: Looking at the current worldwide leaderboards, I suppose most would be inclined to name the priest class, which I think is an accurate guess. Priests -- more specifically, discipline priests -- excel more than any other class at dealing damage reliably while healing, and this matters a great deal when pushing for times, both for gold ratings and beyond. And yet game balance always fluctuates over time, and I recently learned that Blizzard has Atonement under the radar. With 5.2 not out yet and class changes still being announced regularly, it's not impossible that we see a shift in favor of another class in a not-so-distant future. For those that may be wondering why discipline is superior to holy (which doesn't mean holy isn't viable for gold times), here's my view. As a healer, you ideally want to achieve two things: Keep your group alive, and deal damage. It seems simple enough on paper, at least until you start improving your times beyond the gold milestones.
Nerthfu and Bouleau: Mauling the challenge mode record charts
That dude's a beast. If ever you were to use the above phrase to refer to a fellow WoW player, these are the guys that should inspire it. Nerthfu and Bouleau of Haven (Lethon-US) have manhandled WoW's challenge modes into submission, setting scalding instance completion times across the board. As of this writing, the duo from Canada holds all but one American region record, with the rest mere seconds behind the EU's world records. As you can well imagine, a conversation with such high-performance monsters plunges into the realm of the specific almost immediately. That's why we're dividing their perspectives into a two-part interview over the next two weeks. We'll look at both tanking and healing at warp speed and find out what kind of play it takes to defend the top spot on the charts week after week. WoW Insider: How does one become addicted to speed on this level, guys? Are speed runs something you guys have always enjoyed doing in WoW, or did the addition of challenge modes mark a new way to play for you? Nerthfu: As far as I can remember, I always loved running dungeons as fast as humanly possible in WoW, but it wasn't really organized or a goal but rather just my way of doing things. It started in vanilla WoW, where I would constantly get aggro on my rogue and had to use Feint and Vanish almost on cooldown to wipe my threat. Then came Burning Crusade, and I switched to a fury warrior. That's where things started changing a lot. I started playing much more often with Bouleau and had even more issues than before with my threat -- so much in fact that I would end up always getting aggro off the tank and die in most heroic dungeons and raids. ... That was how most of our heroic dungeon went until we were so overgeared that Bouleau could heal just heal me while I was tanking entire packs of trash in heroic dungeons, and that's where we really started running dungeons as fast as we could, which most of the time meant four DPS and one healer.
How to get a World Record Challenge Mode time
NSFW Warning: Some strong language. Zyzzix of Touch of Hades posted this video on Youtube and on the Blizzard forums early this morning, which shows their group getting what was, sadly, a very short-lived world record time in the Siege of Niuzao Temple. It's filmed from the perspective of the tank, Maeby, of The Maelstrom, EU, and has some strong language in places, so do exercise caution. The group held the record of 12 minutes 50 seconds for only a few hours, before a US guild on Stormreaver took it back across the Atlantic with a time of 12 minutes 21 seconds, but the video still makes entertaining watching for anyone with even a remote interest in Challenge Mode dungeons, and, of course, they still hold the European record. The remarkable thing for me is how these guys manage to take on huge numbers of adds at the same time, under the penultimate boss's barrier, using the bombs to great effect to increase their DPS. The tactic employed for the mobs coming up the ramp to the wall was also interesting, concentrating the action on the middle platform rather than allowing them to get all the way to the top. Altogether, a really fascinating video, and I'm hoping to see this team come back with another world record. One thing I did note is that, despite some strong language, the run seemed to flow very smoothly indeed. There were a few very minor hiccups, and it looks like they could potentially go faster! Mists of Pandaria is here! The level cap has been raised to 90, many players have returned to Azeroth, and pet battles are taking the world by storm. Keep an eye out for all of the latest news, and check out our comprehensive guide to Mists of Pandaria for everything you'll ever need to know.
