heroics
Latest
Tigole talks attunement
Attunement is one of those subjects that divides WoW players. You either think people should have to work to get into high-end dungeons, or you think they should be open to anyone with the guts to try. Of course, you're more likely to fall into the first camp if you yourself had to do that work, hence the recent controversy over the attunements for the Black Temple and Mount Hyjal being removed.Well, it turns out that if WoW lead developer Jeff "Tigole" Kaplan had his way, attunement would be much less of a pain. He dropped the following information in a thread on "Attunement and Alts" in the general forums today: They would like to make it so getting a Karazhan key or a heroic key gave all your other max-level alts access as well. They're looking into guild and raid attunements, but "no promises." They're interested in doing server events to open up content, like the AQ war but, Tigole says, with more fun dailies and fewer boring collection grinds. Overall, he says the topic of attunement comes up often at Blizz HQ, and they want to do better moving forward and going into Wrath.
Kazzak and Doomwalker go BoE, 25man raids get more set pieces per drop
The European forums see some 2.4 news dropping, as we find out that Doom Lord Kazzak and Doomwalker will see their drops go from BoP to BoE, 25 man raid content will see their token drops increase by one to three tokens per token dropping boss, gems from Heroics will no longer be unique, and reputation with the Scale of the Sands will now be greatly increased.Meanwhile, Drysc returns again with news that the looting UI system is undergoing some changes, especially involving BoP items. If only you can loot it, you won't be asked if you want to anymore, and you'll see the name of the item in the confirmation window from now on.In addition to news about enchanting, PvP honor and spell haste dropping today, it looks very likely that patch 2.4 is due sooner rather than later. Of course, it's also possible that they're doing all this to confuse and bewilder us.
What are heroics for?
Recently a couple of my guild mates ran Heroic Underbog with a few pug members. Life was good, they made it up to the first boss, Hungarfen, and got him. The odd part happens with the loot. A rogue could have used the Boggspine Knuckles that the boss dropped. However a friendly lock decided that this was a badges run, and not a gearing one. He decided that instead of passing on the item, he was going to need all blue items and shard them. Lo and behold, the lock did just that. Anger ensued, and instead of moving on happy, everyone left quite mad. Now of course, this sounds like just another pug horror story. What makes it different from that is this lock actually went on to defend his actions, and really stood by his convictions. My first reaction is to balk at this, and say this is never acceptable. However thinking a little beyond that, I've got to wondering if this is a practice that perhaps happens elsewhere. Perhaps this guy is from a different server with a different culture, where heroics are just meant for badges and gear gets auto-sent to the DE factory.So my question to you, WoW Insider readers, does this kind of thing happen legitimately anywhere else, or is this just another case of another bad pug story?
Officers' Quarters: 2.3 postmortem
Every Monday Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership.It's been nearly two weeks since patch 2.3 went live, so I thought it might be helpful to talk about the impact it has had on my guild and get some feedback from other officers about their experiences. What has been the best thing in 2.3 for you? What's just plain awful? Here's my take on it.Thumbs Up: Zul'AmanZul'Aman has been a blast for my guild. Most of us enjoy the 10-player raids better than any other group size, so we were really looking forward to this one. Even though it's a bit of a Zul'Gurub rehash lorewise, Zul'Aman has a different feel to it than any other raid. The bosses aren't just standing there blithely unaware of your incursion. The dynamic trash and countdown timer make clearing the whole raid interesting instead of mindlessly slogging through static pulls to get to the bosses. The difficulty seems spot-on, if a little on the challenging side for Tier 4 guilds (but that's the intention, right?). Done right it should be a relatively quick run with some nice loot and badges for everyone. This raid will be a pleasure to run week after week. I hope future raids are more like this one!Having said that, it's been a challenge scheduling all our raids.
Which heroic is the friendliest for beginners?
In Patch 2.3, the reputation needed to enter heroic dungeons has been lowered to Honored. As a result, players who have up to now been limited in the heroic dungeons they can run (if they can run any of them) will now be likely to be able to go into just about any heroic dungeon. This has its up sides (easier to get a heroic group) and its down sides (players who are not as geared or experienced with the dungeons will now be running them), which leads me to wonder: what dungeon would be the best 'starter' heroic?I personally like the Coilfang dungeons on heroic. In addition to running Steam Vaults fairly often, I recently had a great deal of fun running heroic Slave Pens, in a two warrior run the other day. I'm not as enamored of heroic Old Hillsbrad, and I've yet to run heroic Shattered Halls which I think would be grueling. I generally like the Auchindoun heroics with the exception of Auchenai Crypts, which I dislike.What would you tell a player new to heroics? Where should they go first?
Insider Trader: A primal urge to roll for Primal Nethers
Each week, Lisa Poisso brings us Insider Trader -- your weekly inside line on making, selling, buying and using player-made products.In the wake of the avalanche of item and crafting tweaks ushered in by patch 2.1, Insider Trader takes a look at the much-maligned Primal Nether. How do you get one? Do you even need one? Should you roll for one? And keep reading for an Insider Trader tip on a special tactic engineers -- yes, engineers! -- can use to get certain types of motes. But first things first: Primal Nethers. These glowing globules of crafting goodness have about a 5-10% chance of dropping from final bosses in non-heroic Burning Crusade instances, and they're a guaranteed drop from final bosses of heroic instances. Post-2.1, you can also purchase them for the bargain price of 10 Badges of Justice from G'eras in Shattrath City.
Forum post of the day: Thrilling heroics
For all that the forums are wretched hives, every so often some really good posts come out of them. This looks like one of those posts: Tinker, of Bloodhoof-EU, has written a little guide for every heroic instance. (Well, almost all of them; Black Morass is coming soon.) The guides are copied after the cut if you want to check them out from work. He gives every heroic a difficulty rating, too; here's what he came up with: 1/5: Blood Furnace 1.5/5: Slave Pens, Mechanar 2/5: Ramparts, Underbog 3/5: Steamvault, Auchenai Crypts, Sethekk Halls 3.5/5: Botanica 3.5–4.5/5: Old Hillsbrad 4/5: Arcatraz 4.5/5: Mana Tombs, Shadow Labyrinth 5/5: Shattered Halls Looks like a pretty reasonable scale to me. I haven't run anything above a 3 on his list, so I can't comment about the relative order of those. Is this rating system accurate in your experience? And what would you give the CoT heroics?
For great (Badge of) Justice!
The other night my guild stepped into a heroic instance for the first time. Now this isn't great news for those of you who already spend your weekend nights huggling Gruul, but it's a great accomplishment for us. Since we all have the Coilfang Resevoir key we started with Slave Pens, and I must say it was a joy to have challenge in that instance again. It felt like I had been given the instance back, as it were. If I were to walk into Slave Pens at the normal level I would feel little interest since it's tuned for 62-64. I finally understand the method behind the heroic dungeon concept, to allow level 70 players to have fun going to those dungeons again. But what I'd really like is heroic dungeon settings for the old instances in Azeroth. Can you imagine what Van Cleef would be like at level 70? It makes me giddy just to think of it. We only got as far as the first boss, and then the trash beat us to a complete pulp before exhaustion forced us to quit. I really was surprised how the tides shift with heroics. I have a hard time reconciling trash mobs who are impossible to kill and bosses who are manageable. Either way I am excited to have such a novel experience added to our game play. Whoever came up with the concept of heroic dungeons was brilliant. I have my first Badge of Justice, now. Only 112 to go.
A few tips for starting Heroics
Most players by now that started rolling to 70 when the expansion hit are probably either just starting or in the middle of running their first few Heroic dungeons. I fall into that group-- my guild has had a few folks running Heroics for a while, but the majority of us are just now starting to pick up the Revered rep needed in the different factions to make running Heroics a regular possibility. So here's a few tips I've picked up just in the past few weeks or so about how to get started running the most challenging 5mans in the game. Please feel free to add your own below.-Easiest Heroic: in general, you're going to want to start in the Slave Pens. I've heard good things about Underbog and Old Hillsbrad (Ramparts is comparably easy as well, especially if you've got your FR gear on), but really I've found that Slave Pens is a good indicator of whether your group is ready for Heroics or not, and it seems like Cenarion rep is pretty easy to come by, so you've got lots of keyed folks to choose from.-Best place to get badges: Heroic Mechanar. Even the Gatekeeper minibosses, who don't give good loot in the normal instance, will drop Badges for you in Heroic, which means that if you skate through this place in under an hour, you're earning five badges in that time.-In Heroics, it's not the bosses you have to worry about, it's the trash. Trash hits hard (really hard), so there's no room for error (read: letting the mobs go after clothies). If you don't have the standard CC you need (and you should-- heroic groups are best when every class type is well-represented), then fear is your friend, because in most heroics two hits are enough to cause a wipe.
PTR notes: new helms for Badges of Justice
G'eras, the Naaru who sells you things for Badges of Justice in Shattrath, now has eight new epic helms with meta slots in addition to his new Primal Nether trade-in. They cost 60 badges each. As you might expect, there are two helms for each type of armor, which makes it pretty easy to figure out which are for which classes. Of course, there being two cloth helms, the DPS clothies have to share one. Spec-wise, the hybrids' helms break down like this, as far as I can tell: Druid: Feral Shaman: Elemental Warrior: Protection Paladin: Holy All the helms have from 21 to 37 stamina on them too, which is nice -- I've noticed that the better gear my Priest gets, the less HP she has. All in all it looks like pretty good gear (although they need to work on meta gem itemization, but that's a separate issue). Screenshots of all the items after the cut. What do you think? Will you be shooting for one of these? (Pictured is the Rogue helm.)
Breakfast Topic: Easiest Heroic
So far, I've been into exactly two Heroic-mode dungeons: Slave Pens and Steamvaults. My guild group cleared through Slave Pens fine, although we had a few wipes, all on trash mobs. Badges of Justice were of course had by all, and I got a nice main-hand for my DPS set. Steamvaults was another story: we did OK on the trash, but couldn't down a single boss. I'm also keyed for Caverns of Time heroics, but judging by how annoying Black Morass is on non-heroic, I don't think I'll be opting to turn up the intensity on that one any time soon. When a forum poster asked which Heroic was the easiest, Tseric Eyonix replied:So far I've only completed two heroic dungeons -- Slave Pens and Mechanar. Slave Pens was definitely much easier for my group than Mechanar was, however, both were fairly challenging. I'm hoping to do some others soon, but right now I'm trying to gain exhaulted with the Sha'tar faction, so running the Tempest Keep dungeons is in my best interest. Perhaps I'll do a heroics mode Botanica or Arcatraz soon.How about you guys? Out of the heroics y'all have tried, which was the least bone-crushingly difficult?
