Yesterday Blizzard revealed the tier 13 set bonuses for each class as they will be appearing on the PTR. So let's have a quicklook at the Blood Death Knight ones:
2 Piece
"When an attack drops your health below 35%, one of your Blood Runes will immediately activate and convert into a Death Rune for the next 20 sec. This effect cannot occur more than once every 45 sec"
To me this set bonus is really disappointing, all it really means is that if you have a frost or unholy rune (or rune tap is off cooldown) available when you drop below 35% health you will always be able to use a Death Strike. Unfortunately bar diseases (which are used in pairs anyway) we don't use any abilities in our regular rotation that cost a single frost or unholy rune. With the upcoming changes to outbreak even our diseases won't use runes so I'm left wondering when Blizzard expect us to be taking advantage of this bonus.
Bears, Warriors and Paladins all get bonuses based around damage absorption which (shock horror) actually help them tank and we get this which really doesn't. I seriously hope this doesn't survive the PTR.
4 piece
"Your Vampiric Blood ability also affects all party and raid members for 50% of the effect it has on you"
I love this set bonus! 12% extra healing once a minute for the whole raid is huge in any encounter with high raid damage, glyphed (which with this set bonus it really should be) this increases even further to 20% extra healing. Expect your healing team to want you to co-ordinate with them when this ability is being used, imagine this popped at the same time as tranquility!
Bears, Warriors and paladins get similar 4 piece bonuses that make one of their cooldowns into a raid cooldown which forces us to wonder: Just how much raid damage is there going to be in the Deathwing raid?
Adriaria
The blogged exploits of a casually raiding Blood Death Knight.
Sunday 25 September 2011
Tuesday 13 September 2011
News catch up
Finding time to blog is hard =/ but I am going to be sitting down on my days off and writing over everything else to make sure I'm getting blog posts up. This post is just going to be a bit of a news catch up.
First off the biggest news for DK tanks: Ghostcrawlers Bloody Mitigation dev cooler,
He talks a bit about the different mitigation models the devs considered but I'm not going into that since he didn't announce which model they were going to be using. We did get an early look into some possibilities for DKs in 4.3:
1) Outbreak
Outbreak is going to reduced to a 30 second cooldown for Blood DKs. This means we never have to use up runes to reapply our diseases, which means 1 more Death Strike. Those of us specced into Epidemic had 50% upkeep of diseases with outbreak anyway but this is a nice change, though it does make the talent useless for us.
This is mostly a quality of life change but will probably also see the death of the repeated attempts at disease-less tanking, the debuff and damage from the diseases is certainly worth a GCD for no runes once every 30 seconds.
2) Blade Barrier.
Ghostcrawler briefly highlights the odd situation where the mechanics of Death Strike encourage you to save your runes for the right moments but blade barrier forces us to use them to keep it up. It's changing to something passive (though we don't know what) in 4.3 until they can figure out what to do with it.
This change will make us even more Death Strike centric for the moment but we have no idea how this is going to turn out in the long run.
3) Death Strike.
From 4.3 Death strike will always heal you and always trigger blood shield regardless of if it hits or not. This may very well be a temporary change as Blizz have been going on about wanting tanks to care about hit and expertise again lately as Ghostcrawler acknowledges.
This change means hit and expertise don't matter at all to us at the moment, Reforge it all away!
4) Bone Shield.
Ghostcrawler warns us that this may not happen but I sure hope it does! The idea for bone shield is to make it a 'smart' damage reducer that only triggers a charge when you take a large amount of damage at once.
This would be fantastic as it would make us a little easier to heal, at the moment a mistimed Death Strike at the wrong time can be a nightmare for healers as we take a good chunk more damage then the classes with block. It also gives us a minor saving on runes as we won't need to be hitting bone shield once a minute.
5) Blood Shield.
I'll just quote here: Our idea is to somehow turn Blood Shield into more of a pool that you actively try to build and maintain. A system where you’re able to add to a pool of absorption would provide more granularity, which in turn would be more forgiving of errors or streaks of bad luck.
I envision this as Daniel Whitcomb over at WoW insider does, where instead of taking 1 hit then being depleted your shield would absorb a smaller % of each hit but last longer making it like a block that you need to maintain and top up. This would help make the damage we take less spiky for healers.
So that's the big news for DK tanks. Onto guild news!
Our guild had a slow slow slow slow slow start into Firelands. We were finishing up tier 11 and then we just hit a wall. We tried Beth'tilak for weeks with absolutely zero success, eventually we switched to attempting Shannox who we downed the first week we tried (boy did we feel stupid) and got on farm really easily but we were having problems still.
We just couldn't kill Beth'tilak. The lack of hunter didn't help but I simply cannot explain it we just could not down that boss, we barely even made it to phase 2 and when we did the hits I was taking as a DK were just insane. We had a couple of goes at Lord Rhiolith but couldn't get him down either. Morale was at an all time low despite our casual status.
Then a few weeks ago something clicked. I dunno if people had more gear or if suddenly the fights just made sense, or even if it was the slight nerf to Beth'tilak but something happened. We went in and one shotted Shannox, two shotted Beth'tilak and one shotted Lord Ryolith and even make a start on Baleroc. It was a fantastic night and we now have the three bosses on comfortable farm (though the RNG of Rhyolith likes to mess with us), the mystery continues to perplex me!
Last week we also got our first kill of Baleroc which we had to work very hard for as we seemed to be really pushing the ceiling of what our DPS could put out with all the shard switches. We kept hitting the enrage timer but after an hour of attempting it we managed to eke out that last little bit of DPS we needed putting us 4/7.
Which is why the most recent bit of news upsets me.
Blizzard are Nerfing Tier 12. One of our biggest regrets as a guild that started up in Cataclysm was that we started raiding too late to finish tier 11 before the big round of nerfs hit, we wanted to experience the content as it was. We were determined that we wouldn't repeat that mistake and that we would beat Ragnaros normal mode before 4.3 came out and it was nerfed. Sadly Blizzard aren't waiting until 4.3 but are instead going to gradually nerf the bosses down before it comes out.
I have to say I agreed with the principle of the tier 11 nerfs. I like that when it was no longer current content they made it available to a larger selection of the player base, I like that it is much easier to gear alts through them. It was just unfortunate that we hadn't finished tier 11 when it happened.
As I have said a few times before, we are a casual guild but we most certainly don't want these nerfs. We want to get through the content yes but we also wanted to experience it as it originally was.
Guess we won't have that chance now =/
Adriaria
Edit: We also hit Guild level 25! Guess we have used Mass Resurrection so much already it feels like we've had it ages =p
First off the biggest news for DK tanks: Ghostcrawlers Bloody Mitigation dev cooler,
He talks a bit about the different mitigation models the devs considered but I'm not going into that since he didn't announce which model they were going to be using. We did get an early look into some possibilities for DKs in 4.3:
1) Outbreak
Outbreak is going to reduced to a 30 second cooldown for Blood DKs. This means we never have to use up runes to reapply our diseases, which means 1 more Death Strike. Those of us specced into Epidemic had 50% upkeep of diseases with outbreak anyway but this is a nice change, though it does make the talent useless for us.
This is mostly a quality of life change but will probably also see the death of the repeated attempts at disease-less tanking, the debuff and damage from the diseases is certainly worth a GCD for no runes once every 30 seconds.
2) Blade Barrier.
Ghostcrawler briefly highlights the odd situation where the mechanics of Death Strike encourage you to save your runes for the right moments but blade barrier forces us to use them to keep it up. It's changing to something passive (though we don't know what) in 4.3 until they can figure out what to do with it.
This change will make us even more Death Strike centric for the moment but we have no idea how this is going to turn out in the long run.
3) Death Strike.
From 4.3 Death strike will always heal you and always trigger blood shield regardless of if it hits or not. This may very well be a temporary change as Blizz have been going on about wanting tanks to care about hit and expertise again lately as Ghostcrawler acknowledges.
This change means hit and expertise don't matter at all to us at the moment, Reforge it all away!
4) Bone Shield.
Ghostcrawler warns us that this may not happen but I sure hope it does! The idea for bone shield is to make it a 'smart' damage reducer that only triggers a charge when you take a large amount of damage at once.
This would be fantastic as it would make us a little easier to heal, at the moment a mistimed Death Strike at the wrong time can be a nightmare for healers as we take a good chunk more damage then the classes with block. It also gives us a minor saving on runes as we won't need to be hitting bone shield once a minute.
5) Blood Shield.
I'll just quote here: Our idea is to somehow turn Blood Shield into more of a pool that you actively try to build and maintain. A system where you’re able to add to a pool of absorption would provide more granularity, which in turn would be more forgiving of errors or streaks of bad luck.
I envision this as Daniel Whitcomb over at WoW insider does, where instead of taking 1 hit then being depleted your shield would absorb a smaller % of each hit but last longer making it like a block that you need to maintain and top up. This would help make the damage we take less spiky for healers.
So that's the big news for DK tanks. Onto guild news!
Our guild had a slow slow slow slow slow start into Firelands. We were finishing up tier 11 and then we just hit a wall. We tried Beth'tilak for weeks with absolutely zero success, eventually we switched to attempting Shannox who we downed the first week we tried (boy did we feel stupid) and got on farm really easily but we were having problems still.
We just couldn't kill Beth'tilak. The lack of hunter didn't help but I simply cannot explain it we just could not down that boss, we barely even made it to phase 2 and when we did the hits I was taking as a DK were just insane. We had a couple of goes at Lord Rhiolith but couldn't get him down either. Morale was at an all time low despite our casual status.
Then a few weeks ago something clicked. I dunno if people had more gear or if suddenly the fights just made sense, or even if it was the slight nerf to Beth'tilak but something happened. We went in and one shotted Shannox, two shotted Beth'tilak and one shotted Lord Ryolith and even make a start on Baleroc. It was a fantastic night and we now have the three bosses on comfortable farm (though the RNG of Rhyolith likes to mess with us), the mystery continues to perplex me!
Last week we also got our first kill of Baleroc which we had to work very hard for as we seemed to be really pushing the ceiling of what our DPS could put out with all the shard switches. We kept hitting the enrage timer but after an hour of attempting it we managed to eke out that last little bit of DPS we needed putting us 4/7.
Which is why the most recent bit of news upsets me.
Blizzard are Nerfing Tier 12. One of our biggest regrets as a guild that started up in Cataclysm was that we started raiding too late to finish tier 11 before the big round of nerfs hit, we wanted to experience the content as it was. We were determined that we wouldn't repeat that mistake and that we would beat Ragnaros normal mode before 4.3 came out and it was nerfed. Sadly Blizzard aren't waiting until 4.3 but are instead going to gradually nerf the bosses down before it comes out.
I have to say I agreed with the principle of the tier 11 nerfs. I like that when it was no longer current content they made it available to a larger selection of the player base, I like that it is much easier to gear alts through them. It was just unfortunate that we hadn't finished tier 11 when it happened.
As I have said a few times before, we are a casual guild but we most certainly don't want these nerfs. We want to get through the content yes but we also wanted to experience it as it originally was.
Guess we won't have that chance now =/
Adriaria
Edit: We also hit Guild level 25! Guess we have used Mass Resurrection so much already it feels like we've had it ages =p
Friday 19 August 2011
Tanking changes and how they aren't killing the tanking game
So it's been a few weeks since my last (and first) blog post as I have been pretty busy with work. Turns out that finding time to blog among everything else is more difficult then I had anticipated!
This week Blizzard discussed it's planned changes to tanking and implemented a hot fix that increased threat generated by tanks from 300% damage to 500% damage and vengeance stacks up faster. Essentially these changes make it impossible to pull threat off of tanks. There's been a lot of crying on the Internet about this so I thought I'd throw my opinion out there, focusing on two main points.
1) This makes tanking easier.
As a raiding tank I can tell you now that this change hardly effects me at all. Maintaining threat against a raid boss is very very easy, not once has a raid boss been pulled off my by anything but another tank. When it comes to adds occasionally they can be tricky to pick up but I have never found it to be a big issue. Heroics wise once I've picked up mobs I can count the number of times threat has been pulled from me (even by raid geared DPS) on one hand. For end game tanks I would say this change is almost a non issue boiling down to a quality of life change at most.
Where these changes really shine is on under geared and new tanks and even more so in the often unfriendly environment of the dungeon finder. I know there's people out there who think the game shouldn't be balanced around the LFD system but it IS part of the game which anyone who wants current content gear is participating in (except for progression raiders clearing all of Firelands every week). While I am very fed up of troll heroics I am still running them every week to get VP capped as are many others.
Tanks (and Healers but I am talking about tanking) bear the brunt of negativity in the dungeon finder itself and this creates a barrier to entry when it comes to learning those roles for many people, barriers for entry are bad! The most common bad attitude I have spotted in the dungeon finder is speed, people want their runs finished quickly and many don't want to spend the time helping someone learn their role by doing. DPS can practice their rotation on dummies (yes this is an imperfect system but gets you used to where everything is) but tanks don't really have any practice area to learn when to hit their big cooldowns or how to keep up with high DPS, normals don't even come close to preparing you. If you've never tanked before how can you really prepare for a heroic? You can (and should) read up in preparation and you should run normals to get a basic feel for your class but the only real way to learn is by doing.
These changes mean that new tanks can concentrate on their own survival; they don't need to learn how to make up for other peoples mistakes in the form of DPS pew pew and they don't need to deal with "omg tank hold aggro" comments from DPS that overgear them.
2) This makes DPS lazy.
DPS are already lazy, at least the DPS this is aimed at (i.e the random kind) are. Don't get me wrong, I have encountered some fantastic DPS in my time in LFD (I especially love when I arrive at mobs to find all the dangerous ones living as sheep or blocks of ice) but I have also encountered many many bad ones who: complain when the tank is marking CC, sprout "go" constantly, blame the tank when they over aggro, shift blame whenever they die, don't bother with boss mechanics, moan about explanations to people new to the instance etc etc etc.
When tanking I have the confidence to know when people are being jerks and to ignore them but new tanks aren't always going to have that kind of confidence in their abilities, especially when they are first learning.
Many DPS already just pew pew without even glancing at Omen nothing Blizzard can do will change that. The bads will always be bad.
The future
Blizzard have also given us hint about the future of tanking (in 4.3 I assume) with it looking like all tanks will be moving towards a DK model of being more in control of their own survivability. Hopefully without the endless Death knight spam though ;)
Till next time
Adriaria
This week Blizzard discussed it's planned changes to tanking and implemented a hot fix that increased threat generated by tanks from 300% damage to 500% damage and vengeance stacks up faster. Essentially these changes make it impossible to pull threat off of tanks. There's been a lot of crying on the Internet about this so I thought I'd throw my opinion out there, focusing on two main points.
1) This makes tanking easier.
As a raiding tank I can tell you now that this change hardly effects me at all. Maintaining threat against a raid boss is very very easy, not once has a raid boss been pulled off my by anything but another tank. When it comes to adds occasionally they can be tricky to pick up but I have never found it to be a big issue. Heroics wise once I've picked up mobs I can count the number of times threat has been pulled from me (even by raid geared DPS) on one hand. For end game tanks I would say this change is almost a non issue boiling down to a quality of life change at most.
Where these changes really shine is on under geared and new tanks and even more so in the often unfriendly environment of the dungeon finder. I know there's people out there who think the game shouldn't be balanced around the LFD system but it IS part of the game which anyone who wants current content gear is participating in (except for progression raiders clearing all of Firelands every week). While I am very fed up of troll heroics I am still running them every week to get VP capped as are many others.
Tanks (and Healers but I am talking about tanking) bear the brunt of negativity in the dungeon finder itself and this creates a barrier to entry when it comes to learning those roles for many people, barriers for entry are bad! The most common bad attitude I have spotted in the dungeon finder is speed, people want their runs finished quickly and many don't want to spend the time helping someone learn their role by doing. DPS can practice their rotation on dummies (yes this is an imperfect system but gets you used to where everything is) but tanks don't really have any practice area to learn when to hit their big cooldowns or how to keep up with high DPS, normals don't even come close to preparing you. If you've never tanked before how can you really prepare for a heroic? You can (and should) read up in preparation and you should run normals to get a basic feel for your class but the only real way to learn is by doing.
These changes mean that new tanks can concentrate on their own survival; they don't need to learn how to make up for other peoples mistakes in the form of DPS pew pew and they don't need to deal with "omg tank hold aggro" comments from DPS that overgear them.
2) This makes DPS lazy.
DPS are already lazy, at least the DPS this is aimed at (i.e the random kind) are. Don't get me wrong, I have encountered some fantastic DPS in my time in LFD (I especially love when I arrive at mobs to find all the dangerous ones living as sheep or blocks of ice) but I have also encountered many many bad ones who: complain when the tank is marking CC, sprout "go" constantly, blame the tank when they over aggro, shift blame whenever they die, don't bother with boss mechanics, moan about explanations to people new to the instance etc etc etc.
When tanking I have the confidence to know when people are being jerks and to ignore them but new tanks aren't always going to have that kind of confidence in their abilities, especially when they are first learning.
Many DPS already just pew pew without even glancing at Omen nothing Blizzard can do will change that. The bads will always be bad.
The future
Blizzard have also given us hint about the future of tanking (in 4.3 I assume) with it looking like all tanks will be moving towards a DK model of being more in control of their own survivability. Hopefully without the endless Death knight spam though ;)
Till next time
Adriaria
Friday 22 July 2011
About me and a look at the Fireland dailies
Welcome, you've stumbled upon DK diaries; looking at raiding through the eyes of a casual raider.
About me:
I'm a 25 year old guy from London who hasn't really found a neat way to transition from a Student into a real person. My main character is a Adriaria a blood Death Knight but also have a warlock and a priest at 85 who have both been my main at some point. Since my guild has started raiding it has become the main reason I play WoW; I don't hunt achievement and titles, 5 mans have become a means of capping VP and I don't really PvP. Before I raided I never thought I was missing out but
now that i've tried it i'm loving the experience.
About my Guild:
I am chief lackey in Discombobulated (I like to think of the GM and his girlfriend as similar to Cho'Gal one entity that squabbles a lot and passes on the conclusions to the rest of us)an Alliance guild on Hellfire EU. We're a social guild that also has a raiding team (sort off, the team members aren't set in stone) that are raiding twice a week. Our raiding can only be described as casual as we aren't incredibly strict with our members and are willing to take our time with the content. We also have a mix of raid experience within the team, from those who are raiding for the first time in Cataclysm to those with loads of experience who want a more relaxed atmosphere. This does not mean we are unsuccessful though! We started raiding about a month before the big 4.2 nerfs and managed to get 7/12 in that time (and Argoloth obviously) which isn't bad for 6 hours raiding a week without a set team! Since the nerfs we have finished up the last remaining bosses and earned our 'Defender of a shattered world' titles (late, but yay!). We have had a couple of cracks at Beth'tilak in the Firelands but haven't been able to get her down yet.
Speaking of my guild it would be really lame of me not to plug the Discombobulated website and Achievements Ahoy the blog of fellow guildie Aralosseien.
Why a Blog?
I like to write, mostly because it helps me to organise my thoughts far better then leaving them in my brain does. This post is a perfect example my opinion with my opinion on the Fireland dailies changing about 3 times while this was being written ^^
Well that's all the introduction stuff finished if you come back next week then...........whoa whoa whoa. I can't just give you an introduction and no actual content, that's totally lame and exactly what blizzard did with the Fireland dailies! Have a review of them instead:
Fireland dailies:
As I mentioned before we are casual raiders and we hadn't had a chance to finish up tier 11 before 4.2 hit. We are not yet downing tier 12 bosses every week, thus there are 3 things that I am doing to help me gear:
1) Capping VP every week or coming very close to it.
2) Buying the VP bracers with an alt.
2) Firelands trash runs for Avengers of Hyjal rep.
3) Doing the Fireland dailies every day.
Now I haven't been 100% on these I missed VP cap one week, missed a day of dailies and I'm not quite honoured with the avengers yet but this is the beginnings of my gearing for this tier. The opinion presented here is from someone who has been doing dailies a lot.
Overall I like the quests themselves, there's a good mix of killing stuff, collecting stuff and crazy stuff. Best of all it doesn't have the stupid numbers that the Tol Barad dailies did (yep killing 14 ghosts with an only moderate re spawn rate in an area where everyone was doing the quests in was great fun for a daily...) in fact you don't 'tag' mobs in the usual way at all so there isn't any competition over mobs which makes them alot easier considering the sheer number of peiple running them. The dailies in Hyjal itself from Mylune are great fun, punting turtles is a particular highlight for me. Have to say I really don't care about the condition of Hammul though, just let him die and rez him already!
The rotating ones in the molten front are a bit lacklustre since they all just amount to killing slightly different stuff, but I have to say that I love the mini Magmaws, next tamale hunter pet please Blizzard! Again Mylune has the most entertaining quest making your mini fire lasher have to drink from pools of magma. When 4.2 hit the quest 'Burn Victims' was a nightmare thanks to the sheer number of people who were doing the dailies but the hotfix affecting the re spawn rate of the wounded defenders seems to be spot on.
At 150 marks of the world tree I chose to unlock the shadow warden quests because they look cool, turns out that was definitely the right choice. The quests are OK but they are nothing special, kill some stuff, break some spider eggs etc. I have only done the Druid of the Talon quests once (as you can only do 1 faction a day, more on that later) and while running around jumping on air vents was fun the quests take far longer then then Shadow Warden ones which I can knock out in a few minutes.
My big issues with these dailies are:
1) The way they were implemented was awful.
I for one was very excited about the new dailies (considering I was so broke I was doing the Tol Barad dailies for the money new dailies with decent rewards was a godsend) and the first thing I did after the game had finished patching was rush to Hyjal to start them. So what did we get on patch day? 4 dailies and the promise of some advancement in 2 days. Wow, exciting! I know they have patched this so that you get access to the molten front on the first day (which is how it should of been) but I was genuinely shocked by the decision to put a buzz kill on one of the main features of the patch.
2) Too much time doing the same thing.
We were told that it would take roughly a month to unlock everything, that's fine, but from a phased questing area you really don't expect it to be a month of doing the same things over and over. My biggest issues here are that you can only do 1 faction a day and that the Shadow Warden quests are significantly less of a time sink then the Druid of the Talon ones. This has just led to me doing the same dailies I had to do to unlock the second faction to gain access to the first vendor leaving any excitement I may have had at unlocking the Druids of the Talon quests at zero. While it is my choice to actively do the quicker ones the last thing I really want is for these dailies to eat up more of my time then really necessary.
Collect marks; unlock faction, collect more marks; unlock second faction, realise this isn't enough to actually unlock the vendors; collect more marks by doing the exact same quests.
/Sigh
It's getting boring and I am dreading doing it on my alts who I might want to bring into Firelands, which leads me neatly into my next point:
3) It doesn't act as the raid stepping stone it feels like it's trying to be.
It appears to me that these dailies are designed to be a sort of fast track into tier 12 raiding. If we look at who needs to do them (not including broke people or those who just like dailies) it's pretty much only people in 359's or below. Anyone who was downing heroics doesn't need them and anyone currently downing Firelands bosses doesn't need them either as they have superior gear.
However it takes a month to get your gear out of it (comparatively you could get the Tol Barad trinket in 10 days if you really wanted to and you could grind rep with the cataclysm factions as much as you like) which is all well and good now (and I feel it's a good thing that those of us who need the stepping stone are delayed behind those equipped to jump right in, they worked hard to get that better gear after all) but what about when Guilds are trying to gear up new raiders or raiding alts? This is where the rewards of the dailies are most valuable since anyone not raiding doesn't actually need the gear and anyone who is raiding will be replcing them pretty quickly once they actually start downing bosses (unlike the pre raid tier 11 gear which was the same i-level as the raid gear was) but do people want to spend a month to get an alt/new raider some gear that's a half step below the current tier gear? Probably not.
I would love tier 11 raids to still be relevant to gear up for Firelands, it was a fantastic tier, but I don't think the 5 bits of gear you get from these dailies would make them irrelevant if it took 2 weeks to get them instead of 4. It certainly isn't going to do more to make them irrelevant then the JP you get from heroics which you are running for the VP you need anyway.
But who knows, maybe Blizzard are planning to slowly nerf the amount of time it takes to get through the dailies as we progress through tier 12, I certainly hope so.
Adriaria
About me:
I'm a 25 year old guy from London who hasn't really found a neat way to transition from a Student into a real person. My main character is a Adriaria a blood Death Knight but also have a warlock and a priest at 85 who have both been my main at some point. Since my guild has started raiding it has become the main reason I play WoW; I don't hunt achievement and titles, 5 mans have become a means of capping VP and I don't really PvP. Before I raided I never thought I was missing out but
now that i've tried it i'm loving the experience.
About my Guild:
I am chief lackey in Discombobulated (I like to think of the GM and his girlfriend as similar to Cho'Gal one entity that squabbles a lot and passes on the conclusions to the rest of us)an Alliance guild on Hellfire EU. We're a social guild that also has a raiding team (sort off, the team members aren't set in stone) that are raiding twice a week. Our raiding can only be described as casual as we aren't incredibly strict with our members and are willing to take our time with the content. We also have a mix of raid experience within the team, from those who are raiding for the first time in Cataclysm to those with loads of experience who want a more relaxed atmosphere. This does not mean we are unsuccessful though! We started raiding about a month before the big 4.2 nerfs and managed to get 7/12 in that time (and Argoloth obviously) which isn't bad for 6 hours raiding a week without a set team! Since the nerfs we have finished up the last remaining bosses and earned our 'Defender of a shattered world' titles (late, but yay!). We have had a couple of cracks at Beth'tilak in the Firelands but haven't been able to get her down yet.
Speaking of my guild it would be really lame of me not to plug the Discombobulated website and Achievements Ahoy the blog of fellow guildie Aralosseien.
Why a Blog?
I like to write, mostly because it helps me to organise my thoughts far better then leaving them in my brain does. This post is a perfect example my opinion with my opinion on the Fireland dailies changing about 3 times while this was being written ^^
Well that's all the introduction stuff finished if you come back next week then...........whoa whoa whoa. I can't just give you an introduction and no actual content, that's totally lame and exactly what blizzard did with the Fireland dailies! Have a review of them instead:
Fireland dailies:
As I mentioned before we are casual raiders and we hadn't had a chance to finish up tier 11 before 4.2 hit. We are not yet downing tier 12 bosses every week, thus there are 3 things that I am doing to help me gear:
1) Capping VP every week or coming very close to it.
2) Buying the VP bracers with an alt.
2) Firelands trash runs for Avengers of Hyjal rep.
3) Doing the Fireland dailies every day.
Now I haven't been 100% on these I missed VP cap one week, missed a day of dailies and I'm not quite honoured with the avengers yet but this is the beginnings of my gearing for this tier. The opinion presented here is from someone who has been doing dailies a lot.
Overall I like the quests themselves, there's a good mix of killing stuff, collecting stuff and crazy stuff. Best of all it doesn't have the stupid numbers that the Tol Barad dailies did (yep killing 14 ghosts with an only moderate re spawn rate in an area where everyone was doing the quests in was great fun for a daily...) in fact you don't 'tag' mobs in the usual way at all so there isn't any competition over mobs which makes them alot easier considering the sheer number of peiple running them. The dailies in Hyjal itself from Mylune are great fun, punting turtles is a particular highlight for me. Have to say I really don't care about the condition of Hammul though, just let him die and rez him already!
The rotating ones in the molten front are a bit lacklustre since they all just amount to killing slightly different stuff, but I have to say that I love the mini Magmaws, next tamale hunter pet please Blizzard! Again Mylune has the most entertaining quest making your mini fire lasher have to drink from pools of magma. When 4.2 hit the quest 'Burn Victims' was a nightmare thanks to the sheer number of people who were doing the dailies but the hotfix affecting the re spawn rate of the wounded defenders seems to be spot on.
At 150 marks of the world tree I chose to unlock the shadow warden quests because they look cool, turns out that was definitely the right choice. The quests are OK but they are nothing special, kill some stuff, break some spider eggs etc. I have only done the Druid of the Talon quests once (as you can only do 1 faction a day, more on that later) and while running around jumping on air vents was fun the quests take far longer then then Shadow Warden ones which I can knock out in a few minutes.
My big issues with these dailies are:
1) The way they were implemented was awful.
I for one was very excited about the new dailies (considering I was so broke I was doing the Tol Barad dailies for the money new dailies with decent rewards was a godsend) and the first thing I did after the game had finished patching was rush to Hyjal to start them. So what did we get on patch day? 4 dailies and the promise of some advancement in 2 days. Wow, exciting! I know they have patched this so that you get access to the molten front on the first day (which is how it should of been) but I was genuinely shocked by the decision to put a buzz kill on one of the main features of the patch.
2) Too much time doing the same thing.
We were told that it would take roughly a month to unlock everything, that's fine, but from a phased questing area you really don't expect it to be a month of doing the same things over and over. My biggest issues here are that you can only do 1 faction a day and that the Shadow Warden quests are significantly less of a time sink then the Druid of the Talon ones. This has just led to me doing the same dailies I had to do to unlock the second faction to gain access to the first vendor leaving any excitement I may have had at unlocking the Druids of the Talon quests at zero. While it is my choice to actively do the quicker ones the last thing I really want is for these dailies to eat up more of my time then really necessary.
Collect marks; unlock faction, collect more marks; unlock second faction, realise this isn't enough to actually unlock the vendors; collect more marks by doing the exact same quests.
/Sigh
It's getting boring and I am dreading doing it on my alts who I might want to bring into Firelands, which leads me neatly into my next point:
3) It doesn't act as the raid stepping stone it feels like it's trying to be.
It appears to me that these dailies are designed to be a sort of fast track into tier 12 raiding. If we look at who needs to do them (not including broke people or those who just like dailies) it's pretty much only people in 359's or below. Anyone who was downing heroics doesn't need them and anyone currently downing Firelands bosses doesn't need them either as they have superior gear.
However it takes a month to get your gear out of it (comparatively you could get the Tol Barad trinket in 10 days if you really wanted to and you could grind rep with the cataclysm factions as much as you like) which is all well and good now (and I feel it's a good thing that those of us who need the stepping stone are delayed behind those equipped to jump right in, they worked hard to get that better gear after all) but what about when Guilds are trying to gear up new raiders or raiding alts? This is where the rewards of the dailies are most valuable since anyone not raiding doesn't actually need the gear and anyone who is raiding will be replcing them pretty quickly once they actually start downing bosses (unlike the pre raid tier 11 gear which was the same i-level as the raid gear was) but do people want to spend a month to get an alt/new raider some gear that's a half step below the current tier gear? Probably not.
I would love tier 11 raids to still be relevant to gear up for Firelands, it was a fantastic tier, but I don't think the 5 bits of gear you get from these dailies would make them irrelevant if it took 2 weeks to get them instead of 4. It certainly isn't going to do more to make them irrelevant then the JP you get from heroics which you are running for the VP you need anyway.
But who knows, maybe Blizzard are planning to slowly nerf the amount of time it takes to get through the dailies as we progress through tier 12, I certainly hope so.
Adriaria
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