Matticus

Matticus is the founder of World of Matticus, a World of Warcraft blog.

Looking Back at Raiding 1.0

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I am not the most “old school” player in existence. The extent of my experience in Vanilla WoW extends to the first boss of AQ 40 after clearing out Ragnaros and Nefarion.

Often times, I run across players in trade or forums who want to try MC or AQ in their old state of glory having never truly “experienced” it themselves. Even now, there are players who are craving a return to the way raiding was. The game is more enjoyable and accessible now than it was years ago and I personally think of that as a good thing.

Let’s take a look back at history.

First we have raiding 1.0. This was the maiden year of World of Warcraft. We saw the appearance of Molten Core, Blackwing Lair and Onyxia. Raids consisted of 10 really good players, 15 okay players and 15 “ugh” players. There was no Recount then. No sense of accountability. I remember a story where a healer received positive comments when all they did was heal themselves at the front entrance of Molten Core while the rest of the raid took down Lucifron.

Entry level raids Mid-level End game
Zul’Gurub Blackwing Lair Naxxramas
Molten Core Ahn’Qiraj 40  
Ahn’Qiraj 20 World bosses  
Onyxia    

Farming and raid preparation

Preparing for raids often took more time than the actual raids themselves. There were so many cooldowns and consumables that players could get. Higher end raiding guilds made farming of said consumables mandatory.

Whipper Root Tuber – Riding around Felwood really late or really early in the day and picking up these roots
Demonic Runes – Leveling Demon areas in Felwood
Dark Runes – Endless Scholomance farming
Blasted Land food buffs – Involved killing a billion Basilisks and Buzzards (Needed eyes and scales to turn in)
Various weapon buffs in the form of sharpening stones and weapon oils.

Sometimes it felt like farming for raids took longer than the raids itself.

Biggest pain in the ass: Blasted Lands buffs by a land slide.

Attunements

In order to enter some of the raid instances, players had to prove they were worthy in the form of attunements. This meant embarking on some long winded quest to get some key or item. My sympathies go out to Horde players. Getting attuned for Onyxia must have really sucked. Had to penetrate the depths of Blackrock Depths to get a core fragment. The entire world had to cooperate to open the gates of Ahn’Qiraj. Naxxramas required gold and other things in order to get in courtesy of the Argent Dawn.

Biggest pain in the ass: Getting Ony attuned for Horde.

Now lets talk about the actual instances themselves.

Pulling setup

I remember players having to assist Priests and Hunters to get targets. We didn’t have lucky charms to mark mobs with at the time. I believe that came later. But the pulls were so specific. Sometimes it took as long as 10 minutes just to set up a pull every single time. Remember Garr? Lots of Mind Vision while tanks assisted to ensure that all targets were accounted for. When organizing kills for Rag, players had specific areas that they had to stand in. The gauntlet leading up to Broodlord was demoralizing in Blackwing Lair. Rogues were a requirement to trip switches. If they weren’t, then players would suffer from a massive slowing debuff.

Garr

Summary

  • Longest fights: Chromaggus (30 minutes)
  • Most treacherous run back: The walk of shame to Nefarian’s room. AQ40 is a close second but at least you had mounts.
  • Guild breakers: Razorgore, Vaelstrasz, Patchwerk
  • Most frustrating fights: Twin Emps, Four Horsemen (Lack of 8 T2 geared tanks)
  • Biggest pain in the ass: Gothik (Way more mobs than what we know now)
  • Most unforgiving: C’Thun (1 or 2 players down spelled a whole wipe. Losing half raid on a BWL boss was still doable)

I don’t miss the farming or the raid preparation. I sort of wish some attunements were still present. Perhaps not in the shape of lengthy quest chains, but like an account wide “Kill these bosses” sort of thing. Guild wide attunements would be interesting to see where guilds accomplish a set of objectives to gain access to some area. I suppose that would see the end of pickup groups.

I will say this. The success of every boss kill felt magnified. Maybe it was because of the number of other people that were involved. But killing bosses felt much more satisfying. Can’t quite seem to place a finger on why.

Anyway, I’ll take a look back at raiding 2.0 sometime in the week.

Images courtesy of WoWWiki

Downside of Heads Up Healing

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A couple of months ago, I wrote about the concept of heads up healing. The basic idea is relying visually on the screen away from the raid frames to spot impending attacks. Being able to spot who the attack is going to land on should buy the healer a few precious global cooldowns to get even more heals.

Well, I think I found a flaw with that strategy.

It’s to do with Mages.

There’s a Mage in the guild, let’s call him Echo. We were working on Mimiron last night and getting another handle on phase 1 again. The ranged players were divided equally among the… tridrants (Is there a 3-version of quadrant?).

Naturally a Napalm shoots out from the Flame Leviathan look-alike that Mimi sits on. The trajectory of the shot shows that it’s going to hit a player in my area. Sure enough, it strikes Echo and I’m able to target him by clicking the center of the Napalm while he’s on fire and all that.

But his heath bar isn’t moving. Moments later, he is burned to crisp. I frowned. I know I hit him. I saw Penance fly out and followed up with a shield. It was one of the few times where I connected with a heal and still lost a player.

A pause.

A curse.

A sigh.

I fired a disgusted look skyward as I realized my error.

That wasn’t Echo.

I healed Echo’s Mirror Image.

Learn from my mistakes. Pay close attention to who you’re targeting. When it comes to Mages, they’re more than meets the eye.

Abusing General Vezax as Discipline

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The Conquest strike team reached General V on Monday evening. In the final hour remaining in our raid night, we spent most of the time identifying the environmental elements of the fight.

What did the Saronite Vapors look like?

What’s Shadow Crash?

How do we deal with Mark of the Faceless?

More importantly for healers, how do we manage our mana while being truly unable to gain it back unless it’s from said Vapors?

One of the aspects of the fight that I noticed early on is Shadow Crash.

"”Fires a shadow missile at a target. Upon impact, it leaves an energy field that lingers for 20 seconds, increases magical damage dealt by 100%, increasing casting speed by 100%, reducing healing done by 75%, and reducing mana costs by 70%.”

The primary strength of Discipline Priests lie in their powers of mitigation. Shadow Crash affects a healer’s mana cost, cast speed, and actual healing done. You can see where I’m going with this.

Power Word: Shield is instant. The casting speed debuff won’t have an effect there. It’s also not technically a heal. It’s a damage absorption. Finally it does reduce the cost of shields by 70%.

The bottom line: ~200 mana costing shields. Very nice.

Heh, I’m not going to jinx the week by predicting whether or not we’ll obtain a kill. I had an internal progression timeline for Ulduar when it came out and we’re right on schedule.

Hybrid it up on General Vezax

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This is a guest post by Paladin blogger Honorshammer of Honor’s Code.

General Vezax is the the last boss you must down before you cross swords with Yogg-Saron himself.

The General is one of most challenging fights in all of Ulduar due to his Aura of Despair. What is it that this lovely gift from the Developers does?

From WoWWiki (http://www.wowwiki.com/General_Vezax) we find:

Aura of Despair – Prevents mana regeneration throughout the fight by all means, except for Judgments of the Wise, Spiritual Attunement, Aspect of the Viper, Thrill of the Hunt, and Shamanistic Rage. Note that unlike the Play Test Realm version of this encounter Mana Potions and active abilities such as Evocation and Life Tap will not function.

My guild recently downed General Vezax. I was Retribution for the fight, but when one of our healers went down; I jumped in and started throwing some heals on the tank. That’s when I discovered the power of Judgments of the Wise for this fight. By Judging and stopcasting I was able to take over the 3rd healer role and concentrate on helping to keep our Main Tank alive, and do it on a Ret Paladin’s mana pool.

What exactly does Judgement of the Wise do?

Judgements of the Wise Rank 3 – Your Judgement spells have a 100% chance to grant the Replenishment effect to up to 10 party or raid members mana regeneration equal to 0.25% of their maximum mana per second for 15 sec, and to immediately grant you 25% of your base mana. (Source)

The replenishment aspect is useless. After reviewing the WoW Web Stats, I can see that I never gained Replenishment. However I did gain over 100,000 mana from Judgments of the wise! Because it works off base mana, it would restore the same amount regardless of the current mana pool of the Paladin.

We know that for a Level 80 Paladin, Holy Light cost 1,274 mana. So with a little napkin math, we can conclude that I regenerated enough mana from Judgments of the Wise to cast over 70 Holy Lights. That’s without the use of any Saronite Vapors at all.

How practical would it be it for a Holy Paladin to get Judgement of the Wise? Let’s look at a talents build that allows a Holy Paladin to get Judgement of the Wise, and the tradeoffs it makes to get there.

The most popular Holy Paladin build according to TalentChic is 51/5/15. Let’s look at what is needed to turn that into our hybrid build.

First off, the 5 points in Divinity have to go. Divinity is a really strong Tier 1 talent, but we simply won’t have room for it in our build. It doesn’t matter how hard the heal hits if you don’t have the mana to cast it.

Those 5 points move into Sanctity of Battle and Pursuit of Justice. Sanctity gives you even more crit for your Holy spells which should offset some of the loss of Divinity. There is a ton of movement on General Vezax so Pursuit of Justice is really nice as you move away from a Shadow Crash or into a Saronite Vapor.

Then we take the points out of Beacon of Light. This is one tank fight. Let the other healers handle the Raid; you can stay on the Tank so Beacon is a minor loss. You are going to lose the Haste from Judgments of the Pure and Infusion of Light. You will also have to heal from melee range because you won’t have the range increase from Enlightened Judgments. We had our Resto Druid healing from near melee range, so we could just have just as easily had a Holy Paladin there.

You won’t have the mana reduction from Divine Illumination. Based on General Vexax’s enrage timer, you would only be able to fire Divine Illumination more than 3 times during the fight. Are those 45 seconds of reduced cost worth the mana you can get back from Judgments of the Wise?

Assuming a little haste from gear, we’ll call Holy Light a 2 second cast. In those 45 seconds, we can get off 22.5 Holy Lights. To give every advantage to Divine Illumination, we’ll call it 23.

Holy Light costs 1271 so half it’s cost is 635. So we’ve saved 635 mana times 23 casts or about 15,000 mana. It’s about 10% of what Judgments of the Wise gives you. So Divine Illumination is gone as well. Bu-bye!

Our final move is to take 2 points out of Holy Guildance which will result in about a 4% loss of spell power from Intellect. The rest of the Holy Paladin build is pretty much intact.

With these points freed up, we continue to ascend the Ret Tree. The next point taken in Ret is Sanctified Retribution. This will increase all damage done by everyone near us, even if we are running Concentration Aura.

We want to pick up Improved Judgments so we can judge as often as possible, and trigger Judgments of the Wise as often as possible. Now we need two ‘filler’ points to move into the next Tier. There aren’t any great places to put them. I chose to put them in Crusade to increase the damage of Judgment by 3%. This build relies on judging often, so you might as well have them hit a little harder.

On the next tier, we grab Divine Purpose. The 4% spell miss will act as increased resistance to Shadow Crash and Searing Flames should one get through your interrupters.

Here again we find ourselves two points short of the next tier and not really any good place to spend them. I opted for Vengeance. Maybe you could get a stack going and hit those Judgments a little harder. It’s a filler choice so anywhere you want to throw two points will probably work.

Finally, we open Judgments of the Wise.

Here’s the final 38/0/33 build in the WoWhead tool.

General Vezax is a challenging fight. Specing for a specific fight is something that used to be fairly common in late Tier 6 and Sunwell. We didn’t need it for Tier 7 raids, but as we near the end of Tier 8, it may be something to consider again.

hybrid

Would You Consider 3 Levels of Spirit Based Mana Regen?

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This blue post came to me courtesy of Sylly. Her post in particular addresses out of combat regen.

It’s no secret that I’ve felt the pinch myself. I barely end encounters with less than 10% of my mana left.

Mana Injectors? Exhausted.

Pure Mojo Flasks? Consumed to the last drop.

Hymn of Hope? Sang so much Simon Cowell would pay me to stop.

Shadowfiend? Sparky the fiend is tired of being whipped out.

But I’m okay. I’m still hanging on. I still have mana left. There is just enough left to do the job that the encounter asks of me. But oh my is it painful. It’s as bad as House losing access to his precious Vicodin. He can do the job while grinding his teeth and absorbing the pain.

The proposed solution?

A number of WoW forum members made an intriguing proposal. Redesigning spirit regen so that it takes into account three different factors:

  1. While casting
  2. Out of the 5 second rule, in combat
  3. Completely out of combat

Sylly agrees with this and I like the idea myself.

What does Ghostcrawler think?

One way to go would be to just get rid of the FSR and make out of combat regen (legitimately out of combat – not sneaking a sip during an Arena match) provide very fast regen.

Let’s open up the floor. I want to encourage some discussion here especially in the comments. What do you think of this idea? How has your mana held up so far in the current end game?