One Shotting Heroics: The Secret

This post isn’t really a response to Brendan’s guest post a few days back. It’s my perspective on the Heroic at Honored issue that was continued by Amava.

As long as you have the desire to progress and to succeed, then I am confident that you’ll do fine in Heroics. Veteran players like myself who levelled to 70 within 2 weeks of TBC’s release ended up learning every encounter the hard way. The first time I did Shadow Labyrinth, it took two hours and trash reclears just to kill Murmer for our one frag. I didn’t even want to think about Heroics at the time.

The Heroics of now are much more manageable than they were before. I’m not going to say easier, because players still need to have a level of intelligence and gear required.

For example, in Heroic Sethekk Halls, the opening pull involving the two ghostly mobs? Both were immune to shackle, traps, and any kind of CC. I remember they would randomly drop aggro and charge our members. It was a nightmare just to be in that instance several months ago. Your tank had to be geared enough to withstand the massive amounts of damage, and skilled enough to hold aggro on two mobs simultaneously. Your healer had to be fast to sustain your tank. Having a Hunter was almost a requirement for Misdirect.

Trash in Karazhan have been nerfed enormously. What once took two nights can now almost be done within three hours. I remember a pack of trash that was outside of Maiden’s hallway leading towards the Opera Event. Those necro’s could not be shackled nor pally feared. You had to have two tanks on at all time getting aggro on both of them simultaneously so that when one tank got frozen, the mob wouldn’t run and charge a random player in the group.

I thought that was the hardest encounter I had ever faced at the time

It’s a habit of mine that I continually forget that heroic instances of post 2.3 are much more different than they were in pre 2.3.

Why Blizzard dropped the reputation level

1: Replay Value

They lowered it because it was difficult for players to find groups for Heroics. Only a fraction of all WoW players are raiding any kind of 25 man content. The 70’s who aren’t are typically in casual Guilds who do not have the kind of dedication or personnel to go the route of raiding but want to have fun doing challenging content. If they’re not interested and don’t have the time to PvP, what’s there left to do? 5 man instances are the only option left in order to acquire gear.

2: Patch Nerfs

There’s been four main patches since TBC was released. In every patch, there’s been nerf after nerf on various heroic instances. Each gradual reduction in difficult increases the margin of error that players have. That means more time to recover in case something bad goes wrong. It means the ability to take in players who have the brains but not necessarily the gear. Grinding to revered would have increased the chance that you would get the necessary dungeon gear to replace your preexisting greens and lower level blues.

3: Player Pool Increase

Even on a server as populated as Ner’Zuhl, it took me a long time to not only find tanks and DPSers, but to find players that had to have the key to go in. Now there are more people running heroics because they don’t have to spend the time necessary to grind the rep to get in. In my opinion, players that were kara geared or higher had no need to run heroics (other then badges for nether’s, etc). What was the point? Having T5 gear is better then badge gear. They could not justify the cost of badge runs with that of raids. Players that were far below that could not keep up with whatever their job was. This resulted in a small selection of players who had the NEED to go in and WERE sufficiently geared to go in.

Now heroics are such a piece of cake. I can breeze through them

What’s my secret?

I run with a Pally tank and a Mage. It makes it so easy for me to blog and read while I play WoW at the same time.

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Leaving? But You Just Got Here!

I have often wondered what drives people to do the things that they do. At about 10 PM, I saw someone advertise that they were looking for a healer to help fill out Kara. Nightbane and above were the only bosses left. I opted to join. I had nothing really going on and I was tired of reading. I brought in Saphfira to collect some badges along the way. We wiped three times against Nightbane and then cleared to Curator taking him down in the process.

Here’s where things got eyebrow raising.

One of the mages had to leave.
Then a druid just left the group and hearthed.
Subsequently, we lost a Priest due to a family emergency.
A rogue had to raid in 20 minutes.

WHAT THE HELL!?

I think we did pretty well for the most part. We wiped on Nightbane, people stayed. We killed Curator, people left. When you join a raid, there’s a level of expectancy that is involved. It’s expected that your next 2 or so hours will be free from any other activities or interruptions. Your Guild expects that. Pickup players expect that. What the heck’s the point of joining a Karazhan raid when you have to raid 30 minutes later? These people are on my blacklist and I’m sure they looked bad to everyone else. At least we cleared Prince. Then I checked the clock and it was 130 AM. I fell asleep.

But I didn’t leave my group hanging. I told them beforehand that I could guarantee awakeness until 130 AM. After that, all bets were off. I’m not as young as I used to be. I can’t stay up until 4 AM anymore.

Exam on Thursday and on Saturday. Reduced blogload this week. WTB guest posters.

WoW Struggles: Maintaining Reputation

I must apologize about my lack of a post for today. I had a term paper due, and like many WoW students, I have horrible time management skills. But that’s another topic I hope to address entirely.

Anyways, onto business!

First, I want to extend Gwaendar a hearty shoutout. He has honored me with a spot on his blog roll which I will reciprocate in kind. One Among Many has also done the same. I thank them both for their links. I believe it’s important to recognize writers who link to you. Any of you aspiring writers would do well to keep that in mind.

Today, I plan to start an ongoing series of blog posts about our struggles in WoW. I guess you could call it my catch all on days when I have no material!

In addition to WoW Blogs, I also read non-WoW blogs to help improve my writing and style. Lorelle’s Blog Struggles series has inspired me here, as you can see.

An Epic Tale

I’ve been lucky throughout my entire WoW raiding career. I cannot say there was an incident where my instance raid ID or my loot had been stolen and ninja’d. Unfortunately, others have not been so lucky. Big Bear Butt had his raid instance partially taken.

Kirk wrote an excellent reaction to the situation that I think everyone should check out.

In a game like World of Warcraft where players need to interact with others, social reputation is the currency. How players view you could either open doors or close them.

A situation like this one where a player has done something unfair will cause other players to think badly of them. The Guild in question will be labeled as an organization where none of it’s members can be trusted until the culprit is found.

I know what you’re thinking.

One Question

Who cares what they think? So what if I ninja loot and commit other acts? I pay $15 a month to play this game how I see fit and I don’t care what other people think of me.

One Answer

Because if you do that on a consistent basis, no one is going to want to deal with you. Take a look at the following list and possible penalties.

• No fun in groups because you can’t get any
• Zero raiding opportunities
• Crafters won’t want your business
• Online abuse
• …Need I say more?

He Was a Warlock

Let me cite an example. A year ago when I transferred to Ner’Zuhl (gosh has it been that long already?), I heard stories of a Warlock named Evilana. Apparently he was a bad player and had a bad reputation. To get associated with him meant serious bad news. I never knew precisely what the reasoning was behind it, but I did not want to deal with a player who sounded that bad. In fact, he was a target of many flamers on the WoW Forums. I was new to the server at the time and like a kid entering high school for the first time, just wanted to fit in. I didn’t actively participate in any e-floggings but I stayed distant.

A while later, I had gotten word that he either transferred off the server or ebayed his character (or both).

That was the last time I ever heard about him again.

The Lesson

Do not underestimate the power of a united social force. They have a mind of their own. Think of it as the online version of the mob mentality. They can spread the word about a player’s dominance and make him seem like a god. Or they can shred his reputation entirely like he is a pile of dirt. The popularity of a person depends entirely on what other people think of them. You can think of certain world leaders as an example. Popular opinion can spread like a wildfire and ruin WoW careers.

The End?

So what’s going to happen with BBB? I can only imagine. I suspect if they ever find the person involved, he’s only going to get a slap on the wrist and a stern talking to. But I plan to observe any developments with great interest.