[WoW] Cataclysm Dungeons - First run

Last night, a few of the guildies wanted to try our hand at running these mythical, CC-requiring, dungeons of Cataclysm. Going into the dungeons, to be honest we were a bit nervous, after hearing how hard Cataclysm dungeons were. TLDR version, dungeons are awesome, but completely doable if you have a group that can work together.

I'm not going to go into detail about which bosses do what, because there are already guides that do a much better job of it. I will give you my impressions though.

We went into the dungeon with the following compilation: Prot Pally, Frost Death Knight, Shadow Priest, Ret Pally(me) and Resto Shaman healing. This wasn't planned or anything, it just happened to be the mains of the people that were willing and inclined to run the dungeon. Also, the prot pally and frost DK are main spec tanks, and the other three of us are main spec healers. My personal DPS was complete and utter shiet. I don't know if there' something fundamentally wrong with ret dps, or if the problem was the chump at the keyboard, but I was pulling low 4k DPS. This is in full vendor T10, some Naxx25 pieces, and a few Cataclysm quest greens. The Shadow priest was similarly geared, and pulling about the same DPS. The Death Knight was putting out 8K DPS. We were all about level 81 or so ( though a lot of us had forgotten to train up our 81 abilities ).

We went into the dungeons NOT having read up on strategy or anything. The most preperation we had was the tank watching a video from the beta, once, a month ago. We went in with the purpose of just seeing the dungeon, trying it out, and seeing how far we get.

Throne of the Tides

Trash pulls did not require us to do any CC. That being said some did require an interrupt. DBM gives you the big INTERRUPT NOW alerts, so it wasn't terribly difficult to get it done. Even when we did fail to interrupt, the damage done wasn't horrible and our healer handled it fine.

Lady Naz'jar

Right off the bat, this fight requires quite a bit more coordination than most Wrath bosses. When Lady Naz'jar casts the shield on herself, adds spawn. The adds don't hit particularly hard, but they should probably be tanked. Since we had 3 plate wearers in the group, we ended up just each tanking and DPS down our own adds. It was a bit chaotic, but everyone just kind of handled it. We one shot her, and got an upgrade for our healer.

Commander Ulthok

This boss wasn't too difficult. His big mechanic is that he pulls one of the party, holds them up in the air ( but the member can still cast) then slams them into the ground for a bunch of damage. We got through that by popping any kind of damage preventing cooldown ( mine was bubble ) before being slammed. The Slam hits hard but its not 1-shotting. We downed this boss in 1 shot as well.

Erunak Stonespeaker & Mindbender Ghur'sha

Erunak has probably the most interesting, and in my opinion is the most challenging boss in the instance. Its mostly tank and spank until Ghur'sha, which is an Aliens-style facehugger thing, lets Erunak go and finds a new host. That new host is one of the party members. When one of the members is mind controlled, they are CC'able. We took a hybrid stun, kill them, strategy. To be honest we just started killing anything we could before we figured out that we were actually killing a teammate.

Our healer actually OOM'd on this fight, will all the crazy damage, and the length of time we were fighting. Eventually she called for someone else to spot heal, and I started throwing out heals to help her catch up. We lost 2 members but we were able to down the boss. Very fun.

Ozumat

This is actually a multi-phase fight. The first phase you are defending Neptulon a'la the dragon fight in ICC. Tank and DPS took care of the adds that try to start attacking Neptulon. Our tank picked up the bigger guys while DPS usually just took care of the small adds, then helped finish off the bigger ones. This sounds very organized but really it was just a chaotic melee of death dealing. At some point Neptulon casts a spell that makes everyone HUGE. You then fight Ozumat, which is an octopus thats sticking to the side of the room, from the outside. Pretty crazy. At this point it was basically tank and spank, don't stand in fire idea. We downed him pretty quickly too.

Thoroughly enjoyed this dungeon, look forward to running it again.

Blackrock Cavern

We actually ended up 4-manning this dungeon. Our healer had to leave so I switched to healing. We really just wanted to discover the dungeon so that we could queue for it in the dungeon finder. Once we were there we said why not and 4-manned it. We actually downed the 3rd boss with just 4 people, where we called it for the night. That being said, we died ALOT in this dungeon, mainly because we were trying things out and in general gooffing off quite a bit more.

Rom'ogg Bonecrusher

Pretty easy fight, though we did wipe 3 times. Its tank and spank until he brings everyone in and casts Chains of Woe. At that point EVERYONE has to target the inner ring ( it'll be right next to you) that links the rings together and DPS them down. Because we were 4-manning it and were already low on DPS, this was trickier than it should have bene. Also after killing the chains, everyone needs to RUN OUT of where the chains are, before he casts The Skullcrusher, which insta-wipes the party.

Corla, Heral of Twillight

The interesting mechanic of this fight is a simplified version of Netherspite from Karazhan. She spawns with 2 adds, there are beams of light going to those adds. The beams stack a buff on the adds that goes up to 100. Once it reaches 100, they turn into Evolved Dragon things and go around hitting everyone. The point of it is that party members have to take turns breaking the beams and keeping the adds from reaching 100 stacks. The members also have to worry about making sure they let the stacks fall off when they're not in the beams or else they will turn into dragon things and be mind controlled. The dragon things can still be CC'd.

We first tried splitting the tank and melee dps taking turns interrupting one beam, while the healer and the range DPS take turns interrupting the other beam. It worked ok, but we couldn't find the right balance of being in the beam, and being out of the beam to let the stacks fall off. On our last try, the ranged add turned into a dragon thing and the tank just picked it up. The four of us then focused on making sure the other add didn't get a 100 stacks. I think this strategy might be the best for PUGs, as its less complicated, with more margin for error. In heroic I'm not sure it'll be an option because I'm sure the adds will hit much harder.

Karsh Steelbender

This fight is actually pretty easy if done SLOWLY, and extremely difficult if done too quickly. The big mechanic is that the tank has to put the boss inside this lava flow, in order to make it damage-able. But while its in the lava, everyone takes alot of damage every second. The trick is to put the boss in the laval for 3-4 seconds and then pull him out and let the healer catch up on healing. It makes the fight slower, but infinitely easier than just leaving it in and healing/dpsing through it.

At this point we called it a night.

Impressions

The dungeons were awesome. The bosses are much more involved, and generally take much more coordination to down. I can see almost any of these bosses be group killers in a completely random PUG. Specially in PUGs that are used to the AOEfest of Wrath. We did pretty well considering we didn't prepare for the fights. But also, we were on Ventrillo, which helped with calling out things in an emergency. Also this particular group has played together in varying degrees since 2007, so they're pretty used to each other. All in all I can't wait to run more of these, and see how the raids are.

[WoW] Cataclysm First Thoughts

WoW. Vashji'r is pretty amazing. The zones are very vibrant, and the story is pretty compelling so far. I haven't actually read quest text since the release of Wrath ( and even then after Grizzly Hill I stopped reading). This is the frst major high level questing I've done Horde side, and it certainly has a different tone than I remember from questing Alliance. I don't know if thats more because of the expansion or something inherent in the way Horde quests are. I guess I'll find out when I take one of my alliacen toons through Vashji'r also.

Mobs:

The mobs are much heartier than Wrath mobs, by a lot. They hit harder and have much more HP. Take this example, while doing daillies in Icecrown for the Argent Tournament, Hooff had to kill those Twillight Disciples ( or equivalent). Hooff almost always two shot, and at times one-shot those mobs. In Vashji'r Hooff will get through the rotation at least twice before the mob goes down. get 3-4 of the mobs together and I actually have to pay attention and heal myself. A few times I've had to bubble to keep from dying. To be honest, I'm liking it. It really makes you feel like you're going somewhere savage, seeing the change in the mobs.

Professions:

I actually missed out on quite a few skillups because I mistakenly went to Vashji'r BEFORE training up my professions to Illustrious. After hearthing back to Orgrimmar to train my professions I've been keeping an eye out for herbs, as well as skinning anything I can. An unfortunate change is that turning scraps of savage leather into a whole piece of leather now requires a leatherworking ( as opposed to wrath where scraps of borean leather could be combined by anyone).

I'm also selling anything and everything from Vashji'r I can. Learning from my mistakes in Wrath, I'm not stockpiling anything. The thing that seems to sell the best so far is the Embersilk ( Cata equivalent of Frostweave ) cloth. Any and all cloth I put on the AH is snapped up within 5 minutes. The herbs I've gathered are also fetching a pretty penny, though much slower. In Wrath I hoarded everything, so that I would have something to use later. This time I'm going to simply sell everything while the prices are high. Then in a week or two I'll get what I need off the AH for much less, to level whatever professions I want to level.

Gear:

Estimates from WoWInsider said that epic (ilvl 254 ish ) gear should last you well into level 82-83. Either my gear was substandard ( Hooff is in full T10 for Ret, and T9 for Holy ), or their estimates were way off. I've already replaced 3-4 pieces of gear from green quest rewards. It hurts a little to replace a hard one epic with a quest green, but the sheer crazyness of the stats softens the blow a bit.

Ganking:

Since transferring to a PVP server, I've wondered when I would encounter this mythical ganking everyone has been talking about. Up to now I hadn't really been affected by it. Once or twice I would get killed randomly by a passing Alliance on one of my baby triplet casters, but they were few and far between.

With the proximity Alliance and Horde toons were questing in Vashji'r, I was expecting quite a bit more ganking. I think it was the scenery, and the immersiveness of the quests but the factions tended to leave each other alone. At least in the beginning. In the first quest hub the only world PVP that happened was when one toon would use an AOE that would hit a nearby member of the opposing faction. The injured enemy would retaliate and one of them would die. They would rez and be on their merry way. This happened to me once or twice, sometimes it was my fault, sometimes not.

By the second or third quest hub, the PVP picked up a bit. There were actually one or two people working together to kill members of the opposing faction. Still, these didn't last long and people weren't inconvenienced in any major way.

I did find that I am truely horrible as PVP DPS. Part of this was because I tried to Bubble + Lay on Hands, which I found later is no longer possible. Lay on Hands causes, and checks for Forberance.

Other toons:

I did briefly log into my Alliance toons on my old server. I got each of the high level toons Azeroth flying ( 250g, a bargain). I spent a few minutes flying around Stormwind. Its amazing how expansive Stormwind really is. You can't really get a scope of it until you're flying over it. Overall it looks amazing.

I'm not sure when or if I'll ever really level my alliance toons. I'm sure I will eventually, but no idea about a time frame. As for if I'll transfer another character, I'm not sure on that either. I guess it'll depend on how well the guild holds up to raiding. I don't want to transfer a toon and have the guild dry up.

Conclusion

So far I'm really enjoying the story, and taking it slower than I did in Wrath. Hooff is a quarter of a bubble away from level 81, but I was too tired last night "power through it".