With the additions of LFR and Flex, you could say that raiding regained a great deal of prominence in Mist of Pandaria as more options to play the end game content presented itself to a wide variety of players. I think having multiple levels of difficulty in the long term is a great thing and that the way the mechanics should be structured are more of a layering effect as the difficulty ramps up. Each difficulty level essentially prepares you for the next one. However, one thing that needs to be addressed is the difficulty escalation in raids. I felt that there are too many spikes in this expansion that created large numbers of early walls and possible frustration for a large number of guilds. For instance, Garalon and Horridon were pretty unforgiving fights for many guilds but their positioning prevented people from hitting Terrace of Endless Spring, etc.

Another problem that has evolved in raiding is the number of mechanics per fight. Although over time fights do become simpler, I think the problem is that most people simply do not want to deal with the majority of the mechanics. Some fights feel overwhelming to the point where the dungeon journal servers no purpose outside of another mysterious button people tend to forget exist. Fights like the Paragons from Siege of Orgrimmar are so ridiculous due to the number of entries. For myself, I think that fights should work along the lines of 3-4 total at the LFR level, 4-5 for Flex, 5-6 for normal and a higher amount for Heroic. I suggest the Diablo 3 model where you add one major mechanic per difficulty.

The main idea I want to present in this progression mode is building confidence in players to try higher levels of difficulty. Each level should inspire players to give the next one a try, not just from a linear raid progression but game play as well. If we were to take the Paragon fight from Siege of Orgrimmar as an example, you could layer it such that perhaps at the LFR level only 5 need to be beaten while Flex requires 7, Normal 8 and Heroic 9. Or something those lines as opposed to this massive dump of small bosses where the vast majority of mechanics get ignored on the LFR level but slam people on harder levels. For me, it makes for more sense to just remove mechanics completely if people intend to ignore them and just focus on a few core ones that build up as the difficulty increases.

Another idea which I’ve been thinking about is simply ending the idea of 10 and 25 mans. Since Flex raiding was introduced, we’ve seen how a raid difficulty can scale based on the number of people. So rather than imposing these artificial limits for normal and heroics based on the amount of people you have, you would make all raids flexible in terms of available people. The difference would be choosing a difficulty setting that would apply the mechanics idea I described above (i.e. 3-4 mechanics for easy mode, 4-5 mechanics for regular, etc.)

I think part of the reason why Flex raiding was introduced was to provide Blizzard better insight into the optimal number of people for a raid. Some people have speculated that we’ll eventually see the end of 25 man raids and be left with 15 man raids. To me, it’s really absurd to create difficulty levels on mechanics purely based on how many people can show up. The damage, health of a boss, healing requirements, etc. are things that can be tuned based on the number of people because those can be easily calculated. But for instance if someone gets injured or takes a break, that shouldn’t halt a raiding group’s progression. At the same time, you really don’t want people on the bench if they’re available and ready to go.

Another thing that this idea of Flex should be applied to is LFR. While a lot of people bemoan LFR as a loot pinada mechanism or a spot where people cannot get along, it does have a purpose: it allows for ad hoc raids to occur when a person is mostly ready. The real issue with LFR is that the way it pools people together is ineffective. oqueue and OpenRaid are more towards what the aim of LFR should be, but tools like this need to make an appearance in the game as a feature supported directly by Blizzard. The thing about LFR at the moment is that many feel Flex is slowly overtaking LFR, causing the lack of need for tanks in LFR, creating high queue times and groups which have a great deal of problems with mechanics. Part of the issue also is the dependency for 25 people to hit a ready check (even though that really isn’t always the case). In short, LFR needs a major overhaul after Mist of Pandaria.

Here are some things that need to be adjusted in the future for LFR:

• Removing the 25 person requirement and making it adjustable a la Flex.
• Providing more levels of difficulty rather than the present one.
• Adding better loot based on higher levels of difficulty.
• Re-thinking the Vote Kick system such that people who cause multiple offenses are simply banned rather than rewarded over time for the misbehavior.
• Providing a means in which people can consistently group up with others from a pool that they enjoy (don’t tell me that using whispers after a raid ends is the best way; that chat piece of shit needs to be deleted and revamped too)
• Provide profiling tools to ensure that those who enter in LFR are capable and ready to get the job done (not just prejudicing people based on ilvl and so-called progression alone)
• Making loot shareable at the discretion of the individual player
• Providing more than a crappy loot bag as incentives for classes like tanks and healers to queue
• Enforcing more ways to prevent ninja boss pulls (something similar to what has been done to Spoils in Siege of Orgrimmar)
• Adjusting the amount of trash based on difficulty

Next, I want to delve into the environment of the raids. One thing that I felt got lost over time was the supposed Asian flair in Pandaria. The mantid might resemble some distant Japanese 70’s Godzilla-like insectoid robot fight while the Mogu could be something like a cross between a samurai and the Mongols. However, I felt part of that started to fall off, especially as Throne of Thunder entered into the scene. Don’t get me wrong, I think Throne of Thunder was a pretty cool raid instance, having a nice gloomy feel. But we essentially go back to the troll empire, which I didn’t really understand. And when I mean by I didn’t understand, I feel that Blizzard attempted to tie things back to the familiar of the core World of Warcraft universe as opposed to expanding more upon the Asian theme that originally was intended.

Sure, you have Lei Shen, the Consorts and Iron Qon but the other encounters were more random. It felt like Throne of Thunder aimed at an Amazon type of theme, which, imo, aligned more towards what was being developed in the Krasarang Wilds (which felt horribly out of place). I think there were some heavily missed opportunities for raids using Asian history such as the Shaolin temple, the Boxer Rebellion, samurai, ninjas and other cultural elements that other RPGs have managed to incorporate. Matter of fact, Lei Shen reminded me more of Tesla than any known Asian figures.

Probably, what bothered me the most environmentally about the raiding scene was the return to Orgrimmar. Despite having the end boss of Garrosh being announced at the start of the expansion, I think the split storyline ruined a lot in Pandaria. I felt that Pandaria should’ve been more of an introspective type of land of adventure where this other area in the world and their people teach something about themselves to the Horde and Alliance. This aspect of the storytelling comes off extremely weak towards the end and the raid encounters from Siege of Orgrimmar for the most part do not enforce a great deal of this idea. I think it sucks that too much emphasis on the location of Orgrimmar was placed and was not well balanced for the Alliance (this coming from a Horde player). Beyond loot, there honestly is very little motivation for the Alliance doing anything to help the Horde out deal with their own problems.

The lack of balance seems to contradict the overarching idea of having a semi-Buddhist type of flavor. Instead, we have this trigger that’s just waiting to be pulled at any second and when it goes off, we’re simply aiming directly for our head. In short, what’s the point. Any true lessons in this game has less impact from the weak elements in the environment that try to hold together these themes.

If anything raiding taught us in this expansion how much more important loot is. Loot practically is the name of the end game at this point. The emphasis on rolls and re-rolls, valor, gear gates, upgrades, etc. all amount to the only remaining element of progress. You might rhetorically ask, “What about boss progression?” LFR essentially has eliminated the idea of boss progression and have made the game into loot progression. As a long term RPG fan, I like neither idea. But the exclamation point probably has hit home on the loot aspect of the game more in this expansion than any other. The thing about loot is that it drives a few things home: 1) It inflates our numbers rather than focuses on raw skill; 2) It’s one of the few things that makes a person feel they are evolving their character in some semi-meaningful way; 3) It keeps us going for the above two reasons.

Unfortunately, loot is such a controversial topic and sadly so. Certain groups of people cling to the notion of epics and legendaries as belonging to a tiny elite group. However, I think the game was designed in the early days very poorly and lacked a sense of direction. Those that were indoctrinated at that stage feel a sense of entitlement as well as been “environmentally educated” as to what the purpose of things like loot represent. That said, the game still has a long way to go when it comes to loot distribution. I think the game has done a great job of making this aspect more accessible and slightly less controversial with the introduction of the random personalized loot drops. The problem though is that even this mechanism needs a lot of tuning.

Mob-wise, I think that the trash has become excessively annoying. Some people seem to have desired more challenging trash encounters. For myself, I find that on more than one occasion the trash ended up becoming far more challenging than the boss. For instance, Heart of Fear part 1 had some of the worst trash and to this day still causes group wipes. Yet the boss is one of the easiest around. That makes no sense to me whatsoever. Trash should contribute something to the raiding environment but at this point I feel that they serve mostly as time wasters to allow cooldowns to reset. With cooldowns resetting automatically after a boss kill, there really isn’t any point in using trash as a device for wasting time. If anything, the trash’s only purpose now is demonstrating some possible abilities for the next boss.

However, that really isn’t the case at all times. Instead, trash end up contributing to wipe-a-thons, which just adds a new level of frustration. Most people want to focus on the boss. Maybe if the trash dropped worthy loot that helped mitigate the numerous wipes, then they would have some purpose on that end. I really dislike wasting excessive amounts of time if the end result does not yield anything meaningful, which is why I think the trash mob aspect needs to be reduced massively.

Let’s talk about one of the growing themes in World of Warcraft raiding: personal responsibility. This aspect is becoming the forefront of raiding mechanics. I think that the way it’s currently at it’s a bit excessive. The worst one by far was the Amber Shaper mechanic that converted people into a mini vehicle. I think that personal responsibility mostly should be about surviving an encounter on your own rather than causing raid wipes from one’s inability to handle that mechanic. Part of the thing that I hate is being forced to do something you really don’t want to do. That’s what Amber Shaper was at the worst. Ji-Kun was better in this respect since people can volunteer to handle the nest eggs.

With the Siege of Orgrimmar, we see the personal responsibility theme take it a few notches too high. I think they managed to streamline this aspect a lot better such as the Sha of Pride fight, dealing with defensive stance for Nazgrim, soaking pools up and avoiding breath for Malkorok, kiting the boss during fixate for Thok, etc. Still, I find that it’s still excessive because there simply is just too much going on these days in these fights. If you’re in a good group, these issues disappear but I’ve dealt with too many bad groups that probably have caused me long term health issues, both mentally and physically. I think they’re attempting to make these fights feel more dynamic with the players have more control. Yet I suspect that’s not what people really want out of this game. The thing is that you can’t force mechanics onto players and expect them to succeed if they don’t want it. That’s partly why there’s this gradual drop off since people simply cannot handle this aspect and lack confidence for success.

When it comes to the fights themselves, there definitely has been a dramatic ramp up in difficulty. Looking back at the encounters in this expansion, there were really well done and thought out. Those two are Will of the Emperor and Horridon. Will of the Emperor is the hallmark of where I think the expansion should have been going in terms of raid mechanics and build up of an encounter. Even though I tend to hate gauntlet style encounters where you have adds build up, the fight itself is great because of how people can react to the situation dynamically. Can’t handle the Devastating Arc? Switch to adds. Feel like doing the dance? Hit him close range. The one really cool mechanic in the encounter that I think is excellent is the Devastating Arc. Here, if you do something correctly, you’re rewarded by giving an extra action button to supplement the damage. Doesn’t matter if you’re a tank, melee, ranged. You get this extra action bar to use against any mob, not just the boss. And the thing is that it’s not an overwhelming encounter neither.

Horridon makes it into one of my favorites for similar reasons (except the extra action bar). The fight is incredibly dynamic and how you decide to choose adds, etc. is based on your preference. It feels more like a battle ground with a lot of space to run around and do things. Although there is some level of personal responsibility, it’s not an overwhelming amount and most of what goes on is fairly obvious.

Both of these fights change dramatically too depending on your class and spec. DoT based classes are just a bundle of fun for both. Melee mostly can enjoy the Will of the Emperor fight if they decide to focus on the boss. As a hybrid class, you can help out in the Horridon fight by dispelling and curing people. Elements like that are what makes raiding fun because you can exploit the range of abilities you have.

Again, in talking about what I liked, I also must contrast this with what I absolutely abhorred. I will never fail to mention the Amber Shaper encounter. It’s by far the worst encounter designed in the expansion and all of it is due to the little vehicle you get involuntarily transformed into without warning nor explanation. There is absolutely nothing you can do unless your comrades help break you out. But the thing is that you lose the things that make you special, which is your class. People don’t want to play a complex vehicle that their forced into; they want to play their class. Ulduar’s first fight is an exception but it’s something you can prepare for in advance.

Another encounter that I absolutely dread is Garalon. At this point, I will never have to deal with that encounter ever again. And I’m beyond happy. That encounter realistically is one of the worst encounters in the game. It persists as an encounter people fail on because again like the Amber Shaper encounter, it more or less takes people out of their shell by forcing some silly mechanics with the kiting, the pheromones and the infamous little purple circle underneath it. Even with the overgearing, people still cannot handle this encounter on a mundane level. But it was the first thing that Blizzard needed to evaluate in creating all of their future encounters since it created a huge barrier that nothing up until this moment had done. And that barrier wasn’t just for LFR exclusive people but normal mode people as well.

I think most people who started this expansion and got into the raiding scene early on will cite Lei Shi as their most hated foe. The encounter is by far one of the most annoying. Everything from the terrible voice acting, to the random phase transitions to finally the stab-me-in-the-eye loot table are things that need to be placed into a garbage can. It’s not that the encounter is difficult just horribly annoying. For myself it just makes no sense in terms of placement. Maybe if it was some heroic instance boss, this encounter would’ve been more acceptable. But putting it before the Sha of Fear? I don’t get the kind of mood they want to create here.

Let’s now talk about the infamous Durumu encounter. People have said that outside of LFR this probably is one of the easier encounters and maybe even fun ones. But even now this encounter is a wiper just because of the maze mechanic. And even then that mechanic was made easier. To me whenever I see more than half the raid go down to the eye beam mechanic, I feel that those people are the ones that never put any effort into life. They are the ones that cause the rest of the world to slow down because they lack the mental capacity for independent thinking. I think Blizzard learned a bit about the whole idea of putting mini games into boss fights as we see how the Simon-Says aspect of Malkorok does not cause one to instantly die at the LFR level. Still though, this is another one of those encounters which (excuse the pun) should’ve been an eye opener to Blizzard in terms of mechanic design.

What about Dark Animus? Here’s another encounter that was overengineered. It’s simply an encounter that makes no sense. On paper it makes sense. In execution, it’s just flawed and stupid. You’ll often hear how Heroic raiders will quit World of Warcraft if another Dark Animus style encounter ever makes its way into the game. That tells you a lot about expectations. The thing is that an encounter should have a basic level of intuition without requiring one to read a dungeon journal. The dungeon journal should merely supplement the fine points of abilities for an encounter, not act as a requirement along with videos from YouTube (and I’ll get into this subject in a minute).

Honestly, the encounters that are probably the correct style and tuning are things like Iron Juggernaut, Iron Qon, Ji-Kun, Jin’rokh, Feng, Empress, Sha of Fear, the Twin Consorts, etc. Yes, those are the boring and easy ones but they’re pretty intuitive in terms of what you’re supposed to do. There are other encounters which I enjoy more but I think that the way the encounters should be designed need to move towards a very straight forward, easy to comprehend method. I feel that forcing people to watch YouTube videos, read extensive journal entries and strategies take away from the experience of a game. It’s like being forced to purchase a walkthrough manual just to participate. There is no excitement for self-discovery, no manner in which one can come to appreciate the environment, etc. Instead, it’s just push forward, push forward, faster, faster!

And this idea of moving faster is completely counterproductive to the earlier theme setup in Pandaria of slowing down and enjoying life. You can’t enjoy something if everything around you is nothing but a rat race, clusterfuck. That’s what these encounters are to me. They’re horribly layered clusterfucks that just throw a ton of shit on you that you’re supposed to pick up instantly or wipe.

I think the whole raiding experience would be far more enjoyable if many mechanics would be removed. Sure, it would eliminate the competition aspect but let’s be fair: most people don’t give a fuck and it really has no meaning in the long term. If Blizzard is interested in hosting competitions, just create special events that cater to people who prefer playing at a higher level; stop creating these walls in the game.

Raiding to me should be about the social experience of coming together, bonding and sharing a similar goal. It should not be something that divides people because frustrations and personalities get out of line. And that’s what raiding in World of Warcraft feels like at times. The mechanics themselves just are too outrageous and frustrating at times unnecessarily. There’s just too many special abilities that people end up being forced to watch out for rather than dealing with an inflated ability that people are used to; take a dragon as an example. I don’t understand why each boss dragon needs to be special. I like the idea of making types of dragons rare but just inflating what they can do based on their age. But there’s no need to add 50+ special abilities because it’s a boss. There’s too much “I never have seen this before oh shit!” type of things going on. By the time you reach a boss, you should have already been trained to deal with the vast majority of that type of creature so that you focus on dealing with those particular mechanics on a slightly higher scale.

Either way, Blizzard needs to seriously rethink the whole idea of raiding. The present form and direction are really skewed and not interesting. I think it mostly tries to cater towards high end raiders (sorry Method; I do respect you btw) rather than providing a well rounded social gaming experience. If anything the experience is just really frustrating and is a huge part in why people become burnt out over time. I think people enjoy getting together to accomplish things; but people do not want to be around their friends if they know they’ll be frustrated by not meeting expectations (or having their friends meet their’s).

The post World of Warcraft: Mist of Pandaria Overall Raid Thoughts appeared first on Kontroversial Keith.

The first thing I did, of course, was check out the Timeless Isle. After hearing about how great it was from the developers, I figured it would be a nice spot to check out since LFR isn’t out yet. The first time through I found it a little confusing and chaotic. Obviously, in any given patch with new content as big as a dedicated zone, there’s going to be a lot of familiarization involved. So there’s a few starter quests to get you going on the Isle. You should really read the flavor text if you’re starting out since a few quests might not be too obvious.

Almost immediately, when I arrived the first thing I did was give the world bosses a try. The entire time it was pretty competitive from both the alliance and horde since the bosses are faction tagged still. However, the new world bosses are pretty nasty as I found myself dying frequently. There’s a lot of one shot mechanics that I think people are beginning to understand, which probably caused quite a few deaths. But it was a learning experience for everyone so this might be reduced in the long term. Unfortunately, on the two toons I did try this on, I received nothing as I wasn’t prepared with the new Warforged Seals, which are this patch’s re-roll token.

Next, I spent the first session running around trying to complete quests and gather chests. As I did so, numerous groups formed to go after the various rares on the Timeless Isle. I initially avoided the regular mobs until I received quests that required killing them. So I gingerly went what I perceived were the easier mobs. Many mobs, for whatever inane reason, are elites and higher level than you, making it imperative that you have reasonable gear and are hit/expertise capped so that you won’t miss and can do some decent damage to survive. They recommend that you have ilvl 496 or so for the Timeless Isle. I think you can probably get away with a lower ilvl but you probably should avoid solo’ing most mobs until you get some gear.

Although all my toons except my monk are geared, I feel that a fresh 90 can still hit the Timeless Isle and do well. The main thing is to avoid solo’ing mobs and focus on rares with others. The reason is that you want to do some of the starter quests, one of which will provide you with a device that will help you craft items you find for your class. Do these and focus on running around, picking up chest to get you coins and possible crafted items. If you’re lucky, you’ll be able to gear up pretty quickly.

The gear that yo do receive are not really that great in terms of stats. The gear is pretty random and almost resembles greens, except for the fact that they’re “epic.” However, I feel this is a misnomer because they tend to have one useful stat that, while inflated compared to other greens, will probably need to be reforged. There is another item you can find that will allow you to take a pre-crafted item and convert it to an ilvl 535 item. But again the stats are pretty garbage so you’ll still need to reforge it. They’ll help your ilvl overall but I don’t think it’s all that great compared to stuff from say Throne of Thunder or potentially LFR Siege of Orgrimmar once it gets released.

Another absurdity in terms of gearing is that the cost for gaining old Mogu Runes are 2500 coins. It might not seem like a lot but I feel that it’s a little outrageous given that you might have some other toons to gear. It feels that they want you to mostly use the Timeless Isle to gear if you need to catch up quickly. But that leaves older LFRs to die in some way and pretty much almost makes Throne of Thunder worthless since you can get ilvl gear to enter Siege of Orgrimmar LFR once it comes out. I kinda liked the LFR progression mechanism and thought about doing it on my monk once he reaches level 90. But this pretty much makes me lose incentive for doing older LFRs on my monk once he hits level 90.

The Timeless Isle itself is a real mixed bag for me. It feels like they combined the Northern Barrens with the treasure room from the Isle of Thunder and bits of the Isle of Thunder. I’m glad that they don’t have any dailies outside of the trivia pursuit game and the pet arena. But the downside is that the Timeless Isle is pretty unfocused overall. You tend to wander around looking for items but mostly it feels like another grind, except more tedious because you cannot fly on the Timeless Isle. The real meat and potatoes of the Timeless Isle are the rares. Unfortunately, because of the size of the Timeless Isle, by the time someone announces that a rare is up, it’ll be dead. So you have to be lucky and at the right place to down one.

One thing that I didn’t care for was the gating of Ordos. In fact, there’s a whole section that’s gated off. I wouldn’t have minded that aspect if it weren’t for one of the stupid quest that requires you to get to that section using a terribly designed mechanic (the albatross). But that whole area is pretty lame in how you pretty much need the legendary cloak to proceed (more on the legendary cloak in a bit).

The island mobs are pretty dangerous. I found myself getting one shot quite often. The main mobs that I was getting killed by were hot fixed/nerfed but overall these mobs can prove to be a challenge. The elite and higher level aspect are really mislabeled since you can solo these mobs. I haven’t tried all my classes/specs to see what works best. But I found at least as a retribution paladin, I didn’t have much difficulty.

Overtime, however, I feel that the Timeless Isle will lose appeal. Eventually, the treasures will lose its luster and the grindiness from slaying mobs and collecting stones and coins will die down. This aspect is too much like the Northern Barrens weekly quests. The only three aspects I can see sticking around are the rares, world bosses and treasure chests. But the grind will die down and eventually become semi-group oriented. I really don’t think that the Timeless Isle is all that social as Blizzard had envisioned in trying to increase the difficulty of the mobs to force people to group up. Outside of the world bosses, I never found any incentive to group up out of necessity. Pretty much because rares are faction tagged you don’t really need to belong to a group. Farming groups might be okay but I think they’ll only form at the start of the week.

On to other aspects of the patch. First, there’s the Throne of Thunder improved drop rate. This part is great as I’ve been gearing off specs and picking up a lot of missing pieces. It’s motivated me to run my alts. Since Valor Points really aren’t that important at the moment, I’m just focused on doing Throne of Thunder. One cool thing is that they MASSIVELY made Durumu easier with the maze. Sadly, people still cannot figure out that mechanic. But at least with the improved 30% drop rate for Throne of Thunder stuff, it makes the wipes worth it.

Some of the things I’m doing is trying to gear off specs and giving other specs a try. I finally started playing a Fire mage for shits and giggles. From what I’ve heard, Fire mages depend heavily on procs and criticals so most end up switching to Frost for a while until their gear gets good enough to switch over. The thing with Frost is that this patch has nerfed them (and fire too with regard to Combustion). But I’m just so sick of Frost and want to give another spec a try for a while. Fire looks like fun since you don’t have to worry about your pet. So my theory is to create a separate gear set just for my Fire spec and play that spec out a bit.

Also, my Shaman’s Elemental side now is at the four piece mark. I play really like having the choice of switching between Enhancement and Elemental depending on the fight. Same with my Druid. I figure if I am still running Throne of Thunder, why not gear up my off spec and play them? It’s really liberating having that freedom, especially considering how certain fights can be a bitch depending on your spec.

I still intend to give Arms, Unholy and Subtlety specs a go sometime. With the drop rate increased, this will provide me an opportunity to try other specs to figure out which one plays out the best or suits a fight. Regardless, I feel more motivated to try different things as I wait for each of the Siege of Orgrimmar LFR wings come out.

Now, one thing that I’m itching to try is Flex Raiding. From what I’ve heard the difficulty level is around LFR level rather than harder than LFR level. My theory is that people have slightly higher requirements for getting people to join them in Flex Raiding and that communication is better, which leads the experience to excel that of LFR. So on this level I’m hoping to get a chance to join up with a Flex raiding group. I heard it’s very puggable so many servers are doing these rather than normals. My guess is that in reality the difficulty level is around ICC level difficulty.

I have not tried the Proving Grounds as of yet. This is something that I’m not hugely interested in but I can see the point. I’ve been gearing some classes for stuff like tanking and healing but never really have tried those playing styles in group settings. I think tanking is kinda stressful so I might avoid that for a bit. But I have worked on my priest’s holy spec with regards to gear and want to give it a try some day. This might be the thing to use then later going into Flex or World Boss groups in the future after I get a handle on the basics of healing.

Something I decided to go back to though is the Legendary quest line. I managed to finish up the legendary weapon meta socket. I was pretty happy with that, despite having to do some PVP. In reality, I kinda enjoyed doing the PVP parts since I rarely PVP outside of attacking jack asses who try to grief us during World Boss raids. But I did want to do random bgs down the line out of boredom on occasion or just trying something new.

That said, the next parts are going to be pretty tedious with gathering all the Secrets of the Empire and reputation grinds remaining. Not to mention the scenarios and other grind after the Secrets of the Empire. But I figured it might be worth giving the Legendary Cloak a shot since it’s really cool looking and a pretty nice item to have. Also, I’m not happy that Ordos and a section of the Timeless Isle is gated off. At least, if I can get the Cape on one toon, the rest of my toons can access that section. I’m not all that happy that I have to play catch up though. But I think once I get these items, my paladin’s DPS is going to soar through the roof, which makes it worth the effort.

Lastly, (spoiler alert!) it was revealed who the new Warchief of the Horde will be: Vol’jin! The video went up and answered a burning question many lore fans had since the start of the expansion. Many people aren’t really surprised by this move and during the expansion they had been building up Vol’jin as a fair leader. In fact, they started his rise since Cataclysm if you really think about it. Going into the starting zone in Durotar, if you do the quest where you get to view the interchange with Vol’jin and Garrosh, you can see some of the seeds being planted although it wasn’t exactly clear that Garrosh would be displaced at that point in time.

However, this expansion did a lot to establish him as a decent and capable leader, especially from patch 5.1. They did a lot to highlight him and Lor’themar Theron (no relation to Charlize I suppose) in bringing their characters to the forefront. But I think Vol’jin is someone most members of the Horde can respect. If you consider how the Darkspear situation, you can sympathize for the plight of the trolls. Pretty much they had been kicked to the wayside, having no real home for a while outside of a tiny village. Then once Garrosh takes over they get shoved into a small corner in Orgrimmar and later even cast out. For Vol’jin to step up is a way to give the trolls some recognition as a race.

The one thing that is yet to be seen is how Vol’jin will handle the mantle of leadership. Right now, he seems to have the right character but his motivations seem out of vengeance partly. Thrall has been the glue holding together the Horde over the years but Vol’jin has been mostly in the corner. Although I think Baine will do well with him and maybe Lor’themar, the ending scene of the cinematic with Sylvanas still looks doubtful about her loyalty. She’s always been somewhat of a wildcard in all of this and looks like she can pop at anytime if things don’t go her way.

Also, Vol’jin does have a shady side to him. He is a Shadow Hunter and looks somewhat seedy despite displaying strength in this expansion. Unlike Thrall, he has no direct political ties to the Alliance, so his job is going to be tough in fixing the damage done inside the Horde as well as balancing the grievances of the Alliance.

What will be interesting is Anduin Wrynn’s eventual role. The cinematic touched briefly upon him still seeing compassion and being an ambassador towards the Horde. Perhaps, his time with Sunwalker Dezco has given him a new perspective about the Horde. It will be interesting to see how he fares with Vol’jin as Jaina no longer seems sane of mind.

Finally, there’s King Varien Wrynn. My friend and I had a discussion about both cinematics and we came to the conclusion that the Alliance version was done a little better overall. Most people might think of King Varien Wrynn as a type of butthead. He has that self-righteous attitude that many people might despise. However, he does face a difficult task in having the role of the king. The ending showed a very subtle side of character to King Varien Wrynn which reminded me a lot of Michael Corleone from the Godfather: both had to remain honor but firm in their position. In truth, this is all politics since a sign of weakness on either side would cause each factions’ people to view their respective leaders as incapable.

However, by throwing down his sword and telling Vol’jin that he wants to end the bloodshed, he essentially was giving the Horde a chance to continue to redeem themselves. The thing is that Garrosh has thrown a thorn in the tenuous relations between the Alliance and Horde for two expansions. Similarly, Sylvanas’ own people had shown issues that further strained both sides. While both people will probably never fully unify, it’s more than probable that the outcome will be respectfully agreeing to disagree.

With Garrosh down though and Taran Zhu demanding for Garrosh to bring justice to him in Pandera, one must wonder what will become of Garrosh. Will he just disappear and be thrown into isolation like Lord Blackthorne? Maybe sent back to Outlands? Also, is this really the last content patch for this expansion? Certainly, as far as raids go, we probably will no longer see any more raids becoming available. But no one said that this will be the last content patch for the expansion.

There’s still the Vale for instance and the aftermath of Garrosh’s havoc. Also, have we seen the last of the various entities that were hinted at in the expansion? What about the Old Gods for instance? We’ve only seen a sliver of their power in Garrosh. But will there be more that segues into the next expansion?

The other remaining question, of course, is what the next expansion will be about. We do know or hear about how the BoA weapons dropping from Siege of Orgrimmar the scale up to level 100. So does that mean the next expansion will include 10 more levels? Or will we just get an expansion with 5 more levels and a sequel that will cap us out at level 100? Also, the statement that Varian makes at the end seems to imply that there still will be tension between the Horde and Alliance in the next expansion. But how will it play out? Will Sylvanas and Jaina Proudmoore be the troublemakers for each other their factions while Anduin and Taran Zhu remain as negotiators for both sides? Also, what happened to Thrall’s wife? She’s been mysteriously absent with no word on their child.

Another thing to consider is will both factions do more to join forces? If, indeed, we are going to face things like the Burning Legion and the Old Gods as some significant foes, it seems that each faction alone might not be enough to defeat them. We also have the message from Shaohao about what we are fighting for. The thing is that it feels that the climax of the World of Warcraft series is leading to a mega battle where both factions must band together to face an ultimate impending doom like Sargeras, the Burning Legion and/or the Old Gods. The Panderan faction seems like the glue that will down the road bind both forces together somehow when confronted with a mega arch enemy. Perhaps the role of the archeology profession may eventually lead to something more important like the purpose behind both factions and races and what their true destiny is.

Anyway, it’ll be interesting to get into Siege of Orgrimmar, especially with Flex Raiding on the horizon. I would like to do it a few times to get the hang of it. But once I’m through with it, I think I’ll be able to pug it more frequently.

The post World of Warcraft: Patch 5.4 Thoughts Day Two appeared first on Kontroversial Keith.

First, the queue times in LFR have become exceptionally painful. I’ve been averaging between 20-30 minute queues with an occasional 50-60 minute queue depending on the time. I suspect that most people have managed to gear up and are waiting for the new patch or burnt out and doing other things. But the wait times have become super aggravating.

Next, the quality of players have dropped tremendously. Each run has become too volatile to the point where you can expect to wipe at least once and possibly several times on almost every encounter. And it’s a real mixed bag when it comes to groups. Sometimes, you can find really well geared players who refuse to do anything except AFK. Other times you’ll find numerous trolls and jackasses who intentionally wipe the group. Sometimes it’s just plain ignorance. No matter what the root cause is the situation remains frustrating to the point where it makes you not want to play.

Lack of (good) tanks has started to become a major trend. It’s possible that the above reasons have discouraged good tanks from participating but what hurts the most is the wait time. It used to be the case that tanks would have a rough time getting into LFR but that no longer is true. The loot specialization feature has done a great deal to cull poorly geared tanks from showing up but I think the treatment of tanks simultaneously has discouraged new tanks from giving things a try. Either way, it’s not uncommon to sit right before Lei Shen for 10-15+ minutes just waiting for another tank to arrive.

Inability to find gear that you really need and wasted rerolls. You can be one of those types that can miss out three times every time when it comes to rerolls. Worse yet, you can get a useless piece of gear for a reroll or that a useless piece of gear may screw up the so-called “bad luck” buff that you get. Either way, if you depend on LFR for getting gear, be prepared for a lot of keyboard smashing as there’s a good chance you’ll just receive money for repairs from a non-wipe.

Valor Point capping is a nightmare. I use LFR to Valor Cap and supplement that activity with some dailies. I’ve heard that the weekly Northern Barrens quest actually is far better but pretty much unless you do it on reset night, it’ll take forever grinding all the mobs just to get anywhere. Heroic Scenarios seems to be the way that most players are trying to Valor Cap on top of having a better chance at receiving a decent reward at the end. Still, if you do neither of these for whatever reason and primarily use LFR to Valor Point cap, you’ll hate life. The first toon you Valor Point cap can take a good day because the points receiving from LFR are still quite low. Even with the 50% increase to other toons, it still takes quite a bit of grinding to cap off. I really wish that they kept the Valor Point rewards high like they did at the end of Cataclysm. 250 per run was very nice and allowed for better time management.

Getting Lesser Charms for Mogu Runes. I don’t know if the long queue times are intentional but it feels as though it’s to force people to do other things while waiting. That said, I’ve been getting back into dailies to build up my Lesser Charms. For toons that have no Lesser Charms at all, this activity can feel really daunting because you feel as though you cannot queue up until you have your re-rolls ready. So rather than doing your dailies or activities while in queue, you’ve got to prepare to get into LFR by doing another type of grind then follow up by waiting even longer as you sit in queue for 30+ minutes once you hit your Lesser Charm max. I guess you can look at things to motivate you into doing more dailies on alts for the reputation, gold and Valor Points but sometimes all you really want to do is park your toon in town, flip on a youtube video or something else and just relax while the queue ticks away.

General griefing and trolls. It’s a real mind fuck dealing with the people in LFR. It’s more expected to deal with jackasses than people who care about trying to down a boss. It’s really sad how the game’s design can be improved by a few easy to manage social devices. But after a while, you just end up /ragequiting because there isn’t a point after a while. If perhaps people were actually funny and cool to hang around with in LFR, then a lot of these issues wouldn’t be huge for me. But the non-stop bad mouth, attitude issues and inefficiencies from LFR make it a piss poor experience.

At any rate, I think I need a break from the game. People say that patch 5.4 is around the corner and I do look forward to checking it out. But at the same time, the issues present in LFR will be in one form or another once the new patch is released. Not sure if I’ll want to deal with it for long.

The post World of Warcraft: LFR Recent Issues appeared first on Kontroversial Keith.

One thing that I’ve come to a conclusion on is that Saurfang really is a horrible server when it comes to the Horde player base. I think one of the streamers I follow ended up quitting the top raiding guild Ajantis on the server and transferred his toon to another server because they continued to fail in defeating Lei Shen on Heroic. I believe they got up to 300 wipes, which might seem frustrating to any high end progression guild. But that’s on the high end. Imagine what the lower ends are like!

I pretty much have given up on Oondasta on my server because the Horde group continuously fails to demonstrate that they can defeat it. One night we had competition from the alliance but because of people who refused to fly out, they ended up not only killing Oondasta, but griefing the Horde side at the same time. The Horde side kept saying, “No AoE!” to avoid being flagged for PVP. However, in situations like that, the only real solution is to enter world PVP. Even when we had a full raiding group, we still couldn’t get Oondasta down either from lack of organization or people who could not adapt to simple tactics.

Now, of course, the big question is why I bother staying on my server when this frustration is going on. First, I have 10 90’s and thus do not want to do a mass exodus at this time. While I’ll have a spot in my friend’s guild on his server, the sheer cost for transferring all my toons does not feel worth the effort as of yet.

Second, the economy on my server suits my needs at this time. As someone with 10 90’s, all professions maxed out and possessing all maxed out farms, I have been making tons of gold creating epics and other crafting bits that have served my pocket books well. Doing all my LFRs, dailies, etc. in peace has allowed me to accumulate a fair amount of wealth. But not having to deal with constant gankings has allowed me to probably accomplish a lot more as a solo player.

My theory is to wait at least for the upcoming patch to see how virtual servers affects my realm. If I discover that it’s harder to gather resources as a result of high competition, the inability for my server to continue to down bosses like Oondasta, increased number of rude people in trade chat, etc., then I’ll probably start to look into moving my toons to my friend’s server. At least, his server is horde dominated so the ganking ought to be minimal compared to Ner’zhul. I would prefer joining a PVE server in NA so I can have the best of both worlds, but again I have a feeling that virtual servers might make this whole subject moot.

Patch 5.4 is going to be a make-it-or-break-it patch for me. I’ve seen some aspects in various videos, patch notes and commentaries. However, there’s going to be a lot of game changing elements that go beyond the new (and more than likely last) raid for this expansion. The virtual server element may solve certain issues like small population realms facing difficulty in handling world bosses and economic issues (such as dead Auction Houses or Auction Houses with insanely inflated prices). At the same time, it might introduce a great deal of other issues too like resource depletion, high mob spawn rates and kill stealing. While the technology might be tested on a small sample set of data, Blizzard has yet to see the effect with the real production data (i.e. us!)

Another aspect that I’m looking at closely is the Flex Raiding system. Some people are calling it the LFR killer. Others say that it will introduce its own set of issues in that it will be used for PUGs that end up facing the same ostracizing issues similar to Gear Score and linking achievements. The ultimate question is how doable will this Flex Raiding system be? In order for it to be successful, people have to be presented with the illusion of progress that is semi-challenging yet doable. It cannot be in a state where people are endlessly banging their head against the wall. 2-3 wipes per encounter at most is where the acceptable line is, imo, especially since many groups will end up using it as a gearing mechanism to supplement their normal raids.

As a result, the question becomes whether or not Flex Raiding de-stabilizes the raiding scene any further. Certainly, LFR has disrupted raiding where many guilds ended up focusing on LFR rather than doing normals or heroics. Will Flex Raiding move even more people towards the easier content or will it pave the way so people will want to give normals and harder content a try? That’s the key in all of this. The thing is that people want an overall better experience than what LFR provides, which is partly why Flex Raiding was introduced. LFR only resolved two issues which was time (although this is arguable in a different manner) and “progress” by from a boss perspective and gearing. However, the social experience has been extremely lacking, which is the area that Flex Raiding supposedly targets.

In the end, the thing is that people still will be forced to schedule in time for raiding. Where progression raiding can take weeks, Flex Raiding’s partial success will be a result of the celerity in what people feel is acceptable progression. Because Flex Raiding is presenting a difficulty that is in between LFR and Normal mode raiding, you can assume that Flex Raiding might take longer than a single night for tackling the newest Siege of Ogrimmar (unless they’re over geared). Even if it doesn’t, the time demands will still be higher than what LFR commands. In turn, I have to ask whether or not the slight upgrade in rewards and achievements might be worth the effort for the casual player.

For myself, I’m going to distance myself a bit from Flex Raiding to see how it pans out. I have a feeling that LFR might take a dip initially because people will want to try Flex Raiding and see if the experience exceeds that of LFR. If people end up banging their head against the wall only slightly less than Normal Modes, then people will flock back to LFR and Flex Raiding won’t be the hit that Blizzard might be seeking. Instead, what might happen realistically is that people who are having difficulty with Normal modes will completely move towards Flex Raiding and Normal modes will see a great dip in the short term.

Although my friend says that he’s planning on both at the moment, I probably will stick with LFR and see how that goes. I think that LFR might become a little easier while Flex Raiding will be a mechanic or two harder than LFR in its current incarnation. The idea is that LFR still will be catered to casuals but the increase of ease would ensure that groups can bypass it faster as well as the lowered quality of loot. Also, increasing the ease of LFR will probably encourage people to continue to run it; if situations like Durumu, Lei Shen or Garalon pop up, less people will want to do it anymore and find some other activity. So a balance has to be achieved between LFR, Flex Raiding and Normal modes for these systems to work (personally, I prefer just having a big zerg fest. Much more fun).

The other thing that I’ve looked at is the Timeless Isle. The Timeless Isle looks like something that Blizzard attempted to learn from with regards to the Isle of Thunder. Gone are the vast majority of daily quest and replaced by a single lore question. Instead, people still can earn coins by killing rare mobs. I’m not sure about the details of how this all will work but I’m hoping that the system is similar to the rares from the Isle of Thunder.

The other aspect is the enclosed world boss. I think at this moment, there’s one walled off world boss where only people who have the legendary cape will be able to access it. This was a highly questionable move by Blizzard, once again creating another useless wall. People argue that the fact that not many have completed the quest line the ability to get together groups to handle this boss will probably disallow many from handling it at all. Others argue with the upcoming virtual servers, this point will become moot. Of course, reality only will be demonstrated once the patch goes live. Blizzard did state that they will be making this situation account wide for those who manage to complete the legendary quest and obtain the cloak.

Still, the content walling is another example of what I’m calling the poor will towards the community at large by Blizzard. I figure that Blizzard’s internal thinking occurs in two parts here: 1) rewards those who have managed to complete the quest line, similar to Ra-den on Heroic in Throne of Thunder; 2) encourage more people to continue working on the Legendary quest line in patch 5.4. The problem in this thinking is that content walling along these lines just makes no sense at the end of the day. I argue that the only time things like this matters is for high end progression raiders and those who are interested in achievements and personal progression. The average person simply does not want to deal with the grind involved behind this quest line.

For me, I realize that all your effort will just get dismantled in an upcoming expansion. I mean, I like gearing and all but I want my efforts to mean something for a while. I feel that the gear progression model that Blizzard has is just too antiquated and requires massive updating. It’s fun to see your DPS and stats rise but it’s not fun trying to keep up all the time. Being a tech worker, I already have to deal with all the moving targets. Why deal with this issue in a game?

I guess what I’m hoping for in the next patch is an overall less frustrating experience. Already as I read the patch notes, I’m not happy with a great deal of changes. I’m looking for a “quality of life” type of change in the game. The changes are mostly content related or cosmetic but does not resolve a lot of other overarching issues present in the game and might introduce more problems than they intend to resolve.

What’s funny is that this morning I read a re-tweet by the World of Warcraft group on behalf of Ghostcrawler talking about criticisms and how many developers work on their projects. Honestly, Ghostcrawler can’t win with someone like me. I have very little sympathy for a company and group of developers in this situation. It reminded me of a video from Moldran who talked about trying new games (new for him at least) and how he finally saw the light when it came to the lack of changes for Diablo 3. The problem is not with Diablo 3 itself but with Blizzard/Activision. This is a corporate level problem that requires drastic measures (i.e. head cutting).

If Blizzard has hundreds of developers working on these problems, how is it that they fail to resolve simple issues? Like why is there recurring bugs that get fixed then reintroduced into the game? How come the people at Blizzard call PTR a “privilege” when in fact it’s free QA work for them? Why can’t they fix these problems with their “hundreds” of developers when other, smaller companies can handle the same type of games at scale? Why can’t Blizzard hire more developers and QA people with all the money they’ve banked over the years? Why can’t they outsource QA to these high end progression groups?

The thing is that the excuses are getting sickening. I’m tired of the constant PR spins on a lot of these issues. The fact is that the company has a lot of issues internally. If it didn’t why would Vivideni suddenly split off? Why would the constant drop in numbers NOT be an issue? I mean 12 million to 7.7 million is a HUGE drop when you consider the month to month free money that Blizzard essentially receives. You can’t deny that there’s something internally wrong with the company.

And it’s not just me speculating. I know people over at Blizzard and hear about many of their cultural problems. You don’t have any mobility. People who were there from the start don’t move and so there’s no motivation to improve. You work there for the name recognition. And on top of that they’re very selective about the type of people they hire. Wouldn’t you think that the company should start re-considering about the type of people they are hiring if they aren’t able to solve a lot of legacy issues?

I want to start seeing things in good faith from the company. I hate it when I read threats from a company that has incurred its own share of problems. Like forcing people to be online all the time yet still being unable to cure the botting problem. Or dealing with the inflation of gold in Diablo 3. I feel that the company is in a very sensitive position and needs to really work on transparency and distance themselves from Activision itself. They need to do more to build good will with the gaming community and restore confidence that they can produce high end games with excellent quality. But I don’t know if they’re internally prepared to do the right thing at this point in time.

The post World of Warcraft: Recent Ongoings, This and That appeared first on Kontroversial Keith.

The hardest aspect of my “500 Club” idea is getting the first toon to hit the Valor Point cap. Usually, I’ll start with whatever my lowest geared toon is, go after a rare elite on the Isle of Thunder, earn 50 or so Lesser Charms then put them through Throne of Thunder, top to bottom and hit whatever LFRs remain just to squeeze out every little inch of Valor that I can. Unfortunately, the wait times on LFR combined with the RNG factor of occasionally getting into a fail group or the last boss in the instance force me to re-queue, hence costing even more time. With the average wait time being anywhere between 10-30 minutes, I would say most of my time being eaten up is just waiting for something to happen.

However, one of the issues about “Average Wait Time” is that it’s completely inaccurate. Sometimes a queue that might say 5 minutes end up taking 10-20 minutes. If you use your time wisely, you can do other productive activities like dailies, Pet Battles (to try and get ahead on the Lesser Charms), work on your farm or doing some gathering. Either way, attempting to complete a full route the first time through tends to take around 6-7 hours, sometimes more. That’s why I tend to prioritize my lowest geared toon since it’ll motivate me to do more.

The timing aspect can be exacerbated though when you factor in world bosses. At this stage, with my lowest toon having an ilvl of 489, it really makes little sense to do world bosses outside of Nalak if I want to optimize my time. You could argue for Oondasta but the time and frustration for getting a successful Oondasta group together on my realm typically end up being counter productive unless done early on in the week. Even then the waiting factor is utterly frustrating, either standing by for the group to gather or for Oondasta to spawn.

That all said, I’ll probably alter my methods slightly now that I really don’t need the older LFRs and focus more attention on Throne of Thunder and collecting Lesser Charms for the re-roll Mogu tokens. That way, my focus will be on obtaining the best gear for my guys that I can get for the time allotment. I’ll use easier LFRs for remaining Valor Points as well as gearing up off specs just for fun, and perhaps epics/gold. But I won’t force myself to run every single one without a purpose.

The one semi-unfortunate consequence is the return to doing dailies. At this stage, I really hate dailies but I think that you really don’t have to do them all on each toon every day. Instead, a better method seems to be focusing on a single toon, getting the 50 Lesser Charms and spare Valor Points as well as reputation along the way. As with my previous days, I pretty much am extremely selective in the dailies as some still remain nuisances. However, a few I’ve found to be more productive than expected such as the Dominance Offensive, which I’m using primarily to enhance my reputation with the Black Prince.

Along the way, I’ve been doing a lot to make gold. I did a tabulation and discovered that I’m at over 80k in gold spread across 10 toons. That’s not bad actually. At the moment, one of my big crafting projects is creating one of the Reborn weapons. I noticed that the one I’m aiming at crafting is on the Auction House for 50k. Although I heard that the price ranges from 20-30k normally, 50k would be a nice bit of pocket change. I think it’s important to craft these before the patch as I’m certain there might be new items that will eventually devalue these weapons.

On my tailoring side, I’ve been crafting quite a few robes and gloves. Those sell for 2k and are pretty consistent. I think the key here is not overflooding the market and keeping it diverse so that people are buying in sets. I’m sure that when a new mage or warlock levels, for instance, they might want to gear themselves up quickly. So having two pairs of the same robe on the Auction House might be counterproductive as opposed to a robe and matching gloves. Also, I crafted a mail chest piece. The price might be set a little high. However, since there’s only one other piece, which was set a fair amount higher, I’m hoping to still be able to attract a buyer for it.

Doing LFR and crafting with the occasional dailies thrown in has made me realize that I’ve been racking up quite a bit of gold on each toon, once I focus on them for the week. That made me want to set another goal up which I’m calling the “10k club.” In that situation, I am to make sure each toon has 10k worth of gold minimal. Right now, I can’t see any major purchases outside of the reforge mount. Even then I haven’t decided whether to make that purchase or not. I suppose if I could sell a reborn weapon for 50k, I wouldn’t have much of an issue making that purchase as the traveling reforging can be pretty convenient at times.

One thing that I’ve been pretty happy about so far is my hunter. I got pretty lucky in the past few days with my hunter, where he managed to score the 4 piece set bonus, a decent weapon and trinket. Some of the items he won without a reroll, allowing me to save my bonuses for other gear that I managed to win on occasion. As a result, I’ve seen my hunter’s DPS rise up meteorically in LFR.

Another thing I’m pretty proud of is that I finally managed to complete Throne of Thunder LFR on each of my toons. It makes me happy that I can run any section for any person that I want. That provides me an incredible amount of flexibility that offers me numerous opportunities. Some things I hope to do down the road is switch specs on a few toons and try out different play styles. For instance, I’d love to be able to go in as either a BM or Survival Hunter. Or perhaps give Subtlety a try on my rogue and maybe even Unholy. By having all these options available to me, I can really learn how each of the classes operate and decide on my own which spec per class suits me.

Taking a few steps back, I want to talk about the Isle of Thunder vs the other areas for daily quests and even the upcoming new island. One of the things that I’ve come to feel is that the Isle of Thunder, with regards to dailies, is pretty horrible. I really dislike how the daily quests are organized, the structure of the island, the mob density, the high health for many mobs and the stupid raid-like boss mechanics for a few quests. The thing is that the island’s daily aspect really is optional. There really isn’t any positive rewards from the dailies unless it’s your thing. But the thing that gets me more than anything is that the time-to-reward ratio is pretty skewed. Some of the worst quests on the island are the end mini bosses. Those have raid-like mechanics and get pretty tedious to do. I’m not saying that they’re impossible nor hard, just really tedious. And for what? The same amount of gold, valor and lesser charms that you can obtain doing a single Golden Lotus quest.

What’s even better are the useless rewards from the vender on the Isle. Outside of the belt, I really don’t see a point in the gear that Blizzard included with those guys. The fact that the gear requires reputation AND Valor Points to obtain at a lesser level than the Shado-Pan Assault just demonstrate once again how Blizzard really failed in designing a rewarding experience on the Isle with regards to dailies. Usually, I might do the Isle dailies if I’m bored or if I’m waiting around for a Nalak or rare elite encounter. But there’s just a lot of better ways to get rewards, especially for my guys at this stage than doing dailies on the Isle of Thunder.

Ironically, I found that the Order of the Cloud Serpents were inadvertently more rewarding in a very literal sense. The other day I realized that my hunter was very close to getting exalted with them. So I decided to finish up his reputation grind with them. Upon hitting exalted, I ended up getting a mount that I already had. Since the game wouldn’t allow me to use the mount, I ended up just selling it for 750 gold. Since I have 10 toons and you can only get 3 separate ones, this situation implies that I can make a bit of gold just getting to exalted on my other toons.

Getting back to Throne of Thunder, I have to say at this stage, I think I’ve become pretty familiar with the routine at least with regards to LFR. What’s cool is figuring out how to optimize your performance with each toon. Some fights like Durumu, Horridon and Lei Shen have some nice dynamics that force you to change your style up slightly and allow for certain classes to really shine. I’m thinking about eventually writing a blog just ranking each boss in terms of difficulty. I might add things like my favorite/hated classes on top of that based on my experience with each situation.

Looking forward, I’m really trying my hardest to get everyone to that ilvl 500 mark. Although the next patch says that the gear drop rate will be increased, I prefer to believe that it’s better right now with my schedule to get ahead and prepared for the Siege of Orgrimmar. My thinking is that the way things are working now, the current situation is, for the most part, stable. Certainly, the RNG sucks when it comes to LFR, but it’s a mostly known environment. Hard to say what else might change when patch 5.4 hits but most people will most likely be focused on just the Siege of Orgrimmar rather than older content. If more valor gear is introduced, you’re better off using your new valor for those items than older items.

But I am a little worried about how the next system of re-rolls and charms will end up working out. I heard mention that there will be new re-roll tokens that are based on the new island and that creatures on that island will drop the equivalent of Lesser Charms for you to get the next level of re-roll tokens. I haven’t really read much thus far about the new island so I don’t know if Blizzard is committed to creating yet another huge batch of dailies or if the existing dailies will allow you to purchase the re-roll tokens. I sincerely hope that whatever Blizzard intends to do that it is flexible (e.g. can still do Pet Battles, dailies, kill creatures or a combination of the three) and not too grindy. I did give the weekly patch 5.3 supply quest a try and the low drop rate and monotonous killing of mobs just put me to sleep. Also, I’m hoping that the new island and the creatures are better designed than the Isle of Thunder. The mob density and high hit points really are pointless mechanisms to just enforce more of the same, stupid, time wasting grind that the rest of the game has imposed on us in this expansion.

Then there’s the Legendary quest line. I read that some of the new world bosses on that island might only be open to people with the cape from the Legendary quest. I really hope that Blizzard reneges on that decision. Oondasta was horrible enough. So why impose more typical Blizzard bullshit in all of this?

Either way, we’ll see what happens. I’m hoping to get all of this stuff done asap so I don’t burn myself out too much. But at the same time, I really hope 5.4 becomes a major turning point in the expansion. I think the expansion thus far has been okay at best but mostly frustrating and just way too time consuming overall. There has been good points but I really would love for Blizzard to start cutting down on that time factor somehow. I could take other aspects of the game if the game wasn’t so horrendously mismanaged when it comes to time.

The post World of Warcraft: Random Thoughts, Stuff I’m Working On, etc. appeared first on Kontroversial Keith.

Usually, the first thing I do is focus on a single toon and max out what he/she can receive. I tend to focus on my lowest geared toon first as I find myself having more incentive to do older LFR instances in trying to acquire gear and valor. I’ll start off by either doing dailies or pet battles to acquire enough lesser charms for the runes. Normally, I find dailies, though tedious, to be the better method as the amounts received are more certain, provide reputation points and gold. This is even better for newer toons as they may lack reputation with certain factions.

Once I get my runes, I’ll queue up for the LFR which provide the best upgrades. The best stuff at the moment is in part 4, where you have the two bosses with tier tokens and Lei Shen, who has some decent weapons and trinkets. I prefer focusing on tier tokens and weapons since you cannot acquire those pieces of gear with valor points. Since tier tokens are pretty hard to come by, it can take quite a bit of time before you might see a full set (or even partial set).

For valor points, I mostly focus on “low hanging fruit” types of items like the necklace, ring, bracers, etc. I tend to avoid items that can have a tier corresponding piece since I prefer tier gear overall just for the bonuses. As someone who doesn’t raid normals or heroic modes, this path isn’t bad. If my guys get a full 5 piece set, I might eventually buy the shoulders using gold since valor points are harder to come by as you’re gearing up (of course, just grinding through all the reputation towards exalted with the Shado-Pan Assault still will take time, so this is a long term goal).

Once my basics are covered, then I’ll start upgrading items. I tend to prioritize weapons then any higher (522s) items. Weapons are probably the best thing to spend valor points if you want to upgrade them (and if you’re a non-raider like me) as weapons provide the best overall DPS boost.

Ultimately, my goal is to hit ilvl 500 at minimal for all of my toons. I read that ilvl 500 will be the minimum requirement to enter the Siege of Orgrimmar LFR, so I’m trying to prepare as much as possible in advance.

One thing I’ll try to do on my first toon that I gear during the week is to get valor capped quickly. In that way, the rest of my toons will receive the bonus and essentially save me some time in terms of avoiding a few unnecessary LFRs.  Even though I’m gearing mostly through Throne of Thunder, I do older LFRs as well not just for valor points, but the occasional epics, especially for toons with hybrid specs. In that manner, it gives me some motivation to back and horse around. It’s always nice seeing how much your DPS improves as you gear up. Also, it’s kinda fun building extra sets as it provides the opportunity of trying other roles out in the future.

In many cases, my toons with hybrid specs are quite close to receiving all gear necessary for their off spec. Even with that, I like occasionally doing the Treasure Room scenario since the rares provide some nice valor and charms and the treasure room itself averages me around 200 gold each run. To me it’s just a nice bonus on top of everything and offers you some chances to reroll on gear you might’ve wanted previously or just for some extra gold (which never hurts).

Some things I won’t use my charms on are the random boss drops. Although I’ve occasionally received one of the random boss drops from Throne of Thunder, I do not want to make it a dependency in terms of my upgrade strategy. There’s always a temptation to hit your re-roll button but I really feel it’s a waste. I prefer focusing on the main loot table for each boss until I’ve managed to get all the necessary items from that particular boss or in general. My only consideration for using a charm in this case might be to attempt to trigger the bad luck protection buff. For instance, let’s say you’re a warrior and need a weapon (in my case I have a fury warrior which requires two two handed or two one handed weapons). Lei Shen, being the last boss for Part 4, has two bosses in front of him. I might re-roll on those two bosses in the hope of trigger my re-roll protection for Lei Shen (on top of how my warrior might hopefully get a tier token or other goody in the process).

Something else that I do which might sound funny is that I’ll try to spend my valor as soon as I have enough for a certain item and to ensure I might get an item in LFR. It could be me but I’ve noticed that when my toons have enough valor (or potentially have enough valor for the week) to obtain gear, I might not get anything, even from re-rolls. It could be bad RNG but I have this theory that the system might have a limiter where it examines your total possible valor for the week and takes that into consideration when it distributes items. It’s almost as if the system says something like, “Oh, well you will get a guaranteed item this week, so let me lower your chances of winning anything.” In other words, it feels as if the system does not want you to gear too quickly. Of course, I could be completely wrong in that whole process but it’s just an observation based on gearing 10 toons.

Overall, I’m having fun working on each of my toons. Originally, I was fretting a bit in playing ranged in Throne of Thunder (mostly because many fights felt more melee friendly). However, having completed Throne of Thunder numerous times now on both melee and ranged DPS, I will say that both have their ups and downs. I think as long as you know the mechanics for the bosses, you shouldn’t have any real issues for either DPS type; it’s mostly a matter of translating the situation for your class.

The post World of Warcraft: How I’m Spending My Runes/Charms, Valor Points and Pushing Forward appeared first on Kontroversial Keith.

I did a little research on the Blizzard forums and learned that this bug has existed for some time and that some warlocks are actually exploiting this bug to purposefully grief people. In LFR, there isn’t any way to undo the damage of despawning the eggs. We tried wiping using the trash mobs on the way to Ji-Kun and teleporting out/in. Neither method worked. Pretty much the only to handle this situation is to leave LFR as it is impossible to reset the encounter when this happens. In normal mode, you need to leave the instance and reset the raid.

Since I didn’t realize that this issue would create a bug, I could not determine which warlock in our group caused this to occur. I don’t know if the warlock knew about the bug and intentionally attempted to grief the rest of the group. Since he didn’t immediately leave group, I have a feeling that he may not have known about it. However, it’s said that some warlocks intentionally will sabotage an LFR group by creating the Demonic Gateways.

Some residual effects of this bug is that people who immediately enter LFR may receive the deserter debuff if they try to leave. If your group does wipe and/or you’ve been in LFR for a good duration, you can leave the group without penalty. Otherwise, others will have to kick you in order for you to avoid the debuff. Lastly, it’s best for the entire group to leave at once since keeping the group around with the encounter unresolved may cause you to re-enter. I’ve read that some people tried leaving (after getting into this section in a 30 minute queue), only to leave getting the debuff then return 30-60 minutes later to find that the same group and situation is intact.

Hopefully, Blizzard does something to correct this issue because it’s a known problem since April of 2013. For myself, my patience endured and I ended up switching to other LFR sections, having more success and actually finding the crossbow from Durumu. In some way, that crossbow made up for the loss of time. Eventually, I’ll have to re-run my hunter through part 2 as he’s missing the valor. By the time I give it another shot, I hope to just deal with the last encounter without the despawned egg bug.

The post World of Warcraft: Annoying LFR Ji-Kun Bug appeared first on Kontroversial Keith.

First, you’ll pick up the last area where you’ll face spiders, blobs and lizardmen en route to your first boss. None of these are challenging and some tanks might just try to gather up as many as fast as possible since these mobs don’t pose a great deal of threat to the raid. Once you reach the door, you’ll face a group of stone lions and two mini bosses. Pretty much you can go AoE nuts on these mobs until you face the mini bosses. The mini bosses have a cone ability and knock back. But truthfully they aren’t much of a threat and provide an additional 20 Valor Points.

Iron Qon

Most of this fight will be a tank-n-spank + stay out of shit type of fight. Your tank will pick up Iron Qon and for the first phase, you will be focused on dpsing him. The one mechanic you need to watch out for is his throw spear. When the spear lands, a small maze of fire will spread in various lines. You need to avoid this fire as it will give you a debuff that causes you to burn. If you can’t attack him, don’t try skipping over the fire but try running around. Hopefully, your tank will position him correctly.

After you nuke down his mount, he will mount a new one and take to the sky. You will be sucked into the middle of the room where tornadoes spawn. You’re supposedly to fight your way out of the center. Sometimes, warlocks might create Demonic Gateways to the safe zone. If you’re caught in the tornado, you will be stunned and swirled around. So do what you can to get to the clear end of the room.

At that point, he will continue chucking his spear to create two more sets of lines in lightning and ice. The ice will slow you so you’ll want to avoid it as much as possible. And it will cause a debuff on you as well. During this phase, he will put up two shields. A good tank will position him so that you can move around him and attack his unguarded sides. I believe you can also get “glued” to the floor during this phase if you stand in the ice. So again, you want to avoid the lines on the floor.

Once you destroy his mounts, you face Iron Qon himself. Here’s where you want to blow your cooldowns and bloodlust. It’s very damage intensive so you might want to stack up so your healers and lay their AoE heals down on you.

Next you’ll face another group of adds which aren’t too tough on the way to the Twin Consorts.

Twin Consorts

This fight is another pretty easy fight. There is a mechanic of doing some odd drawing thing but leave that to the experts. Most of this fight you will be facing one add or another. There are two: blue and red. You start off fighting blue and this phase is pretty straight forward as it’s just a tank-n-spank fight. Red is slightly more difficult as the consort ends up being a slight chase type of fight. Your tank will kite this add towards the blue ice crystals around the room. At the same time, the red consort will rush off and return causing the Flames of Passion to spawn in her wake. Just avoid stepping in these. The objective in this fight is to typically get each add to 20% (or whatever low percentage) health then nuking red and finally blue. Not much of a description from me just because this fight is pretty simple overall.

The next group of adds are pretty damage intensive. You’ll face a Lightning Guardian and Thunder Lord twice in two separate rooms. The main issue is that they have an ability called Conductive Shield. When it’s on, you want to avoid attacking the add because you’ll damage yourself in the process. There will be a ton of lightning damage going out, so you’ll want to watch your health as you fight these adds. Again defensive cooldowns and any extra healing helps here.

Defeating the first pack, you’ll go up a stair way en route to the next group. You’ll want to rush up the stairs because it becomes charged. Ranged can stand where the platform is on the outside to avoid the damage. So again you’ll want to just avoid taking too much damage. Once you kill these two off, you’ll face your final encounter.

Lei Shen

I think at this point many groups are one shotting this boss. You’ll have your occasional rotter group with the poisonous jerks who’ll do things to grief parties. But mechanics-wise this fight is actually pretty easy. The first thing is that the raid leader needs to set up signals around the room on the four corners with separate colors. At that point, someone (preferably the raid leader) needs to define the groups who will be assigned per corner. Because LFR is 25 man, you’ll have 4 main groups with the 5th group spreading. Each corner should have at minimal one healer. To figure out which group you belong to, look at your toon’s portrait. Above it you’ll see a small “Group #” denotation. So if the group says purple group #3, then during the intermission phase, you need to run over to the purple signal that your raid leader has set up.

Once the tank pulls, you’ll essentially run around the room to each corner. For the first phase, you need be wary of the lightning whip (which looks like a giant grayish mark on the ground) and the Thunderstruck abilities. When you see these, stand on the opposite side so you don’t get hit.

After moving to each corner of the room, you’ll enter into the Intermission phase. This is where the setup that I mentioned earlier plays a key part. Once you group up, you’ll face 1-4 mechanics. First, you might see someone turned into a giant (Overcharged). Everyone needs to stack up on that person in the group. Second, you’ll see someone with a blue arrow above their head, which is the Static Charged mechanic. Again stack up with that person. Next, you’ll see a pool of blue on the ground (Diffused Lightning). Make sure each person covers them in your area and cover spots that are empty. If you miss, an add will spawn.

Eventually, the intermission phase ends and you will face Lei Shen again. This time, one section of the room will be charged up so most people will avoid it during the second intermission phase. Some of the key differences in this phase while you’re fighting Lei Shen is that you may encounter more bouncing balls and tons of adds. DPS adds if they appear and make sure you cover the bouncing balls area before they hit the ground. This will repeat until you reach the intermission phase where you repeat the tactics from the previous paragraph again.

Once that phase is over, Lei Shen will be in the middle and most tanks end up tanking him there. This part will be a semi-movement heavy phase, combining different aspects of the previous phases into this one. You have to watch out for the conductive ground and will need to once again watch out for both the lightning whip and the Thunderstruck mechanics. This time, you’ll be put into a pushback type of mechanic similar to Lei Shi. So you need to move behind him asap. Again at this phase, blow all your cooldowns, bloodlust and nuke him down while avoiding the whip and other mechanics.

At any rate, that’s my little LFR guide to Throne of Thunder. I hope you enjoyed it. It’s probably not the best guide out there by a long shot but I hope to give you enough of an overview of what to look out for just to get you started. Some small pieces of advice in addition to all of this:

• Focus on mechanics for boss fights above all else. Don’t worry about being a turret and tunnel vision on a single monster. Worry about the environment and get a feeling for how an encounter is structured.
• Focus on survival next. That means always be wary of mechanics in a fight like watching out for stuff on the ground or watch out when you’re health rapidly drops. Always be mindful of debuffs you have and avoid situations where your stacks grow too high.
• Always let the tanks pick up the threat. I’ve been in too many situations where I became overly enthusiastic, started attacking a boss then would get one shot because I ended up becoming #1 on the threat meter. If you need it, get something like Omen to help you monitor your threat. Fights like Ji-Kun can inst-kill you if you’re not careful.
• Learn the environment. Study it. Get a feeling for it. Ask questions if necessary. But don’t be a dunce head and dive in head first before everyone. Let people guide you so you don’t make the mistake of others. In short, try following and not leading.
• Be patient. For myself, it takes roughly 3 tries before I feel comfortable on these encounters. With 10 90s, I have a lot of opportunities throughout the week to master these encounters. It’s all about patterns and learning where to be and what to do at the right moment. But you need to give yourself the chance to learn and master these encounters.
• Communicate with your group. Never forget the Golden Rule. Be respectful and if things go really well, mention it to people. LFR has a horrible reputation because people with negative attitudes contribute their mental damage to others and this disease spreads like AIDS. However, you should give praise to help mitigate this damage and compliment your group when things do go well. I believe that LFR is a great tool but a lot of the damage can be reversed through proper communication and having a positive attitude.

The post World of Warcraft: Throne of Thunder LFR Guide (for the Uber Casual DPS Player) Part 4 appeared first on Kontroversial Keith.

The first thing is that you’ll be faced with a bunch of swamp like-monsters circling around a platform. As you DPS down these foes, occasionally you’ll be ported over into a purplish-maze and must fight a tiny creature. Keep in mind how this maze-like prison works as it’ll play a significant role in the upcoming boss encounter. Once you down the three bog creatures, portals around the room will open up, where giant versions will appear. Your tank ought to pull one at a time (for a total of four). Lots of AoE damage will go out and you’ll be forced to find a hidden add that you need to down quickly to prevent more AoE raid damage from going out. Once the fourth large add goes down, move back towards the entrance (or at least get out of the center of the room) to face one of the most difficult bosses in LFR to date:

Durumu the Forgotten

Quite honestly, this boss has been nerfed significantly to the point where groups can now one shot Durumu. The fight is really easy at this point except for a single phase. Despite all of this, people can still screw up because they’ll most likely panic and do something stupid. The first thing to know in this fight is that the shit on the ground is always going to be bad. So avoid it at all cost as much as possible.

Next, you might occasionally be targeted by a Lingering Gaze effect. If that happens, run out of the center to drop a puddle of purple stuff. Along with that you’ll see some purplish stuff from the “Force of Will” cone that looks similar to the maze formation you might’ve witnessed earlier. You need to get out asap or you get knocked off the platform.

Sometime after, you’ll see three distinctly covered beams that may or may not target you. If you’re targeted, run in a circle around the room to uncover adds. There will be three adds that will spawn once you uncover them. When you find them, nuke them down. If you’re not focused, DPS the boss until the adds are uncovered.

Lastly, is the most infamous mechanic of any fight that I’ve seen that has caused a great deal of grief to LFR and required all the nerfs just so the people in LFR can survive. It’s the maze/Disintegration phase. This phase is the raid wiper and has garnered an enormous amount of hate. At the same time in it’s current format, you can still one shot the boss (I’ve seen it where we only had a single death, which might be an LFR record). So let me get into this aspect.

Once Durumu starts the Disintegration phase, you must run to the guide. Someone might have a marker to indicate being the leader. The most important aspect to this phase is surviving. Forget DPS unless you know the mechanic. You have two options in this phase, an inner group or outer group. I highly recommend the inner group because it’s easier to navigate. Most people will gather up in one spot, which I believe is near or under where the beam will spawn (but it won’t start dealing damage). Once people are gathered, you need to navigate through the maze. The maze will deal damage if you hit it and if people weren’t careful in dropping off their purple puddles, you might step in some. Some people might blow defensive cooldowns while healers try to drop as much healing as possible. The thing is that the openings to the maze (i.e. clear/safe spots) slowly. So don’t panic and move through as much as possible without taking damage. You must avoid the eye beam at all cost though as it can one shot you.

If you manage to survive the eye beam phase and most of your raid is alive, then burn the boss as fast as you can. With the exception of Lingering Gaze and Force of Will, you can ignore the other mechanics in this fight (i.e. the add portion). Just make sure you nuke Durumu down before he goes back to the maze phase.

In general, the two things I focus on are staying alive during the maze aspects and DPSing the boss down as hard as possible. Blow your cooldowns at the beginning including Bloodlust. You want to make sure Durumu is nuked down as fast as possible before the maze phase since there’s no guarantee how many people are left.

If you succeed in killing Durumu, then LFR for the most part will seem pretty easy from here on out with a few smaller hiccups. After that, you’ll face another add gauntlet. Your tank will pick up these red oozes. Don’t DPS them until he stops. Eventually, he’ll gather a large group up along with a Malignant Ooze. Now, you’ll have to be a little careful here because upon killing these oozes, they explode causes a great deal of raid damage. So just mindlessly AoEing them might destroy them fast, but you’ll still face the risk of killing your raid (unless your healers are superior). I tend to go single target for these to bring down the risk.

Eventually, you’ll end up in another chamber where you face Primordius.

Primordius

This encounter is fairly simple but it can be confusing the first time through. The thing is that you need to wait for your tank to pick up Primordius and then waiting for these red oozes to spawn from around the room. Focus on killing these oozes. Once they die, stand in them to receive a buff. You need 5 of these to become transformed for which you can start nuking Primordius. Your tank will kite Primordius in a circle so it’s important to keep up as much as possible.

While that is most of the fight, you have to pay attention to your buff. Once it goes away, you’ll need to pick up another 5 stacks. I’ve heard that you don’t need all 5 but it’s probably easier just to keep the transformation aspect up. So you might have to kill more of the oozes. But keep on the look out for the remnants of other oozes. You will want to pick them up before Primordius as they can buff him instead. Also, you’ll want to be wary about the raid wide damage going out. The other thing is to avoid purple puddles as these are considered bad. Overall not a hard fight but most of it is just environmental awareness.

The next part is a few simple add packs. The two guards at the door are simple. Just make sure you attack from behind because they can stun you. Then you will fight a group of Dark Ritualists. Honestly, there’s not a lot which makes this fight special except that they have a buttload of life and it feels unnecessarily long. There is a Dr Who culture reference in the achievement but that’s not important.

Dark Anus….I mean Dark Animus

Before I talk about the strategies of this fight, I want to share this little anecdotal on one of my LFR encounters.

Raider1 (right after porting in): “Which boss are we on?”

Raider2: “Dark Anus”

Raider3: “That’s what she said.”

Me: “LMAO.”

Sorry, I can’t call this encounter Dark Animus anymore after hearing that. Heck, even typing Dark Animus out, I’m always tempted to change the “i” to a “u”. That said, after dealing with this hectic fight, there’s good reason to call this along the lines of the rectum. The fight starts off chaotic but slows into a boring tank and spank. So what to do?

The first half of this encounter involves three types of adds where you face four sets of golems that start off in great numbers and are smaller, leading to activating Dark Animus. The first set of golems (Anima Golems) will spawn on two sides of the room. Most times the tanks will split up, each one taking one half of the golems. People might focus on one group of golems while the other tank holds their half of golems. Single target these smaller golems so that the Large Anima Golems will be activated.

Large Anima Golems are what end up causing wipes. The thing is that if you kill too many of them quickly, a large number of these guys will spawn. But the problem is that they have an ability called Crimson Wake, which causes these puddles of red on the floor. Quite often, the uninitiated will leave tons of these Crimson Wake puddles around and people will stand in them, causing chaos and the raid to wipe. If you get targeted by Crimson Wake, you need to find a corner of the room to drop it off.

The object of that phase is to eventually activate the Massive Anima Golems. Usually, what I’ve seen is that once one group is activated, people keep switching to the next bigger group, up until Dark Animus. With the Massive Anima Golems, the only thing you need to deal with Matter Swap. That’s more of a healer mechanic, but you might find yourself slightly discombobulated when you switch spots with the furthest person in your raid. But just DPS these until Dark Animus is activated.

Once Dark Animus is activated, focus all your attention on this thing. Pretty much at this point things become a tank-n-spank encounter. Avoid casting when Interrupting Jolt hits or you’ll be silenced.

Next I’ll cover the last part of Throne of Thunder.

The post World of Warcraft: Throne of Thunder LFR Guide (for the Uber Casual DPS Player) Part 3 appeared first on Kontroversial Keith.

Forgotten Depth

This section of LFR becomes what you call the standard “dungeon crawl”. It’s got a nice eerie feeling as you make your way towards Lei Shen and contains tons of horrors. For the casual player, the real horror is trying to familiarize yourself with the layout of this place. Whereas the other wings are more or less linear, the Forgotten Depths can be a spot where a new player can easily get lost and wreck havoc due to the design of the zone. You have tons of mobs, some hidden, some pretty overt. But the one thing in common is that most groups want to rush through the zone. Experienced players will understand how to navigate the area and avoid mobs. But to the new player the entire place will be a confusing maze.

Once you zone in, you’ll see a HUGE turtle and will face three packs of bats. The first pack is pretty simple and can just be AoE’d down. The next two packs have the potential of wiping most LFR groups. In these packs, you’ll face three Giant Bats, who have the ability to silence your group. You will want to make sure your tank only pulls a single pack because a bad group will end up missing the opportunity to interrupt their silencing ability and remove the healers’ ability to keep your tanks up. Again, if you die, just run back in since the entrance is close by.

After getting these bats down, you will face…

Tortos

I would argue that this fight forces ranged DPS to be on their game. The fight is primarily an add fight where you have two sets of adds. One group are spinning turtles that are summoned by Tortos while another group are cave bats. Most groups have ranged on turtles while melee go on the bats.

As a ranged DPS, your job is to focus on one turtle and get them down. Once they’re down, they are left on the ground and can be kicked via your new action button. They should be kicked just before Tortos does his breath attack as it will interrupt the breath attack and prevent unnecessary damage. Usually, you should let someone familiar with the kick tactic to handle it.

Melee DPS have it a little easier. When the cave bats spawn, your tank should gather them close to where Tortos is. A good tank will bring them as close to Tortos as possible so that you can hit everything with AoE assaults. These bats do high damage so you want to avoid accidentally grabbing aggro from a tank. Most of the time, I stay on the boss and only attack the bats if once they’re near the boss. Sometimes you can spot a good or bad tank depending on how well they know these tactics. Some tanks might (with the help of good AoE dps) bring down most of the cave bats themselves, so you can just focus on Tortos.

The main things you need to watch out for in the encounter are the falling rocks (blue circles on the ground), moving out of the way of the turtles (fling you into the air) and Tortos’ breath attack. Outside of that, this encounter isn’t that bad in terms of difficulty.

After Tortos goes down, you’ll face what I argue is the toughest non-boss aspect of LFR and is what can cause raid-wide wipes for Part 2. The next series you must travel through the caverns to unlock the next boss. This part of the instance becomes slightly non-linear as there is a certain path you will take en route to Magera. While the adds individually are not dangerous, the most difficult aspect of the caverns is avoiding adds. Many groups prefer avoiding adds so they will go through great lengths just to avoid an unnecessary encounter (which if you ask me is stupid because the time to deal with wipes versus just killing all the adds along the path tend to favor the ladder, not to mention the repair bills).

So the best piece of advice is to mount up and keep stick with your tanks. The thing is that there are these rock spider creatures that have a hideous bug (pun not intended) where even if you’re in a “safe” zone, they can teleport you to their location if an encounter with them starts. On top of that, they will summon more of their kind, which end up overwhelming the raid. Usually, this occurs if someone dies and tries to run back to the group on their own as they inadvertently might pull a group of adds.

If you die with your group to these adds, stay dead. Wait for a mass resurrection because the run back is far more painful than sitting on your ass for a few minutes. Some groups might have a few assholes and will force you to run back. Try your best and try to get a feeling for the layout. I would argue that the first thing you should do before Megaera is to really get a feeling of this layout. Forget trying to be #1 on DPS and learn the route because you don’t want to be that guy that constantly wipes the group because you can’t get back to your body. And trust me, if you’re that guy, you’ll find yourself re-queuing for LFR very fast.

Megaera

Next to Jin’rokh, Megaera has to be one of the easiest bosses in Throne of Thunder. You have two things to do: green-red (i.e. right-left) until Megaera is dead. And the flaming thing. Okay, the fight is a little more involved than this so let me go into a little more depth. First, once you arrive at the little area near Megaera, don’t run around like a dumb ass. Opposite of Megaera is a group of those spider adds just waiting for you to fuck up. Good groups will clear that section so that during the Megaera fight, people won’t accidentally pull them. If your group doesn’t bother clearing the adds, then you’ll have one more factor to worry about in this fight.

Next, the fight is really about tanks and healers. Tanks have the responsibility of facing the heads away from the raid. I’ve seen some tanks accidentally (and sometimes purposefully) point the heads at the raid. If this happens, the heads will spew poison or fire on your group. You can side step it but you have a small area to avoid getting breathed on by both heads. For this fight, you pretty much want to stack up with the group the entire time. The reason is that once in a while you’ll see a giant bomb dropping onto you. So you want to be in the radius of healers’ AoE spells and any group protection buffs made available.

The second reason why you need to group up is that after killing a head, Megaera will go into a Rampage, causing massive AoE damage to the raid. You absolutely have to stack during this phase. It’s most a healing check so as a DPS you shouldn’t have to worry about anything. Typically, I try to help out by using any defensive cooldowns and/or spare healings that I might have. Also, as a DPS, I tend to blow my cooldowns on the second and last head. If I have a bloodlust available, I’ll save that for the last head as well.

The final aspect you need to watch out for is Cinders. This ability can fuck up a raid and piss people off. The thing is that if you get Cinders, you need to run out of the raid asap. Priests have to dispel the Cinders but only once you’re safely away from the raid because it will leave an effect on the ground. Obviously, if you’re inside of the raid when this happens, people will want to beat the living shit out of you. So get the fuck out. Now, here’s where you need to be extra careful. You want to avoid dropping the Cinders in the middle (where the blue head is) and you want to not move too close to where those adds in the back of the cavern are. That’s where the accidental pull can occur and where certainly the raid will kick you out.

Some additional aspects to this fight. As a combat rogue, you need to be extra careful. I’ve found combat rogues to have a tough time in encounters like these. What makes this encounter tough are Killing Spree and Ambush. The problem is that the positioning of Killing Spree and Ambush are pretty buggy because of their mechanics. Sometimes I might accidentally use Ambush and end up in the water or in some other strange spot. You don’t want this in an encounter. So I highly suggest that you just avoid using either. Keep it simple, just use your main DPS abilities and get carried fort his fight.

As a warrior, if you get Cinders, there’s a certain temptation to use your Heroic Leap since it’s easy to discharge Cinders safely away from the group. I almost had a heart attack the other night when I put myself near the adds. Fortunately, I was just far enough away to avoid pulling them (yet for some stupid reason the healers never bothered dispelling the Cinders from me so go figure).

For warlocks, you can set up a Demonic Gateway between both head locations. This is a nice convenience for your raid. It can be a slight help to healing since usually at the end of killing a head, they’ll throw down a bomb on the raid and can be avoided by getting out asap.

After putting down Megaera, you’ll have one more gauntlet of adds to hit and your last boss for this section. The next part is not tough but has the image of being scary because of a certain snail add. Truthfully, the bug adds leading up to Ji-Kun are really simple and most can be avoided. The idea is that as you make your way towards Ji-Kun, you will see glowing bones on the ground. If you step on these bones, you will cause an add to spawn. They aren’t tough but the less adds you have to deal with the better.

Another thing you need to avoid is this reddish fog. It’s a nasty poisonous DoT that you need to run out of asap. It’s easy to tunnel in on killing an add like a snail but completely forget that you’re inside of the fog and end up dying.

The only other add that you need to deal with is the giant snails. During the first week of this wing’s release, the forums on Blizzard’s website were filled with complaints about dealing with these snails because most people were being one shotted. This aspect has greatly lessened but overall you still will see people dying to them (hence partly why I’m writing a FULL guide to LFR, not just the bosses). The snails have the ability to insta-kill anyone who stands in front of them. So you need to DPS them from the side or rear. If you must DPS from the front, just be aware that they have a fairly large hit box (I’m not 100% certain about the range but you can DPS them from the front and remain safe).

Occasionally, you will be targeted by the snail with the little aggro eyes sign. If that happens, you’re best bet is to kite them along one side of the stairs (not the middle) and slow moonwalk, I mean move backwards while ensuring that you keep enough distance to damage the snail and stay alive. After you finish off these adds, continue avoiding glowing objects and head towards the Ji-Kun platform.

Ji-Kun

Ji-Kun can be easy or difficult depending on your role. Fortunately, you have the option of choosing what to do. The idea is that there must be a group dedicated to handling the nest. The nest group requires 3 DPS and 1 healer. This group flies from nest to nest and destroys eggs and probably the most important group to the encounter. Obviously, as someone new to these encounters, your best bet is to stay quiet and let other people do this job. If you feel adventurous, you’re probably better off finding a video showing you how to follow the group. A bad group will cause a wipe so I don’t recommend going in unless you have a group of really cool people who are willing to show you the ropes.

If you’re like me, lame and just wanting to hit the boss, the rest of the fight is pretty straight forward. Most of the fight is minimizing how much green goo you step on. Ji-Kun will do a “Feed Young” ability which spawns the green goo. If you stand in it, you can despawn it but you will also have a debuff that stacks and causes you to take additional damage in the future from these piles of green goo. You want to avoid stacking these up as you can die quickly from the damage.

For the boss’ Caw ability, you’re supposed to spread out. Now, here’s where if you’re a ranged it can get slightly interesting tactically. There’s Down Draft (which I will discuss) and the Feed Young green goo you need to worry about. While spreading out will prevent you from getting killed faster, Down Draft can cause issues as you might get flung off the platform. Now, what you could do is spread out for Caw then move in closer afterwards in anticipation for Down Draft. That way you can avoid being flung off the platform.

For Down Draft, there are two things to do. First, you’ll need to make sure you have some sort of movement boosting effect. For Hunters, DO NOT USE ASPECT OF THE PACK. Use Aspect of the Cheetah and make sure you Glyph it so you don’t daze yourself (I thought about doing a reverse Disengage but never tried it). For Paladins, I found that the passive 20% movement boost during this fight works well compared to the ability where Judgment gives you the 45% boost. If you’re a druid, you can use your Stampeding Roar. Usually, I’ve found that Down Draft occurs around 3 times per Ji-Kun fight, so you’ll more than likely only be able to use this for the first and third time. Other classes should have some form of a movement booster so check up on your talents and abilities to see which one you use. Also, make sure you position yourself facing one of the “longer” ledges. That will help if you have problems falling off. Lastly, if you do have a really good movement boost, do not immediately start attacking Ji-Kun when Down Draft is finished. There’s a chance that your tank might not have the highest threat during this phase. If you attack Ji-Kun with a high DPS attack, there’s a very good chance you’ll end up being one shot.

The only other mechanic in this fight to worry about is Quills. Again, this is a healing phase but you should make sure you have a defensive cooldown ready.

Beyond that most of the fight is easy as there isn’t much movement outside of avoiding the green goo and Down Draft aspects. Some people save Bloodlust towards the end once the nests are finished. It really depends on the group so again look out for raid calls when possible. I’ll go into part 3 next.

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