Greedy Goblin

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

5 levels lower

I wanted to post the next step in blue raiding (ICC5 HC or Naxx10), but the raiders did not show up (hopefully RL and not cowardice). Besides recruiting more people I can't do more to speed the blue raiding up, but I didn't want to let a week pass by without direct WoW content on the blog. So revived the partially abandoned solo/duo project.

This time we went to Razorfenn Kraul. That has level 27 bosses. We were level 22. Yet we wiped only once, and not on bossfight, but by a patrol. With gear and consumables, the low hit chance could be increased a bit, but still had 18% miss. Luckily if the dot is finally up, it stays up. Also the physical hits of Sitah just missed 8%.

And here they came. First Death Speaker Jargba:

And without much problems, he went down:

Aggem Thorncurse wasn't any harder. Overlord Ramtusk also hit the ground. He hits much harder, I mostly just healed Mezzlos, the voidwalker.

And finally came Chargla Razorflank. Did I mention low spell hit? The voidwalker's torment (main aggro generator) is a spell. It's not a miracle that my girlfriend pulled aggro and get herself killed. (Moral: always wait aggro time if your tank is a voidwalker or something dumber, like a DK mentioning Megan Fox). No problem, I kept healing Mezzlos until she ran back. I couldn't solo her, since my DPS was below her HPS. She was on 100% when Sitah got back.

Finally, we seen what happens to a hunter who brings only 2K arrows to a dungeon and also the serious goldfarming needed for such adventures:

Some thoughts: the LFD doesn't even offers us RFK. We couldn't get the "kill endboss" quest. We got loot that we can equip 7 levels later. We were 2 in a dungeon meant for 5. And we wiped only once because of bad positioning.

I know the game meant to be accessible. But accessible to a group with 3 literally 0 DPS people (as the 2 of us could carry 3 0 DPS)?

I'm not sure we hit the bottom. We don't unlock XP and will pay a visit to Gnomeregan. Lvl 28 bosses. We'll see what happens then.

20 comments:

Iiene of Kul Tiras said...

Dude:

Level 27 content is meant for NOOBS at level 23 to 25. Of COURSE your alts with full knowledge of the game and Heirloom / enchants can easily defeat it.

Duh!

What the hell is your point?

Unknown said...

Gnomeregan is a wretched hive of scum and villainy. Out of respect for your sanity, I'd say skip it.

Seriously.

Nobody will hold it against you.

Anonymous said...

Good gear and enchants lift a character to better performance (oh yeah, I haven't mentionned knowing the fight and not being a retard ... but then again that should go without saying, doesn't it?)

Greygamer said...

To be fair these instances have been nerfed into the ground. My L34 Warlock recently completed RFD and got items that also can't be used (I didn't need seeing as I couldn't use them but won on a greed roll)
I'm levelling a group of alts (3 dps, a healer and a tank) through instances and they seem childishly easily even with level approriate gear (250-350 gearscore at L33-34). In fact it's the over geared (gearscore 1k+) characters who are often the biggest concern with tanks outrunning the healer and aggroing everything in sight.

Tanks, especially seem to be overgearing at the moment. It did lead to an amusing moment when a tank was boasting about how he was so far ahead on the Damage meters until I pointed out his gearscore was at least 700 points higher than the next character.
As one of our group said ...owned!

Anonymous said...

Looks like you had a lot of fun in there. The boss fight took over 12 Minutes which usually takes just one minute with a group of 5 level 25 Players. Ok as you said your dps was on the corpse run, so the real fight was surely only some minutes.
But wait, I think the players I was in there where 25 at the beginning of the instance. Since you get lots of XP in there everybody leveled up until we met her.
I wish you good luck with Gnome, but I guess the trash is much harder there with lots of pats and alarm-o-bots. I can't remember of any boss which would be too difficult.

Anonymous said...

Do it yourself and post when you've finished, Liene of Kul Tiras.

Anonymous said...

It's not that strange. The instances are made in a manner that a shadow priest can heal it, and a retri paladin can tank it etc, etc. So it's not that hard already.

You have pets. That makes 4 healthbars to live. As long as your pet keeps aggro and you keep healing him, you won't die, unless your highest hps is less then boss dmg. You can almost calculate it.

Of course there's still something called skill, as I don't see a player who plays a warlock for the first time doing this. So skill is also a factor here, but not as dominant as pets.

Then you have enchants, heirlooms, and some potion or elixer. Did you have those when doing the instances with a normal group when you did them for the first time? I bet not.

I have a lvl 19 rogue twink. His dmg is crazy for a lvl 19. Still he can't solo the first boss in deadmines. Why not? The boss has a higer dmg output then I can bring in healing. With your pet, you can bring that healing. And that's a huge difference. So I'd love to see you doing this on a lvl 19 rogue twink.

I still find the idea awesome though. At least you found something challenging for yourself.

Quicksilver said...

I believe the main reason behind the low activity in your project is simply the fact that they have realized ICC is not that easy as foreseen.

At this point, going in there in blues and succeeding, is, if not impossible, extremely difficult to pull and will require much more time invested than 3 hours per week. And this simply because properly geared guilds are having trouble clearing the place.

It is becoming clear for everyone that what you wanted to prove, that the content is a joke, is not entirely true. I believe they have done a good job with ICC and even with the eventual nerfs to the place, this is a decent challenge, atm. You might want to try it.

Aeonus said...

An interesting point to note is both the power of Glyphs and the *MASSIVE* Talent buffs that have been granted to players through the various content patches.

RFK was available at release, and continues to exist in very much the same form. Contrasting this, take a look at this older Warlock Talent Calculator.
http://www.wowprovider.com/?talent=1604500_9

Chopsui said...

@Okrane

He is talking about ICC 5man on heroic. I don't know any properly geared guild having trouble clearing that.

I just happened to have RL commitments the past 2 Saturdays (as it the day I have most social commitments generally), causing me to be absent.

Next saturday shouldn't be a problem, and I think we'll see ICC 5 Heroic cleared. The idea is to progress semi-slowly through the raid content, so people can get a little used to each other, and their classes, while showing what can and can not be done. ICC is still far away on the schedule, because the point isnt to show that it can be cleared in blues in it's current state. Gevlon stated that we will do ICC not before end of February, with the help of zone buffs, and blizz nerfs.

Chopsui of Undergeared - ArathorEU

Leeho said...

The issue with undergeared project might not be because of difficulty of ICC, but because of ICC consuming too much time.
T10 is really expensive. If people in your guild raid on their main characters, they need that T10. Maybe they don't need it for ICC itself, but for hardmodes they do for sure. Almost for all classes and specs T10 bonuses provide a huge boost, so you can't just pick up some drops and crafts and be generally happy, like it was the case with T9 and ToC.
So people have to farm daily heroic every day, weekly raid and both difficulties of ICC every week. It's a lot of time, so they might be too busy with their mains.
Tbh i really doubt that there're ppl that don't raid at all, but want to participate in such an extreme project.

Halmotors said...

Gnomeregan should be interesting at that level. I think it's doable, but the sheer size of the dungeon, coupled with the quick respawns and numerous patrols, will make it a difficult fight. Good luck to the both of you, though!

Lisa Treadway said...

My husband and I duo'd Gnomer (me as a Bear-Feral druid, him as a Shadow Priest) somewhere in the early to mid 30s. No twink gear, no enchants, no heirlooms. Took a long time; we ended up quitting partway the first session and then going back. But, it /was/ a success; we did all the quests (including the goblin escort quest inside) and killed the final boss on the second try (though one of his bombs killed us a moment after he died, heh!).

Honors Code said...

Devs don't balance classes or talents for low level content. Perhaps Warlocks are really strong at that level.

With a Warlock/Hunter combo, you've essentially got a 4 man party as it is and each of you can heal your own pet.

It might be more difficult if you say a Rogue/Mage duo.

Diorinix said...

@ liene of Kul Tiras

He's not using BoA gear. They using the dungeons blues and quest greens they pick up along the way.

Iiene of Kul Tiras said...

Diorinix:
"He's not using BoA gear. They using the dungeons blues and quest greens they pick up along the way."

No, Golmeg has the BoA gear, Sitah has gear from instances done while being boosted by Koltas. Both have level 60 enchants (where possible) and both have all possible WotLK additions.

Don't get me wrong here, I think the project itself is pretty cool. In fact, I do this stuff all the time myself, I just run both characters myself on two computers. My most recent achievement was to solo Garfrost in Pits of Sauron (normal mode) double boxing a Prot spec Paladin and a Disc spec Priest.

It was a brutal, 8 minute fight. The freakin' Saronite boulders were EVERYWHERE. I wiped 6 times before figuring out the strategy that would work.

Why did I do that? Because that was the only step in the Quell'Delar quest chain that you HAD to defeat a boss. I wanted to see if it could be done solo.

Where I draw issue is in Gevlon's couching of the article to bash the 'easiness' of the game. These are optimized level 22 chars specifically designed to do this, you cannot compare this to the 'newb condition' that these instances are designed for back in vanilla WoW.

Anonymous said...

First, he IS using BoA gear...those trinkets shown in the screenshot aren't available at level.

Second, these instances were level-tuned a long time ago...the game is very, very different now:

1. As noted, there weren't scaled-to-level BoA trinkets available when RFK was originally tuned.

2. The majority of the dungeon drops (and many quest rewards) have been re-tuned to be useful in the meantime. Good example...remember when the cloth shoulders (Feline Mantle) from SFK had agility and stam, rather than intellect and SP? Hit, crit, spell power, and the like simply weren't available when RFK was newly-tuned; that 8% hit would not have been available at level 22 at the time.

3. As mentioned, glyphs make a huge difference. So do the consumables that are available now that weren't available then, as well as profession bonuses that have been re-vamped (along with the items that are actually available from those professions).

4. Talent trees have been radically designed since then as well. At 22, you're only 13 points in, but even the early-tier talents have been redesigned over the years to provide better utility per point.

So, you're not so much proving that "the game has been made too accessible" or that Blizzard is overdoing the "bootsing" mentailty you've been talking about....you're simply proving that Blizzard didn't re-tune every leveling dungeon as they introduced design iterations in other areas of the game. Should they have retuned these dungeons? You can probably make that arguement, but extending that arguement into any deeper meaning is a bit of a stretch.

Kevin Marquette said...

Even before this old content was nurfed, 2 experienced players near level could boost a group. Many times you only need one, but its cake with 2.

The other guys won't even know they are worthless.

Hana said...

I'm really looking forward to see how you manage Gnomer. I remember that place being a huge pain due to all the packs and how fast the respawns are.

And the word verification is "impro." Oddly appropriate.

Iiene of Kul Tiras said...

Kevmar:
"Even before this old content was nurfed, 2 experienced players near level could boost a group. Many times you only need one, but its cake with 2.

The other guys won't even know they are worthless."

And your point is... that experienced players that have no real reason to be in an instance can beat it easily because they're skilled beyond that instance?

Good work, Sherlock! You've cracked the code!