Comments on: Deviating from the norm

By: Sweet

Sweet — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 21:51:02 +0000

@Glissa
Your assuming 2 tanks and 2 heals. If your group is geared you can easily use a Plate wearing DPS as an OT and one Healer. But you are right, it would be a lot easier to bring at least 15.

By: Dorgol

Dorgol — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 20:10:43 +0000

25 man Vault is my only raid so far. Got lucky and won the roll on the pally tanking gloves.

Sadly, they are better than any DPS gloves I have access to. Not better for tanking, that would be expected… these things are better for DPS than anything I have access to.

I when I run heroics I just pray no one inspects me and looks to closely at the +Defense on my gloves. :|

By: Kitts

Kitts — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 18:05:49 +0000

We all know what assumptions do.

By: Inzilbêth

Inzilbêth — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 16:49:29 +0000

Good luck for the spiders!

If you get through the spiders without too much difficulty I’d recommend that it’s well worth going for at least one boss in one of the other three wings:

Military Quarter: Instructor Raz — this fight is tricky on the tanks (Matticus actually recommends using a tank and a DPS to do the controlling, and having the other tank around in case of problems), but fairly simple for the rest of the raid. Expect to wipe a few times whilst the controllers get the hang of the interface, but perseverance should produce a kill

Plague Quarter: Noth is a fairly simple phased tank-and-spank/lots-of-adds-to-control fight so long as you have a good team of decursers doing the whack-a-mole thing.

Construct Quarter: Patchwerk is a fairly simple DPS check, all the damage is essentially shared between the two tanks so provided your healers have enough endurance (which they should if you got through the spider quarter) it’ll just come down to whether or not you can achieve the 12,000 sustained DPS necessary. Unless you’re very close on the first attempt (or something goes wrong) it’s probably not worth trying again. If you’re running with three healers you may find you have an excess of healing in which case it’s well worth getting the priest (if you have one) to wand except when they’re needed, for the extra 250dps or so that’ll give you.

What we did the first time we got through Spiders was to go and have a look at Patchwerk expecting to be rather short on DPS (we were, but it gave us an idea of how far off we were) and then went off and did Noth.

The second boss in each wing is a tactics fight of some description and I wouldn’t recommend going that far unless you’re really on a roll — In my experience most people would rather end with a boss kill than after multiple wipes on an unfamiliar boss. I expect I’m preaching to the choir here though :-).

By: Paraclesis

Paraclesis — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 16:07:47 +0000

Can’t wait till Thursday!!

By: Tigerfeet

Tigerfeet — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 14:38:06 +0000

Don’t worry about gear minimums. Seriously. OS and VoA are easymode as long as you’ve got a group that can follow directions (as you saw in VoA). Things get a little more complicated in Naxx, but again, the focus is on player skill and not gear level.

I do have one reccomendation for you though. If you can field the players for a 25-man group, DO SO! 25-man is easier than 10-man simply because there’s more room for error. You’ve got more bodies and the fights are less ‘tightly tuned’. When we stepped into 25-man I don’t think we killed one boss without at least someone being DCd, often more than one someone. In a 10-man, if you’re coming in with minimum gear (I consider quest blues and greens to be minimum) then absolutely everybody needs to bring their A-game, there’s not much room for little mistakes (which always end up happening, but that’s part of learning)

Good luck though! I can’t wait to see how it goes.

By: FaceTank

FaceTank — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 14:28:59 +0000

VoA is a ton of fun. Basically from a tanking perspective there are 2 critical times. On the trash when they punt the OT needs to taunt and on Archavon when it says he lunges at the tank the OT needs to taunt. By the way when Archavon “lunges” at the main tank take a look at his right hand. The tank is actually being grabbed by the boss. As a bear he was actually grabbing my face and then he tossed me in the air. It is really funny to see :)

By: Glissa

Glissa — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 14:01:28 +0000

” Tristan says:
January 19th, 2009 at 4:15 pm VOA is easy as… you could go in there with a bunch of good 75’s and clear it lol… Apparently there have been guilds that do the 25 man ones in 2 groups of 12 just for double loot its so easy”

I find the 12-man VoA25 VERY hard to believe.. That only leaves 8 DPSers and to reach the needed 33,333DPS to kill Archavon, they would each have to put out 4,166.67 DPS for a full 5 minutes. I know that number isn’t unrealistic but 8 DPS putting out that much, they would have to fully geared with the best that’s available right now and even then..Archavon is jumping around out of range and you’re avoiding gas clouds.. I just don’t see how someone could maintain over 4K dps with all of that going on. I could be wrong though :p

By: Slam

Slam — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 10:26:12 +0000

Got to agree with you BBB, Archavon is very easy and the sort of thing guilds should do as soon as they get a group of 80s together. We hit it for the first time last week, and Obsidian Sanctum and had very few problems with any of it. Once we’d learned the tactics it was easy purples for the guild and something we’ll be doing every week before Naxx runs.

Good luck with the job hunting.

By: Bluetiger

Bluetiger — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 09:32:59 +0000

The biggest challenge of VoA seems to be to get Wintergrasp. When I was in there, and the boss went down (like you said, a mish mash of all kinds of things, and once again, I’m glad my guild needs me as a shadow-priesty) and we were standing around with a general “What now?”-face…