Those are Spellfingers

Never had problems in OK myself. I up up a skull on the Spellfingers (since everybody can mark now) and it’s gravy.
And i’d say that place requires patience above all, as in not to rush forward and aggro 3 packs+the patrol. Patience is sadly a rare commodity nowadays, but a friendly warning of “you pull before the tank…you tank it and you get no heals” works wonders.

There are the impatient and undergeared tanks that overpull, but i find that given my healing gear level i can almost always power through it if i don’t get heal aggro.

But heroic OK?. It semes to be part of the lowest teir like vh/nexus. So you get the sub 2500 gs tanks and dps. It has 5 bosses and a tremendous amout of caster trash and the newer players will want their 5 triumph/quests completed. It has skirmishers that should be killed first and interupted, but are not. Even the first boss. Ok we have a boss that immune to attacks, we have litle adds that are immune to attack, we have a elite add that needs tanking but the tank has not noticed it. Who is tanking it? I am as the healer. I adopted a policy if they want all bosses and I died before the first boss was dead, I would leave. Guess what that lead to me leaving 60% of the time.

I would, and do, happily drop group…take my debuff…log onto another character and Q up for a random. A 5 hour debuff wouldn’t stop me from dropping group. Put a functionality in the LFD that allows you to “blacklist” certain dungeons. Problem solved. If it means I have to wait a little longer, so be it.

I play this game for fun. Secondarily I play this game to enjoy coordinating w/ people I know and can talk to on vent. I generally don’t go out of my way to screw people I don’t know, but I will not sacrifice my fun because Blizz wants to show off “their masterpiece.” Sometimes companies make products that they think are going to be sure-fire hits, and they flop. Get over it and accept that your customers don’t like it.

I’m sure the designers don’t like the fact that people don’t like some of their work, especially since most of the dissatisfaction comes from the much anticipated riding interface. I design software for a living so I know that a bad feature is painful and a direct shot at your pride. I also don’t like EoE much and apparently I wasn’t alone. Once people got the gear they wanted they stopped going (kind of like Occulus). So I’m happy that you and your wife are enjoying H-Occ. Maybe I’ll see you there (oh wait H-Occ?, no I won’t).

I like to think, supplied with sufficient information, designers would take the “well, that didn’t work” approach and NOT make the same design mistakes twice. Players voting with their participation as opposed to just the loud mouthed ravings in the forums makes for a much more eloquent statement, one the devs showed listen to. Idoubt they’d consider tossing gear

Occulus is just one flaw after another. It was never “hard” it was annoying. Give me a hard encounter with coordination, awareness, and timing requirements and I’ll beat my tankish head against it all day long and not curse the designers one time. Give me an encounter with forced disruptive breaks, lame mechanics that don’t leverage the game engine in a way that is fluid … like combat in 3D space … and I’ll just not go. As did MOST players with Occulus. I run it now because, as Bear said, bailing is lamer (more lame?)

The best solution to all this remains an “opt out” option.

I can still get in a sticky bind when I have an itchy-triggered group member that tries to “help” by starting the pulls. Partly because of the Blizzard bug that if you dismount from combat, a lot of times the action bars get glitched and you have some sort of frankenstein half-vehicle half-normal UI.

Nonetheless, I feel totally different about Heroic Halls of Reflection. They either need to raise the reward level (while keeping the difficulty), and raise the gear requirement… or lower the difficulty of the dungeon. I get placed to tank it way too often with groups that are just incapable of performing at the level that H HoR demands – simply because it has sweet upgrades on it, and they are explicitly requesting it as soon as Dungeon Finder allows them to, in hopes of getting “carried” through it.

Super-geared raiders don’t request H HoR as much because they don’t really have slots that get upgraded there, and they don’t need the triumph badges. So most likely if you get someone super-geared in H HoR it’s because it was their random heroic.

I find myself quitting H HoR more often than Oculus nowadays, because it’s just often the case that no matter what you do, you can’t raise a player’s competencies/gear level throughout the night. Competency gets raised over time, I’ve seldom see any players go from “total noob” to “total pro” within 2 hours. You can patiently work your way around someone being new to Oculus mechanics, but telling someone to raise their DPS from 1500 to 3000 for H HoR is a lot harder to do.

The Oculus is a very techincal fight, and pugs don’t do well with technicality. I think Bliz decided to nerf the hell out of it in an attempt to make it as ‘easy’ as the other heroics (ICC content notwithstanding). For the majority of the players, heroics at this point are nothing more than badge farming. Something you can grab a pug for and down in 15-20 minutes. The Oculus simply did not allow this for most pugs. They made Eregos a pinata for an extra incentive. They already nerfed the place to the extent that, if they were to nerf it once more, Eregos would be replaced with a gigantic dragon stuffed with cotton candy holding a big neon sign over his head saying “FREE LOOT, INQUIRE WITHIN”.

The Oculus was a great bit of fun when run with a group of people who knew what to do or were willing to learn (because let’s be honest, it’s really not that hard once you know what to do).It was different, a breath of fresh air (get it?) from any of the other dungeons because it was so different. It was a terrible instance, though, when you had people who didn’t care to know how to do it and would subsequently keep you in there for far longer than you wanted. This was unfortunately the case most of the time.

It’s always a disappointment when something that is conquerable is nerfed anyway. In the case of the Oculus, I feel it was disappointing, but also needed for the sake of the random dungeon finder. The mechanics are pretty much the same and it’s still original from the other instances of Northrend. Whereas it’s less of a challenge to do with an experienced group, it can still be fun. Whereas you can (and likely will) still get Brute Force Billy in your groups, it won’t be as mind-numbingly difficult to work around his ‘creative’ ways to defeating the king of Candy Mountain.
.-= Nim (Ankh)´s last blog ..Kris Kringle: Quicklinks =-.

The thing that always made me dislike running it was the fact that you really did have to get a group of people that were good at that particular thing – the vehicle/flying on dragons/coordinating thing – or it became a long drawn out affair with a lot of wipes… UNTIL everybody figured it out.

I really do agree with Bear. More carrot is nice… but where’s the bigger stick?
.-= Kaethir´s last blog ..The Guns of Icecrown Citadel =-.