Hiya,

I saw a [comment] at Flash of Moonfire you wrote saying:
“I now never get adds, because I have figured out how to get just 1 stack up on the boss, and he almost always dies before the stacks drop at all”
Can you elaborate?

I hate this fight and with the pug finder it makes me feel helpless when healing or dps’ing

When I received this email I had, funnily enough, just alt-tabbed out of game while the group I was running Heroic BRC with was taking a quick afk, having just completed this fight. And not only that, but we had just gotten the achievement to boot.

Personally, I think the continuous stacking method of tanking Karsh is the optimal way to do it, if only to remove the adds portion of the fight completely. This of course depends entirely on if your healer can handle it. I checked with my healer, a Holy Pally, first to make sure he was comfortable with the amount of damage I’d be taking from each stack of Karsh’s Superheated Quicksilver Armor buff.

At 15000 extra fire damage per melee hit once at 15 stacks, there was a lot of extra damage. Of course, Karsh was also taking a lot more extra damage, so the candle was being burnt at both ends.

Anyway, I made sure to put up Resistance Aura to start, and then carefully tanking him next to a pillar. When the time came to dip him in (either at the start of the fight or about 3-4 seconds before his stacks dropped off), I clipped the pillar with him and applied another stack. Don’t drag the boss straight through the pillar, or he’ll take about three stacks of his buff and splash a ton of damage onto the raid.

The trick is getting comfortable with the timing needed to quickly weave him through the pillar and knowing when a stack is applied, even though the effect seems to lag and not stick immediately to him.

It is very doable, just requires a little fancy footwork.

Also, having answered this question I now realize the letter was referring to a comment Anafielle posted at FoM. Anaaaaaaaa!!

Er, in one dungeon.

Well, and the trash before the shadow boss in Halls of Origination. But I digress.

I used to groan when I pulled Heroic SFK in the LFD lottery. Then one day I came to startling revelation while running the place with some guildmates–all the mobs are undead. Well, there’s a spell for that.

Considering how important CC can be in heroics these days, every little bit helps, and what’s more fun than applying some good, honest CC yourself?

So, for that run I glyphed Turn Evil and gave it a place of honor on my bars. With its own hot key and everything. And as we proceeded through the dungeon, I feared mobs left and right with wild abandon. (Some might even say reckless disregard.)

There is an immensely satisfying feeling in applying your own CC and I love having yet another trick in my already bloated heroics toolbox. But there’s obviously a major caveat: you can, and will, pull extra mobs if you’re not careful. To be safe, you could have a druid root a mob and then Turn it, but then you’re probably looking at redundancy since roots is seldom used on a non-melee mob, and if the mob is melee, then fearing it is overkill.

Likewise, to emphasize the danger in fearing willy-nilly, I will admit I pulled two different bosses–Silverlaine and the Commander–by fearing a trash mob into them. And yet my pièce de résistance was in the room right before you go onto the L shaped ramparts leading to Godfrey’s tower. We accidentally pulled a second group of mobs, so I feared one. He then proceeded to run out the door and disappear. I promptly forgot about him, and continued tanking and WOGing while trying to stave off any deaths. Moments later what should reappear but our prodigal mob, who had dragged the four gargoyles he awoke back with him.

I sighed at my foolishness and picked them up, and we continued to grind through the horde set before us. More CCs went out on ranged mobs and the like, and once again–beset by either bravery or stupidity–I feared another mob. He as well ran out the door and onto the ramparts. My thinking this time was that we pulled the first pack of Gargoyles, he couldn’t get far, so no worries.

Moments later the second pack of gargoyles comes flying through the wall to attack us. The mob I feared (I’m guessing) ran across the rooftops, avoided the huge pack of geists, and managed to wake up the other four gargoyles across the way.

Once we were done clearing through about four cumulative pulls, miraculously without any deaths, I was duly chastened.

So, turner beware. But damn if it isn’t a fun and useful spell. Just be smarter about using it than I was.

Yesterday someone spotted on the Spanish WoW forums this revealing quote from a Blue:

Looking to Cataclysm, maybe you want to know that, for normal dungeons, players must discover the dungeon in the world prior to access it from LFD tool. It is possible that you could see attunements for heroics and raids (which would be similar to the one of Karazhan). Developers aren’t sure yet of whether they use attunements or not. However, heroic dungeons at level 85 would probably have more gear requirement (in comparison) than heroic dungeons at level 80.

From this there are two points I’d like to address. The first is the idea of raid attunements.

I think they’re a great idea.

But, not the way they were done in the past. The old BC system was broken, it punished guilds when they had to recruit, and made it really hard for players who joined the raiding scene late to jump into the end game, without forcing a guild to go back and do old content so the new recruits could join the rest of the raid in the current tier. Imagine if that old system was still in place and you had to drag someone through Ulduar again before you could take them to ToC. That would be excruciating.

I tweeted about this yesterday, but I think a great “tweak” to the attunement system would be to do something like the old BC system but couple it with the new guild achievement system to create a third way that doesn’t punish guild suffering from turnover. Set it up so there’s an achievement to unlock each raiding tier. To score the T12 achievement and open up Uldum (or whatever it will be), you need to have 25 guild members complete the quest chain through the T11 content that eventually attunes them to T12. Once you get 25/25 on that achievement, your guild dings, and future members (and anyone on the bench) are automatically attuned provided they are still in the guild.

I think raiding would be well-served by some sort of limited attunement system, especially the one I just outlined. Raiding needs that mystical je ne sais quois it had in the previous two x-pacs where progressing from tier to the other was marked by a lot more fanfare than a new patch. It doesn’t need to be some ridiculously onerous series of hoops, just a simple questline that would be fun and rewarding and easily accomplished by anyone seriously attempting the current raiding tier.

As for heroics, I hope that they do up the gear requirement to run them. Heroics should once again be heroic. I want a situation like we had in BC, where you had to grind a set of gear just to get ready for heroics. The day I dinged 80, I was herded directly into heroics, despite barely getting to the 535 defense minimum for them. Once I was in there, I girded my loins to be struck down immediately by some vengeful and vicious trash mob, but it never happened.

Likewise, I never got the point of having normal 80 dungeons and heroic 80 dungeons if people could just jump into heroics on day one. But, I guess that’s neither here nor there.

A great suggestion I saw on Blessing of Kings was for the first raiding tier to not open up until a bit of time after the expansion pack launched. That way people wouldn’t feel like they had to gogogo rush to max level, and then dive immediately into progression. If we were stuck in heroics for the first month or two of Cataclysm, it would make that “tier” of content more meaningful and feel less grindy right off the bat.

Ultimately, there are two sides to every coin. On one side, there’s how BC ran heroics and raids–forcing people to do lengthy questlines and kill certain bosses to move on to the next tier, and demanding rep grinds for unlocking heroics. On the flip side is the Wrath method–an “anything goes” model where someone can set foot in ICC without ever seeing an earlier tier raid, and likewise being able to jump into a heroic as soon as they hit 80.

Both were extremes, the wrong way to go about it. But, they both had One Big Thing right. The trick is finding the middle ground between the two in Cataclysm and hitting that sweet spot between exclusivity and accessibility.

I did something pretty mean over the weekend, and as a much-needed bit of catharsis I’m going to recount it here.

On Sunday I did a random heroic and was assigned to Utgarde Pinnacle. I buffed myself and the other party members up and sprinted off to the races. Once in that first long hallway I noticed that shadowbolts kept flying past the group I was tanking and picking up mobs up ahead.

At first I was willing to attribute it to a misclick by the Warlock, but after the second time it was obvious he was trying to speed me up.

Once at the first boss he declared in /p that we should do the Incredible Hulk achievement. The hunter agreed but the healer said “meh” and I silently agreed. As Svala does her little speech, the hunter picks up an Abom from the side hall and MDs it onto me. I immediately nuked it down. I wasn’t in the mood to carry these dps through an achievement.

Right before the boss starts, the Warlock decides to pull the other Abom waiting in the back of the room. I don’t know what he was thinking he was going to do once it got to him, because I let it squash him like so many gnats, and then picked it up.

No one said anything, the Warlock didn’t peep a complaint; we just downed Svala and continued on.

Nevertheless, the trigger-happy Warlock died a few more times over the course of the instance, mostly because he would pull ahead of me and I’d let the stuff kill him. I don’t think he ever got the message.

I ended up doing 43% of the damage done in that pug. It probably helped that one of the dps was dead most of the dungeon, and the dps as a whole were barely breaking 2k when they weren’t hugging the floor.

I’ve seen a deluge of folks on the WoW forums complaining about how hard Heroic Halls of Reflection is, how it needs to be nerfed, how it killed their father, etc. My buddy Palehoof apparently had three different tanks quit on him in one H HoR run yesterday. Eep. Personally–and I don’t mean this in a elitist jerkish sort of way–I didn’t find the place that difficult at all.

Honestly, the first gauntlet portion (which I suppose is the part most are having trouble with) is very easy to tank!

Park your party in Falric’s alcove (see image) around the corner in that tight spot. Mobs will instinctively aggro onto your healer and, because they can’t see her, run into the alcove. Then, just pick them up one by one. Keep consecrates down to nab everyone as they flood in. For those pesky casters use Avenger’s Shield to silence and force them to get closer.

The escape portion of the dungeon isn’t much more difficult, just use Holy Wrath liberally and consecrate once you’re got large packs settled in one spot. HotR like your life depends on it.

Anyone here having trouble with this place?