Post-patch raiding: an exercise in frustration?
by Elizabeth Wachowski 
Dec 8th 2006 at 12:30PM
An anonymous low-level alt on the WoW Raids & Dungeons forums posts about the (lack of) fun her guild has had raiding Naxx after the patch. She bemoans that many useful healing mods no longer work, dungeons keep crashing or lagging badly, and of course, there's the maddening click ... click ... click sound of people joining and leaving the raid, which is the raiding equivalent of listening to someone scrape their fingernails across a blackboard for five hours.
Other raiders note that certain boss encounters are nearly undoable post-patch, including Patchwerk (which was hotfixed fairly quickly) and Instructor Razuvious (priests mind controlling Razuvious's students were not able to use their "pet bar.") Less-progressed raiders have been discouraged by paladin and shaman loot dropping for both factions. And of course, there are the personnel issues associated with trying to raid right after a giant patch. What do we do with these trees of life? Why are all our healers either PVP-specced or missing in action? And for crying out loud, who's been going through half the instance 0-0-0 specced because they forgot that the talents reset?
Have you given up on raiding until the post-patch madness subsides, or are you planning to fight the good fight right up until the expansion?
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Gifflen Dec 8th 2006 1:04PM
My guild, Duplicity, on Dragonmaw Decided to try MC the day after the patch just to test the waters without pushing too hard. Well the good news is we did down rag and in almost record speed. The bad news, not only did we not have most of the mods we were comfortable with, the ones we did have were spewing errors like uncle fred after a bit too much bean dip during the super bowl. If all of that wasn't enough, Our ventrillo server crapped out very early on in the night leaving us fairly gimped compared to our normal standards of raiding. It was... an experiance.
Ryan D. Dec 8th 2006 1:14PM
So that's what that noise was... I thought someone was playing Diablo 2...
After the patch and eager to try bigger things with my fancy elemental buddy, I wound up settling for a Strat run..
First impression: I
Lex Dec 8th 2006 1:22PM
We were raiding ZG, and on the Tiger boss a healer tossed a bubble too soon and pulled aggro from Thekal and died. Okay, no problem, reset right?
Nope. Thekal and his boys chased everyone all the way out of the instance. Yeah, the whole leash thing is a little easy mode anyway, but we would have made a real attempt even without the healer if we weren't counting on it.
Paladin Dec 8th 2006 1:44PM
My guild did AQ40 successfully up to Fankriss (our usual stopping point since nobody cares to go any further) on Wednesday and it went "Ok". No wipes but more deaths than usual. The click/lag bug made Battleguard Satura a really close call with only 10 people alive when we killed her.
The big problem came last night in Naxx. After killing Patchwerk and Grobb last week, this week was just a mockery of our progression last week. A wipe on Spider Wing trash mobs, several deaths on the following pulls due to decursing and people outright being morons and then to top it all off it took us 3 attempts to kill Anub, a boss that we always 1-shot.
Seeing as the decursing problems were mixed with people getting less than 10 FPS after Anub, we called it a night. Pretty sad since we normally kill 3 bosses a night in Naxx.
Our Rogue CL said it best though. "This patch removed your mods, not your damn brains!"
Necrofish - Darkspear Dec 12th 2006 10:44AM
/script if not _clickfixed then __xps=PlaySound; function PlaySound(snd) if (snd~="igCharacterInfoTab") then __xps(snd); end end _clickfixed=1; end
Type that in to fix the clicking. A macro is useful since it comes back every login / out.
Salochine Dec 8th 2006 1:54PM
Actually, the mind control problem, is probably because they are using CTRaid. I just got a priest alt to 30, and wanted to try MC out, only to find I could not use abilities!
I heard how we are supposed to, so I removed all addons, and there was the bar. I took a half hour turning on and off addons to find that CTRaid was the one that was causing it to not appear.
I have no idea why, but post 2.0 CTraid blocks it.
Skunky Dec 8th 2006 2:10PM
In response to #5, I do not have CTRaid installed currently, and my pet bar refused to show up for 3 hours yesterday on my hunter. Logging in and out didn't seem to fix it, although this morning it was fine.
Bradley Dec 8th 2006 2:33PM
The clicking is easy to fix. Make a macro with this code:
/script if not _clickfixed then __xps=PlaySound; function PlaySound(snd) if (snd~="igCharacterInfoTab") then __xps(snd); end end _clickfixed=1; end
...and click it. You need to click it each time you login. The click sound is gone!
Our first few raids post-patch didn't go so bad. The lag caused us to disable CTRaid altogether, which gimped some people with lack of tank target boxes, and severely hampered cross raid healing. The latest CTRaid seems to fix it, though, it was working fine and lag-free for us last night.
Manual decursing has been bad for us (we wiped on Faerlina once due to lack of decursing). But people will get the hang of doing it old skool again.
You'd think stacking HoTs would make the healing much easier. But the nerf to +heal gear on downranked spells is seriously screwing with our healing. Our healers really are going to have a tough time with this.
On the plus side, raid DPS seems to be WAY up overall. We took out Patchwerk in like 4 minutes (when it usually takes the full 7).
I think once everyone gets all their favorite mods updated, and Blizz hotfixes the biggest bugs in the patch, things will not only be back to normal, they'll be better than before. With the changes to gameplay mechanics and new talents for most classes, endgame with the current content is going to be way easier than it was pre-patch.
Except maybe for Alliance getting Ten Storms drops. That is just plain stupid.
Oblitherax Dec 8th 2006 3:52PM
There is now a mod to stop the click available @ curse :
http://wow.curse-gaming.com/en/files/details/4993/stoplfgclick/
Thayne Dec 8th 2006 8:21PM
Our guild ran BWL the last 2 nights. First night we cleared to firemaw and all seemed fine besides a few minor issues with Vael, we actually flew through and quit earlier than our usual one night clear to screw with our UI's and get them right.
2nd night everything was fine untill Chromie. We've had Chromie on farm for a while now but last night was disasterous. We've been talking all day to figure out what all was going wrong and it seems there were several issues. Of course there was the Decursive hangover with debuffs stacking much higher than usual, but there also seems to be some issues with both tanking and healing. The changes to healing gear and to damage mitigation along with some other warrior changes seem to be the main culprit.
Druid dude Dec 8th 2006 7:32PM
Ah yes, the Trees, the Trees... what to do with the Trees?
That is a question we had been pondering. Last night we finally got raid for a little before the server crapped out. Those silly Trees absolutely onwed the healing meters. Now don't get me wrong, topping heal meters doesn't mean your a better healer, it means that you topped the heal meters; its one indication, but far from the only thing that matters. Heal meters aside, Druid healing was freakin amazing. But, it takes a different healing strategy than what we used to do. Let me explain.
Pre-patch, Druids were very good single target, direct healing healers. That is, give a Druid someone to heal, the job is going to be done, and done well. One of the most effectiv, (though often maligned) healing strategies was the liberal use of HT4. Sprinkle in a Rejuv here and there, a Druid could pump out a nearly endless stream of heals. With the heal downranking nerf, thats gone. The Druid that tries HT4 spamming post-patch is a lost tree hugger indeed.
With the Druid's best direct heal being just about worthless in terms of Heal-Per-Second and mana efficiency, the HT4 spamming strategy is dead.
Druids however have become Gods of the Heal Over Time. A Druid in Tree form can rejuvs on a large number of people, and those rejuvs now tick for more than we ever dreamed they could. Put 2 or 3 Trees in a single group... it gets crazy, its just awesome!
So again, our single target heals are crap now. Not worth messing with, at least not in light of the healing Godliness waiting for those that embrace a new healing paradigm. Single target healing: dead. Pack Healing: (cue the angleic harps) AAAHHHH!
Look at it this way. 4 Tanks, 4 Druids. each Druid is assigned a single tank to heal. This is how it was done pre-patch. But now, each Druid is going to find they are not nearly as effective as they were. They will probably use higher rank heals, which are also slower, in an attempt to make up for their greatly reduced lower ranks of HT. Druids will goo OOM sooner, the 3 second cast sucks. End result: 4 Druids hurting for mana, maybe a dead tank or two for good measure.
Instead, take those same 4 Druids and Tanks, and tell the Druids: Each of you heal ALL FOUR tanks. Hmmm... The smart Druid says okay, I will Rejuv each of the 4 tanks. We now have 4 Druids each casting Rejuv on 4 tanks, and refreshing their Rejuvs every 12 seconds. If you do the math, you find that a Druid casting Rejuv on 3 targets works out to slightly more healing done in a 12 second period than HT4 spamming used to do, though at a slightly increased mana cost. But the Druid gets the reaminder of the 12 second cycly to regen mana, heal someone else, Swiftmend if a tank is in trouble, NS->HT11 the Mage that pulled aggro, you name it.
The end result is the the Druids are pumping out way more healing in a given time than before, and if smart about it will be no worse off mana-wise. If doing this Paack Healing strategy/method/whatever, you end up with tanks that are in great shape HP-wise, and a bunch of other healers in the raid bored and looking for something to heal. This is what we did last night, it was freaking amazing!
Orcsbane Dec 9th 2006 12:34PM
Post patch raids are actually a waste of time unless your guild has AQ40 and Naxx only on thier list. IMO the epic pvp gear and weapons are better than any gear you get below AQ40. I know I know, the Tier 1 and 2 stats and set bonuses for warrior and priest especially help them much better for raiding than the pvp gear does, but just follow me for a moment by an instance by instance and your future in Azeroth outlook.
ZG - unless you just love running this for the fun of it, why do it. PvP gear is much better than anything u can get here.
MC - Same as above, except for the tanks and healers, it is argueably better to have the Tier 1 gear for raids, but for everyone else this instance is a waste of time, it would be better for them to get the pvp gear and weapons.
AQ20 - books? On my priest I won the rank 5 greater heal book about 1 week before patch and now all healers have it, saved me 4g for paying to learn it.
Ony - LOL, nothing like haveing 2 Shammy helmets to drop on you. Onyxia or shall we call her Onexus. And on my warrior ive been at many deaths of ony and still do not have the Tier 2 helm.
BWL - This instance I would consider not being a waste of time if your guild has it on 4hr or less farm status. If your just starting it with your guild I would say your time is much better spent getting the pvp gear.
Now I know some people are thinking I'm only thinking about myself here and I should think of whats in the best interest of the guild. Remember I have a Warrior and a priest the 2 classes that would probably be more interested in the Tier 1 and 2, but the guild should have on its close radar the fact that we will be leveling from 60-70 soon, and guilds are going to want everyone to get to 70 ASAP. A pvp geared priest or tank will out grind and out level any holy Tier 2 priest or protection spec Tier 2 warrior, and when you get to 70 all that gear is going to be worthless anyway. So why not go after the gear that will get you on a faster leveling start than gear that is good for raiding and will be vendered in a couple months.