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All of the latest Mists of Pandaria newsBreakfast topic: Has Trial of the Grand Crusader been a reasonable challenge?
by Matt Low 
Sep 6th 2009 at 8:00AM
My raiding guild suffered from the Anub'Arak soft reset issue where we were unable to reach the floor where the oversized bug was. We wanted to clear him out on normal mode before we switched over to the harder difficulty. But since the floor was intact, we couldn't! (Note: This has since been fixed).
Because of this, we decided to toggle on Heroic mode for Trial of the Crusader on 25 just to get a feel for it. Some guilds believe that the Coliseum, even on heroic, is too easy. So I went in wondering what the fuss was all about. I wanted to know how easy the heroic setting would be.
But that's when I faced the reality check.
Remember, not everyone is in a top 100 guild. We burned through about 10 attempts that night just working on the first encounter alone. That experience helped to ground us and we realized what we needed to do to get through that mountain. In the end, we weren't able to even get past Gormok. We came to the conclusion that we were definitely going to need to coordinate healing and tanking cooldowns to break past the final minute of the first boss.
Nonetheless, it was fairly humbling. We'll have to go in next time much more carefully and with a more detailed game plan in mind.
It's been several days since Trial of the Grand Crusader has been accessible. Do you feel it has just the right amount of challenge for your raid group? Have you found it too easy or too difficult?
Filed under: Breakfast Topics, Raiding
Reader Comments (Page 4 of 5)
Skem Sep 6th 2009 12:00PM
My guild (a 10manner) 2-shotted normal... and then couldn't get past Gormok in heroic.
On reflection and I think with us while we where focusing on getting everyone experience on the encounters it meant key roles (read healers/tanks) where missing out on equipment up grades.
I have no doubt next week will do better.
we did PUG up to 25 and got to the pvp encounter before decent and difficulty set in.
Satanica Sep 6th 2009 12:02PM
My guild is definitely struggling on 10 man heroic, yet to try 25 man but I think we'll have even more hassle. Best attempt was 1200hp left on icehowl >< Next week we'll have him!
Normal mode was maybe a little too easy though, 10 and 25 man.
Jason Sep 6th 2009 12:23PM
Unless Arthas and all his goonies are a walk in the park, then no, I don't think we've been adequetly prepared.
dan Sep 6th 2009 12:34PM
It was my understanding that you couldn't toggle to hard mode 25 until you killed Anub on normal mode 25....
chady Sep 6th 2009 12:40PM
My guild raids on tuesday nights so we were getting our first attempt on the final boss anub' arak. We downed him in two attempts which was pretty good and were on our way to the Heroic mode for 25 man. Not only does everything hit harder and have more health. But the bosses are also on a timer so if you can't down them your sol for the first boss. That was a very real realization of how unprepared we were.
Frankly Im glad for that if we could have downed the encounter on our first their would have been no challenge at all. So I think yes its easy when people have all top lvl gear and are in raiding gear. And frankly the fights aren't as hard as some boss fights used to be It just has a lot of soft enrage timers.
If your guild is complaining about how easy the fights are then go for the achievements and talk about easiness that way
Lorem Sep 6th 2009 1:16PM
I think Blizzard is headed down the right path with normal and heroic versions. The heroic version is a challenge while the normal version can be a challenge for less hardcore people. I think it's great but it might need some tweaking. It's great that everyone an see new content at the level they want.
Zebulin Sep 6th 2009 1:28PM
Faction Champions (10-normal) has been a roadblock for our guild. We rofl-stomped the Beasts and Juraxxus (sp?) our first night in, but cannot, for the life of us, figure out the Faction Champions. Could be that we're just not PVP-minded, but holy god, these guys are a PITA. :/
Jewbanks Sep 6th 2009 5:40PM
Im under the impression that if you beat normal mode on 10 or 25 you can unlock heroic. so maybe thats what he meant.
ava Sep 6th 2009 1:48PM
I always wonder why people think raiders who can clear content fast have no lives. While it's debatable on top 20 guild that raid non stop until its dead, most raiding guilds I know raid less than 20 hours a week. No one I know fits the unemployed basement dwelling virgin stereotype - most that I know are working professionals and many have families. The difference is they raid efficiently - they're there to get things done, they're prepared, and understand how to go about it. It's a silly stereotype. Besides, I'm not going to judge someone on how they spend their free time, especially when the $15 cost for a month is far cheaper than moat other forms of entertainment right now.
The general consensus I have been hearing is normal mode is too easy. That's not coming from a "hardcore" raider - I'm hearing that from guilds that throw together raids once or twice a week. Casual is often confused with the term bad, and that's not the case with the casual players I know - they feel insulted.
The heroic version 25 is nice - excellent challenge, and I hope we make progress more on it this week. But I feel the difference between the normal and heroic version is just way too much. I don't think that's fair for guilds looking for something in between.
Neirin Sep 6th 2009 2:24PM
For those that call themselves "hardcore" I have a proposition for you: go back before you could save games or there were continues. That's right, you can never log out of WoW and if you die you reset to lvl 1. Now tell me, is a certain amount of pandering to "casuals" sometimes a good thing?.
rrouland Sep 6th 2009 2:28PM
We have one of those semi-serious yet casual raiding guilds and we reached Anub on 25-man and will continue to work on him tomorrow. Many of the fights in H ToC are actually quite easy if you can coordinate and react quickly. This is one of those "bring the player, not the class" things.
Key points on each of these fights:
Gormak: be quick to dps the snobolds, get out of the fire.
Acidmaw & Dreadscale: learn how the paralytic toxin and burning bile work and then burn down acidmaw.
Icehowl: if someone cannot look at this guy and know where he's charging, and get out of the way, you should remove them from the raid.
Lord Jaraxxus: this guy can be a bit tough. It requires everybody to reach fast and know their duties. If someone gets incinerate flesh, we call out in vent and say the group so we can get healing to that person fast before they do damage to all raid members. That's key. If you don't, the raid-wide damage will overwhelm you. If he buffs himself, dispel it. If you get legion flame, walk straight back and not thru the raid. If he summons a mistress, shift all dps. If he summons an infernal, shift all RANGED dps.
Faction Champions: really tough fight. what eventually pushed us over to victory was priest mass dispel. they put so many buffs on themselves that heal/shield/do damage at such insane levels, you MUST dispel. Then focus DPS on 1 at a time, starting with healers. Soft targets need to immediately recognize they have aggro and take appropriate action - fade, ice block, snare, slow, run, etc.
Twin Val'kyr: this is a test of your group's ability to react and coordinate. they do little damage, but if you do not have the proper color at the proper time, you're dead. split the raid in half, Light and Dark group. The dark group gets the dark buff and fights the light twin. The light group gets the light buff and fights the dark twin. You cannot hurt them unless you are the OPPOSITE color. black and white orbs will fly around - dps needs to grab as many of the same color orbs as you can. you will get an insane dps buff. avoid the opposite color orbs - they do 7k damage. the twins only do 2 abilities - twin's pact and vortex. in pact, one of the twins will shield and begin casting a massive heal for both twins. have someone say in vent - "dark twin shield - get light buff and dps". you have 8 seconds to break the shield and interrupt the healing spell. FAST reaction is needed. Once the shield is down go back to your side and get your original color buff. The second ability is vortex. In this, one twin will say "Let the BLANK consume you". Listen to the BLANK. If blank is LIGHT, everyobdy needs the light buff or they will die. If blank is DARK, everybody needs the dark buff or they will die. It takes a lot of practice, but once you get the rhythm down, it's quite easy.
Anub - still working on that one.
Enjoy.
Rippchen Sep 7th 2009 6:46AM
> Acidmaw & Dreadscale: learn how the paralytic toxin and burning bile work and then burn down acidmaw.
i dont think you are referring to 25man heroic mode here. you can not burn down acidmaw on heroic because dreadscales enrage will kill you for sure.
hoviboy Sep 6th 2009 2:35PM
Too easy, huh? Maybe that's true when your decked out in full ilvl245 gear. From my experience, heroic modes (10 & 25) are not forgiving; some bosses hit like trucks, enrage timers are somewhat tight, and the 50 attempts limit adds some kind of non negligible pressure.
But it's true that jaraxxus, champs & valkyr twins are piece of cake (10man version)
Lytebohlt Sep 6th 2009 2:53PM
10 man: Everything other than anub on hm is a bit trivial. We made it to him with 49 wipes after 2 people forgot to switch colors for vortex /facepalm :-p. However this was after most of the group had experience with 25HM. Anub took us 8 tries to learn what was different and tweak our strat for the adds. Anub seemed pretty tightly tuned the others less so.
disclaimer: we're a 25 man guild so we probably outgeared the content.
25 man: It took us ~20 wipes to get beasts, 2 for jaraxxus, 4 for faction champs. We're sitting at 16 attempts left for valkyr b/c of the doubleattempt bug. Beasts was rough from what I heard listening in on vent. We were consistently getting overlap between the bosses until we dropped to 2 tanks from 3 tanks and even then barely beat the enrage. Everyone seemed to think beasts was a tightly tuned encounter but after that people were disappointed by jaraxxus and champs. Maybe twins will be better (and from the sound of it it will be ^^)
Bikhai Sep 6th 2009 4:10PM
Can't really say much about 25-man. My guild has gotten the first two encounters cleared on normal and we're working on Faction Champs right now. Ten man normal was more or less a breeze though. One-shotted every boss, including our first time to see Anub.
Ten man heroic is a significant step up. Not so much the difficulty of the bosses as it is the enrage timers. We put in a good 20 attempts on Northrend Beasts and on our best attempt Icehowl enraged at ~10%. Rng pwned us occasionally. Double bombs on snowbolled/stunned in the fire healers and the such. As has been mentioned before, losing even one dps makes the enrages impossible to hit unless you've got several people rocking 5-6k dps.
Not too worried about the difficulty though. I like the challenge, and I'm glad we're still able to see the content on normal difficulty.
tim Sep 6th 2009 4:20PM
will the wow.com staff please start cleaning up these inane political comments? readers have already made their thoughts on them clear (they're all downrated, as they should be). they've been cropping up lately and some of us try to spend our "WoW" time getting away from crap we have to put up with at work. thank you
sgtteamkill Sep 6th 2009 4:21PM
obama can rot in hell the pos
Sidius Sep 6th 2009 4:49PM
Sometimes I really get the impression that comment posters either 1) do not read the topic - in this case it is addressing HEROIC mode, not normal 2) are posting to flex or swing some epeen around and have NO IDEA what you are talking about.
My guild has a solid 10 and 25 man raid team. We're at Mimi Firefighter on 10 man and have cleared every hard mode in Ulduar 10 other than one light, Firefighter and Alg. On 25, my guild is at Yogg. We've also cleared both 10 and 25 man regular ToC.
The reason I gave the above list of where I am it is to provide a reasonable basis for my following observations about HEROIC 10/25 man ToC, aka ToTGC:
The Northrend Beasts are incredibly difficult and slightly overtuned. Many people on here are demonstrating their lack of knowledge about heroic and I would go so far as to argue you haven't even seen the heroic version of the encounter. Posts that claim 2k, 3k, or even 4k DPS is enough are full of BS. For 10 man heroic with three healers and two tanks, all five DPS need to be putting out almost 5k DPS to beat the timers for the next phase. Each of the three phases is on an approximate 3 minute timer (I believe it's more like 2:45 before the gates open for the next phase and another 15 for the NPC introduction). Our group at first struggled to get each phase down in time, but with practice, we are able to JUST meet the timer for the next phase. Keep in mind we are Ulduar/ToC 25 man decked out. This to me means it is overtuned as I don't know how an Ulduar 10 reg/heroic - which means an average ilevel of 219 to 226 - guild could obtain the gear needed to take 10 man ToTGC at all. In a few weeks, I could see things getting easier as people got emblem of triumph gear from the vendor.
My 10 man is all decked out in ilevel 226/232 gear from Ulduar 10 HM/25 regular and also everyone has atleast one to two pieces of ilevel 245 gear from the 25 man regular ToCs and emblem vendor gear from the past month.
My guess is that Blizzard will nerf the encounter because it takes extreme coordination to down the heroic encounters.
To everyone reading these posts, I would encourage you to filter out most of the posts on here as it is clear very few people have any knowledge about heroic ToTGC modes yet. The Northrend Beasts alone are extremely challenging. I give props to any guild that has downed any encoutner in 10/25 man ToTGC already.
Sid
theRaptor Sep 6th 2009 5:54PM
I don't care how hard heroic mode is, because I will never end up doing it 25-man (casual raiding guild, not enough raid time, not a stable enough raiding base). My problem is they have tuned normal for PUG's and not for raiding guilds like they did with Naxxramas. Ulduar PUG's mostly couldn't get past FL, they wouldn't even try. I have seen ToC pugs full clear. I feel like normal is scaled for the bottom end of the progression ladder, and heroic for the top tier, leaving the middle tier of people SOL. It is like they think most of the player base is just motivated by shiny purples, and the top tier is just about epeen.
Sure Blizzard wants everyone to be able to see this content but I think it should take more effort than running Heroics for two weeks once you hit 80 (which is what my shaman has done, and is top 5 DPS in 25).
So now we have a raid that is easy on normal for my 25 man group that has only killed one keeper (six hours of 25 man a week kept us from progressing much before 3.2), and effectively impossible on heroic.
Go back to triggered hardmodes please Blizzard. That way I will have a chance to actually try something in 25 man that is hard. Otherwise I am going to end up having to just raid 10-man just so we can stack the raid with the best players and do heroics.
Agelamer Sep 6th 2009 6:04PM
It took my 10 man group 3 months to get all the ulduar Hardmodes down.
It took my 10-man group 1 night to get the ToGC heroic version down.
I think Beasts and Anubarak are about right in difficulty, but the middle 3 are too easy. It's not good when you think, well if we can just get through the first boss, then we can kill the next 3 no sweat.