Posts with tag green dragons

If you've spent much time at all adventuring around Azeroth, you understand the concept of instancing - non-shared areas of the world that you will only see your own party members in.  Each has its own advantages - non-instanced parts of the world can make you feel as though you're within a bustling world full of numerous players with whom you can interact.  Alternately, instanced areas can provide experiences that are always available to everyone, regardless of how many players may wish to  to kill the monsters within.   There doesn't seem to be any hard and fast rule about what is or is not instanced in World of Warcraft.  For example, Onyxia lurks inside an instance of her own, while the four green dragons - encounters that involve killing a similar number of monsters of similar difficulty to Onyxia - are not instanced.  Certainly this makes each of the encounters have a different challenge.

But what do you think about instancing?  Is it overdone, underdone, or just right in World of Warcraft?  Do you prefer running through a private instance encounter, or racing against others to achieve the same goals?

While you can hardly pass a day without seeing several threads in Blizzard's Raid & Dungeon forums proclaiming "ONYXIA STEALTH BUFFED!", I wonder if this time the posters have a point.  There are numerous new and interesting challenges awaiting the raider in 1.10 and none of them made it into the patch notes.  Are they bugs or features?  We may not know unless we see hotfixes.  Anyone out there see any other odd raid issues happening this patch?

• Green dragons are spawning at a greatly increased rate - some reports saying they're showing up as fast as hourly.
• Shaman's totems are no longer reliable in many fights - they take AOE damage and can pull aggro from monsters (adds Razorgore, for example), leading to them being destroyed every few seconds.
• Raid reset timers have been completely changed.  Instead of following this handy calendar, Ahn'Qiraj, Blackwing Lair, and Molten Core seem to be reseting on Friday morning.  (While I can't confirm whether this is happening across all servers, there are a lot of reports of it from different players.)
• In Blackwing Lair, Chromaggus' time lapse ability now sets the health of everyone in line of sight to 1HP (you may use your imagination to guess what happens to the main tank at this point). 
• Onyxia is... yes, you guessed it, using her deep breath ability much more frequently in phase 2 of the fight.  While it seemed to previously be caused by players being clustered together (she would intelligently target and breath fiery death on them), it now seems to occur throughout phase 2, on a semi-regular timer of 10 to 40 seconds.
• There are several reports of various bosses in Ahn'Qiraj not dropping any loot.
• Damaging tornadoes that spawn during the Ossirian fight (final boss in the 20-player Ahn'Qiraj instance) are now invisible, making them rather more difficult to avoid. 

For Molten Core and Blackwing Lair, fire resistance is of supreme importance.  As a non-tank, I tend to hover in the 100-150 range throughout MC (depending on the fight, of course!) and in BWL there are fights that are a lot easier once you clear 250.  And though that may sound like quite a lot of fire resist, there are numerous options for a new level 60 preparing to hit Molten Core for the first time - there's an item or two in almost every instance that can help boost your FR.  But as the gates of Ahn'Qiraj start to open, many players are finding gearing up for this challenge to be more trying.  The name of the game here is nature resist - and that's far more rare.