Hot Five-man Action.

No, this isn't a post about gay pr0n (sorry Manx!), but a discussion of the five-man dungeon team as I've experienced it to date in the Burning Crusade.

Whilst five-man Dungeons played a big part in CD's initial activity when we first formed in September/October 2005, we quickly moved past them to the full-scale raid encounters, and over time, over time, we got out of the habit of playing together in such confined environments. Rediscovering how we do this has been a big part of the joy of the Burning Crusade.

In forty-man raids (and to a lesser extent, in twenty-mans), most classes get dumbed down to their lowest common denominator; healers heal, tanks tank, and damage dealers deal damage. Running Molten Core as a Hunter, I could probably get away with spamming three buttons (Aimed Shot, Multi Shot and Feign Death) for four hours without it ever being a problem. Crowd Control wasn't usually needed since we usually had enough tanks to handle most packs and enough healers to keep them alive. Sure the mobs in raid instances may be harder, but they're rarely eight times as hard as the more challenging five-man pulls. Well, except possibly until the Ahn'Qiraj/Naxxramas level.

With only five people, everyone has to pull their weight and there's a lot more multi-tasking. A good Main Tank and Main Healer are, of course, essential and they form the axis around which the rest of the group is formed. In the other positions we need off-tanks/crowd control (to reduce the amount of mobs the main tank's taking down to a manageable number for him and the healer) and enough damage-dealing ability to get all the mobs down before the healer runs out of mana and/or the tank runs out of health.

In groups as a Hunter specialised in Beastmastery, I bring solid damage and a strong pet that can act as an offtank. I can also take one mob out of play with a freezing trap if nessesary, although this is a short-term solution at best. I tend to look for the others to fill out the roles:

Main Tank: Warrior, Druid, Paladin. Someone able to take a beating and keep the mobs focussed soley on him. Warriors have the best damage mitigation, followed by Paladins and then Druids, but Druids and Paladins have better skills for tanking multiple mobs, but Paladin's are limited by their mana pool, whilst Warriors and Druids have regenerating Rage bars.

Main Healer: Druid, Priest, Paladin. Druids have slow, powerful heals, whereas a Priest can react quickly to damage being dealt, and if specced for healing will usually be the best option. Paladins can also do a good job, but they aren't quite up there with the other two unless they have amazing gear.

DPS/Crowd Control/Utility: Mages, Rogues, Warlocks or even another Hunter go here. Their job is to take one or two mobs out the fight whilst killing the first target. Since I class myself in this category, I usually only look for one more. The exception being when I can't find:

Back-up Healer/DPS Hybrid: Shadow Priest, Paladin or Feral/Balance Druid, there to do damage and assist in healing when the main healer's struggling or dead. Shadow Priests are great in this role since they can heal for a percentage of the damage they deal, and provide sheilds to stop people dying until they can get healed. Paladins are useful as well, and since they wear plate armor and can take a hit if they get into trouble. Feral Druids are trickier, since you normally have to decide before each pull wether or not they're going to be doing damage in cat form or healing in caster form, since that affects the gear they wear. This role seems to be the hardest to fill normally, since our healers are often stretched thin compared to our damage-dealing types, so quite often we end up with another damage-dealer.

The instances are great, most of them take between 1-2 hours depending on the group's level and familiarity, and you quickly see how each person plays more. Since I'm usually the one setting up the pulls inside an instance, I quickly find myself working out who can do what, and usually within ten minutes, the group functions like a well-oiled machine. Some tanks can handle two or even three mobs easily, whereas some can't and mobs need to be controlled to stop them beating on the healers. Some healers are able to crossheal excellently, even to the point of keeping my pet in the fight, but some really are only able to focus on the tank, and once again, the additional mobs need to be carefully controlled.

I tend to talk about the healer/tank axis a lot, but it's the cornerstone of any good group in my experience. Case in point was a run to Sethekk Halls on Saturday night. On the final boss, Wulf, the Rogue and the Paladin all died whilst the boss had 15% health. I thought it was going to be a wipe, but the healer (Druid) and the tank (Warrior) proceeded to bring him down very slowly. Admittedly it took about ten times the length of time it'd normally take, but he went down!

I'm really enjoying this period of 5-man playing, which is good, since I imagine it'll be months until CD ever gets back to raiding (if, indeed, it ever does at all) and getting there will require a lot of challenging quests in 5-man dungeons be completed. I can't wait!

Ding!

At about 1pm UK time on Saturday, Wulf hit lvl 70. As it stands, he was the fourth character in Chaotic Divinity to reach this landmark. Because of my extravagant purchase of a bow from the Auction House, I was unable to afford his flying mount immediately. That said, proceeds from last weekend have left Wulf with 600 of the 900 Gold he needs. I feel confident he'll have his mount in the next few days.

Did a few new instances at the weekend, but the one I want to talk about is Escape from Durnholde Keep, part of the Caverns of Time. In it, the heroes travel back in time to prevent some time-travelling dragons from messing with the escape of Thrall, one-day leader of the Horde.

Essentially, it's a large outdoor zone, mirroring the Hillsbrad Foothills zone perfectly, right down to travelling vendors. In the first part of the quest, you move around the keep, setting explosives in the cells that contain the orcs interred within. This serves as a distraction when you then break into the keep proper to free Thrall. From that point on, it's one long escort quest as you lead the young, impetuous Warchief-to-be through fight after fight with scaresly any time to recover in-between. I normally loathe escort quests, but this was incredible fun, and I ended up running it three times over the weekend.

Of course, at the point in time that the escape took place, the Night Elves hadn't revealed themselves to the rest of the world, so measures were undertook to disguise Wulf's appearance as he entered the zone. I'll go into them in another post, when I have screenshots.

On levelling.

As of last night's play, Wulfsblood is approximately halfway to level 70. The quoted line about it taking someone as long to get from 60-70 as it takes to get from 1-60 feels more and more like misrepresentation at best and an outright lie at worst. It's taken me a little under three weeks to get here, and I haven't exactly been steamrollering through content. There's only two zones where I can honestly say I've finished most of the questlines, and I've spent more time than is strictly productive (from a power-levelling perspective) either in dungeons with friends, grinding faction reputation or killing mobs for crafting materials.

Comparing my approach to levelling to a fellow CDer who started a Draenai Shaman at the same time I crossed into Outland for the first time. He's played the toon exclusively since the expansion launch and has logged more hours on it since that time than I have with Wulf. The result is he still has about ten levels to go to 60 whilst I'm sitting with half a bar until 70.

Where I think the idea of 60-70 taking as long as 1-60 arose is the fact that the total amount of Experience Points (XP) required is the same between lvl 1-60 and 60-70. If the monsters killed and quest XP were analogous with what I saw with Stormpaw in his last ten levels, then I can imagine it would have been harder work. As it is, the mobs give about 2-3 times the XP of a mob in the lvl 55+ bracket did to an equivalent level player. The quest XP rewards are as much as five times greater as well.

I'm not complaining though, because level 70 is really only the start of the content. Once I've got to 70, I've gotta get the gold together Flying Mount*; learn how all the remaining Dungeons work (and get Revered with the relevant factions) so I can master them on Heroic Mode; and complete the various attunement quests so I can visit the new Raid content when nessesary. And of course, there's still material farming so I can make the items I mentioned two days ago.

I honestly don't know how people manage to have the energy to play more than on character!

*Speaking of Flying Mounts, the 700-or-so Gold I'd saved for mine went the way of the silly person when I checked the Auction House and found the bow I mentioned at the end of yesterday's post. It was at a 600G bid or a 1134G Buyout. After much humming and hawing I decided to put a bid down on it, fully expecting some idiot to outbid me, but trying my chances. Suffice to say, no-one did and Wulf is now 600G poorer and in possession of quite possibly the best blue-quality bow currently in the game.

That said, I can't use it until lvl 70, and I'm tempted to put it back on the AH and see if I can get some gullible fool over the weekend to pay enough for it for me to afford my birdie. The other alternative to getting Mount money is to go back at level 70 and do all the zone quests that Wulf missed. At max level, the XP rewards from quests gets converted into Gold, so it could potentially be quite lucrative.

Replies to "Professional Opinion" comments.

If there's one frustration I have about Blogspot's software is there doesn't seem to be an easy way to do threaded replies to comments on it. Or possibly there is and I'm being dumber than normal.

As it happens, yesterday's post has elicited replies from a couple of folks in Chaotic Divinty, which I'm going to reply to here and now:

Bluebottle wrote:

"My leatherworking is around 340 somewhere but have just dinged skinning to 375."

I have the same problem, I got my skinning to 375 in 2-3 days and my Leatherworking to 330-ish in the first week. I'm now at 342 and running out of useable patterns.

Peter wrote:

May be cheaper to grind cash and buy the primals from people like miners and engineers who get them more easily (miners get fire and stone from nodes, engineers get life and shadow using a crafted Mote Extractor). Blizzard seem to be emphasising cross-trade requirements, meading you trade for your reagents rather than grinding your own. Maybe an anti-bot measure, at least in part.

That's a possibility, but given the prices in the Auction House atm (anywhere from 30-60 Gold for a Primal?), it's not one I'm going to follow unless I get particularly desperate, or the market starts to get more reasonable (I figure it will in a few months, seeing the way the prices for BoE green items have dropped). I've put feelers out on the forums and in guild chat for folks with spare Primals to give/trade, but I think most folks need them themselves for their own professions.

Damage Adjustments

A recurring theme in the Hunter forums I read is the level of underwhelment at our new main nuke spell, Steady Shot. I can understand how their expectations have been thwarted. It's damage is roughly analogous to our normal auto-shot attack (for me, around 400 normal and 1k on a critical strike), which can be dissapointing when we've been used to massive Aimed Shot and Multi Shot crits we were used to in our old shot cycles. When Wulf was Marksmanship spec, he used to crit for nearly 3k damage on an Aimed Shot, and there were folks with better gear doing more.

What they miss when they're only looking at the big numbers flying above the heads of the mobs is incredible efficency. At 110 mana per cast (99 mana with the right talents), it's one of our most mana-efficent shots yet. With Aspect of the Viper and some gear with decent Intellect bonuses, this shot can be fired in between our free auto-shots almost indefinately creating a flat, sustainable level of damage that can be maintained throughout the even the longest boss fight. Where this change to our class mechanics hurts the most is PVP, where the lack of massive Burst damage

The adjustment hasn't all been smooth on my part, I must confess. I'm actually finding that I pull enemy attention away from the tanks quicker these days than with my old aimed/multishots. The threat generated by these smaller shots mounts up quicker than the old "shit, 3k crit, better ease off!" approach, so I'm having to pay more attention than ever before. The other challenge has been finding a good weapon to use with Steady Shot. As a Beastmaster, Wulf has the Serpent's Swiftness ability, which makes his attacks 20% faster. Combined with the 15% haste given by his quiver/ammo pouch and there's a difficulty in finding a weapon that has:

*An attack speed that allows him to cast a Steady Shot without delaying the following auto-shot. I've found that a base weapon speed of between 2.60 and 2.90 is perfect for this.

*A decent DPS rating.

*An awesome-looking model! :D

To this end, I've found two likely suspects: This is a reward from a long quest chain in Shadowmoon Valley. It's reliably obtainable and shouldn't be too hard to find friends in CD to help me with this. This on the other hand, is a rare random drop from level 69-70 mobs, so I either need to be incredibly lucky to have one drop, or I need to check the Auction House and spend a (probably) obscene amount of gold on it if one appears.

Still, it sure is nice.

In other news, Wulf hit 69 last night. At this rate, I'm expecting to hit level 70 on Friday night. I'm still about 200G short of the cash needed to get my flying mount though, so I expect I might just try grinding cash for one level.