Most encounters are easy, i have a feeling phase transition is much more crucial though, like phase 3 putricide with still a red oose up, or at lich king (if there are too many enraging spirits up for example)

the only "hard" bosses i consider (in normal made, hardmode is a whole different story)

blood queen < sindragoso < lich king ....
which probably makes sense! haha

oh right last week we did our first 10 man hardmode run and failed hard at marrowgar, holy **** that raid damage?!
The 2nd boss was easy though, dps just need to clear the adds asap... and then we did gunship hardmode which there isnt much of a difference... the rest we decided to do normal mode since we have wiped for to long on first bosses hardmodes

edit: forgot we did dreamwalker hardmode too, but also easy

For hardmodes (25 man) its LK>putri>LDW>sindragosa I think - at least without the dmg/healing etc buff. LDW's difficulty is probably trivialized now because it is so easy to take the adds down fast.

Twin Emps - true caster tank (unlike Maulgar), no AOE abilities (so you can't demo shout, thunderclap, etc), unbalancing strike (-100 defense). Still no fight in the game that's even close to being similar, and I think the obvious reason was that it was TOO hard, but like I said, that's part of the fun and the challenge.

I mean, heroic implementation for 10/25 raids is a complete failure imo. Bang your heads into the brick wall known as LK for 3 months for 271 loot, only to get truckloads of 277 1 week later because 8/12 heroic encounters are a joke.

Boss strats, videos, etc were VERY hard to come by in vanilla basically didn't exist until Naxx 40. People were very secretive about their strategies (as I've heard is a common theme in Everquest, FFXI). It was really fun going into some of the fights in Naxx and being like "how the **** does this work".

EDIT: Some other examples of "easy" mechanics now are that all bosses are tauntable now, so dps really don't need to watch their threat as much. Part of Huhuran's difficulty was the tank switches. Another is AOE damage -- aoe healing is so trivialized by chain heal, circle of healing, etc. You basically had to single target heal everyone back in the day, so healers had to be more alert and be smarter about picking targets and assigning healers to tanks etc.

Ofcourse I agree with everything you said, raiding used to be harder... this doesn't take away the fact that LK himself is still pretty dam hard, i'm glad blizz chose to make this fight hard because he's the lich king himself after all.

I'm glad they removed the "RNG oh crap we are ****ed" mechanic though, i'm thinking gruul ? the shatter was a little bit too random wasn't it? i'm thinking gurtogg where if a squishy clothie got enrage tanking part he would roughly 50% of the time die no matter how much you spam heal him, im glad they generally removed that RNG type of style...

what i would like to see back in cata is custom gear sets for certain bosses, like the shadow resistance gear for mother, and the nature and frost resist gear for hydross... make a guild do an effort to get custom gear for everyone i liked this.

well there is one RNG part in LK that can pretty much fhk you up (healer in valkyr + holy paladin needs to run from defile + infest at the same time, jesus.. anyway)

Why? This was really annoying and not fun at all.

Also, they had this, I remember the drama over having to run ulduar again to get blockgear for anub25 hm.

There is no way that Twin Emps was too hard, and it wasn't a 'true caster tank' fight either, as we did it with warriors only tanking after deciding the warlock method was too fiddly, as did a lot of guilds.

It was just an annoying fight, because the bosses had way too much health and no phases, so you were literally doing the exact same thing for 12-14 mins.

Very rose-tinted glasses to say that Twin Emps was fun imo

The infernals from Prince Malchezaar in Kara.. God I hated those things.

I can't bring myself to play anymore this summer. I'll just wait for cataclysm. Maybe I'll log on to do the Ruby Sanctum once and the reclaming events.

Yea, I spent most of my time as frost in vanilla - wasn't untill Naxx I got to go fire. Standard.

Lots is new - but it all looks better. Trying out the 10 day BC trial before I make a final decision, but the new raid/dungeon finder looks cool, and I'd love the prospect of being able to do serious raiding but it's only 3 nights a week instead of 5-6 and 5+ hrs. I'm also ok with the heroics not being as hard as vanilla raiding - 4 Horsemen ate so many hours of my soul it was ridic.

First things first - I need me a sexy UI. All my old addons are so out of date. Any suggestions for casters/mages? Or should I just skim through the WoW forums and try some stuff out?

There was a sick UI linked a page or two back, maybe more, that almost got me to resubscribe just to try it. It scales perfectly to most resolutions and looked goddamn sexy.

I actually unfroze my account to try that UI... it's really awesome...

Tukui UI

just trying out some basic bar changers atm so I can get back into it - Dominos seems nice, also trying Mik SCT.

I think im gonna drop the money today and fully upgrade back.

Try Tukui, it's really worth it.

Loaded it for about 10 min, but had trouble finding some buttons/dont have all the hotkeys back quick. Will probably switch soon.

The only downside to the UI is that you have to manually edit a lua file to set everything like you want it. Still, I don't think I'll switch to somethign else anytime soon.

That UI is cool. But I really like building my own UI's.

We should post some SS's of ours, I'll throw mine up when I'm not at work.

EDIT: I mean, I'm pretty particular with where I like things to be positioned in a way that I can easily use them/see them etc.

Funny enough though my UI is actually kind of similar to Tuk's. Somewhat anyway.

I also play WoW, have a 80 Warrior (server: Arthas, Germany) and a 80 Mage (server: Frostwolf, Germany).
I play WoW since 2006, I'm really looking forward to Catalysm.

I was in here earlier asking about which character to level, and picked an entirely different one. I rolled a Warlock and he seems like a lot of fun. So I'm going to focus on my Lock and my Priest, leveling them together since they share all the same heirloom stuff. DoT classes are fun. I'll probably level my others when I'm bored just to burn through their rested in dungeons, but I'd like to have either the lock/priest to 80 before cata.

Wow I feel ******ed. Spent the last page writing how I was gonna come back, and no one mentioned the refer a friend or "scroll of ressurection" (did both work for people who played vanilla but no xpacs?)

FML, should have the earlier pages sooner.

EDIT; Anyone think it's possible to retroactively do so if I just bought it through the battle.net online thing yesterday? If so, who wants me to try and name their account to get the bonuses if I can?

You need to be on the same server if you're going to do the refer a friend for the xp bonus, so you'd have to pick a server with a fellow 2+2'er. But I think the Scroll of resurrection should work even with someone who's on a different server, I'm not sure though.

True. I'll email support about the scroll. Anyone wanna give me a name to tell them referred me?

Get subbed in for our guild's icc10 A team tonight, we blow throw every boss, taking at most 2 attempts on Putricide, blood queen, what-have-you, then we get to sindragosa and have a few <100k wipes.

On our final attempt, we get her to phase 3 like ridiculously fast, everything is going flawlessly and.. my internet hits a hiccup.

But it's a longer than normal hiccup. I see everyone doing the stand-still dance but it's not catching up. Vent has gone silent and I know our guild leader calls out a lot of info for that fight.

I start sweating and cursing my wireless, which hasn't done anything like this all night. (We're about 4 hours in at this point, downed the first 6 bosses in < 1 hour) It finally catches up right as I'm standing in the middle of all the ranged dps and I get an ice tomb on me, freezing about half the raid.

I think the neighbors heard me screaming at that point, and we live in an old building with thick walls.

Sucks because now you're going to be "the guy with bad internet"

I haven't been in a raiding guild for a long time, so I put in an app for a "casual hardcore" guild that has an average age of 28 or so. I am done playing my mage, since I plan to play my Paladin in Cata.

They had extended their raid lockout from last week, so my first raiding experience as a Holy Paladin was 3 hours of wiping on Lich King.

How many mechanics can they fit into a single fight? christ

It doesn't help that my "PvE" gear has 512 resilience and about 400 extra stamina that doesn't help slay dragons. Our best attempt was 45%. Never saw the third phase. 95% of our problems could be summed up in a single word: Defile

So after months of not raiding, and NEVER really raiding on my Holy Paladin, the fight I get to cut my teeth on is Lich King. Good times.

I was a bit nervous and shy with the heals early because I'm so heavy on PvP gear and was worried about mana.

Those of you who have Lich King on farm, what's your strategy for Defile? It seems whenever defile and valkyrs come at the same time, we got ALL screwed up.