Twice now my raid has had a run in with a rare mob in the new throne of thunder raid. Twice now we wiped, laughed, and searched for some help trying to get the scoop on these bad boys. They are from the weekly raid quests and I did not even know about them. Have to love a surprise.
What? You have not seen any of these rares yet? Don't feel bad. Last week when we ran into our first one we asked around for help in the form of advice from some people in the more advanced guilds on our server and were surprised to hear that no one, not one single guild we asked, which included every alliance side guild above us on our server, has ever seen one of these before. We have been the only one, that we spoke to at least, that has gotten a raid weekly quest so far on our server. Cool, huh? Guess you can tell how far behind in raiding my server is when even the top guild on the server has not seen a weekly quest for a rare yet.
The top guild on the server asked my friend who asked them what they were smoking. They said that there are no rares in the new raids and if there were they would have seen one. Guess what, they were wrong. There are rares and they will be real fun if you do not know what to do.
They are not particularly hard, not at all, but they will surely take you by surprise if you do not know what to expect. Just like the first one we ran into on the bridge between the first and second boss. We ran up and got knocked off instantly. At least half the raid did, and the other half followed shortly after.
So I did a little research on this rare, after seeing that no one we could find on our server had seemingly ran into one, or at least this one, or had any clue what we were talking about.
It is a weekly quest, like the ones that used to be in ICC. There will always be one rare up somewhere in the raid. Being no guild on our server has finished normal yet that could explain why even the top guild has not seen any of the rares yet. Their weekly might be further in and my guild just happened to get lucky and have the weekly as the one between the first and second boss. We have killed that one twice now.
Some information you might want to know, besides what these mobs do, is that you get a baggie for completing the quest you get to kill them. In the two times, I know, really small sample size, we have done the raid weekly, no one has gotten anything worth mentioning. One flawless battle stone, which was the best thing anyone saw, and a couple of gems. Otherwise, just gold and some motes at best.
These quests also do not give you reputation of any sort. Would have been nice if they gave some shado-pan assault reputation, being we are in their raid doing their thing and the weekly is for them, but nope, no reputation rewards. I am not sure about any of the other rares as I have not seen them but I can tell you from the one I saw, twice, it is not something you can skip. It must be downed. I am going to guess they are all like that.
So what do you think of this, the return of the current raid weekly quests?
Admitted, the bags we received were all worthless, but I like them being there. I also like that the ones my guild got were early on and I am also looking forward to running into one later on. While I can only guess at this point, I think it will be like ICC, where there is one per week guaranteed. But will you get to the one your lock out offers, that is the question.
I just wish they gave some extra valor like the ICC quests did (frost back then actually), or like the isle rares do. That would make them better. Valor and reputation, now that would make them much better. As for now, all they are is a little spice but I like them.
What do you think of the new weekly quests with in raid rares?
Blizzard Watch Weekly: Family togetherness
1 hour ago
If you run into the last queen of the mogu, don't google her by name. Virus warning.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the notice. The only one I have seen so far is the one between the first and second boss.
DeleteWe had that rare between the first 2 bosses, Monara or whatever it was called. We knew that there was something different as we could see the ! mark in front of the bridge. So when I got the quest in my log I looked it up on wowhead while we did the bridge trash. I have two screens so it was easy to look while still tanking. Therefore we didn't have any trouble with her, as I told everyone what she did, we pulled her back to Jin'rokh's room so even if someone did get caught by shadow nova it couldn't knock them off anything. Reset the healing stacks half the raid at the time, easy.
ReplyDeleteI too was disappointed that there wasn't even any rep from it. I felt that there should have been but maybe as you said it's a luck thing, they didn't want people getting further ahead with rep. Which is ridiculous as so much is dependant on luck these days. However, the shado pan rep doesn't follow any of the rules. The guild battle standard for instance doesn't increase the reputation. The guild % increase works, as does the humans racial passive, so I really think the battle standard should.
I read on wowhead that those bags do have a chance to drop good stuff, someone on there said that they got a thunderforged item from one. However, they could be lying, they don't show what the bags drop via datamining (or however that works) so there's no telling really. Still it is some nice flavour in the raid.
How are you getting on in Throne btw? We've got the first 2 bosses on farm now. However, the third is giving us some serious issues. The RL thinks that it's a dps problem and I'm inclined to agree with him. You look at kill logs and the overall dps is 750k from everyone combined. Ours is more like 550k which isn't encouraging. The RL is a warrior tank and he was like "I'm 3rd on dps here and it is not that kind of fight" though to be fair he did have a lot of vengeance as he was the tank getting stunned by Malakk and having Sul and Malakk hit him all the time. So 70k isn't unreasonable from that, but yeah 3rd, which is kinda bad. Everyone needs to do about 30k more each which is a lot. The RL thinks maybe it's a wrong class thing as we don't have any dot classes. However, we don't have an abundance of extra people to bring, so we're kinda stuck. Not at all sure how we can move forward from that and get past this boss. People are getting fed up with the wiping as no progress is being made. Hmm it's a tricky one. Hope you are doing better with your team :)
We are having issues with the second boss still. Two weeks on it and nowhere. Hurts that our healer rotation is 3 shaman and a priest right now which means nothing that can deal with poison and shaman are by far the weakest class to heal a fight like that one. Hence the reason they recently got a boost.
DeleteIt also does not help that our healers are not well geared. Bad luck with drops last tier. None of them are over 490. My two alt healers, a shaman and a priest, means I can't even help in that angle and they too are both 487 and 488.
As soon as our healers catch up I can see us jumping at least 5 deep, the first 5 do not seem to be too pressing and out DPS core is insane.
Poisons and diseases will eat your raid. You need to use your raid to help out. Any paladin (prot, ret) cand take care of both dispells and help out. Locks can also help out I think. People with immunities take debuffs off themselves. On gate 3 you get diseases only on hit so you can pull Army if you have a dk and deal with them easier. Mass gripping them (gorefiends' grasp) also works wonders. Don't forget to focus the Dinomancers fast and click the orb.
DeleteIf you have a paladin tank, you'll have a lot less damage and craziness to deal with since paladins can solo tank Horridon from begging to the end (bop / bubble debuff every gate and a cpl of times in the last phase, at 5 stacks, as not to get oneshot).
Shamans are pretty bad for this tier alltogether, you'll have big issues without at least a paladin or priest.
@Taitrina
DeleteThe key to progress is figuring out what's wiping you.
We only did this on 10m the first week, before the nerfs, did it on 25m only after that, but here's what I recall. There's several things to take care here properly:
- are the spirits the thing that's killing you? You need to work out a proper rotation on them. They can be stunned, gripped back, so on
- are the icy things killing your raid? you just need to figure out to differentiate the two debuffs - the ones you stack for and the one you spread for
- is Sandstorm destroying you? On this phase I take the adds, dpses remain fulltime on Sul and burn him down and kill the adds after. I go to pick up adds with Malak on me and 50% CD and offtank takes him back at 14 stacks. Kite adds around the edge so they don't leave sand in the middle!
- are your tanks dying / healers going oom - you need better damage intake management; always a cooldown for frigid assault and interrupt interrupt interrupt. Make and interrupt on focus macro if needed as to interrupt some other target than your main one.
- is damage an issue? We don't keep a tank full time on Priestess, he aggros her at the start and then switches to Sul to help with the burn; only goes back on Princess when she's black and needs to be dpsed.
BTW, Sul doesn't focus the tank, he casts randomly so he doesn't really build vengeance on the tank.
We've had 3 up to now, the ghost one, some blob iirc before iron qon and a thunder guy before lei shen. Pretty sure there's one rare every week. They all resumed to tank and spank. Then again, we also tank and spank Animus trash, so don't take my word for it.
ReplyDeleteYou are a lot further than I am so that could be the reason. ;)
DeleteOur healers are really holding us back and having no one for the poison on horrodon is killing us. But I have a plan this week for it. There is always a plan.