(WoW) The Oculus
I'm not fond of the Oculus. The dungeon ramps you up into more and more dragonback combat until you fight the end boss on drakes. In heroic today, we bit it on the last boss. Repeatedly. Mind you, we have very little experience with the dungeon, ranging from 0 to... a handful of runs before depending on which group member you look at. I'd done it once, I think. On normal.
The problem with drake/vehicle combat is that after 80-ish levels of learning how to play your class and becoming intimately in tune with your abilities, you don't get to use any of them. Instead, you have whatever the vehicle/mount offers. And you get to learn how/when to best use them the hard way. On the up side, you can take off all your degradable gear and it makes no difference to the vehicle stats for the battle (though in Ulduar, there are/will be vehicles that modify their stats based on the item level of your equipped gear).
Ley-Guardian Eregos soundly kicked our asses five or six times (or was it more?). As an amber drake this time, I got to play with Stop Time, which is great, and Temporal Rift which... could have been used better now that I read more in depth. For one, it accumulates points on the target that are set off by the basic amber drake attack, Shock Lance, to do extra damage. The problem there is I though they'd trigger off the other amber's attack, but that's not the way it works. So if I'd switched off from channeling to an attack more frequently, I could have done a chunk more damage. Enough to make a difference? Well, that's hard to say. We didn't get him past about 1/3 health on our best attempt. But if we were all fully familiar with our drakes, we probably wouldn't have this problem. Sadly, it's the sort of thing only study and/or practice can fix.
The problem with drake/vehicle combat is that after 80-ish levels of learning how to play your class and becoming intimately in tune with your abilities, you don't get to use any of them. Instead, you have whatever the vehicle/mount offers. And you get to learn how/when to best use them the hard way. On the up side, you can take off all your degradable gear and it makes no difference to the vehicle stats for the battle (though in Ulduar, there are/will be vehicles that modify their stats based on the item level of your equipped gear).
Ley-Guardian Eregos soundly kicked our asses five or six times (or was it more?). As an amber drake this time, I got to play with Stop Time, which is great, and Temporal Rift which... could have been used better now that I read more in depth. For one, it accumulates points on the target that are set off by the basic amber drake attack, Shock Lance, to do extra damage. The problem there is I though they'd trigger off the other amber's attack, but that's not the way it works. So if I'd switched off from channeling to an attack more frequently, I could have done a chunk more damage. Enough to make a difference? Well, that's hard to say. We didn't get him past about 1/3 health on our best attempt. But if we were all fully familiar with our drakes, we probably wouldn't have this problem. Sadly, it's the sort of thing only study and/or practice can fix.
Well, as a tip to make it a bit easier, keep your buffing person off his drake til last. Buffs, like the priest fortitude hp increase, do work on the drake if cast on you after you're mounted and having an extra 30% health on 4/5 of your players is nice.
ReplyDeleteGood thought, though... I've not done it with a priest yet. ;) I did make a point of tossing Blessing of Kings around before mounting up a time or two, but that only seemed to amount to just over 2000 health to the drakes' 75000 base. That seemed a pretty minimal gain.
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