Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Impressions of the Zandalari Uprising

So far, ZG has been a lot more fun for me than ZA, purely because it's changed so much.

It also seems more of a challenge, since the last two bosses are where most PuGs (and even guild groups) fall apart.

In fact, I haven't even killed Jin'do the Group-breaker in a guild group yet; the PuG stat bonus helped with both of my kills.

However, there's one thing I did take away from a guild ZA run that I find interesting: a taste of how fun it can be to work things out for yourself.

It's really a little like the elite soloing runs I do - wipe until you figure out the right way to do things.

On my first foray into ZA with a guild group, we went in "blind" (not reading the strats) and figured we'd work out any changes from the old 10man raid on the way.

After wiping a few times on the lynx boss before realizing that we didn't need to spend valuable DPS time on killing the water totems, our priest was still having a little trouble keeping us alive, running out of mana and losing clothies in particular to the cat spirit.

I idly clicked on a totem to read the buff description after biting the dust during one attempt and said, "Hey , what happens if you actually stand next to the totem?"

Of course, once we figured out that the water totems actually gave our priest practically unlimited mana and also helped to keep the DPS alive during the split phase, the fight was a breeze.

Sure, we could have saved ourselves the repair bill by reading up beforehand, but I'm really glad we didn't - it made me feel a tiny bit like being in those top guilds that do this type of thing all the time, figuring out how to kill bosses when there aren't any strats to read.

I mean, I know it wasn't much - the healing circle the dragons in Vortex Pinnacle leave on the floor is a similar concept - but it still felt like a huge lightbulb moment when we figured it out!

2 comments:

Sean said...

That "lightbulb" moment is something that makes WoW all the more fun for me. I think we've been conditioned, with all the Addons, strats, and videos of encounters available to us, to almost refrain from seeking that kind of moment in the game anymore. It's been missing since Cata released, which is sort of contradictory in my mind, but we've been inundated since before release with news and previews etc that we knew a lot of it before we even started.

Anonymous said...

We'd done it with the killing of the totems/kiting a dozen or so times.
And then a couple of us pugged it with an otherwise defective DK who pointed out that the water ones were a benefit to our casters. Useful info comes from the oddest places.