Saturday, March 21, 2015

Behind the Curve

I've been out of the PuGging game for awhile (no, I don't count LFR... and yes, changed guilds again. Don't ask :P), so I was rather confused with the request for "AotC" on most of the heroic Blackhand groups.

Being a hunter, I'm used to AotC meaning Aspect of the Cheetah, but of course it's not - it's Ahead of the Curve, as in you've killed the boss on heroic before. Unfortunately before tonight, I didn't have it... so trying to find a PuG to take me - and also be good - has been annoying.

The smaller groups (for some reason the "magic number" seems to be 2 tanks, 4 heals and 9 DPS - possibly something to do with the balance of loot and organising the number of people) had huge problems with handling phase 2. If a couple of people died to mechanics, especially in phase 1, you weren't likely to recover.

It was a whole different story when I found a 25m PuG this evening - people were getting hit with bombs and marks left, right and centre. I had to /boggle at the easy two shot (although the group had been going on a little while before I joined, I think).

I also discovered that you can't loot two tokens from Blackhand - as in, one coined and one from the boss. Not that I minded, since I had my 4pc bonus already, but I wouldn't have said no to a 5th piece to swap in/out with non-tier.

Either way, I'm glad I have the achievement now - hopefully will be less trouble to PuG Blackhand in future weeks, which at least means I should be able to get the 5th tier piece soon!

1 comment:

Kal said...

Loot scales linearly with group size. If you have 12 players, you get 2 pieces per boss, and a 2/5 chance at a third. This is a non-issue.

The 2/4/9 meme is something I'm considering investigating. I remember old UBRS being fun with 15 people back in 2006. I think it's a happy medium between having to many to handle, or to few to loose, and seeing this raid size in action since SoO has been nice. How it actually performs is different, and I wonder if there's any data on this.

Anyway, grats on your achieve and loot!