Grinding Heroics

[Gadzooks]

Thanks for the tip Daviddoran. I recently thought about doing UK, but decided on Mana Tombs as a trial run. I agree that the warrior/priest combo in the group is the core part with the rest just adding DPS as needed. I am going to try UK tonight. I will let you know what happens. I bet I am in for a surprise and will have to adjust formations and macros. I seem to have to do that for every instance I run.

Make a macro that says "/target ice tomb" for the Prince, the first boss in UK. It helps, a LOT.

Use your sheep. The trash pulls in there hit HARD, and some of them are tricky.

[gitcho]

can anyone tell me if AV @60 is an efficient way to lvl? I did the 71-80 bracket (before it became 80-only) and it was amazing ... Questing was better for me than instance grinding from 60-70 - but don't know about bg's... how is the 60's bracket?

[F9thRet]

In the starting area for WotlK ? Howling Fjord/Keep? The one from the Ship in minithil harbor...

anyways, you can go there, and just tag the mobs at around lvl 63-64 and level up pretty quick to 68.

The guards help kill, but as long as you hit them first, it's xp fast and furious.

Hope this helps.

Stephen

[Multibocks]

I did AV last night on my 71 mage and I turned around to answer the phone, turned around again a few moments later and I was already marked AFK. Gotta ported out shortly after and said, screw that. The new AFK is really bad if you gotta pee/getwater/doanything while running AV. Questing is much faster now that xp was nerfed/semiun-nerfed.

[Gadzooks]

What's the "new afk" marking? Is there a new reporting bot?

Nah, it's just a VERY short time now for you to be flagged, and people are flagging everyone, just to be jerks. You know, pause to drink at a tower, defending it, "ZOMG THEY'RE AFKING REPORTED!"

Because of all of the AFK abuse, you have to chain-pull BGs now, pretty much. Stop moving, and you get marked. Do no damage, get marked. It's ridiculous.

[daviddoran]

I was getting harrassed on my 5 shaman the other day, the entire bg was trash talking me, and it seemed that everyone was chain marking me afk, so I couldn't stand and defend like everyone else, cause you have like 60 seconds to get all your toons into combat or they get insta ported AND marked as a deserter. It's way too easy for people to abuse it and remove someone they simply dont like, while AFKers in the cave are still able to stay in, and then there's the bots that go whack on the wolves and rams....

Blizz needs to rethink what is and isn't "active" in a BG. If you've capped a tower or bunker, and are guarding it, you could very well be out of combat for 4+ minutes, so if enough people dont like you, poof you are gone. There needs to be more of a safeguard before it just boots. like, if you are near an enemy tower/bunker and it's being capped, that should count as "combat" as far as being reported AFK is concerned.

Maybe instead of an instant boot, they should take a page from website registrations, and put an image with text on it, and you have to type the text to prove that you are a person, and not a bot...

[Multibocks]

Ya if you get marked when you die, 30 secs to rez then you got a whopping 30 secs to find someone to kill and get the debuff removed.

It's ridiculous.

[Gadzooks]

As much as it's being abused by players, I see Blizz being between a rock and a hard place with the problem - the ultimate solution is to remove exp. from bgs, but the afk problem has been there for a long time - before it was for gear, now it's exp.

If there's a tiny crack in the mechanics, there's 100,000 players waiting to exploit it. The lazy will always be looking for ways to get around things.

[cilya]

I leveled from 73 to 80 this weekend doing AV (was AV weekend) and questing on 3 chars, pally tank, holy priest and mage.

I actually found it quite good. Ok, you have to wait 10-15 min between each battleground but that isnt so much of a problem anymore now that you can sign in from anywhere and end up the same place after so you can quest while AV'ing.

I didnt have any problem with /afk situations except once where i got kicked - but that was actually ok - spend 2-3 minutes chatting with a GM on a 4th char not in the instance so that was deserved.

But AV's went so fast - 12-15 min each for 100k xp. Pretty decent imo. Very few leachers and a lot more effecient than I have ever seen AV before.

Was kinda getting tired of AV before - half the BG was always leaching so it was really a horrible waste of time.

Didnt have many problems with being a multiboxer there - only bad comment I got was "what a waste of money". But got lots of good comments - (ok was basically the main tank for an entire day - so that might have helped a little)

[Drommon]

Make a macro that says "/target ice tomb" for the Prince, the first boss in UK. It helps, a LOT.

Use your sheep. The trash pulls in there hit HARD, and some of them are tricky.

The thread kind got off track but that's ok. So I went to UK. The trash mobs have the health of the BC bosses in normal mode. I did 2 runs and got wiped by Prince Keseleth (sp?) each time. The first time through my priest was speced to shadow and I kept losing my mage to the trash mobs. When I got to the first boss, prince keseleth, I was surprised and that whole battle lasted about 5 seconds. The second time through , I re-specced my priest to disc/holy and the trash mobs were easy since I just dedicated the priest to healing only and the run was faster. But I still got wiped by the first boss but managed to reduce his 142.8k health to 47k before the tank died (last one standing).

So I learned that my priest and warrior should change specs based on the situation either dps/dps or tank/healer. The other toons barely put out enough DPS to win the fight before mana runs out. But for the boss, mana ran out and the fight ended on that note.

Overall I added new tweaks to my play style and got better at CC. But now I think I will go back and do instances that have mobs that are the level of my low level toons like Mana Tombs and Sethekk Halls. My toons are at 90% of a level now. They earned roughly 3 times to xp from the mobs in UK than in MT. One other issue was even though all the toons can go to UK, the 66th level ones cannot summon or be summoned from the summoning stones and they also cannot get the quests for the UK dungeon.

Drommon