Taking on Molten Core

[Chadness]

So, the last few days our guild in WoW has gone through Molten Core for the first time. This is probably the first and easiest 40-man raid instance that you do once you're in a guild that can handle it. Your first class set of epic gear drops there, usually two pieces of class gear per boss and one other random piece of epic gear. Also, epic gear has a pretty high probability of dropping from random trash mobs, as well.

So, our guild teamed up with this other guild. Neither of us can do MC completely by ourselves, which is why we teamed up. We may merge guild or we may just continue to have an alliance - we aren't quite sure yet. Needless to say, either way it goes, its looking a heck of a lot better than the last time we tried merging. This other guild is more fun, more fair and more casual. They let us come in with no DKP (participation points) and roll on epic gear in MC, and a few of our guildies got some awesome stuff already.

So, Tuesday night I wasn't able to make the run, but the guild downed the first boss (Lucifiron) in MC on the FIRST TRY. Wednesday night we downed the second boss (Magmadar) in MC. Last night we downed both Gehennas and Garr. Tonight we might even go in and try for a couple more bosses. Note that every single one of these was on the FIRST TRY. That's saying a lot for the talent we have going in these two guilds. We couldn't even get to the first boss with that other guild we merged with and then broke away from.

So, just thought I'd talk about this since I'm fairly excited. Its like the first time I went to Dynamis, except MC is a lot more involved than Dynamis, and it just gets harder from there. Did I mention MC takes a lot less time than Dynamis, too?

You see, 20- and 40-man raids are on a timer. 40-man raids reset once a week, 20-man raids reset every three days. At any time during the instance, as long as you have the same raid leader, you can go back in and pick up where you left off. That being the case, we raid for 2-3 hours on the nights that we do, and pick up where we left off on the next night. The first night they went, Tuesday, they were only in the instance for an hour and a half and downed the first boss. You can do as little or as much as you want. Not a four-hour (or more) Dynamis run (at least, that's how long it took most of the time when I was running Dynamis, as we were with experienced players).

The boss fights are also heavily scripted and need major doses of strategy to bring down. For example, Garr is a rock elemental type mob. I don't exactly know what level he is, but he's at least level 71, because his level shows up as ?? to level 60s, which means he's over 10 levels higher than we are. He's surrounded by eight level 60 elite rock elementals (we call them his babies). If you just zerged this boss like you do a Dynamis boss, you will die a very quick death.

So the point here is to first pick four hunters, station them around the huge room the boss is in and have them each mark a seperate baby mob (Hunter's Mark is a visible arrow that appears above the mob that is marked, it increases ranged attack power on that mob, plus works as a nifty visual que). Then, we take four warriors and four healers, one for each hunter. The idea here is for the hunters to pull those four seperate mobs to their warriors. Those warriors will do nothing but tank their hunter's marked mob. Their healers do nothing but heal their warrior. For the next four babies, we have four warlocks. Warlocks have an ability that they can use on elementals and demons called Banish. This renders the mob unable to do anything for about 30 seconds (they can't be damaged by us either). Those Warlocks must do nothing at all in this fight except keep their targeted baby banished the entire time.

Then, our main tank tanks Garr himself and is attended to by two to three healers. Once all that is decided upon, the fight begins. We go clockwise around the room, killing the babies that the warriors are tanking. Once one is down, we move to the next, then the next and so on. Once the babies that are not banished are dead, we move on to Garr. He takes about 5-8 minutes to bring down himself. Once he is down, we move on to the babies that the warlocks have banished. Once they're all dead, the fight is over. The fight, in total, takes about 15-20 minutes, on top of about 15 minutes of careful planning.

It was super fun, and last night Garr dropped three epics - two class set pieces and one epic sword (which I rolled on and lost, 'cause its an awesome PVP weapon with agility and +% chance to crit).

I have a couple screens that I'll try to post later from our Gehennas and our Garr fight, but I don't have them available at the moment (since I'm at work).

[tarureaper]

what happened to not giving up ffxi completely again? >.>

[Chadness]

Here's some screens I promised...


Us downing the Beast in Upper Black Rock Spire (UBRS). Once he's down, there's another boss we can spawn in this room that you have to kill for the last part of a long quest series to upgrade some armor.


Fighting Gehennas in Molten Core.


Fighting Garr in Molten Core.


Fighting Garr in MC...again.


Fighting some random trash mobs in MC.


PVP-ing in Eastern Plaguelands this afternoon.


Another shot of all the hordies (in yellow) that came to fend us off.

[kakashi]

whoa... hi chad by the way

[tarureaper]

Kakashi is alive! O_x

[guinodant]

so about a week or 2 ago i bought a friends account on WoW with a 51 pally and so far ive got him almost to 54. Ive been doing all the quest in eastern plaguelands and western plaugelands, but being on a PvP server really makes it hard cuz not only are there tons of mobs there but you have to be careful you dont get ganked especially at low lvl's (ive lost count of how many times thats happened). Man i cant wait to hit 60, im gonna gank every horde i see no matter what lvl they are... they will die > Ive been playing WoW pretty much every day since then (thats why you havent seen me on FFXI in a while). Im getting pretty psyched because really soon im going to be able to do endgame stuff, and from what ive seen it looks pretty fun. Chad, how were you able to get the HP and MP to show up on your screen (not the bars but the numbers)? And do you know of any instances that i can run that drop Lightforge gear at my lvl or do i have to wait a few more lvls?

[Chadness]

The big yellow damage numbers you mean? The HUGE ones are crits, the smaller ones are normal hits. Its a mod, I think. Couldn't tell ya which one, but maybe Titan CritLine...that would be my best guess. In installed the Ometh mod compilation and still don't know what everything does...lol. (www.ometh.com)

For your Lightforge gear, since they lowered the player limit inside Stratholme, Scholomance and the Blackrock Spire instances, you really should be about 57 or 58 before going into them. You can do LBRS (Lower Blackrock Spire) a couple levels earlier, most likely. I think one piece of Lightforge drops there.

Also, remember that the bracers, belt and gloves are BOE, so you can buy them from the AH or other players long before you can run the instances they drop in. If you were in my guild, I'd take you to places like Dire Maul and maybe Strat dead at like 55/56 or so...but probably not places like Scholo or UBRS where its very important to be 60 so as to not draw aggro in confined spaces.

In addition to Lightforge, don't forget Dire Maul, there's a lot of non-set gear there that's really good, a lot of people forget about that place.

[tarureaper]

/sigh u not gonna log back on either guino? ._.

[lizhellsing]

i miss my pet ; ;

[Goero]

Chad needs to remember when talkin on here... that some of us have not and will never play WoW so when he uses acronyms such as BOE and UBRS he throws us all off..

[guinodant]

BOE = bind on equip
UBRS = upper black rock spire ;D

there, now you know everything we say and have no reason not to play WoW j/k

anyway, im thinking once i get to 60 im gonna play a mage or hunter, cuz i want to be a DPS class, which one is a better DPS?

(for all of you who havent played WoW, DPS is to WoW as DD is to FFXI)

[tarureaper]

No one will answer me about coming back to FFXI

[Chadness]

Mage, hunter, rogue, warlock = all the pure DPS classes. Out of those four classes, to this date, there's only been about one or two of each class I've ever partied with that I couldn't beat in single-target damage.

Now, there are always going to be times where mages will beat me based on situation - like an area in an instance where they do a lot of AOE in a confined space such as most of Scholo, Strat and parts of Dire Maul. Obviously in a confined space, hunters' DPS drops to nearly zero and a mage's damage goes up because they AOE the crap out of everything. (For those of you who don't play WoW, hunters can not do ranged attacks from within 10 yards of the target, and our melee damage sucks. We only have three melee abilities and two of them aren't damage abilities they're to help us get back into range. That's why our DPS drops to nearly zero in confined spaces where we can't get at range to attack. Mage/warlock on the other hand can do ranged magic damage from anywhere - close up or far away. They can also AOE a lot.)

But, when you get into situations like Molten Core or most of UBRS where you're only pulling two or three mobs at a time, hunters and rogues top the DPS meter because we're going off single target damage instead of AOE damage.

So, it really depends. My hunter is obviously 60. I also have a 60 warlock and can out DPS a mage a lot of times. I have a 46 mage. So I know a lot of these DPS classes pretty well.

If you're asking which is more fun to play, of course I'd say hunter. ;D Its my main and my favorite class. I'd probably follow that by a tie between warlock and mage. Warlock probably don't do quite the amount of damage mages do because they only have one high-damage AOE attack (well, two really, but one of those does equal damage to them, so its not used often). Plus, mage is going to become a lot more fun after this next patch, when Arcane Explosion becomes instant cast always (you don't have to spend talents to get instant arcane explosion) and you get Evocation as a regular spell at level 20 (instead of spending a talent to get it).

[Chadness]

Here's some more screens. This week's MC run we took down the first five bosses and fought the sixth last night but couldn't beat him yet. At this point, we will probably farm the first five bosses of MC until everyone gets their tier 1 gear from them, then move on to the 2nd half of the instance.

Boss #1: Lucifron - Easy fight, main tank on Luci, two off tanks on his adds. Kill the adds first, then all DPS on Luci. AOE Fear attack is his only bothersome one. Can't really see him in this pick, but its the best one I took.


Boss #2: Magmadar - Pretty easy fight, as well. Magmadar is the "lord" of all the Core Hounds that roam Molten Core. Once he's killed, the Core Hounds stop respawning after you kill them.


Boss #3: Gehennas - Very similar to the Lucifron fight, except a bit stronger and Gehennas has more HP and a nasty AOE curse that only allows you to heal whoever has it at 25% of normal, which obviously has to be dispelled from the main tank ASAP. He has two adds to, which are off tanked and killed first. His "Rain of Fire" attack, which you can see in the picture, hurts bad, but it easy to get out of and avoid.


Boss #4: Garr - A very tough boss fight because of his eight adds. This fight requires four warlock and five warriors minimum. Hunters mark the warriors targets (four of the eight adds). Warlocks get their targets (the other four adds). The main tank charges Garr and tanks him only. Each warrior has their own dedicated healer. When the pull happens, the four hunters fire Distracting Shot at their targeted add and pull it back to their warrior, then Feign Death and let the warrior pick up aggro. The warlocks have an ability called "Banish" that can keep an elemental (which is what these are) out of combat completely for about 30 seconds. ALL the warlocks do is keep their target banished the entire fight. All DPS (damage) goes from one non-banished add to the other until all four are dead. Then, DPS goes to Garr. Garr has massive defense, so it takes about 10 minutes to bring him down. Once Garr is down, THEN you fight the adds that the warlocks have banished, one by one. Garr gets stronger the more adds you kill, so no more than four can be killed before you take Garr down, but if you have more warlocks, more than four can be banished. A very complex and difficult fight. (You can see an add banished in the lower right corner of the screen shot.)


Boss #5: Baron Geddon - A huge fire elemental. He's a pretty easy fight if people do what they're told. Every 45 seconds he pulses waves of lava out from him, but he stops doing physical damage. ALL melee have to back up out of the range of those blast waves or they WILL die (including the main tank). Secondly, every 60 seconds someone on his aggro list gets turned into a bomb. After 10 seconds, that person explodes and the explosion causes 2500-3000 base damage (that is lessened by fire resistance gear and fire resistance potions which we all use liberally on this fight). They will also damage anyone in their blast radius, so if you are the bomb, you have to run AWAY from everyone else. We brought him down for the first time this week. (I didn't get a screen during the fight 'cause there was a lot of concentration needed and a lot of running around, but this is all of us lined up for the official guild screenshot after we downed him. You can see his greyed-out name toward the top of the shot.)