So we jumped into SM Challenge mode last night and OMG was it tuned up! We wiped hard a few times... my wife was laughing and I had a blast. We started at the end of our night, so we called it after a few wipes. If you find the heroic dungeon grind boring, jump into a Challenge mode for a nice "wakeup call". It was awesome. We'll go in again later in the week to create our baseline completion times... we'll take it more seriously.
As a healer, I was popping cooldowns on the very first trash pull. We didn't use CC or anything, so that made the dmg full-retard. On our first attempt at the first boss, I healed 5.5M and the tank healed himself for 4M... that's almost insane!
Anyway... it was a total rush. So if your guild isn't raiding yet, go for challenge modes... you won't be disappointed.
Yeah man, he was sitting at my dining room table when he was customizing his toon after faction change. I was playing with our sons and looked up and said, "You should name him Dr. Locktopus, that'd be awesome." At that point, he had already chosen Drlockstick, but immediately decided on a paid name change as soon as he got home that night, haha.
I'm really looking forward to these, as well. I need 2 more upgrades from heroics (helm and pants), I'm hoping to get some guild help this week stacking the deck to run the 2 dungeons I need directly (one is a first boss, one is a third boss).
My ideal comp (based on what we have to play with):
Blood DK (high self heals + insane AOE dps + 6 sec stun lock on a 1 min CD - essential for AOE pulls with no CC + Army of the Dead) Priest (atonement priest for added dps) or Shaman (tanking totems + damage reduction cd's) Warlock (good AOE dps + AOE stun on 1 min CD) Elemental shaman (great DPS + knockback + damage reduction CD's + offheal) Mage (not sure about spec here, maybe frost?) McBrain can correct me on this.
All of the best groups I've been seeing are using invisibility pots, no CC, and carefully rotating interrupts and AOE stuns to survive double and even triple pulling groups between bosses.
Any Mage spec will be sufficient really. Anyone can access Ring of Frost now, and we all obviously have Polymorph. We can also glyph into Improved Counterspell which allows us to cast it while we are casting another spell.
If there are going to be big AoE pulls, a Fire Mage specced into Frost Bomb will probably give you the best damage.
Maybe someone can answer this for me, are the bosses in challenge modes still lvl 92, like in heroics?
If so, only 12% hit will be required to reach cap, allowing a huge amount to be reforged into another, more beneficial dps stat.
Yes. They say to hit gold you need to reforge hit off and min/max. All of the team videos I've watching pulling gold were pulling the trash 2-3 packs at a time - the healer was NOT healing much, except under heavy damage spikes. He was using holy fire/smite spam. The group was very precise in using their interrupts and AOE stuns to mitigate tank damage.
No don't reforge, in challenge modes you're gear will auto scale down to 460, blizz is still tweaking it but they've said if you're just at the raid hit cap you'll be just at the challenge mode hit cap.
So, they plan on scaling our gear down to 460, but requiring raid boss hit cap?
If gear is scaled to 460, it would make most sense for the challenge bosses to be level 92, thus requiring 12% hit to never miss.
At ilvl 460, unless you are sporting gear that just so happens to be itemized perfectly, there's very little chance you're hitting 15% hit without reforging everything you can to hit, having a couple of hit gems, and reforging some dps stats on gear with hit to expertise.
No don't reforge, in challenge modes you're gear will auto scale down to 460, blizz is still tweaking it but they've said if you're just at the raid hit cap you'll be just at the challenge mode hit cap.
I'd question that, Dark. The blue posts I read said everything will get scaled down except your hit rating. You don't need full raid hit rating for dungeon bosses (lvl 92). So you'd want I think 6% hit rating for melee, and 11%? for casters, not sure on the exact numbers.
No don't reforge, in challenge modes you're gear will auto scale down to 460, blizz is still tweaking it but they've said if you're just at the raid hit cap you'll be just at the challenge mode hit cap.
I'd question that, Dark. The blue posts I read said everything will get scaled down except your hit rating. You don't need full raid hit rating for dungeon bosses (lvl 92). So you'd want I think 6% hit rating for melee, and 11%? for casters, not sure on the exact numbers.
I had read that Hit was also getting scaled down., but they were working with it as it was scaling down by to much.
People were QQ'ing that they couldn't hit Challenge mode bosses because the scaling was messed up and it was bugging on reforges, so people were having trouble hitting them.
Unless your are going for Gold, CC must be used on almost every pull, gear here doesn't matter, is pure skill...
yes... our next attempt will be to patiently finish it for the 60valor quest. Then we'll know better where we can skip groups and hurry around obstacles.
Well, I can see your point about cc, if you are interested in bronze or silver times. I personally don't like learning to do things one way (with cc, and careful pulls) and then have to re-learn the strategy all over with no cc - since gear is not an issue, it's just skill - I'd personally rather just go for the gold strategy straigth up, and learn by failing. That's just my opinion tho
I'd personally rather just go for the gold strategy straigth up, and learn by failing.
The challenge mode is SERIOUSLY tuned up. Seriously... you need to try it. You won't believe the damage these mobs put out. Also, the trash has new abilities. Gotta learn all of the changes. Even a CC heavy fight will be fun.
