My First Archavon.
So, did 10-man Archavon. Realised something: it's damned easy.
No, I'd best qualify that statement: It's damned easy once you know what you are doing, and that's not a bad thing.
Very, very basically, it's a 2-tank encounter in which the melee have to be continually aware of ground-based AoE (effectively, a nature-based consecrate) and DPS has to be pretty high to down him before his Enrage. If the tanks know what they are doing (taunt-rotations etc) it's pretty trivial, DPS-wise the requirements aren't too bad (heck, just look at the gear I was doing it in). As part of a Guild run it seems like the ideal first encounter to be 10-manning because it promotes good co-ordination and situation awareness without being overly taxing or requiring superhuman twitch skills. I imagine that similar could be said of the 25-man version of the encounter.
We had 2 wipes, one to me not being familiar with the encounter (died to a gas cloud :-/) meaning that we didn't have the DPS to kill him before the enrage. Third time around we pulled everything off without a hitch, and everyone was richer 2 Emblems. No Pally gear, but that's okay. :)
So, why is it being easy a good thing? Well, the raid itself is a PvP reward for a PuG PvP Event which resets every three hours. IMO the encounter should be do-able by those who have just helped to gain (or retain) control of Lake Wintergrasp, keeping it the domain of an organised raid given the means of obtaining control and the limited duration over which it is accessible wouldn't make sense. It also drops high quality PvP gear, something pretty hard to obtain at the best of times and which will get increasingly more difficult to get as the Season continues*. I would criticise the 25-man version for dropping Deadly PvP Gear if by doing so I wasn't forced to agree with epic l337 PvPers [shudder].
So, I've just done my first lvl80 raid, and guildless to boot. It remains to be seen just how much more content I'll see over the course of the next few weeks. But I'm confident that if nothing else I won't be a dead-weight in VoA PuGs, something which may worry many Ret Paladins at my sort of gear level.
* ASIDE: Savage Glad should be rep-based and Hateful Honour-based. Grinding BG's till your eyes bleed for sub-par PvP gear is awful design.
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4 comments:
From my experience, 10-man VoA is a lot easier than the 25. Maybe the enrage timer is a little bit tighter or something.
Overall I like how VoA works with WG to create a place worth fighting over and that we don't all abandon the second we win.
I agree with your final comment though: blue-quality gear should not require eye-bleed-inducing BGs grinding. It shouldn't be handed out just like that, but the cost is absurd. When a set of gear requires you to hit the honor cap multiple times, something is wrong.
VoA Heroic is just as easy but you will need an overall higer dps group to beat the enrage timer.
Last time I did this we had 4 tanks in the group and we had no problem beating it though lol
Grats on 80 Tim!!
Nice to see your still wearing my belt!! haha!
25 man is waaay more frustrating.
There's always someone who doesn't know what their doing AND undergeard people that make it in.
They say you should be doing an absolute bare minium 1200 dps, preferrably 1500.
Last week I ran two seperate PUGs, neither of which cleared the guy. In the first group, about half the DPS was under 1k, the 2nd group about 4-5 people coudln't get the concept of leaving the cloud, leaving us with 20 people left alive, gauranteeing a wipe.
I've actualy only been in 1 group that's been able to clear the 25 man.... maybe it's bad luck with pugs, idk.
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