I just hit the ilvl requirement for gamma dungeons, did 3 dungeons tonight, 1 successful, 1 disbanded and 1 kicked me. I’m a lifetime healer in WoW, decided I want to switch to disc priest for Cata from holy paladin.
Its been nothing but a miserable experience. I’m struggling to keep multiple people alive at once, sometimes people die near instantly (which I assume is their mistake but I don’t know for sure). Tonight I ran oculus and we wiped before the first boss because whelps were hitting me with arcane missles. Then we wiped again after the first boss second pack, seemed like mobs had created mirror images of them meaning a whole fiesta & zoo was showing up at once. Tank didn’t hold aggro on them and so I died, even after fading.
I just don’t get it. I know cata is around the corner, I know the intro greens are going to provide replacements to most peoples gear instantly. But I’d like to do some end game raiding of ICC prior to cata in the prepatch to kinda feel my kit prior to taking it to 85. It just feels like that isn’t happening anymore, feels like anybody in a gamma expects you to be ICC geared and everytime I log on peak times for Mankrik there’s no raids prior to ICC running.
If you’re set on getting geared before Cata releases, I’d:
Check the AH, see if there is any low priced BoE gear.
Run FoS for the daily and 4 Defiler’s Scourgestone . It counts as a gamma dungeon for the extra 3 Emblems of Frost, but is significantly easier. Run PoS if you want an extra 6 essences.
Run regular heroics. The drops will be useless but you can use the Emblems of Triumph that you get to get a set of T9 ilvl232 tier gear, and maybe a trinket or offpiece.
And finally, check the Sidereal vendor. You can convert Scourgestones to Sidereal 1 to 1, but a lot of Sidereal gear is cheaper than Scourgestone gear. For example, you can pick up ilvl 245 Aesuga, Hand of the Ardent Champion for 38 Sidereal, vs ilvl 245 Suffering’s End, which costs 60 scourgestones.
You can also specific queue for the easier gammas, like HoL, HoS, DTK, and Gundrak (as long as people know how to avoid poison nova).
Try going holy at low ilvls, disc kinda struggles until you get 4pc t8 with lower ilvls. I’ve geared several characters through gammas and there’s a big problem of people who clearly are not ready to be in there with full pvp gear and no gems so that’s going to make you struggle as well.
Holy has more throughput healing wise so I’d recommend doing that until you get some gear on you.
The xpac is over, don’t bother with Gamma as a fresh char
There will be zero time to drink (usually geared healers don’t need it)
Often tanks will have their back to mobs and do other moronic stuff and need excessive heals
The language barrier is exhausting, like 60% of the chars still grinding gammas are in portuguese/spanish speaking guilds
Just bad play in general, people will overlap buffs, enhance sham morons will delete your Wisdom, stuff like that. Or you’ll have 3 DKs and no horn of winter
I would just do your daily frost heroic quest and wait for Cata
The time when Gammas were fun is over imo. They were challenging and cool but the current playerbase took a nosedive
The ilvl requirement for gammas is much too low for tanks, and somewhat too low for healers, that’s just the reality. Holy may have more raw throughput but it’s not that strong at 210 ilvl either imo.
Unless you’re getting hard carried, you’re going to struggle even if you have healed a lot.
As others have noted, there’s not really a ton of upside to running gammas right now, since unless you’re on the path to get 4 pc 277 out of ICC, you’re going to replace everything else very very fast in Cata.
As emblems of frost and triumph both convert to justice points, personally I’d just do the one daily HFOS or HPOS and then spam regular heroics.
As a healer there are advantages/disadvantages to both. HFOS has much more spiky damage from its mechanics [and some dps will absolutely murder you with no regard on the last boss].
Don’t even buy gear, just get up to the 345 or whatever the emblem conversion cap is.
My experiences as healer in wrath has been interesting as well
When you hit new content such as 70 dungeons or 80 dungeons I find tanks are new and inexperienced. I always farm a full set of pvp gear before I go so that I at least have a ton of stats for the level of dungeons I’m healing, I also bring a lot of mana pots for emergencies
I’ve seen a lot of posts about gammas, seems like they went downhill post SoD launch. After RDF came out I did a lot of gammas on a new character and started them with a full PvP set when I hit 80. Most of them went well. Only issues were usually in trial which seemed to be tuned much higher than the other 5 mans and sometimes getting into an old strat with no disease dispel since you’d also start with no water if it was already in progress. Farmed full emblem gear and got some heirlooms for the characters I’m leveling now on another server, but didn’t feel like pugging or joining an ICC guild and just left when SoD came out and returned after phase 2 ended.
At this point farming a full PvP set and then farming dungeons seems far too time consuming to be worth it just for Cata starting gear. Farming honor is a pain outside of IoC and AV weekend since the smaller BGs are dominated by xpoff twinks.
I’m assuming the pre-patch event will have some catch-up gear as well? Hopefully it’s a decent ilvl.
Would be nice if Blizzard lowered the emblem costs of everything at this point to make it worth the time, but I expect they won’t bother changing anything in WotLK with Cata pre-patch and launch so close.
Question about the FoS part, are you talking about FoS in gamma queue, or heroic queue or something else? PoS I can do, its a lot harder for me personally, especially getting used to the skips and getting mounted up to not pull the mobs up the ramp that groups always seem to want to skip.
Good note about the sidereal vendor. I’ll definitely use that to my advantage. As well as the easier gammas. Definitely doing gamma PoS and Oculus was like “holy cow.”
The item level requirement is stupidly low. Go for 5k+ GS.
Actually if you use honor gear to get 5k you’ll replace damn near everything with the tokens earned from doing gamma, and whatever else you get triumphs from. You can call what I say “spewing crap” but it’s the most logical way to gear at 80. People like you however suggest players go in under equipped, burden the group, then complain when you’re kicked out. The least you could do is stick to FOS/POS/HOR, but you didn’t even mention that.
truth be told, especially for healers reaching gamma-ready (meaning you are “ready” by Blizzards definition" is a recipee for frustration. For priests anyway. I didnt have a lot of trouble on my druid or shaman but paladin and priest…ugh
You can end up with way overgeared people which doesnt help you a lot cuz many tanks have the tendency to overpull or run ahead and never wait for anybody once they reach 6K+
You gonna need some more GS to feel comfortable as a priest healer otherwise you ll feel like your heals are not sufficient and you run oom quickly.
best advice i can give you is making a macro announcing your current status to the group the moment you zone in. Something like…
“Hey guys, please be gentle, I just unlocked Gamma dungeons and am kinda fresh in the gear department”. Letting people know you know all the mechanics is a plus
great advice. With 5K you wont get any upgrades from Gammas anymore. I hate people that spew crap like that. I guess you would only take 5K+ for a Naxx raid as well.
high 3K or low 4K is perfect for Gammas. means you gotta work for your emblems but people definately are ready at that point
Both heroic and gamma queue FoS are the same in terms of rewards, so either works. I haven’t fully tested this, but I believe each of those are separate queues however. So if you queue for heroic FoS, you can find players under 200ilvl (the gamma cutoff), vs regularly seeing 6k gs+ folks in gamma queue.
Yeah, that’s definitely the annoying part of PoS. There’s one skip that’s worth it (hugging the wall to skip the 3’rd pack on the ramp after Ick), all the other ones are risky and easily result in a wipe if one person messes up, erasing any time saved.
If you can find a tank to queue with that will take the normal path, the dungeon itself should be pretty easy to complete.
I would think this would help. I don’t think everyone is unreasonable about someone being new so if they are aware I feel like they maybe more generous in forgiving mistakes, etc
Having geared both a disc and a holy priest that way, I would agree that both were more painful in different ways getting over that hump compared to the other 3 classes.
The issue with paladin imo is that most of the accessible gear around that level has crit instead of haste (or at least haste/mp5). The toolkit itself is fine, but requires more haste than you probably have to really come together. And you can’t gem for haste like sham can because you need the int.
Aye dont get me wrong. Paladins and Priests are excellent healers but they seem to be a lot more gear dependant then shaman or druid IMO needing a little more gear before everything comes together for them.