Kara before Heroics?

So I'm going to post to get everyone's opinion here. I've been lurking a lot and I love reading this section of the forums for strategies on bosses and whatnot.

Anyway, my issue is with my guild and the newly reformed Kara teams.

A new team is forming and our guild is offering to help people with instance runs to get their kara keys.

I'm wondering if we're "setting the bar too low" but just asking for them to have their key to get into Kara? I look at most of these people and they've never run a heroic. They don't have their heroic keys at all!!

I would think this is an issue, not only for getting an idea about 70+ elite mobs, but other strategies like focus fire, aggro/healing mediation and threat management but also gear.

To be fair, some of these people "epic'd out" but its PVP gear. Can their PVP gear compensate for the drops in Kara? Can you get those who think they can tank anything into the "group mentality" quickly? I don't think Kara is the place to teach basic 5-man tactics, but then again that's why I'm posting here.

I definitely welcome any/all opinions people have. If you can make the argument regarding PVP gear > Kara drops, that's fine too. Then I have one less thing to worry about.

Thanks for any/all opinions.

-W|||Try it out. Worst thing that can happen is you waste some time, get a repair bill and learn something.



Just make sure everyone knows their roles and review videos of other guilds downing the bosses. Don't shoot too far, though, take it one boss at a time. Remember, you have a full week to do it (provided you start on reset day).

If you are that concerned, bring it up to whomever's in charge. Suggest that you run some 5-mans first.|||It's worth doing. Either it will work or it won't, and if it doesn't, then there's a chance that people might realize that they need to do more than get the key to be ready for Kara. My guild just started Kara a week ago. We have just about no heroic gear, and little PvP gear. Our tanks and healers take their gear seriously, with the least amount of bonus healing among the healers being over 1200, and two having over 1500. The quality of our DPSers varies greatly, with the best DPSers doing twice the damage of the others.

In our first trip into Kara, gear was not our issue. Our issues were:

1) keeping everyone focused on reaching the boss. Our first try on Attumen failed at least in part because one of the spectral horses respawned just about the time we pulled Midnight (too many afks and similar delays). You need to keep everyone focused from the time you start clearing the trash until you kill the boss that controls the trash respawn in question.

2) keeping everyone focused on functioning as a group. One of our near-wipes was because of a rogue who couldn't resist the urge to explore ahead of the group while the group was mana'ing up.

3) knowing the ins and outs of the bosses themselves. This will just come with practice. Reading strategy guides before going into the fight helps, but rereading them after you've actually been in the fight will help quite a bit more. Before the fight, we thought that garrote would be the worst part of the Moroes fight, but after wiping several times, not once because of deaths to garrote, we're now looking at the other things that are causing us problems.

4) knowing the ins and outs of our classes in respect to the fights. After wiping about 6 times on Moroes, we've done a good bit of brainstorming and have come up with things that we can't believe we didn't think of at the time (and a few other ideas that came up here), and almost every one of the tricks involve specific class abilities that we've never needed to use in the specific way we're thinking of (not that it wouldn't have been useful to have tried these in 5-mans, but they weren't as necessary).

As far as PvP gear goes, that depends much on the class/spec/slot. The vindicator neck pieces tend to be very good for any caster that is getting ready for kara, and not bad for melee classes. The weapons tend to be good for just about any non-tanking class, though they can be a big MP5 loss for healers. The feral Vengeful gear is pretty good tanking gear compared to other things you can get in prep for Kara, and decent DPS gear at the same time.

On the other hand, both my warlock and priest are in epic tailored items or best (or near best) quested rewards for all their armor slots, and the actual Vengeful armor would be a step down in healing or spell damage in almost every slot (the priest has one slot where Vengeful would be an upgrade). Filling in a few spots with PvP gear can help a squishy cloth wearer more likely to survive incidental damage, but they're still going to go down if something starts beating on them and isn't dealt with immediately. Having less than 6K health can hurt if Attumen charges you, though properly played, that won't be an issue.

So, for the PvP gear, it is really an evaluation that would need to be made for every slot of every character separately. There's not a single character in our Kara group that wouldn't benefit from a few select upgrades, but also probably not many characters in the same group for which every piece would be an upgrade, and those only among the poorly geared DPSers.|||Basement boss, Attumen, and Moroes should be easily enough done with even a moderately geared group.

Once you get to Curator, gear becomes more important.

Prince and Nightbane are considered "gear check" encounters.

There are some decent PvP items that will supplement your gear for Kara raiding, so I wouldn't discourage working towards pieces to that end. Just be sure that the Healadin is taking the healing PvP items, for example.

Don't confirm raiders to raid in Karahzan if they aren't working on procuring gear from Heroics and/or crafted gear outside of raiding. They NEED to learn how to operate in a 5-person setting in order to learn how to play their class effectively.|||Yes, agreed with Geboran, even if it doesn't sound like it. I expect us with a little practice to be able to deal with the first few bosses (I'll put Maiden on that list, we didn't do too bad on her on our first attemt, just didn't have time to make a second attempt), but when it comes to the bosses of a more normal difficulty, we'll probably be picking the attendies according to how well they've performed on the first few bosses. I just don't see us benching a DPSer that puts out 700-1000 DPS for a 450 DPS one without a very good reason, and no, wanting loot from a boss isn't good enough. Those that have put work into being good are going to see more of the later bosses.|||Class dependent, but you can go into Kara in all blues or blues and a couple of greens and do fine. No heroics needed.

BUT

You should not expect to do well if most people have dinged 70, been run through the attunement process and not done any gear upgrades. HOW you do those upgrades is up to you, but in general the gear people will have on dinging 70 is not going to cut it in Kara.

My rogue upgraded everything to blues by grabbing some blue level BoE crafted pieces, doing a few quests and running some normal instances. That took a couple of weeks after hitting 70 and no heroics. At that point I was ready to get into Kara AND to pull my weight in there.|||My guild is a small one comprising nothing but rl friends and f-of-f's. We have Kara on farm and are farming it for a while before we seriously head for ZA ( we wiped at Nalorakk on first real try, so I think we should be ZA ready soon).

We will almost certainly never see 25-man content and I'm fine with that. More 10s and maybe a 15 might be nice though.

Anyway we have some new members only just reached 70, or getting there soon. I know they're excited about Kara and heroics. They have no idea what Kara or heroics are like, but they can sense they're somewhat exciting.

Problem is, they are getting plenty of free guild runs through normal instances. Runs from players seriously overgeared for normal instances, and so experienced with heroics that they're generally not much of a challenge anymore either.

This is worrying to me. All they did was level to 70 by grinding and questing, and we all know you don't even need to roll your face across the keyboard to get there, you just slump over it will do.

All of them need to l2p. That day my guild were running Kara leaving the newbies behind, and I missed Kara having logged on late. They wanted to doa run, and I was very happy to help them with a normal SV run.

But NOT on my prot pally who can pretty much pull the whole instance in one go. S0 I took my severely undergeared, badly prot-specced warrior to tank. And I hadn't even used this war for anything other than dailies for 6 months.

For the first time ever, these enwbies got to do a proper run instead of having free blues handed to them for simply being on follow and pretending to do whatever their class is supposed to do.

Disaster on some trash pulls - sheeper not experienced enough to keep sheep sheeped, hunter getting into all sorts of trouble with trap, healer standing right in the middle of fray to heal. Basically everything done wrong because they never had to do it properly.

Coordinationa nd awareness? Non-existent. Multiple wipes on lightning boss - no one watching clouds, or at the very least their own health bar in order to move away quick. Steamrigger - not watching for adds. Kalithresh - don't remember how many attempts before they finally manged to start killing tanks before the chanelling was done.

Absolutely none of these I will take into Kara or heroics. Not that we will wipe, we can comfortably carry a couple through at any one time.

Simply because they will never learn to play their class, and thereby actually enjoy playing their class because they're good at it.

Hasn't come to that yet, but if any of them are invited to Kara at their current level of skill and gear, I will speak out. Especially since we have healer friends with dps alts who have been bringing their healers simply because they're needed when they'd rather bring their dps classes.

To bring a newbie dps who does not know his or her class over their heads is not something I will be strongly against.

PS It's not just their class they need to learn, only from doing proper 5mans will they learn about other classes at all, and that's just as important. I am sure there are many of us who don't play every class, but know a fair bit abuot every class from experience.

Yeah, in my case, I think every new totally fresh 70 should be running plenty of normal instances first.|||Yeah, we've got that problem too, but not in the people that want to run Kara, for the most part. We've been having quite a few discussions in the guild about what to do about lowbies that want to go into instances. We don't have enough people below 60 to run an instance with level appropriate people most of the time, so we either drag them through with an overpowered group, or don't run the instance. Either way, they hit lvl 60 not knowing how to group for the most part. Even then, we never have both a lvl 60ish tank and a lvl 60is healer to help them get through Ramparts or Blood Furnace, so someone in the group winds up being overpowered.

This isn't saying that our kara raiders are all highly competent, knowledgeable players, but they've at least got a handle on most of their class functions. Then again, I'm sure some of these people were as bad as the ones you're talking about when they were freshly dinged 70s. Heck, even our better players, every time we run SL or Shattered Halls, comments on "remember when we used to wipe a lot doing this place?" Heck, our first runs of both of those instances ended in abject failure. Then again, my guild didn't even see all the lvl 60 5-mans before the expansion came out, as most of us had just been playing for a few months at the time, so lvl 70 was the first time we had stopped leveling long enough to get comfortable with the characters. So I wouldn't write off all of them, but yeah, don't take them until they've shown some interest in learning to play.|||Quote:








Heck, even our better players, every time we run SL or Shattered Halls, comments on "remember when we used to wipe a lot doing this place?" Heck, our first runs of both of those instances ended in abject failure.




that is because gear was much harder to get when BC was fresh out, and the instances were nerfed to hell and back since then. You cannot compare these instances with the ones back then, not in the slightest. It has the same name, taht s about it.|||i remeber spending a week every day doing sv till we got in farm and sl took maybe a little longer. we wiped for hours on vorpal and though omg how the hell do we do kara like this. but only a few people on the server had felsteel gear to tank with or any bop epics. last feb we had just hit 70 we had no ah economy to use, very few players had managed to max out trade skills to craft gear. but the biggest problem was the dungeons where just harder then than a heroic is today. and a lot of mobs have been removed as well as pat paths changed.

nowadays a player has no excuse for not wearing good gear, and if they need dragging through all the kara attunment quests without actually working at getting geared up for kara. personaly i would rather not run with players who cant put the effort in to gear up as they are also likley to be players that use your guild to get a certain gear level and then go hey im better than you lot now and rush of tojoin a guild 2 or 3 boss's infront of your progression