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RPT
11.0.2
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The Furious Five: An Introduction
Live
Publié
06/12/2008 à 07:00
par
Malgayne
So in addition to the characters I normally play, I'm also part of something called a
static group
. I don't know if this is already a widely used term, but if it isn't I'm inventing it now.
Static Group:
A group of characters who are specifically set aside for the purpose of playing with one another.
I belong to a five man static group that I've played with for months now. It's five players, most of which are IRL friends of mine, and we get together about once every two weeks and run an instance.
That's it.
We've never levelled any other way since we were old enough to run
Ragefire Chasm
at level 13. We're now around level 60, so it's been a long trip--but with plenty of rest experience, it goes surprisingly smoothly. And it's
fun
--I have my main and my alts to play when I want to do something by myself, but I always get the chance to run an instance with my close friends every week or two. I strongly recommend it for anyone who has friends.
Here's the roster of the group I run with...
Jasica
, Protection Warrior
Sabrielle
, Combat Rogue
Udderbell
, Elemental Shaman
Rotgurgle
, Discipline Priest
Gajuson
, Frost Mage (This one is me)
There are a lot of interesting things about playing your characters this way. For one thing, my gear is really pretty exceptional. I'm constantly doing instances for everything, so I have a ton of instance rares and even a few epics. And when there are gaps in that gear, instances have a higher than normal uncommon item drop rate, so even without quest rewards we have a steady supply of greens dropping to fill in any gaps that we can't fill with blues. So overall, our gear is pretty awesome--242 spell power is not too shabby for a fresh 60.
What's really interesting to me, though, is that when you're playing this way you can treat
every
instance like a raid. I can min/max my talents to an absurd degree. Most importantly,
I never have to solo
. If offered a choice between a piece of gear with 10 spell power on it, and one with 20 stamina, I'll take the spell power--because I never go
anywhere
without a fully geared, competent protection warrior to tank for me, and a fully geared, competent priest to keep me alive. I can skip
all
the survivability talents (
this
is my current spec), because I don't need them--I can focus exclusively on doing as much DPS as possible.
Now multiply that by five. Our warrior doesn't have to worry about anything but threat and mitigation--she never has to do solo quests. The priest doesn't have to worry about building a set of damage gear, because he always has the rogue, shaman and mage to do damage
for
him. So each of us invests completely in what we're designed to do, and as a result we can breeze through content that's supposed to be way too difficult for us.
An example: When we hit 58, we all agreed that we would go straight to
Hellfire Ramparts
. We wouldn't stop and do any of the early Outland quests to bring our gear up to snuff--we'd just dive straight in and see how we fared against
Vazruden
and
Nazan
as fresh 58s with no Outland gear whatsoever. Well, we did wipe once when the priest couldn't get his
Greater Heal
off in time, but other than that it was a breeze.
Another example: back in the day, the 5 of us ran
Uldaman
together. Now this was back when
Archaedas
was still a level 47, instead of the level 40 he is now. At the time, Jasica (the tank) and Sabrielle (the rogue) were level 43, and everyone else was level 42. If you know your
mob difficulty colors
you know that this means that Jasica and Sabrielle are still in orange territory, while everyone else is red.
Now Archaedas is the highest level mob in the instance--everyone else is level 46 or lower. This puts the rest of the instance in no better than orange territory for the whole group, so with our gear and our experience working together, we never actually noticed any special difficulty until we reached Archaedas. But the difference between a mob that is orange to you and a mob that is red to you is a
huge
difference.
Well, the tank was still orange so he held aggro just fine. Archaedas was red to the healer, but the healer didn't need to worry about his level--all he had to do was heal the tank. So our defensive positions were working just fine. But out of the three DPS classes, only one of them was high enough level that Archaedas was orange--
everyone else was missing about 75% of the time
. The shaman missed with so many
Lightning Bolt
s that she gave up trying, and just healed the tank so that Rotgurgle could take a break to regenerate mana. I, meanwhile, just missed my
Fireball
over and over and over again. We were damaging him so slowly that I had time to run myself out of mana, cast
Evocation
, run out of mana again, use a
, run out of mana again, use my
Jade de mana
, run out of mana again, and cast
Evocation
again
before our combined healers ran out of steam, and we wiped.
I still get kind of frustrated about that fight, because I
know
that we could have finished him off if we hadn't had that arbitrary level restriction. If you expanded the game's requirements so that bosses were orange to people
six
levels below them and not five, we would have taken him easily. But because Blizzard had arbitrarily set that restriction at five levels, we were stuck in Uldaman until we got that extra level--and Uldaman is not a fun place to be stuck. :P
I like this group because it lets me experience all the game's instance content, but at my own pace and with friends I trust to be patient with me if I've had a hard day. Sure, we don't get to run together as often as I'd like--but the runs make up for it. Here are the instances we've cleared so far:
Ragefire Chasm
The Deadmines
Wailing Caverns
Shadowfang Keep
Blackfathom Deeps
Gnomeregan
(Had some pretty hilarious wipes in
that
one, let me tell you)
Razorfen Kraul
(And this one. Have you ever been massacred by 100 boars?)
Razorfen Downs
All of
Scarlet Monastery
(Except the Graveyard, no one ever goes there)
Uldaman
Zul'Farrak
Maraudon
(Both sides)
Sunken Temple
(Oh man, for
ages
. We could never get ourselves together to get all those level 50 class quests done in the same run)
Blackrock Depths
(I had never run this one back in vanilla WoW, so I was eager to see it with a good group. That'll teach me. >.<)
Stratholme
(Undead only. By this time we were too excited to get into Outland together to keep trying.)
Hellfire Ramparts
And now we're headed off together into the rest of Outland. We're hoping to hit
Blood Furnace
next week--I'll let you know how it goes.
So what about you?
Is there anyone else out there who levels like this? Do you enjoy it, or find it too restrictive? How do you handle tradeskills? Does anyone want to give it a shot? Maybe someone in this comment thread will want to reroll with you... ;)
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