Windzarko
Well-Known Member
Pre-ramble
Our current main objective is to try and get ourselves into Molten Core and start knocking down a few of the bosses in there; whilst we will never have the 40 people that raid was originally designed for, we won't need anywhere near that number. Back at 60, a lot of the place was perfectly doable with a mere 30 if you had certain key things and a bit of co-ordination and suchlike.
We're going to push things a bit by trying to do the place with likely somewhere between ten and fifteen people. Seem overconfident? Well, we managed to do Zul'gurub and our current AQ20 progress with only seven people. With the changes to game mechanics, gear, talents and suchlike, we should be strong enough to at least give it a try!
Right, initial ramble over, on to the specifics
Basic requirements
Group requirements:
*Multiple characters capable of removing Magical debuffs
*Multiple non-tank characters capable of removing Curses
*Two tanks minimum
*Two healers minimum
*DPS capable of reasonable sustained damage output
*Fire Resistance buffs: Gift of the Wild, Fire Resistance Totem/Aura
*Preferably a good spread of classes to avoid wasted Tier drops
Individual requirements:
*Molten Core attunement
*A decent health pool (this applies to all raid members, not just tanks)
*Preferably around 100 Fire Resistance from gear, talents and personal buffs
*Fully-enchanted gear
Fire Resistance
"Molten" Core. Full of things that are on fire and/or can set fire to you. Lots of Fire damage. Burning, flaming horribly hot death. Because of this, Fire Resistance is going to be very important for us in there. Some of the trash does nasty Fire stuff, some of the bosses do even more (particularly Magmadar, Baron Geddon, Golemagg and Ragnaros). There's also smaller amounts of Shadow damage and one boss that does some nasty Arcane stuff. Because of all this magical and primarily-Fire-based nastiness, we're going to need a fair bit more health than for ZG/AQ20, and Fire Resistance to back it up.
Luckily, Fire Res is quite easy to get hold of, and I'll cover a few of the simple ways here:
Gear
Dire Maul class trinkets, aka "Royal Seal of Eldre'thalas". Apart from DKs, every class can get a book that drops in Dire Maul and begins a quest for them to hand the book in to one of the Shen'dralar chaps in the Athenaeum library between DM North and West. We have plenty of the class books in the guild bank, and Dire Maul runs will always yield more. The trinket gives 10 Fire Resistance, and then a (hopefully) helpful stat.
Crafted gear. This is likely one of the main ones to look at, since there's only so far that the above can take you. Much of the worthwhile Fire Resistance gear comes from recipes obtained with Thorium Brotherhood reputation. Raexin is Exalted and can make various pieces of Mail, Plate and some weapons with Fire Res on, and I can make Cloth stuff on Lithaella. Anyone else that has any kind of good Thorium Brotherhood rep on a Tailor/Leatherworker/Blacksmith, shout it out somewhere in this subforum so we know who to go to for stuff.
Tier gear. The Tier 0.5 (aka Dungeon Set 2) 2-piece set bonus is 8 all resistances. Some of the Tier 1 pieces also have Fire Resistance on, but apart from the BoE pieces, people shouldn't really be using Molten Core-dropped gear until we've made a successful trip or two to the place.
BoE pieces pieces and dungeon drops. There are a fair few random bits and pieces around with Fire Resistance on. For casters, there's the Mageflame Cloak, a reasonably common blue drop that you're likely to see on the Auction House and in the Guild Bank. There might be the rarer, niftier pieces like the Eye of Flame BoE cloth epic headpiece as well, but don't count on those. Some of the dungeon drops in level 60-ish dungeons (DM, Strat, Scholo, etc) might have a few bits as well, and not all of them gimp you too heavily on other stats.
Enchants
Argent Dawn shoulder enchants: Flame Mantle of the Dawn or the Chromatic Mantle of the Dawn. The former requires AD Revered and 10 Argent Dawn Valour Tokens, the latter requires AD Exalted and 25 tokens. Whilst the latter obviously needs a lot more time and effort to acquire, I'd recommend it simply because it'll help a little with the other magical damage types that crop up in Molten Core.
Lesser Arcanum of Resilience: 20 Fire Resistance enchants that you can place on two pieces of gear? Hells yes. Since leg armours don't do so much and spellthread is non-existant at our level, this is a very tasty option and relatively easy to work with. You can get this enchant from a repeatable quest, although it's worth noting that the Libram you need for the quest is Unique, so you can't get more than one in a single trip there unless someone comes with you to hold the second book. If you see these books on the AH or see them drop, grab them, they'll come in handy!
Enchant Cloak - Greater Fire Resistance. This enchant comes from Cenarion Circle honoured, and was updated back in patch 2.2 to use Burning Crusade materials. It's fine for people to use this enchant as it WAS around in vanilla WoW, the materials costs were just updated to BC ones for the sake of people that wanted to keep using it in BC for things like the Warlock tank in the Leotheras encounter. For 15 Fire Resistance, it's definitely worth it.
Consumables
The only real option is the Flask of Chromatic Resistance, which nicely persists through death, isn't toooo heavy on materials (Black Lotus is the only tricky bit, and even that isn't too much of a problem), and at 25 all-resist will also help with the other magical damages in the instance. I can make these on Koreyna and will do so when we actually build a group to go into MC; if you get a goodly amount of Fire Resistance without this, then use a different elixir/flask of your choice, but these things will be there to try and plug any resistance holes in the group, so to speak. I'd advise not counting on one of these to help you reach the 100-before-buffs.
A note for tanks
Tanks will likely already be aware that reaching the Defense Cap is more or less impossible prior to Blackwing Lair-level gear. For Molten Core, this won't be a problem for you, since spell-attacks from NPCs cannot crit. Other stats you've been working on will need to be reconsidered for MC...
*Armour : will not work against spell attacks and elemental melee attacks. The latter is when an enemy does a melee attack and it does (in this case) Fire damage rather than physical. However, Armour will still work just fine against most of the trash and bosses. As a rule of thumb, if the thing hitting you looks like it's made of fire, it's probably ignoring your armour
*Block : also will not work against spell attacks and elemental melee attacks, so for such fights you'll find that dodge, parry and pure defense will be of more value. However, I'd like to see you try tanking Garr's adds without Block, so it WILL still have value on a fight-dependent basis
*Defence : You can't cap it with the gear available to us, but by no means shun it. We can't suffer Crushing Blows anymore, but the hit and crit avoidance it gives will work on anything we fight, and the obvious Dodge/Parry and (to a lesser extent) Block benefits are worth it as well.
*Fire Resistance : Yes, you'll need it as well. You may even need more of it than the rest of us, we'll see.
There, that's a start... I'll add to this thread if needed. If people can make the crafted Fire Res gear, shout out in here. We'll try to get the materials for you. And yes, using a level 80 to grind materials or craft the gear/do enchantments is fine.
Our current main objective is to try and get ourselves into Molten Core and start knocking down a few of the bosses in there; whilst we will never have the 40 people that raid was originally designed for, we won't need anywhere near that number. Back at 60, a lot of the place was perfectly doable with a mere 30 if you had certain key things and a bit of co-ordination and suchlike.
We're going to push things a bit by trying to do the place with likely somewhere between ten and fifteen people. Seem overconfident? Well, we managed to do Zul'gurub and our current AQ20 progress with only seven people. With the changes to game mechanics, gear, talents and suchlike, we should be strong enough to at least give it a try!
Right, initial ramble over, on to the specifics
Basic requirements
Group requirements:
*Multiple characters capable of removing Magical debuffs
*Multiple non-tank characters capable of removing Curses
*Two tanks minimum
*Two healers minimum
*DPS capable of reasonable sustained damage output
*Fire Resistance buffs: Gift of the Wild, Fire Resistance Totem/Aura
*Preferably a good spread of classes to avoid wasted Tier drops
Individual requirements:
*Molten Core attunement
*A decent health pool (this applies to all raid members, not just tanks)
*Preferably around 100 Fire Resistance from gear, talents and personal buffs
*Fully-enchanted gear
Fire Resistance
"Molten" Core. Full of things that are on fire and/or can set fire to you. Lots of Fire damage. Burning, flaming horribly hot death. Because of this, Fire Resistance is going to be very important for us in there. Some of the trash does nasty Fire stuff, some of the bosses do even more (particularly Magmadar, Baron Geddon, Golemagg and Ragnaros). There's also smaller amounts of Shadow damage and one boss that does some nasty Arcane stuff. Because of all this magical and primarily-Fire-based nastiness, we're going to need a fair bit more health than for ZG/AQ20, and Fire Resistance to back it up.
Luckily, Fire Res is quite easy to get hold of, and I'll cover a few of the simple ways here:
Gear
Dire Maul class trinkets, aka "Royal Seal of Eldre'thalas". Apart from DKs, every class can get a book that drops in Dire Maul and begins a quest for them to hand the book in to one of the Shen'dralar chaps in the Athenaeum library between DM North and West. We have plenty of the class books in the guild bank, and Dire Maul runs will always yield more. The trinket gives 10 Fire Resistance, and then a (hopefully) helpful stat.
Crafted gear. This is likely one of the main ones to look at, since there's only so far that the above can take you. Much of the worthwhile Fire Resistance gear comes from recipes obtained with Thorium Brotherhood reputation. Raexin is Exalted and can make various pieces of Mail, Plate and some weapons with Fire Res on, and I can make Cloth stuff on Lithaella. Anyone else that has any kind of good Thorium Brotherhood rep on a Tailor/Leatherworker/Blacksmith, shout it out somewhere in this subforum so we know who to go to for stuff.
Tier gear. The Tier 0.5 (aka Dungeon Set 2) 2-piece set bonus is 8 all resistances. Some of the Tier 1 pieces also have Fire Resistance on, but apart from the BoE pieces, people shouldn't really be using Molten Core-dropped gear until we've made a successful trip or two to the place.
BoE pieces pieces and dungeon drops. There are a fair few random bits and pieces around with Fire Resistance on. For casters, there's the Mageflame Cloak, a reasonably common blue drop that you're likely to see on the Auction House and in the Guild Bank. There might be the rarer, niftier pieces like the Eye of Flame BoE cloth epic headpiece as well, but don't count on those. Some of the dungeon drops in level 60-ish dungeons (DM, Strat, Scholo, etc) might have a few bits as well, and not all of them gimp you too heavily on other stats.
Enchants
Argent Dawn shoulder enchants: Flame Mantle of the Dawn or the Chromatic Mantle of the Dawn. The former requires AD Revered and 10 Argent Dawn Valour Tokens, the latter requires AD Exalted and 25 tokens. Whilst the latter obviously needs a lot more time and effort to acquire, I'd recommend it simply because it'll help a little with the other magical damage types that crop up in Molten Core.
Lesser Arcanum of Resilience: 20 Fire Resistance enchants that you can place on two pieces of gear? Hells yes. Since leg armours don't do so much and spellthread is non-existant at our level, this is a very tasty option and relatively easy to work with. You can get this enchant from a repeatable quest, although it's worth noting that the Libram you need for the quest is Unique, so you can't get more than one in a single trip there unless someone comes with you to hold the second book. If you see these books on the AH or see them drop, grab them, they'll come in handy!
Enchant Cloak - Greater Fire Resistance. This enchant comes from Cenarion Circle honoured, and was updated back in patch 2.2 to use Burning Crusade materials. It's fine for people to use this enchant as it WAS around in vanilla WoW, the materials costs were just updated to BC ones for the sake of people that wanted to keep using it in BC for things like the Warlock tank in the Leotheras encounter. For 15 Fire Resistance, it's definitely worth it.
Consumables
The only real option is the Flask of Chromatic Resistance, which nicely persists through death, isn't toooo heavy on materials (Black Lotus is the only tricky bit, and even that isn't too much of a problem), and at 25 all-resist will also help with the other magical damages in the instance. I can make these on Koreyna and will do so when we actually build a group to go into MC; if you get a goodly amount of Fire Resistance without this, then use a different elixir/flask of your choice, but these things will be there to try and plug any resistance holes in the group, so to speak. I'd advise not counting on one of these to help you reach the 100-before-buffs.
A note for tanks
Tanks will likely already be aware that reaching the Defense Cap is more or less impossible prior to Blackwing Lair-level gear. For Molten Core, this won't be a problem for you, since spell-attacks from NPCs cannot crit. Other stats you've been working on will need to be reconsidered for MC...
*Armour : will not work against spell attacks and elemental melee attacks. The latter is when an enemy does a melee attack and it does (in this case) Fire damage rather than physical. However, Armour will still work just fine against most of the trash and bosses. As a rule of thumb, if the thing hitting you looks like it's made of fire, it's probably ignoring your armour
*Block : also will not work against spell attacks and elemental melee attacks, so for such fights you'll find that dodge, parry and pure defense will be of more value. However, I'd like to see you try tanking Garr's adds without Block, so it WILL still have value on a fight-dependent basis
*Defence : You can't cap it with the gear available to us, but by no means shun it. We can't suffer Crushing Blows anymore, but the hit and crit avoidance it gives will work on anything we fight, and the obvious Dodge/Parry and (to a lesser extent) Block benefits are worth it as well.
*Fire Resistance : Yes, you'll need it as well. You may even need more of it than the rest of us, we'll see.
There, that's a start... I'll add to this thread if needed. If people can make the crafted Fire Res gear, shout out in here. We'll try to get the materials for you. And yes, using a level 80 to grind materials or craft the gear/do enchantments is fine.