World of Warcraft Dungeons Guide

World of Warcraft Dungeons Guide by Grimshott

Okay so you just hit level 15 and had something pop up saying “New Feature Unlocked: Dungeon Finder!” and you wonder, what might this be? Well, you’ve come to the right post, because i will be telling you all about this Dungeon Finder and how it will help you later on in WoW…

How to get to the Dungeon Finder?

Well, there are two ways, the shortcut version that most people do, is just simply hitting “i” on your keyboard, or, in your toolbar, there is a icon with a dragon eye, that is also a way to get to the dungeon finder.

Wait, what are dungeons?
Dungeons are instances of creatures and bosses, basically you will be fighting things that are harder than normal things you have been killing, they will be Elite, which means they have higher health, and deal more damage. Yes, and one of the bonuses of doing this is you get XP, lots of it, except, you are in a group, so you will be sharing the XP with others, and with money aswell.

What are roles?
Roles are specific jobs for your character, the roles in a dungeon are Healer, Tank, and DPS. We will going over in detail what all of these roles do and the proper classes to do them in, as well as specs.

DPS– Ah, DPS, the most common role in a dungeon, and the one that doesn’t require too much effort, but yet, the one that takes the longest, what i mean by that is that if you were to queue as a DPS, expect a wait time of 5-10 minutes, and as you level up, it will seem to get worse, for the best times, try to get on a highly populated server. DPS stands for “Damage Per Second” which basically means your job is to just kill things with your group, which means anything you see your party members attacking, you attack as well, but make sure you are specced properly for DPS!

Here are the classes for DPS, and the spec you should be in for better DPS:
Priest-Shadow
Hunter- Any spec
Warrior- Fury or arms
Mage- Any spec
Warlock-Any spec
Death Knight- Unholy or Frost
Paladin- Retribution
Rogue- Combat
Druid- Feral or Balance
Shaman- Elemental

If you are specced in the following as your class, you are perfect for DPS, if you specced in anything different, then you may want to spend 1 gold for a respec.

Tank– Tank, one of the 2 most important roles, fortunately, tanks get in at a instant time most of the time in the dungeon queue, depending on level and server once again can change this. Unfortunately, you are the leader of our dungeon group and your job is pretty tough. Your job as a Tank is to hold threat to you and only you, that means you pull mobs or monsters towards you, and try to keep them on you as long as possible, and try to make sure your healer and DPS do not have any of your mobs attacking them, just you. This role will take practice, and at your level which assuming is 15, will not matter because you do not have that many abilities to help you with this job.

Here are the classes for Tank, and the proper spec you should be in for better tanking:
Warrior- Protection
Death Knight- Blood
Paladin- Protection
Druid- Feral (In Bear form)

If you would like to be a tank, you should be one of these classes in this spec, great, lets move on!

Healer-Pretty much self explanatory, your job is to heal the entire group, you are the MOST important part of the group, which makes your job alot more stressful at higher levels, but at 15, its not as hard. Healers almost have a instant time aswell, depending on server and level of course, but have a lower time then DPS, so thats fortunate for you. As a healer though, do not deal any damage what so ever, that is not you job, you must stay behind the group if necessary, and heal your tank, and if a dps is taking damage and loosing health, you must heal them too, you’ll get the hang of it, trust me :)

Here are the classes for Healer, and the proper spec you should be in for better healing:
Priest- Discipline or Holy
Paladin-Holy
Shaman-Restoration
Druid-Restoration

If you are one of these classes, and in this spec, you are a healer! :)

Well, thanks for reading my guide, alot of work went into it, aswell as much experience with all roles, haha. Hope i helped people who needed help on this! Good luck dungeoners!

Cataclysm Dungeon Basics by Sharkon

Tanks –
The first thing to realize is that Cataclysm is not Wrath of the Lich King; you can’t tank four or twenty mobs at once in Cataclysm dungeons. Even if you don’t immediately die, your healer is not going to be able to sustain the intense healing output necessary to keep you up while the dps whittle the mobs down. Making use of your group’s available CC abilities will drastically reduce both the amount of damage you are taking at any given time and the amount of threat you need to be putting out at any given time, relieving a great deal of stress from both yourself and your healer. 
Lost Art: Pulling-
Pulling intelligently was a vital tank skill in pre-Wrath content, and is again in the post-Wrath game. There are three primary factors to mind when pulling: CC, ranged mobs, and patrols. 

Coordinating your pull with the rest of the group’s outgoing CC abilities is extremely important. Nothing causes chaos like immediately breaking a CC that can’t be reapplied quickly. Pulling a group by charging into their midst and tanking them where they started, for example, is likely to make effective CCing next to impossible because of the cleaves and AoEs all tanks put out as a part of their normal rotations. A better tactic is to use a ranged ability to aggro the group, then apply CCs while the mobs are still coming to you. This reduces the likelihood of cleaves or AoEs breaking a CC prematurely.

Ranged mobs can throw a spanner in the works of this tactic, however, since they will remain right where they started rather than run to you, and will eventually start nuking your healer instead of you. To counter this, you can prioritize ranged mobs for CC, leaving only melee mobs that will run to you until you are ready to break the CCs yourself. If the ranged mobs are immune to your available CCs, you (or a dps) can interrupt or silence them (if they are casters, and not physical ranged) to force them to come to you, or you can move out of their line of sight to force them to move to a position from which they can see you again (this works with both casters and physical ranged). 

Finally, be aware of any mobs that patrol the area you are fighting in. Having a couple mobs unexpectedly join the middle of a controlled fight will ruin your day real quickly. Pulling a group out of a patrol’s turf before commencing dps is a good idea whenever possible – note that patrols usually won’t be aggroed from passing CCed mobs, unless the CC breaks while the patrol is in aggro range – and should be pulled first any time you have to option to do so without pulling another group.

Healers-
The healing model in Cataclysm is very different from that of Wrath of the Lich King. Healing in Wrath of the Lich King was playing whack-a-mole: you filled up any health bar that took a dip as fast as you could because if you didn’t, they could die in the next few seconds. Healing in Cataclysm, by comparison, is much slower. If players are dying in the space of a few seconds, it’s almost certainly because theyscrewed up, not because you didn’t heal them fast enough. 

Lost Art: Resource Management-
The downside to this relaxation of healing pace is that it is very easy to run yourself out of mana if you don’t heal intelligently. This means understanding the relationship between each of your healing spells and their mana costs. Each class is obviously different, but the basic theory for each is the same: you have efficient heals, fast heals, and big heals. Your efficient heals are relatively weak and slow, but are very cheap. These are your bread and butter spells, the ones you should be casting by default anyone takes damage. Everything else is situational: if the tank takes a big spike of damage, use a big heal. If a dps is actually in danger of dying in the next few seconds, use a fast heal. Choosing the right heal for the situation is the new mark of healing skill, not how much Haste you have stacked. 

Damage Dealing-
To be direct, dealing damage is no longer your primary duty in group content. It doesn’t even come in at number two. Dealing damage is now your third priority, behind staying alive at number one, and controlling mobs at number two. Healers can no longer spare the time or mana to heal everyone in the party constantly, nor can they heal through everything the game can throw at you anymore. In Cataclysm, it is your own damn job to avoid taking any damage you can, and if you can contribute some self-healing to lighten your healer’s load even further, so much the better. Most boss encounters in Cataclysm involve at least one form of avoidable group damage. Learning how to avoid this is the most important thing you can do to prepare for any boss fight.

Lost Art: Crowd Control-
Crowd control, or CC, is the art of preventing mobs from acting. There are a few different ways to do this, and mastering them will do a very long way to proving yourself a competent player. Mages and hunters in particular are traditionally seen as kings of CC due to their wide array of mob-controlling abilities, but all classes have some form of crowd control to contribute to their groups.
Hard CCs are abilities that completely lock down a target from acting for a sustained period of time, allowing you to focus your attention on another target while the first remains safely locked down. Below is a simplified list of mob types and which classes have hard CCs for them. In this case, I am counting “hard CCs” as any CC ability with a duration of 30 seconds or longer and a cooldown shorter than its duration.

Beasts: Druid (Hibernate), Mage (Polymorph), Rogue (Sap), Shaman (Hex)
Demons: Paladin (Repentance [Retribution only]), Rogue (Sap), Warlock (Banish, Enslave Demon)
Dragonkin: Druid (Hibernate), Paladin (Repentance [Retribution only]), Rogue (Sap)
Elementals: Shaman (Bind Elemental), Warlock (Banish)
Giants: Paladin (Repentance [Retribution only])
Humanoids: Mage (Polymorph), Paladin (Repentance [Retribution only]), Priest (Mind Control), Rogue (Sap), Shaman (Hex), Warlock (Seduction, requires Succubus)
Undead: Paladin (Repentance [Retribution only]), Priest (Shackle Undead)
Universal: Hunter (Freezing Trap)

 

Soft CCs are similar to hard CCs in that they completely prevent a target from acting while under their effects, but differ in that they have short durations, so that keeping a target locked down for any length of time with these abilities will require sustained effort on the controller’s part. The infamous rogue stunlock is a premier example of this kind of CC. 

Kiting is a more risky form of CC that is extremely effective when done well, and sometimes required on certain bosses or trash pulls. Kiting is the act of holding aggro on a mob while remaining perpetually outside of its attack range. Because of this, ranged classes with slowing and escape abilities like hunters, mages, and elemental shaman are excellent kiters. Kiting is best done to melee mobs that hit too hard, or that come in groups too large for the tank to survive when hard CC isn’t an option. A good example is the pair of ogre warriors immediately before the first boss of Heroic Deadmines, which are immune to hard CC abilities and hit extremely hard; kiting one while the dps burns the other makes the pull much easier on everyone involved.

Off-tanking is an even riskier form of CC that is often a last-ditch effort to save a pull when something goes wrong, but which can be an effective planned tactic. Off-tanking is the act of splitting the mobs between multiple tanks; in a 5-man dungeon, this means the tank and one of the dps. Classes with a tanking spec such as warriors and death knights are ideal for this, particularly if they have any baseline defensive cooldowns that they can use to help keep themselves alive. Off-tanking with a dps character is risky, because it splits the healer’s attention between multiple targets that need steady healing, but it is certainly preferable to letting a loose mob beat on the healer or another squishier party member. Rogues can also pull this off for short periods with Evasion, and combat pets can fulfill this role briefly since their deaths are even cheaper than those of players. 

Interruption abilities are another crucial form of CC which, unlike some other forms of CC, frequently figure prominently into boss encounters. Even outside of boss encounters, interruption and silencing abilities are extremely valuable tools that can severely reduce the incoming damage to the tank or group, or help a mob die faster. Every class has some form of interruption ability save for hunters and priests (whose only interrupts are a Marksmanship and Shadow talent, respectively), and warlocks (whose only interrupt is a pet skill of their Fel Hunter), but dps warriors and shaman are especially well suited to this role, since both classes’ interrupts have very short cooldowns and a secondary effect (warriors’ Pummel can be talented to grant a small personal damage buff when successful, and shamans’ Wind Shear reduces the shaman’s threat on the target).

Finally, buff and debuff management can make an otherwise nightmarish dungeon experience a walk in the park on a sunny day. Taking a second to remove a beneficial buff from a hostile target can drastically weaken that target, and dispelling a few debuffs from your party members can take a huge strain off your healer. Below is a quick reference guide to what buff and debuff type each class can remove.

Death Knight: N/A
Druid: Curse, poison, magic debuff (Restoration only), enrage
Hunter: Magic buff, enrage
Mage: Curse, magic buff
Paladin: Disease, poison, magic debuff (Holy only)
Priest: Disease, poison (Holy, self-only), magic buff, magic debuff
Rogue: Enrage (requires Anesthetic Poison)
Shaman: Curse, magic debuff (Restoration only), magic buff
Warlock: Magic debuff (requires fel hunter), magic buff (requires fel hunter)
Warrior: Magic buff (Protection only)

 

Closing-
Dungeon design and party dynamics are very different in Cataclysm from what we were all used to at the end of Wrath of the Lich King. Tanks can die, healers can’t heal through the fire, and dps is not a damage dealer’s top concern. Many of the problems plaguing current group content can be resolved simply by recognizing these changes, and by making use of the tools each class possesses but which went largely neglected in the previous expansion (I for one only used Hex once in all the PvE content I ran in Wrath, just for kicks, and the rest of my party spent the next five minutes trying to figure out where the heck that frog had come from). Tank only a few mobs at a time, heal at the same rate the damage is incoming, and interrupt the boss’s nuke while running out of the fire, and everyone’s dungeon experiences will be that much more productive and pleasant.

FAQ

I want a quick run, CCing just slows things down!
CCing may slow down the pulling process, but it results in an overall shorter dungeon run. The Wrath era of AoEing entire rooms down at once is over; the most effective way to kill trash mobs now is almost always one-by-one, in which case not CCing is only an exercise in stress and frustration for the tank trying to hold aggro on all those mobs and the healer trying to keep them alive. Best case, your healer is going to have to stop and drink after nearly every pull. Worst case, you’re going to wipe frequently, and this case is more likely until we get further into the expansion and start to outgear the content. All this time lost to wipes, corpse runs, and mana breaks slows down dungeon progress far more than tossing up a few raid markers and casting a few CCs will.

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