World of Warcraft®

I'm hoping someone may have some insight into the difficulty of Thunder Throne. I'm the raid leader of a casual (4 hours / week) raid team. We were a re-roll group the night mists launched. We're currently sitting at 7/16 normal modes. And we've been smashing up against blade lord for 2 weeks now.

Does anyone have any insight into how difficult the 5.2 raid is compared with the 5.0 content? Is this a raid tier like ulduar -> toc where we just skip the rest of 5.0 and go straight to 5.2 (with a little help from 502 lfr) or is the difficulty jump big enough that we're going to basically need to be strong enough to finish 5.0 before we bother?

I'm feeling a little discouraged being only at 7/16 at the end of the tier and trying to formulate a plan for the team. Thanks!

We're fortunate enough to have an actual blue post addressing this issue, which I'll link here:
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/7710222181?page=3#57

Essentially, Throne of Thunder is tuned around a raid entering with an average ilvl of 500. Exceptional guilds can and do enter instances with gear below the "expected" ilvl -- it's pretty much a requirement of world-rank progression. But for the rest of us, that's the ilvl the developers had in mind.

If your guild is significantly behind that gearing curve, it may be worth scheduling LFR nights as a team. (I'm assuming Throne LFR won't be available right away, though.) LFR gear will be ilvl 502, so it will offer gear functionally equal to Heart of Fear or Terrace. You'd have better drop rates in normal raids, but that's only helpful if you're consistently getting enough bosses down. At 7/16, there's probably a good case for a little of both during the early weeks of the patch.

5.2 is brutally difficult at the moment. For a group that's not at least all in 496 iLvL, I don't think it's remotely clearable.

When 5.2 goes live, the T14 raids will be given a 10% nerf. My recommendation for your guild would be something like this:

5.2 week 1 - farm as much T14 (10% nerfed) as you can, kill as many new bosses as you can
5.2 week 2 - T15 LFR - queue as guild, T15 actual raid, spend last raid day farming T14
5.3 week 3 - as much T14 farm as you can quickly do, spend rest of week in T15
5.4 week 4 - T15 fully

So, you basically want to get as much farm as quickly as you can, using the nerf to get more gear onto your raiders, the first 2 ~ 3 weeks of the tier, until the LFRs are fully opened, and your raiders can get as much valor gear as possible. Make sure everyone on your team is valor capping and getting the new tokens.

Once you're able to boost your iLvLs a bit (5.2 LFR gear, T14 farm, valor gear) start hitting the early T15 bosses.

Thanks for the replies! This is exactly the info I needed.

Great idea Subrosian!

LOL we just last week got 10 people geared enough to set foot in MSV. We might see 500 ilvl by next expansion at this rate.

02/15/2013 01:58 PMPosted by Belmyra

LOL we just last week got 10 people geared enough to set foot in MSV. We might see 500 ilvl by next expansion at this rate.

There's a pace for every person, right?

I really hope ToT get on my raid calendar within a couple weeks of release. I'm liking this tier, and I'd really like to finish up the last two of HoF and get ToES, but I'm itchin' for something new. On the other hand, it'd be my first time since TBC to not clear the first tier prior to first raid patch.