Karazhan Report from the Front Lines - Week of 6/27

[Han]

Hey everyone... Congrats last night!  Considering we are getting to a point where all active players can't fit in one raid, I though we should start making a habit of posting the raid progress for the week.  This should be helpful for those of us who sit out an earlier night to know what bosses we have left for the week.  Also, we can drool over the loots we missed   So, I heard Attumen, Moroes, and Opera went down last night, what about Maiden?  Can anyone remember all the loots and post em?

[dudepal]

Yup, we managed to get maiden down as well Here's an overview of the loots, i'm not going to write exact names though cause i'm feeling lazy Attumen: caster ring and moonkin gear Moroes: rogue boots and caster belt Opera: healing trinket and shammy caster gear Maiden: cloth healing bracer and shammy healing relic

[Hardwigg]

So it's good we beat the Curator and grats to those who got loot.But we spent 3 1/2 hours and only came away with one boss down.  Now I'm just as much at fault here, 'cause I didn't say anything, but I think when we see that an encounter obviously is not working, we should maybe pass for the night and press on to something achieveable.  We had to have wiped 5-7 times on Shade.  Had we called it earlier, we could have made it to Chess and gotten an encounter out of the way before respawns were an issue.  As it stands, neither are completed.  Maiden was a different story; it took 4 attempts, but most people know that fight like the back of their hand and there's good reason to believe another attempt will lead to a defeated boss.  But with newer bosses to us like Shade or Illhoof or whoever else may be coming, we can't be so certain that additional attempts will lead to a dead boss.  After 3 or 4 wipes, when the group composition doesn't seem ideal and things just aren't working out, we should move on.  There's a lot of diminishing returns going on regarding the learning curve of a boss fight once we're to the 4th or 5th wipe.Just my opinion.  I'd rather see us gear people and snatch up as much loot for the guild each week before it resets.

[Drumble]

What we're dancing around here is the problem with this instance and group makeup -- the same 10 for one fight could be considered handicapped in another.  Additionally, this content is meant to be somewhat progressive -- in that you must have beaten and geared / skilled-up from previous encounters in order to function as a raid.No I dont mean to suggest there's a science to what makes the perfect makeup for an encounter -- but I do know that we were severely handicapped with Aran since he takes >melee <spell damage, and we only had 2 targetting interrupts.The problem is, we knew this going into the encounter -- and we didn't adjust the raid.  So sorry on my part -- first of all to the raid for not fixing what we saw as a problem from the beginning, secondly "in advance" to the people who we're going to have to ask to swap-out in future raids.  I think we can all agree that it would be better to complete the encounters so we can gear up for 2 raid teams .. It's crummy that only 10 of us can come to the raid and some have to sit out as is -- it's even crummier to have to leave.  Honestly, this again is a temporary thing until we're geared enough to have the DPS to iron out wrinkles in group makeup.What would have made it better?  2 things:Miramel showed up late, he's our highest DPS except when Fargol cheats -- and swapping in a rogue for that extra kick and consistant melee DPS.   "Balls out" DPS.  This is an encounter you can push it to the max -- figure it out - DO IT.  BALLS OUT DPS I SAY!!!

[Han]

First off, it sounds like everyone who was there learned some valuable things.  I thought I heard that on 1 attempt, we made it through the adds.  If so, that is big progress.  As for raid makeup, I can always make myself avialable for whatever night we plan on doing shade, which sounds like it would be thursday, or whenever we get the second night in.  I don't mind sitting out until the boss fight either, but I would hate to ask someone to clear trash and then step out for the good part   I will usually be on my alt Hanh these days.  Fargol and I can swap in and out for encounters without any hard feelings, but on Shade we need him to banish and fear, so I still need to take up a spot.  As an aside, Did we try the snake trap last night?  If so, how did it work?  Another note I read on the encounter is to drop his armor in any way possible, so faerie fire, curse of recklesness, sunder, its supposed to be brutally effective at increasing his melee damage taken.  Obviously, we would only use that curse if there were enough melee to make it worthwhile.  Before I start to ramble, lets give this a shot on sunday.  Lets emphasize bringing as much melee as possible.  It looks like we will have me, mahonri, and chuunks, mahnalor, any others?  Maybe myrdinn can try cat   Bring those epic rogue pants of yours jon!

[Hardwigg]

I tried the snake trap when I could.  Didn't really pay attention to how effective it was, but I'll keep doing it with the hope that he targets some of those snakes with spells.I was also using Viper Sting to drain his mana and speed him to the mass polymorph, hopefully putting more time b/w that and the elementals.  I'll continue to do this.

[Han]

Yeah I would assume more targets=better in general, so all pets should be out and dps'ing him as they do not trigger flame wreath.  Also, we need to make sure our mages are helping interrupt.  The more I read, the more I tend to think that counterspell and the shaman interrupts are actually BETTER than the long lockout interrupts like kick and pummel.  Think about it, if he is casting frost, I kick him, he is locked out of frost for 10 seconds, then he casts fire, chuunks pummels, now all he can do is spam arcane missiles until another tree opens up, meanwhile, people are dying and he is still using mana.  Ideally, he would cast frost, get interrupted, cast fire, get interrupted (at the end of his casts hopefully) and then go right back to frost, repeat.  This way only the occasional arcane missiles comes through.  If a mage counterspells, he still has a cooldown on that tree, lets say a second or two, so he will for sure switch to frost, then someone can kick that one, and he will be back to fire, instead of being forced into arcane.  If we can keep his casts down, I really think we can do this without a pyroblast.  If we take all the dps'ers with interrupts as a priority on sunday, we will have 7 available interrupts.  He should never get a spell off.  I realize this will cause him to melee, but maybe we should try interrupting everything if we have 7???  Maybe we should save the long lockouts for arcane, so he will be locked out and not do as much damage too.  Especially since he spends the mana up front, the only thing we can do to keep him from casting it is to lock him out.

[Han]

Dan, you should bring Huck on sunday.  Two locks = no problem on the adds. 

[Hardwigg]

Yeah, that's what Dudepal was saying.  My only obvious hesitation is that then I lose a possibility to upgrade my main's gear, while at the same time would pass on everything with Huck to other people's mains.  That's my selfish thought.Also, I think everyone (with the exception of healers) should be using STAMINA food for this fight.  If Shade repeatedly pummels you with spells, or after he polymorphs and pyroblasts, making sure everyone has more health would be beneficial.  Some people were dying really early yesterday, and if you can't stay up for more than a minute in the fight, it doesn't really matter how buffed your damage and attack power are.  Healers should be using Golden Fish Sticks, and in my opinion everyone else should have Spicy Crawdads for this fight.  I think the "slight" dropoff in damage capability is more than outweighed by extra life.  This fight is about awareness and survivability foremost; if we all live, there's no doubt we'll do enough damage to get him.

[Jon]

Just a couple things from last night.  We had to cut down dps every fight due to the polymorph/elemental timing.  So having everyone hold off dps of course makes for a much longer fight, mana becomes an issue, and of course more people die.  I wasn't doing a lot of dps as a balance druid in cat form, but even with that we still had to hold off on dps every fight. Pets/snakes, etc work great.  I always put out trees since they get targeted, even by the elementals.  Problem is that I usually end up throwing them down before an arcane explosion. Flame Wreaths: if you are not near a flame wreath you can move.  Tested this out last night so I could beat up on an elemental.  But if you are anywhere close do not move.  I think the one where Quani got flung may have been caused not by me rotating but actually moving to the side.  So that may have been my turn to mess us up there. I think our best attempts at this is massive dps along with interrupts.  The interrupts don't even have to be perfect, if we dps fast enough we'll hit the elementals before the poly/pyro regardless.  We need to treat this as intensive dps just like the curators adds.  All the dps buffs/elixirs/etc possible.  It has to be heavy and quick.  If we don't think we have the dps to do this with a current class make up we need to intentionally switch the entire strategy to a slower fight and concentrate on stam gear.  Then our game plan needs to switch to surviving the poly/pyro/elemental.  I think I was pushing 11K health last night buffed which let me get through that where others might have been going down.  But everyone will need that stam if we need to slow it down.  And elementals need to be wasted as soon as they appear regardless of which strategy.  It's the casters time to shine here since the elementals take the same spell damage as melee I believe unlike Shade...so blow all trinkets, cool downs at this time.  I'm still a strong possible for Sunday, and may try to go feral.  If I (Myrdinn) can't make it I'll try to post on the raid thread as early as possible on Sunday (work stuff....).  - Jon  

[Fargol]

BALLS OUT DPS!! yes, this fight you can go all the way, max your dps without a care in the world (of pulling aggro, that is)

I tried curse of recklessness last night (increases AP by ~100 decreases armour by ~600) I didn't really notice much difference, at least with the makeup we had, the extra melee dps probably was equal to what my usual curse of agony would have added. Obviously, with some serious melee dps, this would be a great strategy.

This is the melee time to shine fight - for a lot of fights until now, melee has been a liability, but we NEED them for this fight. He's got super low armour. There's no way I should be on the top of the dps charts for this fight end of story.

Making through the adds a few times maybe was progress, but we've killed this guy twice before.

[Mahnalor]

This is great stuff folks.  I like that we are actually putting our heads together and contributing to the forums...Thoughts on Shade... though I was not there this past Thursday, I was there when we beat him the last time.  We had 3 melee intderrupts an tried to coordinate the interrupts with a macro... This worked pretty well as we were able to beat him down fairly easily!  In addition, we made sure to announce when not to move, when to move, etc...I agree with Fargol about the melee... we should not care about aggro with this dude and go BALLZ out!Also... on Hardwiggs comment... EVERYONE should have stamina food buffs... NO EXCEPTION.  In this fight in particular... the increase in stamina means that our party can live that much longer and have that much more time to take him down.  See you all Sunday at 7pm!  He is going down!

[Han]

My thoughts on alt's taking gear:  If you need to bring your alt for the sake of group composition, and the raid generally agrees that our chances would be better with your alt, I think you should roll on gear just as if it were your main.  If the guild asks you to bring your alt, then you should get a chance at the loots.  I know there is a lot of mail that the shade drops, but in this case we have wiped probably 20 times with no loots at all, and I think we need to maybe swap in the warlocks after a couple attempts.  Ideally, we could do it without having 2 locks, and I think we will, but if we have a wipefest on shade next week, we should make sure we try 2 locks at least once.