Forged Alliance

Hey Guys/Gals,

Please don't take this the wrong way.... but after last weeks raid I just need to get this off my chest.

Not that I should be the one saying this or not that anyone should ever have to say this but it would really be great if people could show up to the raid a few minutes early so we can start the raid on time. With that being said we don't need to have 25 people in the raid to clear the trash to marrowgar so I think as soon as we have a solid group within the zone we should start moving to save as much time as possible. This next thing really didn't come into play as much last week as the last time we were at fester but come prepared to the raid... Know the fights "or at least have read about them or watched the videos" and have the flasks etc we need to give each boss and each attempt our very best effort.

Next thing... Last weeks clear was super slow... Yes some of that had to do with the wipe on lady deathwhisper but alot of it was standing around waiting for who knows what... I think everyone in the raid at this point should at LEAST have the first 4 bosses down pat meaning we should need little to no explanation time or group set up. If I remember correctly i looked at the clock when we were on our first attempt of lady deathwhisper and it was 9:30... Thats 1.5 hours into the raid to get to the 2nd boss. Is it necessary to wait and talk about the trash befor lady deathwhisper? I think every single time we've been in there we've pulled both groups and have managed to come out of it with little to no casualties... Yes in a perfect world we could pull them seperately but if we are so uber we don't need to why not just do it? To those who question the call that ultimately wiped us on lady.... it was the right call, but we should have just used hero to help get us over that hump... I don't see a real reason to save hero. No need to panic this week or slow down the raid even more by waiting through another add rotation just when we are close everyone pop some cooldowns hit hero and lets rock her socks. With that all being said the final two bosses "gunship and saurfang" went pretty fast... Jim's alignment for saurfang seems to work well for us... Hopefully with some consistancy in our raid group people will just stand where they did last week, the week before etc.. and all the leader will have to do is assign those new people to a group.

Lastly.... I'm probably in the minority here but I was really sad that even though we were running behind we didn't do our best to at least get some attempts on fester. Yea we only had 50 mins or so but 20 mins worth of attempts is 20 mins of exp we can use this week... Not to mention the rep that most of you need to get rings that will make you better which will make our raid better. I know most people dedicate the 3 hours on tuesday to raiding but it doesn't seem like we are getting the same commitment "or at least not last week" for thursday... so i'd say lets keep tuesdays strictly ICC and then use thursdays time for both ICC attempts "as leaders see fit" and then spend the other time doing VOA 25/Raid Weekly/ToC 25. Because I know we could underman those things but we don't stand a chance in ICC without our full core group of raiders. Not to mention although many of you despise it there are plenty of great pug groups you can run voa/raid weekly/toc 25 with.

Just my opinion...

See you in game!

anch0r "thermal"

Just from the first paragraph I can tell you this has all been said before. Unfortunately its the nature of our beast. Being a casual guild means mommy and daddys going afk for kids/dogs/midraidsex. Not much you can do about it except be prepared and on time yourself. Will read the rest later.

Your last paragraph about going right up until 11:00 is meh to me. Usually I would agree but right now with flask prices so high people are going to be discouraged from using them for 2attempts (by the time we cleared trash and got there). Today I'm working on restocking flasks and pots for my characters and right now I'm down 500g and I haven't even started with flasks yet. For casual raiders like us (example: Fail Rogue) 500g is a lot. Many people in this guild don't have a lot of extra time to farm mats/gold for consumables so they need to be used as wisely as possible. I'm sure we all agree that we will have to be at the top of our game to down Festergut and Rotface. The schedule that makes most sense to me would be clearing first wing on Tuesday and if no time permits then we come back on Thursday and have a full night of attempts. The obvious catch here is that we need to be able to field a solid raid 2 nights a week or start earlier, neither of which having been our strong points in the past.

Yes I agree with your points about forming the raid faster and starting trash sooner, nothing surprising there. I'm sure everyone in the raid knows these things need to happen but just can't for one reason or another. We could form for trash at 7:30 and offer some small amount (1-5) of DKP to those that show up early to help clear trash and get ready.

The whole gold/flask argument is completely irrelevant here.... To get attempts on rotface and fester we wouldn't necesarrily have to have flasks. Yes they would help... but hey if we cleared like we should i'm guessing two flasks gets us through the first four bosses plus a reasonable number of attempts on fester. I wouldn't expect nor ask someone to pop a flask for 2 attempts at a boss. Although ffs you get like 26g per day for doing a daily or whatever... You don't have to farm gold to have enough money to bring a few flasks to a raid. Buy the mats and have guild alchs that can proc make your flasks you'd be suprised how much money you'll save over just buying them straight off the AH.

The real point is that to do anything in ICC we need experience and practice... We can get that if we aren't even attempting regardless if we are flasked or not. Besides rotface doesn't require flasked dps it requires coordination which is something we could be practicing.

Not a bad idea about forming early... btw when you post make new posts don't edit old ones makes my comments seem even more out of place.

Of course you have money for flasks, you only pay me 25g for a flask when they cost 45g! cheap ass..and mats cost 60g for a frost lotus, plus other mats probably total around 70g to make 2 flasks.

Seriously though, I agree with what you said, especially the starting ontime and the slow pace. I thought the whole reason for starting the raid at 8pm was so that people could put their kids to sleep, let the dog out, and clear their bladders. I personally would love it if we could raid 7-10. I know that it is not possible with people schedules just voicing my wishes..

anyways, Yes Yes please be ready on time, and be prepared for raids. I'd prefer not to stay up until 11pm raiding (1am my time). and if anyone ever needs an extra flask I usually have extras of everything on me at raid time. I dont mind doing IOUs, just dont be cheap like anchor.

Anchor is cheap.

7-10 would rock.

going faster is always fine w/me, since I get up at 445AM everyday for work.

hf gg bbq

cheap...? better not come knocking for those free 300g enchants anymore..

Because we are a more casual raiding guild we've always gone kind of slow. We've never gone into a raid thinking we have a time limit there. We like to not only raid, but have fun while doing it (not GO GO GO GO!!!). That is why I like this guild so much and like raiding with them so much. It's been like that since I've been part of FA and honestly, I hope we really don't change much.

I do agree we should start on time. I know I have been late a few times, and because of life changing events Jason and I are going through right now, we may be late or not even there some nights. But if that is the case, I will do my best to let one of the officers know.

completely agree with you coree.... i think thats the great think about this guild too but i'm not suggesting a go go go!!!!! all i'm suggesting is a little less sitting around. And like I said earlier life happens and I think everyone understands that.. my point was in the case that lets say you and Jason were both late we could still start pulling the trash at 8:00pm or before with 20 or 23 people which would give everyone time to log before marrowgar.

Life changing events = preggo?

Right now, I don't trust our raid to pick up the pace. I don't trust our DPS to do the right thing when chain pulling. If people are going to chalk up everything to RNG and don't figure out how things go wrong and how to prevent them in the future, I will take my time to set up pulls and minimize the risk of things going to hell.

Example 1:

When clearing Marrowgar trash, two traps are accidentally set off. What should happen.

1) All melee DPS need to back out.
2) Tanks who already have established threat on melee targets need to activate a survival cooldown, grab both patrolling warders, and stack so that the saber lash is split.
3) Tanks forego attempting to tank the caster targets.
4) Ranged DPS need to focus fire a single caster target.
5) The other caster targets get crowd controlled by a priest shackle or a single smart DPS takes the time to focus them and interrupt their spellcasting.
6) Since the caster target is a line attack, our DPS fans out so that not everyone gets nuked whenever he gets a cast off. If we are using three tanks, the third tank takes the current burn target and points it away from the raid.
7) One of our responsible DPS interrupts the spell cast of the caster target we are currently burning.

Here's what normally happens.

1) Our melee DPS stay in and get cleaved and die to the saber lash.
2) Our ranged DPS continue to AoE to run up the meters.
3) Some DoT or AoE hits whatever I'm trying to shackle.
4) Everyone in the raid is stacked and when the caster mob DPS does its line attack, I see fifteen health bars drop.

Remember, a mob at 10% health does exactly as much damage as a mob at 100% health. I don't care if your AoE does 1 billion DPS if all twenty mobs beating on our tanks are still alive. I want a single mob burned quickly so that only nineteen mobs are beating on our tanks. And then another is burned down so that only eighteen mobs are beating on our tanks. Every time someone's AoE pulls threat off a tank, a tank interrupts their maximum AoE threat rotation to find and taunt that mob. If the tank has to run out to grab the mob, he usually ends up with his back to the melee mobs he was currently tanking and loses all avoidance causing his damage taken to go up. Now that the tank has interrupted their threat rotation, more mobs are likely to peel off as people keep AoEing.

Example 2:

When killing the trash skeletons that explode, I see too many multiple explosions at the same time. We lose one or two melee and laugh about it, but that's more time wasted rezzing and rebuffing. All it would take to make sure that doesn't happen is for at least ONE DPS. It could be any DPS. If one DPS would stop doing AoE when they noticed all those 'V' target bars hovering around 20% health and switch to single target DPS. By single target DPSing, they can make sure that one target explodes before the rest. They could then switch to another single target and that one would explode before the rest. They would then switch to another and another. Before you know it, I have six staggered explosions which our healers can just do a CoH/WG/chain heal to bring the melee back up before the next explosion.

Example 3:

One time during a raid, someone was wondering why I was chain shackling a mob that we were burning down. The reason is that my crowd control interrupts that mob's spellcast which happened to be a heal (dark mending). Since I'm a healer, I can't really add DPS to that mob, but my interrupts will make the trash die faster because that mob will no longer get heals off on itself or its allies. Normally, I wouldn't have to chain cast the shackle because my shackle would be left alone instead of being drawn into the AoE, but someone always manages to hit my shackled mob and let it run into the AoE thinking that their numbers will be that much bigger with one more mob in there.

Example 4:

I would like to spend zero minutes setting up the Saurfang fight, but people would have to memorize where the rough locations for the groups were. They would move there on their own as soon as we got off the gunship. People would survey the stacked groups and whisper to others to switch places with them if needed because they understood the mechanics (e.g., if two mages are stacked in the same place, one would walk to a group without a mage and whisper someone from that group to change places with them so that both groups get a frost nova if something goes wrong). People would do a /range 12 and count if the number within their range matched the people stacked in their group; if there was more than that, they would adjust their position or tell the group next to them that they were too close and need to move over or move back.

Chain pulling trash to speed up our clear is a pro technique. Until I see more people exhibiting pro behavior instead of AoEing to high hell, I'm not going to tell our tanks to chain pull.

Example 5:

If I was confident that enough people were focus firing mobs on Lady Deathwhisper that I could afford to have 1 DPS AFK, I would have us start the boss pull with that person AFK. Heck, if the AFK person would just put someone on follow, we could keep them alive during the boss fight and maybe they would come back in time to help out in the middle of the fight.

Example 6:

If people had to go AFK before the Saurfang pull, they could park themselves in the back, but in range of the healers so that if we do decide to pull with them AFK, they wouldn't blood nova others, but they would be in range of heals so that we could keep them alive through blood boils. When they did return to keyboard, they would wait until the DBM timer said that Saurfang's blood nova was on cooldown before running into the raid into proper position.

If I was confident that we had high DPS to be one or two people down and people understood the mechanics, I would go ahead and pull bosses if someone was AFK for more than 5 minutes.

This isn't Burning Crusade where we had people on the sidelines wanting to raid in 25s. We don't have enough raid members for me to choose one person who exhibited more pro behavior than another. Right now, I'm just glad that we can do 25 man current content as a guild. Back in BC, when everyone was in Hyjal, we were in SSC and TK. When people were in BT, we were in Hyjal; when people were in Sunwell, we were in BT -- we were always a raid instance behind. I'm not about to jeopardize our 25 man raids by yelling at people to change in the middle of a raid -- the last thing I need is for less people to show up on Tuesday and Thursday nights.

That all being said, I do think we have what it takes to kill Festergut. In last night's 10, I think we found the key to making the tanks able to survive the full inhale rotation. Once we kill Festergut which is Blizzard's gear check for the instance, we should be confident that we can handle any other boss in the instance. If we want to get attempts on Festergut, we need faster clears on Tuesday night so we can get a full flask's time of attempts on Festergut. We need people to show up on Thursday night. I'm pretty sure that most people in this guild would want to experience a Lich King kill firsthand instead of just watching a YouTube video of someone else's kill. I'm pretty sure that most people in this guild prefer our raids to a PUG 25. Put those two together and please show up to Tuesday and Thursday night raids.

-HP

I have very little to add to Henry's epic post, but I'll try.

I'm very content with our progress. I think the call to switch to VOA 25 / Raid Weekly early on Tuesday was a good one. With only 45 minutes left, after dealing with the trash we'd have very little time on boss. At the time of course I didn't expect Thursday to be a flop, but shit happens.

As has been beaten into the ground a million times, we're an adult casual guild that raids. We go at our own pace. If we could go in there guns blazing and rip thru the stuff like Heroic speed runs, we would.

Wapow tanked with us this Tuesday and tried picking up the pace a bit on trash. I didn't say anything because I was curious how it'd go work out. We had to reset what was it, 2 or 3 times because of mis-pulling the middle group on accident and then the big dudes coming out. Healing aggro caused the skeletons in the back to run thru middle instead of side and we got a lot more than we expected.

As much as I enjoy speed runs (ala 13 minute *full* H Gundrak clears), I do not like recklessness. I only speed chainpull if the Heroic group can handle it. If we're almost dying with every pull then I need to slow down. The same applies for raids.

I'm sure there's a few minutes that could be shaved off here and there though. Marrowgar, Deathwhisper and Gunship should require pretty much no setup anymore. Everyone should know what they need to do. Saurfang and up is a different beast though. Most everyone is already good with it, but people shouldn't be starting heroics or any kind of pug raid (even VOA) past 7:30 server time.
Ideally people would have RL stuff sorted before raid time as well, but RL is a nasty nasty beast that is not to be trifled with. Ideally all flasks and pots, etc. etc. would be ready before raid time as well.

It is also extremely helpful... nay, damn near mandatory that people use the ingame Calendar. Week after week I put in the event notes to only sign up on one toon. Week after week the events go up and the same people don't accept invites, but then wonder why I don't automatically invite them into the raid. It's not asking much. Click on the flashing ?, go to the event and hit either "Accept" or "Decline". When people signup on multiple toons, it throws off the headcount. I don't care if a alt is available for the run, I only care that you, the person, are. I'm also not a mind reader. I don't know if people intend or want to come without checking the Calendar. So if you don't reply to invites, I don't know.

I'll try to get things going earlier tonight, start sending out invites and getting people into the instance before 8. But I won't start trash if I don't feel we have enough people.

Heh, turns out this post was far longer than I expected.

Hehe <3 anchor. you know i jus playin, come on now.

Don't read too much into my comment. I was just saying life changing in general. Anything can happen

This is The Veg here...Just adding my 2 cents for what it is worth.

I agree with Dustin and Inori on this one. It would be nice to go faster but i dont think we are really ready for it. I wish we would have downed Festergut imo but i dont think we should be ashamed of our progress.

Personally i think the issue is not going faster but rather getting people to show up on thursdays. We didnt even get to attempt Festergut this week...not because of pace issues imo but rather because people didnt show up on THursday.

Just my opinion.

The Veg

Wapow tanked with us this Tuesday and tried picking up the pace a bit on trash. I didn't say anything because I was curious how it'd go work out. We had to reset what was it, 2 or 3 times because of mis-pulling the middle group on accident and then the big dudes coming out. Healing aggro caused the skeletons in the back to run thru middle instead of side and we got a lot more than we expected.

Four things about that pull:
A. Chris did it, not me.
B. He taunted instead of throwing his shield.
C. I put DnD in the wrong spot.
D. The raid needs to move up. The healers that pulled aggro were out of LoS of the tanks causing the mobs to run around the pillar. Yes we were still fighting the spider but so what, it doesn't explode when it dies.

If anyone of those 4 things happened differently it would have been a whole new ballgame.

example 2:
When killing the trash skeletons that explode, I see too many multiple explosions at the same time. We lose one or two melee and laugh about it, but that's more time wasted rezzing and rebuffing. All it would take to make sure that doesn't happen is for at least ONE DPS. It could be any DPS. If one DPS would stop doing AoE when they noticed all those 'V' target bars hovering around 20% health and switch to single target DPS. By single target DPSing, they can make sure that one target explodes before the rest. They could then switch to another single target and that one would explode before the rest. They would then switch to another and another. Before you know it, I have six staggered explosions which our healers can just do a CoH/WG/chain heal to bring the melee back up before the next explosion.

Marking targets so the melee can FF one down is really important. Also, you mentioned Unit Nameplates. Blizzard has added in better control of Nameplates and everyone should be using them. If the Blizzard nameplates are too big for you there are multiple options out there. I'll list some of them.

Knameplates - http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addo ... lates.aspx
Aloft -
Tidyplates
_Virtualplates - http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addo ... lates.aspx

/beat dead horse

Raid makeup would go a long way to speeding things up also. Another Rogue or two for FoK ToT'ing, another Hunter or two for MDs would all help aggro and control on trash packs. Elemental and Enhancement shaman for raid buffs or DK go frost, lock go demo. Also I can't figure out what the problem is but for me mana replenishment is always a problem in FA raids. I don't know if we need a ret pally JoW'ing or what.

The reason you guys moved so slow last week is because you didn't have the uber tank with you. If I had been there we'd be done with all of ICC in 2hrs. Don't worry tough I'm here this week.

I wasn't trying to say you fucked that up Jim, though I realize by naming you it may have seemed that way A lot of things went wrong with those pulls. Hopefully we can tune that up a bit tonight.