Bad Groups

[Paelos]

Glad to see the common sense ruled the day that time. You started with the easier wings, and you removed a complete dumbass who wasn't a team player. That alone will always improve your chances of success. It's odd that your problems centered around dumbass mages, though. I've had many more problems with melee dps types than mages in terms of not getting with the program.

[Khaldun]

 I agree that you need to not contradict the raid leader's announced strat right before the pull--it's better to do it one way, and if it doesn't work, then you gently suggest there's an issue.

However, the stacking strat on Loatheb requires the DPS to go get the first two or three spores away from the tank while the tank builds aggro, because once you allow the spores to come, the MT is going to get zero further threat. Plus in 25-man, you've got to open up with heavy DPS and keep it throughout, so it's important to have the DPS acquire the buff as soon as possible by going in five-person groups to the spores rather than waiting for them. If you've got a raid of people who know what they're doing, it's probably better to have people acquire the spore buff in a coordinated way and then to make them responsible for keeping it up by watching the timer, while having an OT-type keep an eye on spores that might be getting too close to the MT.

[Ingmar]

I agree that you need to not contradict the raid leader's announced strat right before the pull--it's better to do it one way, and if it doesn't work, then you gently suggest there's an issue.

However, the stacking strat on Loatheb requires the DPS to go get the first two or three spores away from the tank while the tank builds aggro, because once you allow the spores to come, the MT is going to get zero further threat. Plus in 25-man, you've got to open up with heavy DPS and keep it throughout, so it's important to have the DPS acquire the buff as soon as possible by going in five-person groups to the spores rather than waiting for them. If you've got a raid of people who know what they're doing, it's probably better to have people acquire the spore buff in a coordinated way and then to make them responsible for keeping it up by watching the timer, while having an OT-type keep an eye on spores that might be getting too close to the MT.

Loatheb is tauntable and he won't one-shot anyone for the most part so it isn't super hard to recover from the tank getting an early spore.

[Lakov_Sanite]

if all the raid stayed behind loatheb at max melee range and everyone stacked on top of eachother the tank should never get the spore buff since their explosion radius is fairly small.

[Paelos]

if all the raid stayed behind loatheb at max melee range and everyone stacked on top of eachother the tank should never get the spore buff since their explosion radius is fairly small.

One roaming OT or a lock can taunt them in or toss a small dot on the spores as well. But yes, that's generally the best way to approach it.

[Sjofn]

I was sad to discover they were immune to death grip. :(

[Khaldun]

I dunno, I still prefer to have dps get the buff as fast as possible and then to be responsible for keeping themselves buffed during the fight.

[skolor]

Loatheb is tauntable and he won't one-shot anyone for the most part so it isn't super hard to recover from the tank getting an early spore.

Ever since Paladins got a real taunt this is how we did it in 10 mans. I'm not sure why it wouldn't work in a 25 man. Yes, it makes things marginally harder for the healers, since it raises the chance of someone grabbing aggro and getting 1-hit, but since our DPS is usually topped by a pair of warriors and a DK, that isn't really a problem.

As far as melee vs. ranged people, our ranged always have problems. On Heigann, they have about a 90% chance of dying each dance. Healers seem to have about a 50% chance on each of the first two, and after that if they survive they'll go all the way. Our melee dies more often on trash than anything else, especially in the Death Knight wing. We will frequently chain pull most of the way to Raszuvius, only stopping to rez the dead rogues/warriors, they always die eating the whirlwinds.

[K9]

if all the raid stayed behind loatheb at max melee range and everyone stacked on top of eachother the tank should never get the spore buff since their explosion radius is fairly small.

One roaming OT or a lock can taunt them in or toss a small dot on the spores as well. But yes, that's generally the best way to approach it.

Priests can also aggro them with Mass Dispel.

[Shrike]

As long as your dps can find their ass without both hands and a flashlight, they should be able to keep themselves buffed on Loatheb without any weirdo aggro gyrations on the spores. Not a huge deal, but come on. It ain't hard.

As for the military wing--heh. Those WW DKs are a damned nuisance. More anti-melee horseshit from Blizzard. However, I do find it amusing to watch the rogues/dps warriors take it in the neck on these. As an enhance shaman, I learned some time ago to stay the hell away from those groups. Drop a magma totem on them, get the hell out of Dodge, then chain-lightning the bastards. Works wonders--for me, anyway. The guild operational philosophy on these are to stun-lock the DKs. In practice this works about half the time. The other half, I wallow in shamanistic smugness.

[skolor]

As for the military wing--heh. Those WW DKs are a damned nuisance. More anti-melee horseshit from Blizzard. However, I do find it amusing to watch the rogues/dps warriors take it in the neck on these. As an enhance shaman, I learned some time ago to stay the hell away from those groups. Drop a magma totem on them, get the hell out of Dodge, then chain-lightning the bastards. Works wonders--for me, anyway. The guild operational philosophy on these are to stun-lock the DKs. In practice this works about half the time. The other half, I wallow in shamanistic smugness.

Our raid leader is a Rogue, and made me tank Heroic Gundrak for the leather (pants, I think) off the last boss. There's that room between the colossus and Mammoth boss with several whirlwind mobs. We never made it through that room without him dying. Eventually we decided it wasn't worth the little bit of extra rep and started skipping it.

The Warrior who tops DPS is the same way. He died 3 times in the death knight wing because of whirlwinds last run.

[Merusk]

I get hit with 'em but don't die.  Let's hear it for plate DPS that doesn't reduce their armor values/ increase damage taken to DPs! Woo!

[Khaldun]

Basically I just hang back on the trash until Raz on my rogue. The only reason to be in there pouring on the dps is obsession with the meters.

But really, I wish there was something *like* a whirlwind on ranged.

[Ingmar]

I was in a PUG Naxx25 this weekend on my elemental shaman, where the Patchwerk tank died 4 attempts in a row, *on the pull*. No matter how many times it was explained to the tank group how to do it, he just kept suddenly running up and pulling while people were out of position, so Patch would just fly in and hit/hateful him and then go crazy on the raid. 

The best part was every time, 2-3 people would have to go repair afterwards, so it was like 20-25 minutes per 30 second attempt. Ahhhh, PUGs.

[Soulflame]

I got sucked into a guild/PUG 25 naxx this weekend.  They had downed almost 3 wings, but couldn't take down Thaddius.  I was a little nervous about this, as I could see the writing on the wall, but I went anyway.

We wiped multiple times, mostly because people could not handle the jump, could not move properly during charge changes, and we'd lose 3-4 people on the first charge, every time.  This isn't what annoyed me.  Then we had a wipe, with a semi-recovery, but people were being held in combat by something.  So we release, try various ways to reset the combat, no go.  Finally, everyone's asked to zone out in order to clear it.  I just closed the window, and did something more productive with my time.

As it turned out, it took them three hours total to finally down Thaddius, and it took switching out people for them to do it.  They then went and failed on Raz repeatedly, mostly because one of the priests they were trying to do the encounter with had never done it before, and is only recently trying to actually become a decent player.  With mixed results.  According to my friend who stuck with it, next time Raz should be doable.  I remain skeptical.

[Khaldun]

Raz is hard for someone who really hasn't done much mind-controlling. I think it's totally legit for priests to find that a difficult encounter at first run.

I was in a OS-25 pug this week that was just so terrible in every way. The people leading it for some reason decided to start clearing trash on the right rather than the left.  That's fine: no reason to go the other way, just it's what every group I've ever been in does. But the raid leader just went over and started whacking on the group of 4 without telling anyone he was going to, and some people got killed. Afterwards, he was like, "nubs!" So someone said, "You might want to call the pull and mark", and he said, "That's for nubs, but since we've got nubs, that's what we'll do". So the trash-clearing and drake killing went fine from there on in, except that the OT (same guild at the MT) had to be reminded by the non-guild people in the raid to go through the portal on the non-egg drakes. (The guild who formed the raid wanted to leave 2 drakes up...no fucking way am I doing that with a pug).

So then we get around to Sarth, and the tank insists on bringing him down to the little island where you first hop across to Sarth's area. I've seen this done, I know it's part of some drakes-up strats, but the guy got the positioning wrong in that he had Sarth right well into the fire tsunami, so that melee were not in the gap at that end. There were maybe six people in the pug who hadn't done it before, and he just said, "Don't get caught in fire" and started the pull. Total chaos. The MT could not hold aggro, so Sarth was turning around a lot even when dps slowed considerably. The OT on Vent called the fire tsunamis from the wrong side twice early on. And the MT raid leader kept screaming about everyone was a nub. Naturally it was a wipe. They set up and did it again, same problems--the positioning was just awful, melee had to disengage and step back a good ways to get to the closest gap, and run an abnormally long distance to get to the farthest one. The OT kept insisting that nobody needed to bother with the adds, "just keep dps'ing Sarth".

[Dren]

I've done Raz on my priest with my own guild on 25 and that is no fun at all.  We did it with 2 priests total, but it was a very close thing after 2-3 wipes.  We just did it again with 3 experienced priests last night and got it the first go, but still with some pain.  I cannot even imagine trying to do that with a pure PUG.  No thanks.

[Ingmar]

I've done Raz on my priest with my own guild on 25 and that is no fun at all.  We did it with 2 priests total, but it was a very close thing after 2-3 wipes.  We just did it again with 3 experienced priests last night and got it the first go, but still with some pain.  I cannot even imagine trying to do that with a pure PUG.  No thanks.

It often sucks a lot, although the group that I failed Patch with over and over and over and over managed it on the first try. You are really at the mercy of whether or not the priests have done it on 25.

[Merusk]

I did 25-man Raz this past weekend for the first time ever on a priest who has 0 epics and another priest who was playing his alt instead of his Mage for the encounter.  It wasn't hard after someone suggested we keep the MC target as our focus and use a "/cast [target=focustarget] mind control" macro, instead of having to switch back between it and Raz.

My reaction was:   "Why didn't I think of that.. "

So then we got him down on the 2nd attempt, making sure to drop MC then recast right after the other priest dropped.  So yeah, not hard if you think just a little and have some +spellhit.  Remember this!

[Rasix]

I've been around for my guild's awful Raz attempts, but I'm never around when we down him.  We had 4 (3 shadow I think) priests at one point and either they weren't hitting bone barrier before taunting or the healers just weren't keeping up with the healing because they (the understudies) were all going down rather quickly.

It's somewhat sad that I've also been on 2 failtastic 10 man attempts also.  Each time, one of the tanks just couldn't grasp his head around the encounter.  Hell, one tank couldn't even realiably use the stupid device to mind control his understudy.  He said he kept bugging out, but this is the same terribad druid that has been since exiled to healing.

[Merusk]

6,5,4,4,4,4,4,4,4,4,4,4,4,4,4

recast MC

repeat until dead.

[Dren]

6,5,4,4,4,4,4,4,4,4,4,4,4,4,4

recast MC

repeat until dead.

You have to time it so that the focused guard has bone shield up.  If not, the healers will never keep him up.  You get 15 seconds of shield on a 30 sec cooldown, so you can't just tank him with one guard.  You have to alternate.  Also, you get MC broken because of all the random damage he throws out to the group.  Get hurt by it?  MC breaks and it can happen in the middle of tanking if you don't watch it.  Having 3 priests just makes it harder to lose control or have a focused guard go down because their shield timer is up.

[Fordel]

In the 10 man, you only thing you really need to do right, is make sure the 2nd tank MC's 15 seconds after the first, so you don't end up with both MC's expiring at the same time.

[Ingmar]

In the 10 man, you only thing you really need to do right, is make sure the 2nd tank MC's 15 seconds after the first, so you don't end up with both MC's expiring at the same time.

Even this doesn't really matter as long as you stagger dropping and restarting the MC.

[Paelos]

In the 10 man, you only thing you really need to do right, is make sure the 2nd tank MC's 15 seconds after the first, so you don't end up with both MC's expiring at the same time.

Deadly boss mods has a countdown on it that tells you as a tank when your bone shield is exactly going to expire, as well as when your OTs shield will expire. It totally trivializes the encounter if you couple it with a dismiss pet macro.

As for the 25 man version, it's the only fight in the whole damn place that makes me cringe. Our priests have gotten the hang of it now, but it's still one priest forgetting that they can't run out of range from going completely wrong. I really really REALLY dislike putting tanking into the hands of people who never tank. It would be the same way I'd really hate trying to put healing in the hands of the tanks. It's gimmicky and stupid, and they should have removed it in favor of the control orbs on both versions.

[Merusk]

6,5,4,4,4,4,4,4,4,4,4,4,4,4,4

recast MC

repeat until dead.

You have to time it so that the focused guard has bone shield up.  If not, the healers will never keep him up.  You get 15 seconds of shield on a 30 sec cooldown, so you can't just tank him with one guard.  You have to alternate.  Also, you get MC broken because of all the random damage he throws out to the group.  Get hurt by it?  MC breaks and it can happen in the middle of tanking if you don't watch it.  Having 3 priests just makes it harder to lose control or have a focused guard go down because their shield timer is up.

Yes, I know about the timing. Somewhere in one of those 4's the other tank has taunted it off and I recasted MC when BS had ~10s left on it's CD.  It really is a trivially simple encounter if you just explain like that and have the macro for it.  I've noticed that the priests I've done it with before usually fucked up because they didn't know the button order.. which is  pretty damn important.

Like I said, me and a mage on alts who've never done it before.  No problem, even with losing the MC once or twice.

[Sjofn]

It's somewhat sad that I've also been on 2 failtastic 10 man attempts also.  Each time, one of the tanks just couldn't grasp his head around the encounter.  Hell, one tank couldn't even realiably use the stupid device to mind control his understudy.  He said he kept bugging out, but this is the same terribad druid that has been since exiled to healing.

The mind control device is really finicky sometimes and will assume you're trying to MC either the already MC'd understudy or Raz and be all THAT CANNOT BE CONTROLLED. I assume it's trying to just pick up whatever is closest, but it's annoying as shit.

[SurfD]

But really, I wish there was something *like* a whirlwind on ranged.

Well, there is the odd mob with spell reflect.  Unfortunately, uber large health pools on players have largely trivialized this.  I remember back in the AQ days, the anubisath mobs would often kill one or two over eager mages if they werent paying attention to the spell reflect type.  AP + PoM + pyro crit reflected back at some over eager mage was always amusing.

[Koyasha]

It would be trivial to have mobs that reflect and multiply the damage on a reflected spell by 10.  Nice 10k crit, too bad you weren't paying attention, you just critted yourself for 100k.

[Rasix]

Yah, it would be awesome if that spell reflect also randomly corrupted a file on your hard drive.   

[Ingmar]

It would be trivial to have mobs that reflect and multiply the damage on a reflected spell by 10.  Nice 10k crit, too bad you weren't paying attention, you just critted yourself for 100k.

Impossible for classes with fast nukes with travel times to react fast enough to that sort of thing - especially if they also proc random nukes outside of their own control (lightning overload.)

[Khaldun]

Horrifically bad VoA-25 pug yesterday. This cured me from ever doing it late in the week: you've got a bunch of people who haven't done it before, or who have failed at doing it that week, or who shouldn't get anywhere near it until they get a few Heroics done.

We start by zoning in with 25, 6 healers, 2 tanks, rest DPS. Immediately three people say, "I can't find you guys, where are you?" We're like, err, we're right here, are you in Wintergrasp? They're like, "We're in the instance, you're not." We're like, "Um, are you saved already?" They say, "What do you mean?" We say, "Did you run it this week already?" They were like, "Yeah, we went an hour ago, after we won Wintergrasp. Why?" We're like, um, you can't run it again this week. They're like, "No fucking way, that's not fair."

Ok. Drop them, we look for three more. We get two more people who join, come to Wintergrasp and then say, "Oh, I forgot I'm saved, sorry." Finally, when we have 23, raid leader says, let's just do this, we can do it.

One of the guys who joined late keeps yelling out instructions on the trash, most of them vaguely wrong. I notice he's a rogue doing about 1k dps. I notice with more nervousness that in fact there's only six of us doing more than 2k dps, everyone else is somewhere between 1 and 1.5k dps. I figure, "Hey, it's trash, they're not paying attention or something".

So we go at the boss. Some of the low dps people almost immediately die to choking cloud, despite the fact that the raid leader went over the instructions for the fight pretty carefully. The others who survive stay in the same low range as they did on the trash. We get to enrage, and he's got about 10 percent left, everyone dies.

Now a second loudmouth rogue pipes up, who did about 1.5k. "This fucking sucks, you all suck, nobody should ever wipe on this, we do it in my guild and never wipe." I notice he's in a guild that has about 10 members, so at best he's talking about VoA-10, but whatever. The raid leader, who is the MT, patiently says, "Ok, let's just do this again, we'll get 2 more dps and see what we can do". So we do get two more, and start up again.

This time those of us doing more than 2.5k really step it up and dps our hardest, knowing we have to make up for everybody else. As a result, the OT, who was ok but not great, starts to have trouble holding threat after lunge. On about the third switch-off, he can't keep threat and the boss one-shots the top three DPS people, including me. So this is bad. I say in /raid, without looking too carefully, "If someone can battle rez us up, that's good--we need the DPS quick". What I notice right after that is we have one druid. Who is the MT. Who remarkably *does* manage to battle rez me on the next hand-off to the OT.

In the meantime, loudmouth 1.5k has managed to die in the choking cloud. He now starts to scream in /raid, "BATTLE REZ ME ASSHOLES, I NEED BATTLE REZ, THIS GROUP IS TOTAL FAIL NOBODY IS BATTLE REZING, FUCKING DRUIDS. I NEVER GOT PALLY BUFF EITHER, YOU ALL SUCK."

So the thing fails again. This time a lot of people just peel away and give up, it's clearly over. Mr. 1.5 continues to bitch in /raid until someone says, "Hey, jerk, did you notice there was one druid? And that he did battle rez?" He's like, "Who the fuck cares, you all suck". I send him a /tell: "That was a terrible group, sure, but with that dps, you're not entitled to criticize." His reply: "WoWWiki says 1.5 k is good enough, it was all those other losers who made us fail."

Just painful.

[Rasix]

Luckily yesterday my guild was done with raiding for the week and was able to get together mostly all guild runs of 25 man VOA and OS.  Really amazing how smooth those went.  I hadn't done Heroic VOA since my last pug disaster.

I can actually raid this week with my wife out of town, and am really not happy they decided to put Naxx25 on for first thing this week.  It's really painful when they've got to bring in folks that are even poorly geared for the 10man because we can't fill the slots otherwise.  It's going to be a wipefest.  They weren't able to get all wings down over the weekend over approximately 14+ hours of raiding.

[Shrike]

In a switch from PuG horrors, my guild decided to run OS25 and one wing of Naxx25 with an understrength group (just lack of people on a Monday).

OS goes like clockwork, though it does take some time to drop Sarth as we're rolling with 16 people. One fresh achievment coming up! Then we decide, what the heck, we're going to Naxx. Construct is clearly out of the question with 17 people, but plague sure isn't. We smoke Noth. Heigan buys a farm with no deaths (pretty amazing this, another raid-wide achievement). We tee it up with Loatheb and go 20 dooms and drop his fungoid ass (melee dps had it rough in this one; here's another case where it's good to be the enhance shaman). A good time was had by all.

And there's the rub. With people that are used to working together and focused on doing their best, you can accomplish quite a bit. You wouldn't have dared to do this with typical PuG fodder. In fact, I usually PuG VoA, but there's no way now. Heck, we might 15 man it this coming weekend...

[Merusk]

I did a VOA that had a wipe on Monday night, too.  (I'd missed the guild run Wednesday by logging-in too late.)   Apparently Mr. Raidleader/ Tank and the offtank hadn't ever been told "don't stand in the damn clouds."   I'm amazed we'd gotten him down to 10% on the first attempt as most of us were melee dps and dying so quick, or dancing in and out enough to live, but getting pretty damn low before the healers could heal us up again.

Still, I'm somewhat impressed that a quick explanation of "hey, pull him out of the clouds after the taunt" by a few of us was all it took to correct this bad behavior.

I know that loudmouth type, though.  Man you just want to slap that guy upside the head through the intertubes until he starts crying, don't you.