Bad Groups

[Gobbeldygook]

One of my former guildies joined a new guild.  I ran 1.5 nights with them.  They brought four tanks to Naxx, one of every spec, and then ran a DK and druid tank for Patch.  That's right, they ran a two-tank strat when they brought FOUR tanks and equally importantly the wrong two.  DKs and druids are much better at DPSing in their tank specs than protadins or prot warriors.  Convinced they were retarded beyond redemption, I rejected them.

He reported last night that they've successfully killed Sarth 25 3-d and yet still act surprised and angry when their Immortal attempts are ruined by melee dying every week on patch.

[K9]

DK-Druid might be the best arrangement for 2-tanking Patch25 as they have the largest health pools. I'm not 100% sure though. However, it sounds like they were going about it in a supremely dumb way.

[Ingmar]

2 tank is pretty pointless when you've got 4 there already, but I'd argue that right now Druids and DKs are the best choices for that, due to higher health pools and the DK's massive avoidance advantage at high gear levels.

[Gobbeldygook]

DK-Druid might be the best arrangement for 2-tanking Patch25 as they have the largest health pools. I'm not 100% sure though. However, it sounds like they were going about it in a supremely dumb way.

What makes it truely inexplicable was the justification when I asked the raid leader why and is something I left out.  He linked me his successful achievement for a 3 minute Patchwerk kill and said that running two tanks was the key.

[Paelos]

DK-Druid might be the best arrangement for 2-tanking Patch25 as they have the largest health pools. I'm not 100% sure though. However, it sounds like they were going about it in a supremely dumb way.

What makes it truely inexplicable was the justification when I asked the raid leader why and is something I left out.  He linked me his successful achievement for a 3 minute Patchwerk kill and said that running two tanks was the key.

I run two tanks on my run. A warrior and a druid OT for the hatefuls. It isn't really a problem at all.

[Gobbeldygook]

What makes it truely inexplicable was the justification when I asked the raid leader why and is something I left out.  He linked me his successful achievement for a 3 minute Patchwerk kill and said that running two tanks was the key.

I run two tanks on my run. A warrior and a druid OT for the hatefuls. It isn't really a problem at all.

That is not the point of the story.  Imagine you have a raid with four tank-specced players, one of every class, all of them geared.  You are trying for the fastest kill you can and you don't want to waste time or gold summoning people back and forth for respecs.  You need two of them to tank the boss.  Which ones should tank and which ones should DPS?  The correct answer is the paladin and warrior should tank because the two of them put together will do less DPS in their DPS set than the DK or probably the druid in their DPS sets.

Now imagine you are seriously trying for Immortal and yet you always seem to have some dead melee DPS on patchwerk.  How many tanks should you run?

[Chimpy]

I would guess they are running with DK+Druid (I assume the Bear is the hateful tank) because they heard you have to 2 tank it, and they were having problems with tanks dying with smaller health pools. In theory, now that parrybombs are gone, a DK with high parry would be a good choice for main tank on that fight.

But meh, we usually ran it with 3 tanks (we never had a tanking DK).

The biggest thing that people miss is that melee DPS need to wait until the hateful tanks get hit before they attack. Once the first hateful lands on each soaker there is effectively no way a melee can die before a tank due to the mechanics of the fight.

[Merusk]

Yeah, but a protadin will be OOM and doing only white-dps and a Prot war not getting hit or dodging/ blocking will probably be rage starved and also doing only white DPS.  Ferals and DKs are better to offtank or DPS, even if better geared, in situations where you've got too many tanks and need more DPS.   Why? Because their special  resource doesn't require getting hit/ healed/ dodging/ blocking to refill.

[Sjofn]

Yeah, but a protadin will be OOM and doing only white-dps and a Prot war not getting hit or dodging/ blocking will probably be rage starved and also doing only white DPS.  Ferals and DKs are better to offtank or DPS, even if better geared, in situations where you've got too many tanks and need more DPS.   Why? Because their special  resource doesn't require getting hit/ healed/ dodging/ blocking to refill.

That's pretty much why I always offtank/pseduo DPS as my DK, even if it's a fight I'm usually better off being the MT. I just feel bad for protection warriors and paladins. :P

[Rasix]

23 minute heroic Heigan.  Woo. 

[Khaldun]

When we're doing Heigan with some new people, we just tell them, "You're going to die. If enough of you die, the people who've done it before will go ahead and wipe and we'll do it again so everyone has seen it and can do it right. We can still win with the people who know the fight, but you'll be bored and you won't really have a chance to do it yourself the right way."

[K9]

We're verging on a 'no loot if you die' policy for heigan. Some people are just dead weights who die and then go afk for 8mins while everyone else kills the boss.

[Hindenburg]

That's... quite a good idea.

[Ingmar]

Maybe if you limit it to just deaths via exploding floor. There are other ways to die in that fight that are out of your immediate control depending on your class (disease mainly.)

[Khaldun]

As long as someone's seen the fight twice or so and they don't have known latency problems, I think it's fair to expect them to survive it *if* disease doesn't become an issue. I've died from disease now and again.

[Rasix]

That's... quite a good idea.

Yes, it is.  Wouldn't fly with the people that just cry "I can't dance. I just can't do it.  So, I'm not going to try."  Normally, you'd expect some backlash, except here it was half the officers crying.

They also spent 30 minutes to an hour trying to see if they could find a way to beat him without dancing at all.  /facepalm

Sure, I've died on it, but at both times it was near the end when I was absolutely loopy after dancing for 10-20 minutes and got turned around.  At 23 minutes, I felt like I was going to collapse.

[bhodi]

Can you /follow someone and live?

It REALLY shouldn't be that hard to dance and only get hit once or twice. Healers SHOULD be able to keep most people up. Just find the 4 spots on the floor and move to each one.

[Paelos]

Wow, at times I shake my head at the sheer lack of output by some of my members, but at least they know how to move their asses. If we had those kinds of issues on Heigan, I'd just give up and tell them to go back to heroics.

[Rasix]

Wow, at times I shake my head at the sheer lack of output by some of my members, but at least they know how to move their asses. If we had those kinds of issues on Heigan, I'd just give up and tell them to go back to heroics.

It's consistently this bad also.  At least with 10 man, I'm only dancing for 10+ minutes.   

It just boggles my mind that they'd think we're ready to progress on a 25man primarily when people can't grasp concept like move out of the fire or "don't pop the fucking balloon."

[Dren]

Heigan used to be a big deal for us, but we have it down pretty well now.  We get maybe two deaths and that's just because they are low on the totem pole for getting cleansed of disease (I'm the Pally healer, so I know better than most.)  I only have so much time to cast that many cleanses and if I'm the only one doing it there will be some deaths.

Rarely do we have people die to the dance anymore.  It is usually due to the nasty disease. (3-4 ticks and most non-tank chars are dead.)

No, you can't use /follow.  You will die.  It isn't reactive enough to work.  It's been tried many times.

You also cannot use another character as your way to manually follow.  Your lag is not their lag.  We tried that many times too with many many deaths.

Some people just don't have the computers/connection to handle the dance, but it is minor for us.  I certainly would give feedback to Blizzard to not do that again though.  I still don't find it fun even though I can live through it.

[K9]

Maybe if you limit it to just deaths via exploding floor. There are other ways to die in that fight that are out of your immediate control depending on your class (disease mainly.)

Disease deaths are understandable, especially if your raid is running short on, or without priests or shamen (abolish disease and cleansing totem are a godsend here when9ou precast/pre-place them). During the run clipping the explosions does happen even to the best of us, and as a priest I have no trouble dropping renews and CoH (and instant flash heals from SoL) on the run on people who take a single tick; that I can forgive, I know I do it myself. People who die on the first explosion though annoy me.

We had a 21min kill on heroic the other day, was just 2 tanks, a hunter and the healers alive. We had a single pally healing the tank while 4 priests lolsmited heigan from ~3million hp down.

[Paelos]

Good lord, at some point when half the people are dead and boss is still above 50%, it's just faster to eat the wipe and start over.

[Merusk]

Good lord, at some point when half the people are dead and boss is still above 50%, it's just faster to eat the wipe and start over.

No, because after 3-4 wipes where it's the SAME stupid, worthless, clueless fuck sticks dying in that 50% you realize you're just going to have to long-timer it or give up entirely and leave the instance.

[Paelos]

Good lord, at some point when half the people are dead and boss is still above 50%, it's just faster to eat the wipe and start over.

No, because after 3-4 wipes where it's the SAME stupid, worthless, clueless fuck sticks dying in that 50% you realize you're just going to have to long-timer it or give up entirely and leave the instance.

Choose B.

[Selby]

As long as someone's seen the fight twice or so and they don't have known latency problems, I think it's fair to expect them to survive it *if* disease doesn't become an issue.

My first time I watched the video, saw the steps, realized this should be simple, and tried it.  The issue our raid had was that no one was paying attention to the 4 spots you need to move to, even the raid leaders and people who had done it before.  Everyone was heading over to the opposite side of the platform rather than staying right up close to it and moving to those 4 different spots.  Unfortunately the first 2-3 times we tried it, the goo wasn't showing up on my computer and half of the other people's, with massive latency resulting in instant death to everyone.  That was just annoying.  Our DPS could get him to like 65% health before the dancing started, so we figure if we could mostly survive 2-3 rounds of dancing we could beat him.  It was quite frustrating to deal with the lag monster on that one though - I figure with a little more practice we would have it down.

[Sheepherder]

I do this pretty regularly on a connection with a 1100 ms ping once the fight starts.  I occasionally clip an explosion, but barring freakish 9000+ ms pings or complete disconnects I don't die on it.  If you die on Heigan, chances are you are bad.

[Gobbeldygook]

I do this pretty regularly on a connection with a 1100 ms ping once the fight starts.  I occasionally clip an explosion, but barring freakish 9000+ ms pings or complete disconnects I don't die on it.  If you die on Heigan, chances are you are bad.

To add to this, sheepman is not an anomaly that must be studied by Blizz to find out how he does it.  My guild had a number of Brazilians and Australians on our Boston-based server.  They typically did not have any more issues with the dance than anyone else, despite crazy ping and in the brazilians case, very low-end PCs (third world country, etc).

[Hindenburg]

in the brazilians case, very low-end PCs (third world country, etc).

You're oh so wrong. We contraband shit.

[Sheepherder]

You're oh so wrong. We contraband shit.

Shh, you're brown people, you're not allowed to have nice things.

[Lantyssa]

Is that tech support brown, or valet-parking brown?

[Hindenburg]

Aren't we still using the paper bag criteria to define skin color?

[Rasix]

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.

Oh ho ho ho.  I am the prophet of doom.

Net result of two days of 25 man Naxx:
-Plague wing down.
-Construct to Thaddius.

-2 best tanks quit
-Best druid healer apping as a boomkin to another raid guild.  Another solid druid quit when the GMs responded to his questions of raid targets with swearing and insults.
-2 raiders removed due to listing "bad leadership" as a reason they'd leave our guild in their apps to another guild.
-10+ active raiders quit due to various slights and conflicts with officers and lack of confidence in leadership.
-GM freaks out in Vent and quits guild including all alts.

After the 25mans were over a group of us (including several who quit) clear all wings in 10man with only 1 or 2 real wipes and a long dance with Heigan.  DPS is solid, people listen, and input is listened to and taken into consideration.  People are actually able to react and adjust during fights. Lots of mail drops and we have no shaman or hunter in the raid.   

Night and day.

[Ingmar]

Wow. 

[bhodi]

You can always server transfer over to icecrown and join my alliance raiding guild! We're less retarded, I assure you! We raid mon, tues, wed, sometimes thur.

[Rasix]

Alas, I'm horde.

I'm wondering if I want to try and keep the guild together.  Even if the GM was a bad raider and emotional wreck, she was decent at keeping things scheduled and keeping people busy. And not to be too judgemental, but I hear her kids on vent everytime she speaks; so maybe she should pay attention to them for a while. The remaining GMs are nice people but are not really raiders.  The two main raider type officers both left and have already started a new guild.

But really, all they need is a voice of reason that's communicating and not the silent treatment the GMs/officers are giving this.  I don't even have to play to accomplish this. Sadly, I'm not sure it's in everyone's best interest to keep this juggernaut of failure going.  They will never, ever been competent enough to clear 25 man material without growing pains they cannot bear.

Edit: Of course, the ship may have already sailed.  And I'm just a member and casual one at that, not sure if I'd have much impact.  I just really hate looking for guilds.  Too time restricted to join a real raid guild, yet can't stand the ineptitude of guilds that can't be bothered to not stand in fire.