Cataclysm Raiding

[Merusk]

Each time I just end up standing there watching names go grey, going WELP and waiting for my turn.

I think you'll find that this attitude is occurring throughout your raid and its a large part of what's killing you all.  When you fail enough at something, it just becomes expected that you'll fail which is largely self-fulfilling because of mental attitude.  It would serve you all some good to take a break or perhaps just stand in a big room while someone yells effects over vent so you can all walk through it.

My guild had the same problem with Yogg and it was all mental attitude. We never got the 25-man kill, but the 10m always went smoothly when the few defeatists whose attitude was "we'll never make it" weren't there.

[Samprimary]

I think you'll find that this attitude is occurring throughout your raid and its a large part of what's killing you all.  When you fail enough at something, it just becomes expected that you'll fail which is largely self-fulfilling because of mental attitude. 

Out of the problems we do seem to have, defeatism isn't one of them. I am saying this in terms of looking at the raid bars and knowing that it is suddenly now already an assured wipe, I just haven't died yet.

From what I'm getting, we need more AoE slows action going on. We have a (1) hunter now, that should help with the bloods.

[caladein]

(This is all for Normal 10s.)

In general people shouldn't be getting corruption unless they're the add tank and their interrupter is messing up or they're eating long worships.  In general, no more than one person in your raid should be getting Corruption: Accelerated before entering the last phase.  If you're getting more than that on a consistent basis, people just need to not stand in crap (or, they're getting hit by the bloods and aren't noticing it).

On our kills, our Mage as Fire and my Hunter as Survival can take care of both each other for worships and the first two waves of bloods.  The Corrupted Adherents are killed at the stairs and between an Ice Trap and Frost Nova (maybe a Ring of Frost if we were going slow) we can get them down.  For the third set we'll call in the rest of the ranged DPS and they'll pop their knockbacks and such.

The important thing with the Adherent/blood group aside from getting Depravity interrupted is that they have to watch each other.  You will get worships when the bloods are out so getting each other out quickly makes every other part of that easier.  If these people are bit slow on it or have trouble with targeting, have them make variations on this macro:

#showtooltip Scatter Shot
/targetenemyplayer
/cast [raid] Scatter Shot
/targetlasttarget

/targetenemyplayer and /targetlasttarget should be clear.  The [raid] conditional means that you won't blow the ability auto-casting on the boss if the person's already been broken out.  Defining the ability name in #showtooltip is just a preference thing so it will show the ability cooldown even when I'm not targeting a raid member.

Cutting down on Twisted Devotion stacks and corruption gained from Worshipping is going to make the whole fight go a lot smoother.

[Rokal]

Our guild kills the adds in the small alcoves where the trash originally spawns in Cho'gall's room. First adherent is killed pretty deep into the NW corner of the Western alcove, the rest are killled further out each time, but never further than the small corner at the northern lip of the alcove. Since our raid stands slightly NE of that alcove, most adds congregate around that small corner and it gives the ranged dps a nice place to throw down aoe and snares. Since this is nowhere near Cho'gall, melee/tanks don't have to risk getting corruption from blood melee. Survival hunters really help on this fight and they should take Entrapment if possible. That 4 second root on frost trap really helps you buy more time for aoe. Balance druids (with the typhoon knock-back and ton of burst aoe) are also really great for this fight, but we don't usually run with one. We usually have 3 ranged dps who handle bloods, and our prot warrior throws shockwave out after the frost trap roots fade, for another 4 second stun on all of the bloods. Depending on who you use for tanks, and what order they tank Cho'gall, this might not be possible but it's another thing to think about if you do have a prot warrior.

[Samprimary]

Thanks, duders — I'm taking all this in and I'll see if it'll be able to show me what the hangup is. on tuesday we slogged our way through chimaeron and i'm watching everyone improve in certain ways.

[caladein]

Not sure how many folks here are in heroic 10s guilds, but it's worth a punt.  My group's 3/7 right now and if the nerf wasn't happening we'd probably be looking at starting work on Alysrazor (going by Wowtrack) this week.

Assuming the nerfs are on the scale they've announced and evenly distributed, I think it would make sense to try the more gear-check-y fights like Beth'tilac and Baleroc first as Alysrazor's got like 3-4 hard failure points on us (one of tank's damage, one side's interrupts, tornadoes, and line-of-sight hilarity).  On the other hand, Beth'tilac just seems to be asking a lot in the throughput department and of the Spiderlings/Broodling person (me).

Thoughts?

[Miasma]

Nerfs are in.

[Paelos]

Health and damage reduced by 15-25% across the board???

Wow, that's gotten by unprecedented.

[Ingmar]

Health and damage reduced by 15-25% across the board???

Wow, that's gotten by unprecedented.

Roughly the same magnitude as the nerfs to the T11 stuff, and also the difference between ICC with and without the 30% boost to players.

[Hutch]

Reducing Alysrazor's health by 25% isn't going to help my group get past phase 1, so we still have to get some reps in 

[Rokal]

The nerfs will help you on phase 1 because the adds will also have 25% less health/damage. The fight will end faster and Alysrazor will do less damage. Fire tornados will also be moving slower. Should be a pretty faceroll fight now.

[Paelos]

Roughly the same magnitude as the nerfs to the T11 stuff, and also the difference between ICC with and without the 30% boost to players.

ICC was gradual though. These last two have just been a sort of cutoff from the rest of the previous content.

[caladein]

I don't think that's accurate.  If you go through the hotfix threads, there were a lot of little nerfs here and there throughout both T11 and T12.

[Paelos]

I don't think that's accurate.  If you go through the hotfix threads, there were a lot of little nerfs here and there throughout both T11 and T12.

So in essence, this nerf is indeed unprecedented?

[Ingmar]

We didn't make significant progress in ICC til at least 20%, so I don't know that it felt all that gradual to me.

[caladein]

I don't think that's accurate.  If you go through the hotfix threads, there were a lot of little nerfs here and there throughout both T11 and T12.

So in essence, this nerf is indeed unprecedented?

In the sense that it's "the big nerf" happening while T12 is still current, yes it is without precedent.  In terms of scale in comparison to other "big nerfs" though, not really.

[Paelos]

I meant moreso where you read in the patch notes, fuck it we're nerfing everything across the board X%

[Rendakor]

That's exactly what they did before 4.1 hit to the Cata launch raids. 20% across the board, right in the patch notes.

[Wolf]

so what do people that raid 10m think about LFR and the whole "token for each tier piece" deal? I find it incredibly silly that I either have to get lucky or raid 25m with randoms to have a shot at getting 2/4p in any reasonable amount of time.

[Miasma]

I think it's a cynical ploy to get people to raid either in their own guild or in the LFR system.  Everything else they are doing points to them realizing their mistake in making the game too hard core in cataclysm but then they go and do the exact opposite here.  They want to force people to raid so that they have something to do during the long dry spell before pandamania expansion.

If they make the LFR encounters easy enough that they actually succeed it might work but I wouldn't hold my breath.  The LFR system will make or break 4.3 for most people but it would be incredibly hard to make work right, I hope they manage it...

[Rendakor]

so what do people that raid 10m think about LFR and the whole "token for each tier piece" deal? I find it incredibly silly that I either have to get lucky or raid 25m with randoms to have a shot at getting 2/4p in any reasonable amount of time.

2p will still be easy because you'll still be able to get legs and gloves from BH. I run a 10m raiding guild (4/7 H FL) and the removal of tier from the valor vendor doesn't bother me at all. Maybe my perspective is skewed but as a tank, the 2p is usually garbage (read: a dps improvement) so I never bothered buying it early. The 4p is usually solid, but half our raid is on my Vanquisher tier (DK Tank, Resto Druid, Rogue, Mage, and either another Mage or a DK DPS) so getting it takes forever.

[Wolf]

I don't know, we have 1 druid, 1 DK, 1 mage and 1 rogue and at times it seems like we're getting only vanquisher. Rogue has both tokens, mage has 4 in total (2/2), DK has 4 in total (2/2) and the druid has 3 heads and 2 shoulders. It gets very frustrating at times, and now you don't even have to only get 1 drop. I think Miasma is right and they're forcing people from raiding guilds into LFR so they can ensure some sort of success rate on raids there.

And if BH10 is dropping pve loot for you, I'd suggest buying a lottery ticket :)

[Miasma]

Yeah I could count on one hand the number of times BH has dropped PvE set pieces for us.

[Rokal]

BH drops PvE gear quite a bit more often now. They intentionally upped the drop rate a while back, and now we usually see 1 PvE piece every time we run BH (10m). I don't really think tier pieces dropping from raids only will slow us down much. It just means that an earlier boss in Dragon Soul will drop a tier piece every raid.

[Phunked]

Not to sound like a dick, but I'm not sure if gear progression is really the bottleneck for 10 man guilds, given the tuning. Class balance, maybe. Gear optimality? Probably not, unless, again, you want to gear up 4 moonkin in parallel or something.

[Rokal]

Composition is definitely the biggest hindrance to our 10m guild. I can't tell you how many raids we've randomly been missing something like heroism/bloodlust, fortitude, or fire resist. It becomes a huge problem for us on heroic fights.

[Sheepherder]

The tier gear set bonus shit wouldn't be a problem if Blizzard didn't insist on using the set bonuses to test new talents and fuck with class balance.

[caladein]

so what do people that raid 10m think about LFR and the whole "token for each tier piece" deal? I find it incredibly silly that I either have to get lucky or raid 25m with randoms to have a shot at getting 2/4p in any reasonable amount of time.

I don't see what the deal is.  Most of the raid bosses in DS will have to drop tier tokens now and the LFR-level stuff will be lower ilvl anyway.  It's a nice secondary lockout (much like 10-man was to 25-man last expansion) but it's not something I'll get too wound up about min/max'ing.  Unless I'm switching characters, I don't see myself bothering with it past the first couple weeks if it isn't fun.

[Rendakor]

Not to sound like a dick, but I'm not sure if gear progression is really the bottleneck for 10 man guilds, given the tuning. Class balance, maybe. Gear optimality? Probably not, unless, again, you want to gear up 4 moonkin in parallel or something.

The complaint wasn't that it's hard to gear up, just that it's difficult to actually assemble tier sets.

[Shrike]

Composition is definitely the biggest hindrance to our 10m guild.

This has been our biggest hurdle lately. Getting the right people to show up for the right fights. I've noticed more and more wanting to go melee so what used to be my own little spot on the boss is now crowded by rogues, paladins, DKS, warriors, and even other shaman. It's like a friggin' parade now. Get off my lawn!

Hell, the guild has practically dragooned my paladin for healing. I might delete her this weekend...

[Rokal]

This has been our biggest hurdle lately. Getting the right people to show up for the right fights. I've noticed more and more wanting to go melee so what used to be my own little spot on the boss is now crowded by rogues, paladins, DKS, warriors, and even other shaman. It's like a friggin' parade now. Get off my lawn!

Hell, the guild has practically dragooned my paladin for healing. I might delete her this weekend...

It's stupid how many fights in T12 outright favor ranged dps, and it makes it rough for a 10m guild with a shifting composition. In T11 I was the only melee dps that consistently raided in our guild. In T12 there's now two of us and sometimes that seems like one too many for some heroic fights. I can't even imagine how much it sucks for your guild. Examples:


The solution isn't to give melee more dps like they're planning. The solution is to not make fights like Beth'tilac or Staghelm. Giving melee more dps just means that guilds will stack them for fights like Baleroc, but will still favor ranged dps for pretty much everything else.

[Rendakor]

There's a spot you can stand on Staghelm and still eat the cleave while also being "behind" for parry/backstab purposes.

On H Bethtilac, melee are actually very good at the spinners because most of them have a taunt so they can help bring them down. Although honestly there should be no problem getting 5/6 of them down instantly. The 2nd one on the 3rd set is the only one that a DPS would need to help with, provided you do the encounter correctly.

Baleroc would be a nightmare ranged heavy, because then your healers have to dodge crystals.

[caladein]

Outside of Beth'tilac, my group has found it pretty easy to run with 2-3 melee through 6/7H.

Heroic Beth'tilac-10 is really tight composition-wise in a lot of ways because of the need for three healers and strong AOE damage on the bottom.  The majority of classes have taunts so unless you're running tons of clothies you shouldn't have a problem getting Spinners down.

On the other end of the spectrum, Heroic Majordomo-10 is an incredibly strong fight for melee because of cleaves and not having to dodge the pounce leading to high Concentration uptimes.

[Evildrider]

I had to switch from my Rogue, which I had played all the way up to Cata as my main, to my Mage because we had too many melee.  They just made it a total pain in the ass to play as a melee class.

[Sheepherder]

This has been our biggest hurdle lately. Getting the right people to show up for the right fights. I've noticed more and more wanting to go melee so what used to be my own little spot on the boss is now crowded by rogues, paladins, DKS, warriors, and even other shaman. It's like a friggin' parade now. Get off my lawn!

I've been of the opinion since the end of TBC that they should take the thematically appropriate melee DPS (i.e. Warrior, Paladin, Shaman) and give them the ability to stand toe to toe with the boss without eating one-shotting cleaves or losing DPS, possibly at the cost of losing the ability to DPS from the rear effectively.

Gruul is entirely blameless in this matter.