Cataclysm Raiding

[Rokal]

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.

I know about the spot on Staghelm, but using it always makes me feel a little worried that I'll reduce the effectiveness of some aoe heals. Usually I'm one of the dps that stands behind him for heroic, so it's not something I've had to deal with much.

As a rogue, I don't have a taunt, but it's true that every other melee dps does.

The crystals will target whoever is in melee range, so in this case you'd just have your ranged dps stand closer than everyone else and they should be picked. I know this because our demo warlock kept running into melee range for free hellfire damage on normal mode a few months ago, and he was getting picked for crystals and pissing us all off. If you're having ranged dps do that, you obviously lose some of the positional benefit for beams that ranged dps gave you though. You could adjust raid positioning slightly to still benefit from it though.

[Setanta]

Hunters can pull spinners down with distracting shot too. We usually run warrior/DK tanks, 2x pally, 1x shaman heals, rogue and dk melee, 2 hunters and a mage or shadow priest - makeup really doesn't seem to matter as sometimes someone cant make it and we sub in others including boomkins, ferals, locks etc. Quite often we are missing MoTW or Fort or Int but we have still managed 6/7 heroic. I really wanted to take my enhance shammy there but got told no by the RL so originally took my Boomkin then switched to my hunter as I wasn't comfortable as boomkin. Of course, my hunter got heroic domo's staff which results in much tears from druids in the AH :D Ranged is still FoTM

[Wolf]

the only melee specs that are hurting are the ones that _have_ to be in the back and don't do expertise - which is muti rogue and cat. Everyone else is fine. Most of the fights require 2 healers and all are 2 healable, so a 3 melee comp is not hurting you. The only fight you were forced into a 4 ranged comp was Rhyolith, but that's easily doable with 3 after the nerfs.

My pet peevs are CoE and DI in particular. We're lucky enough to have a warlock. I'd be super rage-y if we didn't. No one is playing unholy or muti this tier, so you're stuck with Boomkin, Warlock & the buggy dragonhawk (or forcing people into suboptimal specs they don't want to play). CoE is the only ability that sticks, the others all have to be refreshed - so Beth for example if you don't have a lock, and you're running with frost DK, enhancment shaman or retri paladin, they're instantly losing DPS even if you have some other sort of increased magic damage debuff in the raid, because they don't get it upstairs. Same to a lesser extent on alys. And the debuff in particular is too powerful - it's 8% of all dmg on all casters and a good portion of the DPS on a bunch of melees. Like I said it's not very hard to imagine raids that don't have CoE or are stuck with a hunter with a retarded pet that requires you to macro its ability to ensure any meaningful uptime. On top of that you have DI that's 1700 personal DPS when cast on me. How do I bring the player and not the class in this particular case? Especially with DPS checks like Ragnaros P3 in place.

[Setanta]

Weird, we rarely have a lock or boomkin yet the 2 hunters run a wolf for howl and hyena (ugh) for bleed debuff (2xMM hunters). Resto Shaman/Holy Pallies (2) and Frost and Blood DKs make up the buffs along with whatever else comes along for the ride. Not sure why you'd use CoE or dragonhawk.

[caladein]

My pet peevs are CoE and DI in particular. We're lucky enough to have a warlock. I'd be super rage-y if we didn't. No one is playing unholy or muti this tier, so you're stuck with Boomkin, Warlock & the buggy dragonhawk (or forcing people into suboptimal specs they don't want to play). CoE is the only ability that sticks, the others all have to be refreshed - so Beth for example if you don't have a lock, and you're running with frost DK, enhancment shaman or retri paladin, they're instantly losing DPS even if you have some other sort of increased magic damage debuff in the raid, because they don't get it upstairs. Same to a lesser extent on alys. And the debuff in particular is too powerful - it's 8% of all dmg on all casters and a good portion of the DPS on a bunch of melees. Like I said it's not very hard to imagine raids that don't have CoE or are stuck with a hunter with a retarded pet that requires you to macro its ability to ensure any meaningful uptime. On top of that you have DI that's 1700 personal DPS when cast on me. How do I bring the player and not the class in this particular case? Especially with DPS checks like Ragnaros P3 in place.

You'll run into that problem any time you split a 10m raid up like you do on Beth'tilac.  The Armor debuff is in the same boat as Spell Damage (if you don't send a Warrior/Druid up), where Faerie Fire lasts five minutes and the other options don't.  There's a couple of combinations that can leave your top team with everything they need but then you're usually looking at all 100yd buffs and/or getting debuffs up on the pull.

As for the Dragonhawk, unless there's some issue particular to it (I use a Wind Serpent to cover that buff when I have to), just leaving a debuff on auto-cast should get 90% or higher uptime on a boss the pet can just stay on.  If you need even more than that, you can certainly micromanage it.

[Wolf]

Setanta, you don't have magic damage debuff (CoE) in this setup. Plus 8% magic dmg straight is a lot more damage than 12% armor. We always have a warrior anyway, so we have that covered. As an aside covering bleed damage and not having magic damage is silly and selfish. Piercing shots is _at most_ ~10% of a hunter's damage on a straight single target fight. So bleed would give them ~3% dmg, while all of your casters lose 8% damage and your frost DK loses 4%.

They work the same way Cal, you get about 75-80 uptime on single target if you don't micromanage it, look at your logs. The silly pet triggers it's own global with bite and doesn't refresh it on time, ever. If you got adds on the fight, you're stuck micromanaging anyway.

[Setanta]

Look at the group config:

2 MM Hunters.
Frost DK
Rogue
Shadow Priest/mage/whatever fills in if someone is away
Warrior MT
Blood DK OT
Pally healer x2 (sometimes a Disc Priest for one)
Resto Shaman

DPS usually results in more geared hunter pulling 32-36K+ followed by geared DPS DK followed by rogue and second hunter (me) at 26-32K plus SP.

Casters be dammed :)

I'm not saying we are an optimal caster group - the point being that we didn't need to cover every base with raid composition - it just worked using the pets we used to maximise our DPS.

We didn't need "Boomkin, Warlock & the buggy dragonhawk (or forcing people into suboptimal specs they don't want to play)".

[Wolf]

it works on nerfed firelands, that setup has no hope of killing pre-nerf rhyolith unless you rotate alts in. Or pre-nerf bale, unless you make your rogue go muti and it'll still be iffy (too much of a chance for unlucky debuffs on the longer fight and having to have hunters stack, which is a direct dps loss). Pretty sure pre-nerf Beth will gib you on the burn with two paladins, to be honest.

And that setup will go nowhere on rags.

[Rendakor]

Except that was the POINT of the nerfs, so you can raid with your friends and the classes/specs/pets you like, instead of having to swap to the single ideal configuration. I also assume you're talking about pre-nerf heroic fights, else you're just blatantly wrong.

[Wolf]

Obviously talking about heroic fights, aren't we all?

Since my point is getting lost across specifics - CoE (or rather 8% Increased Magical Damage debuff, CoE for short) is relatively too strong for the classes that have it available and the relative way it works across said classes. That's bad design, that is skewed towards taking warlocks to raids. Dark Intent is part of that same problem, as it is a unique and extremely powerful buff, that once again makes you have a warlock in the raid or raid sub-optimally. That was all I was saying.

And since we're on the topic of the nerfs - I'm not that happy about that bit too. First of all - 6/7 is just too easy now and requires very little effort. Ragnaros is an insane jump in difficulty. Nerfed Ragnaros difficulty wise is in line with pre-nerf 6/7. It makes the fight doable in less than 250 wipes, with suboptimal gear and drops some of the requirments to your comp. Not all though, it still is a bring a geared resto druid or go home fight. We were chugging along nicely before the nerfs and they straight up robbed us of the 2 kills we had left so we've been stuck banging our collective head against the firey wall for two months now.

On the point of playing with your friends - wasn't the whole point of the raid design for some time now "bring the player, not the class". Via dropping the ball on class balance and encounter design, you're very much required to bring the class on any sort of meaningfully hard content this whole tier.

I like the harder stuff in my raids and blizzard is struggling very hard to find the balance they're looking for. Right now, with the rate nerfs are coming, it's a bit of a "raid 5 days 20hrs a week, or do the nerfed content" which I really don't agree with.

[caladein]

They work the same way Cal, you get about 75-80 uptime on single target if you don't micromanage it, look at your logs. The silly pet triggers it's own global with bite and doesn't refresh it on time, ever. If you got adds on the fight, you're stuck micromanaging anyway.

I looked before I posted.  The only time this month my pet has had less than 89% uptime on the boss on a Shannox or Baleroc kill was a Shannox kill where someone got ice trapped, and even then it was 86%.

H Shannox-10, Tendon Rip @ 89.7%
H Baleroc-10, Tendon Rip @ 89.3%
H Shannox-10, Ravage @ 86.1%
H Shannox-10, Ravage @ 90.3%
H Baleroc-10, Tendon Rip @ 89.7%

Something like H Beth'tilac-10 P2 has the same behavior in the buff details (Tendon Rip again).  Application, small gap, re-application.

A Wind Serpent or Dragonhawk, on auto-cast, should be slightly higher because it'll have less of those 1-2 GCD gaps as their debuffs last 45s instead of 15s (Tendon Rip) or 25s (Ravage).

[Wolf]

http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/1hd8fry9lgn0r0pz/details/8/?s=1516&e=1647&target=45 that's the beth burn. It's 85.

Last time I looked was when I had to use dragonhawk on our alt raid, and it was on ragnaros. I'll give you that it's ~90% on a straight single target boss without micromanaging. It still is a far cry from any class applied coe/sunder/whatever. It's especially silly with Ravage, as it lets the stack drop. It's just silly that they give you the buff and it doesn't work.

[caladein]

http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/1hd8fry9lgn0r0pz/details/8/?s=1516&e=1647&target=45 that's the beth burn. It's 85.

Last time I looked was when I had to use dragonhawk on our alt raid, and it was on ragnaros. I'll give you that it's ~90% on a straight single target boss without micromanaging. It still is a far cry from any class applied coe/sunder/whatever. It's especially silly with Ravage, as it lets the stack drop. It's just silly that they give you the buff and it doesn't work.

Ravage hasn't been on stun DR since February if that's what you're referring to.  Or do you mean Tear Arrmor?  That'll just get spammed on CD to keep its stack up, different logic.

Ragnaros is a problem though because he has possibly the slowest debuff application time I've ever experienced.  You can easily add 2-3s on each of those little gaps.  (You might also have the pet Growling to stay ahead of the melee in case the tanks are slow getting back in, although I don't know if that auto-cast resolves before the special.)

[Wolf]

Yeah I meant tear armor. Does that no longer drop off? I've not played my hunter seriously all expand, but I seem to remember having issues with tear armor dropping off because the pet wouldn't reapply it after getting 3 stacks, and would only start reapplying after the 3stack drops off. I even wrote a ticket about that. I never really got over focus if I have to be perfectly honest :)

[caladein]

I've used a Raptor in a raid all of once and it was pretty recent so I don't know if that logic is new or not.  I remember it staying up then (Majordomo I think) and he definitely spams it on the dummy when I tried it now.

[Rendakor]

Doing Dragon Soul now, regular 10m. Warlord Zon'ozz was pretty challenging with his orb mechanic; otherwise the first 4 were pretty easy. Working on Ultraxion now; got him down to 10% but the final phase damage was too high.

[Wolf]

How much trash is there?

the orc lady was easy? Did people derp on charging the lightning totems, sorta worried about that. Did you 3 heal everything? What healers and how did you separate the buffs on ultraxion?

Also what sort of gear are you running in? 6/7 firelands hc bisish?

Zon'ozz was Vezzax with the bouncy cloud? Did you 2 tank 3 heal it and what was the issue?

[Rendakor]

Orc lady was easy, yes. The lightning totems were the easy part, we had people run into the ice crystals to death a few times. 3 healers, 2 resto druids (our regular and a pug) and a holy pally. We gave our pro resto druid the red buff, holy pally the green buff, and the pug the blue buff. Got him to 1% and wiped! Gave it another shot and 2 people derped up the Hour of Twilight and we were already 20m after quitting time so we said fuck it. We'll get him tomorrow.

We're 4/7 H FL, so not quite as geared as you guys.

My biggest complaint with the zone is that too many of the fights are 1 tank; it sucks for our OT having to do mediocre ret dps so often.

[Wolf]

how about the trash? Is it a time waster?

That's the bonus of running with 14 raiders, I tell my tanks/healers to perform on their os or they're getting replaced by a MS. Yes, I'm that asshole. 

[Wolf]

looks like they ninja nerfed heroic ragnaros. Removed magma gaiser in p4, which basically removes the hardest part of the phase. Basically if you push 1 meteor you get /sadf

I hate the patch timing, we needed another week to kill him, 20ish wipes most. We were getting stable in p4. If they had announced the patch on time, we could've extended last week and gotten a couple more hours. pfft.

[caladein]

Ultraxion's trash is the only one that felt like it took a long time, probably because we were standing in one spot the whole time.  Otherwise it's 3-4 pulls per boss.

For Ultraxion's buffs we ran three healers (we ran three the whole night except for a few Gunship II attempts) and it was Disc Priest=Arcane, Resto Shaman=Dreams, Resto Druid=Life I think.

[Wolf]

bosses are way easy, but they. are. fun.

Way, way, way better than firelands. And i don't think it's new shiny, the mechanics are fun. We cleared up to and including Ultraxion in 2.5 hours, ran 3 healers to be safe on everything but not-ozruk, but it looks like Ultraxion, Hagara and not-vezzax will be two healable. Kinda rng-y on hagara, since you can get frost tombs on two healers. Hope we can finish up this week so we can do the fun ones next week 

[Rendakor]

Got Ultraxion and Lootship 2.0 tonite. One shot Ultraxion this time with a different pug healer (disc priest this time) than yesterday; I chalk most of our success to being awake this time.

Lootship gave us a lot of trouble, but we got it right at the end of our raid time. The adds are just messy, lots of shit going on, and people kept dying to random shit. We hit his 8 minute enrage timer once because only 1 dps made it to phase 2 alive. Once we made it to phase 2 with (nearly) everyone up, we got it. Probably my least favorite fight in there so far, just because it's a messy adds fight.

[Wolf]

did your ship ever die?

[Rendakor]

Yes, 10 times?

[Wolf]

I meant not you wiping, but the ship dying because people don't stand in the void zones?

[Rendakor]

First couple times we didn't realize the small void zones were actually soakable (because people were running in alone and getting one shotted). We missed the sappers a couple times, etc. Yes, the boat blew up on us about 10 times. We only actually wiped to the boss (aka phase 2) once or twice, most wipes were the boat dying or key players dying and me calling a wipe.

[Outlawedprod]

LFR is officially a success.  Top guilds already exploited it and it was hotfixed.

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/3657278530?page=5#97

[Ironwood]

I've read and read that thread and I still don't really understand what they did.

Except it's bad.

[Evildrider]

Something to the effect that one person was master looter and it involved everyone disconnecting and the master looter giving the item to whoever I think.

[caladein]

It's not based on an ML, just on having the one loot-eligible person trade the items around.

[Drubear]

So the check for "looting from this boss" flag is separate from the "oops i looted by accident does anyone else want this?" flag.

Bliz keeps forgetting that "the client is in the hands of the enemy" and apparently doesn't quite think about "worse case scenarios" much. I wonder if they have any QA at all?

[Miasma]

Ran the LFR and got all four available bosses down without too much trouble, it was fun.  Fun.

As a word of caution it seems like sometimes the loot won't auto distribute if someone disconnects and the rolling system has to wait for the timer so don't leave the corpse because you will have to manually loot if you win.  Most people run off to the next boss and once you do that you can't get back to the corpse sometimes.

[caladein]

So the check for "looting from this boss" flag is separate from the "oops i looted by accident does anyone else want this?" flag.

Bliz keeps forgetting that "the client is in the hands of the enemy" and apparently doesn't quite think about "worse case scenarios" much. I wonder if they have any QA at all?

A "disconnect at the appropriate time" exploit gets by everyone sometimes.

[Merusk]

I've read and read that thread and I still don't really understand what they did.

Except it's bad.

Ok, I'll break it down.

Everyone is only allowed to loot once per week in a raid.  That doesn't matter if it's LFR or a normal guild run, once you've killed a boss you're ineligible to loot from it until the following reset.  You can, however, run a raid as many times as you want via LFR because there is no shared lockout now, just individual flags.  So you can kill Deathwing on your uberguild then runa PUG or two with your friends for kicks or to help them flesh-out a LFR.

What Paragon did is create a raid of entirely alt characters + 1 "Primary Raider."   They then used LFR to destroy the encounters.  They already know and have beaten all of the encounters on Normal or Heroic mode, so LFR mode is "LOLEZMODE X4"  and easily done with less-equipped alts.   In this raid, they gave all the loot to the primary raid character with no hassle.

They then swapped one alt to a Primary Raider and did it again.  Same deal, that Raider gets a full instance's loot to themselves.   Repeat until your entire raid core is equipped with all the loot they can haul that week from the lowest raid tier - which apparently is still a higher iLevel than the Heroic Tier gear from the previous raid (Big mistake.)

So now they've got some toons (who got lucky with the randomizer, honestly) who have full newb-tier gear.  It could have worked against them as well, as we've all come across that raid where nothing but plate drops and your tanks are already fully equipped and you really need a few pieces for your healers.