I realize it's harder to min/max the crap out of your raid if you're assigning things based on group number, but our DPS has been where it needs to be without consumables for some time now. Also, setting things up by cube allows me to assign healers in an intuitive way (you heal the tank in your group, who is also on the cube your group is responsible for). It really does amaze me, though, how people are able to mess up clicking no matter how many times they've done a fight. We had a guaranteed kill lost last night when at 5% ONE cube got double clicked and nobody from that group backed it up. Wipe at 3%, and it was pretty late (we did Mag at the end of the evening...not a great idea in retrospect) so everyone started playing like crap and we called it a night with Mag still up.

It's actually gotten to be a theme lately...half a dozen people dying every single time the Lurker uses his Spout. Clicking going wrong on Magtheridon. Healers just stopping their heals when our MT gets an avoidance streak on Gruul...and then he eats 3 hits in a row and dies without heals. We went back to Naxx to kill KT this week--didn't bag him before TBC And he should have been dead on the third try but we had to suffer through two single-digit wipes. Might be a derail, but any ideas how I can get my raiders' heads back in the game? I'm not a screamer, I've never been into calling people out and shaming them in front of the raid when they mess up...but I don't know what to do.

Ghando: As bad you feel your guildmates probably feel just as pissed off they didnt get kills in. No need to yell at them to make them feel worse. Sometimes taking 2-3 days off in a row from raiding helps rejuvenate people as well. Or even just take a whole week off.

Don't ever be afraid of calling raids early or giving a few extra days off. After a solid night of Leo learning last night and a Lurker 1-shot, we went over to Mag'theridon and started putting in some gongshow-worthy attempts, so we just called the raid after 30 minutes rather than stressing people out by wiping to farm content. Had we spent another 30-60 minutes it would have obviously died, but in this particular case it wasn't even worth doing that, since people were obviously tired out and not playing particularly well.

That said, if some people are truly playing below par and consistently wiping your raid, replace them. If no replacements are available, have them sit outside anyways.

How far in? The first minute or two? Likely the first pack respawned while you were setting up.

Unless the trash pack comes running in when Magtheridon is at like 60%, which is a different story...

As far as Gruul goes, that trash definitely keeps respawning during attempts, we've had them respawn on our last two Gruul kills. Luckily our Ground Slam throws weren't too bad and they patrolled out before they became a problem.

As far as wiping to Mag trash during attempt yesterday, Mag just came out of banish and shadowbolts come streaming through the ceiling... I figure if they were already there they'd have annihilated us before we got the first add down, but I guess it's possible they just took that long to run down to us or something.

I just set up normal max-DPS groups, with a tanking group for the eventual Mag MT and the last 1-2 Channeler tanks. People can remember which cube they're going to click and what mob they're supposed to tank without needing a group setup to remind them. Shamans start the fight in groups for the most effective DPS Heroism, and then might get swapped to some other group (say for Mana Tide) later on.

If someone's having trouble at this fight, my advice would be to prioritize as such:
1) Kill the adds faster. This solves all the problems at once.
2) Interrupt better. Spells should almost never be going off, and definitely not on the currently DPS'ed target, where everybody is.

On our first night of attempts, we had 5 tanks, 9 healers, and 11 DPS. A few nights later, we had 4 tanks, 8 healers, and 13 DPS, and things were already getting better. We also switched from a "move-the-mobs" strategy to a "move-the-DPS" strategy. This cleaned up interrupting a good bit. Without having to worry about cross-heals between the adds (they start out outside of healing range of each other), tanks could interrupt Shadow Bolts themselves, without having to distract any Rogues or Shamans away from the main DPS target. The feral Druid tanking two adds was in the far corner, and we just let those Shadow Bolts go off, hitting only a few people. For our second kill, we had only 7 healers on, and it went even better. Only 6 Abyssals every spawned, the fourth add was almost down when Mag spawned, and we'd even accidentally let a heal go off.


After practicing the fight exactly the same way for a while, you settle into a rhythm. Everyone knows exactly what's going to happen, and things just tighten up. The same person eats the first Fear from a particular add every pull. The same people interrupt the first two heals. Everyone knows when their Heroism is coming. The healers know that the DPS might eat one Shadow Bolt while running to the Druid-tanked add. Once it's a rehearsed execution (think Gothik, only less intricate), it's not so scary anymore.

Hmm... that's odd. The timers we're using to keep track of the trash pack respawns seem accurate down to the minute. I've called a repair break when we were close to having a repop and they spawned right in front of us almost exactly when expected... and there's been other times we've pulled with less than 2 minutes left on the clock.

If Mag was coming out of a banish though... I can't imagine trash taking 2 minutes to run down the corridor. More bugs, I guess. :/