◊ selece

Some background:

We're <FEST>, arguably the most stable end-game raiding guild on Deathwing Alliance today. We've been around since the MC times, and we've seen a good chunk of the bosses out there pre-BC (everything down minus C'Thun (don't ask), KT, Sapphy and 4H). Not the most impressive record, but respectable for a non-hardcore guild.

We're currently "working" on Magtheridon, and his rubik's cube trickery. Kara fully cleared, usually 2 groups and Gruul on acceptable farm status.

However, we're not a hardcore guild. We put in 3-4 nights of raiding a week, from about 5:30 to about 9:00 server. We've been having burnout issues as of late and we're in a transition phase of sorts - a sort of changing of the guard from those that have lead for a while to those that still want to continue playing. I'd like to ask given a fairly decently competent member base (i.e. we downed Maulgar the night we zoned in, Gruul to sub 20% pre-nerf after 2 days of attempts) what our expectations should reasonably be considering the brick wall of content ahead of us. From everything that I've read and heard, it only gets harder from here on in - more demanding on everyone to push for their very best and demanding that their best be just a little higher than before.

Considering it still takes us 2 nights on average to clear a Kara for any given group, with 1-2 nights "progression", what should we be expecting from SSC? We're looking to start it fairly soon and I'd like to walk in with some sort of reasonable expectation of progress. If you haven't guessed, yes, I'm the current guild leader / raid leader.

I have a good chunk of faith in our current group of raiders as far as getting a mechanic of a fight under their belts, but what kind of learning curve are we seriously looking at with maybe 6-8 hours of progression time a week?

I know it isn't a lot of time spent on progression by any "hardcore" guild standard. Our "mission statement" has always been to create a positive "friends first" environment first, and to nurture a dedicated PVE team second. So far, it's served us fairly well as far as stability and morale goes, as we're still here and our trophy wall isn't -too- sad.

I guess I'm just looking for a "hardcore" guild perspective (i.e. time invested, learning curve estimation) or better yet, to hear from any guilds in a similar position (fairly casual mindset, but still looking to do better than just Nightbane each week).

Many thanks for the replies in advance.

 

Opu

This post is pretty indicative of the entire PvE scene on Deathwing for those guilds that are post-Nightbane and have a large enough member base to start working on 25 man content.

At <Indecision> we're raiding two nights a week in the 25 mans. While we don't get a lot of time to actually run encounters, this does leave us with plenty of time to discuss a lot of strategy tweaks outside of raiding or even during raiding as we do Karazhan every other raid night. When you are limited in actual raid time rather than player ability there needs to be a concerted effort to have all of the preparation in order for the next raid. Speaking from my experience with your player base, skill isn't your issue.

As far as SSC goes, we also haven't zoned in as a guild. Judging from the reactions in the 'SSC kill order thread' it seems most prudent to start with Lurker/Morogrim rather than Hydross. From everything I've read, Hydross is definitely more consumable intensive and if FEST is anything like Indecision your membership probably wouldn't be too pleased with burning a truckload of consumables just to make the fight workable.

 

Deris

Hardcore denial! ropetown raids 2000 EST to about 0000/0100 EST Monday-Thursday, with 1600 EST to 0100 EST sundays. The only difference being we almost always put in 5 days. Those long sundays really help when learning an encounter as the time constraint just isn't there - you get a solid block of just staring at a boss which is really nice and allows for some thinking to happen.

SSC isn't that hard in my opinion, at first it seemed daunting due to the trash but once you learn the trash pulls and can do them efficiently (basically not everyone dying to earthquake or watching as 90% of the raid stands in poison after a lord kill) the time lost is minimal, and Tidewalker/Karathress both only took maybe 1 or 2 nights of attempts to kill. Tidewalker is really just a healer check with minimal coordination on part of the AOE'rs and is a fairly forgiving fight in that you can make mistakes. Karathress is a little harder on your raid consumable wise (for me as a healer anyways) but again, you can make mistakes. Hydross sucks because one mistake usually means a wipe with little to no chance of recovery and it can get ugly fast.

OT : I'm a prior Deathwing raider, nice to see you guys still kicking. I transferred when UF broke up shortly after Depraved's hiatus last year in May or so, Shail was my old main.

 

• Celenia

My guild is in pretty much the same position. When we push hard on some raid content (as we learned on C'Thun), it tends to stress some of the social bonds in the guild and we end up losing a couple people. Would it be prudent to put off SSC until 2.1.0 makes it easier? That might not be the deciding factor in when we go in, but I'd like to think that the patch will make the place more of a natural extension of Karazhan and Gruul's difficulty.

 

Omega IV

Great post.

We raid 4 nights a week as well. We're currently working on Nightbane and Gruul, but have everything else dead. I was also thinking ahead about SSC and Mag and how they would all work within the framework or our raid schedule.

If you need two nights a week to clear Karazhan, then you should, imo, continue to take those two nights until the optional bosses no longer require killing for loot. So on day one you kill Midnight, Moroes, Maiden, Opera, Nightbane and day two you do Curator, Aran, Prince. When you no longer need loot from say Maiden (because the healers all have the healing mace -- for example) you just skip her. Same goes for Aran and even Midnight to some extent.

I've even heard of guilds that do Moroes, Opera, Nightbane, Curator, Prince on the first night and then see from there. I believe that this would be the ideal "first night" if everything is completely on farm. Then, go back as people want loot from optional bosses like Midnight, Maiden, Aran, etc.

Then on your second night, High King, Gruul and Magtheridon. If you can drop HK & Gruul in the first hour, you have 3 hours to work on Magtheridon.

Then spend 2 nights in SSC.

 

◊ Praetorian

We probably raid a lot less than most "raiding" guilds -- less than 16 hours a week on 25-man content thus far, though that'll go up a bit in 2.1, for sure. It's partly due to necessity -- we have a lot of professionals, and a mix of EST folk who need to get up for work the next day, and PST folk who don't get home until later on. So we end up raiding from 8pm-midnight CST three nights a week, and one weekend afternoon. Thursday nights are currently Kara, but that'll change when 2.1 hits. Anyway, because of this, I try to stress efficient use of time and consumables, rather than brute force. We learned pre-nerf Gruul in 3 hours total, Hydross in 4 hours total, Magtheridon in 2 hours, Morogrim in 2 hours (well, more like 2.5 -- wiped at 5% on what would've been a kill to a naga pack adding and then had to take another 30 mins to reclear everything), and so forth. Yes, there are times when I wish we could just take a lot more time and throw ourselves at a boss for hours on end, but maybe it's because we're all a bunch of old geezers, attention and execution inevitably seem to wane past the four-hour mark.

There's a thread in our Benefactor forum sort of about this issue, titled "The Serious Casual" -- i.e., players who are competitive and take the game seriously, but simply do not have the time to play dozens of hours a week on a fixed schedule. It can work. You just need enough good players on the same page when it comes to making it work. The key point is that you do need to be good and dedicated in order to make progress. You need people who will come prepared, knowing the boss's abilities and understanding the intended strat before they even zone in, who will put in time outside of raiding to prepare consumables and optimize their gear and spec, and so forth.

In reality, the biggest obstacle to progression as a 3-day or 4-day guild is going to be farm content. 3 days is plenty of time to learn new content. But if you have to spend 2.5 of those 3 days reclearing beaten content for loot and to get access to the new boss you're working on, you're going to have a much harder time of things.

 

Omega IV

Well, the thing is Grugthock, that you can't realistically clear Karazhan, HK & Gruul all in one day in a 4hour time block. Most guilds aren't at that point and the ones that are prolly don't need a whole heck of a lot of loot from those places.

I agree that maximizing the use of your time is waaaay more important than anything else, but keep in mind too, that with 2 karazhan groups, there's going to be a learning curve when new people hop in and so forth.

In a 4 day raid cycle, I have always felt that 2 days should be to farm for loot and 2 days should be to learn new content. With all the instances that we have now, that's going to be easy for a while.

 

Groglox

Keep track of who needs loot from a boss so they can be sure to get in to minimize your time in Kara / Gruuls. Once people need nothing more from optional bosses you can skip straight to the ones you do need and come back later in the week if you have time.

If you really wanted to, you could use consumables for farm clears of Kara to help speed it up to give you more time to do other things and examine your pulling / downtime so you can start to push chain pulling to speed up clear times. Right now we have tuesday for High King, Gruul, and Attumen - Curator, then usually come back late in the week for the second half of kara (which still seems to give us some trouble, but is getting smoother). We also raid 5 days a week though.

If you have two kara runs in equal progression, have a "speed clear" night to see who can clear fastest and the winning team /rolls with the winner getting to redesign your tabard for that week (or whatever reward you feel appropriate for your guild -- we use tabard redesign to encourage farming).

Much of this will be streamlined once 2.1 comes out. Flasking for a full night of farm content won't be a big expenditure at all, and bosses should be better tuned overall.

OT: I am also a fellow Deathwinger! Odette (guiding hand and Tacohut) / Groglox (UF and Depraved)

 

◊ Praetorian

Also, given limited time, understand when to cut old content loose and move on. When you're coming out of Kara every week with 20 void crystals, and hoping for maybe one item per boss that one particularly player needs, is that still a worthwhile use of a raid night?

If you have the time, sure, more loot is always better, but at some point the marginal benefits of milking every last piece of tier 4 loot from old content are outweighed by the extent to which it hinders progression and thus the intake of tier 5 loot.

 

OzzymandiasKJ

When would you reccomend is a good time to move on from a boss that your raid is just simply having too much difficulty with? My guild has been attempting Aran for 6 weeks now and morale is dropping through the floor. For the last couple of weeks we've been attempting to skip Aran and go straight to Prince but every time we do that something seems to go wrong; usually bug related. Last night the chess event wouldn't deactivate and we couldn't do the following pull because of the "Game is in Session" debuff. Before that players got stuck into the walls after the second re-clear, everyone was too disheartened for a third re-clear.

The only logical step is to kill Aran but for whatever reason we can't seem to pull it off. Multiple 1% wipes prove to me that we're capable of it, but it just hasn't happened. And the guild is on the verge of exploding because of our lack of progression.

I don't believe that putting more hours into the week will solve the issue as we generally have such a dip in morale after the third or fourth wipe on Aran that our players just stop trying in order to prompt a premature end to the raid. I know that kind of attitude is a part of the problem, but honestly I don't blame them anymore - 6 weeks on a boss that other guilds downed on their second or third attempt is absolutely terrible.

 

Pigz

We're in about the same situation. Until this week we were raiding 3 nights a week with Kara on Thursday/Monday and Gruul with attempts on Mag on Sunday. Our goal during this time was to get our 70's attuned for SSC and just gear everyone. This week we attuned the last few people we needed to and now all our raiding 70s are attuned we stepped into SSC yesterday.

Unfortunately we didn't come prepared with fish oil so water walking was out. We figured we'd spend the time learning the trash and Finding Morogrim/Karathres. So we started a clear that took a good 1.5 hours that went through hydros's trash, Lurker Trash, Morogrim Trash, and Finally Karathres trash and spent about 1.5 hours attempting Karathres. The good news is we know the trash and can one shot it all now without more than 1 or 2 people dying on the harder pulls. And we got some good attempts on Karathres which certainly seems doable for a guild on our level once everyone learns to react to the 10 different things happening at once and we can deal with that stupid spitfire totem better.

That said. I'm assuming with water walking you can skip a fair amount of the trash pre Kara/Morogrim which if it takes it down to a 30-45 minute trash clear then you can net a lot of chances on Karathress/Morogrim with good wipe protection usage.

 

Ranalis

Hate to derail yet another thread to talk about Shade, but have you looked at the various strats in other threads around EJ? The two best are probably

Karazhan, Already?
Shade of Aran - couple questions.

My guild took 3 weeks on him, and it was majorly depressing even at that point. I feel your pain. If you need something to look forward to, 2 weeks later Nightbane is dead and we're feeling like the cool kids. So I'd advise you to keep working at it, but take a break first so everyone can stop worrying about it all the time.

If your guild is dying based on lots of wipes, that's a worrying sign. There are always going to be bosses that don't go down when they "should" and part of being a good raid group is to understand sometimes that complete discouragement is never the answer. But you could take a week off - just don't pull him AT ALL. Or you could bring your very best 10 people and stack the group with good classes for that fight (i.e. bring two warlocks, a fury warrior, an elemental shaman, etc) if they are available. Shake things up to the point that you feel SOMETHING is different, if you just MUST pull him. But knowing when to take a break from a boss is always important - whether for 15 mintues or 2 weeks.

My suspicion is that if you take a break, you'll probably one shot him the next time you pull him. He's in your head now - breaking might be the way to get him out of there.

 

OzzymandiasKJ

Right I don't meant to hijack this thread and make it about Aran. My intention is to get some feedback regarding how much time we should be spending a boss when we know that we can down it.

Thanks for the feedback though, perhaps a full week of not even talking about Aran will keep him from haunting my dreams at night. But like I said, skipping content seems to bite us in the ass more often then not. I guess we could go for Netherspite instead of all the way to Prince.

 

◊ zeidrich

I would say that if you're 6 weeks into karazhan and can't get Aran down obviously you're doing something wrong.

Aran is one of those pissy bosses that sometimes we 1 shot with no problems, and sometimes we bash our head against the wall and can't do it. And it all boils down to who's in the raid. (We switch up our karazhan groups every week)

I would say check out one of the other threads (I'm sure you have already) to find where you're screwing up. There's only really 3 points of failure in that fight (Interrupts, Environment (blizzard, flame wreath), Elementals).

But more on topic. I would say if you've been wiping on it for 6 weeks, give your guys a break. Tell them that you're going to get him down, tell them that you're doing some research and are improving on the strategy. Then tell them that you're not going to try him this week. Clear up to him, then go do the chess event. Pick off any optionals that are easy for you if you missed them, and then let everyone log early with a "well done".

If you sounded like a more hardcore guild, I'd not recommend that, but it sounds that your people are sick of trying Aran. My hope with doing that would be that, assuming the raid up to Aran goes smoothly, people will be kind of interested in trying him again, and to see what new strategy you might have come up with. If you actually tried him and started wiping again they'd become just as discouraged as before.

Next week, change up the strategy a bit. If you think you're working with the perfect strategy already, still change it, even if only trivially. Nobody wants to keep trying the same thing they've been trying for 6 weeks and losing with. And if you can, bring 2 warlocks. If you need to, supply flasks even. The psychological benefits of your raid knowing you can kill the boss should offset the price of the flasks.

If you still can't do it after that, you need to look good and hard at your raid, find out who's underperforming, and take steps to rectify that.

 

◊ Anias

Something worth mentioning with the 2.1 patch.

If blizzard is designing encounters around "one flask per person" then it is in your best interest if you want to maximize the value of your consumables to have your time against the boss line up in 2 hour increments.

You can do this by planning for each night to have 2 hours vs the boss, 4 hours vs the boss, or 6 hours vs the boss (ok, nihilim can have 8 hours but that's crazy).

It's just inefficient and leads to more farming to have 3 hours against a boss or 5 hours against a boss for new content (because you waste an hour of your flask), although it might be workable on a "farm clear" night.

So if you're currently raiding in 4 hour increments, unless you spend 2 hours clearing trash and have 2 hours on the boss, or minimal time clearing trash (less than 15 minutes total) for 4 hours against the boss, you'd probably have better time spent cutting down to 3 hour raids or moving up to 5 hour raids. (Unless you flask to clear trash, which we don't, but maybe it will be worth doing post 2.1)

Regardless, worth mentioning in a thread that basicly boils down to "making your time spent smarter".

Admittedly, not every fight is going to be "flask it always" but the ones that are are the ones you have to farm for each week, and saving 2 flasks a week because you cut a night and extended the other nights an hour each will add up to more time doing fun stuff, and less time spent on the pinecone progression path.

 

• Snowy

My summary:

Be Efficient: Start your raids on time, all the time. If you have dedicated people, they should know the general strats already. Jump right in, don't spend 20 minutes on your first pull when you're usually going to wipe either way. Nothing beats experiencing it. Wipe recoveries should be speedy.

Know when to Move On: If you're limited in time, and you're trying to progress in Naxx, surely you wouldn't be trying to still farm MC for one or two items off Ragnaros, correct? Make sure you always have at least 1 day dedicated to new content. How can you progress otherwise?

In my old guild, pre-TBC, we raided 7 nights a week. Believe you me, I wanted a Rejuv Gem, but I found myself skipping a lot of BWLs because frankly, I was burning out on raiding that much. That chance at 1 item out of an entire zone just wasn't worth it. For most people, it was the same situation -- going for a shot at 1 or 2 items at most. It was time to move on.

For the OP: If you slot Karazhan in as regularly scheduled raids, and that takes 2 days to complete (not unreasonable for typical groups -- a power group can do a full clear of Kara in 3 hours) then you're going to have problems fitting in any new content with only 3-4 days available. I would suggest, if possible, moving Kara off the official raiding schedule. Have 3 or 4 days scheduled for 25 man raids, and let people fit in their Karas around that. Once you get Magtheridon down, you can easily fit him + Gruul into one night, and that would give you 2 nights to jaunt into SSC on a 3 nights a week raiding schedule.

 

• Arawethion

Let me expound on this a bit. We were the only Alliance guild on our server to kill 4H, and we did so on a strict 4-evening schedule.

You have to create a guild ethos and expectation to extract the maximum value out of every minute of raid time. Make a big deal of being at the zone on time (or whatever your policy is) with gear fully repaired, consumables stocked, already on Vent, strategy posts about the bosses already read, etc. Anything and everything that can be addressed outside of scheduled raid hours must be. Once you're going, stress that you expect fully alert raiders the entire time. Point people out when they miss a ready check, when you say "move up" and they don't move up, or even when a trash pack is pulled early and they don't move or realize what's going on.

Have guild discussions about priorities. Farm vs. Progress is the big one. Most people seem to take comfort in spending much more time on "farm" than is necessary. When you're truly trying to maximize utility of limited time, beefing up people's character sheets is a luxury--the real value is in the time you get to practive new content. When we were learning Naxx on a 4-day schedule, AQ had to be canned very early (around Maexxna). For a few weeks after that, we bought a C'Thun instance from another guild on the server, and eventually stopped even doing that. When there was a week left until 2.0, it was Deathknight-wing-only from then on in (and as mentioned above, we got them, and at 11:40 on Monday). Now, I considered myself lucky--though it took a lot of prodding to get people to see past their T3 sets, our members were motivated enough to focus on a goal.

So continually remind them--the difference between them and world-class guilds may have a bit to do with gear, but it has much more to do with the fact that the world-class guilds know how to kill the bosses and you don't. And there's only one way to improve that.

Answers to Moonkin questions:
0) Read the TTT/use the spreadsheet: http://elitistjerks.com/f47/t66856-moonkin_pve_dps/
1) Maintain high DoT uptime. Use WiseEclipse.
2) Nothing beats 2T8.
3) Sometimes you cast many Wraths and no Eclipse procs. Deal with it.

 

civatateo

we're experiencing the same sort of thing. we used to do karazhan on tuesdays (2 raids, both usually stopped after aran), world bosses + gruuls' lair on wednesdays, mag's lair and karazhan finish on thursdays, and progression + 2nd world boss spawns over the weekend. now, things are a bit more complicated. we've killed hydross and tidewalker, but both aren't on "farm" yet; hydross still takes a night to kill. we've killed void reaver, but even if we one shot him, the whole process of clearing to him and killing him takes almost 2 hours. it's getting to the point where we've found ourselves short on progression time.

i think the only way to deal with it is to sacrifice karazhan, and maybe even world bosses. a lot of loot from these encounters gets DE'd, and while some people still want an upgrade here or there, the time sink is beginning to be a burden.

hopefully, the raiding guilds on our server will all mature enough to the point where we can start running joint KZ raids on common offdays or something, but those types of things tend to not last very long (ie: once your tanks stop needing gear, they stop). gruul/mag's lair are both pretty quick and contain 3 T4 pieces, which will probably be worthwhile for a long ways to come, so i don't foresee stopping those soon.

i also think that once SSC encounters get on farm status, things will get easier. unfortunately, we're rather large for a raiding guild (over 50 active accounts), so there's always new or less experienced people in the raid, and one person screwing up on hydross can turn an attempt into a wipe.

 

◊ selece

Thanks for the responses so far - especially Gurg's. That's a pretty impressively fast learning phase for those SSC bosses!

I suppose it'll come down to now:
- setting the mood / expectations for each raid (i.e. coming prepared both strategy and consumable wise)
- getting more efficient at old content

We've been leaning on a fair number of more "casual" players for a while now - they don't have the time to gather the gear that our raiders have/had from the 5's or enough playtime in general, so it'll be interesting moving to content which exclusively locks them out due to attunement requirements.

I suppose the main message to convey to my raiders is that "this is definitely POSSIBLE for us to do - but it's on us to come prepared and ready to go".

OT:
./wave to other Deathwing-ers.
./salute to other GMs/raid leaders. Don't you love this job? Sometimes I feel like I'm trying to herd a bunch of drunk cats all driving farming combines but when everything clicks, it's like seeing the perfect Rube Goldberg machine go to work.

 

Tszyu

Right now, my guild raids 5 days a week. Monday-Thursday 7 to 10-12. On Sunday we start slightly earlier. Saturday is used to clean up anything we're missing in karazhan. While it is a pretty rough schedule, I think it works fairly well for us. We have our scheduled content and if we finish it, we call it for the night. If we don't, we go until 12 at the latest or we don't have enough to continue.

One of the issues that I'm seeing is trying to maximize performance. I believe the guild has some highly skilled players, but I'm not sure the improvements on new content is as good as it can be. Perhaps I expect too much, but I don't necessarily see the kind of progress on new bosses that I would like to see. So how do you as leaders in your guild bring out the best in people for the amount of time available?

 

Dendory

"raid progression expectation" is totally impossible to predict, average or compare. It depends on so many factors. Simply hitting a road block for a couple of raid days can be enough to discourage people from logging in for progression nights, delaying progression even more, like is our case. One guild can progress through a zone in 3 weeks and another guild in 3 months, putting in the exact same time in. And what determines if you're going to be in the lucky guild or not is quite often pure luck.

 

Cel

On a similar note: How hard is it suggested, at least till the patch, that you push consumables for a fight, and when in a fight's progression do you see the need for consumables?

I feel like my guild tends to try to brute force it's way through everything and as such consumables are wasted more often than not. Thoughts on controlling this? I'm not a raid leader or an officer, so I really don't have a say beyond maybe a friendly forum post, but I'm curious how other people handle this.

For instance: We were told to flask for the last attempt on the boss @ 11:30 one night (raid ends @ 12pm)... I refused to do so, and I feel rightly so as our best attempt on Morogrim was 55% or so, and I didn't see damage as a problem as we always died after a tank did, either the murloc tank or the main tank. (Apparently someone got the idea he had an enrage timer.. ~_~) Should I have sucked it up and flasked, or was it ok to stand my ground and not waste what my limited farming time can produce?

"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge." - Bertrand Russell

Alpha is recruiting... go go.

 

Zwink

Flasking at 11:30 when you end at 12:00 is crazy, unless you are very close to a kill or can extend the raid to get some more time out of those flasks.

I'm rather conservative with Flask usage. Usually a handful of vocal people are pushing for flasks and full potted attempts, but I would prefer to see progress before doing so and consistently get to the point where I'm confident we can win with Flasks. However, flasking your warriors is needed on many fights for learning attempts.

http://vodka-guild.com

 

◊ Praetorian

That's retarded. Flasking for Morogrim is also retarded. The whole fight is about your ability to kill a wave of murlocs consistently. If you can kill 7 waves, then flasking so he dies after 6 waves instead isn't going to make a difference. And flasks aren't really meaningfully changing your ability to kill murlocs.

Morogrim is the last boss in the game anyone should be flasking for, unless it's Mighty Resto flasks for healers (which would actually be understandable... if you aren't in a shadow priest group, Morogrim is about as taxing a fight for a healer as I've seen anywhere in TBC).

 

• Arawethion

I can see reflask-ing a tank at 11:30 (if the alternative is effectively calling the raid), but I still ask if people might stay up until 12:30 that day. A whole raid? No way. Of course, this is kind of biased; I've never flasked a whole raid, so I don't really know what I'm basing that on.

Answers to Moonkin questions:
0) Read the TTT/use the spreadsheet: http://elitistjerks.com/f47/t66856-moonkin_pve_dps/
1) Maintain high DoT uptime. Use WiseEclipse.
2) Nothing beats 2T8.
3) Sometimes you cast many Wraths and no Eclipse procs. Deal with it.