Hey all. I wanted to pick everyone's brains with regards to the repeatability of the encounters in TBC. As a bit of background, my guild is probably a slightly above average raiding guild, with a semi-serious, friend friendly approach. By this, I mean our raiding roster is probably on the order of 40+ players and no explicit attendance requirements. This is also the approach we took in vanilla WoW if you simply up the number a bit.

In vanilla WoW, we had cleared all of the raid zones through AQ40, and ended up burning out/being eaten by attrition after downing the spider wing, razuvious, noth, patchwerk and grob. In vanilla WoW, we'd have occaisional fights that we'd have some difficulty putting on farm (farm being defined as essentially never wiping). Some prime examples would be the bug trio, c'thun, faerlina, patchwerk...we'd even have occasional wipes to nefarian right up until the point at which we stopped running BWL (bad fear break leading to a few instagibbed healers, coupled with a bad class call during the skelly zerg, etc.).

Our current progress has us with all outdoor bosses down, gruul and mag's lairs cleared, and Karathress dead in serpentshrine cavern (first kill this week...we'll see how farmable he is!) We have some outstanding players in our guild, but the skill level does vary some. I wouldn't say we have anyone I would consider to be glaringly bad, but there is certainly a noticeable difference between our best players and the rest. We generally have a consistent 15-18 people in raid each day, with the other 7-10 switching up. We have no members, save new recruits, that have not done any of our "farmed" content.

My main reason for making this post, is I'm curious how other guilds, at all levels, have found their repeatability of encounters in TBC to compare to that in vanilla WoW. We have occasional wipes on Maulgar (typically a felhound will resist or the tank on Maulgar simply falls over since we don't flask for this encounter anymore), frequent wipes on Gruul (I typically expect him to die on our third pull...sometimes it's better but 3 seems to be about right...problem is typically a tank death with unfortunate timing of ground slam and reverb) and frequent wipes on Magtheridon (poor abyssal control during phase 1, random fear related healing issues, occasional bad box clicking during phase 2, etc.). I'm trying to nail down what is causing this inability to put encounters on farm status, and I'm having a difficult time deciding between the 20-25% of our raid that is in flux day to day, or if it's something inherent in the encounter design, or if it's a little from both columns a and b.

My suspicion is that it is both, with a nod towards encounters being tuned more tightly, so individual mishaps often lead to wipes down the road. Of course, doing an encounter a number of times internalizes things, enabling people to become more adept at avoiding these mishaps, but part of me thinks that some of the design choices of TBC encounters tend to force (I feel "force" is too strong a word, but it's late and I'm having trouble being precise with my expression) mishaps upon the raid.

Leading raids can be a frustrating endeavor when encounters refuse to be put on farm, and I want to be able to figure out what, if anything, I can do to steer us away from this trend, and any input on this situation would be greatly appreciated.

In the last couple of weeks I believe my guild has wiped on every raid boss except Gruul (and maybe Fathom Lord and Maulgar, I wasn't about for them). And we'll kill Leo this week and have been killing Hydross and other SSC bosses for a while.

We also don't have a core 25 who are there for each and every raid, and I'd attribute it to this. Takes a little bit of adjustment when you dont have the same group, let alone the ideal one..

(for instance last week we one shot tidewalker and spent a couple of HOURS on lurker.. then this week we 2 shot lurker and gave up in frustration on tidewalker when respawns popped)

The only previously-beaten encounter we've ever wiped on where I could really say "Well damn, that was stupid, not really our fault" was Hydross, when he did one of his famous "hey I'm going to randomly take an extra five seconds to shift phases, do a 250% mark, chain a tomb through some players, and hit the tank for 18k for good measure, before transforming" acts. Everything else was because someone (or many someones) did something dumb, or because our strat was flawed.

We've definitely wiped to every fight at least once since learning it -- even Maulgar, where mages new to Krosh tanking typically need one "oops, zone out" wipe to get the positioning and timing right. Everything is repeatable though, and we one-shot things more regularly with each passing week.

The one major piece of advice I have is to never stop evaluating your strat even after you've secured a kill, until you're certain it's foolproof. Sure, maybe sometimes you wipe because someone screws up, or some new players need to practice their role within a certain strat. That's inevitable. But maybe some elements of the strat are too error-prone, and you could redesign them to minimize the effect of a single player's mistake. Maybe the strat as a whole doesn't handle "bad luck" well enough and will unravel if an unlikely series of events transpires (e.g., gambling on Morogrim that 1-2 specific people don't get Graved when they need to be doing murloc stuff).

We killed Lurker pretty easily, then next time we went back to fight him we wiped for two hours straight. It turns out that our initial add strat was really suboptimal, but that we'd had a high-enough DPS group the first time that we could kill everything anyway. Add a few less-geared players and a slightly different class mix for our return visit, and it was messy. We adjusted, killed him very easily with the new add strat, and have one-shotted him since. Sometimes adjusting a strat that you know can work can be risky and difficult, but it can be necessary if you want consistency. I watch boss videos from bosses we've already killed, unless I'm completely satisfied that our strat is perfect, looking for clever ideas to try out and evaluating them against my own experience.

Anyway, in short, TBC fights can certainly be repeatable. I think you'll look back in a few months and wonder how you used to wipe to these fights. Thats normal. The first time we killed Twin Emps, I said to myself, "Holy shit, this is intense, we'll never be able to do this easily week after week, much less swap in lots of new players..." and obviously a couple of months later Emps were trivial. Be patient, but also don't stop evaluating yourselves just because you've killed the boss once.

I think repeatability depends largely on raid composition, and that may be where you are having trouble with so many rotating people. My guild has about 32 raiders, so we typically dont have much variance. As a result, we have no trouble with gruul at all, magtheridon typically takes maybe 2-3 tries.

As far as SSC, we have some small issues with karathress/lurker, but morogrim is farm and hydross is luck-based(nature 250).

Basically, what we've determined is that the number of wipes is directly proportional to group makeup. For gruul, any makeup will do. For mag, 8 healers seems to be best, but you can accomadate 9. For hydross/morogrim/karathress, 9 healers really seems to be essential to making things run smoothly when not flasking. Note that if you are chugging a flask on everything, you can probably sub out a healer for dps. For lurker, we use 7 healers since dps is key, but we have not had to flask for these repeat kills outside main tank and maybe a couple healers.

In general, if you have the right group makeup, it is rare that a wipe cannot be attributed to a specific person/persons messing up. For instance, when you see players X, Y, and Z die to spout, you know exactly who screwed up. In general though, the fewer people you have cycling through the group, the less likely it is to see a specific individual make a lot of mistakes, because they are more familiar with content. Our first lurker kill came out of nowhere, coming off of several 50% attempts, and I really did not expect it. The second kill still took a few tries, but since most of the same people were there, they had experience with the strategy and knew how to approach the fight, thus made fewer mistakes. When you have an extra 10 or 15 people who have not seen the fight as much, you should expect many more mistakes and learning time.

Once they buff gear and nerf this stuff, It will be extremely easy to repeat if you are reliably killing it currently.

I couldn't agree more on the continual need for refinement but I think overall the repeatability of the fights I've seen is pretty high. If anything, I've been a little surprised how quickly some fights went from wipe, wipe, wipe (sometimes for many nights) and then a first kill and subsequent weeks a one-shot or very near. We are not deep into SSC though and this will change I am sure.

A big part of this, as always, though depends on how tight of a raid group you keep. The more players cycling in and out, the longer the learning period and the longer the transition from first kill to farm status.

Or better yet, pull with a felhunter, and notice midway through the pull that the felhunter ate the shield from Krosh.

I hate to say this but gruul V1 was entirely controllable, you needed alot of HP but that removed the 'randomness'.
As for mag the infernals spawn on someone so the max damage the should/can take before it gets CC'd is the eruption and a hit if your healers dont have the stamina for that then this will feel random too.

The only randomness that stops us killing bosses is 'disco spout' at lurker and the resists when both leothras and his shadow are up, sometimes our warlock ends up with 8 stacks of nova and dies, sometimes he resists loads and other times he gets 8 stacks and lives suprisingly long this coupled with our inability to not panic on phase 3 whirlwinds makes loethras an absolute chore.

Apart from a bug on lurker repeatability is basically 'user error' and/or gear choice imo.

PS If you've done alar phase 1 you'll know how much of a different fight that can be one try to the next

I think we are typically in the same situations as Gurg is in the way that we have very few wipes anymore than can be attributed to genuine players messing up (not to says there isn't any though), I think the thing I notice more than anything, especially when I'm leading the raid is there are 2 type of raiders that view a encounter.

There are the 1st type who are very dedicated to their role, are able to perform that role know exactly what to do and when, but ask them to do any other role in the fight and their lost,

Then there is the 2nd type which I like to flag myself a about 1/2 the raid group under where as they could be given any role and even have to play other classes in that role and still know exactly what is going on and what to do.

Nothing annoyed me more than when we were attempting gruul v1 and each week someone different would come up and say "what do we do here" the fact that it takes such a small amount of time, and is so beneficial to a raid to spend that 10 minutes reading up on boss abilities, watching a video and whatever. Since I had a rant at people after that though I have to say lately most people have know what to do for each boss before hand.

I guess that is my point in this long winded post, If you want you guild to be able to repeat boss kills reguarly with little to no wipes then emphasize all points of every encounter for everybody and make sure everyone knows the exact specifics of all the fights, this will bring the ability to reproduce the kill even if x member isn't in the raid that was doing x job, with that you'll notice that the "luck" factor dissapears completely

Again thats user error.

On attumen the charge is ranged, if your out of his minimum range your gonna get charged. That is your fault, no one elses.

If an infernal kills someone in your raid a warlock is to blame, it lands and does 2-3k dmg (cant remember exact) you have 2 seconds before it hits someone, unless your playing from some third world county or your server is shite, he should be feared/banished.

If its on a priest they can shield, they also have instant fear, a mage can blink away.

I cant see any reason why anyone should EVER die on mag unless it is their own fault or that of a warlock.

isn't his charge like most (all?) charges, as in: if you stand close enough he wont do it ?

[edit] beaten. feel free to delete.

I think the most frequent cause of our wipes is a lack of contingency planning. A prime example of this we never bothered to set up an enslave rotation for the Felhunter on Maulgar. This meant a couple of resists or all our Warlocks thinking "I won't bother, he's gonna do it" equals a dead healer. And a dead healer with all mobs still alive on Maulgar gets nasty very quickly. It took us 3 trash reclears to kill Gruul last night too. Now this most certainly is a repeatable encounter, but it's somewhat frustrating when 10 people get thrown within 5 yards of eachother on a Ground Slam. Sure, everyone might decide to run in opposite directions but more often than not...

Our final wipe on Gruul was particularly frustrating. He delayed his first few Shatters, so when he did his 5th or 6th shatter on about 11 growths, the end of shatter coincided with a Reverberation. Tanks dies and we wipe on 1%. Of course, most, if not all of our wipes preceding this were caused by idiotic play, and we had a lot of new people and a melee-heavy raid but still...my blood was boiling by the end of evening.

In general, the fact that you only have 25 people in raids, and fights such as Maulgar (and Gruul to a lesser extent) require a lot more individual contribution is the cause of most of our wipes. The only fights pre-BC that came close to TBC raids in term of individual skill level requirement was Twin Emps and C'thun. We only killed 5 bosses in Naxxramas so I can't speak for the latter bosses there.