kalbear

I'd love to get some advice for Brutallus. We didn't have many good attempts on him, but the best attempt we did have we were at least 4k down, DPS wise. There are some obvious ones I can do specifically to get better, such as going to cat between transitions, planning to use innervates and whatnot. And of course, we need to drop our 8th healer. We brought them in so that we could get better at burn and tank rotations and seeing the fight for a longer time, but we're going to have to break ourselves of that.

Aside from those things, what do people see that we aren't doing properly here? In particular I feel like some of our rogues and mages are lower than they should be, and I'm not sure we can afford bringing a moonkin.
Brutallus attempts
best attempt

 

Zedd

Its a shame the report is Anonymous.

Im going to assume that "Titan" is Uhohhotdog due to him having a Dragonspine Trinket.
His gear is fine, but he could do with the cape from Zul'Aman.
His rotation is basicly.. odd, he seems to hover between 1:1 and 1:1.5
Make sure he swaps to the 3:2 macro.

Tinco (Wish I assume is Tyyranus) has a bad rotation, or more likely Mana Issue's
Try to get him enough mana to substain LB LB LB CL rotations instead of pure LB spam.
He should also consider using the badge totem, and a better weapons (Naj'entus shield and Archimonde offhand is nice, Illidan staff seems an option)
His boots need to go also, or at least be enchanted.

The Umbar shaman (Wich I assume is Aedarg) needs to stop using Healing wave and lesser healing wave and just spam rank 5 chainheal on the current tank, he even had a shadowpriest!
Gearwise he looks fine, but get him the Living Earth HoD crafted bracers and regem yellow slots to +10spellhaste.
His cape also needs to go for the Illidan/ZA timed cape. and the neck either [Brooch of Nature's Mercy] or [Guardian's Pendant of Reprieve]

Thats all I have time for ATM, but basicly every dpsser just needs to press the buttons harder.

 

Mezzlock

all three rogues let SnD fall off to many times, maybe it's just for a sec but their dps is low for sunwell, seeing as the enh. shaman did ok dps it shouldn't be a problem with debuffs on brut, but more about their skill and gear.

The warrior should be able to respec MS/BF and still do the same dps as he did now with a fury spec

the affliction warlock is also doing more dps than the destro locks, which shouldn't be the case

Basically you need to upper the dps all across the board and maybe drop out the boomkin for someone with a bit higher dps.

And yea, don't let dpsers die, during the learning phase having dead dps will almost certain lead to enrage wipe.

www.in-excelsis.net

 

Pheroz

I think the bigger problem then any specific DPS issues is that you weren't able to go 6 minutes and hit the enrage. Especially if your bring 1 more healer then you'll probably have to.

The things that terrify me from that parse are things like a tank being in a shadow priest group, and people dying to lack of heals from slash (not BuRN!!)

I think it's important to look at it from a Stand-->Walk-->Run perspective, rather then trying to take off running.

Rather then trying to push straight towards the enrage timer, and see what happens if you make it there, I recommend going with your expected group, and making sure you have the things worked out that will get you there.

There's little point in contibuing as your are with 8 healers. Your going to cut down to 7 to get the kill, you might as well do it now. It's of critical importance that your healers stick to their assignments so you can identify shortcomings.

Our healing assignments our simple. 2 Resto shammies chain heal through the current tank. We have 3 other main tank healers, 1 is our best priest, the others are (ussually) Paladins. The remaining 2 healers are burn healers. A resto druid who's job it is to keep a 3 stack of lifebloom on everyone with burn, not letting it pop untill their burn wears off and a Priest (cuz thats what we have) who adds healing for the last 20 seconds when burn damage is greater then triple stack of lifebloom. When not healing burns (do to resists or immunes) those healers can assist on the tanks.

With those assignmnts, see if people are dying, and if so, to what. We run with 2 shadow priests to your 1, so that helps us with raid healing. I notice theres no amp magic on anyone, which is a collosal mistake. Everyone should be amped before this fight. No exceptions. That should help with healing as well.

With that setup, start doing the fight without being concerned about the enrage and see where the deaths occur. If people are dying solely to slash, then it's likely a positioning issue and people need to be better so the chain heals bounce from the tanks to them and heal them up between slashes. We found that our burn haling priest needed concentration aura to prevent pushback from a slash from disrupting their heals and letting pople die late in burn. Other then that, the only burn deaths where due to burnsex (spreading burn) and failure to get to the correct spot so you didnt take slashes.

Tank deaths are a little trickier. We have a 1 countdown with only 1 healer switching preemptively. We also have 1 of our maintank healers focus target another main tank healer and occasionaly reset to make sure their heals are slightly staggered. As long as Imp Demo Shout and Tclap are kept up, our tanks are pretty stable. Always full ironshields, always a cooldown on a stomp that is not immediately getting taunted off. From there, we don't even need to give our tanks survivability group buffs, like tree of life our devotion aura. We don't run with an aff lock for Shadows embrace, although I do think one of our hunters keeps up scorpid sting.

There are 3 things that occasionally drop our tanks, and you'll likely see and have to work with. Transitions, Stomps, and healers moving becuase of burns.

From there, you should start seeing Brut grow big and wtf pwn people.

About your dps, the one thing I will say is you don't seem to be supporting your mana users very well. No ret people for JoW and giving the shadow priests to your healers (and your tank, really?) is pretty harsh. Our healers run without shadow priests on this fight (except our resto shammies who are in the caster groups) and they don't complain. On this fight I'm used to having a shadow priest and I still squeeze a mana pot in between my 2 destro pots. DPS losses from evocate, life tap, lack of destro pots, having to mana gem instead of flamecap, huntrs being mana limited, are very real. Remember, healers can go oom at 6:00ish and thy've done their job.

 

kalbear

Thanks, Zedd. I was actually a bit shocked at Umbar's healing - until I looked at who he was healing. All of his LHW/HW casts were on him, which happened when he moved away from his position into the burn zone. That part's reasonable - though I think he's probably not casting chain heal through the tank as much as he could. That, or the other tank is really unlucky with ancestral fort procs. I'll talk with our elemental shaman and our survival hunter and see what we can improve.

All of our locks went destro for the attempt. That's just an artifact of WWS; he was destro for the attempt. At least I hope it was; if he was aff for the attempt that's not good at all. He certainly was acting like a destro lock.

We had been having the spriest with the healers. The shamans are all in the caster/tank groups. The last attempt was with one of the tanks with a spriest, but that was more experimentation; I don't think we were trying to do that purposely. Even so, our healers were complaining about going OOM, and that was with a spriest. I think we're going to have to work on our healers cancelcasting more or downranking more.

Thanks for the advice though. I think you're right; right now, our fundamentals are not where they need to be.

 

Wizeowel

Edit: -Removed-

To echo Mezzlock: rogues should never let SnD drop for a even a split-second. No extra ticks of rupture will ever to be equal to losing +30% attack speed. Never let it run out, this is really class basics for them. Even dropping rupture entirely from rotation is better than letting SnD drop 11 times which "Bassai" did on your best try.

About healing. 8 healers is too much. It means you didn't understand the fight yet. You just need to have a look again at your assignments and notice that the dangerous moments are stomp and transition between tanks. Stomp should mostly be dealt with by the tanks using cooldowns, and incoming healing should be staggered (count out loud on vent 1,2,3 and make a rotation for each MT healer to start a big cast on each second). However, both of these danger moments are infrequent enough and predictable enough that the healing at other times isn't so challenging. So I also wonder why your paladins both get a shadow priest and mana tide but they are also casting 50% flash of light. Either they need the mana or they don't. Furthermore, you've got your warrior tank in that shadowpriest group which is a bit of a waste on various levels. For your guild I would have a group with SP/Shaman/Mage/Mage/x, where X is either the moonkin or the worst geared warlock depending on who has the bigger mana issues, and the shaman could be resto or elemental, again depending on mana needs.

To then solve the problem about the warrior tank needing paladin devotion aura: bring a retri paladin! Even someone's undergeared alt will likely improve the total raid dps with JoW and the crit aura more than you lose from someone else in that spot. Plus the extra blessing of course.

 

kalbear

Never mind - response removed so response to response removed.

To be clear, we didn't do a spriest-warrior tank for most of the night. Only towards the end, and that was because the warrior was getting frustrated by death. At that point group optimizations were out the window entirely.

 

Wizeowel

It's not a healing issue so much. Tell him to get his Moroes trinket out of the bank

 

Gange

We've recruited a bunch of new raiders and are starting to have problems with raids not running smoothly.

Wow Web Stats

Specifically, we've had some threat issues. Could you guys take a look at Aeonflash, Gandrayda, and Murazor? Is there anything they could do to improve their TPS?

 

kalbear

For Gandrayda, they're doing about as good as I would expect them to at least in terms of cycles on Gurtogg. They're doing the standard mangle/lacerate cycle. It's hard to say whether they're mauling appropriately; that's very much dependent on rage, and on Gurtogg that's an iffy thing. About the only thing he should have had is thorns.

However, their cat version is really poorly gemmed. A cat should almost never go for strength, and that's exactly what he's doing. If his bear set is similarly poorly gemmed, that could be a problem.

 

Austin

Thanks Jezz,

I went and worked with Fugms a bit, as is evident with his current gear, though he's really short on badges, hence the reason that the T4 ring hasn't been replaces, as well as the T6 leggings. Thank you for the help.

Here is this week's WWS: WWS Loading...

Highest recorded DPS for us on the following:
Naj'entus
Teron
Bloodboil
Mother
Council

This week's Teron, 31,382 RDPS, ~4,000 RDPS higher then last week; WWS Loading...


Please ignore Corine's output, I just wrote a long PM to her on gear/gems/enchants.

DPS looks good overall, but I'd still like to improve it if someone could get me some additional pointers.

MT - Vandil: I know that both Sunnyj and Alista were fairly heavily threat capped most of the fight, could I get some help on figuring out how to increase his TPS?

Austin, 80 Mage - Austyn, 80 Death Knight - Austen, 70 Rogue - Dormant account - 70 Resto Druid, 70 Feral Druid

 

◊ Klasto

Greetings, I wasn't able to find out why and how but in almost every Entropius breakdown I check , mages seem to be close to the top, I can't find out what our mages are doing wrong since the mage class is not something I know much about.

However I find it hard to believe that Refire(now unguilded) with Skull of Gul'dan and almost perfect SW gear up to Kil'jaedan and Neogeox can get outdamaged by a feral tank.Can someone analyze or help me analyze what is wrong here or is it something that I'm missing?

Wow Web Stats

 

SoraHime

Er nvm.

 

Wizeowel

Instead of only looking at the damage on Entropius, it may help to make a custom split in order to analyse other things WWS Loading...

What I see there is a mage who probably spent more time running from stuff than doing damage. Total 20 casts in the 70 seconds he was alive, of which 6 were low damage debuff casts, 3 were blink and 1 was iceblock. Not very effective given the limited time available. Although he has skull trinket, he popped it just before he started running around, so it was wasted. He also didn't save combustion and icy veins for phase 2, nor did he pop a destro pot. Very poor judgement on his part, since you want to save and use all cooldowns for the last part of phase 2. You can also see that at the start of phase 1 he didn't use his cooldowns very well either. In fact he started the fight in phase 1 popping everything, which for a mage is wrong since we must first debuff the boss with 5 scorches.

However, not all the fault is his. Firstly - he was let to die. Half his heals come from VE, 5 heals from being in the right place for a chain heal tail, and only 2 direct heals on him. So despite being at the bottom on incoming damage he still died. Perhaps all his running around made the healers complacent about him. Secondly, the mages you see with top damage on other guilds' WWS get a shaman in group for bloodlust. In a sense you've chosen for the feral tank to beat the mage on the meters by giving him a bloodlust but the mage none, and also letting the mage die just at the point where his damage would gain 20%.

 

cuddli

Hi our guild is 4\5MH and managed the 2 first bosses in BT. Skipped Vashj earlier but are now trying to get her down before wotlk. Our problem like everyone else i guess is phase 2, Kiting,positioning seems to be the mains issues. WE loose ppl fast here from strider aggro and the forked lighting. Healing aggro on the striders\nagas aswell
Here is the WWS from last raid 11 attempts with best try getting 3 generators down. Any help is welcomed

Wow Web Stats

 

Arakan

One thing I wonder: Have you figured out what is wiping you? What stuff is going wrong during the encounter that lets it get out of control?

On the WWS, the things I found mostly, are the huge differences in the dps lists every attempt. Your warrior tank (which I assume is tanking Naga) has a 80% presence, while a lot of dps have a lot lower % presence, so from my point of view your dps can work harder on getting more time spent dpsing.

Simple things of note is the central ranged dps switching targets fast and often where threat permits. They can go all out on the naga/striders till theyre high on threat, and switch to the other target. Dps on the stairs should already be constantly dpsing, if they arent, it could be that you've overassigned dps there.

 

Grital

SV Hunter isn't either of the standard raid specs according to that (missing IAotH), his shot rotation is wrong. You are only running two locks and one of them is CoDing. CoR+CoE. I'm assuming you're not CoRing. CoR, alone, will make up the missing dps for a kill. Make sure your dps warrior specs into Improved Demo and keeps it up. You really want to fully debuff the maps AP, have a hunter bring an owl.

You are not group swapping for bloodlusts. No BL on the mages sub-20 (or at all). Having your warrior respec to BF would add ~700 dps (his dps as Fury is lower then it should be anyway). Get him a Solarian's Sapphire and make sure he wears it. Drop Urania, she's being outhealed by your Spriests VE. Add in another dps, 7 healers is more then enough. Buffbot a third blessing or, better option, bring a decent Retadin. Ele Shaman let watershield drop a few times, not helping his mana. I'm assuming Tyranus is the Shaman. He could stand to grab a better shield (I believe the 33 badge shield is straight up better for dps, less stam). I dunno quite what he's doing wrong honestly. I have badge gear etc. in my Ele offset and over a ~4min fight with 1 lust I'll push 1.6k dps. He has 4pc tier6 and a Skull of Guldan. He healed himself to... and I checked, it wasn't because he was burned. Ele heals hit for nothing, he should focus on his job (dps).

All that would lead to a sub-enrage kill, despite stuff like Rogues letting SnD drop etc. There's a hundred ways most of your dps could improve dramatically honestly, I'd encourage them to at least read their classes thread on EJ.

 

Maelstrom

Seems to be a recurring theme here, but hey, my guild is on Brutallus as well.

Wow Web Stats

The above link was our best try for the night, we've only had 2 full nights of attempts on him so far. The main issue we're having (Aside from him occasionally deciding for the tank to just die) is that our hunter DPS is epicly poor, and our mages are running flat out of mana around the 3 minute mark. The mages could drop consumables and use mana pots/gems but their DPS is already struggling as our elemental shaman has been dragged away due to school. I've recommended already that we swap the shadowpriest in with the mages so they can keep nuking, but as I know periolously little about hunter DPS and shot rotations and such, I thought I would seek some guidance on the matter.

Oh I almost forgot, our burn healing is less than optimal as well, but that's being slowly improved through practice and coordination.

 

SoraHime

Maelstrom-

A cursory look through the armory reveals that Vindaloovian is not using the Relentless Earthstorm Meta, nor is his bow enchanted. He should be using +15 agility on gloves, not 26 AP. His spec is fine. In the attempt you linked, he's getting roughly the same amount of steady to auto shots, which is weird because he doesn't use a DST or doesn't have one equipped, and didn't get heroism. His steady shots should outnumber his auto shots, especially because he's using a 3.00 speed bow. He's using 5/8 T6, which is bad because hunter T6 is not all that great, especially the helm and shoulders. I would recommend him to either switch in Beast Tamer's shoulders, or better, swap to the S3 or S4 helm. Both are much better than T6, and the arena helms have a red socket instead of an orange socket. Also, the S3/4 helms have the +hit that he's apparently going for.

Lanatra is using the T4 helm, which is a joke. He should get the S2, S3, or S4 helm, which are all noticeably better than T4. If he can get the S3 or S4 helm, then he can get rid of a couple orange gems, or replaced them with Wicked orange gems. The easily replaceable ones are the one in his boots and in helm (since the Arena helms are red socket, and T4 is yellow, besides the meta) and socket them with 10 Agility gems. Either that, or get Cursed Vision of Sargeras or the Forest Prowler's Helm. Spec is fine.

What i suspect to be the main cause of their low DPS is their pets. Their pets are consistently doing around 300 DPS.

Looking further, I see that they only use Kill Command and Bite for Vindaloovian, but the other hunter's pet seems to be doing the right skills, but mysteriously does low damage. What pets are they both using?

They may be getting less focus than desirable due to their low crit.

I also see you guys using a Feral druid, it would be a good idea to put both hunters with the feral druid, the hunter's really could use the crit.

I really suspect a big problem is their macro is not really utilizing their pets. There is no reason their pets should be doing anything south of 400 DPS on Brutallus. You should ask them about their macro and possibly recommend them to switch to Manito's macro.

 

Maelstrom

Thank you for the helpful reply.

Lanatra uses a cat to DPS, Vindaloovian uses a ravager. I'll reshuffle the raid a bit, we were thinking of bringing in a ret paladin for the extra crit and JoW mana regen, so if we move the feral druid out of the enhancement shaman group and in with the hunters that works as it provides a space in the melee group for the retadin. 8% extra crit for the hunters should hopefully be a decent buff to their DPS.

As far as Manito's macro I'm assuming I found the right one (Link), I'll speak with them when they're online.

 

Wizeowel

Well, whomever convinced you to put a hunter in the shadowpriest group really needs a reality check. While hunters suffer from mana issues just as any class, using mana pots and judgement of wisdom can solve this easily while leaving VT for classes who can really use it. Especially if he dies half way and is not swapped group, as happened, it's just a big waste. Your other dps choice for VT was a warlock - and let's be honest, locks can do huge dps when they have VT+mana spring and don't have to tap, but then again they can lifetap while other classes can't. You might also find locks are threat-capped anyway when your tanks are more worried about keeping TC and demo up and might be missing some opportunities to dump their rage into threat.

So then the holy paladin getting VT. Sure it seems like it's necessary for him since initially he might think that he has to spam max rank only for 6 minutes. But the trick of healing Brutallus (mentioned as well not many posts above here) is that it's the taunt and the stomp which kills tanks. In between that MT healers can choose a more efficient spell. I'm not saying it's easy to sustain healing for 6 mins without VT but it's a matter of learning it and coordinating heals during stomp.

Lastly, the holy priests. Why are they spamming PoH? Well I looked in your WWS at your resto shaman. I see him doing 90% chain heal, which is correct, and the two primary targets are the main tanks, which is correct. But then the healing output list kind of falls flat. Where are all the other people the CH should be healing? Seems like you have your meteor soaking groups standing far back from the tanks. Can you explain this? So you are wasting chain heal, and to compensate your priests are using a very inefficient spell for group healing. You are better off having 1 of the holy priests respec shadow for the fight and use imp VE. Because it ticks frequenty you will get more effective healing out of this than PoH or CoH plus the extra mana back for 4 other people. Then you could also bring another resto druid for hots on tanks and burn healing, or another resto shaman for CH.

So if anyone of the healers needs a shadowpriest it's the resto shaman. They should wear haste gear and spam CH through the current tank into the the soaker group who should stand all at 10 yards around the tank. This healer should have the highest healing; there is no question that you were wasting half of the potential healing by your positioning.

Okay, so you were actually asking for tips about your dps.

For a start, your moonkin healed himself and did tranquility. That's not his job, and if he would have save some life doing it, then he's only covering a healing problem. Secondly, he should check the moonkin thinktank article here to see that he shouldn't be casting 50% wrath and 50% starfire.

Your mages aren't spamming mana pots, only Bluebeard used 3 cooldowns for mana pots. Also they need to work out who is scorching. Minikaster did 27 scorches in a fight that needs like 15. Also tell him if he needs to wand, he's doing it wrong - mage armor, gems/pots, evocation all are more dps than using destruction potion and then having to wand. In fact I'll guess that they all used molten armor instead of mage armor.

I'll leave a warlock expert to comment on Raia, that's some impressively poor dps from a class which is usually called overpowered. The main difference I see between Pliug and Skellos is curse of doom, but surely that doesn't account for 350dps?

 

SoraHime

Vindaloovian should be using Gore as a focus dump, not bite. Lanatra is using claw as a rage dump, which is right.

Yea, that's a good idea, the crit will help.

That's the right macro. Just be sure to use the wind serpent macro but replace the lightning breath with the correct focus dumps, Gore and Claw.

I'd suggest doing this and see how things go.

Edit- Ah, also, Vindaloovian switched to Aspect of the viper. This may not sound like a horrible thing, but he also didn't use any mana or fel mana pots. He should use a fel mana potion so he would not have to switch aspects.

 

Grital

Arms is better RDPS then Fury and Bearn isn't gemmed properly for either (he isn't using +str gems, skips perfectly good socket bonuses). Skellos needs to change his trinkets. Pliug is doing great for his gear. He needs 4pc tier6 and to upgrade some of his Kara items, heh. It is a little odd the average SB is 3.2 seconds since I'm assuming they're only soaking 50% of the time. Do they use Quartz? Raia just needs gear (lots of gear).

Linuva needs a different meta and gemming in general. See shadowpriest.com. Also +12 spi to boots will give her more regen if she wants to pass on Boar's for some reason (Boar's/Cat's are always the best boot enchants in my opinion, but if you're going to enchant for regen at least get the enchant that gives the most regen).

Bloodlust Mages sub 20%. Well, in theory. I wouldn't BL your mages cause they're all to cheap to get Sunfire (pet peeve concerning 1% wipes, ugh). Really though, sub-20 make sure they have a lust and give them a Spriest if you expect them to last the whole fight. Fireball has a long cast time, but averaging out at 5sec is long even for soaker.. repeat Quartz question and do these people play with a lot of lag?

Group synergies are incredibly important (for 7 more days anyway).

 

grogg

I noticed from our hunters that their overall dps increased a bit by using a wind serpent with lightning breath attached to their regular steady-macro.
We took Brut down for the first time "last week" (read: last lockout) and we did that with 8 healers and somewhat f***ed up groups. What we noticed made the most difference between our not so successful tries and the better ones were making sure the soak groups are in range of chain heal from the tank and people not having sex with eachother while burned.

Raid composition was something like:
G1: Shadowpriest, holy paladin, holy paladin, resto shaman, resto shaman
G2: Ret paladin, MS/BF-warrior, enhance shaman, rogue, rogue
G3: Resto druid, resto druid, warlock, warlock, protection warrior
G4: Feral druid, survival hunter, BM hunter, BM hunter, resto shaman
G5: shadowpriest, elemental shaman, mage, holy priest, warlock

Due to one of our shadowpriests who couldn't make it for the raid we had to sacrifice two warlocks without SP:s.
Having four drummers in each group makes a crazy difference, move your shamans to the most dps-producing groups for lusts and for christs sakes - keep thunderclap och demoshout up.
With that raid composition you can expect 2k+ dps from: at least one warlock, the rogues, the mage and the BM hunters. I'll see if I can link a WWS-parse when I get home from work. So you've got something to compare to.

edit: Wow Web Stats

 

Maelstrom

Wow Web Stats

Well myself and a few others tried out some changes, although no retadin was available so I spec'ed improved JoC whilst tanking. Tweaks to hunters netted about 400 extra DPS out of Vindaloovian, the others not so much, although Lowlander was trying out survival which he's never raided as before.

Of note:

Raid DPS was basically 20% below the enrage benchmark, which felt a bit demoralising.
Mages are still sporadic at best, they've moaned about crit luck and partial resists, I'll see if I can track down anything else (Uneccesary scorch, etc).
No DPS warrior last night seemed to really gimp the rogues, that combined with what appears to be agility totem for the melee group because it had a BM hunter + Feral druid in it may have cost us a lot of DPS. I know the accepted rule is retadin/warrior = windfury, but the lines seem fuzzier when you have 2 rogues who will gain from GoA and then the feral druid and BM hunter who will gain from actually having a buff they can use.

Healing is still cock-eyed and is frankly being detrimental to our raid setup. I'm assuming it's right for me to attempt to convince the raid leader that putting a holy priest in the caster DPS group so they can use PoH is a bad idea.
We've reached the enrage a few times now but the tanks are basically being ganked whenever a healer gets burn. I've suggested moving people into boxes around the tanks and having chain heal bounce as it seems a much safer option than prayer of healing (As mentioned above, thankyou Wizeowel).

Now that I read this it feels almost comical that we're on Brutallus and yet have this many issues.