Docjowles

Your advice in general is good, but I just wanted to point out that this is not a useful comparison. Depending on how many debuffs are stacked, Arcane Blast is between a 2.5 and 1.5 second cast, whereas Fireball is a 3.0 second cast (talented). So in general, fire mages will have a lower number of casts than other specs.

 

lav

First kill vashj stats. We dropped her last night after about 12 hours of attempts. Being our first kill some constructive criticism is always welcome.

Vashj

 

Volshebnik

For your Tidewalker kill, why is Mortenous Rain of Firing while the rest of the Locks are throwing Seeds? Additionally, he's wearing a lot of unenchanted gear. He's running sub-700 Shadow damage whereas your other Locks are 1000+. He needs to get that stuff in order if he wants to compete. Him using Seed instead of RoF will also help kill the murlocs quicker, allowing him to increase his DoT uptime on the boss.

Deadassassin seems to have taken more hits than he ought to have. Encourage him to try stuff like [Moroes' Lucky Pocket Watch], [Gnomeregan Auto-Blocker 600], or even [Styleen's Impeding Scarab] instead of +Stam trinkets, and 15 Agility on his tanking gloves. Stamina is nice, sure, but Block Value is straight up less damage taken and therefore less damage to heal through. Additionally, something like Styleen's gives the other passive bonuses. Extra block rating is convenient for Tidewalker (Tidal Wave eats Shield Block charges) and Defense is avoidance. Less stress on your healers will make for cleaner kills. He has plenty of HP, he can swap both of those trinkets out without trouble.

On Karathress (grats on the kill btw) your Mage seems low because, well, he didn't do very much. Even with a Shadow Priest and a Resto Shaman, he only got 20 Fireballs off. He had nearly double the Scorches that he did Fireballs. Scorch isn't a strong DPS spell, so I assume a lot of that was maintaining the debuff. I think he should be able to cast quite a bit more, but to be fair your raid makeup doesn't favor him at all. He's the only one using Fire, therefore he must feel compelled to maintain the Improved Scorch debuff alone. Putting him with other Mages distributes the burden of maintaining the debuff, and thereby would boost his personal DPS as well, since he can then throw more Fireballs. Otherwise, he could definitely use more Spell Hit, 90 is pretty low.

 

Volshebnik

Fair enough, I accept that, but it was the best comparison I could muster.

 

Volshebnik

Grats on the kill.

What's with your Warlocks? Elope didn't die, yet his output was very very low. 34% of his damage done was Static Charge... that's really weak. I don't have much experience with the Affliction/Demo hybrid build, but our Warlock with similar spec is normally top 5 on this fight. Did he take an inordinate number of Static Charges? A third of his damage is Static Charge on himself and others.

Amren needs to pick a focus and stick to it. Throwing both Shadowbolts and Incinerates isn't very efficient. He has very good +damage, but his crit is kinda low for throwing that stuff. Picking up a stronger raiding Destruction build and especially getting Improved Shadowbolt will help him immensely. I note again that a lot of his damage was from Static Charge, did he also receive quite a few?

 

Silmeria

This is pretty situational advice. In general, you want to gear for maximum stamina since the idea is to survive the worst case scenarios as a tank. Following the above advice mainly improves the efficiency on your healers. So ask yourself if your healers are running out of mana, and then determine from there if your tank is just badly/wrongly geared, or playing incorrectly, or if your healers are having problems in general - e.g., Solve problems that are really problems, basically.

And to be honest, healing efficiency is one of the least significant problems in TBC raiding, as you can just consumable your way through it via chain-chugging.

I'd advise the WWS poster to go asking your healers if they have mana regen problems if you think there's a problem. However, looking at the WWS, it looks like DPS fixing should be your main priority, and the rest of the posted advice for that is good.

 

◊ Asgorath

I'm surprised Mortenous was using RoF, he's a good friend of our GM (Stanlry) and I was under the impression he'd been getting some good 1-on-1 advice on how to do these fights. As I mentioned, he's just getting started with 25-man raiding and clearly has a long way to go. I'll follow up with the gear and enchants, I'm actually in the middle of doing a complete review of our raiding roster (of which Mort really isn't a regular part of yet) to make sure people are on top of things like that.

I was pushing Deadassassin for a long time to stack Stamina, and finally convinced him to switch to all [Solid Star of Elune] etc. I think he's a little too attached to his 16k unbuffed HP, I'll bug him about those trinkets again. He was Arms through all of BWL so never got the Styleen's, but I'm pretty sure he has the Moroes trinket at the very least. I'm going to force him to take the next Hydross trinket as well -- if it's good enough for Paches, it's good enough for him Thankfully, he's been working really hard on avoiding Crushing Blows in general, but 19 for Morogrim seems high. I think his gear is good enough that he can start stacking a bit more avoidance now, I'll follow up with him about that.

Hyacar was our only Mage in that raid since our other regular Mage was out of town this weekend. We've had a hard time getting good Mages, so usually only have 2 in the raid (both in a group with a Shadow Priest, Elemental or Resto Shaman, and Destruction Warlock). Still, he should be able to keep up the Scorch debuff with an 8:1 ratio of Fireballs to Scorches, I'll check with him to make sure he's got a good timer mod. Any suggestions as to which one he should be using?

 

Cesar2000

The stamina trinkets are very very good, don't listen to him :P

 

Silmeria

Warlocks using RoF instead of SoC are usually warlocks who are afraid of pulling AoE aggro (just providing some motivation as to why he may have been).

My mage friends use NECB for tracking the scorch debuff across the raid. If you want individual scorch timers, I am pretty sure Quartz has one built-in.

 

Volshebnik

I'm not saying they aren't good. I'm saying that Stamina is not the be-all end-all of tanking. There are certainly situational fights (learning Tidewalker is one of them, Azgalor is probably another) where trinket choice can be changed up a bit. Certainly the Vengeance card is excellent (I have and use one myself).

As Silmeria posted, yes, it's situational. But the job of the MT is to adapt to the situation, having a few different gear options doesn't hurt.

 

Volshebnik

Tidewalker really isn't a good metric for Crushing Blows, since you lose Shield Block charges to Tidal Waves. 19 is kinda high, but A) that's why he's got a lot of HP and B) he has very low avoidance.

 

◊ Asgorath

Right, but in this case, given the fact that the other Warlocks were doing nearly double his DPS, threat should not have been an issue for Mort at least. I'm sure it was a simple misunderstanding on his part, I'll make sure he knows that AoE = SoC for Warlocks unless specifically directed otherwise.

As a Rogue, is there any way I can track Scorch via NECB? I use it for a variety of other things, but haven't been able to figure out how to track debuffs from other classes. Good information, so thanks either way.

 

kaib

http://files.wowace.com/pDebuffList/...-r44334.29.zip

that shows raiding relevant debuffs on both target and/or focus target. Helpful for raid leaders or generally for people who care about their guildmates not doing the right stuff. :P

 

Docjowles

I don't think pDebuffList shows the scorch debuff. It's meant to be pretty bare-bones and braindead to use.

If you want to precisely configure a list of what debuffs you care about seeing on your target, Debuff Filter is awesome stuff.

 

Austin

Here is the WWS report for our first Morogrim report, it looks pretty solid to me, but I'd like your opinions. Be aware that the mage Milonious hadn't been to this encounter before, and it was his first time there. Teso and Thalizar swap specs ~3-6 times a week, so if you look at them...yeah, you really can't tell too much, they're Ret at heart, but we need the healing more often then not. Thalizar was a Prot/Holy Hybrid spec for tanking the Murlocs, shouldn't need that spec again.

For the Murlocs we had Thalizar tanking them behind Morogrim, which turned out to be an utter headache, we moved the tank down to the water while maintaining Morogrim at the hallway to Karathress and downed him in 2 attempts, after ~10 wipes due to various aggro/healing issues with the Murloc tank. We had Mythos(guild MT) helping on the Murlocs with Demo shout and using his Thunderfury, as well as Vandil using Demo shout and making sure that we don't have any runners.

The fight was right in the neighborhood of 10 minutes, and it seems to be very repeatable with us tanking the Murlocs at the Watery Grace Area.

Here is the link:
Wow Web Stats

Thank you for your time in advance.

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

 

◊ Shaker

Our first Void Reaver kill -

Wow Web Stats

Anything anyone notices would be appreciated, we had 5 pulls total (though WWS counts more due to a few 'how big IS his aggro radius' res attempts), first 2 were no/low DPS 'figure out how to move' attempts, last 3 were 'real tries'.

Our melee DPSers (rogues and Darkflame) were in Arcane Resist gear, so their DPS was considerably lower than normal.

 

lav

Just took a quick look. Your melee dps would be better if you get them out of arcane gear. Put a shaman on them chain healing and they shouldn't need resist gear. Most of your top 5 dps are rogues yet none of them had windfury.

 

Docjowles

Edit: For the record, this is re: Shaker's post.

Lexxias could be doing better. Xenophon managed to cast almost twice the number of fireballs he did in the same time span, which is pretty amazing. He needs much more spell hit. He is also missing several key raiding talents: Master of the Elements, Playing With Fire, and Elemental Precision. All three of those will help his damage and longevity noticeably.

Part of it seems to be that Lex is using a ton of scorches. Assuming both mages share the burden of refreshing the scorch debuff before it runs out, there is no reason to have 30+ scorches being cast. Its DPS is crap compared to Fireball spam.

Xeno did very well obviously, but more +hit wouldn't kill him. Replacing his crit gems with hit, and equipping [Scryer's Bloodgem] would get him most of the way there. [Ashyen's Gift] is a good one, too.

 

Dyslexicmonkey

Shaker-

You have two holy priests and both are spec'ed for Improved Divine Spirit. See if one of them would want to go with a deep holy build to pick up Circle of Healing. Fights like VR are were CoH and Chain Heal really shine. If you do convince one of those priests to respec, make certain they get a shadow priest (only for VR since pretty much all they're doing is spamming CoH).

We've never used arcane resistance for Void Reaver. Tell your melee dps to just use their normal gear and have the shaman (and potentially CoH priest) go to town.

Other typical stuff like giving shaman to melee/tank groups.

 

Silmeria

Just to add: [Violet Badge] is the only AR you need on this fight if you're just starting out on VR.

 

◊ Shaker

Yeah, we had 2 shaman... one elemental (and in 2 mage/boomkin/shadow priest group) and one resto (put with the healers) ... we have an up and coming enhancement shaman, but yeah.

Thanks for the tips on specific people - I think Xeno does have both of those (and wears them for boss fights).

As for arcane gear, it just felt better - we had both shaman healing with Chain Heal, and we still were losing melees, so I had them strap it on and our Healers started breathing a lot easier - I'm sure in the future we'll pull some pieces off, but for now, seeing as we have enough DPS to down him in full AR gear (with like .. 10 seconds left before enrage >_>) we'll probably use a little just to keep the healers sane.

Thanks a ton for the input so far!

 

Revanx

I'm really eager to get some info on which DPS'ers/Healers/tanks could improve. Here's a WWS stats from a High Astromancer Kil:

Wow Web Stats

Not sure High Astromancer is the Ideal fight, but all i have at the moment. It's done in normal gear, by the way.

Thanks alot for any help^^

 

Lenala

(Cribbed from the R&D forums)

VR Down:
Wow Web Stats


VR /Headdesking for 4 attempts:
Wow Web Stats


Lurker wipe @4%, fish respawned in water during attempt QQ:
Wow Web Stats


Lurker Downed:
Wow Web Stats


Lurker Downed again, plus first Hydross attempts:
Wow Web Stats


Looking for specific critiques of individuals be it spec, gear, or actions during raids. Although armory checks for gear should be taken with a grain of salt since a lot of people log in their solo/farm/heroic stuff.

Our raids are inconsistent at times, one week 2 shotting VR and other times /headdesking for 6+ attempts only to hurry out of TK due to trash respawns. Would appreciate more experienced raiders at the T5/T6 level taking a look and perhaps revealing a few things we may have missed.

 

Cos-

Lurker- Your rogues got gibbed in ~ a minute on Lurker? How the hell does that happen? Deadly boss mods is your friend. It looks like they died to a combo of whirl and water? Don't go into whirl range if you dont have the hp to risk it.

edit: armory shows one of your rogues with ~6400 unbuffed hp? send your dps to karazahn for gear. Same goes for the guy struggling to break 700 on VR. Im not going to speak for your other dps but your rogues simply don't have the gear to kill shit in t5 and not be a nuisance.

 

UnholY_Prince

Hi there EJ, perhaps you can help me find out what our DPS Warrior is doing wrong. I'm the GM of a 5/6 SSC guild, and our DPS usually is our strong point, however this guy, despite all extra gear and tips he might get, simply always ends up dead last on the WWS and Damage Meters. I looked at his WWS profile, and really don't know what to thing, everything seems in order, he looks rage starved all the time though, and might possibly need more hit?

Spike Flail 9/4 SSC.

Mootankhamen - the Warrior in question. He's 2h Arms spec'd atm, and we usually stack our melee party with every appropriate buff possible. Tonight we were low on Rogues, so the melee Party had a Shaman and a Feral Druid, so they had Windfury and LoTP. I really don't know what tips to give him anymore, besides to respec Fury, which he's in the process of getting Weapons for. Any advice you all could give would be much appreciated.