Wait a minute, wtf? Do most guilds really consider 6-7 melee a heavily stacked raid? Standard operating procedure for us is 8 melee.
Our "Normal" raid setup is as such..
2 Prot wars
1 DPS war
2 Feral tanks - 1 goes dps half the time
2 rogues
1 enhance sham
1 Resto Druid
2 Shadow priests
1 Holy priest
3 paladins
2 resto shaman
2 hunters
3 warlocks
3 mages
Depending on the fight we drop a warlock for another healer, or for another melee dps. For mother we run with 1 or 2 mages and 1 or 2 warlocks, and bring in additional healers and a 3rd rogue.
Its funny that its just mentioned as I wanted to come here today and moan about the parry mechanics aswell, in this case on Teron. We killed him twice before but yesterday he just refused to go down (we had some 10-15% wipes which didnt end up with kill thanks to our incompetence, but thats different story). The frustrating part was that we had about 3-4 very nice going tries which ended up cause tank literally exploded after multiple parries from snakes (yes, he tried to avoid them hitting from sides / front). After that we used the snakes very carefully and on some tries not at all, however that didnt seem to help much. We still lost 2-3 good tries just on parries from melee when he turns on them to incinerate.
Is there any way to reduce the chance of this happening on Teron except the obvious positioning ( camp ----- MT -- Teron -- Melee) or do we just have to hope for a semi-lucky try?
You can't really blame the snakes killing your tank as a legitimate parry mechanic is broken. When he turns and its just melee that kills you its one thing but adding the snakes is a risk to make blossom easier is kind of a tradeoff in my opinion. I have had 1 time I was gibbed by parries and thats just once out of alot of attempts/kills so. Adding the snakes is a risk you should be willing to deal with the consequence.
Raid stacking is terrible and any fight that requires you to stack your raid is poorly designed, we run pretty light on the healing side and we've been through fights with less than recommended healers and done them fine. Havent had a go at Gurtogg yet which everyone wants you to have 9-10 healers on, but we do Naj'entus with 7 healers and we've done Rage Winterchill with 5 healers. We put more weight on killing the boss before his gimmicks kill us and individual survival over stacking healers and make the kill take ages.
Btw, PvP trinket removes the iceblock at Rage Winterchill, havent seen it mentioned anywhere. Pretty much trivializes that fight and reduces the healing requirement tremendously.
Raid stacking is terrible and any fight that requires you to stack your raid is poorly designed, ...
I am inclined to agree here. One of my biggest gripes with WoW raiding is that bringing a "better" class combination for almost any fight makes it significantly easier. I look back at my favorite fights in the game and ultimely the fights that didn't require stacking ended up being a lot more fun to me.
While raid stacking may not be required to kill bosses, raid stacking is most certainly required if you want to come even close to being competitive with other guilds.
The problem isn't an easy one to fix, however. Blizzard wants to keep each class unique and have a particular function. When a fight requires a classes particular function it will always be beneficial to bring more of that class. The only real way to fix it is to give multiple counters to abilities so that most classes can contribute in a significant way.
Despite its other flaws the Illidari council follows that model pretty well. Multiple classes can do interupts. No one dps class is really that better than another. The only area you are pigeon-holed is a mage tank and probably the warrior tank on the paladin (not that a druid can't do it, just nice to spell reflect for 7k!).
Anyway back to the main topic. Thanks for the tip on PvP trinkets on Rage. I'm sad to say Rage is the hardest boss (casualty wise) in hyjal for us now. We lose more people and have uglier kills on him every week I swear.
Well, 9-10 healers is stacking surely. I think he meant that.
Is it? And if so, is it anything new? I remember many, many guilds doing Patchwerk and other fights in Naxxramas with 16 healers. That's 40% of a raid.
Guess what - 10 healers is also 40% of a raid.
I mean not like we wipe to him or anything we just usually have a lot of deaths from frost nova + ice tomb combos where people aren't topped off and die quickly...
Originally Posted by Illundai
Is it? And if so, is it anything new? I remember many, many guilds doing Patchwerk and other fights in Naxxramas with 16 healers. That's 40% of a raid.
Guess what - 10 healers is also 40% of a raid.
16 was pretty standard for a few fights in Naxx, but that was considered to be stacking back then too when all the other fights except 4H, PW, Sapph could be done with considerably less.
Still by TBC standards 10 is most certainly stacking when once again nearly every fight can be done with 6-8.
That's not the point. Pre BC raids were much less dps oriented, so yeah, 16 healers was a normal raid. Since BC, I suspect most raids run with 7-8 healers so yes, 10 can be considered stacking but is that really bad ? It just makes the fights easier, they're not impossible without stacking, just harder. We did gurtogg with 7 healers and 1 sp once, we did shahraz with 8, but these fights are indeed way easier with more healers so if you can do it, why not ? As long as nothing is really _IMPOSSIBLE_ without stacking (think 4hm), then it's ok for me.
Pre-TBC you also had a lot less hybridization of classes and roles that you see now (i.e. no Enhancement Shaman, no Feral Druids, etc.).
So pre-TBC, with 8 classes and 40 people in a raid, you can expect (assuming a uniform distribution of classes) to have 5 players per class). With 3 healing classes you'd then expect 15 healers, so 16 or 17 wouldn't be considered to be "stacking" too much.
In TBC, what's changed is not the ratio of "healing" classes to "non-healing" classes (which is a higher ratio now, 4:9 as opposed to 3:8), but rather that the concept of a "healing" class has essentially disappeared. You'd expect 2.44 of each class in a 25 man raid with a uniform distribution, but you longer expect all of those members of a "class with heals" to be necessarily in a healing role.
So now, we tend to think of 7-8 healers as the norm, rather than the 9-10 that would be "expected" based on the ratio of "healing capable" classes to "non-healing capable" classes.
I think the important question isn't the ratio of healers to dps (since its been discussed a lot already on these forums), but perhaps is this a better design?
I like having a lot of healers in a raid. Controlling a fight to me personally beats zerging it down before it kills you. But I believe even before TBC we were in the minority in preferring control over DPS.
I suppose that's due to the fact that you can't really control fights in wow since there are many many random elements so the general opinion is : we can wipe if the mobs casts this spell just before another, let's try to make the fight as short as possible to avoid that. But there are more reasons behind that philosphy change in BC like the huge mana regen every healer has access to now (flask, shadow priests everywhere, mana tide / mana stream + bow, and so on...).
I like having a lot of healers in a raid. Controlling a fight to me personally beats zerging it down before it kills you. But I believe even before TBC we were in the minority in preferring control over DPS.
I'm of the same philosophy. I remember when we first killed Ragnaros we did it in 2 waves of sons and back at the time that was nearly unheard of. We controlled it and could have sustained it even longer.
The problem now is that the quicker you can make a fight the less time there is to get fucked by the random number generator, which is a lot better solution these days.
I think the important question isn't the ratio of healers to dps (since its been discussed a lot already on these forums), but perhaps is this a better design?
I like having a lot of healers in a raid. Controlling a fight to me personally beats zerging it down before it kills you. But I believe even before TBC we were in the minority in preferring control over DPS.
In my old guild we actually always had more trouble with an encounter when we brought MORE healers rather than less.
We'd always do well on fights when we had healer numbers in the low teens (12-13ish) than when we brought 15+. Nefarian? Consistent one-shot with perfect control during phase 1 with low healer numbers, absolute mess when we added more. Sartura? Much less time for adds to roam around randomly whirlwinding into healers, killing them anyway. Huhuran? Much less duration of healing has to be sustained with more damage for the sub 30% phase.
In fact, I think our cleanest C'Thun kill was the one we did when we had 8 healers in the raid, just because Giant Tentacles were dieing much faster, little ones were dieing quicker, and it also only took two vulnerabilities.
I don't think preferring more DPS to healing is a new phenomenon in TBC. I think it just depends largely on the style of the raid strategies your guild uses on each encounter.
I'm of the same philosophy. I remember when we first killed Ragnaros we did it in 2 waves of sons and back at the time that was nearly unheard of. We controlled it and could have sustained it even longer.
The problem now is that the quicker you can make a fight the less time there is to get fucked by the random number generator, which is a lot better solution these days.
You're right, Ragnaros is a good example.
Burning him before the sons is simply not as good of an encounter as the guilds who went into phase 2. But it had a little epeen attached to it I guess.
It was certainly epic to kill him with that level of execution.
As to Juggernaut - like I said its about guild mentality. Many guilds did prefer DPS over healing (most?), but ours definitely went for control. Our 4 Horsemen kills were slow for instance. We saw the berserk on Sapphiron for instance (then we'd buff and kill it in half the time, GO CONSUMABLES!). Stuff like that.
Making fights as short as possible reduces the chance of wiping for us. We always perform better with more DPS and less healing, although there is a breaking point. We bashed our heads against Naj'entus with 6 healers for our first kill due to low amount being attuned and got him to 18%, but spine fuck up wiped us. Adding a 7th healer made the fight a cake walk and we killed him shortly after and then one shot him on our second kill with 7 healers. Some guilds bring 10 (!) healers to him. I just cant fathom the need for it.
Fight takes less time = less chance of wiping due to attrition/death touch/berserk etc
I remember when we first killed Ragnaros we did it in 2 waves of sons and back at the time that was nearly unheard of. We controlled it and could have sustained it even longer.
Yeah same here.
Back in my very first guild (we were months behind, killed Rag after BWL came out)... our first Rag kill was with 3 waves of sons, with only seconds left until the 4th. As a holy priest at the time, I really didnt know much about the dps on the fight. Looking back at it now, I think the ranged might not of known they cant pull aggro or something. Tanks got knocked back almost every punt too.
Fast forward a year or two, in an C'thun killing guild (just as Naxx came out). We brought way too many item-buyers to the raid, and we didnt have the dps to kill it before sons. We wiped around 3 times simply because we hadn't done sons in year(s), and we never did kill it.
When I played a healer, I liked control. When I play a dps, I want a high dps raid. Mainly because I dont have control myself, so whatever makes it shorter reduces too many 'you loose' combos.
And then there are always the fights with dps benchmarks where it doesnt really matter. Bring enough dps to kill the adds/weapons/tentacles/channelers and you're golden.
Its funny that its just mentioned as I wanted to come here today and moan about the parry mechanics aswell, in this case on Teron. We killed him twice before but yesterday he just refused to go down (we had some 10-15% wipes which didnt end up with kill thanks to our incompetence, but thats different story). The frustrating part was that we had about 3-4 very nice going tries which ended up cause tank literally exploded after multiple parries from snakes (yes, he tried to avoid them hitting from sides / front). After that we used the snakes very carefully and on some tries not at all, however that didnt seem to help much. We still lost 2-3 good tries just on parries from melee when he turns on them to incinerate.
Is there any way to reduce the chance of this happening on Teron except the obvious positioning ( camp ----- MT -- Teron -- Melee) or do we just have to hope for a semi-lucky try?
We were working on our second Teron kill when I read this, so we tried using snakes as well. The hunters tried to place them behind him, but it really didnt work- they all had around a 10% parry rate.
It's not worth dealing with all those parries, just so a few shadow bolts (and incinerates?) get eaten.
I really don't think your problem here is parries though. Hundred of guilds 1-shot this guy every week, and I doubt they are getting any luckier than you :p Improve your healing assignments, and possibly just bring more/better healers (we seem to have been doing fine with 7 tho).
(our stats if interested, the last 'try' was a kill Wow Web Stats)
You can switch the Hyjal rings at exalted for 75g. One person that got the exalted healer ring said that it didn't proc much so it probably has a 45 second cooldown. (The proc chance is 10% according to Wowhead.)
To me Shahraz and Archimonde are the most fun fights by far. The randomness of the fights is a good thing. It's fun that you suddenly can die and wipe. So what if you can wipe to no fault of your own due to bad luck? If the chance of that happening is small, which it is on Shahraz and Archimonde, it only adds to the encounter. The rest of the bosses become something you just farm real fast.
As bad as they were I miss the impossible and untuned fights from before, Kael for example. It would be fun if there were heroic versions of BT and Hyjal. Or an impossible fight that you could see how far you could get.
As bad as they were I miss the impossible and untuned fights from before, Kael for example. It would be fun if there were heroic versions of BT and Hyjal. Or an impossible fight that you could see how far you could get.
What exactly was changed with the Kael fight? I can't find anything in the patch notes for 2.1, which had all the rest of the changes. (this is the patch 3 days before your first kill).
As bad as they were I miss the impossible and untuned fights from before, Kael for example. It would be fun if there were heroic versions of BT and Hyjal. Or an impossible fight that you could see how far you could get.
Definately agree. There are no fights currently in tbc that took as long to learn as C'Thun (when he was killable), Nef (when you didnt know how to get to phase 2) and most of Naxxramas, that's one thing I really do miss. We know they can make hard 25 man fights because we've seen them, pre-nerf A'lar, Vashj, original Gruul even and many more before they got fixed or nerfed, the problem wasn't the difficulty of those fights (with a few tweaks that is), it was the difficulty compared to their placements in the raid progression order, if those fights were in BT or Hyjal there wouldn't have been the outcry those bosses recieved...maybe. Hyjal and BT are just far far too easy and it's just nowhere near as fun, still old A'lar is the fight I had most fun learning and killing.
09/07/07, 2:17 PM
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