Tyrian

Alot of the "Look at our Brut WWS, how do we improve our DPS?" posts can be answered with several points:

- Bring more shaman
- Bring more hybrids (A ret pally and/or BF warrior and/or shadow priests and/or elemental shaman)
- Bring 7 healers only (Ties in with first point = Favour bringing Shaman healers)
- Set groups up for the best synergy possible
- Do a thorough review of consumable usage for a nights worth of attempts to highlight players who are not giving 100% (Demonslaying elixirs, Well Fed, Destruction Potions, Haste Potions, Mana potions etc)
- Review WWS to find players who are just bad at playing their class (EG: We once had a feral druid dps who preferred to spam mangle every CD instead of shred....) and get them to visit the EJ class mechanics forums before its too late!

All of the "Help us on Brutallus!" comments can be answered with a mix of those points. Using the WWS link on the previous page, that guild needs to: Bring more shaman, less healers, review consumables (Not everyone is using destruction/mana pots I can see!) and check whether those players are specced/playing correctly - because a "top" dps of ~1790 on Brutallus is really quite low.

 

candlegarden

After Tyrian's post I hesitated a bit on posting but looks like we still need spesific advice. On our latest night on Brut we reached enrage twice. We experienced most problems due to burn targets dying (tree druid and paladin on burn healing), secondly tank deaths and lastly dps. We had 7 healers, we had 5 shaman. I know a ret pala would help but I don't think it would help us close a gap of ~2.1-2.2k. Your critisism and comments are appreciated.

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◊ Kyth

Just commenting on the bolded bit:

You *never* "have" to. All they're doing is reducing their total damage done for a short-term dps gain. Your tank's threat is no different in minutes 3-4 than it is in minutes 0-1, so it's silly to use a threat ability on a five-minute cooldown so early in the fight when they can just stop casting for a bit and stay under the tank until 50-65% (lower percentage if you're getting lusts, higher if you aren't.)

Saying "I have to stop casting for substantial portions of the first part of the fight" is valid. Saying "I had no choice but to shatter/invis" is bad play.

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Ramsden

One of the big problems I can see starting off is your shadow priests. First, you have three of them. This is not really recommended. Since shadowpriests are likely going to be your lowest dps, the more you bring, the more dps you have to make up. Secondly, they are not performing well at all. I can't comment much on their spell rotations or anything, but their dps is a good 200-300 below what it should be. I notice their gear is pretty lackluster but if they can't pull more, you need to drop one for someone with more dps.

Also, your shadow priests' dps/VT uptime is hurting your casters in the form of not returning enough mana to them. I notice both of the mages in your two best attempts had to use 5 or more ticks of evocation. This is bad. This is a large dps loss for mages. As for warlocks, Mephi's DPS is much lower than it should be. He has 4pt6 but Bannish is beating him on practically every attempt. On your best attempt, Bannish got 15 more shadowbolts in than Mephi. At an average SB of 3700 (not counting crits), that's 55.5k more damage that he would've done, which equates to somewhere between 100-200 more personal dps. There are many small things like this that would help you to increase your overall dps.

Stack heroisms where it counts. It looks like you used 2 in the warlock/spriest/one hunter (?) group on your last attempt. With your warlocks, this is not quite effective. I'd recommend giving 2 to your hunters or melee group, or mages. Also, 1643 dps for a fury warrior is pretty dismal. Both of your dps warriors need to step up their game (though I notice your MS warrior's gear is not exactly amazing).

All that said, it looks like many people in your raid are not geared well enough or geared correctly to do the dps. Some of them are, but others are lacking things like 4pt6 that would help them significantly.

 

Ramsden

I would never recommend just 'stop casting for a bit.' That is a big dps loss. Most of our mages/locks use invis/shatter around 85% and never look back. It's easy to get threat capped in that first 15% if you get lucky crits but you should be able to go to 130% threat depending on your positioning. Also, if your casters have shamans in their group give them Tranquil Air Totem until 90% or so. By the end of the fight, you may catch back up on threat if your tanks are bad or you have like 50% crit, but chances of that are low.

 

Cathela

Another point about shadow priests is they use up a lot of debuff slots. There's still a 40(?) debuff limit on mobs; since you're presumably pulling out all the bells and whistles for Brut, it's going to be crowded. We had difficulty with losing Deep Wounds (and hence Blood Frenzy) last week when we had two spriests and four locks.

My comrades are my weapons, and I am their shield.

 

bigdogcc

We also have the shammys puttting down searing totums. It looks like 2 of your shammies are not.

Are your melee dps'ers remembering to re apply their elixers during the fight?
It also looks like your melee is not chain chugging Haste pots as well.

Are you bringing in extra pallies for buffs? Three pallies are about a must for this fight (kings, salv/light, wisdom/kings)

Is one of your pallies speced for imp might? (armory is down)

Is one of your pallies speced imp crusader (3% cirt)? We use it situationally every buff helps. Its a dangerouse game though finding the sweet spot to blow a gcd,but everyone loves more crit.

During the pull have at least one pally judge wisdom its a little mana that the casters can save/get back.

We also let the priest do burn healing. Let the 2 pallies chain spam the tanks since they will get the most benifits from BoL. 3 shammies should be enough to keep the armor buff up with out the priest. It will also allow the priest to cast hots when a burn lands on a class that can remove it.

One other thing to look at is if you place your pallies in the slash group not only can they bubble out of burn but they also get mana back from the heals they recive extending their mana even further.

 

knopik

I have a question to everyone in this thread.
2 resto shammies, 1 ele shammy. (caster groups only)
Our healer group gets one of our shadow priests, so we have: 3 warlocks, 2 mages, resto shaman and ele shaman + an spriest.

HOW would you set up these groups? Our mages are telling the warlocks that they get a bigger boost from dps, 1700 without spriest to 2100-2200 with spriest/ele shammy while our warlocks do around 1900-2000 dps without an spriest and with a resto shammy, but with ele/spriest do 2100-2300.

What the mages are telling me is that they deserve spriest/ele shammy more than the warlocks because they get a bigger benefit from it, what the forums and everything else i've read are telling me is buff the warlocks cuz they can pump out mad dps...so as I see it, our warlocks are not performing or our mages are kickass.

help me deciiide!

Wow Web Stats Warlocks had ele shammy/spriest. Granted I was on COD, my dps is...comparable, salahhuddin's crit rate was terrible, and arandel idk. Mages had a resto shaman, and I think that's it.

Wow Web Stats Me, and 2 mages had spriest and ele shammy, and it shows, the others had only a resto shaman. Granted this was a little bit earlier, and I had less gear, i think I did comparable at the time.

What is the optimal setup here?

EDIT: I don't have skull of gul'dan. My other trinket is...quag's eye...

 

Fimotik

There are various options available to you including swapping in synergistic classes to mages at the 20% mark so their dmg bonus gets a boost. Just be careful looking at the DPS numbers as they are a bit misleading, especially between difference classes. Have a look at total damage (and don't forget to take CoD out of your damage when making comparisons).

 

candlegarden

Ramsden, thank you for your reply. I read your post but couldn't reply earlier.

Yes we are aware of the spriest situation. At that raid we didn't actually have another choice. In fact one of them (Jene) is our holy priest, he respecced to shadow for this fight. Evrian is a good shadow priest who gave a big break to raiding and lacks gear. Only real shadow there was Cwap. For future fights we plan on bringing two only but there is already a discussion about who gets them. Healers say they will go oom if they don't have one and as you noticed caster dps is going oom without one.

I'm not so expecrienced about the locks but I will paste your reply in our forum anyway so they can find out what's wrong.

I don't think we really planned on how to distribute heroisms but we will consider your suggestion. MS warrior is something like a half time raider and we know he doesn't really have gear for SWP. For future raids I think we will drop to one warrior and make the Fury spec MS for this fight.

 

candlegarden

bigdogcc thank you for your reply.

Thanks for the tip.

I'm not really sure if we re-applied during the fight but considering that we reached there 2 out of 11 times and even in the best try we didn't really have a chance probably no one reapplied.

Yes we did

Though question to answer right now. We do have an imp might specced pala but he wasn't there that night, the others I don't know really.

I need to check the imp crusader.

I will let the healers know about your setup.

Only one was in slash group, thanks for the tip.

 

Ramsden

I'd say if you have two spriests to put one with the mage/lock/ele shammy group and then one with the paladins that are on the tanks full-time. You could also squeeze another lock into that group or something. Also don't forget you can move shamans around to put down mana tide for healers that are going oom (it has proven to be a big help for us).

 

Blacksen

Mages really should get the shadow priest.
Our setup:
Mage, Mage, Mage, Shadow Priest, Elemental Shaman
Boomkin, Warlock, Warlock, Warlock, Resto Shaman

Works very nicely.


I was hoping for some feedback on our WWS.

This is our kill from last night. Funny enough, our feral druid tank died, and we were able to pull it off with some fancy tanking and battle-rezzing (I ran to the other side for next meteor slash. Ended up getting to MS #9. Shield wall got me through). Anyways, was hoping for DPS critiques more-so.

Wow Web Stats

Anything terribly wrong? Or are we just limited by gear at this point?
Thanks!

 

Melthu

It would help your tanks' survivability if Absolutvodka used Insect Swarm, he only used it once on all of your Brutallus attempts. I know very little about balance druids, but I calculate him spending 355.5 seconds of casting Starfire in a 349 second fight (before counting pushback and casting things like Innervate and treants), so he didn't appear to have any mana issues. This being the case I believe that working in Moonfire and Insect Swarm would be a dps increase, but again I'm not too confident on balance druids.

The only thing I can say about Yihmo is that I think he should start using Swipe. He used it once (accidentally) and did 530 damage, which would make it's base damage about 252. Considering the nature of this fight and that it would take at least 10 second to build a 5 stack of Lacerate every time he takes over tanking, I think he'd increase his TPS by spamming Swipe.

 

coredumperror

My guild's been killing Brut for a couple months now, and while things are really shaping up and we're getting him down in fewer and fewer attempts each week, we're still got one glaring problem that I'm trying to help fix. Apparently, whatever timer our burn healers are using to keep track of how much time is left on each person's burn is showing them that the burn is wearing off a few seconds before it actually does. I don't know if it's DBM's timer, or some other mod, but I was hoping to get some advice for them on which mod is consistently accurate for this purpose. We've lost several people to this problem because our pally healer who's assisting the resto druid switches from one burn victim to another when the burn timer ends, and then a huge tick of dmg hits the original target.

----------------------
My DPS Set
My Boss-Tanking Set

 

Lambach

No man, insect swarm is definitely a large dps decrease for the druid. It hits for nothing, and blows 1 gcd every 12 seconds.

I'd say keeping up IS over a fight is probably a 30k damage loss on brut.

However, if you're good on dps but having tank death issues its worth putting it up there.

Edited for typo.

 

Regen

While keeping IS up is a dps loss (Please don't over exaggerate with "large") at the very least you should try to put it up for every stomp. IS is one of the unique benefits a moonkin brings to the table, try and remember why your raid is bringing you instead of worrying about "large dps decreases" (Hint: its not your personal dps).

As previously mentioned the druid should be using moonfire instead of just chain-casting starfire over and over.

Blacksen:
I also question why your druid is using Moroes' pocket watch over a badge of tenacity, this strikes me as an obviously insane trinket if you are worried about tank deaths (lets be real, the only time any tank should ever die is inside stomp).

 

LockApologist

Don't post split.

@Knopik:

On the 2100 dps run, Siuan got off 20 more fireballs. You also didn't have a Ret pld, so no JoW, and 3% lost crit. They also had 8% less crit overall. So, there's a lot more in that 500 dps difference than "didn't get a spriest."

If your mages have any mana left, you wasted a spriest on them. You may have to move your spriest around. But, assuming your locks are smart, they can easily turn more mana into more dps more easily than mages can. I do agree with your assessment that you locks seem to be underperforming your mages.

 

Denogran

Why would you use [Badge of Tenacity] over [Moroes' Lucky Pocket Watch]? Using the numbers posted in the Feral Druid Megathread, 13 points of agil is 1% dodge. So you get 11.5% dodge during the click. Moroes' is 17.9% dodge( 2% passive and 15.9% click). The armor on it isn't that helpful either, as Stomp reduces your armor by 1/2, so you're only adding about 300 armor while losing 6.5% dodge.

 

Blacksen

Not really sure on this one. Best guess is that it's an extra button to hit for stomps. I know as a warrior, I rotate bloodboil trinket - nightmare seed - last stand. I think he rotates trinkets and barkskin w/ Seeds. I think he's stacking armor so high that the badge is unnecessary.


This is incorrect though. The badge adds 11.5% dodge AND armor (you're forgetting the armor contribution from the agility). With a stomp reducing armor by 50%, any bit of armor is extremely significant and worth getting. I know as a warrior, the "key" to this fight is getting your armor as high as possible. I hit 27k armor regularly with full buffs. Once that gets reduced by 50%, armor is much more valuable.

Basically, 100 armor is extremely worth it on a mob that hits as hard as Brutallus, especially when you're at 13k armor for a few seconds.

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Natural