Amonra

We have 2 holy priests and 1 shadow priest on the raid.

With our raid makeup we don't have the luxury of being able to have 2 healers and 1 dps just standing around doing nothing for anything from 0 to 40 seconds while waiting for gas nova to be cast. Well, we could probably get away with the shadow priest doing it, but the holy priests have groups to heal.

I agree that if the priests are just waiting for gas nova then it is very easy for them to prevent it from even ticking. However if they are casting spells while waiting for gas nova then it is going to tick occasionally.

Anyone who thinks otherwise clearly hasnt experienced a higher latency connection like mine - it isn't a difficult task : wait for gas nova to start, press my macro to interrupt a spell and cast a mass dispel and then start casting as soon as the big green circle appears (I may have to mash my macro until the server ackowledges the previous spell stopping). My reactions are pretty normal for a human so there really isn't anything I can do to improve my performance, unless there is some trick I am missing here?

Uh huh. As for your point about latency, you are right. I guess thats why X in my calculation needs to be 0.9 seconds rather than the 0.5 seconds I calculated and therefore explains why I can avoid the first tick about 75% of the time.

 

Amonra

I went to the trouble of looking up your guild's WWS parse for your Felmyst kill: Wow Web Stats

148 hits of gas nova and it ticked 55 times, meaning that it ticks 37% of the time for your guild. Pretty much in line with my expectations.

 

xyruul

Melee can out range encapsulate on the MT and still be in melee range. Every single melee class has some means to take less damage as well, rogues can cloak, shamans can shamanistic rage, druids can barkskin plus they move at +30% speed and can additionally sprint, warriors can intervene macro out, and paladins can bubble. We just have all melee stacked in a dot formation and no one dies unless they simply react slow and also don't use pots/hs when their priest was slow on MD, which isn't often to begin with. We bring 10 melee and it's fine. If anything they are the ideal group to get encapsulate.

 

Zupal

slight clarification/nit:
Currently Encapulate AOE arcane damage hits through cloak of shadows. This may or may not be a bug but we yell at our rogues to cloak every week when it's on a melee'er and every week they take some damage and quietly, respectfully tell us that it (still) doesn't work.

 

• constantius

Doesn't negate my point: it is possible to MD in time to prevent ticks. If I do not do so, that is my fault, and I caused the ticks and the accompanying mana burn. I cannot blame anyone or anything, especially not lag. You get 3.5 seconds to finish whatever you are doing and cast a MD; if you can't get it off before the tick reliably 5 out of 6 times, then get someone else to do it. Aim for 6/6.

Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house. - R.A. Heinlein

 

Elerion

No, you get 3.0 seconds. If you are quick you can get it off every single time as long as you don't evoke the GCD, but in a high lag environment you will run into issues even using only cast time spells.

 

Rithny

55 ticks a fight is not THAT bad, and chances are many of those ticks came from the same group/person if they were missed or what have you. More importantly if the previous was ignored, the majority of the priests are still MD'ing perfectly, making it more of a testament against your reasoning then for it. Also it's fairly immature; stick to the fight not the individual raids.

For her green beam our raid splits up based on positioning to both sides of the middle, allowing a clear area to run from the breaths. Range on felmyst is fine with the small distance we move and apart from a few seconds of healing separation (where you only need to heal the aura anyways) makes for at least one easy pack of skeletons for our pally to pick up. If the second beam is on the other side, healers (very easy to make them come to pallies) and the MT help bring them to the middle.

 

Amonra

I'm not saying it is a bad performance - having looked at a number of WWS reports from Felmyst kills, gas nova usually ticks between 30 and 40% of the time so it is right there along with everyone elses.

What I'm trying to avoid is people reading this thread (or parts of it) and thinking that priests should always be able to avoid gas nova ticks. If they look at their own WWS parse after a night of wipes and see that gas nova has ticked 30 - 40% of the time they should realise that this is a normal performance and not blame the priests for their night of wipes.

I don't think that it is a realistic goal to avoid gas nova ticks every time unless a guild has the luxury of enabling several priests to do nothing while waiting for up to 40 seconds for gas nova to cast.

The reason I looked for Constantius' WWS parses was to try to get an understanding of how his guild was doing it so well in the hopes of gaining insight into how I could improve my performance. That was the point I discovered there was no magic trick I was missing, and that 0% gas nova ticks seems unrealistic.

 

Elerion

Amonra is right on. With so many people reading these threads it's important to keep the information correct, or you'll see a lot of priests around blamed for wipes after getting one or two extra ticks during the fight.

The untalented 100% pre-tick removal rate absolutely requires use of no GCD-invoking spells (as 1.5+1.5+latency > 3.0s).
Even if you do skip all GCD-spells (this includes Mind Flay, by the way) and stick only to cast time spells, you need a combination of fast reflexes and low latency to get a 100% removal rate (reasons stated earlier, most notably the issue of the "fake" GCD until you get a reply from the server).
If you skip all spells after cooldown is up, you should be able to get a 100% removal rate, but this can be very risky for healing priests (or shadow priests in a low dps setup) due to Gas Nova sometimes being delayed by up to 50 seconds.

 

Dokos

Id be surprised if it worked but afaik we haven't tried it... can you intervene corrosion?

 

Elerion

You can't intervene Corrosion, but you can intervene the following melee hit, which helps considerably with reducing burst.

 

• Falk

And again, the counterpoint is it shouldn't be a fallback for priests to say that one tick is the norm. One tick is common, but not all the time. 100% is miles different from putting in effort to get an average rate of 30-40% ticks. That's equally important to note.

That being said though, we've been having fun the past raiding week with massive World Server Down and Instance Not Found chunks eaten from our raiding schedule, with the rest of it suffering from random mini-spikes (see: Blue posts @ WoW Forums -> Oceanic servers unstable). Brutallus already can be kinda fun with random gaps in knowing what's going on but good lord, Felmyst was a massive pain. Gas Nova aside, a spike on server processes at the wrong moment means a bunch of people disconnect on breaths. I don't know why, but that event seems even more connection intensive than Razorgore/Thaddius.

 

Andeh

We finally got our first Felmyst kill last night (4th night of attempts I think). Our big holdup, as I suspect will be for a lot of guilds, was reaction times in general (but especially Priests').

Our strat used the 4 camps setup (3 ranged, 1 melee, and tank). On the kill, I believe we had 1 Resto Druid, 1 Holy Paladin, 2 Holy Priests (+2 Shadow Priests), and 4 Resto Shaman. The 4 Shaman were one of our biggest changes on the kill from previous nights, and I felt that my average health stayed much higher because of it. In terms of DPS, I think we had 2 Rogues, 1 Fury Warrior (Warglaives), 1 Enh. Shaman, 1 Ele. Shaman, 4 Mages, 3 Warlocks, the previously mentioned 2 Shadow Priests, and 1 Hunter. On the kill attempt, we felt it was going well and started rotating Bloodlust in the melee group (since our casters were very high on the threat list, we couldn't afford to BL them). On the first air phase, we lost a mage, and I think lost one each phase after that. She enraged while in the 4th flight phase, and landed with a high 1% left, proceeding to run around 1-shotting people until she died with about 10 people up.

The biggest things I took out of our kill were:
1) Make everyone use the /use Master Healthstone /use Major Arcane Protection Potion macro for Encapsulates. As a corollary, make everyone farm up 40+ of these potions.
2) Make every healer set up focus windows with cast bars (for dispells and healing Encapsulate groups). Its really surprising how many people didn't know how to do this.
3) Sit people if they DC going into Phase 2. There appears to be some sort of bug with this, and was affecting one of our Rogues and a Shaman.
4) 6 Shaman are amazing.
5) Get people to bring a pair of boots with Minor Speed of some form on them.
6) More Priests on this fight is not better if their reaction time sucks. We had 2 sitting.
7) Tranquil Air helps a lot at the start of Phase 2 to keep your healers from getting munched by Skeletons before the Prot Pally has agro.
8) Spending time gearing up alt healers or alt healing specs in BT was worth it. One of our Shaman was a Hunter's alt, and the Resto Druid was one of our Ferals respec'd.

Overall, I feel that this fight itself isn't difficult, its your players who make it hard. It will make an excellent benchmark test for future recruits.

 

CD

Making individuals farm for arcane prot potions is absurd. If you have the gear to kill Brutallus at this stage you've been farming BT for a while and should be able to supply cauldrons from the guild bank.

My experience with this fight is really negative because of daze- a fight with part tanking and part dps should be ideal for a feral druid but it's incredibly frustrating to have to lose aggro or get dazed and probably die.

 

Andeh

It was our decision that the actual Potions are more effective than Cauldrons, if people are using the HS/Pot macro, instead of everyone just popping them at the beginning of each Phase 1. They also don't require people to pick up new potions from the cauldron each air phase. Our guild bank did provide potions for the slackers, but the vast majority of people brought plenty of their own (40-80). Given the large amounts of gold people are swimming in, and the cheap costs of Primal Mana, we didn't hear any complaints.

 

Flamingcloud

60 potions x 25 people would be enough mats to make 750 cauldrons. You could drop a cauldron in the middle of every group spot every phase 1 for far far less, let alone if you dropped them in phase 2 and just had everyone click.

I don't see how everyone spending 1500gold on potions is efficient.

 

Uldreth

I don't see how this is relevant at all, seeing as everyone and their mother have gold falling out of their asses. Who cares. Bring pots, bring cauldrons... just bring them.

I'd like to know if other people are experiencing a rash of DCs in P2. It really botched our best attempts lastnight.

 

skrewler

We are. We've had them delete WTF folders and not run any addons, problem still happens. If anyone knows of a fix, please let us know.

 

Andeh

We can't figure out what's causing it for a couple of our guys also. Our best guess was DBM, but we have several people who run DBM with no problems. At least one of our guys it happens to has a pretty crappy computer, which makes me wonder if its something combat log or graphics related.

How are the systems on the people who have DCs for you guys?

 

Flamingcloud

You realize what you are saying is the equivalent to having everyone in your guild do leather working to 350 for brutallus, and after the raid immediately dropping LW and doing your old profession to 375 right?

 

• Snowy

No, he's not. This arguement is silly anyways.

Paladin: Pyla
Mage: Pylah

 

Flamingcloud

Its actually worse, because for most professions it would be cheaper to drop bring LW to 350, and redo your old profession to 375 then it would be to buy 60 arcane potions.

 

Kaeleb

I have this problem as well. I have been trying to find a solution for the last few days but was unable to come up with anything useful. There seem to be A LOT of people with that more or less random disconnect when Felmyst uses her Green Vapor. The Information on the official (technical help) forums (EU/US) provides a very large varity of CPU, GraphicCard, OS, ISPs or anything else related to your gaming machine.

The only blue post i found was the usual "Delete your WTF / Interface Folders blahblah" and that as you probably guessed did not help anyone who tried it. While i am posting my guild is working on our first Felmyst kill and i'm probably gonna miss the first BC bosskill, damn. Any help or information is greatly appreciated.

 

Buiden

Huh? 1 primal = 5 pots right? 12 primals = 120-240 gold depending on your server? The mana thistle isn't too bad either, certainly much cheaper than you're claiming.


Edit:
150 Cauldrons, not 750. When you factor in that a lot of pots from a cauldron never get used the difference really isn't that much.

 

Flamingcloud

If it wasn't obvious from what I wrote, I clearly didn't notice at first that it made 5 pots at a time.. Pretty weird imo.. oh well... Primal Mana is over 20g on my server most of the time, and certainly would rise higher if we bought all those. but ya I was interpreting 1 primal = 1 pot when I looked at wowhead. Still like 300g for 60 pots.. but that amount is actually acceptable.

My bad =P