First thread I've started here, and I'm curious as to how other guilds manage their bloodlusts/heroisms effectively.
We seem to be running into a few problems:
1) Who do we give the Bloodlusts to?
It's easy to pick-out warlocks and rogues for pre-20% bloodlusts on a fight like Brutallus. Just a quick rotation of the tank who's not tanking, vent call, then switch-back. But on fights like Twins and Felmyst, they're usually getting agro capped (for us at least) and we're left debating who to give them to.
2) How to manage them effectively as a raid leader?
I'm also our guild's main tank, and juggling around Bloodlusts is a huge hassle and puts a damper in my tps. We've tried to switch up other people to do bloodlusts, but healers obviously aren't an option, and other classes lose their rotation in the transition.
Basically, I'm trying to come up with a rule-set for some other person in my guild to start doing these Bloodlusts, but as we started discussing it, the rule-set became extremely complicated. Agro, cooldowns, support vs raw, etc. - the factors just seemed to start piling up. Obviously we prioritize mages and warriors sub 20%, but we can't get the bloodlusts pre-20% allocated correctly.
Honestly, there's no better person to do this than your raid leader. If it happens to be you, tough cookies. As MT your situation is sketchier, but you either need to figure out a way to get it done, or find a person who you trust to make the right decisions, and then not whine at them if their bloodlust choices don't line up with yours in every situation. I'm the raid leader for my guild, and I also do prot paladin work where required, sometimes up to MTing if our tanks are busy out of game. I know that moving groups around on fights like Brutallus lowers my DPS, and having to do it on Felmyst makes it tougher to pick up skeletons or condense groups or make calls, etc. But that's part of raid leading.
As for a ruleset, I wouldn't really say there is one. Make sure your melee group gets at least one of the lusts they're going to get below 20% because execute range is silly for warriors, but beyond that you have to adapt to the situation, including deaths in the raid, performance levels of your raiders, etc. You might be inclined to swap an elemental shaman out of a caster dps group for another lust, but if he's doing better dps than your mage or lock in that group, why should you? I think the only general rule I follow is that when swapping somebody out of the caster group for an extra lust, I move the spriest out. Other than that, I would say the calls are very subjective and depend entirely on your group composition and personnel.
One of the hunters has assistant and rotates shaman into the feral 3 hunter sham group to lust as beastial wrath cooldowns come up.
For twins is 3 resto shaman shadowpriest holy pld group, they rotate the lust/drums themselves for 120 seconds of 1.5-1.6 chain heal casts during phase1 (shadow twin first).
what guild are you from and what's your position in the guild? p.s. could you link your guild webpage and armory?
It was a question of how the abilities of the fight are handled. I did not know the answer so I come to the place where I expect to see well formulated, concise and correct answers. Not snotty comments. - eclectic778
Vent is only necessary because of bad players. - ebbv
"WoW is a game about upgrading your stuff." - Ghostcrawler
... or find a person who you trust to make the right decisions, and then not whine at them if their bloodlust choices don't line up with yours in every situation...
I don't really understand this. Seems to me we always plan who our heroisms go to on a progression fight so i don't really understand why you would have disagreements in some ones heroism selections? The best person to do it in my experience is the person with the easiest job, generally a DPS class with 2 buttons or less, we usually have a mage or warlock do it.
Assuming you're doing twins 'reversed' strat with sacrolash dying first, we save all our heroism's until phase 2, always have because of threat issues. They naturally go to locks/rogues and some times the mage group i guess too. If you think about the fights ahead of time you can generally see where the heroisms are needed in all fights heh.
I am also the raid leader and MT for my guild and trying to swap while tanking can be difficult depending on the encounter. My suggestion is to talk to some of the other people you raid with who might not have a lot to pay attention to (I use a destro lock) and see if one of them is comfortable doing the switches. I've found that so long as I don't have to do the physical act of moving the groups around everything still goes smoothly.
If you are pushing any serious content where optimizing bloodlusts is necessary then you no doubt have at least a handful of people that can be trusted to swap 1-2 people for a bloodlust without standing in fire. That should free you up to pay attention and call out the swaps on the fly to account for deaths in the raid and you can also have preset swaps before the pull.
Also what are the other officers in your guild doing? If there is no other option then surely one of them can take over to let you focus on surviving and maintaining threat.
For twins is 3 resto shaman shadowpriest holy pld group, they rotate the lust/drums themselves for 120 seconds of 1.5-1.6 chain heal casts during phase1 (shadow twin first).
Assuming you're doing twins 'reversed' strat with sacrolash dying first, we save all our heroism's until phase 2, always have because of threat issues.
And we give our Bloodlusts basically to everyone in the raid around 30% (tank group doesn't get one). Agro is never a problem on twins assuming people are semi-holding-back watching for Conflags and Tranquil Air is down.
Still wondering how to get more out of our Bloodlusts :-\
And we give our Bloodlusts basically to everyone in the raid around 30% (tank group doesn't get one). Agro is never a problem on twins assuming people are semi-holding-back watching for Conflags and Tranquil Air is down.
Still wondering how to get more out of our Bloodlusts :-\
Doesn't that kind of waste half the heroism? that would be a mighty fast 30% and some of your hero would be wasted moving down below i'd think. Not sure about thread as im a healer but im fairly sure our locks ride our tanks all the way till the end, cant see them being able to use a hero :/
The general problem with using bloodlusts in p2 of twins is that it's completely pointless. Realistically, unless you're already down a lot of people, there's no way to wipe in p2 (especially not due to dps concerns).
However, any bloodlust in p1 offers benefits in that it potentially speeds up the "hard" part (are all your dps really threat capped the whole way through? it's possible your tanks can do slightly better, or your dps can manage threat CDs better) and gives your resto shamans a BL in the phase where it's actually beneficial. Since for most guilds I'd imagine (especially with the potential difficulty of healer stacking which can be useful for initial kills) healing is the most difficult aspect of the fight, the extra benefit of increased healing throughput in p1 seems to outweigh the somewhat pointless use of p2 bloodlust.
That said, I imagine if your healers can very consistently keep up the raid through p1, a bloodlust in p2 would be more likely to get you top 10 WWS kills, since threat probably won't be an issue and there isn't the possibility of conflag/shadowfury to interrupt bloodlust dps. I just think that for a safe and reliable kill, p1 bloodlusts make way more sense.
2) How to manage them effectively as a raid leader?
I'm also our guild's main tank, and juggling around Bloodlusts is a huge hassle and puts a damper in my tps. We've tried to switch up other people to do bloodlusts, but healers obviously aren't an option, and other classes lose their rotation in the transition.
Is there a reason you cant give assist to somebody on the bench in group 6 and have them do the actual mechanical swap when it's called for on vent/raidwarning whatever?
Not every guild has a group 6 bench that is attentive 100% of the time during raids. If you do have that, then yes this is a valid solution. If you don't use a group 6 guy, then a good choice can be tank healers, since they should be able to just tap on their high-rank heal key while they're doing the swap. They may lose a little more mana than normal but they shouldn't miss a beat in their healing. Nuke casters or macro-hunters are also good for a similar reason.
I don't really understand this. Seems to me we always plan who our heroisms go to on a progression fight so i don't really understand why you would have disagreements in some ones heroism selections? The best person to do it in my experience is the person with the easiest job, generally a DPS class with 2 buttons or less, we usually have a mage or warlock do it.
In an ideal world, of course. But sometimes people die and your group makeups change and you have to make decisions on the fly. There's no point trying to contingency every situation, so you have to trust whoever you put in charge of this to make the best call.
Identify a player or two who will be relatively less occupied in an encounter and put them in charge of moving shaman in & out of a group. Examples of such candidates are prot pally on Felmyst, off tank on Brutallus & Twins .. etc.
Im one my my guilds raidleaders and I play a dps war, I tend to swap around people for lusts alot, but in genereal if the fight dosnt call for really sick dps I let each group handle their own. (take brut for example, I usually give the tank/hunter group a lust for a threat boost, the only shaman I really swap around is the one whos in the healing group. ) And if my dear melee group isnt aggro capped I tend to swap him into my group. I let the mages/locks handle their own lusts, and for some fights I simply tell our lock officer "steal g3s hero when you wish" Its easier for me to simply rely on the other groups to know when their hero will be most usefull (has worked fine for now, I do tend to tell people to save hero for this and that though, so now they have learned)
Kalec - When both the demon/dragon are at ~12% and we begin our final burn
Burtallus - When he hits 20%
Felmyst - For DPS its on the last landing phase. Sometimes if we have extra Shaman we give the MT a heroism on the pull.
Twins (Sac First) - When the first twin is ~50-60%, just after a fresh conflag has been cast.
M'uru/Entropius - About 20 seconds into Phase 2.
Im sure all this is pretty standard and most guilds do it very similar. Using the aforementioned as an example, most of the heroisms are done 'for dps'. The notable exception is the Muru and Twins heroisms which can also be considered 'for healers'. Naturally they are great for DPS too, but also really help the healing (Moreso on entropius than twins).
We did use a few heroisms (on the pull) 'for tanks' when we initially learnt Felmyst and Twins (sac first) to help them with initial TPS gains, but only while learning. The only time now we have a specific tank heroism would be on Entropius when he spawns - just before the other 3-4 shaman in the raid blow theirs.
Im sure there are some guilds out there that have experimented with rotating chain heroisms through an all-healer group for Twins Phase 1. We've never tried that - but im sure its an viable alternate way to handle heroisms for that fight, even if the standard way is to give them all to DPS when Sacrolash is ~50%.
As a raid leader, the kind of information I'd find really useful is some standard math on what % dps increase bloodlust is for each class. Obviously mages/warriors at sub 20% gain the most benefit, followed by locks/hunters, elemental shaman and boomkin (not sure exactly where rogues fit tbh). But Exactly how much is the difference and what is the order you'd rank these gains?
Another consideration is that while hot swapping is relatively easy, swapping more than just the shaman creates some problems. If you move a warrior out of a group for sub 20% lust, his group will lose the battle shout for example. And if you have to make more than one swap back and forth, then you might lose too much time and might become distracted from the fight. I know for example that while we were learning Council, I had to do quite a few swaps to rotate mana tides and spriest to manage the raid's mana and as a result my DPS suffered or my pet died.
So I'd be interested to know how much other guilds fine tune their lust swaps. Do you stick to the standard "switch 1 shaman in for the person that gains the least in the group and then back" or do you try and micromanage it more? Also, considering the cost of haste for mana users and the benefits of cooldown stacking during a lust, what are the diminishing returns of multiple lusts in the same group? How much worse is the 2nd lust given to the hunter group compared to the first lust? How many lusts can a magex3 group with an spriest sustain before it has negative effects on mana?
We just downed Brutallus last week so we're not as well geared as others, but we've always been a relatively high dps group and on our first Brut kill we had 15 seconds left on the enrage timer, so it will be a lot of fun for us to shoot for faster and faster kills.
Well take your standard melee group for instance, war,rogue,rogue,enh shaman, retri/rogue/druid/war, obviously the warriors gains quite alot from heroism sub 20%, a good rogue and retri pally will know this and save their AW/BF, which also stack quite nicely with heroism. As for the second hero im quite sure that all classes have already burned their cds, and you can either wait for 2 min to get skills like bf and dps potions ready again or you can simply let one class run hasted or use it for a class that does high damage without any 2 min cds up, such as a warlock. Aslong as aggro isn't a issue its mainly down to which players are better in your own guild. If you have a really well geared melee group for instance you will gain more from using your second hero in that group. I usually switchout shaman for shaman when I do the switches since the shaman isnt doing that high personal dps and his spot in the raid comes from his group buffs, (same can be said for a arms warrior) aslong as your players are attentive and you can switch them back fast again it will be a nice dmg increase.
I wish there was a mod that allowed you to swap players around in the raid while incombat. Unfortunately I havent found any that works.
At the risk of throwing a spanner in the works here, I don't think we've ever hotswapped for a bloodlust. However, our shaman groups are:
Enhancement (2 Rogue/DPS War/Retadin Group)
Enhancement (2-3 Hunter/Feral Tank(/Maintank) Group)
Resto (3 Lock/Spriest Group)
Resto (2 Mage/Spriest/Healer group)
Generally our DPS aren't threat capped, but we do have some particularly good tanks so we leave it to the groups to decide when they want their Heroism. Obviously we aren't as hardcore as some here (only killed KJ last week), but this has worked fine for us so far, without the need to swap. The only swap we do for heroism is on Entropius, where we swap the MT into the melee group (instead of a DPS warrior or the Ret) and he stays in there for that phase to avoid any threat issues.
Edit: The heroisms are used at ~22-25% for the Melee group and the Mage group (to ensure they get the full duration of the heroism, and to make sure the resto shaman finds a point he can spare the GCD before 20%. The hunter and lock groups generally use theirs once the tank has a reasonable threat lead and they have CDs available.
Assuming a hunter group, melee group, warlock group, mage group, and a healer group (rough summarization of groups)...I would give the melee and mage groups bloodlust to get maximum affect under 20% (earlier if time to death is soon enough). Warlocks I don't think can handle the threat of 2 bloodlusts so I would let them decide themselves when is best, probably 2.5 minutes into the fight (2nd trinket cooldown). If there was a 5th shaman in the raid, then I would give the bloodlust to the hunter group because not only does their dps scale tremendously (as with most classes), but they can deal with the extra threat more nicely. They should be timed with both TBW/trinket cooldowns as well as when their feral druid will be tanking to both maximize dps and tps.
I'm sure people will disagree, but for Brutallus that is the best option imo.
On Twins, where guilds frequently run 10+ healers, I would stagger bloodlusts for the benefit of the raid healers, not the dps. I would even prioritize bloodlusts on the tanks over dps here.
08/11/08, 3:21 PM
