i feel its better to change the raid a little in order to ensure 1shotting the encounter if needed...
i wouldnt be too comfortable doing gothik with 4 mages and 4 priests

Something like that I can understand. I was more leaning towards the guilds who boot Hunters/Warlocks and bring in mages on Loatheb, things like that to min/max.

How does a UD or tauren warrior get more than +7 skill offered by edgemaster's handguards?

(Using non-sword)

Our approach has been to take whatever measures are necessary to 1-shot the encounter every time. If that means bringing 2 hunters and 2 warlocks, then so be it. People can rotate in and out based on dkp, so whomever is up for loot will be present. In many cases if we don't have an ideal group, we simply won't attempt an encounter until more people log on and our group comp improves.

There is certainly something to be said for beating every encounter with a 5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5 raidgroup, and it used to annoy me to no end to have to wait for our sixth priest to get home from work and log on for vael. However, the logistics involved in a loatheb kill really just make it silly not to bring a stacked raid. If you wipe, you lose several hundred gold worth of consumables, not to mention time spent porting around for world buffs. The fact that there are so many potion-dump fights in naxx really takes a toll on peoples' willingness to spend a bunch of money on loatheb just to learn the fight with a disadvantaged group. Give me 8 mages and 6 fury warriors and I'll happily collect some epics and then go crush gothik and thaddius thank you very much. :highfive:

Also, Masq, I'm not sure whether anyone pointed out--you're misunderstanding what +10 skill does. It eliminates the white DPS loss from glances, yes, but not the effective crit cap. There's no way for the Rogues and Warriors to pick up that last 40% against a 63 mob.

Meh I dont think you can compare patchwerk to loatheb - we could drop him in 5 minutes if necessary but we go for as clean as possible with healing so we don't ever lose a tank, and haven't in probalby the last 2 months... so we push dps right to the 7 min barrier. However, loatheb we've done faster than 4:30, and always before 5:00.

Loatheb is a different beast... the fight screams DPS budget. Do the math on what each element gives you in overall improvement... flasks for mages, removing a lock, removing a hunter... Rolling a proper ignite is big - but that almost requires an ignite nazi to get rolling properly. Not a bad thing to have lying around tbh. You'll find as horde the rend buff is big (I don't believe theres an alliance equivelant)... and obviously: hakkar, onyxia... and hey, I think the faire is coming up soon! That buff is obviously huge.

The idea of farming 120 extra gspps just because we wiped is so ridiculous, we'll probably be going for world buffs and flasks at least until KT dies for us.

I have a rogue asking a question about builds as we prepare to down Loatheb - he wants to know if people find a Seal Fate build more beneficial than Combat Daggers on this? He's trying to find the best crit/dmg ratio.

Only if he's willing to pay the 100g a week to spec over and then spec back, and even then, it really isn't going to be that big a deal.

Ironically, on both Loatheb and Thaddius, he'd be better off respeccing combat swords for the fight and then speccing back (Thaddius because of arc issues, Loatheb because combat swords gets more out of the crit buff than combat daggers, to the point where it generally way outdoes CD).

While said classes can't beat the 60% crit cap on white hits, DW Warriors can beat the system by keeping HS up for most of a fight. Only OH swings are going to be penalized by glancing. This is especially true for Loatheb, considering buffs affecting rage upkeep from the OH and no threat.

On the topic of DPS (min/max), DW Warriors should consider Expert Goldminer's Helmet with Gauntlets of Annihilation, if using axes.

Would swapping lionheart for goa be worth it?

The difference..

GoA Combo
========
34 AP

Lionheart Combo
===========
.83 crit
1 hit

1 hit always translates to 1 hit (-1 miss). Hit(s) and Crit(s) are on the same die roll, and they don't share sides. All of which is beside the point, as the AP has, against even 1.75 crit, better returns on DPS. This is going beyond this thread though, and I only brought it up here, because Edgemaster's were mentioned.

Another advantage to take, currently, is the Wickerman buff.

For Loatheb, he's correct. +1 hit, until you hitcap, is equivalent to +1 crit because the miss component converts to crit component due to the buff.

Your warlocks must be terrible if you can outdps them as prot. There are a few viable warlock specs that you don't need a shadow priest for (although we use me as shadow at that fight with the MT, a pally, and 2 locks in the party and I get the first crit buff to up my VE crit rate to ~75% which makes a significant difference - that said, you can get more VE's out then people think and time them appropriately as long as you know when he wipes curses, the timer on impending doom, etc). You can get one VE out at the start after Loatheb wipes curses but before he applies the debuff, making it so you have VE up at every impending doom tick - eliminating the need for your MT to use shadow pots and allowing him to instead use stoneshield pots. That said, the 2 warlocks in the party benefit greatly and end up higher then hunter dps, but lower then the mages/melee due to still having some lifetap constraints. It's also not bad with VE up as a shadow priest. You basically never want to consume more then 2 debuff slots though - so SW:P is only applied when you don't have VE up, and if you don't have VE up alternating wanding (crit rate applies to wanding) and using SW:P in conjunction with max rank MB each time it's up will allow other debuffs to sit there until it's time to due more healing.

That said, the warlocks in the MT group can go nightfall/conflag and drainlife between conflags and proc nightfall while still throwing shadowbolts in. That works out pretty well even with the possibilities of immolate being knocked off (consume the immolate right away to avoid that issue since you're likely to crit both the immolate/conflag).

The other spec that works out really well, if you aren't in the MT group is to go 9/21/21 and use demonic sacrafice on a felhunter or a voidwalker (depends on your preference, I'm not totally sure which turns out to be better overall, but probably the felhunter since you won't accidentally lifetap more then you need..but regardless), you do that and spam shadowbolts (still have ruin and imp shadowbolt).

So yeah, warlocks can do fine on loatheb - nothing exceptional since it's still rough on them, but they can contribute just fine as can a shadow priest. We take 16 total healers to loatheb and don't min-max at all and get him down just fine /shrug. Most guilds take 12 from what I understand.

The only thing we remove from the raid is prot warriors. They have the option to respec fury for it, though. Our bank helps out on respecs for fights (Warriors respec a lot, I respec out of shadow if we need me on a MT for 4H and then back to shadow for saph/kel). Otherwise, everyone in our raids regardless of class can output enough dps to drop him, so we don't worry about that or world buffs. We do 1 test run to make sure our healing order is solid (cheaper to wipe and repair to make sure all the healers know the order properly each time then go in with shadow pots and dps consumables on).

If your raid needs 8 mages and 8 rogues to win, I'd venture to say the other classes suck...or your rogues/mages aren't outputting enough dps. Also, I find flasks on the mages/locks/Shadow priest to be more valuable then world buffs since you're crit rate is so high anyways. Those can then be taken into Saph/Kel as well if necessary. They aren't required, but they do make a big difference.

This might be true for rogues, but you shouldn't forget that when fully buffed on loatheb, a well-geared warrior's offhand basically generates enough rage to allow most of his main hand swings to be heroic strikes, i.e. only ~30% of his total dmg is white dmg and therefore suffers from the increased miss chance. That's not quite enough for 1% hit to equal 1% crit, I think.

No buffs at all.

16.5k Raid dps (cant remember if this is max or average but it comes out to be around 61% when the first doom is applied) with no consumables at all should net you a kill when potted up with just mongoose/str/arcane pots etc but no world buffs/flasks. Not sure about what you need if you are going to flask/world buff tho.

Thanks for the clarification both of you. We'll get 2 more DPS in, get the spore rotation down and dig in.

With 14 healers, we were hitting between 64-67% at 2mins regularly last night. We then tried surviving through the Dooms with just healing pots/bandages, and wiped at Doom 4 on 38% (with a truckload of people dropping on Doom 3 for whatever reasons).

Imo its not even worth trying to do it half arsed by just using healing pots/bandages. You either have the dps to kill him or you don't. If you think you do, you are going to have to go all out with shadow pots to kill him anyway and if you know you don't have the dps, prolonging the fight for 1 or 2 minutes isn't going to do much. It is much better to just go all out on attempt and see how much you have to step it up rather than pussy footing around and not getting any extra info.

With the cost of GSSP's im gonna make my guild REALLY comfortable repeating the 2-min cycle before 1st doom and reliably getting him to sub 65% and making sure our MT never ever dies before we'll go balls to the wall.
As Sticky pointed out i don't think its worth semi-potting up to see what you can do. Either go all out or keep praccing.

Now i got some solid numbers for our DPS and i'll be sure to hit that before i waste hundreds of golds on pots per try.