Hi
I know it probably has been discussed a lot, anyways i'd like to hear some opinions.

We're a fairly small raiding guild(roaster of 50 people) with 3 raiddays a week. We can't really stack our raids because of the small player pool(42-43 people online average a raidday).

Our Raidsetup looks something like this("stacked" for loatheb with only 14 healers(cant take less because we don't have any more DPS on^^):
6-8 warriors(1def 1fury/def 2 fury rest MS(they acutally do PvP))
3-5 rogues(5 is all we have 3 dagger 2 combat)
3-4 mages(got 5 but 1 inactive, think they are all fire by now)
4-5 hunter
3-4 wls
3-4 priests (1 shadow rest healing)
2-4 druis (got 1 feral, rest healing/balance or healing)
6-8 schamis (most of em manatide specced)

I think we got the strategy down and still missing over 20% when we die.(without screwups getting the buff and people dying too early i think we can gain maybe 5%) Will world buffs increase our DPS that much?

So far naxx has been a blast for us (11 or 12 weeks with 2 naxx days a week and 10 bosses down). How do you rate our chances against the upcomming bosses(loatheb as explained, gothik(got 4-5priests 3-4mages max), and 4h (we have a total of 8 warriors, average 6-7 a raid)

Thanks in advance for any advice.
-dsw

I haven't done Gothik myself, but from what I have picked up on people talking about the encounter on the forums you're basically screwed big time with 4-5 priests. I think Gurgthock said he'd never attempt the encounter without 6 priests for example.

Can't comment on the bosses, but I find it quite impressing that you proceeded so far with that few people and only 3 raids/week. :V:

Gothik would be real pain with less than 6 priests, at least for us. It could be done with 5, but it would be much more difficult, and it would require stuff like frost nova rotation to CC one deathknight for some time (or Really Sticky Glue^^). With 4 priest it would be quite amazing achievement.

At loatheb we use first Doom cast time as our DPS mark. 65% unbuffed seems to be the limit for us when no world buffs used, mages flasked though on real try. Can't comment 4H yet too much, but there's 6 warrior kills.

Is that with or without flasks? Flasking your mages/warlocks and getting world buffs should do the trick. Our best was 29% before we just went all out on buffs and slapped him silly.

we had all casters flasked and every non-world buff available.

blah double post

well 4h + sapphiron will be very painful. basically you'll need ALL your healers logged on for those. 4h can be done with a full warrior rotation with 6 warriors but resists will fuck you over badly. all 6 with 4 DN and ZG trinket and then you still need to avoid bad luck until mograine is dispatched. but just from the math its doable.
gothik can be done with 5 priests as well. theres 7 deathknight waves, 2 DK each spawn. you kill the first 2 waves. then you kill the 5 knights on either left or right spawn point and shackle up the others. the problem is that during 2 DK spawns, a rider will still be alive for a few seconds, 6-7s max i'd say. the 'easy' out is to shackle the DK while the rider gets dpsed. you can do that the first time but for the 2nd time i thikn the rider clashes with DK #7 (correct me if i am wrong here). that means you have to chain nova the left DK before killing it, which is certainly doable. generally gothik does not require much of a special raid setup. its about people knowing what to dps, finding their targets FAST and killing them fast as well. with 5 priests, you should put 2 druids on living side as well to combat res a dead priest. you got the number of shamans to have enough healers on dead side so that seems ok.

for loatheb, well, the 3 classes that do the major dmg for us are rogues, mages and fury warriors. our first few kills we had 15+ of those 3 in our raid. now we usually have 1-2 fury warriors, 7-8 rogues and 4-6 mages. we don't use any world buffs but usually have 5-6 mages flasked. doing that dps zerg with 5 rogues 4 mages and 1 fury warriors is surely possible, but its gonna be quite hard.
as someone said, you should benchmark your dps at first doom. if you reach 65% when the first doom is cast (not when it dmgs you) without dps buffs, you are on target. if you are above, you'll most likely wipe due to not having enough dps.

A lot of the people giving suggestions have done the fight many times and are probably referencing their latest kills. Unless you plan on wiping multiple times WITH world buffs, I wouldn't suggest going at the fight with 4 mages and 4 rogues or anything near that. Yes, its possible. No, its not likely that you'll be looting a body at the end of it, especially since your gear is probably not up to the same level as these guilds that are farming KT.

If you're set on doing the fight with what you have, you're really gonna have to maximize everything.
A few things you may want to look at are:

What time into the fight did you hit 20%? Would it be possible to prolong the fight another 20s?

Are healers putting forth enough dps? We usually have our healers range from ~1.4% to ~0.6% of the total damage each. Are you having healers bandage the mages? The hunters? Are the mages able to keep a huge ignite up the whole fight?

Are your spore groups made so that the highest dps get it first? Are people missing spores? Forgetting consumables, and dying early? Are most equally geared rogues and fury warriors doing about the same damage?

For Loatheb, you should try using heavy dps consumables (Flasks, Arcane Elixirs, Greater Fire Pots, Magebloods, Mongoose, Juju, Firewater, etc etc etc). Then, get some world buffs: DM (200AP, Stam, Crit(Nonissue)), Onyxia, Rend Head, Zandalar, EPL North Tower (5%stam, works in Naxx).

The Haste buff from Rend alone will boost your DPS a lot, and with so many stam buffs (Rogues probably have near 7-8k life unflasked) You can actually afford to skip a bandage (raidwide 8s+ dps). I would start by looking at your group spore list. Prioritizing certain classes first (Fire Mages, Fury Warrior/Combat Rogues etc. over Hunter/Warlocks). You also stated you run pretty warrior heavy (6-8) having them respec until you get some experience on the fight wouldnt be a bad idea, and that 20%-0 should be pretty damn fast with that much executes critting.

On another note, our first Gothik kill was with 5 priests, so its doable, but its harder.
As for 3-4 mages, that'll definitely be ... hard on Gothik.

I _think_ the 29% was without flasks. So we flasked and got onyxia/hakkar heart buffs as well as the north tower buff, and Loatheb died. Might have been people playing better, might have been the buffs. I can't really tell, as I got disconnected at 49%.

We had 3 prot warriors, 4 hunters and 4 warlocks. 14 healers.

Arms warriors are pretty bad on Loatheb as well, unfortunately. You could do him with that raid composition, but not when only one of your warriors is actual fury DPS. Horde has one advantage in the form of the Rend buff, which is incredible for melee. What I'd do is Rend + Hakkar + Ony/Nef + DM buffs + EPL tower buff + rockets if you have those (+ Wickerman if you do it soon!), and then use Major Troll's Blood as well as the standard DPS/food buffs on the raid. You want to both increase your DPS and increase your survivability. When your DPS classes have 7k hp buffed that lets you live longer so even if you can't kill him in 5 min, you can still kill him before you wipe.

If you trust your other members you could also share account info and box one another. Recruiting more is always an option too obviously...

you have about 4 hunters too many in your raid... :)

Why not just guild bank respec the warriors for the Loatheb fight?

Removing 2 warlocks, 2 hunters, and respeccing the warriors will give you 29%. CoR and CoE, 1-2 hunters max for first kills. All Fury.

Another option over the DM buffs is to pass out bijous/coins and do a Spirit of Zanza on each raid member; little more expensive, but less time consuming.

This fight is the Fury Warrior dreamfight similar to Thaddius so as everyone says if you respec all the warriors fury assuming they have decent fury warrior gear it will really boost DPS. Overall though yeah arms warriors are just pitiful DPS (well not as bad as hunters and locks).

Whats with so many Shamans? Nothing really against shamans but they are about the worst healer possible for the fight due to their tiny heals :-/

Edit: Also if healers has say a decently geared rogue/warrior/mage alt you might want them to get on that alt instead. Thats a big thing we do since we normally are sporting 15 or 16 healers in our raid while only using 13 healers on Loatheb (I personally think 13 is too many myself but we don't really have much more DPS to swap in).

A couple of weeks ago we had 6 hunters for loatheb, and one of them beat all the rogues on damage. This week we had a warlock at #1. 835 isnt bad dps for a warlock, but its still wierd seeing a warlock at the top spot. :/

World buffs makes such a huge difference on this fight. I think its silly that we could get him to 4% without any world buffs and very good execution, and then the next day killing him easely fully buffed with people missing spores and other general noobishness. Going all out with world buffs would probably make a bigger difference then perfecting your group setup.

You must have some really undergeared (or terrible) rogues... A hunter beating a few of them seems reasonable, but beating all of them seems far fetched. We've had very undergeared rogues fare about as well as the hunters, but rogues with 4 piece bonus and good weps blow hunters out of the water.

I would love to see a screenshot of Damage Meters for either of these occurances.

Shadowcraft rogues vs 6/8 Cryptstalker or something? Seriously, that sounds a bit over the top.