Forged Alliance

Only 10 members of the raid got the debuff of being recently bandaged on the najentus kill last night.... and 5 of you only had it once.  Thats terrible. Kudos to Benvolo, Hardwigg, Amelya, Whitetadpole, and Kreekor.  The rest of you suck and either didn't bandage more than once, died early, or somehow haxored the game, morphed into a healer and healed yourselves (think Shang Tsung).   13 of you used healthstones, and only 3 of you used both.  We had 2 healthstones, and there is no excuse not to use them.  This is not a lollygag around and the healers will get around to healing you kind of fight.  This is by far the most healing intensive fight in the game to this point, and we need your help.  There is only a 10 second window before he starts chucking damage at the raid again.   Next time I am calling out those of you that did not bandage and healthstone, and your names will forever be preserved in shame on these forums.

Yay I like it when I get kudos sent my way, and it is not hard to just click a button for the healthstone to be used, or bandage. So you stop dps for a few seconds....but it helps out our healers in teh long run thats for sure and saves mana. That 2k or 3400 from the bandage makes a big difference. It is not about being on the top of the wws it is knowing your class and helping the raid on killing the boss. I know that from being on my rogue like for example in Romulo fight in kara all I do is kick teh healing so I lose out alot of dps on the meter but not a biggie since that is my role. So lets try to keep up the bandaging and make it a habit of using our HS. You know after a boss fight if you don't need HS then there is something wrong and you nkow peopole did not use them.

I'm kind of split on this post. As much as I love the idea of calling people out for being stupid, and I do love it believe me, I'm not sure this is the best instance to do it. We 2 shot Najentus, our wipe being because chuunks died IIRC. Our kill was pretty solid, I think 1 person died? So even with all these people, myself included, slacking off on the healthstones and the badages we still killed him with ease. On the other side I agree with you, we're (the dps) overall really bad at saving ourselves. We need to be reminded far too often that we have HS and badages and we need to be using those. So maybe this is good as a reminder to wake up and use ALL the tools we have. Personally I try to save HS for the really "OH SHI.." moments and I try to mix a few pieces of pvp gear for Naj to get the added the stam so that even if I take one of those spine things after the shield breaks I'll still live, plus I was a little more preoccupied than usual this fight trying to get aimed off as close as possible to his shield going up so it lasted the full shield duration. excuse, excuse, excuse.   TLDR: reminding us tunnel-vision dps to pull our own weight is a good thing, using a solid Najentus kill as an example, eh...

Yeah, dps needs to stay alive.  And I think we did pretty good at it on the kill.  (except I looted zarkks spine to late and she died)  I think we are all aware that staying alive = more dps in the long run.

I am going to be honest though, I took one healthstone from the box the entire raid.  I did it after we wiped on supremus.  I still had it in my bag when we killed Akama.  Healthstones share my mana gem cooldown, so I never really even pick them up.  Even if I wanted to use one, chances are I used a gem or a flame cap sometime the last 2 minutes, so the healthstone is worthless.  But fortunately for mages, we get fire ward and frost ward...  which I think pretty much makes up for it.  Bandage cooldown not up after the spine?  gogo frost ward to avoid the gib from the aoe thing.  Oops, ran by a volcano?  gogo fireward.  

But yeah, use what you can to stay alive.  Its better than getting one more cast off to spend the rest of the fight facedown.  And then when we get the kill someone will probably take a screenshot of themselves sitting on your body...

I'm guilty on the first wipe -- didn't run the old raid nanny before the first attempt, ran it before the second -- noticed I didn't have my flask buff, whereupon I realized I was in my trash gear as well.  (I DID remember to put on my ninja outfit at least.) Benvolo has a point though -- as much as I think it's good to save "oh crap"s for the right moment, this is a fight that is SUPER healing intensive, and the healers asked us all to use one and/or bandage.   There's *nothing* you can do during the 4-5 seconds that shield is up -- might as well click the old bandage macro in the least. What begs calling out are the consistant violators to the raid nanny.  Some people rarely have food/elixir buffs -- and even if you came to the raid unprepared because you thought you were going to be in Duluth and not raiding or pulled in from a battleground or whatever, it should be your duty to borrow/repay from your fellow raiders. At this point I've made it a playful joke with my /rw "RAID NANNY GONNA GET YOU!" -- but honestly, if your name is on that list and it doesn't get fixed before the pull - that's terrible, you're terrible -- you're relying on the 24 other *prepared* raiders to carry your flabby butt.  That's who I'm calling out next time.  Obviously I can make some concessions if you got pulled into the raid to cover for someone, .. Speaking of that -- there's someone else I'm going to start calling out with my angry voice.   IF YOU LEAVE A RAID IN BETWEEN PULLS WITHOUT A DECENT F'ING WARNING YOU F'ING SUCK.  HARD.  We had 15 minutes downtime getting a new member last night because "someone" decided he had to go to bed.  That's 24 people ... 15 minutes each.  You cost 6 HOURS time total.  Jerk.

I'm all for the calling out. Last night was a good result for us, but not 1 shotting Naj and Supremus is what stopped us from attempts on new bosses. People REALLY need to do some research and know these fights ahead of time. The 3 sites listed on the main page (raidguru, wowwiki, worldofstrats) will most likely have different versions of the fight. Read them all! Then go youtube a fight or two from the perspective you play if one is available. Pentamino mang, if you would have lived longer then 5 seconds on our first Supremus attempt we probably would have 1 shot him. The raid went very well imo. There were very few trash deaths and, only the one wipe. My main concern with our raids is always raid composition. We have to play the hand we're delt but how in the name of all things holy can we not have any rogues! Rogues are dime a dozen! I understand we wanted/needed to stack the raid in favor of ranged and that's great, but a little wound posion isn't a bad thing. Also Ret Pallys! Seal of Wisdom, not quite as good as Amelya but it affects all attacks and spells against a target! Elemental Shaman! I put up a debuff called Stormstrike on a target which has 2 charges and gives +20% damage to the next nature attack. Instead of the windserpent eating this up an EleShammy or Moonkin should get it. BTW one moonkin isn't a bad idea, Improved Fairy Fire would help all the physical dps and tanks. And let me just pose a question to the hunters real fast. I've been over to the EJ hunter threads and used some of the hunter spreadsheets to try and figure out my own benefits of ArP. My question is: Do you really gain sooooo much personal DPS as BM that it makes Survival spec and the buffs it gives the rest of us not viable? And wtf did the wolves and owls go!? And to the OP, I'm one of those that "tries" to morph into a healer. But I'm having a hard time figuring out on WWS if I actually healed myself or if all I did was overheal. Also it looks like Akuma and Andrew healed themselves a lot, unless it's just counting Improved Leader of the Pack. Regardless of all my rants, great raid and lets do it again tonight and tomorrow!    

WarmApplePie wrote Do you really gain sooooo much personal DPS as BM that it makes Survival spec and the buffs it gives the rest of us not viable?

Yes - from what I've read / chatted with someone who's tried survival at T6 level, the added raid dps compared to lost personal dps is pretty close most of the time. And it's not just personal dps from the BM hunters - +3% dmg to party members from FI is substantial in it's own right.

Also it looks like Akuma and Andrew healed themselves a lot, unless it's just counting Improved Leader of the Pack.

If you look closer, all but like 2-3% of that is imp LotP / PoM / Earth Shield /final lifebloom

I don't even have max lvl bandages. To me stopping to bandage instead of just using binding heal or something is silly. And it looks like other healers didnt either. Unless you weren't refering to healers at all, then ignore this post. But 7 healers + 10 bangagers accounts for 17 people, and not everyone even needs to all the time. (for example, tanks staying topped off. noticed none of them bandged) So i dunno, doesn't really seem like there was that much failure.

WarmApplePie wrote I'm all for the calling out. Last night was a good result for us, but not 1 shotting Naj and Supremus is what stopped us from attempts on new bosses. People REALLY need to do some research and know these fights ahead of time. The 3 sites listed on the main page (raidguru, wowwiki, worldofstrats) will most likely have different versions of the fight. Read them all! Then go youtube a fight or two from the perspective you play if one is available. Pentamino mang, if you would have lived longer then 5 seconds on our first Supremus attempt we probably would have 1 shot him. The raid went very well imo. There were very few trash deaths and, only the one wipe. My main concern with our raids is always raid composition. We have to play the hand we're delt but how in the name of all things holy can we not have any rogues! Rogues are dime a dozen! I understand we wanted/needed to stack the raid in favor of ranged and that's great, but a little wound posion isn't a bad thing. Also Ret Pallys! Seal of Wisdom, not quite as good as Amelya but it affects all attacks and spells against a target! Elemental Shaman! I put up a debuff called Stormstrike on a target which has 2 charges and gives +20% damage to the next nature attack. Instead of the windserpent eating this up an EleShammy or Moonkin should get it. BTW one moonkin isn't a bad idea, Improved Fairy Fire would help all the physical dps and tanks. And let me just pose a question to the hunters real fast. I've been over to the EJ hunter threads and used some of the hunter spreadsheets to try and figure out my own benefits of ArP. My question is: Do you really gain sooooo much personal DPS as BM that it makes Survival spec and the buffs it gives the rest of us not viable? And wtf did the wolves and owls go!? And to the OP, I'm one of those that "tries" to morph into a healer. But I'm having a hard time figuring out on WWS if I actually healed myself or if all I did was overheal. Also it looks like Akuma and Andrew healed themselves a lot, unless it's just counting Improved Leader of the Pack. Regardless of all my rants, great raid and lets do it again tonight and tomorrow!    

We can look for ret pallys and moonkins to join our guild to take to raids, but that means that some of the 29 people that either went, or wanted to go last night will have to sit out...  I am more for makin it work with what we have and raiding with good friends then recruiting people and watching friends and longtime guildies sit out.  And as far as stackin for ranged last night... Im not a huge fan of having more than 5-6 melee in the middle there on the Naj fight because they take so much splash damage... we had 7 last night and I am pretty sure that we wiped when Chuunks died that first time because we were healing splash damaged melee.

WarmApplePie wrote IAnd wtf did the wolves and owls go!?

From what I have heard and read top pet dps is wind serpents and then cats... but Daghi would probably know more about that.

I'm trying to gear my rogue to bring him to a place where he can rightfully participate in T6 content - should be sufficient atm if we need him. Also, if Robyn lets me run away from her character that I've been leveling with, I can get an elemental shaman in the works.  But even if I do, my raid schedule will still be spotty.

aaaahhh, there was a hunter question somewhere in the mess since I last checked, long detailed reply INC.

WarmApplePie wrote My main concern with our raids is always raid composition. We have to play the hand we're delt but how in the name of all things holy can we not have any rogues! Rogues are dime a dozen! I understand we wanted/needed to stack the raid in favor of ranged and that's great, but a little wound posion isn't a bad thing. Also Ret Pallys! Seal of Wisdom, not quite as good as Amelya but it affects all attacks and spells against a target! Elemental Shaman! I put up a debuff called Stormstrike on a target which has 2 charges and gives +20% damage to the next nature attack. Instead of the windserpent eating this up an EleShammy or Moonkin should get it. BTW one moonkin isn't a bad idea, Improved Fairy Fire would help all the physical dps and tanks.

I don't always agree with you on stuff, but I definately agree with your first sentence. I complain constantly about raid composition to tsuni, riggins, anyone who will listen. I usually get dumped in some random caster gorup or in a healer group, or a tank group and still ALWAYS pull top 5, usually #1 on damage, but that's another rant.
IF we could hand pick a raid group for any given encounter it SHOULD go something like:
Melee group: fury or ms warrior, enh shaman, rogue, rogue, ret pally
Hunter group: BM hunter, BM hunter, BM hunter, feral druid, shaman (prolly resto)
Caster group: Mage, Mage, Lock, Lock, boomkin/ele shaman
tanks group: tanks, tree druid
healer group: healers, resto shaman, spriest But like you said we don't get to hand pick, we get who is on. We have a lot of feral druids, a lot of priests, 0 ret pallies and few pallies in general, 0 regular boomkins, 0 elemental shamans, inconsistant ms and/or fury warriors, and very few rogues. I.E. we rarely can make a melee group. So instead of making a psuedo-melee group like we usually do and spreading the hunters out wherever, we usually have 2, sometimes 3, hunters so when there's no melee we should make a stronger hunter group. Or if there's only 1 hunter and a TON of casters, make a strong caster group. A problem with the hybrid dps people you mentioned is that you really only want 1 of each. 1 good, consistant hybrid dps of each type. If the R & D forum has any truth to it finding those people is extremely hard, like finding a good hunter. now, TIME FOR FUN

And let me just pose a question to the hunters real fast. I've been over to the EJ hunter threads and used some of the hunter spreadsheets to try and figure out my own benefits of ArP. My question is: Do you really gain sooooo much personal DPS as BM that it makes Survival spec and the buffs it gives the rest of us not viable? And wtf did the wolves and owls go!?

AT MOST in a raid you want ONE survival hunter. There are several reasons I think a survival hunter would NOT work well for us and that the raid as a whole is getting a better benefit from all our hunters being BM.
1) Survival only buffs the physical damage in the raid (melee + hunters). Like I said earlier we rarely have enough melee to make a proper melee group as it is. 
2) Survival does WAY less personl dps than BM, so much so w/ that our average make up having a survival hunter would be less raid dps.
3) Survival is a PAIN to gear for. It's almost like going from ele to resto. Surival is RAW AGI AND NOTHING BUT. Every gem is agi (cept those for the meta gem), highest agi pieces of gear, every enchant is agi, you get the picture i'm sure. 
4) Feroscious Inspiration stacks and is up most of the time during combat. so if there's 3 BM hunters in a group the whole group get's a 9% damage buff.
5) FI works for casters too.
6) The survival stuff (expose weakness) doesn't even stack. Now to address the pets. In the OLD school, pre-BC, pet pathing blew goats and so hunters didn't use their pets in raids. Then people realized, they could use a wolf because it would stand there and just do it's howl that buffs the group. NOW in the new school pet pathing isn't nearly as terrible and pets are viable again. So hunters aren't limited to wolves or nothing. That being said:
Cats, Ravagers and Raptors have +10% dps and Windserpents have + 7% but also have lightning breath and with proper crit makes up for and even surpasses the  +dps % of the others because of GFFT (hunter talent) and it has no cd.
Wolves have +0% dps and only buff physical damage and only for that group and has a 15yd radius and a 10s cd....not worth it. As BM my pet does ~20-25% of my dps. so a 10% or more cut in dps is not worth the "extra 45 to 57 damage to the next physical attack".
Owls/Bats (since they both have the same abilities) have a +7% dps and Screech does like 50 damage and lowers the AP of all targets in melee range by 210. NOT a large amount considering the type of damage mobs/bosses are dishing out these days. I'm not opposed to trying one for a night and seeing if chuunks/the tanks notice a difference but it seems really miniscule to me. But atleast you aren't losing a ton of dps for it. I hope I didn't sound condescending, I just tried to get all the facts out. I think we did pretty good last night 3rd time on killing Naj and Supremus and 2nd time killing Akama, all in 1 night, pretty good imo. hopefully BT isn't bugged because stupid akama got himself killed and we can hit up teron gorefiend on thursday. SEACREST OUT

You totally hijacked my thread   The point of this post was to call people out, and I will tell you why.  Last night we had 9 healers on najentus. NINE.  Ideally, we should not have 9 healers, but rather 7 (including the prot pally healing).  We do this because we are learning, and it helps to turn what could very well have been a wipe into a boss kill.  Trust me, we are not going to be running in babysitter 9 healer mode for long, so I want us to learn, and learn to heal yourselves.  I know from raiding on my rogue that its hard and it sucks, and you constantly think about wether you should have stopped to bandage etc, but I just wanted to point out to everyone another point of learning in this fight.  As far as how tight the healing really was, I used every mana trick in my book every cooldown, and I was running at <10% mana for half the fight.  Yes, we won, but it was oh-so-close to a wipe several times from the tank and melee healers perspective.

Tsuni wrote
I don't even have max lvl bandages. To me stopping to bandage instead of just using binding heal or something is silly. And it looks like other healers didnt either. Unless you weren't refering to healers at all, then ignore this post. But 7 healers + 10 bangagers accounts for 17 people, and not everyone even needs to all the time. (for example, tanks staying topped off. noticed none of them bandged) So i dunno, doesn't really seem like there was that much failure.

Not talking about healers, but I am talking about non-healers.  Yes 17 great but most of those people bandaged once.  I didnt count.... but there were maybe 3 or 4 tidal shields.

sorry for the hijack, the time called for my expansive bank of useless knowledge, I had to indulge.

Hanh wrote Tsuni wrote
I don't even have max lvl bandages. To me stopping to bandage instead of just using binding heal or something is silly. And it looks like other healers didnt either. Unless you weren't refering to healers at all, then ignore this post. But 7 healers + 10 bangagers accounts for 17 people, and not everyone even needs to all the time. (for example, tanks staying topped off. noticed none of them bandged) So i dunno, doesn't really seem like there was that much failure. Not talking about healers, but I am talking about non-healers.  Yes 17 great but most of those people bandaged once.  I didnt count.... but there were maybe 3 or 4 tidal shields.

Seriously though - max level your bandaging. Anything but is unacceptable for raiding, and has been since MC. It's not like it's that costly or time consuimg. In the case of healers, certainly it's better to heal yourself, but some day, in some situation, you'll run oom have pots/healthstones on CD, and be at 2% health. Bandaging is just another last ditch trick for healers, and it's one that should be there if/when the time comes to use it.

The time did come for  me last night.  The 3rd boss in BT does take all your mana, so if you are able to bandage, this would be a good time.  'When' you run oom and start blowing up, you might be able to give yourself a few more seconds with bandaids, sometimes a few more seconds is all you need...

Kaittlynn wrote The time did come for  me last night.  The 3rd boss in BT does take all your mana, so if you are able to bandage, this would be a good time.  'When' you run oom and start blowing up, you might be able to give yourself a few more seconds with bandaids, sometimes a few more seconds is all you need...

/signed Bandaids can get you regenning outside of the mp5 -- save a big giant heal for your wovable cuddly tank!!

Fargol wrote Hanh wrote Tsuni wrote
I don't even have max lvl bandages. To me stopping to bandage instead of just using binding heal or something is silly. And it looks like other healers didnt either. Unless you weren't refering to healers at all, then ignore this post. But 7 healers + 10 bangagers accounts for 17 people, and not everyone even needs to all the time. (for example, tanks staying topped off. noticed none of them bandged) So i dunno, doesn't really seem like there was that much failure. Not talking about healers, but I am talking about non-healers. Yes 17 great but most of those people bandaged once. I didnt count.... but there were maybe 3 or 4 tidal shields.Seriously though - max level your bandaging. Anything but is unacceptable for raiding, and has been since MC. It's not like it's that costly or time consuimg. In the case of healers, certainly it's better to heal yourself, but some day, in some situation, you'll run oom have pots/healthstones on CD, and be at 2% health. Bandaging is just another last ditch trick for healers, and it's one that should be there if/when the time comes to use it.

/shrug. I can get on that. Just healed all the way through mid-AQ40 without em pre-BC. And never really had a use for them post-BC. Mana regen is so amazing, I can always just binding heal instead of wasting time bandaging.