Last Thursday night's Festergut attempts were good and worthwhile. I mentioned a few things over vent, but I want to list them out here.
1) It's been a while, but we're back on content where it will take more than one night to figure things out and work on our execution once we do figure things out. There are some old timers in the guild who remember how long entire servers (not just guilds) worked on making progress on new bosses in Molten Core.
2) Every wipe is worthwhile. Speaking for the healers, it has been a long time since we were subjected to a true 25 man healing load. Speaking for myself, I'm quite a bit rusty and it is taking a while for me to recognize and understand the damage patterns that I'm seeing during the course of the fight and tweak my own responses to match those damage patterns.
3) For the DPS, it is very true that at our current learning stage, the ball is in the court of the healers and tanks to get their mechanics down. However, these attempts are valuable time for you to practice your own DPS and survival mechanics. If you look at our attempts in the WoL last night, the friendly fire from Vile Gas (the barf) is almost nonexistent on our later attempts -- the DPS did properly figure out how to maintain their spacing, set up rapidly at the beginning of the fight, and recover rapidly after gathering for spores. DPS needs to keep up the good work, I expect the ball to be in your court very soon as healers figure things out and we hit the enrage timer consistently. Things to think about and experiment with a little are:
3a) Using instant DPS abilities on the run.
3b) If I'm a lucky ranged DPS who gets to stand nearby the spore gathering point, how much of my rotation can I squeeze in while standing around waiting for the spore to explode.
Starting next week, we will set a cap on Festergut attempts assuming that we are making satisfactory, but not 'breakthrough' progress. The cap will be set at a little under one hour after the first Festergut pull, that way you only have to use 1 flask. That will leave us with two hours to jump over to ToC25 or another raid (perhaps the raid weekly) to finish off the night.
1) Please don't just skip out on Thursday night raids. While you may think you yourself have everything figured out about Festergut (or whatever new boss we're working on), your presence is needed so that the others still practicing their mechanics can get them done correctly. Healers will not learn anything without a proper 25 man healing load. DPS will not learn proper positioning without 25 people competing for space in a positioning based encounter, and so forth.
2) Please don't just show up for the ToC25 part of the night and ditch the ICC25 part for the reasons stated above.
3) Please don't just show up for the ICC25 part and ditch the ToC25 part of the night. The real value of doing ToC25 as a guild is that we don't have to deal with PUGs. Try to save your main's raid ID (or at least one of an appropriately geared alt -- blues/greens don't count for an appropriately geared alt) for the ToC25 so that we can fill the raid.
4) Please don't just wait for ICC25 to be nerfed. The nerf is not going to be so great that we can just beat the boss with zero practice. The time we spend practicing now means that if we still can't beat this boss before the nerf, we will definitely one shot it after the nerf. Also, by practicing under duress now, we will become better raiders and have the skills to tackle harder bosses (I'm pretty sure that Festergut is not going to be the hardest boss in this instance). If we are making breakthrough progress where we as a raid truly feel that downing Festergut is just around the corner (e.g., we've got healing and tanking figured out and we're seeing steady improvements in raid DPS with various tweaks), we will stick with Festergut (or whatever new boss) for the night.
This is a departure from how we did things in BC, but when learning new content nowadays, we don't need to bash our heads into the wall for a full 3 hours to make progress. The way I see it, our learning process will be:
1) Read up on the encounter and watch videos before the raid.
2) Do the first pull. Inventory what we observed went wrong.
3) Make one or two changes to the raid setup or execution plan to address one or two things that went wrong. We won't try to solve everything that went wrong -- we keep things manageable.
4) Repeat the pull, evaluate if the changes solved the problem. If so, grab one or two more items from the inventory of things that go wrong and repeat.
5) At the one hour mark as flasks fall off, decide if it's going to be a breakthrough night or not.
6) If not, review the WoL logs after the raid and discuss strategies on the forums.
7) Practice some stuff in the 10 man versions to see if they are good candidates for the 25s.
8) We are now prepared for the next Thursday night.
Before, there were no 10s to practice in. You had to get 25 people together to work on mechanics because there was no other way to have the boss to practice on. In WotLK, I think we will get a reasonable bang for buck and minimize burnout by capping attempts at one hour if it isn't a breakthrough night -- enough things can be done outside of the raid to still make progress.
Lastly, as people get more gear (from doing the guild ToC25, 10s, badges, and whatnot) and we eventually get the zone wide buff, the breakthrough night will come sooner than you think.
I'll have a post in the raid strategy forums to outline what I think we should try tweaking for the healing.
-HP