Help us out please (yet another WoL thread)

[Deleted]

First off, we are a tiny guild, with only 11active raiders at this very moment, which means a few offspecs here and there.

This thursday we did 7/8 (all normal, DW has yet to bite the dust), nothing unusual there really. Feel free to go thru the logs thou. Help on any encounter is greatly appreciated. It also needs to be said that Shindrella (Bear/moonkin) is completely new to tanking.

Our real problem is deathwing. I know this log is kind of sparse with only a few attempts on DW. But feel free to look at older logs too, setup barely changes. (not sure how to find em actually, WoL-Noob). Are really just looking for help to improve performance for everyone, anything really. since it seems to be so very very little we need to get to that next phase.

Aaaaand ofc i can't link anything yet.

well WoL.com/reports /xcgu3itn8nqfrwz6/

Hopefully this will be sufficient to find the log, otherwise plz let me know

[Ineras]

It seems that the Elementium Bolt + Impale on the tank is what is the cause of those wipes. I'm not a tank so I'm not sure if that is because of a healing issue or a tanking issue. Just remember that you take less damage from the initial hit of the Bolt the farther you are away. Have everyone stack in the Shaman's spirit link totem for the initial blast of the Elementium Bolt (and then spread back out quickly if the Corrupted Tentacle is still up) and have your boomkin use tranquility on the third platform and shadow priest use Divine Hymn on the fourth platform (or vice versa, or both on the last platform since the 20% health buff will be gone for that one) to help with the healing at those points. If you are still having trouble with that you may want to try a G>R>Y>B order for the platforms; that way you will only have to deal with the one bolt which will land on the fourth platform.

[Deleted]

Alright lets see here.

Comp
You are missing 10% crit from your buffs, you lack the 5% crit debuff and the 5% crit aura. Your mage can respec fire (which is higher DPS anyway) for the 5% debuff, to get the aura you'd need either a Fury War, Sub Rogue, Ele Sham, Feral Druid, or hunter pet. So it's a bit harder for you to get, but the mage should respec (and reforge for fire, etc.)

Tank deaths
Tank keeps dying to the 2nd Impale. You do know that tanking a 2nd Impale on the same platform will hit for way harder right? The way to solo tank the fight is by abusing BoP, you'd need your pallies to spec into reduced BoP cooldown in the ret tree then take turns BoPing the tank during 2nd Impale. Someone has to OT the tentacle during this, shadow priest in dispersion works well so long as your melee move out of melee range. They will have to attack an Elementium Bolt anyway so it all adds up perfectly.

Healers
Pally - stop casting HR on the same person over and over, cast it on different target so the HoT isn't overwritten. I can't see their holy gear on armory, spec looks ok but glyph of LoD should be replaced with DP.
Shaman - needs to pick up Telluric Currents. This is a fight that has both a huge amount of downtime to LB in and increased damage taken by mobs for extra LB power. Telluric Currents is a huge mana gain on this fight, in fact it's a great talent for most of DS and I cry when I see shamans without it.
Priest - Looks ok from what I can see

DPS
I can't get too in-depth here, lets just say their DPS is a tad low. A lot of that is in the gear and raid buffs you're missing, 10% crit is a lot of DPS lost.

Strat
I don't know what you do, but what I'd do is this:
Green -> Red -> Bronze -> Blue
-Tank takes 1st Impale always, with a hand of Sac from the paladins. Every 2nd Impale the melee move out of melee range and prepare to attack the bolt while the spriest goes into melee, when the Impale comes a pally BoPs the tank and spriest disperses. Impale ends, tank cancels BoP and taunts.
DPS need to kill the bolt fast, adds fast, tentacles fast etc. Try not to DPS the arm/limb boss too low before the Corruption spawns, that makes healing much harder. Nothing special until 4th platform.
-On the 4th platform you gotta soak a bolt so when it's coming stack far away from it (except for tank and spriest), use all raid CDs and survive it. Then finish off the bolt and the pillar.
-In phase 2 bloodlust, kill 1st spawn of tentacles and first set of adds (tank use CDs after the first add dies). Kill 2nd spawn of tentacles but ignore 2nd set of big adds and burn boss.

CDs
Raid cooldowns - tank 4pc, rallying cry, aura mastery, SLT, Barrier, Divine Hymn, Tranq, Hymn of Hope, etc. They are usable a lot, so use them. Bloodlust is also usable twice, so use it. Having both priest Hymn of Hope at the same time twice in the fight helps a TON for healers. Remember Spriest and Boomkin tranquility too. Remember to use the green buff and personal CDs. In general pre-plan and optimize when you will use what for maximum coverage, even on the easy pillars. Making the easy pillars even easier will help prepare you for the harder ones.

[Kurzior]

Firstly, your warrior tank took 5 hits from impale over the course of the fight. This may be a problem of low dps or it could be that people just aren't switching to the corruption tentacle quickly enough. In either case, you shouldn't have him soak 2 impales on the same platform as its nearly impossible to survive 2 of them back to back without using Hand of Protection or some similar immunity ability.

Second, he's pretty clearly not hitting some kind of cd for at least 1 of the impales. He takes a 200k+ hit on the last platform, indicating no cd was active. The base hit is 400k, and the average plate tank has about 50% reduced physical damage from armor, meaning with a good cd, he shouldn't take more than 80-90k. There are ways around this, Guardian Spirit, Hand of Protection, Hand of Sacrifice, etc. Even having a ret paladin taunt and bubble if the warrior has no cd available. Bottom line though, he can't afford to soak the hit unmitigated.

The other thing that seems to be killing your raid is that you get a few people hit by the tentacle's Crush right after a bolt hits and they're still at low health. There are a few ways to beat this. If your healers are strong enough, go to 1 tank/2 heal, so the extra dps can kill the tentacle before the bolt lands, removing a source of damage. Otherwise, make sure you can stack raid cd's for the bolt impact. In my raid, we use Aura Mastery and Divine Guardian (replace with Shield Wall + warrior tank 4-set), and then use Rally Cry and our Boomkin's Tranquility after the hit to recover before the next crush.

[Deleted]

We do use external cooldowns on the 4th platform(hand of protection from me, Retpally). But if the corrupter gets to cast the crush, yea then we pretty much just die.
I think we figured out the proper way to do it, but out problem is really the DPS. I am not sure if our healers are capable of 2healing it. Even if they were, then we don't actually have another DPS to swap in, nor any offspecs.

Our mage flatout refuses to go anything but arcane, and we are kinda ok with that since he plays it rather well. I see we really could use the 10% crit, actually thought we only missed out on the 5%crit debuff. But that would defintely put us over the edge.

Does anyone see any improvements that could be made of specific DPSers? reforges? gems? use of bursts? uptimes etc? i don't really have extensive knowledge of most classes, so really conting on you guys to help us get the few extra %

[Deleted]

Does anyone see any improvements that could be made of specific DPSers? reforges? gems? use of bursts? uptimes etc? i don't really have extensive knowledge of most classes, so really conting on you guys to help us get the few extra %

Your raid, your decisions but I just gotta say... flatout refuses to respec to fire? Because he plays it rather well? Arcane is a 1 button wonder, a blind ape could play it rather well. So he refuses to increase his personal DPS because what? He doesn't wanna press 2-3 more buttons? AND he refuses to buff the raid's DPS with 5% crit even though it will make the difference for a kill. With an attitude like that you'll struggle on more than just this boss.

But whatever floats your boat, for more DPS you can do a few things that I see. For one your priest could use an atonement spec and DPS the corruption, there's very minimal healing to do at that part of the fight anyway so he should be perfectly capable of smiting until the bolt comes, it'll probably get you 10k more DPS on the corruption, maybe more even. Atonement specs are quite common in DS and useful on a lot of fights, it'll definitely help. Also your shaman's telluric currents will help on DPS as well as vastly increasing his mana.

Last but not least I can't see anything glaringly wrong with your DPSers logs but there is room for improvement in their gear, a subpar enchant here or an upgradable item slot there. Little things that do add up, especially those boot/bracer item slots. I'm sure with an entire guild of people and alts you could find the valor or gold for BoE boot/bracers for all your main raiders if you really wanted to.

[Deleted]

Not really gonna comment on the magespec, yes it is annoying and it would have ment the difference on ALOT of the tries, but can't force respecs on people.

Great suggestion with the attonement! and ofc the shaman telluric currents. even if they just pushed something like a combined 15k during corrupters, it would make the difference (in most cases).

I wasn't aware that we had people who wasn't wearing 397wrists+boots, but yes! that is almost unacceptable this late in the content(and after wiping for DAYS on dw, mostly due to dps issues).

thanx for the replies. Tomorrow we will have the entire evening to try out the different suggestions mentioned in the thread :-)

[Soranii]

You're doing normal. All immunities work on impale. Bop/bubble/vanish/iceblock etc.

Don't take damage you don't need to.

Cloak bolt landing, iceblock bolt landing, bubble bolt landing, etc.

shadowpriest soak an impale... etc.

There are many ways to deal with impale that do not directly involve a tank, if it is a % reduction it works, do the math on what you'll need to survive.

note: don't even consider trying anything but dispersion for heroic, they don't work

[Deleted]

as a rogue in the same position i just found out that on the 4'th platform i am able to cleave the main limb whil attack the small tenticlas
and you cheating

[Deleted]

Thanx alot MMO-people! Sunday we had alot of very good tries and finally managed to see phase2, but unfortunately we had to pug a not-so-good hunter only doing 33000dps, so we came a few % short during the final stage..

But tuesday we had our mage back and despite missing out on a few buffs we downed him with close to no problems. But couldn't have done it without our disc going attonement.

Log is here worldoflogs.com/reports/1prq524emseamyga/ (there seems to be only 2attempts logged, not sure why, but our kill is in there) and would still love suggestions on how to improve personal performances for each and every raidmember. Would love if someone who knows anything about retribution would go into further detail on my cooldown usage/overall performance. We can all get better, and we know it!