H Spoils Help

[Notdev]

So we just got to Spoils yesterday, and put in like 7-8 attempts. DPS was an issue, but one of our healers was playing Boomkin for raid buffs, even though his Feral gear is a good 15 ilvls better. He's going Feral tonight.

Had a few questions..

What's the ideal box opening combination? We were doing 2 big - 6 medium - 4 small, but I've heard/read many other combinations.

How should we split up groups, considering the player's DPS and raid buffs? Here's our comp and how I rank them DPS wise:
Ret paladin
Frost DK
Hunter
Warlock
(First 4 are all very close and on any given fight any of them could top damage and I wouldn't be surprised)
Fire Mage (Not far behind)
Feral Druid (can play Boomkin, but he's got better gear for Feral. Either way, it's his offspec and he's a little behind gear wise, but on the other hand the caster group will lose 5% haste)

For tanks, we have a Blood DK and Prot Warrior, the DK does a bit more damage than the Warrior.
For healers, we have a Disc Priest and Holy Paladin. Priest does a decent amount of damage without the healing buff.

We were probably consistently 10-15 seconds behind on one side, and the other side consistently 10-20 seconds ahead.

Any other tips you have to help us net our first kill?

Thanks in advance for any help

[blharkness]

1) Can't understate the potential value of the healer buff. You can have him shooting it at sparks, or mobs, or players, but ultimately have them make it a game to hit as many targets as possible with every proc. It's a game changer if optimized.

2) The only mob combination you need to really worry about (as far as making the timers) is getting double robots on the mogu side. If this happens, focus one down ASAP, use dps CDs if necessary. Move them constantly, they WILL heal each other an insane amount; you just have to minimize it.

3) On the mantid side, it can be extremely helpful to dispel the healing buff the priests cast on all enemies, if you can swing it. Your best bet, mana allowing is to have your priest mass-dispelling it or your mage stealing it (speaking of which, make ABSOLUTELY sure your mage knows to steal the damage buff). Otherwise, hunter, dk (with glyph), warrior or whatever offensive disspells you can muster

[Deja Thoris]

To be honest if you are getting that close in 7-8 attempts you just need to look at your pathing slightly or just open boxes a teeny bit more aggressively.

The order you open them in matters too. For instance on the mantid side I open up the big fella then 2 small boxes in total (one at a time) so they can get cleaved down. Then I save the second large for later when peoples cooldowns are up again.

On the mogu side the big boss seems to do more AoE damage but you can really go to town when opening smalls as log as you focus down urns. It may pay you to open more smalls here for teams with good cleave as 2 anima golems can really mess up your day.

I can only re-iterate the power of the buffs. If no healing buff is present then drag the big fellas to the middle to cleave down sparks. If the healing buff is present position so it hits sparks and as many players / open boxes as possible. Put the disc on the side where you struggle with damage the most and have them wear the dps cloak if they aren't already. It's good damage.

[Teebu]

1) Can't understate the potential value of the healer buff. You can have him shooting it at sparks, or mobs, or players, but ultimately have them make it a game to hit as many targets as possible with every proc. It's a game changer if optimized.

2) The only mob combination you need to really worry about (as far as making the timers) is getting double robots on the mogu side. If this happens, focus one down ASAP, use dps CDs if necessary. Move them constantly, they WILL heal each other an insane amount; you just have to minimize it.

3) On the mantid side, it can be extremely helpful to dispel the healing buff the priests cast on all enemies, if you can swing it. Your best bet, mana allowing is to have your priest mass-dispelling it or your mage stealing it (speaking of which, make ABSOLUTELY sure your mage knows to steal the damage buff). Otherwise, hunter, dk (with glyph), warrior or whatever offensive disspells you can muster

In regards to the damage buff; it doesn'† actually give you damage even thought it says so. It's still good to dispel, but ideally by the Priest so the Mage can keep on doing what he does seeing as you had some DPS issues.

[Notdev]

Thanks for the tips so far guys, hopefully we'll kill it tonight.

- - - Updated - - -

Didn't get it, but got even closer. Its a cop out but I think another week of gear will net us the kill easily.

[Cantor]

This is how we do it on the Mantid -> Mogu side; we have one side (Mantid) open a boss, then all of their trash, then their boss, while the Mogu side opens half of their trash, then Boss1, Boss2 and finishes off their trash. When your boss is being killed, tank it in the middle of the room. This is a huge help because it doesn't matter whether you get the tank or healer buffs, as your tank will be stood next to the sparks when they spawn (Room1 is kill trash, thus spawning sparks, while Room2 is killing their boss, and vice versa).

So in the Mantid room, we open both Panda boxes, then the Boss crate at Diamond (tanking it in the middle of the room), then I (Feral) run/Displacer Beast over to the 2 mediums and 2 smalls at Cross when our boss is at 5% and pop them open; while these are dying, they're dragged over to Moon, and we pop open the medium and 4 smalls there. When these die/are nearly dead, I again DB over to Star and open the 2 mediums and 1 small there; we kill these, pop our last boss (Circle) and kill him in the middle of the room.

When we move to Mogu, we reverse our order, so we're opening trash first. Start with the 2 mediums and 2 smalls at Diamond, then the 2 smalls and medium at Cross. Usually the other group have killed their boss by now, so we open one of our bosses, BL, second pot and and kill it; when he's low (5% or so) we open our last boss (I save Berserk/NV for this so our Resto Druid can DPS with HotW). Once both are down, we open the 2 mediums and 1 small at Star and Moon (unless the first you open is a Golem, in which case you don't want to take the risk of having 2 up).