Help needed with Council 10m normal

[NRL1515]

Hello community,

Last night we spent the entire 3 hours of our raid time working on council. After many wipes, it seemed we just were not making much progress and so I'm wondering if there's something we're overlooking, or not paying enough attention to that we may not have noticed?

Our group set up:
Tanks -
BM Monk
Prot Pally

Heals -
Holy Priest
Resto Druid
Resto Shaman

DPS -
Lock
Hunter
DK
Rogue
Mage

We've tried many different combinations of tanks/heals/dps (1 tank, 3 heals; 1 tank, 4 heals; 2 tanks, 2 heals; etc) and we never seem to get much farther than any other combination. I have a feeling that a few of our dps are sub-par, and it's hurting us because we can't seem to get Sul down before he gets empowered. I know a few people had issues standing in quicksand too long and complained their DBMs would only shout at them when they became entrapped, which by then would be too late because they already took too much ticking damage from the sand. Most of our wipes have come when Kazra'jin becomes empowered and our range can't muster enough dps on him before he starts AoE-ing the raid. I'm the MT Monk for our group, and I try to call out stuff as much as I can, but it's getting to be too much to try and see where all my group members are standing, who needs to stack for frostbite, who needs to get out of quicksand AND keep up my tanking 'rotation' and knowing when to taunt Malakk off the other tank, etc... it's a little overwhelming.

We've tried stacking the bosses for extra cleave, and we've tried sending Mar'li off on her own separate from the rest of the members. Nothing seems to work any better than any previous strategy and I'm wracking my brain trying to come up with a solution.

These logs are not from the entire night; when I saw we weren't really making progress I had our mage turn on the logs to record for the rest of the night: http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/r...tsmo3v/fights/

I hope I've provided enough information, and appreciate any help and advice that we could use.

P.S. I know we may have under-performing members. Dropping them and recruiting replacements is not an option for us. If this is all that is attributing to our wipes, then so be it. But if there's an important mechanic we're ignoring/forgetting or treating more importantly than we should, I would love to hear it. Thanks!

[Ninotchka]

When are you switching to Sul away from the empowered troll? For us, the key to killing Sul in time was to burn him while the empowered guy was low energy, and only switch when we absolutely had to. Finding that 'when we absolutely have to' line takes trial and error, and will change as your gear improves. One or two ticks of the AoE is survivable, more is a raid wipe.

We pile Sul, Malakk and Marli together and ignore the blessed loa spirits. It sounds like you've tried this tactic and rejected it, but I'd urge you to give it another go. The loa spirit has 1.4 million health, it heals for 4 million, swapping targets will lose you that much dps and losing cleave will cost more. Your DK was #1 in damage on the blessed spirits. If he had spent all those globals on the bosses instead of running around chasing spirits you'd have a better picture.

I notice that you have your paladin on Marli when he's being a tank. Even if you don't stack the trolls together, try having him start the fight by establishing aggro on Marli then come over and cleave off of Sul, taking Malakk when he does his frost stack thing. Marli's casts don't do incredible amounts of damage, and you're losing a lot of dps on the prime target by having him standing way over there. Also, the healers can aoe heal him if he's over with the melee pile. Also he can help with interrupts.

Here's his damage over all your attempts:
High Priestess Mar'li 19669021 56.7 %
Frost King Malakk 10277936 29.6 %
Sul the Sandcrawler 1895963 5.5 %
Kazra'jin 989483 2.9 %

That ought to be far more weighted towards Sul.

[NRL1515]

Thanks for the reply, I'll get with the pally and we'll tweak that a little bit.

You mentioned our DK's damage on the blessed spirits; he's our top dpser for most fights and one of our better raiders. We had him chase after spirits just because our ranged we're failing to do so. We understand that it's suboptimal, but we were at the point in the evening where we wanted to see if it would be easier on our group in any way. Obviously it wasn't.

Like you said, our first tactic was to group everyone up and just brute through the healing, but our issues came with people getting picked off to stuff they probably shouldn't have. And for some reason, most of our dps cannot see the energy bars of whoever is getting empowered (due to their UIs or w/e, I don't know), so I tried to keep an eye on it and call it out to switch off Sul to the empowered, but like I noted in my previous post, I was juggling too many things to effectively keep track of it.

This also led to our issues whenever Kazra'jin would get empowered, we cannot get him down (with just ranged dps on him) even from the beginning of him getting empowered until he wipes the raid with his aoe. We then tried having our DK peel off and help, but again, that's lost dps on Sul/cleave.

But the note about the pally sure is helpful, and hopefully it'll help out with the rest of the group. Thanks!

[lordsphinx]

We had him chase after spirits just because our ranged we're failing to do so.

but our issues came with people getting picked off to stuff they probably shouldn't have.

And for some reason, most of our dps cannot see the energy bars of whoever is getting empowered (due to their UIs or w/e, I don't know)

This also led to our issues whenever Kazra'jin would get empowered, we cannot get him down (with just ranged dps on him)

I've been in your place, but you totally answered all of your problems already. These things can't really be helped other than (as much as I hate saying it) L2P

[Deleted]

3 ranged dps should be enough really to get kazra'jin down before his empower given they swap to him asap. I'd strongly advise dropping a healer if one of them has a viable enough off-spec. If not, perhaps ask your priest to help dps (disc may be better for it) and your resto druid to pre-pot + wrath spam during bloodlust with heart of the wild at start. Yes 2-healing is a bit on the rough side but you have a monk tank and pala tank who help out in that regard, AND the fight is virtually over after a good 3 minutes if you execute it correctly and Sul is down while priestess breaks her empower. So it's not like healers have to save up much mana at all, just blow it all including their cooldowns in first 3 minutes.

[zuke8675309]

I'm not sure of the gear levels of your dpsers but looking at the log you posted, but I think you certainly have the dps to get the fight done.

A few things I'm seeing from the logs:
Your rogue is combat. While that certainly makes his numbers look good, in this fight I think it actually hurts the raid overall. Cleave damage doesn't matter. Getting Sul dead before he empowers is what matters. Blade Flurry increases overall damage at the cost of dps on the main target. He should be doing as much dps as humanly possible to his main target. My guess is that the way your Rogue is playing is the main problem.

Try number 5 your prot paladin had 33% uptime on Sacred Shield. That needs to be 95% +. It's huge for survivability for him. Similarly, his Shield of the Righteous uptime was 12% and general cooldown usage was bad bad bad. His healers probably don't like him very well. Better uptime on Sacred Shield, better uptime on Shield of the Righteous (especially when tanking Frost King) and better cooldown usage (again, while tanking Frost King) will result in your paladin not dying.

You have the exact same dps comp as my raid and you also run a prot paladin like we do. Here's a few things that we do that you might try if you haven't already:
Paladin on the priest boss and tank away from the group. Monk on Sul and obviously trade Frost King between them. Blow hero on the pull with all dps on Sul until Frost King gets to 25 energy then ranged on him to burn him down. We have our Paladin call out Blessed Loa spawns and he uses Fist of Justice to stun every one he can. We have our melee (myself as frost dk and rogue) kill every Blessed Loa and then return to Sul. Our warlock drops a Shadowfury stun if he can and will sometimes put dots on but not always. Rogue can stun the Blessed Loa, DK can chains of ice or even run away and deathgrip the blessed loa away. Melee then are back on Sul.
We have melee killing the Blessed Loas because ranged have their hands full already killing the Empowered boss and the Shadowed Loas. Once you get Sul down, everything else should fall into place.

TLDR: Your dps is fine to kill the boss. Get the rogue to stop using Blade Flurry and help your prot paladin be a better tank and you should notice a big difference.

[NRL1515]

I've been in your place, but you totally answered all of your problems already. These things can't really be helped other than (as much as I hate saying it) L2P

Right, I think that's about a good 75% of our issues, we have a couple people who - god bless them - it takes a little bit longer for things to sink in for them than it does for the rest of the group. Maybe I should have been clearer or highlighted it more, but the main point of my post was to see if there's something along the lines I was missing as far as mechanics goes, and most replies here so far have not noted that this is the case.

Try number 5 your prot paladin had 33% uptime on Sacred Shield. That needs to be 95% +. It's huge for survivability for him. Similarly, his Shield of the Righteous uptime was 12% and general cooldown usage was bad bad bad. His healers probably don't like him very well. Better uptime on Sacred Shield, better uptime on Shield of the Righteous (especially when tanking Frost King) and better cooldown usage (again, while tanking Frost King) will result in your paladin not dying.

You have the exact same dps comp as my raid and you also run a prot paladin like we do. Here's a few things that we do that you might try if you haven't already:
Paladin on the priest boss and tank away from the group. Monk on Sul and obviously trade Frost King between them. Blow hero on the pull with all dps on Sul until Frost King gets to 25 energy then ranged on him to burn him down. We have our Paladin call out Blessed Loa spawns and he uses Fist of Justice to stun every one he can. We have our melee (myself as frost dk and rogue) kill every Blessed Loa and then return to Sul. Our warlock drops a Shadowfury stun if he can and will sometimes put dots on but not always. Rogue can stun the Blessed Loa, DK can chains of ice or even run away and deathgrip the blessed loa away. Melee then are back on Sul.
We have melee killing the Blessed Loas because ranged have their hands full already killing the Empowered boss and the Shadowed Loas. Once you get Sul down, everything else should fall into place.

TLDR: Your dps is fine to kill the boss. Get the rogue to stop using Blade Flurry and help your prot paladin be a better tank and you should notice a big difference.

Thanks for the advice, especially with the pally. He used to be holy in previous tiers but was forced to go prot for MoP due to our group make-up. I'll get with him some more (I'm the monk MT) and let him know about his SS and SotR uptime... I think most of the lacking on his part was due to him trying to help me out in calling stuff out for the rest of the raid; usually he's pretty good about that stuff.

Myself (the monk), the DK, and our mage; we usually have enough DPS to carry the rest of the group through most fights, but this fight seems to call upon a greater avg dps across the board. We have very inconsistent play from our lock and rogue, which hurts us from time to time.

Thanks for all the replies so far; it helps reinforce some things our officers discussed after the raid, and we'll have a chat with our rogue and pally before we try again on wednesday. If any other thing comes to your minds, please don't hesitate to share. Cheers!