Lyntha

That's a surprisingly positive way to look at it!

:-O Hope its not damaged irreparably

It's just the ice waves that kill you. The bubble knocks you back anyways so it's not really an issue. We have two ways to handle this. Everyone run to the edge to start. This will delay the healing output needed. Or everyone get knocked back like normal THEN run in. I think that this might be more problematic just because we're starting to take damage immediately. Maybe with a stamp roar, we'd be fine. We'll see. And yeah, we're gonna do lightning phase positions before pulling.

You're starting to sound like me. I agree with pretty much everything you said, thank you.

This is more or less what we're gonna try, with stacking occuring in the middle this time.

Locks are the most changed class in MoP. Perhaps you were right Vile...

Then you'd ruin my spreadsheet! It needs Some sort of reference as to how many days constitute 100% attendance so it references your total number of attended days.

Ideally, we actually want ranged/healers to be in the VERY middle. This allows them to heal/dps/dispel from the same place. Splitting in two just allows us to stick healers and dispellers in the middle and help out the melee groups with heals/dispels. Upon thinking more, I think that the best choice might just be to have EVERYONE get close and as soon as bubble is popped, one healer pops a tranq/hymn while another pops a raid-wall (AM or Tank Raidwall) and we all run to the middle. All the while, healers can pop SWG, CD's etc to get us there. ONce we get in the middle, the people in the middle will be able to dps all the pillars and heal all the people without moving. Your guys' thoughts? On my attendance spreadsheet, the FIRST person listed has to be 100% attendance. Previously, that was me. Since I'm trying to tone down how much I play WoW (When able to), I changed it to be you. So you're at the very top. Putting you there is in direct conflict with how I order people on my spreadsheet. It's suppose to go tanks --> Healers --> DPS. I know the tanks and healers off the top of my head and what their attendance is since there's so few but I didn't know all of the DPS' attendance. When I made that post, I looked at the middle of my spreadsheet and just added people in that had high attendance. Since I have you listed at the top, I missed you

Let's review the status of our attempts on this fight: 1.) Lightning phase seems good. We occasionally have mistakes but practice will make perfect. 2.) Normal phase seems OK but we haven't had a whole lot of tries on this phase. 3.) Frost Phase is the worst phase. Let's review our frost phase problems: 1.) Even with 7 healers, we are not putting out sufficient healing in the middle. I don't think that this is our healers messing up as our healers are routinely putting out 30k+ HPS during that phase. It seems like it's just TOO MUCH healing. I think that the issue is that we are ranged heavy and we're just sticking too many ranged in the middle. 2.) Melee are not getting the first crystal down by the second pass. Again, we are ranged heavy. To try to solve both issues, I am thinking that we will adopt updated frost phase positioning and move some of the ranged to the outside. This will allow the first crystal to die reliably while also taking some ranged dps out of the middle. We will 6 heal this (Instead of the 7-healing we're doing now) and stick our mobile healers and mobile ranged dps on the outside. I think that it might be a bit too demanding to demand that our mobile healers heal on the run, while dispelling, while healing, while dodging falling icicles, while running from ice waves. To solve this issue, we'll have 2 groups in the middle instead of one and we'll have 1 dispeller IN THE VERY MIDDLE. That dispeller should be able to reach anyone inside the water globule. The positioning will look like the following: The ranged groups will start at Triangle and Diamond and stay where they land, starting on the crystal closest to them. The ranged will throw up dots on Square and nuke down their platform. If we only have chex as the only druid, we're going to stick 3 ranged dps in Diamond and 2 in Triangle so that Triangle is still up when the melee and ranged on the outside get to it. Melee, mobile healer and movement RDPS will all start on X. A sample group makeup would be the following: Group 1 (Tanks + Extras): Mantra Kalikk Sazda Snugg Vertanni Group 2 (Melee): Rebel Ninja Chosi Zenzae Axe Group 3 (Triangle): Jlogg Heavenzy Brynneth Baneraiser Mordechai Group 4 (Square - Moves): Chex Wilistari Mordechai Darkhuntar Thundere Group 5 (Diamond): Boredman Deftonia Sefi Wilistari Bash Updated: Our recommended movement RDPS: Ele Shaman --> Hunters --> Fire mage Ele Shamans can spam Lbolt while moving and briefly stop to cast LvB in addtion to their instant casts (Shocks, etc). They lose almost NO DPS by moving. This is also a good time for SWG. Hunters can switch to fox to hit cobra while moving and all other abilities are instant cast so we don't lose a whole lot by moving. Fire Mages can spam scorch and keep up LB's while moving. Although this would kill any chance of combusting during this phase, the fire mages should be saving combust for normal phases anyways, preferably during feedback. Although scorch is not as powerful as FBall, they also get more Imp HS procs and Scorch still hits decently hard for its cast speed. Spriests have no spammable abilities while moving thanks to VT, MF and MB all being casted. Although Dots are powerful and will keep ticking while moving, it doesn't make up for the fact that 3 core rotational abilities are casted. Locks are in the same boat as spriests. Although they DO have a spammable ability they can use on the moves, it's relatively weak. Boomkins are similar to the other classes. Although lunar shower allows your moonfire spam to hit decently hard (And keeps your balance bar moving), they still lose a fair bit of damage while moving.

My condolences

A good lock will always beat a bad shadowpriest, fire mage, boomkin or any other class

Eh it's basic risk management.

I just don't see us staying alive while we move to the middle. That's so much damage.

In the exact middle? How do you get there? If you take a look at my diagram, we stack a bit outside of the middle and get knocked back when the bubble spawns. Where we land is where we mostly stay. This allows us to dps 3 out of the 4 pillars with melee solely responsible for the one they start on.

Just as a point of reference... Take a look at our attendance spreadsheet right here: https://docs.google....&hl=en_US#gid=7 We were missing 8 people, 8! And we downed a new heroic boss. I'm working with what I got. On both nights, we literally had just enough people to raid (25) and nothing more. If I had people sitting who would do more damage than the people already in, I would have sat them. While this guild is clearly more of a raiding community than a hardcore progression guild (And that's what I love about it), we do have expectations of bringing your best when we raid. If somebody is not performing up to par, the officers work on performance improvement during non-raid times. If it's affecting our ability to down a boss (Like it was on H Yor), we sit the particular person and bring in somebody else, IF THERE ARE PEOPLE AVAILABLE. If there were alternates for our 2/3 people that were low on Heroic Yor, you bet your ass I would've brought somebody else in. Also Vile, I can see how locks would be suboptimal on Hagara but it's not the most difficult fight out there compared to Spine, Madness and Blackhorn. While you're suboptimal, I highly doubt that any guild would wipe on that fight because locks did 1k less dps than another class because their dps requires ramp-up time. As Sazda said, you still have pretty good multi-dotting and burst AOE opportunities. Obviously, Demo is tits for short, bursty AOE with Demon Form + Immolation Aura + Felstorm and both Afflic and Destro are awesome at multi-dotting due to Bane/Dots. You guys even out! Now locks are clearly awful on spine but a ton of classes are. Hunters were sat for that fight too because of our pets and lack of burst CD's. That fight in particular was just a fail on blizzard's end, something they acknowledged by the great spine nerf.

I guess that we can stick eles outside, they lose almost no damage from movement.

What is the problem that makes locks so bad on Hagara??

In theory that sounds good but in reality we have too many points of failure. The best strategy is the path of least resistance. If we leave it at 20% and melee DONT finish it, we have to walk back to it, while being slowed and taking a ton of damage. Not to mention it's kind of difficult to place it at an optimum HP level where it will have enough HP for melee to stick their teeth into it but have a small enough amount of HP that they can finish it off. Either it's got too much HP and melee dont finish it or it's got too little and it's wasted dps time regardless. While I'm sure that we CAN practice it enough to get it right, the fact is that it will take PRACTICE to get the timing and coordination down. Practice in this case means wiping when we fail.

Upon thinking about it, I think you're right Saz. Our movement DPS would probably be best utilized there. If melee can't kill their pillar by second pass, we'll move hunters over one by one until it's down consistently. Edit: I just didn't want to have melee unable to dps ANYTHING. I think that we should just reverse our DPS order to start on West AND North then all switch to East at the same time. My thinking is that the west and north will be up until right after melee passes them up. Then we all switch to east and it blows up.

While we have excellent movement DPS, we always just have plain excellent dps and killing it by having us move would be bad. A fire mage would probably be best since scorch is spammable while moving and they can keep up 3 LB's pretty easily. I don't know, I'll think about it.

Agreed. Although RNG does play a LITTLE bit of a factor at the extremely high parses, any gear or skill differences are factored out. Any strat or time differences are usually ironed out as well as typically the only people geared enough to parse in the top 10 are in very high-end guilds that use similar strats and have similar fight lengths. The top parses are about as consistent as you can get.

I don't think that master's call would dispel that. Even if it did, it would probably leave behind the frost patch.

Be ready for this fight guys. Take a look at the diagram above. Let me know if you have any questions.

That's not true at all. Look at fire mages on Heroic Yor'sahj. The DPS potential is limited (Mostly) by skill. I imagine that 50% of mages pull less than 40k on that fight. That doesn't accurately reflect the state of fire mages on that fight.