(WoW) Deathbringer Saurfang
... is hard.
For the... umm... several-th week in a row, he's proving the roadblock to us in Icecrown Citadel. That's not fun, and some people are getting frustrated with it. Me, I'm actually fairly happy we can usually get to him.
Last night, we had our typical offtank down for a couple reasons, and pulled in another up-and-coming paladin. More experience might have made Ignis go a little smoother (we sort of powered through him on our successful attemp, and I think I have a screenshot of at least four adds pounding on me while I was tanking the boss), but I didn't perceive any tanking problems in ICC. Even on the low end of what's "acceptable" for the place, it might have put a little more pressure on the healers but worked out just fine. Lady Deathwhisper took us three attempts, and part of this seems to be luck as far as add-buffing and where her Death and Decays land. The airship battle was one-shot readily enough, though I got disoriented after a jump and walked off the ship. Strangely, it 'ported me back onto the Skybreaker rather than letting me fall to my death. I picked up the tanking neck from Marrowgar (yay) and saw the shield drop on the airship, but made sure to roll for that - it may be the only real upgrade available to me, but it's a bigger jump for Tarken and I'm actually glad it worked out that each of us got one of those pieces.
Deathbringer Saurfang... ow. On the up side, we're getting the execution down. We wiped on him something like... four or five times, anyway. Through all of that, I think we caught blood beasts with accidental AOE maybe three times (I know I saw myself do it once). We were controlling his blood power intact such that he only got off one Mark of the Fallen Champion in the fight. We got him to his 30% health frenzy reliably. But we have trouble with that last 10-15% health, where we're losing someone to the mark and he's hitting hard - and then we hit his enrage timer (8 minutes, according to my DBM) and die. For a first time raid tanking, Tarken did excellent on taunt trading and while it may have been harder, he was healable (judgement based on not seeing him die early). I feel tanking of the fight is solid. Healing is pretty good as far as I can tell, we don't look Marked people right away, though eventually we tend to lose the first one. But we simply aren't doing enough damage to him over the course of the fight to counter his healing (damn, watching his health yo-yo is almost as back as GW bosses) and down him before his enrage timer.
So... we need more DPS. There was some discussion about focusing on the boss versus getting blood beasts down fast - I think that's largely a moot point. You can't afford to leave the beasts up for long. It would be ideal to leave the melee just on the boss and ignore the beasts entirely, leaving them to ranged to handle, but even with a less-melee-heavy composition than usual last night, we didn't seem to have enough ranged DPS to do that. And we can't add more people, so... we need to get our DPS characters better equipped/skilled/whatever, I guess. It doesn't help that my own DPS output is cut back in the fight due to limiting AOE abilities, but tanks aren't big contributors anyway. According to Recount, some people are putting in 4-5k, but there was at least one just over 2k. I'm not sure about our average, or what's technically needed, but it appears we need more whatever it is. Part of me wants to go around and audit everyone on the rotations they're using and such, but I don't want to do that. I want to trust in people to know how to get the most out of their classes.
Warning: Extremely rough theory...
Saurfang starts with 8.7 million health. It's really hard to judge how much you have to burn through because he heals some from his abilities. If the Marked person dies, he gets 5% back just from that. Rounding up to 9m and granting that 5% gives 9.45m. Figure we have to get through at least that much, probably more. If his enrage is 8 minutes, that's 19,688 DPS raid total on him to kill him by that time. Figure tanks might contribute about 3,500 total, two healers doing almost nothing, and that leaves 2,698 DPS for each of the six DPS characters to average over the course of the fight specifically to Saurfang.
That's about where my theoreticals end, though. The practical requirement is higher than that if he heals more, and this totally ignores the loss of DPS on the boss from having to burn down the blood beasts, too. I have seen one post saying you need 3,666 average DPS minimum throughout the fight to win - but I didn't see the math that came to that number.
Still, if we can keep doing that, it's something. 6 Emblems of Frost from ICC, 5 from the weekly raid quest, up to 14 for the week from random dungeons. If our active raiders can pull in 25 emblems of Frost a week, that's a new, top of the line piece of equipment every three or so. 'course, that may be a lot to ask, too. We'll see if we get any deeper...
For the... umm... several-th week in a row, he's proving the roadblock to us in Icecrown Citadel. That's not fun, and some people are getting frustrated with it. Me, I'm actually fairly happy we can usually get to him.
Last night, we had our typical offtank down for a couple reasons, and pulled in another up-and-coming paladin. More experience might have made Ignis go a little smoother (we sort of powered through him on our successful attemp, and I think I have a screenshot of at least four adds pounding on me while I was tanking the boss), but I didn't perceive any tanking problems in ICC. Even on the low end of what's "acceptable" for the place, it might have put a little more pressure on the healers but worked out just fine. Lady Deathwhisper took us three attempts, and part of this seems to be luck as far as add-buffing and where her Death and Decays land. The airship battle was one-shot readily enough, though I got disoriented after a jump and walked off the ship. Strangely, it 'ported me back onto the Skybreaker rather than letting me fall to my death. I picked up the tanking neck from Marrowgar (yay) and saw the shield drop on the airship, but made sure to roll for that - it may be the only real upgrade available to me, but it's a bigger jump for Tarken and I'm actually glad it worked out that each of us got one of those pieces.
Deathbringer Saurfang... ow. On the up side, we're getting the execution down. We wiped on him something like... four or five times, anyway. Through all of that, I think we caught blood beasts with accidental AOE maybe three times (I know I saw myself do it once). We were controlling his blood power intact such that he only got off one Mark of the Fallen Champion in the fight. We got him to his 30% health frenzy reliably. But we have trouble with that last 10-15% health, where we're losing someone to the mark and he's hitting hard - and then we hit his enrage timer (8 minutes, according to my DBM) and die. For a first time raid tanking, Tarken did excellent on taunt trading and while it may have been harder, he was healable (judgement based on not seeing him die early). I feel tanking of the fight is solid. Healing is pretty good as far as I can tell, we don't look Marked people right away, though eventually we tend to lose the first one. But we simply aren't doing enough damage to him over the course of the fight to counter his healing (damn, watching his health yo-yo is almost as back as GW bosses) and down him before his enrage timer.
So... we need more DPS. There was some discussion about focusing on the boss versus getting blood beasts down fast - I think that's largely a moot point. You can't afford to leave the beasts up for long. It would be ideal to leave the melee just on the boss and ignore the beasts entirely, leaving them to ranged to handle, but even with a less-melee-heavy composition than usual last night, we didn't seem to have enough ranged DPS to do that. And we can't add more people, so... we need to get our DPS characters better equipped/skilled/whatever, I guess. It doesn't help that my own DPS output is cut back in the fight due to limiting AOE abilities, but tanks aren't big contributors anyway. According to Recount, some people are putting in 4-5k, but there was at least one just over 2k. I'm not sure about our average, or what's technically needed, but it appears we need more whatever it is. Part of me wants to go around and audit everyone on the rotations they're using and such, but I don't want to do that. I want to trust in people to know how to get the most out of their classes.
Warning: Extremely rough theory...
Saurfang starts with 8.7 million health. It's really hard to judge how much you have to burn through because he heals some from his abilities. If the Marked person dies, he gets 5% back just from that. Rounding up to 9m and granting that 5% gives 9.45m. Figure we have to get through at least that much, probably more. If his enrage is 8 minutes, that's 19,688 DPS raid total on him to kill him by that time. Figure tanks might contribute about 3,500 total, two healers doing almost nothing, and that leaves 2,698 DPS for each of the six DPS characters to average over the course of the fight specifically to Saurfang.
That's about where my theoreticals end, though. The practical requirement is higher than that if he heals more, and this totally ignores the loss of DPS on the boss from having to burn down the blood beasts, too. I have seen one post saying you need 3,666 average DPS minimum throughout the fight to win - but I didn't see the math that came to that number.
Still, if we can keep doing that, it's something. 6 Emblems of Frost from ICC, 5 from the weekly raid quest, up to 14 for the week from random dungeons. If our active raiders can pull in 25 emblems of Frost a week, that's a new, top of the line piece of equipment every three or so. 'course, that may be a lot to ask, too. We'll see if we get any deeper...
An audit of the guild, as a whole, via a service like WoW-Heroes reveals that only about six of the members are cut out for ICC, and one of us (that'd be you, dear) is only going to be challenged by ICC 25-man. So there's definately a gear issue. I'll also include the caveat the other guild I'm in uses. When their druid tank isn't holding Saurfang, he goes cat and helps DPS until the time for a taunt trade, then shifts and taunts. This adds in extra DPS on the encounter not normally being provided for.
ReplyDeleteThis is part of why I'm not really upset we aren't getting farther. ;) And a druid tank can do that, and it helps some. A paladin... not so much. We could drop Righteous Fury between taunts, but there isn't any way to boost our actual DPS output during that time (save popping wings, but I do that just as easily while I am actively tanking. Instead, we have to lay off the Consecrate and Hammer of the Righteous that are normally part of our maximum threat/DPS rotation.
ReplyDeleteI'd also have to say I have a minor worry about the whole "switch modes to DPS" is that it may overly complicate things. I'm already keeping track of WAY more in this fight than normal, watching DBM timers for blood beasts and keeping an eye on the rune debuff while trying to be aware of what's going on. Having to hear "rune," process that, shift to bear, get in front of him, and taunt seems like it could very well add a few seconds to the transition. Is the increase in DPS worth taking a couple hits on a Runed tank? I don't know.
ReplyDelete