We set up a rogue chat channel to talk privately to all rogues that may have any questions and make sure everyone knows what they're doing as the raid leaders are setting strategies up. Think that might be beneficial to set up a chat channel for each class? that way if there are any questions for anyone new to the strategies they can join that said class and they can all chat in there. If there is a class lead, they can issue out orders to their class in that channel as well. might limit some raid chatting and sometimes you miss things from the raid channel going by too fast. and it's fun to talk to your group and get to know them even outside of raids. I know most of the time all the same class is in the same group so you just party chat but sometimes you get more than 5 of a class. This will resolve that and even allow the groups to be mixed up if needed.
anyway. just a though.
This is a great idea, and its something a lot of classes have implemented already. Here are the channels I know about:
Healer classes => ILHEAL
Warlocks => PETKEEPERS
This generally covers shamans, druids, priests, and warlocks. Warriors, hunters, mages and rogues (until now) I guess haven't had their own channel, but with how useful petkeepers has been for me, I can't imagine not having one.
The second method will indeed transfer all aggro to the orb controller who lets go, I've seen wartorn do this strat and then have a warrior go around in circles and do convoluted frost trap routines. The truth is this would have more of a consequence of screwing up CC than anything. Dragonkin would become unslept and warlocks would find dragonkin running off after Rawne instead of back to us if we can't keep up with them ((it happens a lot, especially when they get into corners where LOS becomes a huge problem for us))
Mass fear is well...if I have to use mass fear, we've already lost the fight.
I am a strong proponent of the Hunter Kiting strat. A concussion shot hunter running around can keep 2 dragons kited..IF..*IF* he doesn't run into mages who are using aoe explosions to daze him all the time...in that case he is toast. So for it to function, we need to tighten up those corners.
Observations that I made:
People were getting dragged from the spawn points pretty often, several attempts I came to see groups not at their corners. The problem was, spawned mages were standing in their corners lobbing fireballs to kill members of the raid and arcane explosioning the heck out of me as I ran by to get my dragon kited.
Loose dragons - lethal. These things hit on us poor clothies pretty hard, and if they arn't being cc'd, they will be heading towards anyone casting heal spells..not a pretty sight. While I know the warlocks had things under control (I cannot speak either way for druids) we of course have those two loose ones. We did not truly define a great way to handle these by using raid markers (as far as I noticed) as the posted strat tends to suggest - its hard to do and probably would work best if razor slept some of the first coming out)
Be liberal with stuns. I've seen good rogues in MC gear near solo mages that pop out by locking them down and eating them alive. If it takes us a few weeks to do this, better equipment will just make things smoother.
It took the raid I was in about a month and a half to learn Razor Gore, our first night we were proud to be down to 14 eggs. So keep perspective on the fight.
I personally want to state I value everything people say about the fight and how they see it unfolding and how they want to help change things. Discussion and fresh perspective are vital to fine tuning a good raid and I know I myself would quickly get bored if all I was to do in a raid is what i'm told and thats that. Keep the discussion alive.
Shaman are in ILheal also.
I agree Damo, the dragons seemed to be the biggest problem.
Not sure this thread is alive anymore. If there's a better one to post to, let me know.
My observations from the second week of attempts:
When a corner goes down, the experience seems to be consistent. "Everything was going fine until a (or many) dragonkin came by and started killing my healers." Our DPS looks like its sufficient, and our tanks seem to do a great job surviving against the orcs.
CC is also doing its job, but dragonkin get loose. Every attempt we've had dragonkin running loose that ultimately cause a corner to go down, because they're so good at killing healers.
Here is my proposition for the next attempt:
1. Have a consistent nomenclature for each of the corners. People were calling them by two sets of names last night and that got confusing. I prefer, personally, the NSEW method based on the minimap, but whichever designation is chosen, everyone needs to use it.
2. Don't say "our corner is getting hit hard" on vent. Some folks might recognize voices and immediately know which corner they belong to, but most of us, even if we recognize the voice, wouldn't be able to immediately know which corner is being referred to. Say "North corner is getting hit hard".
And my big one:
3. Take the hunters off of DPS and make them dragonkin scouts. Instead of distributing the CC to each of the corners, distribute the hunters. Have them help corners while watching for dragonkin spawns. When one or two spawn in their corner, that hunter announces it in vent and kites them toward the CC. CC then pulls them off the hunter with sleep or fear.
The reason I see, for this, is that if CC is overtaxed, the dragonkin is still being kited by a hunter. Even if the hunter can't hold aggro, which I still feel is unlikely if they only have one or two things to kite, the dragonkin would have been running free anyway because the CC wasn't able to pull it off of him.
Also, hunters could mark targets they are currently kiting so that CC knows to catch those. They would be able to keep track of the locations of free dragonkin much better than warlocks (who are running frantically about trying to follow their feared creatures) and druids (who are frantically trying to balance healing and sleeping targets).
Now, centralizing the CC may not be the best idea if an AoE comes by, so spreading them out along a set path for the hunters would work, as well. The way I see this working is that, in the beginning, hunters will pull the dragonkin toward the CC, the CC will grab it, and hunters will return to their posts. In the middle, some hunters will get lucky and have theirs taken, while others will have to continue kiting because nobody's there to pick theirs up. But at least its after a hunter and not a priest.
I feel this strategy doesn't depend on kiting so much as use it as a backup when CC loses control.
This is my observations as a Shaman, and what I think that I could do better based on last night's attempts. Maybe it will help others, as well.
Healing Aggro killed me each attempt, even though I have the Healing Grace talent. In attempts 2 and 3, it was after a corner group went down, and mobs were running loose. Orc Legs on 2, dragonkin on 3. I think I almost got it right in the 3rd attempt. I drop healing stream totem to help keep my corner group up without drawing agro. When heals are needed, I cast lower rank spells (HW rank 6) to do some healing without drawing agro. This worked pretty well until things started going to Hades and I popped a big heal to keep someone up = Jaba's dead.
The current strategy should work if we can improve at keeping those corner groups up that are in danger of being overrun. WIthout healing from Shaman and Druids, this seems a challenge. Shaman should do all they can to reduce their healing agro, i.e. healing stream totem and lower rank healing wave spells. Those of us with Healing Way could help by spamming that so that lower rank HW spells are more effective, if it can be done to multiple groups. Also, I wonder if there is a way to use Tranquil Air totem to reduce healing agro.
I don't feel qualified to speak for the Druids.
Here's what my experience was like, as a rogue in a corner group.
As a rogue in a corner group, my experience was of running after mobs as they dashed out of the corner, engaging them in melee, and killing them (if mages) or bringing them back to the tank (if legionnaires). Several times I chased a mage up onto the orb platform and killed it there, having no good way to pull a mage back to my group. I switched targets frequently in order to tag mobs and keep them from getting loose in the middle of the room. I figured it was better to tag and control multiple mobs rather than kill one while others ran past me.
In all three attempts, we tagged and killed the first four or five mobs from our corner one after the other without trouble. We'd kill them on the main floor and we'd have a brief, mob-free moment between each kill. This initial phase was quite smooth.
After this phase the mobs would start to pile up slowly, and we'd have several mobs going at once. Our tank would hold multiple mobs and we'd kill one at a time but more would spawn in the meantime, so we no longer had any mob-free moments. Occasionally a feared dragonkin would run through our group and run out again. During this phase I was helping to kill mobs in the corner, but was also frequently running after fleeing mobs, tagging them and bringing them back, and sometimes killing mages on the platform as I had no good way to pull them back.
A short while into this multiple-mob phase we tended to run into trouble. On several attempts during the past two Razorgore nights a loose dragonkin or two attacked and killed our healer. In one case two dragonkin attacked our warrior. In another case a dragonkin attacked our shaman, who ran around in circles kiting it. In this latter case, with our healers dead or kiting, healing became difficult. At this point the fight was very intense, as we had multiple legionnaires and mages to deal with as well, and more of them spawning all the time.
Once we lost a party member we had only 4 people to deal with the spawns, and the fight became desperate. For me as a rogue, it was a question of killing as many mobs as I could before falling to their greater numbers. In the final 5 seconds a mass of dragonkin and legionnaires would run though our corner and kill each of us in turn. It was sometimes possible to survive a few more seconds, avoiding the mass of mobs, perhaps killing one or two last mages or legionnaires, or kiting some for a few seconds, but everyone was eventually overwhelmed and killed. At that point our corner was down.
I shouldn't even be awake so I can't really post coherently here but I'll bump the thread so we can get the ball rolling again now that we've gotten a couple of attempts under our belt using some kiting on dragonkin (while still DPSing orc mages and legionaires).
Especially on the second attempt it felt solid. Eggwise we were able to get within 3 eggs or so of our best attempt under the CC method on the second try. Hard to gauge in that respect.
Observations? Ideas? Suggestions? I'm going to review this thread more thoroughly before next time, I was away much of the last intervening week.
Tae
Every time I've been in this fight I still have no idea how things went :p Too busy focusing on staying alive and trying to keep my group up.
Healing aggro = instant death. Mordeous, Akora and I all got mashed painfully by this by around 4-8 angry dragonkin. We start out pretty smoothly but after a minute or two loose dragonkin shred the battlefield. A lot of loose dragonkin. Dunno what this means, but its only when the loose kin show up that people actually start dying.
Yeah, last night it was loose dragonkin on every attempt. I don't know what that means.
In the other method (non-kite), it seemed to me that it was mainly legos and mages that got us in the end. Was this different, or am I imagining it?
Were the dragonkin coming from the corner groups that went down or from kiters that went down?
I was able to do a lot of healing without agro until the very end when we were overwelmed. For shaman, I believe lower rank HW and Healing Stream Totem are useful for this.
This may be an example of the tribe collectivly gaining enough experience with this fight to master a strategy. With two groups per corner, it seems to me that they should be able to handle all the mages and legos without interference by dragonkin. Therefore, is the key getting enough experience with kiting dragonkin to keep them off corner groups.
One idea I had was to create a fire brigade group that could respond to back up corner's in trouble or aid the kiters. Also, would it be worthwhile to create a healing group with a shaman to drop tranquil air to manage healing agro.
These are just random thoughts. My feeling was we were closer with last night's attempts. Things seemed more in control. Whether that is strategy or experience, hard to tell.
-Jaba
This is the first battle ever, Akora has been individually unable to do what I have to do.
Healing aggro still kills me every time. Akora does not like defeat.
My observations are:
1. This week in every attempt, 3-4 Dragonkin came over to slay me quickly as Flu also mentioned. I donââ¬â¢t recall Akora dieing to this swarm of Dragonkin on the prior week.
2. The prior attempt week #2, it was a slower death as Legos & Mages beat me up, not Dragonkin.
3. Healing Steam totems help, Iââ¬â¢ve experimented w/ Mana Regen totems, and Healing Steam I believe is better.
4. Chain heal is good, donââ¬â¢t ââ¬Ëoverhealââ¬â¢ with a big healing spell if your healing target is down 600 Hp, and you use a level 6 lesser healing wave that heals 800 Hp, you are pulling ââ¬Ë200hpââ¬â¢ of unnecessary aggro. This is my biggest challenge area because, I as most healers rarely pull healing aggro, and I frankly donââ¬â¢t know how to manage healing aggro effectively. Consider using lower level healing spells.
I had exactly the same problem as Akora. Our corner's tank was getting low, I started healing him, then 4 dragonkin decided to come over and eat my face. I think (as Shillatae suggested) that we'll have to leave the vast majority of the healing to people who can dump aggro.
Sometimes easier said than done when a key person's going down, though, and walking the line's tricky.
Last night, my experience was also that the corners ended up fairly uneven - either because of randomness in the spawn order, or runaways. My corner actually had about 10-15 seconds of almost idle time, during which we could see that other corners were under heavy attack.
I was trying to find an efficient way to pull some mages and legos over to our corner but it was hard to get close enough to the other corners without moving out of my comfort zone (where I could still heal and shock our spawns).
In general, though it felt more solid and in-control than previous weeks.
I agree, Oryx. I think that /usually/ it is dragonkin killing someone in a corner, which means that our focus is still on managing them. Naturally last night was trying something different and I think we did well with that in mind.
I noticed that healing range is pretty easy to get across the short width of the room but difficult without moving out of the corner across the length. Perhaps corners closer together can support each other a bit but I suspect some of us are already doing that and healers cross healing too much will draw down the heavy fist of "draggro" as it was dubbed.
Just my 2 coppers on that.
Tae