Post by drazzl on Aug 21, 2014 15:28:49 GMT
So your raid has wiped and you're getting ready for the next pull to try again, but no one has any idea what went wrong. Insanity is beating your head against a wall expecting the wall to not be there. You need to identify what went wrong so you can prevent it from happening the next time. That's the story of raiding. As much as it is about problem solving, identifying the optimal strategy to navigate the fight's obstacles, it is about memorization, execution and another sort of problem solving, figuring out what went wrong. In my experience, this seems to be a rare skill. I've been toying with doing a workshop on this for awhile but never seem to make time, instead you're going to get a written guide.
Learn the fight.
I mean it, learn the fight....all of it. It's not enough to know what you need to do, that's simply regurgitating information someone else gave you with no insight on why you're doing what you're doing. If your goal is to be a drone and collect your loot, you can stop reading now. If you enjoy puzzles and want to be active participant in the conversation, helping to figure things out, this is the most crucial step. The more people who can actively aid in the discussion of strategizing a fight, the stronger the raid team.
Every fight is a litany of mechanics. Depending on your role, you only need to know some of them. To aid in the discussion, you want to learn all of the mechanics, including ones for other people's roles. From there, you classify these mechanics into a few categories:
1 - Do this or die.
2 - Do this or take a lot of damage (1/3-1/2 of your health)
3 - Do this or take trivial damage
4 - Unavoidable damage, how can I mitigate this?
1-3 on this list are predicated on the idea that the damage is avoidable and must be handled a certain way. You can usually ignore #3 as these are trivial amounts of damage and not worth stressing. Mastering those is an optimization of your performance, it won't make or break the raid team's performance, but it does make healers' lives easier. The other items on your list are the focus on your efforts.
Once you've classified the encounter's mechanics into categories, you can begin to assess things:
Did the person go splat? i.e. did they go from full health to zero health in under 3 seconds. If yes, then they died to either #1 or some combination of #2's. Look at your combat log for the last 3-5 entries of damage and look for major hits to identify the culprit. Discuss what you did wrong and solicit advice on what to do to avoid this.
Is the person taking tons of damage such that the healers have to focus on them or they die? If you see your health hemorrhaging or hear a healer complaining, this is your indicator of a #2 scenario. Diagnose as above.
Are the healers going oom or just can't seem to keep everyone up? This is a symptom of #4 type damage. This can indicate 2 different sorts of problems.
First, it could indicate a problem on the healer's end. This can be a wide variety of issues such as: not enough spirit, undergeared, players not stacking for optimal heals, healers need to swap to more optimal talents for the fight, player skill, not anticipating damage spikes.
Second set of problems has to do with the tanks and dps. This is a much smaller set of possible issues: ineffective defensive cd usage, better talent choices, undergeared, failure to understand fight mechanics.
Ok, I know this was a massive wall of text, so I'll be making a condensed chart later to simplify this info for reference.
Before I finish, I want to go through a few specific examples from fights.
Siege has been out for almost a full year now and in that time I've geared 5 toons. Between running the raid on lfr, flex, 10m and heroic, I estimate I've run each fight upwards of 100 times. Double to triple that if you count wipes. I know there's a few of you reading this that are in the same boat. By now you've seen amazing groups and awful groups. Look for the little things that separate those groups. Those inconsistencies are what will help you identify problems. It's pattern recognition. You may not be able to identify why the differences are there, but seeing them is the first step, the next is curiosity.
Ex: Some are blessed enough to see a Thok group that either phase transitions once or not at all. Clearly they're doing something right, so you ask yourself how do you replicate that? Well, first you need to know why Thok phase transitions. In lfr, those transitions are coded to his health and are unavoidable. In flex and above, it is based on the healers being able to never let people drop below 50% health. Therefore, you need a powerful healing group. Then you see the main issue is that Thok is constantly interrupting casters, every 2 seconds. Insta-casts are unaffected, so the more a healer can use those the better they perform on the fight. Cast-based healers need to time their heals around the interrupts. The only thing going in their favor is that it is a stack fight, so aoe healers can perform ok.
Second Ex: Iron Juggernaut is the best example of a fight littered with raid-wide damage of all sorts. To understand what a group is doing right or wrong, you need only watch people's health bars to see the story. Let's look at phase 1. If you see a lot health bars struggling, you know people are standing in stuff as 80% of the damage in that phase in avoidable. It also means the healers are working hard to compensate and there's a chance that can give out. You don't have time to check their gear and you probably aren't looking at the heal meters, but you've got a 50/50 chance they'll oom and people will start dying if that continues. So, if people start dropping in that phase after you see that, it's people overtaxing the healers. If you see anyone go splat in that phase, well, it has to be the crawler mines as they're the only things capable of meting out that kind of damage in that phase. If you see a few people go splat, it's the mines not being picked up. If one person goes splat, someone jumped on a mine when they shouldn't have or the tank wasn't healed properly. How do I know, because I know how much the crawler mines hit for and what happens in all 3 of those situations and by process of elimination, it's the only mechanic capable of generating those outcomes. So, we return to learning the fight. Now, that being said, there is one other way tanks can go splat in phase 1, being undergeared and/or taking too many stacks from the frontal cone. So 3 possibilities of how a tank is going to die really. If you're lucky, you were able to look around and were watching the mines and who walked over to them, or you saw the tank's stacks and you can probably figure out which of those 3 it is. You can also inspect the tank's gear after the pull to investigate that option. You can ask the tank to check their combat log and see what their final hits of damage were. You can also just ask the tank what killed them, decent odds they know if something was out of place having run the fight enough times. The key here again is to identify all the mechanics and classify them...know which ones are capable of killing someone and what it looks like when that happens. For me, I glance at the health frames and I look for movement. Is it hovering below full for awhile, is it bouncing up and down, did it go from full to empty in 2-3 seconds? Those 3 behaviors will match up to the types of damage, and then you process of elimination what mechanics are capable of mimicking that behavior. Phase 2 of the fight, tons of-wide damage and the crawler mines still. Well, you already know what the crawler mines look like. So, lots of raid-wide damage. The extent to which you see health bars flutter up and down is the extent to how powerful the healers are and how much they're struggling. If you see someone slowly bleed out with no healing, then you know they got blasted out of range, they weren't standing in the proper place to not get knocked out of healing range.
Third ex: Immerseus has only a few mechanics over 2 phases. Phase 1, you got 3 mechanics: puddles, sha blast and his water sprinkler. The sha blast only affects the tanks and it's a debuff mechanic - get hit by a second one, die. It's the only mechanic capable of one-shotting a tank. Therefore, if the tank drops suddenly, that means there was no taunt off. Of note, the sha blast will one-shot any non-tank, so if you see anyone splat after this ability, they were standing next to the tank when they shouldn't be. The location of their corpse is also a dead give-away. Puddles, bad void zones that hit for low amounts of damaged every second but add up quick. If you see someone's health hemorrhaging, that's standing in a puddle. The water sprinkler is a one-shot mechanic for any non-tank. If you see someone splat or nearly splat, they didn't dodge this. Though it should be said, while not a mechanic, viv discovered another way to be one-shotted, shadow-stepping the boss. And when he suddenly went splat, people asked how he died because there was nothing on the field to explain it. Phase 2, there's only 1 form of damage going on. when the pduddles reach the center, they hit for raid-wide damage. They're small hits that add up to mid-range damge. Not capable of killing anyone, but will soften them up for a phase 1 mechanic. Therefore, you should never see anyone die in this phase or they had to have done something very off. It is predictable damage because you can see the adds enter the pool. That means it is perfect for a defensive cd. It is a big blast of damage that is predictable. While not lethal, it saves the healers some work and that's a good thing. The sha puddles of phase 1 are not ideal for defensive cds as you should only be taking 1 hit from them and it's not predictable or steady damage. You could use a defensive cd to likely survive the water sprinkler, but that's more of an emergency life-saving measure, not something one aims to do, especially since taking the hit knocks you back. There's no benefit to soaking it like perhaps gaining a few more seconds of dps.
Learn the fight.
I mean it, learn the fight....all of it. It's not enough to know what you need to do, that's simply regurgitating information someone else gave you with no insight on why you're doing what you're doing. If your goal is to be a drone and collect your loot, you can stop reading now. If you enjoy puzzles and want to be active participant in the conversation, helping to figure things out, this is the most crucial step. The more people who can actively aid in the discussion of strategizing a fight, the stronger the raid team.
Every fight is a litany of mechanics. Depending on your role, you only need to know some of them. To aid in the discussion, you want to learn all of the mechanics, including ones for other people's roles. From there, you classify these mechanics into a few categories:
1 - Do this or die.
2 - Do this or take a lot of damage (1/3-1/2 of your health)
3 - Do this or take trivial damage
4 - Unavoidable damage, how can I mitigate this?
1-3 on this list are predicated on the idea that the damage is avoidable and must be handled a certain way. You can usually ignore #3 as these are trivial amounts of damage and not worth stressing. Mastering those is an optimization of your performance, it won't make or break the raid team's performance, but it does make healers' lives easier. The other items on your list are the focus on your efforts.
Once you've classified the encounter's mechanics into categories, you can begin to assess things:
Did the person go splat? i.e. did they go from full health to zero health in under 3 seconds. If yes, then they died to either #1 or some combination of #2's. Look at your combat log for the last 3-5 entries of damage and look for major hits to identify the culprit. Discuss what you did wrong and solicit advice on what to do to avoid this.
- Sometimes this just a string of bad luck/rng, it happens.
- Often times it is using a defensive cd or standing someplace else.
- It can also be that abilities are not being interrupted or dispelled, the sort that need to be. A word on interrupts and dispels, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure - these are mandatory skills, not an optional one like everyone treats it (looking at your interrupts...and stuns count here too).
- For experienced raiders, it's often just paying more careful attention. Addon usage or customization is usually the fix. There's a lot of things going on at once during a raid, addons work best when they simplify this information for you or provide it in a more convenient or streamlined fashion. I cannot stress this enough, there is a metric fuck-ton (actual measurement) of things going on at once during a raid, your brain can only focus on a few of them. The game's UI is not set up to be a one size fits all for players, you will want to tinker with the configuration that works FOR YOU.
Is the person taking tons of damage such that the healers have to focus on them or they die? If you see your health hemorrhaging or hear a healer complaining, this is your indicator of a #2 scenario. Diagnose as above.
Are the healers going oom or just can't seem to keep everyone up? This is a symptom of #4 type damage. This can indicate 2 different sorts of problems.
First, it could indicate a problem on the healer's end. This can be a wide variety of issues such as: not enough spirit, undergeared, players not stacking for optimal heals, healers need to swap to more optimal talents for the fight, player skill, not anticipating damage spikes.
- If a healer is consistently having mana issues across a number of fights, it is a gearing issue where they have not stacked enough spirit. Healers do not have a set amount of spirit to use, but rather a varying amount based on personal play style and their relationship to the tanks and raid they are healing. If a healer is undergeared and you're not already aware of this going in, odds are the whole raid team is undergeared. You'll be able to tell when the healers are doing their best and are struggling as well as the fight is moving slowly, i.e. the boss' health isn't going down fast enough. Note, both of those conditions should be present to make this determination, at which point the answer is to farm some earlier fights and collect more gear.
- If you're on the first few bosses of a raid and gear farming is not an option, it's a player skill issue. There is a specific ilvl threshold to be able to run a fight and if you aren't able to at that level, that is simply an inefficiency of the team and you either accept you need the higher gear as a handicap or improve and make the most of what you have.
- Raid fights generally fall into a few categories: loosely scatter; high movement; stack. You'll see fights transition between these modes often between phases. The rule of thumb is that if there's no major aoe damage or stuff on the floor, stack up to make things easier for the healers. I say major because even moderate aoe damage (re: #2 type damage) is easy to power through for healers in a stack formation. Stacking is always the most efficient model for healing (and healing is all about efficiency), so you want to be as close together as the mechanics allow for.
- Part of healers being efficient is that they need to anticipate, not respond to damage where possible. Major damage abilities operate on set intervals and dbm will give you warnings, so healers look to time big heal casts to go off a split second later - this is sort of an extension of the anticipation timing others have with use of defensive cds. Lack of anticipation means panic as healers react to large swaths of damage quickly...and quick spells mean inefficient healing which means oom.
- If a healer finds their numbers low on one fight in particular, it can be that their class is weak to that fights mechanics (re: Thok's constant interrupts), but also that they should explore other talents more tailored to those situations. Remember, you're supposed to be swapping a talent or two on a fight by fight basis.
Second set of problems has to do with the tanks and dps. This is a much smaller set of possible issues: ineffective defensive cd usage, better talent choices, undergeared, failure to understand fight mechanics.
- A bit more on the topic of the raid being undergeared. Most bosses have an enrage timer, kill the boss within this amount of time or you die. Enrage timers are handy because they indicate benchmarks for the dps that are very clear cut. Conversely, tanks and healers need to sort feel things out. Divide the boss' health by the enrage timer in seconds, divide again by the number of dps in your group (count tanks as 1/3 of a dps) and that is each person's performance benchmark. If you have people who can't make it and don't have others who are compensating, your group will die every time. Once more we return to the idea that you should be able to make those numbers at certain gear levels, so you either improve or gear up. Also bear in mind the enrage timer based dps benchmark is merely the absolute mathematical minimum, the more you can surpass that minimum, the faster and easier the fight is. The faster the boss dies, the less you'll need to deal with mechanics, the less chance for mistakes that get you killed. If you're only doing the minimum numbers, then the loss of even a single person to a mistake means you will wipe because you are no longer making the minimum. There is an inverse relationship there - the more dps you have, the more mistakes you can afford to make; the less dps you have, the more flawless your execution needs to be. In other words, high dps from better gear or high player skill makes things easier.
- Gear has also a direct relationship to your health pool and how squishy you are. An undergeared player can turn a #2 ability into a #1, and then there's not much that can be done.
- There's little more to be said about defensive cds other then that they exist to be used, so for god's sake use them every chance you get. Time them around #1 and #2 abilities, the big spikes. It saves the healers extensive amounts of effort and it becomes important during progression when the margins are tighter and you can't outgear the fights. There's usually a tier of talents devised around defensive cds, once more, actively reevaluate these on a fight by fight basis, don't be lazy. Other tiers involve movement speed and utility, don't neglect these either, sometimes there are gems hiding that will significantly reduce the difficulty of a fight's mechanic.
- On the topic of fight mechanics. Most fights have stacking debuffs that force tank swaps thus ensuring the 2 raid tank model, failure to heed these means tank dies and a wipe. A better example comes from heroic Spoils of Pandaria. The Mogu side's mini-bosses spawn little statues that do frontal cone attacks. Due to their high health and the fight's tight enrage timer, these often ignored until the mini-boss is dead and their attacks dodged. Well, on heroic, the mini-boss gets a stacking damage bonus based on how many of those statues are up and before he can be killed escalates his damage beyond what the healers can keep up with, turning low-mid level damage into damage that one-shots you, meanwhile the healers were blowing all their cds and going oom trying to power through. It took us 4-5 attempts before we figured this out when someone combed through the dungeon journal looking for an explanation as none of the guides we'd seen mentioned this little gem.
Ok, I know this was a massive wall of text, so I'll be making a condensed chart later to simplify this info for reference.
Before I finish, I want to go through a few specific examples from fights.
Siege has been out for almost a full year now and in that time I've geared 5 toons. Between running the raid on lfr, flex, 10m and heroic, I estimate I've run each fight upwards of 100 times. Double to triple that if you count wipes. I know there's a few of you reading this that are in the same boat. By now you've seen amazing groups and awful groups. Look for the little things that separate those groups. Those inconsistencies are what will help you identify problems. It's pattern recognition. You may not be able to identify why the differences are there, but seeing them is the first step, the next is curiosity.
Ex: Some are blessed enough to see a Thok group that either phase transitions once or not at all. Clearly they're doing something right, so you ask yourself how do you replicate that? Well, first you need to know why Thok phase transitions. In lfr, those transitions are coded to his health and are unavoidable. In flex and above, it is based on the healers being able to never let people drop below 50% health. Therefore, you need a powerful healing group. Then you see the main issue is that Thok is constantly interrupting casters, every 2 seconds. Insta-casts are unaffected, so the more a healer can use those the better they perform on the fight. Cast-based healers need to time their heals around the interrupts. The only thing going in their favor is that it is a stack fight, so aoe healers can perform ok.
Second Ex: Iron Juggernaut is the best example of a fight littered with raid-wide damage of all sorts. To understand what a group is doing right or wrong, you need only watch people's health bars to see the story. Let's look at phase 1. If you see a lot health bars struggling, you know people are standing in stuff as 80% of the damage in that phase in avoidable. It also means the healers are working hard to compensate and there's a chance that can give out. You don't have time to check their gear and you probably aren't looking at the heal meters, but you've got a 50/50 chance they'll oom and people will start dying if that continues. So, if people start dropping in that phase after you see that, it's people overtaxing the healers. If you see anyone go splat in that phase, well, it has to be the crawler mines as they're the only things capable of meting out that kind of damage in that phase. If you see a few people go splat, it's the mines not being picked up. If one person goes splat, someone jumped on a mine when they shouldn't have or the tank wasn't healed properly. How do I know, because I know how much the crawler mines hit for and what happens in all 3 of those situations and by process of elimination, it's the only mechanic capable of generating those outcomes. So, we return to learning the fight. Now, that being said, there is one other way tanks can go splat in phase 1, being undergeared and/or taking too many stacks from the frontal cone. So 3 possibilities of how a tank is going to die really. If you're lucky, you were able to look around and were watching the mines and who walked over to them, or you saw the tank's stacks and you can probably figure out which of those 3 it is. You can also inspect the tank's gear after the pull to investigate that option. You can ask the tank to check their combat log and see what their final hits of damage were. You can also just ask the tank what killed them, decent odds they know if something was out of place having run the fight enough times. The key here again is to identify all the mechanics and classify them...know which ones are capable of killing someone and what it looks like when that happens. For me, I glance at the health frames and I look for movement. Is it hovering below full for awhile, is it bouncing up and down, did it go from full to empty in 2-3 seconds? Those 3 behaviors will match up to the types of damage, and then you process of elimination what mechanics are capable of mimicking that behavior. Phase 2 of the fight, tons of-wide damage and the crawler mines still. Well, you already know what the crawler mines look like. So, lots of raid-wide damage. The extent to which you see health bars flutter up and down is the extent to how powerful the healers are and how much they're struggling. If you see someone slowly bleed out with no healing, then you know they got blasted out of range, they weren't standing in the proper place to not get knocked out of healing range.
Third ex: Immerseus has only a few mechanics over 2 phases. Phase 1, you got 3 mechanics: puddles, sha blast and his water sprinkler. The sha blast only affects the tanks and it's a debuff mechanic - get hit by a second one, die. It's the only mechanic capable of one-shotting a tank. Therefore, if the tank drops suddenly, that means there was no taunt off. Of note, the sha blast will one-shot any non-tank, so if you see anyone splat after this ability, they were standing next to the tank when they shouldn't be. The location of their corpse is also a dead give-away. Puddles, bad void zones that hit for low amounts of damaged every second but add up quick. If you see someone's health hemorrhaging, that's standing in a puddle. The water sprinkler is a one-shot mechanic for any non-tank. If you see someone splat or nearly splat, they didn't dodge this. Though it should be said, while not a mechanic, viv discovered another way to be one-shotted, shadow-stepping the boss. And when he suddenly went splat, people asked how he died because there was nothing on the field to explain it. Phase 2, there's only 1 form of damage going on. when the pduddles reach the center, they hit for raid-wide damage. They're small hits that add up to mid-range damge. Not capable of killing anyone, but will soften them up for a phase 1 mechanic. Therefore, you should never see anyone die in this phase or they had to have done something very off. It is predictable damage because you can see the adds enter the pool. That means it is perfect for a defensive cd. It is a big blast of damage that is predictable. While not lethal, it saves the healers some work and that's a good thing. The sha puddles of phase 1 are not ideal for defensive cds as you should only be taking 1 hit from them and it's not predictable or steady damage. You could use a defensive cd to likely survive the water sprinkler, but that's more of an emergency life-saving measure, not something one aims to do, especially since taking the hit knocks you back. There's no benefit to soaking it like perhaps gaining a few more seconds of dps.