nailbat.us

First off: great job on Ultraxion last night folks. We attempted him to learn the encounter, not to down him, but we got pretty damn close~! He's going down next time.

Rattling off some points from our experience/looking at logs:

- The best attempt for quick reference: http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/0k0b ... 21&e=10246

- 2 heals/6 dps is the way to go. Looking at the way the incoming dmg scales, a 3rd healer is superfluous till about the 4 min mark. And optimistically, a 3rd healer would buy us maybe an extra ~20 secs of uptime at the end. Dmg scales up really fast at the end. Having Andy as cat was more beneficial. Only reasonable alternative would be to have a 3rd healer hybrid spec'd to dps during the first 4 mins. I hear priests can do fairly well in that role, thoughts?

- How close were we? If we want to kill him by the 5:15 mark, we only need to increase our overall raid DPS by 6%. That's easily within reach.

- DPS requirements: we can confirm the numbers we were throwing around in last week's thread. Namely: Morock/Yor'shaj are reasonable benchmark fights to estimate your dps on Ultra (you'll do little better on ultra), and DPS roles should aim to average around 24~25K. A Zon'ozz kill in the ~5 minute range is another good target.

- Rogue single target uninterrupted DPS is quite impressive. Or was it all Schaden skill?

- DK off tank for soaking the hours of twilight is amazing. Or was it because Dorian spec'd into droid language?

- Logs blindspot: this is kinda neat, the logger does not record the events in the other phase. Key example: since Dorian soaked all the hours of twilight alone, those events are not reported in WoL.

- Anything about a 3rd healer, hybrid or whatnot is probably not the right strategy. We just need to up all dps (and uptime) to get closer to the 5 minute mark.
- Rogues will look like hax with single-target uninterrupted dps, especially when we're trading trix to up each other's dps 5%. If I can reliably get an extra second or two of dps before hitting The Button, I think that adds up to ~100k for the encounter. But of course that is risky, and probably better ways of increasing dps.. like if I feint and recuperate less.
- The log blindspot also means that any brief amount of time that a logging character is out of phase from any dps will underreport our dps. Of course, the boss health at the end of the fight is enough indication of what our true raid damage done is...

anju may want to get the blue healing buff (when it eventually shows up) and spam holy radiance

Also, as I mentioned afterwards, I was not optimally reforged for the fight (they changed Cat DPS secondary stat priorities in 4.2 and I haven't yet switched my mindset). I have since made myself hit and expertise capped, which should be a net increase.

Also, I'm at the point now where my VP is about to be spent on feral gear, as I have most of what I'd want for my healing set already, so that will help too. Now, if only I could get those damn agi shoulders to drop from Archbishop Benedictus... Dorian wasn't the only one still wearing Cho'gall shoulders (okay yes, it's my off-spec gear, but still).

Hour of Twilight isn't that bad for me to tank on my own because anti-magic shell sucks up so much of it. When I was gaming my cooldowns just right I was able to pop vampiric blood followed by rune tap to get back a decent chunk of my life. With the reduced cooldown and up time I'm able to anti-magic shell once before the 1st hour of twilight and then every hour of twilight. So having me inside for that makes a lot of sense. Hopefully I can snag my 4 piece set this week so I can get the vampiric blood cooldown for the raid. I think that'll help with the healing a small amount since the uptime on it is 20 seconds out of every 30. I think, though I'm not sure, that a Paladin with glyphed divine protection may be able to do the same job when it comes to Hour of Twilight tanking. The reduction is about the same as AMS. I'd have to ask the healers about how healing me coming out of hour of twilight was, but I never felt in danger of going down just because of that damage source.

I now have 4 piece T-13. That means can pretend to be a paly and raid wall! Should help out some with the all the raid burst dmg we get in DS.