Ogri'la mandatory for raiders?

[Trien]

If you have a feral druid on hand and choose not to use him as OT, you are deliberately choosing to make the fight harder on yourself. If a feral druid is threat capped, your enhancement shaman and especially your rogues and dps warriors are completely crippled.

Oh, I definitely don't mind it when the other feral druid is OT'ing... but I guess I'm not so picky as to argue the point if the other prot warrior wants to be doing something useful. The rogues can get away with it unlike myself (last screenshot I have from a few weeks back shows them running a good 70-80dps above what I'm forced to keep myself down to); enhancement shammy/dps warrior are not issues. Switching me to OT would be the other option if I'm the lone druid, which perhaps would let the rogues push the limit a tiny bit more, but exchanges a feral DPS for a prot warrior DPS.

Losing an extra Rebirth and Innervate could mean that you fail the encounter. I think it's kinda selfish not to use KTM and not care if you die because you can't watch your aggro.

What were players to do before KTM came along? Learn by trial and error, living and dying, figuring out the limits. I'm a coder at heart, I love writing addons to do nifty things, make life easier, and all that, but I draw the line in a certain place, and KTM for me is on the other side of that line. A lot of people haven't drawn the line in the same place, obviously, but for me, for how I want to play the game, KTM is 'cheating', and I shouldn't have to 'cheat' just to beat that encounter. Will it be harder? Sure, a bit. I'm not calling everyone who uses KTM a 'cheater', but for my own choice, I choose not to use it.

I suppose my philosophy is still to play the game as closely to the default design as possible. I'm at last count, up to 70+ distinct addons, yet none of them really alter my playstyle terribly from the default UI. This is in part due to occasionally running off an addon-less computer... where I can still sit down and play without my usual mass of addons. The only one I really do miss is DruidBar (estimates mana while shapeshifted). The rest of the addons? Data-collecting, rearranging the visual display to be more efficient or informative, but really, none of it is needed or should be needed.

Getting offtopic now, but back to the original question. We did use consumables to a some degree when learning Gruul; these days the top DPS'ers don't really need them. Never hurts to flask up your tanks of course, since there's always the chance he may not be fully topped off during a silence. And since we are subbing in other players who are not necessarily in the top gear, flasks can do them benefit as well.