Thursday's Raid this week.

[mjdoom]

I'm in for Monday.
We had similar issues.  The L59 guard that our 2 druids were chain sleeping resisted them a lot.  In fact I didn't pull the L60 guard that I was tanking away because I thought that the damn things were immune to sleep and I was going to try and pick it up too then I finally saw the Z's. 

I may have this wrong but we lost a healer earlier because with the 2nd one resisting sleep it hit Galreth off his pull aggro and as soon as he was healed things took off.  Galreth went down shortly after the first guard went down and I started tanking the 2nd guard.
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I think there was one major mistake we made in our run that might have been enough to make the difference and that is that we let all of the mobs clump in one spot. This makes it harder for people to recognize when sleep is active as well as generally making it harder to see what is going on. I know my screen was simply a bunch of dragon bodies blocking my view of everything. What I would recommend next time is this:

1) Pull with sleep. This gives everyone one quick chance to see if it fails on the first try so that we can act appropriately. The other two mobs (General and guard) are going to be peeled immediately after so your druids should be ok.

2) This step starts immediately after the first sleep attempt hits. MT hits Drak and peels him into the corner (away from everyone else but his pally/priest support team). One hunter shoots the non-sleep guard to grab his attention and peel him off in the other direction. This mob will then be taunted/sundered/grabbed by the OT and summarily dismissed by the rest of the raid. Hunter can even use FD after the warrior hits taunt if they feel it is necessary. If the sleep initially failed then a second hunter (who is waiting over to the opposite [entry] side of the room) shoots that guard to peel him away from the other two. When you are running CC like sleep it is always easier to handle it when mobs aren't clumped together. The hunter can use FD if necessary but should generally try to use aspect of the cheetah to kite the guard around the entry side of the room until a sleep hits (don't go too far away though so that druids can still heal people fighting).

3) Everyone but the MT/Pally/Priest combo and the kiting hunter/druids should be killing the primary guard target right after the OT grabs aggro on him. Once sleep is applied then the kiting hunter and druids can join them. After the first guard dies then all but the MT group move to the sleeping guard. Make sure that the OT is healed to full before engaging so that an early mortal strike will not wreak havoc. Once the guards are down everyone piles on Drak.

Notes: The druids have the unenviable task of sleeping/healing for the guard groups as well as watching for extra heals on the MT. Much love for the druids pulling this off. The druids also have combat rezzes which can be huge if the priest healing the MT dies to bring him back up ASAP (and thus save the MT).

Also, as we saw after things fell apart last night; Drak can be kited to some effectiveness once the guards are dead. We don't ever want to have to kill him fully by kiting him (as we pretty much did last night) but the fight is still winnable with a bunch of people dead. Hunter kiting ftw.

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With this peeling strategy it should reduce the chances of losing our main priest right at the beginning of the fight through healing aggro. As GG had mentioned Vilatra went down almost immediately because I took initial aggro on all three mobs and they didn't get tied down before he had to heal me. This brought the guards straight to him and priests don't handle those guards very well (never forget psychic scream priests; remember that fear is a usual strat on the guards and it can't hurt to try if things go badly).

though those traps can cause some ugly graphic lag for people too and we already had some issues with that.

Oh well.
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For some reason a few people were having more lag than usual last night. I'm not sure if it was related to the number of graphics going on but I've done 15 man runs before and not had as many issues. I suffered one death entirely due to a lag spike causing me to run straight into the middle of a patrol (I'm very thankful that I didn't go off of the bridge though). Hopefully next time we don't have that issue and that can only help.

- mjdoom