An Apology to the Thursday Raid Group

[TheDragoon]

Kan:  Yes, yes, yes, not possible yet but yes, OH MY GOD THANK YOU YES, yes, probably, yes, good question, yes -- keeping in mind that AoE is hell on bandaging, yes, yes, yes.  ;)
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Heh, I had to open up both posts in a split-screen to understand these responses! :lol:

[Tal]

We (as a team) would do much better with more with, Mana, Health, Fire Resist, or Restorative Potions, but one person is not capable of spending all their non-raid time farming for Elemental Earth or Elemental Fire.  We have alot of alchemy power that we are not using.  My offer to anyone is; that I will supply the herbs, vials and skills if you can get me the elemental parts.[right][snapback]85257[/snapback][/right]

Shalandrax can make the restorative and health potions if it helps ease the burden.

I think we need to start helping each other out more, by sending junk lvl 50+ items to our enchanters to build up their supplys, so that its not a big deal if someone wants to get some stamina on their boots.  I would love to hear our enchanters complaining that they have too many mats.[right][snapback]85257[/snapback][/right]

Sharanna would like that. I have several 300 alchemy recipes that would be most beneficial to the guild at large...

We should all train and equip our own Heavy Rune Cloth bandages.  In the Lucifrom fight it saved me 2-3 times by keeping my own life always above 2000.  For 3-4 seconds of channeling bandage, it kept me in the fight longer until I got caught eventually waiting for my bandage timer, and got hit by the curse at a bad time.  I realize that many people (tanks, healers, decursers) are too busy to spend their own time.
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I went into MC with 40 Heavy Rune Cloth. I came out with 5 from bandaging myself, others and whatnot. Thank goodness they drop so often in higher instances. :D

[TheDragoon]

Oh!  I forgot to mention a thanks to Kapowee for giving me some savory deviate delight to make me taller to help with LoS issues after how ever many times of whining about LoS I did. ;)  Although, now that I think about it, I didn't actually eat the silly thing right after she gave it to me.  I think a core hound got pulled at that time and then I just forgot about it.  But I do appreciate it Kap. :)
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You could try joining GG in his firewater farming up in Winterspring. I think that might help with line of sight too (and it's cool to be big!). :)

[Tal]

I'm going to apologize here as well.  I'm also going to give my condolences to tal.

If it makes you feel any better until Altrius got on I was getting my salvations, the few times I had one, from you and I was in an odd group.  And yes I pulled healer aggro a couple of times when I didn't have the blessing.  I never saw a paladin blessing unless you put it up or I yelled about it, or until Altrius got online.[right][snapback]85248[/snapback][/right]

Sometimes I think I should just go ahead and pull out and bless all the raid groups mana be damned. ;)

Again though thank you all for being so cool.  Tal, I was never upset with you or really anyone but the warrior and his paladin friend so you are easily forgiven, and in my opinion justified.  Everyone else thanks again for what was still a mostly good time despite the problems.  I'm so glad you work so well with a recovering nutjob like myself.
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Thanks GG and I will never hold you and Treesh having to bolt when things get stressful against you. It means a lot when you guys show up to help me. :)

[Kevin]

You could try joining GG in his firewater farming up in Winterspring.  I think that might help with line of sight too (and it's cool to be big!).  :)
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Actually it's Mirajj that farms them while grinding his faction. I'm just his safe deposit box, but yeah, I'm willing to hand those over (I think I'm over 100 of them now) to help out with LoS. They do help. Gnolack drinks them whenever he is pulling an instance just because of that. The 35 attack power is just gravy. :)

[Treesh]

You could try joining GG in his firewater farming up in Winterspring.  I think that might help with line of sight too (and it's cool to be big!).  :)
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Light feathers drop better than the fire water and the critters are quicker to kill. ;) I also still have low level characters who ship off their light feathers to Aleri. She's just down to 6 now, even after getting some mailed to her recently. I tell ya, levitate is one of the best skills in the game for a dwarven priest. Forget fear ward! Levitate ftw!11!! ;)

[Tal]

Disagreements in game are to be expected at times, but outright trashing is unacceptable in any circumstances. As a mage I'm for crowd control, and I leave it to our leaders to apply it.
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Darian was smart to leave me unpromoted. I was advocating dropping the tankwhoshouldnotbenamed very early. After the second time he blamed the paladins for the raid's woes I would have whispered him saying "Good luck in all you do Logic but you're no longer welcome" and booted him. :)

[Darian]

Darian was smart to leave me unpromoted. I was advocating dropping the tankwhoshouldnotbenamed very early. After the second time he blamed the paladins for the raid's woes I would have whispered him saying "Good luck in all you do Logic but you're no longer welcome" and booted him. :)
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Funny thing is, the only reason you weren't promoted is I just didn't think of it... :whistling:

[Treesh]

Funny thing is, the only reason you weren't promoted is I just didn't think of it...  :whistling:
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Thanks for laugh Darian. :)

Man, it really is so easy to type your name as "darina" instead. ;)

[Kevin]

Don't sweat it. Nobody's perfect, and I know all too well how a hernia can ruin your day, having had 2/3 of a hernia some years ago. I wish I had as good a reason for my occasional ... misconduct.

On the plus side, it was interesting to see Molten Core. I'm glad I did it with my 'lock first because once battle is joined, what actions warlocks can take are mainly focused on the mobs, so I got a good picture of the tactical situations. I also got to see MC without peering at little slices of MC between health bars. :)

So thanks for putting up with a low-DPS 'lock. We need to see about getting Hykim attuned so multiple druid gear can drop on future runs. :)
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Glad to hear you had fun. :)

I'll be glad to have Hykim along, not just for double druid drops, but because I'm always so torn between who to play! I love playing both Gnolack and Taranna. Having more healers and specifically druids available to the pool of players means more opportunities to bring Gnolack to either Onyxia or Molten Core. Some days we might be short locks and want Pavis so I take Taranna. Some days we might have extra pallies so tal takes Shalandrax and I take Taranna. Some days we might have plenty of healers and not enough pallies so I take Gnolack, tal takes Sharanna, Bun takes Pavis or Hykim. I like that. Lissa with Tahapenese and Lissanna could be in the same boat. We need a hunter more than a lock or vice versa. And others I'm not thinking about I'm sure because I'm not thinking all that clearly anymore So it isn't all bad that we have multiple 60's on several people. I like the flexibility it can provide to us.

There were two Onyxia runs where I wanted to take Taranna and not Gnolack, but since then I've always wanted to take either one of them equally. :) I actually enjoy the whole thing of how can I help the raid most, crazy gnome or elf? :)

[Tal]

Some days we might have extra pallies so tal takes Shalandrax and I take Taranna.  Some days we might have plenty of healers and not enough pallies so I take Gnolack, tal takes Sharanna, Bun takes Pavis or Hykim.
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Although Shal is blooded and attuned I don't think she'll ever be sought out for a raid - there simply isn't enough paladins to go around...

Its a nice thought and I would love to take Shal to see the dragon but I don't think it will ever happen...

[Kevin]

Although Shal is blooded and attuned I don't think she'll ever be sought out for a raid - there simply isn't enough paladins to go around...

Its a nice thought and I would love to take Shal to see the dragon but I don't think it will ever happen...
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Tris is at 60, Garrin is 53 (I think), Balador is at 48. It'll happen. Heck Skan may just want to come along with Katrin to let Shalandrax go in there too.

[Sabra]

Man, it really is so easy to type your name as "darina" instead. ;)

Isn't that his name?

[Quark]

On a bit different topic, there was one thing that kind of frustrated me last night: do we really think it's necessary to wait so long for the call for DPS?

No. This is the reason I wanted free reign on Onyxia on Monday. I wanted to test the waters and see if I, attacking much more than anyone else, could still even get a glimpse of aggro. Never happened.

In many cases, I was burning through mana pretty quickly and had to use potions and all of my other tricks repeatedly against trash mobs.  In other cases, we had things well under control but were still throwing around a lot of healing so when aggro DID get stolen, it was from the healers, not the damage dealers.  Judging by some of the whipsers I got, last night, others had the same frustration.

One bad fight (when Anadrol went down), I asked for an earlier DPS call. We got it, and during the fight aggro was taken off the 2nd MT. Some in the raid then asked why we called DPS? It was healers stealing aggro. If damage is not gonna steal aggro, damage should be on. Especially if we have an emergency tank on, because that makes it that much more likely that a healer will get aggro.

Thus, I always wondered why we were waiting for so long.  Do people like to wait for big round numbers worth of health on the mobs before attacking?  If so, that strikes me as a somewhat superstitious practice that slows things down considerably but doesn't really do much good.

I don't want numbers, percentages of mob's life. Maybe time, but more so a feeling. If I can be safe waiting for a single sunder on a UBRS boss - at 98% life - and never pull aggro, why should I be waiting for 90% when I could have been attacking 8% ago and getting the encounter done?

The only real reason I can see for waiting so long is because you're afraid that someone is going to go crazy, unload everything they have, and pull aggro.  If this is the case, then I think that this approach is not solving the problem, but treating the symptoms.

Let's learn by trial of fire. Let's call DPS earlier, and if people pull aggro, call them on it. It's not the DPS call's fault they pulled aggro - it's the player's.

Now, if there weren't drawbacks to this, it wouldn't be a big deal.  However, going as slow as we did has many drawbacks:

1. You burn through the healers' mana pools (for some fights)
2. You invite respawns of patrols which are probably the most dangerous thing you can face in a place like the Molten Core, short of the bosses
3. You let things live longer, increasing the time in which "something can go wrong"
4. You bore the meleers to death and make the healers/tanks work for a lot longer than necessary, taking both groups of their game

Yes, to every point. And everything below it.

[Quark]

Two things about last night, though I arrived last:

1) Consider it clean slate. We still got as far as we wanted, so everyone forgive (almost) everyone else, and let's work on the issues we had :)

2) I have been somewhat confused about the Luci encounter before, and I'm sorry for asking the wrong people for the wrong things. I will, however, say this - I haven't had the 2000 damage debuff removed from me once. One night I was surviving simply because we had excess healing and Treehugger was being nice to me (thanks!). Last night, one Renew is the assistance I got to survive. I lasted 5 seconds longer than I should have in the last Luci fight simply because I resisted it and only took 1500 damage, so the Renew saved me. It didn't matter much, anyway, because at that point I had the double skill cost curse on me for 15 seconds and couldn't even backstab. I realize MTs and Healers are more important, but when Arleas and I go down we are losing a lot of DPS. When we lose DPS, the battle lasts that much longer, leading to issues of OOM and death-attrition.

Just be careful of that - at the rate we're going, there will be a time when only healers and the MT are left on Luci, and they won't outlast him.

[Icebird]

My observations on when to make the DPS signals for the trash mobs:

Molten Giants, Ancient Core Hounds - Wait until the mob is fully sundered (and turned away from the raid in the case of Core Hounds). The Giants seem to like rampaging through the caster camp at the drop of a hat.

Core Hound Packs - I wouldn't start the DPS until the tanks have herded them together.

Against most of the other trash mobs you can start DPS almost immediately it seems without increasing the risk substantially.

Chris

[LochnarITB]

(outline style readers please don't jump on me, but I'm going to respond to several ideas here rather than try to link off the first post on each topic <_< )

Tal, I don't think your apology was necessary, but thank you. I am the king of bottling things up, so, when someone else expresses frustration for me, I appreciate it. More importantly (Lochdoctor mode on), please don't put off your surgery any longer than absolutely necessary. Last November, not knowing just how dangerous it was to do so, I sat down to watch America's Funniest Home Videos. It was going quite well, eliciting well timed grins and giggles. Then they brought up the big guns, videos of pets doing stupid things. :o I was laughing hard enough for tears from my eyes when it happened. I coughed at the same time. I felt a pinch but didn't think much of it. Over the next few hours, the pain started, I started getting queasy and I noticed a lump. I went to a doctor the next day that dismissed it and sent me away with a prescription for Motrin. After another 24 hours of getting worse and not holding anything down, I went to the emergency room. They pumped a gallon of putrid fluid out (nothing had been going through) and sent me to surgery. I got to spend the next three days being attended to by cute nurses and aides (ok ok there was a good side to it ;) ). I was told by the doctor afterwards that, if not taken care of soon enough, parts of the organ squeezed out through the hole can die from lack of blood and become poison to the body. Long winded story made short - an umbilical hernia that requires surgery can go from bad to worse very quickly and can make people very dead. We don't want to lose you. Please take care.

Sharing buffing duties - I noticed that there was a problem in the mage ranks as well last night. Mages only have one buff to apply. There is no excuse to not have AI on anyone that uses mana. I am glad to AI toons here and there in other mageless groups when I notice they don't have it. I do get frustrated when I see a group with a mage in it that does not get AI. A couple times, I had to Arcane Brilliance another mage's party because the pull was coming and it was obvious they weren't going to get it otherwise. If they don't want to buy the regent, or don't have Brilliance, putting on AI individually is essentially the same. No excuse not to.

Decursive - I was glad to have it. Because things slow down badly in those close in, high activity battles, I have difficulties selecting and casting something quickly. Being able to bind it to a key and spam that allowed me to do my job. The only problem I had is that it would find Anadrol, who was out of range. Thankfully, someone else must have been in range because a subsequent try would tell me nothing needed to be cleaned. Also, in case people don't already know, you can set up a priority list for decursive. If the tanks (or healers or ?) are placed on the priority list, they will be the first one checked, before it goes to the caster/party/raid. Also of note, people mentioned that it jumped from the casters party to party 1. My understanding of how it works (and it appears to me to be so) is that it tries the caster then their party and then increments the party number by 1 so it would go from party 4 to party 5 not to party 1. Also, there is an ignore list. If there is no reason for the caster to decurse themselves, they can put their name on ignore and it will skip them. I will probably keep using it until it is declared a cheat or I get a monster machine that makes my gaming easier.

As a side note on that last point, I may have found my secret double your framerate button. I actually saw 80+ fps in the entryway to ironforge and 25-30 in front of the bank (used to often be 10 or less). I am anxious to try MC next time to see if it helps. The more toons/mobs there are in close proximity, the worse the slideshow becomes, so it is almost exclusive to MC. Onyxia is smooth as silk. It even got better the closer we got to Magmadar, probably because we were in a smaller space and moving away from more and more mobs.

Alchemy - Lochnar can also make potions given the materials. I have never paid much attention to fire/magic resistance since, up until MC, it really wasn't necessary. I may not understand how it actually works so this question may be based on an incorrect assumption. Would magic resistance potions be of more use than greater fire protection potions? Do fire resistance points indicate mitigation of fire damage or the chance to not be hit by it at all? The whisker can be hard to find, at least for Lochnar, but purple lotus is a weed, it seemingly grows almost everywhere.

[Treesh]

Alchemy - Lochnar can also make potions given the materials.&nbsp; I have never paid much attention to fire/magic resistance since, up until MC, it really wasn't necessary.&nbsp; I may not understand how it actually works so this question may be based on an incorrect assumption.&nbsp; Would magic resistance potions be of more use than greater fire protection potions?&nbsp; Do fire resistance points indicate mitigation of fire damage or the chance to not be hit by it at all?&nbsp; The whisker can be hard to find, at least for Lochnar, but purple lotus is a weed, it seemingly grows almost everywhere.
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Greater fire protection potions completely block all fire damage until they expire or they've absorbed all they are listed to absorb. IIRC, magic resist pots and greater fire resist pots stack (at least both buffs stay up at the same time), but I don't know if the resistance is calculated before or after the absorption of the greater fire protection. But magic resist pots only mitigate the damage taken rather than completely block like the greater fire protection do.

[Mirajj]

On my end...I have several things to talk to Darian, Anadrol, Porlupus, and their favored healers about moving the raid faster via pulling. Hopefully we'll have a chance to chat sometime before the next time we get into MC. I'd forum it, but it really strikes me as a more dynamic conversation thing.

Next...Despite all the blips at the start of the raid, I had a good feeling about it. Remember how our Onyxia kill raid started? ;) The bugginess was frusterating to me, but not direcly applied, so I can't comment much.

Treesh...I am always watching raid chat (I love reading) and saw your problems, and all the problems going on with raid chat...but had no answers. I have never run up againt a casting bug (all my "spells" are basically instants with different cooldowns) nor have I ever encountered the warrior charge bug. My warrior didn't live long enough to get it applied to her, and AFAIK, Meg's has never "seen" it yet, either. However, I could have been more vocal about trying to bring your plight to the attention of someone who did know what was going on, and how to fix it.

Also...I'm surprised that hewhoshallnotbenamed didn't try blaming the first Luci wipe on me...after he stole my/Darian's target. Unless he did and I missed it in the Meat channel. ;) I am, however, very glad that he'll not be raiding with us again. The sheer amount of friction and negativity he generated was just...there are no words.

This leads me to another point...Due to the nature of our Alliance, we are going to end up with people that we just don't 'mesh' with. This isn't the first or even the fourth time we've had problems with the HWSNBN. For the most part...we are all a pretty good judge of people, and while last night cinched it....that person should have been gone 3 raids ago. Perhaps we need to start focusing a little more on our intuitive feels about a person, and after giving them a couple or trio of shots...lay it on the line if we (being the higher ups) decide that it's just not going to work.

As well...Yes, I farm Winterfall Firewater while I rep in Winterspring. I have probably thrown away about as much as I have given GG, because before he told me he used it, I couldn't sell it, the novelty of the size change wears thin, and the +35Ap doesn't apply to Ranged AP. I collect the things by the fistful (I routinely send GG 30 or so, from one of my repping sessions) so if you'd like to be a bit of a Firewater "vault" too, just ask GG or me.

So...all in all, aside from the couple of blips, I did have fun. I look forward to more. =)

[LochnarITB]

Greater fire protection potions completely block all fire damage until they expire or they've absorbed all they are listed to absorb.&nbsp; IIRC, magic resist pots and greater fire resist pots stack (at least both buffs stay up at the same time), but I don't know if the resistance is calculated before or after the absorption of the greater fire protection.&nbsp; But magic resist pots only mitigate the damage taken rather than completely block like the greater fire protection do.
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I knew that the greaters absorbed damage up to their limit. If resistance works to mitigate rather than give a chance to ignore, the question involves a couple factors - what percent of damage does 50 points represent and at what rate do the baddies do their fire damage. The potions have a cooldown so there is a window where another can't be used that the resistance can help cover. I think it would be good to have them stacked then. I don't have much whisker but I often sell stacks of purple lotus because I have filled their bank slots and need to clean house. I can bring some next time, depending on whisker I can get my hands on, and we can see how that helps the tanks survive.