Last night Rev and I took some alts to a guild raid that’s trying to get itself established. I went along as a paladin healer and he brought his hunter.
This raid has had ups and downs. It had a more stable roster a month ago and now it’s struggling. At this point there’s basically 5-6 guildies who raid on their mains, coming on alts; one or two guildies who only run this raid; and then they fill in where they can get it.
Last night, we had a role swap – one of the tanks really wanted to heal instead, and the raid leader, who had been one of the healers, agreed to bring her new tank. So we had two people in roles they don’t usually do. But we also had one long term tank, and all three of us healers heal on our mains in other raids.
We were short three dps though so the raid leader went to trade and picked us up two mages (making a total of three) and a shaman. Then we got started.
When Magmaw took a few tries I knew it was going to be a long night. First we had to teach the new tank how to do it. Even when you’ve done Magmaw dozens of times as a healer or dps, learning how to tank him takes trial and error. Then we had people standing in the wrong place. After one bad try where we got three pillars of flame right by the raid, the pugged shaman started saying we should change our strategy to the everyone stay out at range strategy. Unfortunately, there were a couple problems. First, he was the one who had dropped the pillars in the wrong place by not standing in melee. Second, he wasn’t in Vent. He’d insisted he knew the fight and could manage without it, and we’d agreed to let him try. Third, this wasn’t his raid and here he was firmly stating that we needed to change our strategy.
And his final straw came when, as the raid leader was inspecting him and realizing he had no gems and enchants, he started calling out the frost mage for not having redeployed his pet after the wipe yet.
We removed him, and just then a guildie showed up, an enhancement shaman who had run with us before. She’s a good player and I felt good about her coming.
We finally killed Magmaw then moved over to Omnitron. Same thing. It took some learning. The healer team was not communicating and I feel like our heals were not spread around quite right. We had me on a paladin, a druid, and a holy priest. I was doing way too much raid healing and letting tanks drop. But when I switched to just tank healing it seemed like the raid died.
One attempt we got to under 2% before the last person died. So exasperating! But we healers just had gone out of mana. That attempt took over 11 minutes. The dps was just not there… Reversion was pulling something like 17k and was at least 4.5k higher than anyone else there.
And there were other issues. One of our pugged mages could not seem to switch targets; I had to cleanse her every time Toxitron was up because she didn’t switch fast enough. People didn’t run away from slimes. People didn’t run away when they had Lightning Conductor. Yes, guild members and myself were making mistakes but the puggers were way worse than we were. It felt to me like most of our mistakes – mine and my guildies – were due to knowing the fight but not being on our main. Whereas the puggers just didn’t know the fight.
On the other hand, even those who know the fights don’t always know every bit. One of my guildies whispered me saying that she wished the green cloud wouldn’t get dropped on the mana puddle all the time. I asked if she knew that the green cloud doesn’t CAUSE damage, it just increases damage taken. She said no, she always ran away right away because her GTFO addon was yelling at her.
I bit my tongue. That’s the number one reason I won’t use an addon like GTFO. It tries to substitute for knowing the mechanics of the fight with a simple “get out of this” when there’s way more to it than that. There are many times in Omnitron where you can quite safely stand in that green cloud. And many times when you can’t. Knowing the difference is really key.
Anyway, we finally killed them, went downstairs, and pulled Maloriak. We executed the fight perfectly, stacked up, spread out, killed adds, interrupted stuff. And we hit the enrage timer with 15% still to go on the boss. Ouch.
One of the dps – one of the pugged mages – wanted to try again even after we explained that this wasn’t happening. I’m not sure how he expected to pull that much more dps out. But it was quitting time anyway and most of us could do the math.
Anyway the whole thing confirmed to me that A. I really really like my Fri/Sat raid group. They’re a great group of people, fast learners, and actually listen. And B. I would rather bring someone’s alt, who knows the fight but maybe isn’t great with the class, than someone who doesn’t know the fight at all.
You guys should’ve had me come help heal.
It really does matter about knowing your role in the fights though the first few attempts healing those fight instead of tanking them, it was just such a completely different perspective. I saw some of the affects that I had heard about before, but not actually encountered. I’m just glad everyone in our raid is good.
Unfortunately healers were the only thing we were set on – had Cyla on a priest, Share on her druid and me. You need a dps alt.
I’m working on it. Actually I’m working on several. Maybe after I get this second set to 60 (hopefully this weekend), you guys will have to run me through some dungeons and help me get through the Outlands. I’ll level either the mage, druid, or hunter next.
knowing the fight is one of the most important things before coming to raid. Its shocking how many people do not know fights.
What is also interesting is the number of people that ‘know it’ but don’t really know it. Meaning they have been with a group that downed the boss but it was more or less an accident. At best they are just following directions without knowing why and at worse they are being blatantly ‘carried’.
Another aspect of people not knowing things is what we ran into last night. That is someone knowing it very well on one role but having no idea how another role does the fight. That one can take me by surprise. As a raid leader, strategist and someone who does three roles (ranged and melee are different) and sits near someone doing the third, I know all the aspects of all the fights. I have to. I guess it is possible, in theory, for a raid leader to not know what other classes or roles have to do… but not in a progression raid. Well I digress. That would be another whole post sometime… maybe….
My point is when you are moving people between roles you can’t assume they know ANYTHING or you are going to get burned.
Agree, you may know the fight on one toon but going to another one, you may not realize what you could do in the same fight. like maging it up…spellsteal? counterspell? huh?
As opposed to bubble, bubble, PoH, PoM, bubble, penance, penance etc.
Ouch. Sorry to hear that. One of these weeks I’ll bring in Ross or Sousa to help DPS (or heal?? wtf?) to that midweek raid. I probably would have come on Ross last night, but it was volunteering night.
I find more and more that once we’ve done a fight a few times, i have a bit more time to try to work out what other roles are doing, but it’s hard when you’ve got nothing but boss underpArts filling your vision. But that’s why i leave raid leading to good players 🙂
Ok- I’m going to ‘fess up. I don’t know that I was fully aware the Toxitron green cloud just increased damage. I fail again! I don’t have a GTFO addon but after a moment or two I always move out of the green cloud. Oh well- I learned something new today : )
I’m sorry it was such a trying night! Log- if you get your alts to high 60’s, I can come tank on Imbuff. I won’t promise I’ll be stellar right off the bat, but I do learn quickly and we can play “let Imbuff die!”
You can actually use the green clouds to your advantage: I’m placing one half of my Tron’s behind in it when tanking or put the cloud between me and Toxitron so that my slime has to go through it. Except that I don’t get targetted for such abilities since Anoob in ToC…
On your PuGers: Even better than not knowing a fight from your role’s perspective or at all is not knowing your class at all… “What? I can tranq on my rogue? Nice! But WTH is tranq?” Maybe this effect is increased by using english terms when talking to Germans, but I noticed them adding a tranq to Shiv by myself, even though I’m not playing my rogue anymore.
Gawd, I hate them suckers.
I will agree that I rather take people on their alts than complete randoms. While you might occassionally be lucky enough to get someone else’s alt in as a random, the odds are it’s going to be someone who got carried through (if they said they did it) and don’t really know the fight.
While playing a new role means the fight changes slightly in how you do it personally, I would definitely take that over someone who doesn’t know the fight at all. I think the learning curve is a lot smaller if you know the fight and just need to learn the extra little things for your role.