Friday, August 22, 2008

Druid DPS in Karazhan

Another Karazhan report, this time powered by WoWWebStats.

WWS Parse

WWS is a wonderful tool, and pretty easy to use. If you haven't tried it yet, I suggest you do.

Now looking at this report, I think I should make it clear that Savant could care less about trash. That is to say, performance can only truly be measured in boss fights. Why is this? Because trash mobs are too easy. Once you get it down, it's just a matter of clearing it to get to the boss. It doesn't matter if you're first in DPS when you're fifth when everyone else starts trying.

Now, this may be the reason why we only got to Curator, but I feel it is necessary to allow for AFKs when it doesn't hurt the raid. Not to mention I require them myself. As a side note, a player abusing this policy is hurting the raid, so that's not allowed.

This time I did not tank. I was going to have Anberlin and Besideme tank, since Besideme showed up as Protection spec from a run the night before. However, when we came to look for a pug, I picked up a good tank by the name of Pinchy and made Besideme respec to Retribution. So our tanks this time were known, trusted individuals, unlike when I pugged the Warrior and Pally last week.

I pride myself on being the best Druid I can be. That's why when I look at the report for "all bosses" I can't help but feel bad I'm in second on DPS. I know the reason why: I died on Attumen. Without that death, or at least if it weren't so early, I would have surpassed my peers. Not that that is my goal, but I figure if I'm beating everyone else, I'm doing all right.

Though to be honest, I think we all put together a nice shiny run, and I have the WWS to prove it.

We started out as a seven man run, with Andreya joining in the middle of Attumen trash. We actually did wipe on the trash, so we took the opportunity to summon him from a flight to Duskwood. For some reason it takes us a little bit to get warmed up. However we clear through the trash and get to Midnight. Anberlin makes the pull and Pinchy is supposed to pick up Attumen. But, when Attumen comes out, he heads over to Nodin, and kills him. I try to pick him up but I forget that I'm still in cat form and thus die a swift death. I think he took out Smidgie shortly thereafter. So that left us with 1 healer, 2 tanks, 2 DPS, and the longest Attumen fight I've ever witnessed. Made worse by the fact that I was watching from the floor.

By the time we got to Moroes, our other Retribution Paladin has come in and started kicking ass. now to be honest, Argeryth is a bit below the rest of the DPS, but that's because the rest of the DPS are above the curve, in my opinion. He just represents the average Karazhan raider.

Moroes presents us with Women and Warriors. The trash dies pretty quick and we clean up Moroes with no problems. As always, I lead in damage and not in DPS. I always wonder to myself (and sometimes out loud) if our mages just can't start DPS earlier. But they do pretty well as is and they are still better than most DPS on their gear level.

On to Maiden. We actually wiped with about 5000 health left on Maiden the first time because there were not enough HoT's on the tank during Repentance. I ask our Druid what was going on with the healing, and he pretty quickly admitted things were not as they should be, and he didn't keep enough HoTs up. I am astonished to find out later that he only used Lifebloom for both fights.

On the second fight, we finish without a hitch, a full minute faster than we spent on the fight before. I somehow pump out more than 1000 DPS. I rejoice. Andreya swapped out for Tencice, his Warlock main, which was very useful when we added our tenth member, a healer named Cae.

When we did opera we were dismayed to find out that it was the Wizard of Oz. Now Wizard of Oz is probably the easiest fight for Opera, but we've faced it every time we've done Opera so far, except twice when it was Big Bad Wolf. So every time we go in, we hope for Romulo and Julianne, just for something we haven't done before.

Nightbane is always fun. There's usually a healer dying or something like that when the adds appear. This time, however, everything went smoothly. Pinchy had a couple of issues with positioning Nightbane, as the report indicates, with pulled off a flawless victory.

Curator is truly where Warlocks shine. Typically, when I'm tanking Curator, I bolt tank in cat form and in DPS gear, with Salv up (trust me, I need it.) Last week, when I did that, I probably did about 1200 DPS for the whole fight. This week, I'm chasing flares and "only" doing 988 DPS. Meanwhile, our resident Warlock goes "Curse of Doom" for 26664 and shoots 1000 DPS above everyone else. Cheater.

Last night went smooth, and I encourage every raid that is missing members to just plug on and see how far you can get. Not everyone is as well geared for what we are doing as Savant is, but still, it's better to try and fail than not to try at all. Unless you already failed to the point of frustration. Then you could probably use a break.

2 comments:

Swordchucks said...

FYI, a sound strategy to use on Maiden with a druid healer is to have the druid healer watch their boss mod carefully to see when the CD on repentance is up. When it's up, the druid healer moves into the AoE. The AoE hits you with a 1s silence debuff every 3s, but for a druid with instant cast heals, that's not too big a deal. The damage is also not that great.

Anyway, repentance will hit, and the next tick of the AoE will break the druid out. The druid then backs out of the AoE and heals normally. Repeat every time the CD is up (every 30s, I think).

This could work with other types of healers, too, but druids remain more effective while doing it than other classes.

Dessyreqt said...

Incidentally, this is exactly what I do on the rare occasion that I end up healing that fight. It may have been what Nodin was doing the second time, I didn't really notice except for the fact that the tank didn't die.

Also, I don't been require any mods for my raiders, so I don't know if the healer is using a boss mod or not (I use both BigWigs and DBM myself.)

In either case, a full compliment of Druid hots is enough to keep the tank going during Repentance, and this is not a problem that we usually have. Thanks for the tip, though!