I'm sitting

We'll never see Sunwell if we continue to raid like we did tonight. 3 hours, could only muster Hydross and Lurker kills. I really don't know what else to say other than it was incredibly frustrating.

What frustrates me is the inconsistency. We walk in 1 night and 1-shot bosses, and on another night we die on trash and take 3-4 attempts on bosses. What gives? The night we did 1-shots we were unsure of our healing, we had our 2nd MT who had never done these boss kills on his own, and yet came out successful, albeit rather slow. I was listening on vent and getting a few tells last night. /sigh

I just don't get it.

What kind of turnover do you have in raids? With my prior guild, we had no idea who would show up what night, and the raids varied in results as well.

I wouldn't suggest melee on the elementals - too much mobility. BM Hunters or Affliction locks do better, typically. Melee should be on the naga in the middle.

Yeah, the elementals are easy to kill, but they're fairly spread out. DPS is very tight when progressing that fight, so I'd probably rather have all the warriors execute spamming the naga in the middle before the next one spawns. You want as little overlap as possible, and a 2H MS warrior is far from the best choice.

Then theres the aforementioned battleshout, buffing the other melee so the naga goes down faster.

I had a hard time sleeping last night after the raid and subsequently was late to work. I don't know what to think. We look fine one minute and then crumble the next. How can we expect to make progression when you take last night's raid and see that we killed the same 2 bosses we've been killing for 3 months. Everyone has bad nights now and then and every raid has eveings they'd rather forget but for us....they are every other raid. Blowing through and one shotting 3 bosses we have already killed before is a resounding success?

No....Sunwell is not for us. If they continue to nerf content and attunments, I guess we'll get into BT by default but it feels a little hollow. No...alot hollow.

Who am I to criticize? I'm here. Am I like the retard screaming in AV "OMFG, u nubs suck, Alliance sucks"? Am I part of the problem? Ahh, failure begets self doubt. Fuck, I dunno anymore.

ttocs: Heh, this is supposed to be "Vashj Week". We couldn't friggen kill Leo last night. Tidewalker and FLK are still up too. Can't even begin to pick apart problems and issues on Vashj unless we actually can clear to her.

That's what's frustrating. At this point I'd love to be chain wiping on Vashj but we can't even clear the rest of the zone consistantly.

Our turnover is not that huge and we know who's coming to raid for the most part, in a guild of 35 raiders we never have nights that we don't raid. I'd say at the most 5 raiders are subbed on any given night for a more casual raider, generally it's more like 2 or 3.

On Vashj, I hear what you're saying about melee. Well, our locks will be on strider duty, we have 1 bm hunter who dc's constantly. We will go with a melee strat on elementals. Our rogues are top notch, and we'll see how it goes. I'll keep your suggestions in mind should we experience getting overrun by elementals and missing the core. I'm also concerned about putting melee on naga getting cleaved, not so much the melee at fault, but which way the tank decides to face that mob, he twitches just a little bit and melee gets cleaved. Also the striders fear and will be kited, I don't want to get feared around a naga, who again could cleave melee to death.

So if you have hunters and locks on elementals, who picks up your cores?

Horacio: Yeah, well... theres probably going to be some of that. The guild has to learn to think on its feet and adapt to adverse situations. Could turn wipes into one-shots (we've had a few messy one shots last night in BT... but we adapted and made out OK). You're going to have to stress execution on these fights, or you're going to have a tired and demoralized raid going to Vashj. I'm of the opinion that people who consistently have issues need to sit out and watch videos or talk to others to better understand the fight before they can get back in. Others might not agree with me, though.

Keza: I could see rogues doing it better than warriors, because of rage/energy mechanics.. while their DPS does go down, they're ticking as they run from one target to the next.. a DPS warrior's only source of rage comes from beating things up.

There's more than one way to kill a cat, though. Going Melee could very well work.

But anyway, we split the outside ring into 4 zones. Each zone has a Hunter (we usually have 4 BM/MM hunters do it, and save the locks for the striders), and a healer. Healer stands at the top of the ring. Hunter calls out which zone number the tainted spawns in (we reference them as zones 1-4). A Naga tank healer (or off healer... dont know much about healing assignments - but this is one person and one person only) moves in position near the shield generator closest to that zone. Hunter kills tainted, with help from some others. Hunter loots tainted, passes to hunter's healer, which then passes to the healer at the generator.

So, it should always be Hunter -> Hunter's healer -> Generator Guy (who is a naga tank healer).

You can probably work out something similar with the rogues and warriors.

You're early enough in the game that you're probably going to have a much easier time if you just get a new Enhc Shaman that can raid 100% of the time.

My raid's lucky, we've had very little turnover because people are so closely knit together. We usually get about 27-29 people on each night to raid, and the extras are always happy to sit the night. ANd even if they need loot we swap people in.

Horatio: Don't worry about the wipes, it happens to the best of us. We had a flawless week 2 weeks ago. Last night we spend almost 2 hours wiping on Teron, it was horrible. Constructs flooding the raid almost every attempt. Then another grueling hour on Mother Shahraz because everyone decided to run in the same direction, and blame each other.

And Ttocs is right. You can turn sloppy attempts into wins. We had a god aweful Gurtogg last night. At least 3 of the Fel Rage people died from lack of heals, and miraculously the druid OT dodged him out the ass when he picked Gurtogg up twice, and I was able to shield wall through the 3rd one.

I tend to have strong reactions and let my frustrations run lose. I am generally pretty good at keeping it to myself and showing a positive face and end up having meltdown rants on my blog (or on Keza's, lol) or to my wife who is an ex raider.

We are a casual guild. We have some very good players. People tell me I am one of them, I'll let others judge for themselves on that point. I think our number one issue is consitancy. We raid 9 hours a week and don't have time to spare relearning what we learned last week. We don't have alot of turnover...but even then the mistakes are being made by players who are there every week.

But like I said, I let off steam and I come across as a malcontent at times but I'm not content to fail. I want to win. Owning the healing meters is not enough. I am playing my druid to aid progression, because its what the guild needs. When that progression isn't there, I get pretty grumpy.

Thank you for the words of encouragement, empathy, support and strategy suggestions, they are all greatly appreciated.

Keza

1st attempt, we did not expect to make it to phase 2 and tasks were not assigned (melee on elementals):
http://files.filefront.com/vashj2222.../fileinfo.html

2nd attempt (melee on naga):

http://files.filefront.com/vashj2222.../fileinfo.html

What a difference a day makes. 2 generators down on the 2nd pull on the first night. While I would rather see some consistancy from night to night, we should enjoy the highs while we can.

Healer POV of the 2nd attempt:
http://files.filefront.com/Vashjnigh.../fileinfo.html

We were pretty bad on Wednesday night and needed to play very well to even see her last night. Without any experience in the fight, we expected to piece together phase 1 then start working on phase 2. Well, phase 1 was pretty easy and we made it to p2 on the very first attempt with 25 standing and were not prepared to mess with p2. So it was a cluster bleep but educational

I'm satisfied that I can dps elementals (with a ranged assist to actually kill them in time) and not be too concerned about rage gen. Looking at that 1st attempt I was very happy with the results, some elementals got by while I was waiting to toss my core tho.

I was not happy about being on naga the 2nd time. When the rogue and I went after the naga we could not drop it fast enough (30 second spawn timer), I've no idea where the feral druid was (I take that back, after watching the video again he was on the elementals). I don't know why our off-tank decided to drag his naga all over the place. Enh, I'll have to wait and see how things tighten up, but I really don't like the 2nd set-up. I worked pretty hard developing a strat I thought the melee would be capable of carrying out, guess it will have to wait.

I believe you're right. Melee would be better served on the elementals. You'll be able to loot the core immediately and are not mana dependant. Eh, that's why it was important to get a couple pulls in. We will go through alot of strategy tweaks before and probably even after we kill her. Striders worry me the most at this point.

Hehe, I got my wish!

Kez