Thursday, October 2, 2008

Screenshot: Hex Lord Malacrass...



...didn't go too well. Pretty good for a PUG to go that far, especially when 2 or 3 of the raiders (including me) were seeing Dragonhawk and Lynx for the first time.

Short commentary:
- Today was excellent timing to pug it out. The reset day is the same day we have a guild ZA. I can lend my services if they are required.

- Avoiding Dragonhawk's fire orb thingy is more fun that I had expected.

- /target macros such as /tar corrupt or /tar demon simply don't work for caster classes. You need to do add /stopcasting and /cast [primary nuke] at the beginning and end of the macro to ensure that you don't lose time using esc/move to cancel out of a cast.

- Spellstealing Haste from those Amanashi Fire dudes is rediculously fun. Using Arcane Missiles afterwards is just PIG DISGUSTING.

- I was on sheep duty for the Blood Elf in the Hex Lord Fight. I did my job well, but gimped my DPS, which added up with other CC'ers to become very lackluster raid DPS.

- Many of the raiders in this pug are in guilds well into T5 and above. Doing an adequate job was good for at least a decent first impression for networking purposes. Even the pally tank, who is part of a BT/MH guild added me for future ZA pugs.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Even though performing crowd control during Malacrass diminished your damage, you played a very valuable and I would say necessary role. Anyone that looks at damage meters and disregards the extra utility that an individual may be requested to perform probably is an idiot. DPS epeen-stroking by uniformed people make me sad -- especially since as a hunter I am usually tasked with trapping or kiting various mobs!

Question: did you keep the mob sheeped the entire time or did you kill off that mob eventually? I've seen and done scenarios where all of the mobs were killed and where one was kept crowd controlled for the entirety of the fight. I'm always interested in seeing what people do in the same situation.

And congratulations on seeing new fights and content!

krizzlybear said...

Thanks cyn.

There is a fine line between diminished damage and essentially gimped damage. On pulls such as those involving the Amani'shi Flame Casters, something as simple as tanking the sheep dispellers away from the casters can spell the difference between sheeping once and resuming DPS and being on "sheep spam duty."

But when it comes to boss fights, there is a marked difference in DPS depending on how you incorporate your CC spell into your rotation. RL told me to cast CC after every 2 frostbolts. What? A little too conservative, but I followed his instructions anyways. After several wipes, I adjusted my rotation accordingly, only sheeping when DBM gave the "5 seconds until Spirit Bolts" warning. Increased my DPS by miles, while still doing my job. I think I should have mentioned this in the post, since not saying otherwise may have made me come off as a DPS-whore.

Throughout the Hex fight, that line gets really blurred. The RL at first aimed to simply CC 3, kill 1 and go straight for Hex. Didn't work out. Switched over to 2:2, and did slightly better, but still wiped. Later on, we were forced to go 1:3 (just me sheeping the blood elf) because other raid members were unable to keep their CC's up, but the delay in DPS was too much of a strain on the healers. It's a give and take sort of relation that's open to debate, but heavily relies on raid makeup and awareness of raid performance.

So if I were to take anything out of the fight, it's that the similarity to Moroes is uncanny. It's an indicator of your raid's CC coordination, but most importantly raid awareness of performance and adjustment, strongly dictated by the abilities of your Raid Leader.