Cataclysm 10M Raids & Buffs

For a while when our guild was moving to TotC 25 HM, we had an A-Team that explored TotC 10 HM to gain experience. I was de jure raid-organizer for these runs, even though the runs themselves were pretty much anarchic.

We didn't had Anub'Arak down on the second week, and tried to have a shot for some of the tribute rewards the next weeks. So we started to theorize a perfect setup that had best possible buffs. After hours of hours of discussion, drama in the guild and so, we downed it with a non-optimal setup with 45 attempts remaining (War/Pala tanks, Pala/Druid healers, Blood DK, MM Hunter, Spriest, Elemental Shaman, Mage, Boomkin).

This whole ordeal has given me an insight with the problems of 10M raid designs. Wrath's Bring the player, not the class motto pretty much works out in 25m raids, when you can cap out the raid buffs with ~15 people very very easily, and past that point, you really do bring in your best DPSers/Healers/Tanks for the job regardless of the class/spec.

My experience with 10M Hardmodes in Wrath was they weren't balanced around min-maxed groups, so pretty much a random group with a few exceptions would have a decent shot at any and all Hardmode Encounters.

When this does happen, there's a few consequences to it:

• Shamans before anything else is the most important addition to 10M raids. Before tanks, before anything, we'd look at which shaman could make it to our raids, and compose our raids on that. When the playing ground is even, Bloodlust makes Shamans more equal among equals. Icing on the cake, their totems are absolute bonkers, and nullify the need for other classes. There is nothing a Blood/Frost DK can bring that an Enhancement Shaman can't. 

• Retribution Paladin is the close second to Shamans. While Kings is God, it's just top of the iceberg. Replenishment, Haste, Damage, Crit Chance all are a few reasons why Retribution Paladins are gods. Now, all Wrath raids are balanced around Replenishment, so you need either a Shadow Priest or a Retri Paladin. And Shadow Priest does not compare to Reti Paladin, not even remotely closely.

• Druids are the fail-proof additions. If you don't really care for the buffs past Replenishment and Bloodlust, each Druid is one more combat res and innervate. 

It's kind of a funny feeling that, once the ground is "level" for all classes, some classes are more equal. If you balance the raids for a DPS setting of Rogue, Survival Hunter, Frost Mage, Shadow Priest, Arms Warrior with no Restoration Shaman, then any of the classes I've listed in bulletins will make the content far, far easier. And if you balance it with at least the classes having moderate amounts of synergy together, and with Bloodlust, then it's mandatory. You just can't win this one. 

Case in point, my old DK was pulling 4.5-5k sustained DPS on Boss Dummy with no buffs and around 10k in a tank-and-spank in TotC. That's %100 damage increase. If you arrange the bosses for minimum DPS in a most most random raid setting, then for example a stacked physical DPS team (which is often the preferred medium for 10M HM raids) will absolutely destroy the setting. 

Another interesting point of Blizzard was "Making 10M just as hard as 25M". While relative DPS and HPS/Survival numbers were yes, in favor of 10Ms in Wrath, 10M HM were often much harder, at least from what was expected of a single player to do. The only reason more people did 10M HMs over 25M is logistic problems, since it's easier to find 10 people willing to go %150 than 25 people doing their %100. 

But for example, where a DPS in 25M encounter is %6-7 of the raid's damage output, a DPS in 10M was %17-18 of raid damage -a little more than a double. I remember us just giving wiping certain hardmode fights after one dps was down ~1 minute into a fight. Same as with healers -Most 10M Hardmode groups bring 2 healers to compensate steep DPS requirements, and as such, death of one healer is the loss of %50 healing on the raid. In most cases, it was just impossible to kill after a healer death (Though we did have a really uber Druid, who healed Anub P3 HM solo. That was some feat, that was something. I still have no clue how he pulled that off). 

But anyways, each healer/dpser is more responsible on 10Ms, which made most fights even harder than when compared to their 25M versions. To negate that, for example, adds-per-dps etc numbers were low and in favor of 10Ms.

Tuning it now even harder, I can see 10Ms being a retro-case of Burning Crusade, when raid-stacking was important and where 10M content (Especially Zul'Aman) was not just something that was PuGable. 

All in all, I have to say I (and most of the casual guilds strictly 10M) didn't mind to know that, yes, 10Ms were gimped, were easier on the whole and reflected the best "Bring the player, not the class" mentality. However, I'm not sure how casual crowds will reflect that, if Blizz does keep its word and make 10Ms harder, the fact that they're now wiping again for hours like a 25M guild. 

But in the end, it's always easier to find 9 more patient and sentient people to wipe with, as opposed to 24.

Obligatory Cataclysm Post

So, I really should do this to attract more attention, right?

Well, there's really not much to talk about, to be perfectly honest. Path of Titans idea is scrapped, Guild Talents are gone. There's going to be even more competition and name calling among guilds now, especially with Guild RSS feed, Guild Achievements, etc. This, I really don't like. I enjoyed "We did X!" over the recent "You noobs haven't done X!" elitism of WotLK. An ex-member of our guild didn't stop bitching about to a rival guild after we killed Freya Knock x3, rubbed it all over their faces.

Accomplishments in WoW is for personal satisfaction, and while it's fun to race server firsts and have some friendly rivalry, to the point of progress is the norm and thus lack of it is a cause of booing -that doesn't really suit me.

I'm going to high-light some changes that are relevant for high-end guilds:

Guilds: A lot of crappy fluff, which, if I don't have to exactly go out and grind ZG outside of my guild's weekly content farm for, I won't mind cool rewards like mounts with guild tabard and such. But most important point is Guild Reputation, you're going to need these to buy the rewards that your guild has unlocked.

Now again, from what I've understood, rewards are fluff only. If you can earn Guild Rep in only raids or trading with guildies or such, then I'm a happy fella that now has a metric source to measure my members' contributions.

Raids: There's a few changes, most of them I support. A quick glance over them:

Different raids, same bosses: Say, you went to Naxx this week and killed up to Patchwerk. Now, once your guild's raid catches up to Patchwerk, you both can join the same instance now. Sounds fun.

More Algalon: Heroic raids will have exclusive Algalon raids with half a tier above loot. More bosses = Fun! But, even now the casual crowd (Who has been given access to all the raids without even attunements just so they can see the content they complained that they were unable to see) complain how Algalon was for hardmode raiders only. I hope Blizzard won't listen to them for this one instance now.

Splitting it up: You can 'downrank' a 25-Men raid lockout to 10 men, for cases like it's Tuesday night, some assholes blew you up and you've got only 20 people, so you downrank your ID, and go with 2 x 10 groups. It only can do good.

Path of the Titans scrapped over: Personally, I've got mixed feelings. It was going to be another gold sinker that forced the raiders to put more effort into (Which already is a lot in the beginning, with insanely high prices for flasks, foods, enchantments and crafted epics). Also given the slow nature of its explained progression, either the raids would be balanced around the premise that guilds had max Acheology already, or not at all. In first case, it would take a fresh recruit months to get him in proper position to raid among the others, in the second case, the profession would make any half-decent raider just way over the top (even if it was just a simple %5 damage/health/healing increase).

Matt at World of Matticus said Cataclysm lost one of its selling point probably because of release rush, but I disagree. Path would make either characters overpowered, or the ones without it miserable. Neither are profitable for a raider guild, who's always looking out for bright talents on their side even if it's a fresh re-roll. I think it's nice that it's gone.

Why was Faction Champions great?

Before I raided anything in Vanilla WoW, I had watched a few videos (mostly movement heavy ones with bosses charging random members around). In Vanilla, threat was a real issue. Especially for Horde side, where we didn't have Blessing of Salvation. Old school raiders still remember the saying wait for five sunders. Threat is now just a buffer for some classes (MM Hunters come to my mind) but mostly ignored by all but the tanks.

Most bosses were in fact immune to taunt. They would often charge random members. Shit would loose apart. DPSers had often access to much more damage than they were bringing to the table, but were limited by their threat. There wasn't an illusion of a fantastic tank protecting and keeping you safe. Even in Burning Crusade, many considered Blessing of Salvation to be the greatest DPS increase. It all changed in Wrath like many other things.

Fights we had in Wrath were mostly the "Tank & Spank" kind of variety we old schoolers called them back in the day. Not only most raids in Wrath had bosses with no kinds of adds -or adds that were just the same as the raid elites like Razorscale or Thorim- Karazhan's second boss was Moroes, and it was an achievement to down him. High King in Gruul's Lair was also a fight with a lot of things going on. KT Council, Illidari Council, Vashj so forth were benchmarks of Burning Crusade raids.

Flashforward. Back when Faction Champions were released, it seemed most guilds had a setback, even if only temporarily. Almost all guilds were one-two shotting Northrend Beasts, and Lord Jaraxxus was "merely an interesting fight". But Faction Champions really turned the tides and got some guilds wiping.

People were crying about how they had to do PvP for PvE. It was the biggest nonsense I ever heard.

I really enjoyed people changing specs, taking out certain trinkets for others (Usually the PvP trinket, though sometimes some whacky engineering trinkets did come into play), how abilities unused in raid instances was something valuable (When was the last time you sheeped something in a raid setting let alone a raid boss?). As a DK, even though I was one of the highest DPSers in the guild, my job was to make sure Rogue, Warrior, DK or pets were not disturbing the healers. Hungering Cold, Death Grip, Chains of Ice, Taunt were the skills I spammed the most. I would also Strangulate the healers whenever it was off the CD. People actually bandaged this fight! Everyone understood it was an encounter of survival and they treated it as such.

My only sadness with the fight was, the hard mode was not significantly different, aside from higher numbers and less room for breath. But still the encounter was just a fest!

It made people realize, they had to get out of their comfort zone to kill this boss. You had to learn a new ability, a new skill. In certain cases, people used different gear or even completely different, niche talents for this encounter alone. This is why this fight was one of the benchmarks of Wrath.

When was the last time you've seen a DPS class come to a raid with two different talent builds, even gear, to kill a boss? Hell, back in Burning Crusade, we had two different gear as rogues -one for bosses, well-over the yellow hitcap, and one for trash, with a lot of Agility/AP. We didn't really actively build the second set but it was just a by-product of all the loot that was laying around.

People have to realize that this sort of dedication is what's required of them for hardmodes in Wrath. In most cases, the numbers are so off the chart, you literally have to do everything you can. This is why, 25-men normal guilds have an A-Team of 10 men hardmode raiders, mostly composed of officers and co -because they know they can trust each other. When we were doing Firefighter in 10 men, we once had to invite a random priest from guild, not been in our hardmode runs before. We explained him the fight, wiped a few times before he asked "Why are we bothering to do it? Normal is much easier."

I'm often calm in raids and I can wipe a full day and a half without complaining about repair bills, but people had to calm me down after he said that. We had a guild who was pestering the officers (us) for lack of progress in 25-meh hardmodes, and they were the ones who threw towel after two full wipes. "I don't have the gold for repair bill soz".

This is what the Faction Champions taught -you couldn't rely on the rotation buttons, DPS, Healer or Tank. You had to get creative with your abilities, you had to think outside the box -and this wasn't even a hardmode fight. This was the 3rd fight in the instance, you just had to do it. People can complain about hardmode fights and how they were not cut out for the job, but very few people would like to admit they wiped on Champions and called it a day.

I really hope such fights in the future that greatly rely on people increasing their skills and their train-of-thought will be implemented in the future raids of Cataclysm.

Bloodlust & You

In one of my previous posts, I mentioned that most of the time, Bloodlust should be burned on the pull. This generated some interest and I promised to look back to the subject, so here it is.

First, we should compare Bloodlusting early or at Execute range, and ElitistJerks do not fail to deliver us some math. TL;DR version is (copied from EJ):

1. If there is no other factor, use BL early to maximize the number of people and cooldowns available.
2. If one particular phase needs to be burnt through in the shortest possible time, use BL then, and match cooldowns to BL.

There is a few good reasons why Bloodlust on the pull is so great. 

Proc-Based Buffs:

Make a Death Knight on the PTR, give him some proc trinkets, give him a runeword, and go to a dummy. Toggle auto-attack, and watch the number of buffs that appear from procs in 1-5 seconds. 

Most (if not all) proc based buffs have a very high chance to proc, with differing cooldowns. Usually, it's something like every 45 seconds (or 90, or 135. You get the drill). The nature of these abilities is they're unreliable, even if you keep track of multiples of 45 seconds. Even then, not all procs diligently go active every 45 seconds. So, the only time you can rely on these procs, is the beginning of the fight.

X Minute Cooldowns:

Classes' cooldowns do not always match. For example, Rogues' Adrenaline Rush, Death Knights' Summon Gargoyle/Empower Rune Weapon are five minute cooldowns that insanely benefit from syncronization of buffs. For all classes, it's a direct DPS increase to burn all their cooldowns at once on the pull, and later burn them as they come off CD. Now the problem is, some of these cooldowns do not come off CD simultaneously. There are 1.5 minute, 2 minute, 3 minute, 5 minute cooldowns. A large part of DPSers damage comes from timing the usage of cooldowns.

"We'll let you know when we're going to Bloodlust" is murder to DPSers. DPSers [should] plan ahead. We need concrete information to whether burn our Cooldowns to squeeze a bit more DPS or wait if we know there's a Bloodlust coming our way in a minute.

Haste is multiplative:

The simplest math is, if you have a cooldown that gives you %50 haste, and there's the goold old %30 Bloodlust, one might think that the final haste is %180. This is wrong. The correct math is: 100 x 1.5 x 1.3 = %195. Different haste effects stack insanely well. But this is the tip of the iceberg.

While haste for casters offer almost a direct damage increase, for melee classes currently it only effects the amount of while damage they do. To make the stat more attractive, Blizzard has several on-strike abilities that scale well with Haste: Druids proc Clearcasting, Death Knights proc Killing Machine, Rogues regain energy, Warriors gain more rage, Shamans proc Maelstorm Weapon and [I believe] Paladins deal more damage from their Seals. The faster you hit, the more yellow damage you will deal.

And what happens if you syncronize all Cooldowns at once? Haste gives you more special abilities, and your other buffs increase your yellow damage.

"Okay, we get it, but why more DPS?"

I think a lot of people actually understand the mechanics of Bloodlust and why is it a straight-up DPS increase when all of these are blown at the start. The problem is, the raid leaders often come from Tank/Healer roles who devalue exactly how is all this DPS is beneficial to their guild. They say, "We don't have a problem with DPS, our Tank dies at X / our DPSer die at Y" and to them, more overall damage from raid is unnecessary.

This is one of the fallacies I've time and time tried to combat. Or that the added damage is required for certain parts of encounter when the boss hits relatively harder. I'll bite, time for a little napkin math:

The boss has a one minute phase [based on your raid damage] when it hits like there's no tomorrow. Bloodlust, while not directly increasing the overall damage by %30, it does increase frequencies of yellow attacks and is multiplicative, so let's stick with this number. You blew the Bloodlost for %30 raid wide damage increase for a 1 minute phase:

First 40 seconds: %30 damage increase, effectively 52 seconds of damage. +4 seconds = 44 seconds.

You've gained 16 seconds of less punishment on your tank. [In case you're wondering, this is exactly how long Saurfang would take, if you had 15 DPSers pulling off 10k DPS each. Obviously, if your guild pulls 20k sustained DPS, he'll only take 30 seconds and if you blow Bloodlust then, you'll close it up in 22 seconds, gaining 8 seconds less of a punishment].

So what is this - Bloodlust now is another healer tool to heal the tank less? Why - I never knew!

Aside from the fact that, if you can keep up the tank for 44 seconds of saurfang cleavefest, you can probably spam it a bit more for 10 more seconds. That and, assuming you'll lose a few DPS on the way, while an early Bloodlust would result in perfectly delaying the first mark for a good while with all the alive DPSers rocking the boats. Yes, you should blow Bloodlost on him on the pull.

I was told Rotface is another fight where one should save Bloodlust for %30. Directly from Wowwiki:

"It's frequently recommended to use the DPS cooldowns at 30%. This is not a useful recommendation, since the encounter mechanics remain the same over the whole fight - there is no special enrage at low boss health. The only thing which changes is the Mutated Infection rate, the time between Infections slowly decreases. For this reason, it's best to use all cooldowns just a few seconds after the pull, as soon as everybody is in position. At that point, all damage dealers can maximize their output undisturbed from Infections or small Oozes. It's even possible to have the kiting tank help DPSing until the second Infection."

And in case you're wondering -no, I'm not a writer at Wowwiki. Heh.

Next time you go to a farm boss of your's, please redirect your raid leader to this page, and ask them for an experiment: That you blow Bloodlust on the pull and try to see if there's a difference. Ask for people how it felt [It should be gooood]. Ask whether your healers had mana issues with overall length of the fight cropped thanks to DPS optimization.

You should visibly see a difference between a boss being whacked and a boss being whacked. This also serves a second, nice psychological side effect - people enjoy seeing big numbers! They will see how fast the boss' health is dropping, and they'll be excited. This excitement is particularly useful in progress nights, where you struggle with the morale of the guild. Keep the spirits up -one particular way to do is spoil your DPSers and let them have fun with the 30 seconds of godmode. They'll be more eager to loose hell on the boss, and thus, your guild will reap the benefits.

One thing of note is, I don't suggest you use Bloodlust on the pull for every single boss. If you're unsure off boss' abilities, or you're confident the boss is not an asshole like Anub'Arak is at p3 and yes, your whole raid can instantly die over the course of 1 second, then opt to use it on pull as a default, which will help you see more abilities on progress wipes.

Optimization and DPS science is not easily "X is True, Y is False" for every single case, and Blooslust is an example of an ambigious discussion. Strictly mathematically speaking, Bloodlust on pull is undisputedly a DPS increase beyond your imagining. However, this doesn't mean it's undisputedly the right choise all the time. For example, I can't think of any boss in ICC where I don't want to Bloodlust immediately [Well, Gunship doesn't matter, but it really doesn't matter seeing how easy it is]. In previous content, we had bosses like Yogg-Saron and Anub'arak who laughed at Bloodlust.

I don't expect tough healers to think 10 seconds less off tank punishment is worth losing 1 minute of mana because the DPSers didn't benefit from Bloodlust the best. Everyone is entitled to their opinions. But please, for what it's worth -tell exactly when you're going to blow Bloodlust to your DPSers, before the encounter. They will thank you for helping them do their job.