The Post Patch Post Raid Synopsis

Any of you who’s guilds were crazy enough to raid on a potentially unstable patch server with unfamiliar spells minus the luxury of completely functional boss timers, raise your hand.

Don’t worry, I’m with you on that one too.

But, I’ll see your instability and raise you short handedness.

Yes, I was insane enough to try raiding short handed. We started off with 15 at the designated time, but players were still wrapping up patches, addons, glyphs and reforging.

It felt like the crew we had today was operating at something like 70% strength. Of course, it was completely understandable.

We were getting our collective butts handed to us by heroic Marrowgar. While yes, we were short two, I felt that a kill was within reach. I knew Marrowgar’s abilities had not changed. It was a matter of being re-familiarized with the encounter and with our new found skills.

A number of players wondered why I wanted to push hard. We could have downgraded from Marrowgar hard mode. We could’ve called it an early night and give people additional time to get accustomed to the new changes. I don’t know what it was, but I felt driven. I didn’t want to give up. I didn’t want to leave until Marrowgar was taken down. I guess one could say I wasn’t willing to tolerate failure. But that wasn’t it. Another part of me sought validation that this was something we could still do. That come Cataclysm, the grit and determination of taking down bosses will still be present.

You know what I mean?

I wanted to see if that spark was still there. If there is one thing that terrifies me as a GM, it is complacency. It is a nightmare of any progression based guild leader. We don’t want people who feel unmotivated or who decide to give up after a few wimpy attempts. I’m not saying its going to happen, but what if we hit a point in Cataclysm where we’re working on a boss and there are no strategies or videos to pick apart? Will we tough it out or call it an early night and wait for some other guild to draw up the plays? That’s not something sits well with me.

During the Canadian winters, I would always carve my own path in the fresh blanket of snow instead of stepping on trails made by others. That’s a mindset I carry when it comes to my projects and work (as you may have guessed).

We’re something like 23rd overall on Ner’zhul with our recently acquired ICC 25 drakes and finish at 11/12 HM. My desire is to enter the top 15.

We did manage to secure Marrowgar in the end and then placed a few shots on Deathwhisper hard mode before it was decided to call it early. I think we gathered enough information on our classes and rotations. We had a better idea of what was working and what wasn’t (like ret paladins).

Something I need to remind myself is to take a step back and realize that not every player devours patch notes as much as I do. Most of the players in the guild are just as passionate and thirsty for knowledge as I am. But not everyone has the time or the desire, I suppose. I want more players in the guild with the former as opposed to the latter. Sadly, desire to learn and improve aren’t traits I can instill in people.

All things considered, it wasn’t a complete waste of a night. We got 1 boss down and we know what our weaknesses and strengths are. We also learned:

  • Mages and Warlocks are ridiculously awesome
  • Unglyphed hunters do no DPS
  • Neither do pet-less hunters
  • Atonement is really effective but it requires support from the rest of the healing time
  • Ret paladins got sucker punched
  • So did DPS death knights
  • Overall raid healing shot up which means damage taken must have increased
  • Discipline priests are the Energizer bunnies of healers (They just keep going…)
  • Holy priests (without access to Archangel) just burn through mana insanely fast

25 thoughts on “The Post Patch Post Raid Synopsis”

  1. Re the comment about disc priest efficiency and holy inefficiency. Can you confirm if this was not just bad spell choice from the holy priest(s)? What role was the Disc priest performing, MT healing, raid healing or a simple bubble bot?

    1 raid on a night with people learning their new spec (which tbf is everyone) is not a sufficient test to be able to supply us with perfect results, but I would like to know your methodology in arriving at this conclusion all the same.

    Reply
    • Evlyxx: I was planning on expanding more about the healing on my Raid Rx column, but I’ll give you an idea of what I think is happening.

      Spell choices are pretty much the same. Heal is pointless to use right now (Flash Heal’s just straight up better). I’ve been using a mix of the usual healing spells and coupling with Chakra. It takes a bit of getting used to. Sometimes I don’t see my Chakra wearing off.

      The other thing is Archangel is inaccessible from Holy. Its one less mana restorative talent I can get.

      The Disc priest was largely on the tank along with the raid during bone storms. Bubble spamming is a practice we’re all trying to get away from. It didn’t help that a number of players were also hit with FPS problems. Probably an addon issue. Lower FPS leads to lower actions per minute which means everyone else needs to compensate (I isolated it to a ForteXorcist).

      Now as for efficiency, it felt as if our overheal dropped. I need to double check the numbers, but effective healing was quite high. It felt as if more damage was being taken across the board. Everyone was definitely working hard to sustain the raid even though we still had a number of deaths.

      DPS is in a major flux across the board. Some classes are overpowered, other classes are lower then where they should be. Part of it is class changes and some of it is L2P issues. Regardless, fights are taking longer than usual. Naturally, the longer the fight, the higher the mana requirement for healers to sustain the raid.

      With regards to stat allocation, I was being a blacksheep and reforging straight mastery even though I knew it wouldn’t be as effective. It was something I wanted to see for myself personally in a raid environment. Still, having Echo of Light reach 4000 health per second ticks is pretty cool ^^. What I’ll most likely do is switch back to Spirit to help alleviate the mana pressures.

  2. Great post, still trying to decide myself what we’re doing for raiding tonight. Seems like DPS is taking a big step down for lots of classes. In the HoL I ran with my feral druid the most I could pull was just over 6k on a boss with cool downs.

    I spent time on the dummies with my feral druid, ret palli, and enhance shaman and my numbers are pretty abysmal. I ran CoS with my disc priest and was pretty pleased with atonement but that doesn’t equate to a raid setup obviously but it seems like your findings aren’t too negative.

    If the intent was to lower dps across the board thats awesome but what about existing enrage timers

    Reply
  3. I think DPS specs are trying to adjust to the changes – Warriors and Feral Druids in particular took a big hit because of the removal of Armor Penetration and the change of Sunder Armor to only 3 stacks.

    Reply
  4. Firstly mages were always awesome. 🙂

    In all seriousness, they likely may have the easiest transition with the patch changes. I know that in my pre-patch planning, the talent choices for my mage seemed the most obvious.

    I get the joy of spec’ing up my bear druid tonight. Meep!

    Reply
  5. I’m curious, Matt. Did you find your guild to be sufficiently motivated? Was playing with a whole new set of talents/abilities, etc. energizing for your group as a whole?

    I’ll see how folks in my guild react tonight. Motivation has definitely been a little lacking for some (myself included) lately.

    Reply
    • Jeffro: Seemed that way for just about everyone. Some were a little confused and frustrated because they were just plain unfamiliar. Not everyone hits the PTR. Those that were either on the PTR or the beta adjusted the best, it seemed like, since they were familiar. Either way, it felt to me that everyone was curious and wanted to try new skills out.

  6. Good luck on the goal of top 15 on your server. I have the fortune to be in the number 5 guild on my server and we are progressing nicely. Of course my server is ranked 235/241 US servers, so top five is like top 500 on your realm.

    Side note…Are you attending the WoW insider meet up next Thursday? Would love to meet you, and you still owe me a beer for the SC2 Beta key.

    Reply
  7. We had all sorts of people show up last night in response to the patch, some of whom haven’t so much as logged on in six months.

    We weren’t crazy enough to go after ICC25 hardmodes last night, but perhaps you can confirm this for me – I heard that the Chill of the Throne AND the 30% ICC buff got removed. I was only able to confirm Chill in the patch notes.

    Incidentally, I’d just like to point out this is the first EVER expansion transition patch where people haven’t been frantically calling for a ret paladin nerf.

    Reply
    • Jadissa: I can confirm that Chill of the throne was removed. Strength of Wrynn is still there as an option.

      And I would argue it is almost a requirement now.

  8. “During the Canadian winters, I would always carve my own path in the fresh blanket of snow instead of stepping on trails made by others. That’s a mindset I carry when it comes to my projects and work (as you may have guessed)” This is deep, I like that it goes beyond WoW. I like your attitude when it comes to wanting the best from your guild, it’s something I tried and unfortunately I burned myself out because nobody else had the same fire as I did.

    Reply
  9. Are you kidding about the DPS DK part???

    Our mages were wiping the floor with the meters, of course, but our DKs (a 2h frost with shadowmourne, and an undergeared but really excellent 2h unholy) were way up there. On the fights that weren’t ridiculously melee unfriendly, they were both hitting the top 5. I like them, but they’re not THAT much better than the rest of our DPS. I was thinking DPS DKs are the only ones in melee who didn’t get screwed! Our rogues, warriors, and (especially) ret pallies were just ridiculously frustrated. And the rogues and ret pallies are usually our top DPS. The DKs truly enjoyed their moment in the sun and they were giggling the whole night long. And that’s both the major DPS specs – they were very much in line, although Shadowmourne pulled our 2h frost out ahead I believe.

    Huh. Every guild is different, I guess. Our top DPS by a very, very long shot was a boomkin gleefully pulling ridiculous numbers, and I haven’t read about them being OP anywhere.

    Reply
    • Anafielle: Hmm, maybe our DKs are still learning their specs and rotations. We’ll have a better gauge tomorrow. Wouldn’t be surprised if it was also partially fight specific as well.

  10. It’s crazy how everyone’s raids seem to have different DPS at the top (although the same people at the bottom). Your DKs clearly had an entirely different experience than mine.

    Man, I wish either Rhidach or my’s logs addon was working. I wish I could compare our logs to other peoples’. Loggerhead broke and we ended up without them. Addon dependant much? 🙂

    In a random side note, our resident holy/disc priest is usually the most snarky and critical member of the raid. But she was giggling – yes, giggling – all night long, kept showing off her new animations, and was in general a positive and fun loving soul. Our raid was floored. I kept looking around for other signs of the apocalypse. Whatever Blizz did to priests, it must have been very awesome. And she demonstrated New Lightwell, too. Very cool.

    Reply
    • Annafielle: I’ll make mine public right here if you wish to compare. http://www.worldoflogs.com/guilds/4135/

      Actually, it’s not a bad idea to see what our numbers are looking like and to see WHY those numbers are being reached. What’s different? What works? What doesn’t work?

      God I love patch days when everyone doesn’t have a damn clue what’s going on. So fascinating!

    • Matt – True story. Your experience varies because of the fights you saw. We managed to get through about half of ICC25 (because we did the bosses on normal, whereas you worked on heroic Marro) so I have a much, much bigger range of fights to draw from. I am also biased as I ran heroics with these DKs while they practiced their rotations – AKA practiced ripping as many trash mobs off me as possible 🙂

      I will link my logs but there are none from this week due to me & Rhidach both failing to take them 🙂 http://worldoflogs.com/guilds/16231/ He is still sobbing in a corner due to “no proof of his 55k SOTR crit” on Festergut 25. I totally kicked his ass on DPS even though I was tnak #2……. take that, MT!

      Rhidach will post a run down of raid last night, like this one from you, I’m sure. If you don’t know his blog, I have linked it in my website box.

  11. “Discipline priests are the Energizer bunnies of healers”

    6s CD on Rapture instead of 12s will be generating a lot of extra mana. I’d be surprised if it didn’t get nerfed back to 10s soon.

    Gobble gobble.

    Reply
  12. Matt, although our guild only managed to down hc Marrowgar (a lot faster than our last kill), I compared the damage taken for that fight. It’s almost identical to the last kill. So damage to the raid did not go up. We couldn’t continue because too many people had addon issues (who needs addons, rly …) so I didn’t get a chance to try out my priesty ways more.

    For Marrow I was holy and I noticed two things, I can do insane aoe healing, and I can go oom extremely fast. (thank god the fight was short because of silly caster dps).

    The tries on DW just went very wrong and I didn’t get to really test the way Disc works now 🙁

    Some notes:
    * I LOVE the fact that i can now hover over a cast shield or divine aegis and see the absorb left on it
    * I like the blizz raid UI. I was using stock blizz UI, no addons at all before, but I might start using this.
    * I’m disappointed about the Archangel effect, it looks more like Pidgeon Mode 🙁
    * Chakra is fun! Sanctuary looks gorgeous

    One happy priest here!

    Reply
    • Sinuviel: Yeah, it was also brought to my attention that tanks may have taken a bigger beating largely due to a narrower Cleave radius. So soak tanks weren’t accurately soaking the damage that was necessary.

      Agreed on the AoE healing, especially under the Prayer of Healing Chakra.

    • Tanks seemed to take more damage, also on LDW adds, but as my other disc friend pointed out, we had only 3 healers actually doing decent healing. Out of 5.5 (disc was going atonement because his UI wasn’t ready for actual healing yet).

      I’ll see how things go this evening, in hopes most people got working UI’s and addons again 🙂

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