Its LOG, log, is big, its heavy, its wood.
12 Wipes O Wipping
Wednesday nights raid was a wipe fest. A good old fashioned slam your head on the desk wipe fest. The first half of the evening turned out to be tanking issues. Well I say turned out but it pretty damn obvious when Jugg turned his head to follow the out going tank and spewed hot lava all over the raid.
But once that issue was resolved...what the hell was the issue?
It didn't take logs to see that we simply were not able to live through the siege phase. As the hot tar poured out players were dropping like flies. Why?!? We've done this boss a dozen times before and while he wasn't on full farm status we should have been deep within the refine cycle (I realize I have explained boss cycles yet so I'll do that at the end).
I initially thought healing was the issue. It made sense, siege phase doles out high sustained damage that could easily lead to a wipe cascade if healers did not adapt quick enough.
So into the logs I went.
At first it seemed my suspicions had been confirmed. Almost every wipe was occurring at the 3 minute mark just as siege phase was ending. My own healing numbers seemed a bit down from previous nights with less atonement and more PoH. In addition to that Shade, our Druid, had been teamed up with our new, and temporary, healer Bludmace (shaman).
Could it be that Blud somehow was not able to help compensate Shade as well as Zya (disc) or Os (Holy Pally)? The numbers looked oddly in their favor. So it must have been me? I needed to know who was dying and when and so I turned to one of WCL's most innovative features, the replay.
By turning on advanced combat logs WCL is able to give a replay of the fight with all the actors in their appropriate positions. As it turned out this was very, very informative.
What I initially suspected to be a healer failure turned out to be a raider failure. For whatever reason on this night we simply failed to properly position ourselves as the beast bore down on us. Players would go flying wildly when Jugg blew them back and then would be out of range of healers or healers (myself =( ) would be out of range of them. So yes it was a healing problem but not a raw one.
Our old enemy raid awareness reared its ugly wiptastic head.
Boss Phases
Learning - Upon first pulling a Boss we spend time figuring out the various mechanics and how they apply to our group. Initial learning occurs when we are still getting a handle on exactly what the boss does while deep learning is more about how we handle the abilities.
Once the Boss drops for the first time we enter refinement. This phase is identified as the point in time that we begin to clean up any kinks in our strategy or adjust it to roster changes, something we deal with all too often. Initial refinement can often look very similar to deep learning as we adjust or try new things. Deep refinement on the other hand is similar to early parts of the last phase in that we are just integrating a new player or new class into something we know well.
The last phase is farm. A boss on farm should need only minor refinement when roster changes occur and otherwise is a one shot unless we are derping too much that night.
Our current progression has seen attempts on Nazgrim placing him in the learning phase. Dark Shamans still cause us much heart ache as we only have one kill and thus they are very early refinement.
Iron Jugg seemed to be moving into late refinement and early farm until the wipe fest this week... /sigh
Beyond that only Galakras remains in early farm, everything else is pure deep farm status.
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