A new home and a bright future

So after a break for most of Legion I'm back and this time running with Eternal Kingdom...if I pass the trial that is.

Looking forward to raiding again and to thinking about raiding again.

=)

Raid Organization

"Who's in charge around here?"

For many guilds the Guild Leader is the Raid Leader and the recruiter and the one shouting "Come on guys, you've got to get better". The problem is that this way of doing things fails to understand and then proficiently execute the various things that need doing. Expectations can become unclear, goals are nebulous, and everyone is suddenly expected to be on the same page and just as competent as the loudest disgruntled in voice chat. This voice is inevitably not the raid leaders.

Approaching your raid team with the mind set that this is an organization with goals to be met and understanding the various positions that need to filled can be a great way to minimize stress and increase not only performance but also the enjoyment of the guild as a whole.
Let's break it down.

Thoughts on Holy pre-patch

Just real fast.
So, yeah once I kinda figured it out I have to say I like it for the most part. HW: Serenity hits like a truck.
Incidentally I was wrong about some stuff in my pre-pre-patch look and I'll redo that work later.

I've learned that complaining and saying "I'd do it this way" is pretty pointless but never the less I do have a few words about the Talents.

The level 15 row is fine. The level 30 one though, it's just so odd to see movement talents mixed with a self heal OSB. Instead we could maybe have something that alters how Leap of Faith works, like the old glyph that changed it to pull the caster and had a small healing buff.

Level 45 is whatever, its a leveling talent and then your raiding talent. Shining Force is a silly spell. How about a silence for once? Whatever.

60 is a good tier. Good choices that are sorta related. This is a well done tier.

75. So this is the one that I am most interested in changing. Healing without Binding Heal just feels like a tool went missing from my toolbox. I miss it and honestly the 3s reduction to both HW's would be a nice thing to have baseline. This would also give you another choice in the AOE category besides just PoH. "But you can take it as a talent" Well, sure. Surge of light however is simply too good. Free, instant Flash Heals? They reduce HW: Serenity by 6s, not 3, they are free, and they work well with Trial of Light. And they are free.
So I would love it if Bind was returned to our base kit and desperate prayer was moved to where bind is. Or really it doesn't matter what you put there because SoL is awesome.

Finally on the 90 row I would move Divinity. It just doesn't fit there. Put Circle Heal there and give us a row that insures we have a second healing spell. Plus, choosing between circle, star, and halo is actually a good choice as they all do roughly the same thing in different ways.

But then what do you do with divinity? Put it on the same row as Apotheosis? Sure why not? Either HWs give a healing buff or once every three minutes you can boost the rate at which they can be cast. Now thats real choice.

Also, why do we have shackle undead? WHY?????

Fast and dirty look at pre-legion-post-wod Holy Priest

Without the artifact and using last Tiers gear we are only getting a vague idea of what the Holy Priest will look like in full Legion Raid Regalia. And as I shall use the most wishy of the washy napkin math here this will not be a very thoughtful nor accurate examination of what is in store.

With all that in mind I can say that I am excited for the first time in a long time. Holy is looking good it must be said.
Shall we dive in?

Preparing for Legion

With Legion looming on the horizon and the great Sippy Cup Mythic Experiment a seeming success it is time to begin to mentally prepare for an actual season of Mythic raiding. HFC saw us dip our toes and eventually belly flop into the pool of serious raiding and now it seems that there is a hunger for even more.

Log Review

Ok. So you had a bunch of pulls and are wondering how you can improve for the night. Time to hit the logs.

I'm going to grab one log from tonight and go over my own performance but the concept applies to all logs.

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/py3689jHrG1vTDLa#fight=28

Why is raiding hard?

Or rather what makes encounters difficult?

So suppose we decide to designs raids around a 20 man group. 2 tanks, 3 healers, and a mix of 15 melee and ranged.

Now suppose we want fights to last roughly 5 minutes (300 seconds).

Our DPS, with perfect rotations, can output 100 damage per second. Tanks can do 50 DPS.
Our healers can sustain 100 heals per second with perfectly optimized casting for 300 seconds before running out of mana. Tanks can mitigate or self heal another 50 HPS worth themselves.

So with perfect play in five minutes our DPS output 450,000 damage, tanks put out 30,000 damage, healers can heal 90,000 incoming damage and tanks can mitigate/heal another another 30,000 damage.
We then set the boss health to 480k and tune the raid to output 120k damage over five minutes and set an enrage mechanic to go off at the first second after five minutes that will kill everyone still alive.

So this is a very bare bones set up but it represents a zero margin of error style raid encounter. Every single raider must perform perfectly for five minutes without any human or computer error or even lag spikes.
In reality even the hardest fights are not this restrictive. By lowering the boss health we allow the DPS a margin of error. By lowering the unavoidable damage dealt to the raid we lower the healers margin of error. Tanks depend on how damage is dealt to them typically with a stacking mechanic that needs to be swapped off. If we add wiggle room to the amount of stacks a tank can have this allows for some error from the tanks as well.

We can also move some of the damage being done to avoidable mechanics. This increases the difficulty for players who have to now move or in some other way handle this issue but also allows for our group to show skill by lessening the difficulty of healing with greater awareness and reaction time.
We can also move some of the boss health onto adds, or have a period of time when the boss takes extra damage, or other such mechanics to lessen the amount of damage that needs to be dealt.
At the end of the design process we get a raid tuned in to a skill level that we find is acceptable for the challenge we wish to present.
We can then remove some mechanics entirely to make an easier difficultly, then again reduce out going damage and enemy health pools and extend the timings needed for other mechanics to make the raid easier still for an entry level raid.

This all sounds very simplistic and like common knowledge but I'm always surprised at the number of raiders who begin to attempt Mythic level content and blame a lack of gear or bad luck or some other such nonsense for poor performance or even for the lack of boss kills. I also hear players claiming that rankings don't matter. At the end of the tier it is true that a subset of the population over gears and goes on parse runs looking for top slots but there are ways to filter these people out and then see what people are bringing to the raid. The ranking is essentially a way of telling log analysts how well you perform compared to others who play your same spec.
Mythic fights are designed with a lower tolerance for error and sub optimal play and as such Mythic teams who value progression look for those players who make fewer errors and have more optimal performance.