Heroic Morchok
As sad as it is we are trudging slowly into the DS heroic modes after the nerf, and yet we STILL can't get our Morchok kill... the issue seems to be healing, but i can't imagine why seeing as we are 4 healing it. Wondering if anyone out there can help me piece together the missing links and see exactly what we are doing wrong. I am including a link to our logs to help answer any questions. Thanks! http://worldoflogs.com/reports/pdag1f9ti0mqxs4o/
I should also state we 4 healed it, on Kohcrom's side we had a pally tank, fire mage, combat rogue hpal and hpriest. On the Morchok side we have another pally tank, a resto shammy, a disc priest, a frost DK and an arms warrior. I realize we are melee heavy which is also less than ideal but this is what we have to work with for now.
I believe I've narrowed it down to 2 possibilities... 1) Underhealing, I think in certain situations our healing wasn't "bursty" enough and simply didn't keep up with the damage taken... and 2) Improper CD usage. I thought we should save a bunch of CD's for 20% but at this point it seems we need them throughout the fight... any thoughts on this? What CD's are imperative to have, or are they even necessary with the addition of BL or TW to the equation?
The healing looks like it meets the requirement pretty well and the set up is ideal. Stacking shields from paladins and discipline priests is super strong this fight so it does make sense to have them in separate healing groups. Precasting for stomps will also help greatly. Your holy priest could be stacking Renews pre-stomp and soak phases. On your longest attempt his Renew only did 4.4 % of heals. And as a priest who has played holy on this fight that seems super low to me personally. Your paladin might want to try a Radiance/Light of Dawn rotation instead of wog. Just cause the aoe heals while stacked/soaking may out benefit the single targeting he does with wog, though I can't really speak for our Holy Paladin on this fight. I know that as the discipline priest on this fight I'll stack shields prestomp and save my barrier for a crystal soak if it coincides with a stomp. There's plenty of time for regen during blood phase so there's lots of room to go crazy with mana. Blood phase is a good time to use a mana hymn or concentration potion for mana regen. Though I personally find this a good time to stack Arch Angel and get some dps in (woot!).
Another thing you have to look at is that your dps is fairly weak for this fight. In comparison your raid did about 50% of the dps from our last 4 heal Morchok kill. Our kill was around the 4:40 mark with that dps. http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/c...?s=1108&e=1388 With what you guys pushed on your longest attempt at 5:49 you are looking at 7 minute plus kill. I can't imagine it would be sustainable to kill him at that pace. It may benefit your raid to do a pre-potion Bloodlust at the start of the fight just because you have that amount of time during the initial pull, before the split and beginning of the split to concentrate solely on dps. Healing really shouldn't be an issue at all. You may want to work on strategies that let your dps stay in the black blood phase and attack the boss for added damage. Like have your discipline priest stack pain suppression with your rogue who uses cloak or dk with anti magic shield. I dunno for sure on that or what else you could plan. You guys will have to figure out that type of system. I should also note that your arms warrior's dps was exceedingly low, on the longest attempt, for his gear level. 9.2k effective and less damage than a paladin tank. Might do this member of your raid some good to look for some specific information online or tips for his class on this fight specifically as a dps.
Looking at logs, I'd also guess that your guys positioning could be worked on. This looks like an underlying cause as to why a few of your members died to stomp early in the fight, not being aware of range on the tank and additional soakers. The additional soaker should be on the tank or at least in front of the boss with the tank the entire time with the other 3 dps/heals stacked up fairly closely and maybe behind the boss at max melee range. It would help to mark your positioning using the raid flares or even marking a healer and the tank for stacking references. Also the tank needs to be aware and quickly get to the soaking crystal or that could cause problems. Any raid members lagging behind on that are going to take extra damage and healers have to play catch up pretty quick. Which is never good on this fight. I would probably say that positioning is the biggest part of this fight from a healer's perspective.
Hope some of this helps and best of luck.
If you expect a kick in the balls and get a slap in the face, then it's a victory!
I just woke up, so I may be missing things in my grogginess. I'm sure Kull or someone else will catch other issues. There's a large chain of events I'm noticing though...
It looks like your healers are being too conservative. The only large heals I'm seeing, are when they heal themselves. The majority of healing on their sides, and even the tank, seems passive. They might be too afraid of OOMing. (I didn't really dig into all the parses for this, so it may or may not be a problem.)
On the flipside of that, one of the longest parses you have in those logs is 6:21, which will contribute to your healing issue. If the healers are being too conservative on their own, then that's it's own problem. But I think it ties into how long you're dragging out the fight. On one parse, your warrior didn't die until a wipe, but only pulled 16k. Your DPS overall is very low. I'm looking at another parse now where your frost DK is at 13k and your warrior is at 11k. That doesn't cut it, all of your damage needs to aim for ~25k+, the higher the better.
On the flipside of THAT, you are waaaaaaay melee heavy. Your melee could be suffering because they're too distanced from the boss during crystals. Keep in mind that every player must be within 25 yards of the boss to mitigate the stomp. I'm seeing a lot of deaths due to huge stomp damage, so it's likely that either the tank or someone else is too far away. Have your tanks drag the bosses to the crystals when they spawn, close enough for the melee to comfortably continue DPS, that should help a bit.
The tank 4pc T13 bonuses help a lot if the group is too low for a stomp, but shouldn't be a crutch. I'd pick them up soon regardless, because they're incredibly valuable in all other fights.
Last edited by Tree; 02-15-2012 at 03:31 PM.
Dougall, you were looking at the pally tank's effective dps, not our warriors for that fight. Also, we ran into some issues with us being melee heavy where the DK was soaking crystals and the tank weren't dragging the boss correctly, thereby taking him out of the fight (aside from howling blast). Our warrior also kept dying from stomp damage so he resorted to stance dancing to mitigate some damage, effectively shitting on his dps as well. keep in mind he didn't get his 397 creche trink or 397 weap till after the heroic attempts. as for the holy priest (it was me) i was very undergeared for the fight and was really running into mana issues at first. i was healing the kohcrom side though, and the pally and i effectively had our side covered without me spamming renew and all that. i ended up switching to inner will instead of inner fire just to help my mana as well. 90% of the wipes we had were due to the morchok side though, and im assuming it was placement/CD usage/shitty dps. pardon my language!
also, i really appreciate the detailed input, another reason i will keep vox forever in my heart! haha
I agree with everything Doug and Tree have said thus far, so I'll just elaborate on a few key points myself:
Crystal Positioning
By far the most important aspect of this entire fight is raid positioning relative to crystals. Have one observant player from each "5-man group" be designated to closely watch their five people on whichever boss and ensure everyone is doing their assignments in terms of position and movement. This fight is very much a patterned encounter, meaning once you've figured out a working system for crystal positioning, you can repeat that ad naseum throughout the fight and be successful.
As Tree mentioned, you are very heavy on melee DPS, which is fine, but it means positioning when a Crystal spawns needs to be that much more precise and expedient. The best way to do this is to have your tank move the boss almost directly on top of each crystal spawn, and then position himself off to the side, so that the crystal is basically touching the right or left edge of the boss, as illustrated below:
This will allow any of your melee DPS who need to be stacked on the crystal to soak to simultaneously DPS the boss and thus not lose too much if any DPS time. Meanwhile your tank and extra Stomp soaker are off to the side slightly, stacked on each other in front of the boss, so that the extra stomp damage only hits those two players and not anyone taking the crystal explosion.
Practice positioning first and foremost: The vast majority of your deaths/wipes are due to not enough people being in position to soak stomp and crystal properly, and thus people taking much more damage from one or the other than they should.
Raid Assignments
The next big factor is how you split up your raid to handle each role. There are basically two roles special roles:
1. Stomp Soaker - (1) player on each boss that takes double Stomp damage by being the closest raid member to the tank's position each time Stomp is cast.
2. Crystal Soaker - (3) players on each boss that will absorb the Crystal explosion damage by stacking directly on top of each crystal, close enough to receive the "Safe" debuff before the explosion occurs.
Your raid makeup seems to be:
Heals:
Holy Priest
Disc Priest
Resto Shaman
Holy Paladin
Tanks:
2x Protection Paladin
DPS:
Fire Mage
Combat Rogue
Frost Death Knight
Arms Warrior
From that list, the first thing to decide is which two players will be assigned to Stomp Soaker positions. Since Stomp is Physical damage, it should be either a player that can use a survival cooldown every stomp or has the highest innate armor reduction value. From looking at your logs, it looks like your Rogue is already soaking stomp for your Kohcrom team, and is doing a great job of it (I only see one instance where Stomp hits Kohcrom team and the Rogue doesn't use Feint), so that is a good choice there, but frankly the Morchok team is not doing well at all with positioning: http://worldoflogs.com/reports/pdag1f9ti0mqxs4o/xe/?s=2788&e=3169&x=%28spell%3D%22Stomp%22+and+%28type%3DTYPE_DAMAGE +or+fulltype%3DSPELL_CAST_START%29%29+or+spell%3D% 22Feint%22
A few times in that log the Morchok Stomp is only hitting 4 or even 3 people, rather than all 5 as it should, which is a fast way to cause major healing issues if not outright wipes. Everyone in the 5-player group for a given boss needs to be certain to be within 25 yards for every stomp to help soak the damage, no exceptions. Beyond that, as best I can tell, you're using your Arms Warrior as the Stomp Soaker for the Morchok team, but you might want to consider a different soaker, such as your DK or even your Holy Paladin (will have to adjust teams). The Paladin will likely have higher armor reduction innately due to their shield, and the DK will have more cooldowns available compared to the Warrior.
So with a Rogue and Pal or DK as your two Stomp Soakers, this leaves the other six non-tanks as Crystal soakers, and again they should be very quick to move directly on top of the crystals each time they appear, without hesitation. Again, it may help to have someone in each group call out when a crystal spawns to remind players to move to it.
Healing
As Doug and Tree pointed out, it seems in some cases, healers simply aren't spamming enough spells. As long as the casts aren't completely wasted (i.e. overheal on full-health targets), then it really doesn't matter a whole lot what, they are casting, so long as they're always casting something to keep their grouped topped off. As an example, see this log section where your Resto Shaman dies from a Stomp > Crystal > Stomp combo. The immediate thing that jumps out is this timespan is 13 seconds, but your Shaman only cast 4 heals in this time. Also I'm not a master of Shaman mechanics so I can't say anything with certainty, but I suspect stuff like Chain Heal would be much stronger in most cases when it will always hit for maximum jumps and can be modified with Riptide, over single-target heals.
Either way, the point is this gets back to pattern recognition in this fight: Once a crystal forms, it does not explode immediately. You have about 12 seconds from the time it appears till it explodes, so a healer should evaluate the situation when a crystal explodes and if they are in range of stomp (like in this case), feel free to stand still for a bit and spam up the group before moving into position when the crystal explodes.
Other than that, healing is all about target priority. The most dangerous thing in this fight for healing is the Stomp > Crystal > Stomp combo, so healers need to recognize which targets will take damage from what abilities and ensure they are at appropriate health levels to survive. For example, this is how I focus my healing on the fight:
1. If Stomp is coming up next, make sure tank is topped up enough to survive incoming Stomp.
2. If Stomp is coming up next, make sure Stomp Soaker is full HP.
3. If Stomp just hit, focus heals on the 3xCrystal Soakers to get them high enough health so the following Crystal Explosion doesn't kill them.
4. If Crystal just hit, heal up 3xCrystal Soakers so stomp doesn't kill them.
And so on. The key here is that your healers recognize the patterns of the fight (Stomp > Stomp > Crystal > Stomp > Crystal > Stomp > Crystal for Morchok team; Stomp > Stomp > Crystal > Stomp > Crystal for Kohcrom team) and top off appropriate targets quickly -- as Doug and Tree mentioned, don't worry so much about healing efficiency as burst healing output when needed. When not healing up Stomp/Crystal damage, you can use very efficient heals to cover the tank in this fight and regen during Black Blood.
Good luck!
Thanks, we'll implement this next week!
If you just 2-3 heal it I think it would be easier. Our second week of DS releases we 2 healed it and did just fine, I guess it just matters how well up to par the healers are.
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