ZA Monday 07/27

mahonri · Post by **mahonri** » July 27th, 2008, 9:23 pm

ZA Monday 07/27 at 9 server (sorry so late again but key people cant get on until then and I would like to keep the same team going). Tank - Rachal Tank/DPS - Akumabarai Healer - Handsomo Healer - Inori DPS/Healer - Hanh AOE DPS - Benvolo DPS - Daghi DPS - Amelya DPS - Dakila DPS - Doktorevil If you are not going to make it please let me know so that I can find someone to replace you, even though I am pretty sure yall said that we would be going.

Daghi · Post by **Daghi** » July 27th, 2008, 11:14 pm

Here's hoping team rock face turns into team bear mount.

Krikor · Post by **Krikor** » July 28th, 2008, 11:38 am

Well if someone can't make it let me know I can fill the spot.

Baraccus · Post by **Baraccus** » July 28th, 2008, 12:31 pm

Some of my thoughts from last run, as linearly as I can manage: 1) We made it through the gauntlet pretty fast. timeclock was at 17 minutes when we got to eagle, and it felt like I pulled the tempest earlier than I had in previous attempts. My initial tactic of running in, grabbing the first one, stunning it and then shielding the next two has been working extremely well for picking everything up off the bat. We were a little slow actually getting to the boss and engaging him after the trash was over. 2) Bear trash went pretty smoothly. If Akuma grabs the first patrol with one CCed mob I'm able to drink up and rebuff. This went pretty smooth, no comments up until the pull before grabbing bear. In this pull we have 2 bear riders and 2 others. One of those others is polymorphed and I tank the other. I really think the "add" should be killed before the bear is, making it the 2nd overall target (after Akuma's bear). My reasoning is that this mob stuns, and I get 0 mitigation other than my armor during this stun. The bear does a lot of damage, yes, but the stun is huge, spiking and I believe harder to heal than consistent incoming damage. The mob also has less health than the bear rider + bear. No comments on the bear boss except that it felt like a longer engagement than the attempt before this last one. 3) Dragonhawk trash... mhmmm. I've pretty much got a good drinking rotation down, so many isn't a problem here. We've gotta watch scouts, I'm guilty of this too. I get caught up and tunnel vision into the pull, my mana, watching the cooldowns and the like and completely missed that incoming scout. Also, when we're making a scout pull and Akuma is counting down, I'm trying to time my shield to coincide with his feral charge to get all of my mobs on me. This caused an issue last time when the pull was called off right as my shield fired off. Given the limited options a paladin has to pick mobs up, the only method I see to prevent this happening in the future is to keep a vigilant watch on incoming scouts. No real comments on dragonhawk. 4) (Warning, wall of text inc...) I think there are 11 pulls in lynx trash. We have the initial lynxes, the lynx + troll pack thats beyond the patrol we skip, the troll plus croc pack, 3 lynx packs, another patrol, 2 troll 2 lynx at the door, then a patrol and 2 pulls inside with lynx. I think there is a lot of down time we can shed and efficiency we can gain right here. Before I go further, I'm going to mention a few assumptions I make as a tank, that may or may not be correct, but ones I've been operating under. The first is that as long as the incoming damage isn't enough to gib a tank, that healing one tank who is tanking everything is easier than healing 2 different tanks. The second is based off the first: any incoming damage, as long as it doesn't kill the tank, makes the tank stronger (to steal a line, and apply it to a paladin tank). Any damage I take translates into mana when I get healed. If I have mana I can keep pulling. My mana pool, buffed, is approximately 6600. Each time I pull a pack, I burn 2180 mana in the first 3-4 seconds. 6 or so seconds after that, I'll burn another 900, and then basically another 900 every 8 seconds. Those numbers never change, tanking 1 mob or 5. I get 10% of the amount I'm healed for back as mana (not counting overhealing), through an ability called Spiritual Attunement. Now I may be way off base here, but I don't think the lynx packs are doing too much damage to me, so I'd like to tank them all. I'll probably be low mana after each pull, but maybe not in as bad a shape as before. During this section of the run, my mana pot is on cooldown and I may look into some Dark Runes to get some mana too. There are quite a few pulls here to be made, and not much time to make them in, as we're usually cutting it close to the wire by now. I can't think of any other adjustments to make to this trash except for pulling a pack when we get to lynx if the patrol isn't /immediately/ available. We'd have to pull it back, of course, but it may save some downtime. The only comments I have for lynx is that the spirit of the lynx is a retarded boss mechanic. I hit that dumb mob with a judgement, an avenger's shield and it still went on to gib Inori. I'm going to setup a macro this time for better pickup. After all this work and effort, paying attention to each individual pull and giving it 100% for 45 minutes, we'll be looting our 4th chest.

Baraccus · Post by **Baraccus** » July 28th, 2008, 12:51 pm

Oh, one more thing... timers. We should shoot for engaging eagle with 17 or more minutes on the clock. The only other timer I remember is the dragonhawk timer, and we need greater than 15 minutes after he dies. No sweat, we had 15 minutes on the clock on our first run, even with pulling the extra pack on dragonhawk and nearly wiping. We just have to keep our acts together on the trash and we'll bag ourselves a bear tonight.

Akumabarai · Post by **Akumabarai** » July 28th, 2008, 3:20 pm

Random note: In general, I grab the first focus fire for two reasons, can't beat druid initial threat, and I can dps once my target is dead. (Yes pallies have good sustained threat, but go epeen elsewhere.)

"2) Bear trash ... pull before grabbing bear."
Agreed. If you can hold both the non-sheeped one, and a bear rider, I'll pull off the other bear rider from ya {cross}. My only worry would be initial threat, so dps be wary.
In order to make this pull faster, and easier for the pally tank to pick up multiple mobs, should we attempt a sheep pull? Mage runs up, sheeps add, blinks and runs the heck away. Pally stands kinda in the middle and attempts to pick up everything (Assuming sheeped far enough away). Druid tank just pulls off {cross} from pally (hopefully before the first hit), and then we separate. This is so we can attempt to use consecrate, and makes the pull more manageable.

"3) Dragonhawk trash... I'm trying to time my shield to coincide with his feral charge to get all of my mobs on me."
I'll have initial aggro on most things, and I can take a good thrashing and stay alive. Be less concerned with pulling them off me, and more concerned with keeping them off healers/dps which will only happen 3-4 seconds after the pull. Basically the first 3 seconds of the pull should be primarily focused on the scout, which gives you plenty of time to pick up everything else.
Also, I've said it in another thread, but we should be making more use of druid roots, shammy frostshock, and that mage frost-slowing-thingamabob to keep those scouts from hitting the drums.

"4) Lynx trash."
I'll handle the "troll plus croc x2 pack". Sheep+hibernate make it easy. You drink, you need it for the next pulls.
For the 3 invisible lynx packs, I'll switch to dps gear as soon as the pat is down. The difficulty is we "need" 2 tanks for that pat, both can MC, and if the tank is tanking both, and get's MC'd, we wipe.
We will probably have to pull the pat with a lynx pack, If this happens, I'll attempt to build up inital threat on both, and then move them into your consecrate so you can remain second on aggro if I get MC'd. Dps focus on lynx, and then afterwords we break up the pat.

Also a side note, I've seen Inori rezing people if someone dies. While the thought is nice, this *should* be the shammy, as we need both main healers to be moving as fast as the tanks.

Han · Post by **Han** » July 28th, 2008, 3:46 pm

I will get on the rezzes... no problem. How about drums akuma? Should I make some drums of battle up for tonight? Every little bit helps... On the consumables note - I am getting some destruction pots together for tonight, since I am fine on mana with Amelya returning so much, I think any of the casters should probably be using them every CD.

Akumabarai · Post by **Akumabarai** » July 28th, 2008, 4:04 pm

If there's anyone else that can use drums besides me, I'll be glad to supply. I'll bring 3 for myself and just macro em for both bear and cat, since I forget to hit it.

Thinking some more about Lynx trash...
A wild and crazy suggestion would be to have me pull the 2nd invisible lynx pack for the first 10 seconds. I can hold 4-5 on me for a short amount of time, and blow my aoe taunt when I lose one. Should give you 15 or more seconds to drink after the first pack. This would only work if we had dps stop completely when I use my aoe taunt so you can pick them up off me. I can't sustain this for long, so it's probably not a good idea, unless dps were really, really smart. And once again, this still depends on the pat. IE: overall very risky, not worth it...

Daghi · Post by **Daghi** » July 28th, 2008, 4:21 pm

Wow, great to see all this discussion, kinda makes me glad I'm a tunnel-vision dps though, but I know for me I'll be keeping my finger on FD more so Rachel doesn't have to keep saying "Daghi you're high on threat" Also I've just been throwing MD around when I see fit so if you think of a time where it would really help don't hesitate to tell me.

mahonri · Post by **mahonri** » July 28th, 2008, 5:46 pm

Yeah, great discussions going on. I am glad that everyone is as excited as I am.

Baraccus · Post by **Baraccus** » July 28th, 2008, 10:08 pm

And our first bear goes to.... AMELYA!!!!! Grats on the bear run, and many more to come.

Baraccus · Post by **Baraccus** » July 29th, 2008, 7:54 am

Thoughts on this run: I totally botched up eagle trash. I wasn't sure that was recoverable, but we did it just fine. Things were off from the very start when my hammer wasn't up to grab the second pack, and generally went downhill from there. I got too focused on moving quickly that I messed things up in the process. Lesson learned, I hope. For bear trash, we had some miscommunication about the pre-boss pull, probably need to talk that over again. I'm afraid all I did was confuse everyone

. I did find this on tankspot though to save more time: " - On Bear trash, you can have your Druid use Soothe Beast on the first 2 bears and sneak by them." <--- Thats at least a minute saved right there. Then onward to lynx. I think we did extremely well there. We cleared it very quickly. I was chain chugging mana pots and dark runes through all this trash. I think that was very helpful towards our progress... thanks Hanh for the runes. One thing I did notice was that things were getting looted after the call for "mount, run to next boss" was made. Given that we finished the timed event with less than a minute on the clock, every second counts towards our success. I'm not saying leaning over to loot a mob once will totally break the run, but we're trying to put a lot of effort into being speedy, and this could be another place where we can improve our time.

Krikor · Post by **Krikor** » July 29th, 2008, 10:00 am

Grats Amelya and great work all. Nicely done. hOPEFULLY WE WILL SEE MORE BEAR MOUNTS RUNNING AROUND WITH fa TAGS.