Forged Alliance

For pulls where there are two high HP hard hitters, the common mentality I've seen is that the OT should hold "X", or the second kill, and the MT hold "skull", or the first kill.I'd like to put this practice into question.Assumptions:MT has better gear, and thus can take more of a beating. (Or else they wouldn't be MT)OT generates enough threat to hold their mob through the whole fight. (MT can't taunt it back)Two protection warriors.Current strategy: OT holds X while MT and dps take down skull first.PRO: OT doesn't need to generate much threat to hold X, just above the healers. OT has plenty of time to build up a pool of threat before dps comes.PRO: MT with better gear tends to generate more threat (Less rage wasted on defensive abilities), therefore DPS can go all out on the first mob.CON: OT takes 100% of the beating because their target is killed last, while MT only takes 50% of the beating. Harder on healing.Proposed strategy: MT holds X while OT and dps take down skull first.PRO: OT takes 50% of the beating, MT takes 100% of the beating. Easier on healing.CON: OT might have difficulty keeping threat above DPS on their target.Summary: If you have an OT that has no difficulty generating threat, you should be able to switch the kill order and save on some healing.The OT can also equip DPS weapons once their target is down and start beating on MT's target. Also true for the reverse, but MT dpsing and not tanking is putting all that great protection gear to shame.However, the minimalistic benifit in healing mana VS. the risk of OT losing aggro may not be worth it, especially if you have great healers that never go out of mana. It depends on your group composition....Now, throw in a feral druid as OT and this small change adds a whole bunch of benefits, not just healing.Proposed strategy with feral druid as OT:PRO: Once OT's target is down, druid can now shift out and can support the group by innervate/HoT's on MT/BRez/etc, rather than being stuck in bear 100% of the fight.PRO: By equipping a dps weapon and shifting into cat, even if primarily in bear gear, there is a near whole DPS added to the fight.I would assume the same "group support" benifit also applies if a pally OT's target goes down first, such as some off heals, but I'm not that familiar with a pally tank's in-combat support.Basically if a hybrid OT, once the first target is down, the fight should be exponentially easier because the OT can now support the group in other ways than just "meatbag".Now, if the target is taunt-able, then I would say stick to the old strategy, and just have MT taunt all the aggro off of the OT. Or if OT has trouble building aggro, then the old strategy works best for the added threat pool.Doing this might also add confusion to the raid markers if people aren't paying attention. One pull the MT will have skull, and then the next pull MT will have X & OT will have skull, this switch requires extra time to coordinate. Even more confusing to those who target MT's target.So implementing this during a group/raid would be difficult unless everyone is on the same page and understands the points made in this post.Anywhoo, I'm just thinking about random stuff.Comments, questions, rebuttals, death threats, and love confessions welcome

That's the way we did it with my horde raiding guild -- this was back before raid markers, and as much as raid markers help set up the pull -- they can be detrimental to people using their brains about who to attack next.  Our MT would take the hardest hitting mob for the longest, our OTs (up to 4) would be set up as assist targets in CT Raid and we'd follow up the DPS chain.One reason we stuck with killing the skull first is that in the group 1 raid, our OT was not specced in protection and therefore not able to generate adequate threat - bottlenecking DPS.  But with adequate threat -- the theory makes complete sense.  Best at mitigating/receiving the damage should be the one being hit the most..I agree, though -- you need smart DPS to follow the "bouncy ball".

I like that you are thinking critically about your job in Kara.  I think that there are a lot of good ideas here.If you would like we could give some of this a try on Sunday.  Might be fun to change things up on the same old trash pulls.I also think that the trash in Kara is not very hard, and that some of these ideas would be overkill for many of the pulls.  But as we progress farther into 25 man content, a lot of the trash becomes a lot harder.  So a lot of the things you talked about here would become more practical in later content.  But we could put some of these things into practice on Sunday, and see how it works.Andy

I can come on sunday if you guys need me

Hit me up

Yea, Akuma - the status quo kill order came from aggro issues, not mitigation issues. Although it's clearly a case-by-case decision, I'd imagine it would work better for your OT target to die first, if you're OTing

Yeah, from a healer standpoint, at least in kara, most of the trash isn't really healing intensive so it doesn't really matter which one goes down first. On the other hand, with those bear mounted trolls in ZA, it might make more of a difference.

Oh great, trolls ride bears now, just wonderful.  I better tell Colbert.