Post Mortem: OD disease wing

Short story - a win! We cleared the disease boss after about four proper attempts and now that we're familiar with the strategy, I'm confident we can beat it quite easily in future. That was a really good raid night and there were a whole lot of positives to come out of it, as well as some really valuable learning. We're also getting better with all showing up at the pre-arranged time and getting things kicked off quickly.

We really have come a long way in a pretty short amount of time. I know looking back on that there might be a temptation to think that was an easy fight, but there really was a lot going on and many classes in the raid were having to do really unusual or difficult things. Hunters having to tank, pull straggling adds and coordinate mutli-target switching, healers having to heal said medium-armour tanks, our proper tanks having to do fedex and compete with ravens, rune-stones and each other for aggro, burglars being asked to riddle the un-riddleable (oops!) and me having something of a learning curve in how to deal with the anger cc mechanic. There really was a lot more going on in that fight than pretty much anything else we've done and we did reall well for our first proper on-level raid attempt.

Some specific points:

• Be ready on time. On raid days, please try to have your character ready to go as far as traits, repairs, consumables, equipment and clear bags before you show up for the raid. I know I personally can't rely on having any free time prior to the raid start time to do all those things, so the morning of the raid or even the night before I just go over my character and make sure he's ready to step into the raid. If you're retraiting or swapping equipment or whatever at the last minute that's a recipe for forgetting stuff and you're just holding everyone else up too.
  
• Situational awareness. Now I'm not one to talk about this because I caused a wipe by not noticing that a disease had gone off on me (in my defence I was juggling cooldowns trying to lock down 2 anger-buffed CC targets) but if you get that eye disease you need to clear it as quickly as possible. I put up a post a little while ago which linked to some plugins which can help you notice these things if you find it hard to watch tiny debuff icons (and who could blame you!). The buffbar effect slider and the palantir potion popup (or the buffbar one, but I like the palantir one personally because of the pretty lights and the morale sliders ) can be particularly helpful here. Not required by any means but if you want some extra help in getting information that's already on the screen communicated in a better way, these are good options.
  
• Champion stuns. Now I might have just been missing it, but I didn't hear a lot of horns going off while the bog lurkers were up and they took out the champs on a number of occasions. I know I was using my AOE stun on those lurkers basically every time it was off cooldown because having a few second window for the healers to stabilise can really help. We lost a lot of champions last night and you can't totally blame the healers for that because champs are hard to heal. Use your damage mitigation abilities when you can, and ebbing ire if you get threat too, hopefully it makes a difference.
  
• The anger cc buff. I need to do a bit more testing with this next time we go in, particularly on how long after the initial cc application (to clear the buff) I can wait before throwing mine down. We also need to have a backup cc plan because cc does get resisted. We had one wipe on the 3rd pull when one of the two initial roots resisted (it was either the RoT or the herb lore, because one of the gnawers ran into combat straight away after the start). Imo we should have the minstrel ready to throw down a fear if one of the CC targets run into the mob and people also need to be aware of this so they don't AOE break the fear. Also people need to realise that there's going to be a slight delay in the application of the cc due to the fact that the anger buff needs to be cleared before stuff can get cc-ed. This means the group should move the kill targets further away from the cc targets at the start than they might normally have to. In the second to last attempt on the 3rd trash pull, we had one of the cc-s get broken by an unnamed champion which meant it got way too close to the group for the cc to be maintained for the rest of the fight as it got broken by AOE again soon after it was reapplied. It's definitely a different type of cc required to deal with these adds so stuff is going to go wrong more than it normally would with cc!
  
• Fireworks. We need more fireworks.

All in all, went pretty well. Sure a few wipes, but then we also got darn close more then once.

I do however have a thought, from reading another way to handle those trees and I wonder if it would be better then how we did it.

Rather then have just have the tanks go over and pick up the adds, have the whole group go over and wait for adds to pop.

That way you avoid the whole crossing tanks, not pulling aggro and having the healer left behind. If the whole group swaps places, healers and tanks, etc stay together, you only have to pick them up right in front of you and start DPSing.

Of course the one down side, is the need to not hit the tree you move to, till after the adds are dead, then you can start DPSing the tree you are now in front of, till the text pop's for the next round of adds and the whole groups swap again. Frankly, not hitting the tree till the adds are dead shouldn't be a problem and if you do, then well, you deserve to die

Another plus with that is as you keep swapping trees, the whole raid will have a better idea at the health level of each tree during the fight. Main downside, will be some less overall DPS on each tree, as each group breaks off a bit sooner then we did before. But at worse that should only mean 1 more add wave and if we avoid all that tank crossing, adds not moving over, healers not in range to heal, etc mess, then frankly, the adds should really be nothing to worry about.

As for Champs horn and dying a fair bit, I'm not sure about the others, but I really only died during the trash after others starting dropping (till then my health was always just fine) and with the trees either again after others dropped and I got some big hits, had 1.5k damage * 5 in about 1 second at one stage, but by then tanks had gone, etc and I was history. I did try my Sound the Attack, which is a stun (needs a full 5 pips tho) on those Lurkers and I'm pretty sure I saw 'immune' float up above all three heads. I also tried that a couple of times in the trash pulls, but not really sure it had much of an effect.
If you are talking about the crafted horn, that has a 10min cooldown, so one use with the trash and your done and once during and boss try. I have to admit I didn't try it, when tanks were up, I didn't have any problems and heal stayed at pretty much full the whole time. Tanks gone, then followed by healers and really at that stage, a horn wasn't going to matter.

I have some fireworks in storage somewhere, must drop them in my bag the next chance I get.

Ant, the way you describe with the trees is the suggested tier 1 strategy. The difference is that to complete the tier 2 challenge, you need to have no one in the raid change sap colour and you also need to do hard DPS so even if you could do full raid swapovers without changing sap colour, you wouldn't be able to DPS the trees fast enough in the awake phases. I agree, the way you describe is in some ways the easier way to go (although it does involve EVERYONE doing a lot more movement and making sure they change sap correctly which adds its own challenges) but what we're doing now is learning a method which will allow us to do tier 2 without having to relearn a strategy. The tank swapover did cause us some issues at the start, but every time we did it we got better and I'm confident we can get the strat down cleanly on future runs.

People should be able to keep an eye on the tree health level by looking at the RATs, we did pretty well at keeping them close together though .

Oh and don't get me wrong, I expect champs to die. It's what they do lol . They're the first to go down when things start to go wrong and they have -30% heals so it's a fact of life. The sound the attack or crafted horn idea was more for during the lurker phases when the healers were struggling than anything else. The reason you saw "immune" when you tried on the lurkers was because you were in my group and I was throwing stuns out. Look out for the little 'red target' stun immune icon (if you don't know what it looks like, go test out a stun on a mob and see the icon that pops up on its buff bar for 10s after the stun) and time your stuns to happen when the mob's aren't stun immune. Group 2 didn't have a LRM so they would have had an easier time of stunning.

ahh, that's fair enough then, so just need to manage the tank swap/pull over a bit better, which seems to more be a tank and healer thing, as it's easy for DPS classes to not hit them, hence they go for the healer.

Now that you meation it, I do recall having seen that red dot stun immune before, so will have to keep a better eye out. As such, if sound the attack will work, that's a 3s stun which can be used a lot more, at the expense of DPS, since it needs/uses all 5 pips.

All in all a good learning night with well-deserved success at the end. Perseverance pays off guys - well done!

A few general notes

• Preparedness - i agree with babble here guys all consumables/traits/gear need to be sorted out before the raid - we put all the information you need in the sign-up post so you can be ready on time and we don't run out of time. We have yet to start a raid at 8pm on the dot. Right now it generally starts closer to 9pm.
  
• Comms - while it's not required it would be great if some of our silent members (currently ~50% of the raid doesn't have mics) would get a mic. It really helps when we have people pitching in on strategy and feeding us information that would ordinarily be missed in chat during a pull that can save and benefit the raid.
  
• Pot those diseases! - it was one of the big sticking points i had for the entire night, there were too many greydbg getting loose because we were not potting the diseases! It complicated both the 2nd pull and the 3rd and probably contributed to some of our wipes on pull 3! If people are having trouble with this, consider the plugins that babble has mentioned, they help significantly!xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
  

The Trash pulls
I think both pull 1 and 2 we will be able to get first go next time around as we have sound strategies having seen both. once the workers are seperated in pull one a quick aoe wind-lore will make them relatively harmless. Their targeted ranged attack was hitting quite hard (~2.5k).

I will note though the bone-gnawers and how balling up should be done was very misunderstood. The bone-gnawers do distributed damage and a 3-phase ~2.5k per hit mutli-target attack. Whenever one gets loose and cannot be cc'd (anger) the HEAVIES and ONLY the HEAVIES need to stop whatever they are doing and get right on top of the bone gnawer, a gnawer on its own is going to run around one shotting the raid with glee! This means in that situation there would be a ball of heavies and a ball of medium/light armored characters WELL CLEAR of the gnawer.

Pull 3
So our strategy was tanks pick up the queens (wind lore again useful here) have the DPS burn the worms and have both gnawers cc'd until all other adds were cleared.

• Our strategy was working until the gnawers got loose. Although babble need more assistance in clearing anger so he can keep cc i think. So maybe a bit more planning on cc rotations will help things greatly here.
  
• Not potting diseases really hurt us, we had at least 9 greydbg loose at one stage which means on 3 seperate occasions diseases timed out.
  
• We need a quick action plan when a gnawer breaks mez a) if under anger a quick double cc will remove the issue, b) all heavies move and stack on the loose gnawer and focus him down ignoring all other targets.
  

Baleleaf and Dourbark
We had a solid strategy from the get-go here, and the execution on our successful was almost an exact replica of the damage phases needed in t2 challenge mode! so well done! The biggest issue we had was cross-overs. both myself and athel need to work on our pickups and speed getting to the other side as the hounds are quite lethal.

Also healers: RKs - no runestone (caused problems) and avoid group heals (huge threat). DPS did well to position and give the tanks space to pick up their targets.

That's all i can think of for now - I'll post more if it comes to mind.

Just a quick note on the comms - it's actually not essential for everyone to have mic's imo. More people with mics means more cross talk and it can definitely get to a level where it gets confusing. Yes, it's good to be able to talk BETWEEN fights, but during fights there should only be communication by the raid leader and calling for pre-defined events. I know I'm guilty of talking too much during fights at times and confusing raid calls, when you have the mic the temptation is there to use them so be careful.

Pull 3 - note that I'm heavily constrained in my ability to use wind lore by the fact that it's an AOE (traited to be max 8 targets, so it will hit anything nearby) and I'm paranoid about it breaking mezzes. Afaik the queens there are next to the mezzed gnawers which makes it difficult to use. Burglar disable can be safely used as well as LRM sign of power: command if they're hitting particularly hard as they're only single target.

Re healing threat - Can someone tell me if the stone heals raid-wide? Or does it only heal in-fellowship? If it only heals in-fellowship that could clarify an argument I had with some more experienced raiders on the forums about heal threat mechanics in this game (I would be right, heh ). If it does heal raid-wide (ie if it was healing athel when he went to pick up the lurkers) then we need to do some further testing about heal threat mechanics to see exactly what will and won't generate hate on the lurkers when they wake up. Also the stone is obviously an important aspect of the RK heal, so they should use the stone but just unsommon it when the tank's move over to pick up the adds.

My understanding (tho I could be wrong), is that at one point, the stone did heal the whole raid, this was a bug. As far as I know, that's now been fixed.

Even so, its easy to test, grab a RK and a couple of others, convert to raid, jump in to something and put one member in group 2 and drop a stone. You'll soon see if all are getting a healing effect.

Did a quick test with the RK stone last night. It seems, that when it it first dropped, members in the other group got one heal, but then nothing. As soon as someone was pulled over to the same group as the RK, heals started to tick over.

So basically, no, it's not raid wide, just the group. Didn't actually try to see what happens if the stone is dropped and then the RK is moved. But either way, I'd say it's healing and hence any extra side benifits are group only.

great, thanks for that.