Post Mortem Examination - Ost Dunhoth Raid 8/4/11 8:00pm

Firstly, thank you to everyone who took part. We certainly have improved from the 1st few raid attempts from before. Please use this thread to post your feedback and thoughts of how this raid went and what we need to improve.

Most importantly, we need to have a roster of all those taking part as earliest as possible before the raid. This allows us to mail each other in game and post on this forum on developments in strategies, organisation and preparation. I suggest for the next run to include as many of the people who were in the last run as we can because, we are all figuring out what to expect (ie no surprises or repetition). Once this is done we can then mail via lotro mail or post on this forum the information people will need to know before going in.

My general recommendations:

1) Quantify consumables needed (such as 30 of each wound, fear, disease etc pots)
2) Targeting strategies (such as aim on mobs from left to right instead of through an assist. However not for the renewer wights sections of the corridors)
3) More mics for communication (I believe some of you are already working on the vent/team speak for next time)

Specific recommendations:

We know we are going to eventually all make it to phase 2. Here i suggest all light + med armour classes stack up on a predetermined friendly target. Champs should also come 2 protect this group and wait with the Hunters for adds 2 appear, whilst tanks + healers sort out the aggro. This strategy will help us identify what tanking strategy we need.. ie can the healers sustain a tank taking damage from all 3 mammoths (doubt it unless we have a 3rd healer) or do we need the 2nd tank to kite. At this stage of the fight if there are FMs id suggest all blues, or a mix of blues and greens as it is no longer a dps race, but in fact the opposite, were we slow down dps as much as possible and the focus is on the tank + healer keeping our shields up.

Im just really going on my own thoughts here, so feel free to correct me if you see anything you dot agree with and please add your own information as it is probably valuable

P.S. I figured out that when we fail phase 1 without anyone dying, its because the mammoth touched a mob so, we shouldn't let this happen.

everything that PtP says is correct and thanks very much to him for posting this. Also grats to the group on getting through the first phase at least a couple of times last night, although never with a full raid standing unfortunately . That second phase is going to be brutal though, the mammoths hit like, well, mammoths and there are a LOT of adds that spawn at a time (appx 10 from what i saw). It's complete chaos!

Stepping back a bit though, i think we might be trying to run before we can walk with this raid (or indeed any of the raids which require a significant degree of skill and coordination). A few points that I think point to us as a group not being ready for this kind of raiding:

• Class makeup. Ideally a raid should never have more than 2 of every character class. It should also have at least 3-4 support classes including 1-2 captains (for very important group buffs, off-healing and raid-saving panic buttons) and 1-2 burglars (for debuffs, addle induction multipliers on certain bosses/mobs, cc on the undead and FM starters). These things are assumed to all be present by raid designers. I had thought we might be able to brute force our way through tier 1 of the new raid, I'm not convinced we can. I know one of us is working on levelling a cappy, but even with slotting aruthar into last night's group we're still too DPS-heavy.
  
• communication. PtP has already pointed this out but (as I have said before), I am not a suitable raid leader. I can do my best with organisation, preparation and strategising but we need someone to call out targets, direct traffic when things are hectic and respond to new situations. Also, as noted, we need software to facilitate such coordination. We are working on this.
  
• Basic individual reactions and situational awareness. This includes things like reading personall debuffs and using an appropriate potion quickly - I saw that "white eye" AOE wound stun go off far too often last night despite frequently calling it out in chat (again, the voice thing hurts here). I don't know if everyone knows about the option in the "social options" panel called "show dispellable effects only", it should be used by everyone as it's great at displaying the effects you really want to focus on - also turn on "show effects cast by me" while you're there if you use skills that have a beneficial effect that you want to track. Also corruption removal (some classes like LMs have their removal skill on 30s cooldown with a high resist chance, everyone needs to be tracking, reading and removing relevant corruptions at all time), interruptting, target forwarding and situational awareness of negative landscape effects like dirty big mammoths about to stomp on you. All of these things are just assumed in a raid environment. While the challenge in a 3 or 6 person instance is about figureing these sorts of things out and executing them, in a full technical raid they are simply expected to happen and the challenge on top of that is related to coordination and strategy.

Anyway, in spite of all that I still had fun last night and do want to continue. Right now though I'm thinking of taking a step back and heading back into helegrod for some more casual and forgiving raiding. Also if anyone other than boomer is leveling a captain or knows a good one who would be interested then please let me know!

I'm not going to congest this thread much further. Babble and PtP have hit the points well.

Understandably some people are new to the team/raiding environment and elements of teamwork and individual situational awareness are currently lacking. Dispellable effects and standing in aoe damage puddles etc are two blaringly obvious things that come to mind. That said some of the aoe slow puddles are hard to avoid - my group had them on the two wights that was hard up against the next gate.

In a raid you have to be aware of what is happening to you and the wider raid in general so you can act appropriately. this goes for grouping overall, but has a tendency to only really punish you as your group grows in size.

Agree with you Earval. I think we could do with a bit more practice in some of the more difficult/technical 6-person instances. I think we should avoid GS and HoC runs as much as possible in favour of things like SG, lost temple, glacier fortress all of which have good mechanics to practice on also the more technical moria instances (skumfil HM spider has some similarities to the gauntlet here, forges is great for positioning and coordination)*. I know HoC in particular has some gear upgrades everyone wants, but the positional learning and character/grouping skills you'll learn from non-faceroll instances will benefit you far more than an extra 50 morale or a little more avoidances.

also, from what i can tell that puddle comes from an interruptible (orange circle) induction from the lesser "zombie" wights. agree that positioning can make it hard to avoid these once out, but our group didn't have too many troubles with them bc as a LM i can stack a 15s AOE daze followed by a 6s AOE stun (again, a burg would be helpful, they could mez one and addle or startling twist the other too). I recommend that champions get their crafted horn stun up to 10s duration (I think its a legacy) if this encounter is causing difficulties. Alternatively focus on the wights first rather than the renewer, making sure to interrupt both the wights and the renewer's (green circle induction) heal.

*Interestingly enough, when done right both of these runs are also a better source of moria medallions for the time invested than GS but bc they're a little harder the community basically ignores them. go figure.

While I'd like to keep at the OD raid, without a fairly fixed group that knows how to play their class and has good experience with 'working with others', it maybe a bit much.

So yes, I think working on something smaller and 'simpler' would be a good idea and I'd say that Lost Temple and Glacier Fortress would be the best choices.

We should be able to get to a point, that from a group of 10-12 ppl, you can grab any 6 (within reason of course, need a tank, healer, etc) and run LT and GF at T1, as fast as possible without a single wipe.

Then also, be able to run them at T2, maybe with some 'issues', but with the right balance group, still get it done. Basically, get us all to the point, that we think of the new 6 man fellowships, the way we think of GS now. That being, 'you want to do GS'?, Sure, that's easy.

I'd say, once we are there, then we can get back to OD, as that will then just be a strategy thing, rather then a group learning exercise.

On a side note Psy, I don't think the Champ horn can be relied on. It uses a LI legacy that is better used for other things and has a 15min cooldown which I assume won't reset, since it's not a usual skill like all the rest. So if it's used on first try and we wipe, then that's it for the next few tries.