After an enjoyable week's break in Spain, it was back on the progress trail with Iron Maidens Heroic!
This fight is wonderfully set up for Elemental Shaman... 3 bosses all stacked up just waiting for super-powered Earthquake after super-powered Earthquake, the rest of the raid just doesn't stand a chance :-)
Even the movement, with a bit of good luck, can fit in nicely for us. The duration of Glyph of Spiritwalker's Focus is perfect for Rapid Fire and can help out a bit on the second (for us) boat.
I am routinely sent up to the boat, generally so I can coordinate the group up there for more than any other reason. I am quite glad because I think I would find trying to dps during the bomb phase quite frustrating. And it adds a bit of variety to the fight.
It took a night, or slightly more, of wipes to get us into a position where we could start thinking about the kill.
The bomb phase seemed to confuse a few people, the usual people who seem to be confused by any and every type of fire that we need to avoid.
I had only done it on lfr but it seemed easy enough, bit of Hokey Cokey and you're all good. I know lfr is lfr but the mechanic is the same, it's just the penalty for failure that changes.
As the night went on, we either got better at the bomb phases or we moved those failing on to boat duty, finally beginning to reach the hectic burn phase at the end.
To AoE or not to AoE...
When one of the bosses reaches 20% HP, all hell breaks loose!
Damage ramps up dramatically and it's a race to kill one of them to relieve the pressure on the healers before people start dying.
We choose Marak to die first. He does massive, mostly unavoidable, raid-wide damage so it makes sense to get rid of him as quickly as possible.
Here is the crux of the issue...
We ask our dps players to stop AoE/Cleave and just focus down Marak single target to get him down as quickly as possible.
The problem is... nobody wants to do it! :-)
All that potential dps lost by not cleaving, who can blame them?
It's all about Recount after all!
Our RL tells the raid to single target but some people just don't listen and beyond repeating the instruction to the whole raid again, he does nothing else.
What can he do?
Should he start kicking people out of the raid?
I don't think that's the answer but there has to be some way to make these people understand, make them want to put the raid before their own dps.
Is there a way?
The worst culprit is a combat rogue who point blank refuses to turn off Blade Flurry.
I don't know whether he doesn't believe that we need to single target, or just doesn't care, but Blade Flurry stays on in all possible cleave situations.
His refusal to go single target even made me question the need for it at all so I looked at the logs...
Marak has roughly 20M HP at 20% with our raid comp but, by the time we had killed him, we had done a total of 28M damage. That's 8M damage on things we weren't supposed to be hitting at all.
Well, not 8M, as 2.5M was done to the turrets which were still the priority of the ranged players so 5.5M 'wasted' damage. That's about 20 seconds he was alive for longer than necessary after allowing an arbitrary amount for passive cleave.
Did it make any difference though?
Well, in that 20 seconds, Marak does 4M+ more damage so it's nothing to be sniffed at. On a couple of occasions, we lost 3 or more people during that 20 seconds and then wiped.
On the third occasion... even more died but the rest of the raid managed to continue on to get the kill!
Iron Maidens down! Only 2 more to go!
It still doesn't solve my dilemma though. We killed the boss so was the rogue right to stick with Blade Flurry?
Personally, I think it was a riskier strategy, more in line with an overgeared farm boss than progress.
Should I even care? I'm not the RL after all, I'm just another raider.
What would have happened if we all stuck to our AoE/Cleave?
I think we would still be running round avoiding bombs instead of looking at Blast Furnace
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