Team 2 Struggles...

My relaxed, social raid team has struggled lately. 

We are lucky if we have a full team from the guild and often have to bring in a friend or two from elsewhere.  That's not a problem, we have some good friends coming in and the atmosphere stays relaxed.
My aversion to pugging has held us back a couple of times, sometimes I just don't feel like I have the mental fortitude to cope with the negativity that some (most) pugs bring.

Having so few regular raiders though means we very rarely have more than 10 or 11 in the team and the tuning/scaling seems to be way off the mark.


The early signs came on the second boss, Chronomatic Anomaly.  We handled the mechanics without any problems but hit the enrage timer... on normal!
At the time I just put it down to low dps, the team was at the right gear level for the content and still learning the fight so it made sense.


As we progressed out of the sewers though, we started hitting issues in all areas of the team...
On Spellblade Aluriel, the damage was extraordinary!


Massive raid-wide damage from the Mark of Frost debuffs which were on the entire raid so that damage was constant.  We resorted to building up higher and higher stacks to prevent it spreading too quickly, which then meant more spot healing was required.

Tanks required spam healing through annihilation even with cooldowns up, and still sometimes died anyway.

It was way too much for 2 healers to handle but there is no way you can run with 3 healers in a 10-man group, the dps requirements are just too high.

There were many wipes.

As a last resort, I switched to my Shaman for more healing cooldowns and Val (Team 1 RL), who had been helping us out on his Demon Hunter, switched to his Boomkin main to boost dps.

Even with Val's massive dps, it took almost 3 full rotations through the phases to kill her and we healers were surviving on fumes for half the fight.

Next up we moved to Krosus and I assumed the dps requirements would be the main stumbling block. 
Completely wrong, it was the healing again!

The tanks were taking an incredible amount of damage from the big debuff and it was a constant struggle to keep them alive at high stacks, particularly through Slams and Orb detonations.
Any unnecessary raid damage set the healers behind and often resulted in a death further down the line, to the next unavoidable damage.

Liberal use of tank and external cooldowns saw us through in the end but we still lost a tank from time to time, it just seemed impossible to keep them alive.

It was fun working out the puzzle of how to keep everyone alive and I was really happy that we met the dps requirements as it should set us up for the rest of the raid.

Wrong again.

Tichondrius was like going back to Spellblade again.
To be fair, the first two phases were fine unless people made silly mistakes.  It was when we reached P3 that all our problems started.
P3 seems to be a burn phase by design, a race to kill him before you are overwhelmed by the damage.
With only 2 healers, it was an absolute nightmare!

The damage was intense but manageable until adds started draining all of our mana.  At that point it would very quickly go downhill.
Because there was only two of us, the debuffs would often hit the same healer twice in a row meaning we had to adjust our positioning to stay in range of each other in addition to everything else going on.

Even without the mana drain, the loss of healing for a couple of seconds as we moved away from everyone else then dispelled was putting us behind and struggling to catch up.

It was difficult to handle but we slowly improved and were just about managing to keep the raid alive... far from healthy, but alive.
Then we hit the enrage timer and everyone died.

We were miles off the pace, boss was around 17% I think.

I tried shifting some of the dps to the boss full time, hoping that we could handle the adds ok and less target switching would help overall.
It didn't, and we needed to kill the later adds quickly anyway so it was only an option at the start.

In the end I gave up and switched to my Shaman to boost the dps numbers.  It's a great fight for Ele Shaman with periodic, sustained AoE but it was still an enormous challenge to beat the enrage timer, 3 or 4 more attempts getting to sub-5% before we finally got the kill.

Is it really supposed to be this difficult?
It is on Normal mode, we are following all of the mechanics and pretty much doing everything right, why are we having so much trouble?

There had been some mention of the raid being poorly tuned for smaller teams so this week I put it to the test!  Overcoming my aversion to pugging, I brought in an extra 10 people to take us up to a 20-man team.

We had a couple of big hitters in the pugs but everything ran much more smoothly than normal, the healing in particular was much less stressful with twice as many in the group.

Everything I've experienced backs up what was said about tuning for small groups and it seems particularly egregious when it comes to debuffs:
Frost on Spellblade
Tank debuff on Krosus
All the debuffs on Tichondrius
It has made me hesitant to go to Star Augur so we will probably try Botanist next.

I don't think it should be like this though on Normal mode, it feels just as tightly tuned as Heroic and even harder at times.

Following all of the mechanics, doing reasonable hps/dps, tanks using their cooldowns and mitigation properly... surely that should be enough?