My raid team is 15 people and we run an odd system of "pods" so we have 3 tanks, 3 pure healers, 3 off healers, 3 melee DPS and 3 ranged DPS and rotate people in these pods based on their availability rather than a strict rotation and I'm actually an "off healer" but as my raid team runs with some good DPS, that enables us to run with 3 healers on most fights and allows me to stick primarily to atonement which makes up some of the slack of the missing 6th DPS and allows us that extra security blanket.
On our kills of Horridon in the past few weeks we had a healing team of priest/paladin/druid and priest/paladin/shaman and everything was great. This past week however, we hit a massive issue and actually failed to kill Horridon until 20 minutes before raid end on our 2nd day of attempts. This meant we didn't get a Council kill this week which meant we missed out on a tier piece for the raid. /boo. Why did we have this issue on a "farm" boss?
The problem we encountered was that on door 3 the Deadly Plague, was raping us as it deals 20k damage per stack and we had everyone with multiple stacks because I simply could not keep up with the dispelling because we had a shaman/druid/priest healing team. Previously I had a paladin to share the burden and we got by without problems. Unlike door 2 which is easy to prevent the poison dots by having people interrupt the Venom Bolt Volley and that only deals about half the damage per tick too.
The dispel it is annoying because of the ridiculous 8 second CD on Cure Disease (and all other dispels) and then give us a fight where a stacking 5 minute debuff is applied randomly to people with no real way to avoid except for running away from a mob which is untankable. If everyone gets hit and only gets 1 application it takes 80 seconds to dispel the raid, we had people getting infected multiple times and that was what was wiping us. I pity teams with no monks, priests or paladins.
We tried 2 healing but that was worse as the loss of healing while I was running around trying to get the people that needed dispelling in range as they ran away from orbs and dino charges rather than focusing on healing the most needy.
The dispel it is annoying because of the ridiculous 8 second CD on Cure Disease (and all other dispels) and then give us a fight where a stacking 5 minute debuff is applied randomly to people with no real way to avoid except for running away from a mob which is untankable. If everyone gets hit and only gets 1 application it takes 80 seconds to dispel the raid, we had people getting infected multiple times and that was what was wiping us. I pity teams with no monks, priests or paladins.
We tried 2 healing but that was worse as the loss of healing while I was running around trying to get the people that needed dispelling in range as they ran away from orbs and dino charges rather than focusing on healing the most needy.
Eventually we modified our strategy by defining a position on that door which was basically tank Horridon on the right hand side of the door (between doors 3 and 4) have the OT and melee DPS in the doorway of door 3 and the ranged/healers stood near the middle of the arena and we had to change our kill order to focus the Risen Drakkari Warriors and Risen Drakkari Champions until the Dinomancer joined in and only took care of the warlords after the Dinomancer had been killed. For a picture to show this see the lovely image I made below.
This meant that the mobs spreading the disease were dead before they could infect ranged/healers and if they decided to pick on our melee or off tank there was only 3 people not running around too much to dispel.This worked so well I see no reason not to use this approach in future as it is good training for the weeks when we have only 1 dispeller for the poisons/disease.
This does highlight a bigger problem though for 10 man raid teams who therefore need a monk, priest or paladin in their raid to be able to dispel the disease. The only other option is to have to heal throughthe effects of Deadly Plague for the whole 5 minute duration of the debuff. The solutions are many but the first one I dislike because it splits PvE and PvP and the second because it removes our uniqueness:
- Remove the CD on dispels in PvE;
- Give all healers the ability to dispel everything;
- Make the debuff a shorter duration;
- Better encounter design so the debuff is more easily avoidable;
Am I whining? Do I have a valid point? I'm torn on this so would love to know your views.
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We haven't yet downed Horridon (we are extremely casual though, I'm glad it's been nerfed!), but agree with what you're saying: dispels should be without CD as most raids will only have one person capable of doing it.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure about nerfing the debuff - I like the challenge - but there are certainly steps available to make it easier on the healers!
The nerfs brought in the day I posted this should help greatly although I have yet to see the nerf in action so fingers crossed :)
DeleteAs part of the raid team that had to put up with this hell then I'd say no, you're not overly whining. 5 hours on a boss we probably should down at either the first or second attempt was immensely frustrating and, as someone new to my role and the team always seeming to struggle on my weeks in-raid, it was demoralising for me especially even though I knew I wasn't really doing anything wrong nor could I have done anything really different to change things.
ReplyDeleteLet's hope the nerfs mean a 1/2-shot this week though again our raid composition isn't looking great so it should be interesting.
It certainly wasn't a tanking issue, although having 2 pallies in the raid does mean that there is no need for a tank swap on Horridon as the debuff can be removed with their Divine Shield and Hand of Protection while he is stunned in the door.
DeleteThe comp you guys have without me this week isn't ideal but a priest helaing and a pally tank simplify things and as long as ranged stay the feck away from the door all should be manageable.