I have been looking at ways we are wasting time in raids lately and trying to trim off a minute here and there that will hopefully give us 15-20 minutes extra per raid.

The first step was the change to loot system from master loot /roll to using group loot which certainly I feel is a big contributor to the "wasted" time.

My new target is DPS. I don't give a care about individual DPS, HPS or TPS as long as bosses die quickly.

FACT: The faster a boss dies the better YOUR DPS is because the longer a fight goes on the less % of that fight you spent in the perfect DPS situation where all your trinkets and weapon enchants proc'd during heroism while you blew your cooldowns.

 Some people love to cheese the meters and make themselves look good to people that only focus on the DPS meters. A great way is to cleave on a council type fight even if technically that makes a DPS loss on the kill target.

Council fights come in 3 flavours a shared HP pool (Stone Guardians in MSV), each boss having their own independent HP pool (Council of Elders in ToT) and each boss having an HP pool that gets healed in one of the other bosses dies (Paragons of the Klaxxi in SoO).

In examples 1 and 2 cleave is godly, you should multi-dot and cleave as the bosses die much faster. There may be times when you need to burn through one of them for a short period of time but mostly cleave (not AoE) is good. The last example is one where cleave and multi-dotting is not godly. Sure if some light cleave actually boosts your single target DPS it should be done (thinking warlock rain of fire to generate embers for chaos bolts) but things like Chain Lightning, Sweeping Strikes and Blade Flurry should be avoided because it lowers your DPS on the focus target.

As an example I'll look at our kill of the Paragons this week where we failed big time:

1. Rik’kal the Dissector - 44m HP
2. Skeer the Bloodseeker - 61m HP
3. Korven the Prime - 61m HP
4. Hisek the Swarmkeeper - 54m HP
5. Xaril the Poisoned Mind - 54m HP
6. Kaz’tik the Manipulator - 54m HP
7. Iyyokuk the Lucid - 54m HP
8. Ka’roz the Locust - 44m HP
9. Kil’ruk the Wind-Reaver - 61m HP

That gives the bosses a total of 487m HP, the Bloods have 6m, Amber and kunchong 7m each and we kill one of each during the fight meaning we should do a toital of 507m damage if there is zero cleave which will never happen because tanks need to AoE tank, we have legendary cloaks and the genuine DPS boosting cleave. I'll assume that this is worth 15% of our total damage so overall we should be hitting around 583m damage on the Paragons. However our damage was MUCH higher:

In fact we did 20% more damage than we needed to. The issue can be seen when looking at the damage done to Karoz, Iyyokuk, Hissek and Kilruk who despite having a combined HP of 213m took a total of 392m damage to kill. Karoz took almot 3x his HP in damage!

Dealing this much extra damage means a MINIMUM of 20% extra time taken to kill a boss and places more strain on the healer team as mana does begin to run out and people take mopre damage from bosses. If all fights we're 20% shorter and people avoided the damage of doing dumb stuff to get an extra chaos bolt in we could 2 heal many more fights which would mean even faster kills and less time having to raid.

Shorter fights will also mean you do more DPS without having to cheat the meters and that makes you and your raid team better raiders.

more »

Following on from my guide on Gemming Your Gear, I thought I would move on to enchanting, the other more "traditional" way of improving the stats on your character and their gear. If you're not an enchanter there are 2 ways of getting an item enchanted, the traditional way was to find an enchanter, give them the required materials (either bought from the auction house or acquired through using the disenchant option during dungeon runs), "trade" the item in the "not to be traded" slot let them use their profession spell to enchant your item and you're done (although I'd always offer a tip even if they don't ask). However, since Wrath of the Lich King, it has been possible to enchant vellums into scrolls which can be sold on the Auction House so it may be worth buying a scroll from there and selling your materials. To transfer the enchant from the scroll simply right click the vellum and left click on the item you want enchanted. Simples! as the cool kids say now.

Read more »

Gemming your gear has become a way of life for us since the Burning Crusade, but with all the changes to specs and stats how many of us really know what we're doing when gemming our gear?

The aim of this post is to cover off the basics of filling those lovely sockets in that shiny new piece of gear that the big bad you just killed dropped and then go a little deeper and take at look at maximising the benefits you can gain by adding gems to your gear.
Read more »

The guys and girls of Saturday Knight Fever ventured out this week with our first night of raiding in Cataclysm. OK we did visit Blackwing Descent on December 14th and got our collective asses handed to us as we failed to kill more than a single trash mob and Magmaw, he did lol at us as we ran away with our tails firmly between our legs.

But more than that I have been shown a harsh lesson, one that I've been expecting if I'm honest but it still caught me of guard. My step down from serious progression raid guild to a fun and friendly guild that has some people who want to raid has left me with a group that values their time more than the purple pixels dropped by slain Internet dragons.

Read more »