hello, I am in a casual guild that takes a long time to clear MC. we can kill rag before sons, so dps should be fine.
since I kind of took over one of our MC raids I have it down to just over 2 hours. I would like to get it under 2hrs ideally.
currently I jump down at the beginning, skip trash between gehennas and garr we only clear the left for gar. we skip the far lava packs on shaz and kill him where we kill geddon. we skip the trash on the right for golemagg.
last week we tried the hold the loot til garr thing and it seemed like more trouble than it was worth.
I guess my ultimate question is can I get under 2hrs without getting an insane amounts of buffs?
Yeah basically need to pull trash faster. Our guild was about 100 min clear until we got better gear we usually clear now in about an hour or less as our healers can handle chain pulls.
Boss strats might need to change as well. On garr, have one tank on all the adds, with all the DPS on the boss until about 50%, at which point ranged switch to AoE the adds.
Shazzrah, have melee bring arcane prot pots and resto pots. Prepot arcane about 2 minutes before the pull, run in and use resto pot as soon as the first curse is cast. He melts in seconds as he has a tiny health pool.
The rest is really just a matter of killing trash faster. You can pull 10 magmadar dogs at once instead of 5, for example. Not sure what the shaman equivalent is, but paladins always maintain wisdom on trash mobs to reduce the amount of times casters and healers have to drink.
Your loot distribution method may also slow things down. Having too many wait around to distribute items takes up a lot of time. Our raid team uses a kind of modified LC(no two LC’s are alike), so as soon as a boss dies, everyone except the master looter immediately starts to clear towards the next one. We then summon the master looter with a warlock once loot distribution is finished.
Use basic consumes (not flasks, that’s cray). Agil/SP/Str/Mana potions, etc.
You’ll shave ~15-30 seconds off every fight if your whole raid consumes, both trash and bosses, and that’s a lot of time saved over a whole MC.
Chain pull. You don’t even have to skip trash if your goal is sub 2 hours. Just pull faster.
Also, have your master looter loot everything to him/herself after the boss, and trade it to the winners as you clear more trash. Spending 5 minutes doing loot after every boss is 5x10 minutes wasted. (They can also just stay behind and do loot while ppl clear but I figure you don’t want to spend the whole raid looting things while everyone else is fighting).
When people say pull faster they mean, Boss is dead we’re pulling next pack in 10 seconds, lol. Like as soon as the boss its the floor your raid is running to the next pull. Its the only way you’re gonna shave time off MC, not much time to shave off boss fights.
I think I will try that, having the loot master loot everything then just pass it out before the next boss instead of trying to hand out 15 items halfway through.
as far as pulling faster goes… would you ever have more than 3 tanks grabbing anything. like 2 giants and a hound would be max right. I suppose when the first giant goes down that tank could then go grab an annihilator or something. I mean your not gonna chain pull when dealing with a serger.
we usually have a fair amount of fury warriors/shamans… is it worth putting 3 warriors with a shaman/hunter or feral or just go 4 warrior/rogue with shamans
Not exactly sure what you’re asking but ultimately you want your rogues and warriors to benefit from as many damage buffs as possible.
So you want your rogues to always be in a group with at least one warrior so they can get battle shout.
If you have enough shamans to drop wf for all the rogues/warriors, you want to distribute them among the groups accordingly.
If you have any feral druids or hunters with the aura, then you want to also evenly distribute them among groups so as many rogues/warriors get the buffs as possible. If you have 1 feral and 2 hunters, then put each of those 3 players in separate groups that optimally have a shaman and 3 other melee in them. Feral of course benefits from trueshot aura and battleshout as well but you may not have enough hunters for that.
we have a couple nightfall’s in the raid on our 2 enhance shamans (their other weapons are spinal reaper/hand of rag) should they be using nightfalls on trash?
Yeah probably. Assuming Orc, Spinal/Nightfall is better than hand of Rag.
The nightfall proc, even on trash is going to benefit the raid more than the minimal increase in damage they’d get with Spinal. Especially if you’ve got 2 Nightfall shamans, trash debuff uptime should be pretty good.
In terms of a Tauren going HoR vs Nightfall on trash… it probably depends on how many casters you have. But Nightfall is generally going to be better. I’m not sure how many Nightfalls is optimal before you get diminishing returns but that number is probably around 2. It’s an ultra endgame weapon and people use it all the way up to Naxx because it scales proportionately. At the same time if he’s having way more fun with HoR on trash then it’s probably not worth the drama. I’d leave it up to him if you guys are casual. The human element to WoW can never be underestimated. Happy players stay for the long term. Min-maxing too hard can lead to burnout.
