Surviving trash / encounters in Tempest Keep as melee

So I just got into tempest keep this week, so it might be a git gud kind of scenario, but I had horrible problems staying alive as a Retribution Paladin.

The first set of trash anything could kill me, 2 ticks of whirlwind, a couple ticks of starfall, fireball volley, with only about 8k hp simply any mechanic hitting me at all was just destroying me, most other melee have about 2-3k more hp then me, and that seems to help them a lot, plus they don’t damage themselves, should I just equipment some stamina gear for trash? Trinkets? get some PVP gear?

The big sentinels further in which do arcane overload would almost 1 shot me, so during the pulls of two, or the arcane overload + the pound or whatever it was called, would instantly kill me since it did 6k for the overload + 4k for the pound.

Fel reavers room was ok, long as I was careful about avoiding saw blades.

Only thing on Void Reaver was just pound damage, (mind you it only took us 2 attempts to kill him, but that first attempt I died early to no heals it felt like, I used a healthstone, and was using haste potions so couldn’t health potion)

A’lar P1 was fine, but in P2 my low overall health seemed to make surviving the dive bombs very difficult.

Is it a gear issue from just using all the straight damage gear as a pose to getting some stuff with more stamina on it? I just genuinely want to do better but I feel like i’m failing, and not quite sure if its just a git gud issue, or if I should sacrifice some DPS for more stamina gear. Any more experienced melee or Ret Paladins in particular have some tips for me? I would appreciate anyones thoughts, I have not had these kind of issues in SSC (though I have not fought Vashj yet)

It just really sucks for melee, really gotta watch for whirlwinds and for some mobs an arcane protection potion could save a life

When the dudes spin run out

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Part of it is getting out of whirlwind fast, but some of the fireball volley or saw blades type stuff is unavoidable and just gotta rely on your healers pumping

Gearing for stam is an option but should not be the first one.

The trash in tk dose not do enough damage unexpectedly to kill a ret pally that is geared properly (read using p1 bis and moving towards phase 2 bis) outright. Using lower ilvl gear as not in phase 1 bis or using close but worse items for dps value will make you more likly to die as the bis ones norm do not only have the dps value but also higher armor abs stam due to higher ilvl.

Looking at your logs your gear is not great. You are well geared for t4 content but under geared for t5 content abs as such you need to play better with a smaller margin for error. You are not undergeared to the point of being outright killed thou.

As such in order to die you are playing badly. Thou healers not keeping people topped also will be a factor as if not doing so makes your margin for error lower abs as such then also playing badly but you playing well would still keep yourself alive by knowing when to pull out of not topped. Your healers are quite bad as a note. Not even able to maintain there mana in “low” damage cases like void reaver when 6 healing for 3 min. You had them already on fumes at the 3 min mark.

Prime example 2 ticks of whirlwind. Whirlwind has a 1 sec delay from the cast bar, before the first tick and a further 1.5 secs between that means to take 2 ticks you spent 2.5 secs before getting out. You should be only one step away from being out as the ww radii is only slightly more than the mobs hit box so if correctly at max melee range your only glad a sec of movement away or getting out. That means it took you more than 2 secs to react that is a learn to play thing react quicker. You
Should be planning for ww and ready to move so should only need 1.5 sec to react. In fact most people react faster 0.75 secs to see something than 0.75 secs to carry out the action is considered slow by about 0.25 secs for each action as per testing done for drivers reaction times. This is before mentioning that the animation starts before the cast bar giving even more time.

On the big guys there is no reason to be taking overload and pound at same time from different ones, pull them apart more. Use your hearthstone if healz are slow so the same one dosent kill you with both it’s what it’s there for.

Not living by dive bomb is your guild as a whole messing up. Dive bold hits for about 150k as you should be spilting between 35 ish targets is done bad upwards of 50 when done right it means you get hit for about 2-4K (around 2k for most guilds as they have around 50 targets) that is nothing.

To compaire by your logs you guys are hit for 5-6k each almost tripple the normal damage done by dove bomb that is a learn to play issue. Esp when you have 2 hunters should be around 45 targets per dive bomb so should take around 2.5-3k not 6k. Stack properly abs use snake traps. Your hunters dint use a single one all night that alone doubled the dive bomb damage.

Side note your also wasting 15 secs of your lust on alar using it where you do makes no sense should be after dive bomb one not at start of p2.

Pounding on void reaver hits for around 5k for classes 6k at most over its duration. So pounding will not kill you. If it did it means you where not topped of going into it abs that means you should of healthstoned. You don’t healthstone after a pounding you do it before one if not ropes for it. There is about 15 secs between them and no damage at all between them so using after is a waste of a healthstone. You only use if healers won’t top you in time for one watch your timers. While if you don’t have a healthstone or healthpot you run out so your not in the pounding effect.

Also please don’t make yourself look quite bad by saying since your using a dps pot can’t use a healthpot. It really makes it seam like the issues you are having are massive learn to play issues to not even know that healthpot and dps pots are not on the same cd. Your healthstone is on the healthpot cds but using a dps pot will never stop you from using a healing pot. Furthermore you never used a healthstone on void reaver for your kill, while on your wipe you used it after pounding ended when you took no further damage for 12 secs after resulting in not having the healthstones if you needed later and causing the healer has had a heal primes on you to overheal. Furthermore you where at 50 percent at the time so in no danger at all from dying able to still take 2 more ticks of a pounding before death of the three ticks on each cast. Healthstones should be used in sub 60 percent at start of a pounding or at sub 25 percent after the 2nd tick to prep for third. You where sub 40 percent going into the own you died on. Your healthstone was furthermore not on cd at the time of death meaning healthpot was not on cd. Furthermore you had 4 locks 2 aff 2 destro as such you have diff healthstones levels abs as such had more than one to use. Your death was 100 percent on yourself, abs not on gear it was completely a learn to play issue.

Side note why are you pulling alar after void reaver rather than sol. Sol using the soaker build is easier than void reaver for many of not only slightly harder. Alar is a incomparable step up in diff.

4 Likes

You’re really undergeared.

Our melees don’t die that often on trash.

I took the liberty to check your logs:

https://classic.warcraftlogs.com/reports/kaLvWPrYJ1dxXKcw#fight=1&view=replay

Observe the replay. The mobs are all stacked. That is an invite to your melees dying all the time.

Look our fight here:

https://classic.warcraftlogs.com/reports/kLVvnrJd8h7t1fpc#fight=1&view=replay

Our melees didn’t die. I pull over the 2 Legionaries who will do WW away, and even after they go and kill it (I can disarm them, the WW does much less damage).

Get away from the melee range when they do it.

This is our fight here:

https://classic.warcraftlogs.com/reports/kLVvnrJd8h7t1fpc#fight=12&view=replay

You can check our ret paladin in the logs as well, he barely dies as well.

5 Likes

Like others have said, your guild should try to separate whirlwinding mobs.

20 stam food is cheap and can make a difference on trash.

Any PvP gear you already have is something you can swap on for trash.

Your priests are bad.

/thread

EDIT: I mean… One of them was flash heal/Greater healing himself for big chunks of VR. That’s… really bad. Priests should rarely/never Fheal/Gheal themselves… And you especially should never do it on VR.

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Although to be fair… Your dps are also bad… No reason VR should take 5 minutes… That’s a looong time to maintain mana

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I raid as a rogue but what I can say is carry bandages, a pile of HP pots, and major prots if you want. As a paladin you may want rejuv or mad alchemist pots (hp+mana). I’m actually looking at getting resilience gear for raids because HP is simply not scaling up enough after P1 to keep up with the growth in damage.

Thanks a bunch for all the replies. Seems its mostly a git good issue, I appreciate all the detailed feedback though, We are going back in tonight, so hopefully I can do better this time around!

For Void Reaver I know myself and most of the other melee were threat capped for large portions of the fight, resulting in us just sitting there, I even sat on cooldowns instead of using them immediately so I would do less threat on our kill, so the slow Void Reaver kill might of just been a tank issue. Was bad enough I have thought to go get the threat drop trinket from Keepers for next time. Edit - seems that trinket only drops 901 threat, not going to make a lick of a difference, rats. Guess the only one which could make a difference is in one of the old 60 raids.

In retail in the past I’ve had plenty of 70-90, even a couple 99% Parses, so sitting as low as I was even though I know a big part of parsing is the right group comp and quick kills in classic didn’t sit that well with me. Particularly on Void Reaver since I actually got into the main melee group for once getting windfury from an enhance shaman and battle shout from warriors instead of being stuck in a healer group with the paladin tank just to give him sanc aura like most of my parses.

We had quite a few of the trash mobs active and in the same area, and from watching videos it seems we really just need to CC more of them and spread them out to avoid overlap of abilities.

I spent some time watching some videos and observed even guilds in the top 100 having melee die to those sentinels when the overload + pound goes off at about the same time, so I’ll definitely just be running away from it from now on.

I only recently starting using haste potions once I switched to this new guild as my last one was pretty laid back and was not doing logs, and I genuinely thought health potion cool-down was shared with the dps potion, must of got the notion from also using dark/demonic runes, not needed on Void Reaver though, I actually took health potions off my bar thinking I couldn’t use them, that’s a pretty basic mistake, so thanks for clearing that up for me. T4 content was so easy and brain-dead I have not really had to worry much about staying alive.

Think we were doing A’lar first because of some miscommunication which led to not having the proper soak tanks for Solarian I believe. Though I genuinely felt we could beat a’lar with more practice, we were doing better on nearly every attempt.

Again thank you everyone for the feedback, I didn’t except such in-depth feedback and I’m sure it took some of you a good bit of time parsing it out, its really helpful.

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Your raid team needs to know how to pull trash. You can stun or disrupt most of the trash and the ones that volley can be CC. Not to come off as a tool but your raid lead is failing you guys if he isn’t making calls. Also for trash like the sentinels pre pop an arcane pot to give you a cushion and nightmare seeds are a god send.

Legonare ww hits for about 3.5k on dps plate not that worrying.
Its the centurion with their arcane flurry ( looks sorta like a ww ) ticks for around 7 - 8k and have to be chain cc while you kill the.

Just rotate Bloodlusts on your tank group and you should be good, also have your DPS to timely reset/lower their threat (vanish / feign death / invisibility / soul shatter, reincarnation) that should do the trick.

Our bear sometimes doesn’t get knock back so he will just pile up threat, I also wear mostly DPS gear so I’m always catching up on threat in the fight (dual wielding).

After Another raid night in Tempest Keep I felt massively better about my performance! While there were still mistakes I died far less then previously. Our guild still needs to work on better control of the trash but at least now I know when it isn’t being controlled well to just stay the hell away from it all until it is and /popcorn when any melee who goes in anyway dies.

We got a’lar down to 29% I believe on our best attempt, a vast improvement to last night, and I can see us getting him down in the near future. Thanks again everyone for all the insight, I’ve taken it to heart, and hopefully a few of these pointers will help our raid as a whole perform better too!

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Weirdest thing for us. We 1 shot Alar. But sometimes we have problems with Solarian with healing keeping up. Although we do end up needing to pug a healer or 2.

It’s no biggie if the ranged are actually out avoiding orbs.

I guess if parsing is super important to you but I don’t understand all the guilds doing the stack in melee thing that constantly waste time wiping to Void Reaver once or twice a week from someone being not quite in melee range and killing the entire group with an orb.

Undergeared and/or unskilled guilds that wouldn’t be parsing either way mind you.

Lol… Who is wiping to VR “once or twicec a week?”

Tons of guilds on my server, some person ends up standing in the wrong spot when the boss moves slightly when he does his knockback, or they don’t get in quickly enough on the pull.

To be honest I don’t understand how 80% of guilds came to make an very easy boss harder for no reason, it’s fascinating. We’ve never wiped on Void Reaver but similarly progressed guilds here have at least 7-8 wipes on him added up over the last month and a bit. A lot of wasted time.