Bastion of Twilight: Cho'gall - Defeated March 31st 2011

[Treach]

Comments on RGW's attempt tonight?

I probably had the easiest role of the raid. Pewpew boss, grab aggro on 1 ability, tank while other tank takes the adds, then back to pewpew.

I thought that, by the end we were getting the hang of it.

The things I felt we needed to work on the most is the adds. I can't stress how important they are to take down. When they hit soemone the give corruption and after 30 seconds they start doing aoe corruption. There was a definite difference withe the amount of corruption people gained depending on how well the adds died.

I would suggest that people get themselves TidyPlates. THe mobs floating health bars change colour when they target you, giving you the opportunity to move out of their way before they hit you. Since they do 10 corruption per hit and everyone really should be aiming for under 20 corruption before phase 2 killing the adds and avoiding their attacks is vitaly important.

Everything else was great. Everyone kept out the bad stuff, the swapping to the big add was clean, the grouping tight. I think a little bit more practice and we'll have him down in no time.

[Legolei]

I would like to suggest a little change in the place where Corrupting Adherent (big add) dies. We shortly discussed it at the end of the raid yesterday, but I don't think a lot of people saw where I was bouncing while saying here :narnar:

Our layout last night (bit exaggerated):


X is where the Corrupting Adherent dies, and the Blood of the Old God (small adds) spawn. The arrows show a path towards the healers. Blue square is where the adds are close together.

In this situation it is impossible for me to place a frost trap in such way that all adds are affected. The same applies for all AoE spells. They all have limited range of effect (most have a 10 yard radius), and to be optimal effective, the adds need to be together.
The blue square is too close to the group.

My suggestion:


Make sure the first two Corrupting Adherent die close to the walls leading to the stairs. There is room enough to place the second add next to the first.
This layout has the big advantage that the adds are close together in an early stage. If I place my frost trap just before the blue square, all mobs are affected, and can be AoE-ed early. If any adds come past the blue square Hermioneg can freeze them with Frost Nova and Cone of Cold. Also that looks to me as the ideal spot for any melee to help with AoE attacks like Fan of Knives.

Disadvantages are that one healer needs to move towards the stairs, and melee and off tank need to move further back from the group. But since all melee have some sort of movement boost (sprint, leap, jump, charge, shadow step, etc) they should be able to be back in the group and on Cho'gall very quickly. The healer needs to go only a bit further than now. The biggest problem would come from Conversion and the resulting Worshipping.

Finally we should maximize dps on Cho'gall to make sure we prevent the 5th Corrupting Adherent, and hopefully even the 4th. So blow all short cooldowns all the time and blow your long term cooldowns with a cooldown of less than what we need to get to Cho'gall to 25% at the start. Hero/Time warp needs to be saved for phase 2, given the Temporal Displacement debuff of 10 minutes.
So control (no corruption at any cost) with maximum dps.

(disclaimer: lot of things shamelessly stolen from discussions in the previous 8 pages).

[TeaLeaf]

From my perspective you'll get better quicker if you handle Worship better/faster.  Too often people were not stacked, or not close and were left in Worship too long, often during and adds phase.   We had several instances of a worship not being broken because someone was too far away from the stack point - for non-hunters there's really no excuse.  

We also had worship issues when big adds are up and we had two specific types of problem.
-a big add is about to spawn and a worship is due immediately after.    We had people running away from the group for the big add wehreas you just need to sit tight and stay in the group for 5 secs to allow the worship to be dealt with and then break and go to dps the big add.
-taking too long to dps the big add down leaving little or no time to stack ready for the next worship.  As you get a couple of worships as the little adds spawn, you need to get back into position for these so that the Worship can be broken rapidly and the raid returning to dps/slows etc.  We know dps on the big add is too slow due to the panic in our debuffed MT's voice asking for a taunt when the OT is still tanking the big add.  Killing the big add quicker makes it easier for the Ot to taunt, the dps to be re-grouped for worship, the whole thing gets easier.

In general, try not to spread too far from the raid during the big add phase so that you can be reached for Worship.

Lego made the point about width of the adds.  That's simply a tank thing, you have to get used to how tight to kill the big adds to allow a narrow path for the little adds which slows/traps/AOE can then hit.  Too wide and adds miss the traps/slows and the adds start humping you.    

Too many stood in crash too often.  Stop the cast and move.

@Lego: you need 4 big add spots not 3.  As a healer I was not watching where they were dropped, but if they were that spread then you're right the positioning needs to change.  It has to be narrow enough to get them all into the same 'cone' for slows/traps/aoe.  If anything they need to be closer than your 2nd picture shows but offset/staggered so you get a zig-zag of drop spots.  You'll want to push into P2 after 4 big adds (possibly off-tanking the 5th add if Chog dps is too slow).  Much more than 4 is too many little adds to deal with and  causes issues.

[Whitey]

The positioning we try and use in RGT and as TL mentioned is more like this for the big adds. Get them as tight as you can without standing in the corruption of the last one.

[Legolei]

@Lego: you need 4 big add spots not 3.  As a healer I was not watching where they were dropped, but if they were that spread then you're right the positioning needs to change.  It has to be narrow enough to get them all into the same 'cone' for slows/traps/aoe.  If anything they need to be closer than your 2nd picture shows but offset/staggered so you get a zig-zag of drop spots.  You'll want to push into P2 after 4 big adds (possibly off-tanking the 5th add if Chog dps is too slow).  Much more than 4 is too many little adds to deal with and  causes issues.

I know, but the picture was getting crowded with arrows.

With the 5th spot, I think this would be ideal, since I doubt we already have the experience (with resulting controlled reactions) and dps to take them down with the placement Whitey's picture shows.
When Cho'gall is a controlled fight, it surely is a better placement.



Blue square is where the small adds should be dead, at least most of them.

[TeaLeaf]

Bottom line is you do not want a 5th spot as 25 slimes is nasty.  You need to push P2 before the 5th wave of adds as handling 5 lots of adds is too much.  Plan on killing 4 big adds, 4 waves of little adds.  If you have not pushed P2 when a 5th big add spawns, just interrupt it, off-tank it and use the time before little adds spawn to push Chog into P2.

[Treach]

I think we were reaching around 50% (45-54%) while wiping, that was with 3 groups up or so. Reaching 25% was a bit out of range for us last night.

[Treach]

Ok my thoughts on improving dps for this fight:

Before we pull we must set the distance fairly. Get 1 person to stand where the 1st big mob gets pulled to and somone measure a 30 yard range. Put a ground marker here. This is where the gorup can stand untiul the 1st small adds are dead.

From this point, the group moves 5 yards or so away from the spawn area every time the adds die. This should hopefully mean that the ranged wont need to move at all for positioning and the melee have a smaller distance. This shouyld help increase up time as well as keep the group closer for the worship breaking.

Any thoughts?

[Arcticfire]

What worries me the most is the lack of DPS and movement, not just in this fight but overall. If you look at the logs(and you should) and you are below 10K DPS(e) then youre doing bad.
The further we get into instances the more we notice these small things that need to be fixed.
 
So I suggest that people start checking the logs and they arent doing some good dps, then they should search the web for what they are doing wrong, or you could use the forum area here to ask for advice from guildies.

[Grimnar]

Why do i get a feeling some people only look at numbers...
 
Take a look at the fight and check what that class has to do aswell and remember what happend during the tries...
 
As now people are just going to focus on their dps instead of the tactics etc.

[hubbah]

I think you both got a point here.. Yes there is more then just the numbers BUT seeing Chogall is a dps race for phase 2 it is important that certain minimums are there. And dont get me wrong.. im not saying they arent there.. cause i dont know what dps is needed to do a smooth 2nd phase.
On the other side, the DPS says nothing when you got 20k dps but you dont kill adds, move from fire's etc etc.
And what grim is saying.. lets take Chogall for example.. in theory me as a hunter should be above all melees on that fight just cause i can AoE during add phase.

[TeaLeaf]

Why do i get a feeling some people only look at numbers...

Not sure who you mean here Icy or if the comment helps.

[Legolei]

Ok my thoughts on improving dps for this fight:

Before we pull we must set the distance fairly. Get 1 person to stand where the 1st big mob gets pulled to and somone measure a 30 yard range. Put a ground marker here. This is where the gorup can stand untiul the 1st small adds are dead.

From this point, the group moves 5 yards or so away from the spawn area every time the adds die. This should hopefully mean that the ranged wont need to move at all for positioning and the melee have a smaller distance. This shouyld help increase up time as well as keep the group closer for the worship breaking.

Any thoughts?

I had to think about the pro's and con's quite a bit to come with arguments why the current setup is better. Your pro arguments sound attactive for dps. So here are my arguments against it.
1) Your setup would place the group about in the middle. That would make the distance between the small adds and the healers/tanks very small. Leaving even less margin for mistakes
2) The big add casts Corrupting Crash, which causes corruption if you get hit. If the majority of the group starts together, the chances are high that a member of the group is targeted and everyone has to move, while the impact is next to the boss and tank.
3) When P2 begins, Cho'gall should be next to a wall. Having him in the middle of the room makes it a big kite.

[Legolei]

What worries me the most is the lack of DPS and movement, not just in this fight but overall. If you look at the logs(and you should) and you are below 10K DPS(e) then youre doing bad.
The further we get into instances the more we notice these small things that need to be fixed.
 
So I suggest that people start checking the logs and they arent doing some good dps, then they should search the web for what they are doing wrong, or you could use the forum area here to ask for advice from guildies.

While I normally do not agree when DPS gets accused  that low dps is the reason for wiping, I have to agree in this case.

I think dps will go up as we get used to the fight and know when we must hold back a spell to have it available on the big adds. I played in a different spec last wednesday (still SV) that was more for slowing the small adds, but I noticed that my dps dropped a bit.
Fact it that in our best attempts we were overrun by small adds while the Cho'gall was still far from 25%. Having Cho'gall at 45% when the 5th big add comes is a wipe, and that was our best attempt.

I also think that we should get Hermioneg back in Arcane spec or Fire spec so she can do way more damage on Cho'gall and the big add. If you look at frost damage compared to the other specs for 10 man normal raiding, it's just horrible. But only if we have another ranged to slow/push back the adds like a boomkin.
That Hermioneg will do less damage to the small adds, I'm very willing to risk. At least, for a dozen tries or so.

[Arcticfire]

I agree that blaming DPS/Tanks/Healing isnt the thing to do normally but its the truth atm. Some of our DPS is just to low, not just on Cho'gall but also on other bosses. If the DPS would be low on just Cho'gall then we could blame it on him being a new boss and getting used to it, but thats not the case atm.