RGT - Heroic Madness

[TeaLeaf]

Folks, we're seeing some nasty trends in RGT at the moment and we need to figure out what we're doing before it gets out of hand.  This is not a go at any individual, just a general "we need to shape up" post.

Attendance is starting to look very patchy:
http://dkp.deadmen.co.uk/attendance.asp

Some attendance drop-offs are planned due to work commitments, others are not.  This is how the Council have planned to deal with what we knew was coming through the summer period:

Tanks
Due to planned work absence in the tank camp we recruited another tank with a melee dps off-spec.  

Melee DPS
Worganator therefore also provides us with melee dps cover, which helps cover planned absence in that camp.
Whytee also respecced to ret to provide additional cover in the melee dps area.

Healing
With 5 healers (and my disc off-spec) we're not seeing any need for Whytee to retain his holy offpsec, another reason for his switch to ret.

Ranged DPS
Maldaror wanted to return to raiding and we're cutting his teeth and gearing him up on the easier heroic fights so that come MoP he's ready to roll as a fully fledged member of the ranged dps unit.  Come MoP we'll have 6 in the ranged dps camp, but right now for progress fights we have just 5.


Heroic Madness
This is a 1 tank, 3 healer, 6 dps fight.  Tonight we have 4 dps signed up for the raid who will be there at the raid start.  

If we plan on finishing the game before MoP comes out we need people to commit to turning up for raids.   We should be aiming to get 7/8HC down on Thursday so that we get 2 full nights on Heroic Madness.

This week it took us 2 nights to clear to HC Madness and it looks like we'll waste the night by not having a raid team show up.
Last week we ended up with just 20 minutes at the end of the raid week on HC Madness.
The week before that was a modest week where we had just the one night on HC Madness.

So in the last 3 raid weeks, we had the potential for 6 raid nights on HC Madness (we can clear 7/8 HC in a single night with ease if we have a full squad online) but we'll manage just 1 raid night out of the 6 possible.

Closure took 1 raid night to learn and kill HC Madness.
We've had 19 pulls on HC Madness and we got into Phase 2 with ease.
We've wasted the other 5 nights where we've had the opportunity to learn & kill Heroic Madness and finish the game.


Performance is also getting patchy, sloppy wipes, errors, lack of focus.


So, my question to RGT members is this:

How bad do you want the kill?


Let's finish what we started on 30 November and then get onto a 1 night per week farm schedule so that we can enjoy the summer and recharge our raiding batteries ready for MoP!

[hubbah]

As been said in the other post and in PM as well ill do my best to be there.
Its a bad timing really for me, i have been going from national holiday to party to weekend madrid to overwork ( even tho i did not miss that mutch if i look at the schedule thingie )

I really hope we can wrap this up soon as the football ( euro cub or whatever you english people call it ) is around the corner..

The rest i already told you in an PM and ill update the absence list when i know more for next week.

[microid]

coming from the most dedicated raider in dmr. we should get thursdays farm night last as long as it takes to farm 7 bosses not as long as we got raid time. in MOP this is more important. we will have 14 bosses, even if we would farm all raid nights we still would have kill 1 boss every 45-50m including trash+moving.

im an ready to raid tonight all the way till reset for the kill of madness. but i hope its done before 6am server time because of work =)

[Niel]

There are two issues that i can see - one being the patchy attendance reducing choices for optimising........but the other is complacency and i think it is this that is costing us raid time on madness.

Everyone makes mistakes but our mistake rate is shooting through the ceiling right now. Fights that should be 1 shots are taking 3-4 ( or worse ) attempts because i think they are seen as "easy" and people relax to the point of being sloppy.

However, this is showing up in the harder fights still.........tendon dps on some phases was really sloppy on Sunday, but when the call was put out about it suddenly it was being taken down with ease.........nothing had changed, the people were the same.......the only thing that i could work out was that people were focussing as they should do and suddenly it started to work.

The same thing is affecting many other parts of the kills - as a healer one of the nice things for people to do is to group up tight so that the proc from the DW weapon gives free heals.............but we ( most of the time ) seem to see gathering tightly as something that is below us and people happily spread out all over the place making it impossible for the healers to position optimally...........but back when we were workign on the fights people were a lot more disciplined and we did these things a lot better..........now it is on "farm" the attitude seems to be "bugger that...this is easy" and hence making it "not".

Cheers

Niel

[hubbah]

Hello!

I think i summed it up nicely in the PM i send you TL but i will post abit here as well seeing we are all 1 big happy family

The past few weeks have been 1 big buzz for me to be honest hopping from a national holiday to a weekend Madrid back to a national holiday to working late and having a few RL commitments which resulted in pretty fun days / nights ( as you could tell Sunday.. lol.. Sorry about that! ) so my attendance dropped a small bit.
And the weather is really not helping either ^^.

Now i dont think this should be a problem if one or 2 of us have this problem but it becomes a problem when we keep missing key people on certain fights.
The thing that comes to mind is missing both leggs & torgen on fights like Spine / Zonozz/ Warmaster and will be more of a problem on Madness due to the amount of burst & AoE needed on there.

I think if we can get 1 great night on Madness its down and we can have a nice 1 farm night a week schedule

Anyway, i will do my best to be there but i like i said in the attendance treath i might be late once or twice ( A collegue of mine is in and out the hospital and im taking over his project.. but before i can ill need to go to 2 training sessions both abroad so will be flying back into the country like 2 hours before the raid. Thank god Zurich and Dublin are just around the corner )
For the Theusday's i will be working late and probably be 15 min late as well but i will be there

To close up i agree with all points Niel made, we need to get back to our normal routine and start 1 shotting everything on thursdays so we get more time on the last boss.

And seeing Micro is the most dedicated raider in DMR i cant disagree with him anyway :-)

Back to work for me and cu all tonight!

[hubbah]

i guess all is forgiven

[microid]

no....teal should still be punished for not frapping =)

[TeaLeaf]

I don't think any of us quite expected it to be killed on our second entry into Phase 2 last night, certainly not me!   Mea culpa, I'm hoping to be cut some slack seeing as I managed to fraps most of the other first kills.

[Milli]

As long as you got a fraps of Ambers' "timely" leap of faith

[microid]

but its the end game boss of cataclysm!!!! our first kill and nerd yelling =)
i vote for 1 month of tol barad dailies to teal