The Art of Improvement

[Shortngeeky]

Read http://kwsnnews.blogspot.com/2011/03/art-of-improvement.html

Comments?

[Tifone]

Nice post:) No I agree that we need to constantly be looking out side the normal spells that we cast and looking for more raid utility when we can get it. I think right now in raids you are lucky in that you have gilg to keep pushing you. A little friendly competition really goes a long way! I find I do best at this when I am leveling a new toon - ie STYNETE. I am able to go through and look at the spells and make the most of them.

I know that a lot of people aren't looking at their old spells all the time to get the most out of them...for instance on toomey when I pull using cc (as often is the case with a mage) I like to stand next to the tank go invisible and then run away like a little girl. It really helps...I mean I aggro wipe...they are running towards the tank and focus on him that way and I can reposition to get into a 'good' ranged dps spot. Yet when I run with mages I rarely see a mage that will ever use invisibility except on a wipe in a raid trying to save their repair bill. There are other examples that I can give (mostly with mage - b/c as a priest I never get to really heal with another one:(

Which brings me back to it is nice to have some friendly competition - so lets start 25 man recruiting and get me a priest healer to compete with

[Pirtuk]

I know that Blizzard seems to like you using all of your buttons when raiding in your "yellow" zone. Certainly Shammies need to utilize all their cooldowns. I am guilty of leaving some of them unused sometimes. After all I only have 16 buttons on my mouse.....

[dlmok]

Well one thing that we as a guild dont enforce or have is a rule that makes it so your raiding toon has two profesions tha boost your dps/hps/tps. So on your raiding toon this would mean no gathering profesions in wrath when i was a raiding boomie i had alc and tailoring alc gave me the extended flask time and in think it was 47 more sp from flask. Tailoring gave me the extra sp from the proc of the embroirdry, this boosted my dps by a decent amount from when i was alch/herb in ICC when it only had up to putricide and no buff for being in their on festergut with only like two t10 peices i was pushing like 9.9k dps on him never did get to bommie after that guild fell apart so dont know what i would have done with the 30%buff and all t10 gear.

[dlmok]

another thing we can work on as guild is have the tank count down from three for pulling the boss that way everyone can use a potion before the fight starts then another during the fight say when heroism is used will improve dps and tps/hps will also improve slightly. then the potion the tanks use during the fight would be another mitigatiion cd like bears would use a agility pot this will give them more dodge and more crit. the other tanks could use the strength pots for more parry. Healers are prob. going to use mana pot of some kind during the fight.

[Tifone]

Along those same lines dl we should also be calling out a lot of our cooldowns so we can stack them ( or not stack them.) I know there is nothing I hate worse than popping my guardian spirit on someone to find out/figure out they blew one of their cooldowns so it is wasted. On the other side of this is if my divine hymn is about to go off it would be helpful to know if pirt is about to lay down a mana tide totem b/c they would stack and cause a heck of a lot of mana to come back to all the casters out there.

[CrazyJedi]

People certainly need to wake up from the tunnel vision, sometimes they need to get in dungeons or raids and try to improvise, just because a raid video or written strategy didn't said use repentance to interrupt the add's spellcasting doesn't mean you can't do it.


Those are 1 of many strategies that people post on guide websites which is a really great thing because it gives people an idea of what the general strategy is for x encounter but you can expand on it and improvise/test when posible.Specially on this expansion where more and more abilities seem to be more useful compared to Wrath or even Burning Crusade.I can't remember the last time I saw a druid using hibernate on anything( maybe a hunter's pet on pvp at most) before this expansion. On my experience besides pugs and raids , pvp has helped me improvise and change strategy on the fly depending on a lot of factors like group composition , etc but heroics and normal dungeons are a great place to test out stuff also before trying them on raids.





Also I agreed with your last post Dlmok but the first one I don't think its a requirement to have 2 max professions in my opinion , I would put at least 1 as mandatory yes but not really the 2 , it helps but we aren't doing hard modes either.



But that is why this place is such a good idea to discuss this kind of things.

[Beeastt]

Crazy makes some great points, we need to not be locked into someone elses strategy at all times. often times our makeup is so different in raids from most "traditional" raid comps that strict tunnel vision will make things harder.

to this end its always good to get out of your comfort zone and do other things with your toon to help max its play style in pve. for me personally ive always found that PVP helps me fully integrate the full spell book on my toons, utilizing spells i might not normally use if i didnt pvp and see their viability and ways i could use them on particular boss fights or trash clearance.

Im with dl on professions. a raider should have the two BEST professions this xpac for his main raid toon. I know we arent hardcore, but we give up a lot in group stability and learning curve due to our dedication to train new raiders and not just make raiding available to the top few. there are only so many "concessions" we can make to be casual and not be an albatross as individuals to our raid team, there must be balance. however, that can be something available as a recommendation to a raider who would like/needs to improve, and can be handled by class/pvp officers when counseling and coaching their teams.

i firmly believe in the philosophy of min/maxing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Min-max your main raid toon, every tweak you add translates to a quicker boss kill or better group and individual survivability.

Finding our balance as a guild this xpac will be how we stay happy and down new content while turning out better raiders and pvp'ers without (hopefully) people burning out .

speaking of which we might want to have our first 25 man o-meeting to discuss how we want things to flow and the realities of what will happen that first night out. wrangling 15 new people into the mix who may or may not have raided before means there will be a lot of basic explaining iof things we take as givens already, as well as the normal boss/trash instruction. if we have an understanding of how the first night might go, we can direct its flow in a measured way and set the tone for how ni 25 man raids will be handled in the future, in a positive way. ....thinks back to my first 40 man and what a nightmare that was, .[/url]

[CrazyJedi]

Beeastt brings a good point on proffesions that I kinda miss , I was basing my opinion on the premise that everything goes well and everyone knows their class plus the group raiders are constant.There you have room to relax a little in that department but for progression and with some flaws or cons Ni has on raiding ( like only being able to do raid 2 times a week and needing to replace raiders with new people) then you will need any advantage you can take.


I myself I'm guilty of trying to min/max my paladin tank, been doing it for a long time and keep doing it for some weird reason even if I'm not going to raid.(Is like a nervous tick).I think what I should had said is that you don't need your professions max 100% IF you already have your prof. bonus for your role. Example reach the maximun point where you get all your prof bonus for your role if you want to min/ax your toon. Like Jewelcrafting and the JC only gems which don't required max proffesion or Enginering etc.

[Beeastt]

, im the same way crazy, by mid xpac ill have 3-4 toons at max ilevel and enchants, i call it gear O.C.D.

[Griffygriff]

Heh. It seems every one of us has a different view of exactly how casual or hardcore we are as a guild.

Short obviously has the final say, but in my opinion it's best for our guild to have more general expectations for raiders like "10k dps minimum" and "mostly item level 346 or higher". I for one would not be okay with being asked to switch professions if Alchemy suddenly became the OP profession for bears.

With that said, the people who put a lot of effort into maximizing their gear and overal performance will naturally become the most-valued raiders. Right now there isn't a very clear difference between farm bosses and progression bosses for us, but there will be soon. Last expansion, we rotated people around a lot just like we do now, but only the best people for the job got taken to progression nights.

[CrazyJedi]

I dont think the point was to change your proffesion to another that is more compatible with your role or the OP one of the moment . It was more about min/max your raid toon as best as you can with every bonus you can get from what you already have . Each prof gives a good bonus regardless of combination just don't ignore it.

[dlmok]

i am guilty of not having the 2 best profersions for my toon cuase herbing i so much easer on a druid than any other class. It was only a suggestion for maxing the preformance of toons. There agin like beast said we are not a hardcore raiding guild and i have no desire for us to be. as for my healing im sure there are things im not doing but i constantly look for diffrent ways on every enconter to max my preformance on that encounter cause ever encounter is diffrent in some small way and there is no oneway to do every enconter. While having the boomie on certin fight pop tranquility to help healers has helped us its not the idea way to do thing cuase thats 10 seconds of dps we are missing and on some fights that will hammper us in meeting the enrage timer. I agree with Stynus on calling out cooldowns are using macros to alert the raid of there use or cordinate the use of em before hand as we have done in some fight so we are not wasting any cooldowns. In the end it just requires us to learn to do the encouter with what we have, but there are certin bosses that do require certin things like purge or spell steal that we need to be aware of.