We mostly worked out the kinks with Penetrating, and we are definitely very aware of it (it's very clear when Penetrating goes wrong), and the plan for a new order will help during the bomb phase, but there was another major repeating issue with the Blood Ritual that's less obvious in the moment.
We had 4 proper attempts (not counting the 2 minute bailout as a real attempt for purposes of dressing issues. Obviously it was a total fail).
During the first we had 2 deaths to mishandled rituals. One early on when a target didn't run, And a melee got between the boss and the tank, and another later when another person got between the boss and tank. That's out of only 4 mishandled rituals during the attempt. 50% lethality.
The second attempt had only 3 mishandled, and saw 2 people dying to it. Both when melee got between the tank and boss.
Our third attempt saw only 2 mishandled, and luckily neither of them caused a death. Though both were near misses. Probably not coincidentally that was our best run.
The fifth saw 2 more go wrong, luckily neither target died, though it was again close. We were doing great on that one actually till 2 healers died when no one else stacked in a Penetrating =)
I'm counting only the "Bad" mishandlings. Where a non tank ate a Crystallized Blood due to positioning (and not the 12th instance, where it was mid wipe and really didn't matter) 11 Instances, 4 deaths. There were other badly handled ones where the tank got the Crystallized hit, but way more than 2 people ate the ritual damage, like that one I totally blew during attempt 5.
Basically saying nearly all our "Oh crap someone died wtf!" moments were either Ritual or Penetrating. With the Penetrating being caused by ranged not stacking, and Ritual by melee getting between Marak and her tank. Watching the playbacks I see a Lot of melee just hanging out in that spot. Really bad idea.
On the up side only 1 person died to the Axe in all 5 wipes, it seems well managed.
Oh and on the one time we did make it to rage, that Dark Hunt actually became a very serious threat. We had several deaths to it even in the brief time it was active. Luckily we have an 8 second warning. We just need to be sure to get a bubble up on the target before impact, and we need to stay aware so we can use personal cd's. It might be possible to ditch it wither feign or ice block, like we do with penetrating, I haven't tried yet.
On the topic of tradeoff between who to target at rage, some math.
With our numbers last night, Marak had 80.6 Million HP. I assume the other 2 had the same. Meaning at rage in a perfect world they each have about 16.1 Million hp left. 48 Mil to burn to win.
Each cannon that spawns adds 1.62 mil hp to the fight. Or 10% of the boss remaining total. You could think of it like a boss healing 1.6mil every time one spawns. Our ranged dps seem able to put about 80k dps on them outside of Hero. So they stay up for about 20 seconds outside of Hero.
They spawn every 20-30 seconds...
Our raid dps is around 200-300k outside of hero. Depending on movement, people dead, etc. Meaning it will take 3-4 Minutes to finish the rage period. Or 1-1.5 Minutes per boss. Each cannon adds 6-10 seconds to that. This lines up pretty well, we dropped Marak in about 2 minutes, during which there were enough cannons to cause at least a 30-40 second delay.
Assuming everyone was still alive, we would likely have gotten Garan down in another 2 minutes, then Sorka significantly faster due to cleave and reduced movement. Call it another 1min.
That leaves us with 2 minutes of Marak raid damage, and 4 minutes of Cannon dodging.
Marak's Raid damage seems to be a direct 20% of whatever his tank takes. Mitigation or Absorbs on the tank prevent raid damage as well (So spamming Clarity of Will on Marak's tank might be a really good idea actually, could pretty much entirely negate this as long as mana holds out, and since any damage the tank takes is multiplied 300% (20% *15 people ish), totally worth it. Looking at the logs, looks like something like that happened for about 15 seconds, and the raid took 0 Sanguine strike damage during that period.
On the other hand, the Dominator turret damage is entirely avoidable, and can be reduced to 0 by dodging. Our damage taken from turrets was lower than that from sanguine strikes, suggesting the turrets are more survivable, HOWEVER!
The turret damage when NOT dodged is remarkably high. 90% of our total turret damage was taken by just a few people, all of whom died to it. These are often rather important people, like tanks and healers. No one died to *Just* sanguine strike damage on the other hand, it was a contributing factor for sure, and will eventually run our healers out of mana, but it is not a burst damage source, and isn't causing deaths.
****The rest of this is opinion****
It would be my contention that mana lost to keeping Marak alive would be offset by the mana saved through overall reduction in fight duration. Making the mana portion of this argument a wash. In terms of survival, in a perfect world Marak would die 3rd, since her damage is the most avoidable. But this isn't a perfect world and we make mistakes. And her abilities are the least forgiving of those mistakes.
Mishandling a Penetrating or a Turret causes the most deaths for us. Hands down. Even if they aren't the highest source of over all damage. They are the largest Spikes (other than Sorka's 8 second warning, totally predictable Dark Hunts that are much much easier to handle)
There is also the hard to quantify benefit of dramatically simplifying the fights complexity with her dead. Rapid Fire, Turrets, And Penetrating are the 3 biggest causes of movement and confusion in the fight. With her dead all we have to worry about are Axes, Ritual, and Blade Rush.
Reducing the Sanguine Strike damage with Absorbs should negate a full third of outgoing raid damage. 7million of 21 million was Just that. Aanvin took 5 million in melee during this period, Which would generate approximately 15 Million in Raid damage. Luckily half of it was absorbed, and a few people were dead, so we only took 7, but it was still bad.
If we absorb, or otherwise parry/dodge/prevent 100% of that 5 mil, we actually absorb 20 million. Leaving us only 14 left to heal.
I would actually suggest trying to do this either way. Whether we are killing Marak or Garan first. I suppose the best indicator of who to kill first would be the Disc Priests mana pool at rage. Can they keep it up for 2 kills? If so, drop Garan first. If not? Marak first.
Nice work Lariel. A few points for next week.
1) We didn't review carefully the Blood Ritual and I ended up explaining to Trathis how to do it in the middle of the fight. If you are targeted by blood ritual you stand behind Aanvin on the side of the Red X. If you are melee, you can stay in melee range as long as you are behind me. The melee and tank group need to do a better job keeping clear positioning so that Marak is closest to the Red X and all other bosses and melee are behind Marak. Anyone who steps in front of Marak will die.
2) We are going to change our ship order in order to simplify the abilities during bombs. Penetrating shot only starts after the 3 minute mark, so after the first ship. We want to reduce penetrating shot during bombs, and avoid penetrating shot and blood ritual happening at the same time during bombs. So we will have Sorka go first, then Marak, then Admiral. This way, Marak and Admiral won't be up at the same time except during the first ship phase when penetrating shot isn't online yet.
3) Dominator Turrets give you a massive DoT that does 35,000 every second for 8 seconds. If you get hit twice, double it. If you get hit, you MUST hit a personal CD to mitigate the damage from the DoT.
4) During the execute phase I will call for CDs on Aanvin to try to keep them running one after the other and avoid doubling them up.
Review this video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Z_B8xhUEe0
Great analysis, Lair, thank you! So the main points to take from that are melee need to be careful of squiggly lines and everyone needs to be aware of the purple debuff in the final phase. Since it's actually a debuff, I'm guessing it can't be Feigned/etc out of. Personal CDs like Deterrence can, and should, be used.
Looking at boat order, as Aanvil mentioned, sending Garan second or third should reduce the chances of bad Penetrating Shots during boat phases. This sounds like a strong improvement. We will send Sorka first so that the dock-side group does not have to deal with both "red line shots" during a boat phase. Garan and Marak definitely look like the most dangerous pair, so we will put them first.
Marak and Sorka seem like a very tame pair to have on the docks. Both have abilities that encourage spreading out and should not be very dangerous. We may want to have them as the final pair, saving the safest for last. That means Garan goes to the boat last. This leaves Marak as the middle boat. The main danger to the dock group during this phase will be an Axe Throw during the Shot Line. You'll need to keep an eye on that.
For the final phase, in theory, Marak should die faster first since melee can stay on her. As Lair said, this lengthens the time to kill Garan, prolonging the fight and the Turret danger. Killing Garan first removes the Turrets and substantially speeds up the rest of the fight, but she will take longer to die than Marak. She is definitely the most dangerous though, with Turrets and Penetrating Shot. We'll go with killing Garan first tomorrow night and can adjust as needed.
Great analysis, we will get them tomorrow!
For Science!
That's a great analysis - but I feel like we're missing the real problem though all of that.
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/trK7XPZNGqJFR9wL#type=damage-taken&...
People are being hit by bombs which means even if they did help with penetrating shot during the bomb phases they're likely to not have enough health AND we're wasting battle rezes on them.
Cleaning up our bomb phases will give us more room for error across the board.
That's true, though half the bomb damage was 2 people, one of whom I think it was their first time at Maidens (outside lfr), so hopefully we can clean that up by discussing movement beforehand.
I know we said it in Raid, but the bombs come down essentially in a grid. None of which have explosions that touch other bombs. So the easiest thing to do is during Alpha, stand next to a circle, then run to the bomb that fell during Omega. After Omega run to a bomb right next door and wait for detonation, then back to your Omega Spot. 0 hits every time. The only thing that can play havoc is stacking requirements for the Laser, which, in theory we have addressed by altering the boss order. Sending someone other than Garan first means no laser for 2 bomb segments. And if we pair her with Sorka for the one we DO have bombs for, there will be no dual/spread requirement.
To further expand on that. What happens if we did Marak first, rather than Sorka? Need to check my math, running permutations... Bear with my insanity a minute. With Garan non first there are 4 possible combos. MSG, MGS, SGM, SMG
SMG, Sorka->Marak->Garan gives us Marak/Garan for 1st bombs. No line, easy mode. 2nd Bombs are Garan/Sorka, meaning we need ranged on the boat for the big guy during Laser/Blade bomb phase. 3rd bombs are Sorka/Marak, Ritual/Dash/Axe, all spread phase with possibility of sending melee to boat to kill the caster pair. Pretty good.
SGM, Sorka->Garan->Marak gives Garan/Marak, Hunters to boat, easy. 2nd Sorka/Marak, with Garan to the boat. We can send melee to the boat and Ranged can spread, pretty easy. Sorka/Garan 3rd, Ranged to the boat leaving melee stacking for laser again like SMG. Pretty good, 3rd phase hardest, SMG probably better.
Alternately with Marak first...
MSG, Marak ->Sorka ->Garan means Garan/Sorka for 1st, Big guy killed by ranged on boat, easy mode bombs. Marak/Garan combo gives us laser/ritual combo with ranged needed on boat for assassins. XXX Bad combo, shouldn't do this. MSG bad. Shoulda known.
MGS, Marak->Garan->Sorka, means Garan/Sorka first, Marak on the boat with hunters for easy mode. Melee don't need to spread since there's no axes yet. Marak/Sorka 2nd, with Garan on the boat. We can send melee to kill, easy. 3rd is Marak/Garan... with melee dodging... Yeah why did I think this might be better? XXX Bad.
Ok that was a waste of time. Confirmed, SMG is best. SGM also viable, but puts the hardest wave 3rd, and may as well get that out of the way earlier to speed up fails if things go wrong.
Stacking during the Bomb phase we do have lasers for (i.e. moving as a group in ranged) might be a good way to go. It would mean likely eating a Blade rush hit for the stack, but it looks to only hit for 100k. Which is less than eating a bomb trying to avoid stacking.
Hah, yes, Stone. Avoiding bombs is very important! We can mention that too.
Lair, I ran through all that too, you just posted it. Nice to see confirmation, thanks! :) Interesting idea to send melee over for Garan's boat. Could certainly make Axes easier since melee tend to naturally group up.
For Science!