Ok, let's look at the numbers on our rotface attempts to figure out what we need to do better. Doug also asked how we use these charts, so I'll go through dissecting this one. I'm no expert, but I find it helps.
Before I look at the chart, there were a few things I remember I thought were causing issues :
1) People running into and dying to slime pools and floods
2) Traffic jams and not being aware of baby slimes causing multiple large slimes to form.
3) People getting the mutation plague thing and not immediately jetting out of melee.
4) People eating slime sprays.
5) DPS not burning him down fast enough during that last 30% when he goes berserk and starts dropping lots of little slimes.
The first thing I see is under Damage taken by Spell (ignoring the spells from the 1 Festergut attempt) :
Melee | 13,595,195 | 43.9 % |
Weak Radiating Ooze | 5,349,046 | 17.3 % |
Slime Spray | 2,188,991 | 7.1 % |
Mutated Infection | 1,721,017 | 5.6 % |
Radiating Ooze | 1,202,679 | 3.9 % |
Ooze Flood | 1,021,341 | 3.3 % |
Unstable Ooze Explosion | 370 038 | 1.2 % |
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Melee is the boss beating on Kanwulf, so I expect that to be high. Weak radiating ooze is damage from the small ooze AoE which again, is unavoidable. It may be doing too much damage in melee, so I'll take a look at that later. Suprisingly, it looks like we avoided the Unstable Ooze Explosion pretty well, and Ooze floods are doing less damage than I expected. But Slime Sprays... oh boy. To get a better idea of what is going on with Slime Sprays, I click it.
The Slime Spray page shows me who took damage from that spell and in what proportion.
I've stripped out some of the numbers and kept only the order, percent of damage suffered and "Hits" (I assume this is the number of times the person was hit by the spray). Kanwulf looks to be our benchmark. I think he avoids most of the slime sprays since the boss turns away from him.
Bigshorty | 18.9 % | 88 |
Aethana | 11.8 % | 56 |
Cobo | 11.7 % | 64 |
Indor | 11.7 % | 54 |
Zoognosis | 11.5 % | 55 |
Rheâ | 9.2 % | 42 |
Behl | 7.9 % | 36 |
Chawchaw | 6.7 % | 40 |
Kateli | 5.7 % | 27 |
Kanwulf | 4.8 % | 27 |
Strange. Kateli's number of slime spray hits is much lower than the other two hunters. I click the Deaths tab to get a
record of deaths and can rollover everyone to see what was happening to them before they died. I can see when someone is kiting small oozes, when they are doing the buttonhook and when they've gotten back into position. Looking at Bigshorty and Zoo for instance, I see some of their deaths involve getting hit by Rotface. This tells me the tank is already down, which means we messed up earlier. I do see something interesting... it looks like Zoo is DPSing while kiting slimes. That seems unlikely, but something I want to take a look at further.
I decide to click over to the
Survivability tab to figure out what was going on during each attempt. By looking at the percentage of time alive, its pretty easy to see what happened. For example.
On Rotface Attempt 2, Carla dies (60.8% survivability) after kiting the little ooze and getting stuck in an ooze flood. Kan then gets hit by an unstable explosion AND rotface, and the remaining healers are unable to keep him up.
On Rotface Attempt 3, I totally botch kiting and die to the Big Ooze, which runs amuck and kills everyone.
On Attempt 4, Behl dies to an Oooze Explosion, and Rhea falls 8 seconds later to a Big Ooze which means we had two big oozes out at once.
Attempt 5, Rhea dies early to a Slime Spray, and then Kan dies to a Big Ooze, meaning a big ooze was in melee. I am seeing a pattern here...
Attempt 6, Kan dies to Rotface + small ooze + ooze flood. We were probably fleeing from an ooze explosion and ran into a corner that got flooded.
Attempt 7, we lose Carla early to a mutated infection + big ooze + flood, and later Indor to a slime spray as he is kiting the small ooze.
Attempt 8 I die first by being hit by the big ooze, but I'm also taunting a big ooze. I don't think I was drunk that night, so I'm guessing I was trying to taunt a big ooze in melee while kiting a second big ooze.
I'm having a hard time figuring out what is happening on the last attempt.
Anyway, here's what I see : I think we can lose either one healer or one or two dps, but not both. With only two healers, DPS needs to burn like a mofo to get the boss down. What is killing us? Lack of situational awareness. "Try not to die" basically.
I don't think we can avoid slime sprays while kiting, so we need to focus on the other bits. Here's the checklist as I see it :
1) Do I have a small ooze in melee? (Get out of melee!)
2) Is there a second small ooze out? (Don't make a SECOND large ooze!)
3) Ok, I'm kiting the small ooze. Am I running towards slime puddles (look for the wall gushes! Look for the puddles left by slime spray! Don't stand in those at all costs!)
I'm really not trying to pin this on anyone. If you look at the data, you can see that everyone made a mistake at one time or another. We can get through the fight if one or two of us makes a mistake, but three mistakes is a wipe.
That's stressful. How can we build a cushion to mitigate that and give us breathing room? The next thing I want to look at is DPS. The faster the boss goes down, the less time there is for mistakes.
I clicked into Damage Done, and turned off Festergut, to see how our
damage for the Rotface attempts looked.
Zoog is our upper mark with 5299 DPS. He is geared to the teeth and knows his stuff, so I don't expect everyone to do that sort of damage. Let's shoot for 75% of that damage which would be 3,974. Kateli is close with 3844. BigShorty and Chaw are in the 3.2 and 3.3 range. Not ideal, but these are newer toons so it may be a gear issue. It could be a rotation issue too, but we have very few Warlocks or Death Knights who put out consistent high damage, so I need to do more research to figure out what is up. Aethana is pulling 2.3K though which is way low.
Luckily we have other hunters in this fight, so its really easy to check her rotation to see if that is the issue. I don't know hunters, so I'd like Zoog to take a look, but I did notice that 6% of her damage showed up in the rollover as coming from melee, and uh... whoah. That can't be right. Right?
Again. Its a game. Its pushing buttons. We all make mistakes, and we can call improve, but only if we know what to work on. Ok, that's it. GO TEAM![/quote]
Zoo DPSing during kiting is pretty easily explained. I have the 2pc t9 that is standard in MM builds at my gear level. That means my Serpent Stings crit. So, while I'm running around, both my pet and the critting Stings are doing non-trivial damage.
I know I need to work on getting out of the slime sprays a bit quicker. Hunters can't park on the boss like everyone else (if they are, then they are doing it wrong)...so we are likely going to take a tick or so from the getting out of the way from range. That said, I can always work on being quicker about it
.
Another thing was that I was often pelted by the slime spray when I was button-hooking. Is that just plain unavoidable that the circle Cobo kites in will lead to bad luck like that? Or is there something we can do?
I agree with the DPS issue. The longer this fight lasts, the harder it is. We got him down to burn range a couple of times, but so many folks were gone by then that we were unable to finish him. I looked at the last kill we had on him, and we downed him in 5 minutes and change. That was with Fortula and Zoo pushing ~6k DPS each. This fight's mechanics are pretty brutal on DPS (lots of kiting and moving, making it hard to maintain an optimal rotation), but if we can all work on making the best of a bad situation, then we can push this fight to a more reasonable time frame.
No one should be thrown under the bus here. Except Zoog. Screw that guy!