Nine Swords

I built a new AR/Blood build that seemed to work ok last night for Adds, as far as I recall, the only time we wiped to adds was when I was podded and killed in the first phase. Not saying I was the hero against the adds, but I helped

Build contains:

Slow the Advance (AR Elite Adds Slow)
Suppressing Fire (AR Adds builder)
Safety Off (AR Boss builder)
Three Round Burst (AR Boss consumer)
Cannabalise (Blood Instant Builder)
Guts and Glory (Blood Adds consumer)
Exsanguinaite (Blood Boss Consumer)
Dragon's Breath (Flamethrower Adds)

Passives:
Elemental Force
Brawler
Lethality
Iron Maiden
Eagle Eye
Twist the Knife
Probability
Viscous Accelerant (Flamethrower Slow for Adds)

As I promised (or threatened, depending on how you see it ) here is our winning run:


I actually made quite a few mistakes myself, those might be particularly intriguing to watch.
Phase 1: Was almost flawless, the last swap which led to Kate having 18 stacks could have likely been avoided though.
Phase 2: Drake pickup was great, adds also almost always got killed in a timely fashion. Due to me choosing to stand on the pile of rubble, I almost got killed by the first drake's death AoE. It was really hard to spot it up there, and the reason I moved out wasn't actually to avoid it, I just happened to do it to get better line of sight to #2. So here's mistake 1! Also, on the final drake the DPS missed one zombie which proceeded to nibble on me for quite a while as the focus was on killing the birdie.
Phase 3: The phase change was pretty good. We had two "capital" problems here, neither of which thankfully were fatal for the raid as a whole:
At 4:10, there was a sequence of double stacks on the tanks. Had that coincided with a pod coming up, there likely would have been some trouble.
Slightly more significant was filth placement and podding, and my two main mistakes. The first badly placed puddle was also at 4:10 I think. It wasn't terrible as it was out of the DPS' way, but it started a sequence that ended in Claretta and Shedevil's deaths. That puddle gave me very little room for movement at the 4:25-4:30 pod, which meant as a "worst possible chain of events" meant that I ended up inside a pod and dropping another puddle almost smack in the middle of the ranged circle. I likely should have just ran straight into that one to catch it behind the first puddle. The following puddle was somewhat ok, I would have liked to place it a bit further out of the way. I think Incarnation ended up knocked into it during Final Resort. The final pod was also a pretty major thing, I ended up looking for it but sort of expecting it on the other side as they usually tend to follow an alternating pattern. Not so today, and it ended up on a path through the previous puddles, making it both hard to see and intercept if spotted. As I managed to do neither, we ended up with the previously mentioned deaths.

In good news, combined with two more deaths to Final Resort (and a great angle to watch it from too, nice "last second" rocket jump from Kate!) we still ended up with five people alive and only 50k HP to burn. So it died even before I got into real trouble with the adds.

Uragon wrote:I think Incarnation ended up knocked into it during Final Resort.

Yeah, that was sort of a calculated risk I was coming up on consumers just as we passed the HP threshhold for Final Resort and Shadow was coming, so I decided to burn, and relied on shadow to knock me back out of FR. Alas, filth ruined that plan, which is always a risk when you go for that tactic, but I did take a huge chunk of health during my burn and at least supplied buffs in time.

Hit my highest DPS ever that raid:

http://i.imgur.com/Rks36la.jpg

(My combat time is a bit reduced because I got distracted briefly by my cat during phase 2)

Just 16 seconds to shave off our time?!

Gratz on your DPS, Inc!

Well tnx for the video post Durendall and specially for the description cause it helps figuring out the plan on filth placement.
And ty for letting me have a try at it! It is very appreciated!

That's okay. Sorry I chose to change up the teams a bit at the end. Just after an hour I wasn't prepared to let the raid go to a fail so wanted as many experienced people in roles as possible.

It'll take a while to get the important roles downpat. I think it's easy to take for granted just how much easier experienced people can make a raid, and I have to balance the training of new people with keeping morale up by getting raid completions.

We kept getting that weird stacks thing at the start of third phase all the time.
Both tanks would have 20 or 18 stacks about every try. That in fact is very tricky to heal if I was getting further away to grab a pod.
Maybe that allways happens and i just didn't pay attention because i was in another role or was it just this time?
Also the lag was awfull all nigh yesterday... was very hard to do anything in a decent way.

Lag and third phase double stacks definitely do a number on my DPS, yeah. 2,700 isn't that good for me when healing! (I ideally want 3200+)

I'm wondering if it's related to TSW's poor memory management in general, and if I should do a total computer restart before the raid.

Regarding double stacks at the start of phase 3 -

It can happen for some of the following reasons:
- The tank with stacks at end of Phase 2 hits confuse and therefore, even though they were the last one with agro, the lurker gets a little weirded out.
- The tank that didnt have last agro ends up going in first due to unforseen circumstances
- It just happens because it happens (unhelpful, but sometimes it just seems to swap without anything causing it)

Sometimes, I admit - I am not so quick off the mark in stopping hitting when it switches too soon (which I and the other tank should do to make sure only one of us has the agro. There is a lot going on in those first seconds and its really a lot on the eyes with the buff circles coming and everyone firing everything off.

@Clare - I was happy to leave to let the adjustments happen. I am glad the raid ended up being successful even after so long trying. It is hard for everyone to keep concentrating that long Definitely a great step getting more people "trained" into different positions.

Katelin wrote:Just 16 seconds to shave off our time?!

Yes, and that's with several DPS below 2k I think if we really wanted to, we could start trying for the 5 minute achievement again. Though it'd require training a few new DPS!

That's generally something Cir and me have been talking about - how to improve individual DPS. It's not unusual for the two of us to be responsible for nearly half the total damage done. Now, don't get me wrong, I don't want to foster an environment where we have gear checks or DPS checks to participate, not at all - I also don't want to encourage people obsessing over their place in the parse. Being on add duty will always lead to lower DPS, but it's still a very, very vital job. But I do think everyone wants to improve, and I'd like to help with that.

So...suggestions about how to go about that? I was thinking one-on-one build advice would probably be best, so we don't push all raiders into cookie cutter builds, but it'd be the most time intensive. I also think this sort of education would be very important coming from Kiss, in regards to add-duty builds, which still seem to be the issue that wipes us the most.