Thursday, January 20, 2011

fun with graphs: maloriak

It's been a pretty great raid week, so far. We have five bosses down. Omni gave us quite a bit of trouble the second time (we got him on Monday and again last night), but these things happen.

If you're having trouble with slimes on Toxi, you can encourage your raiders not to use aggro dumps. Abilities like Hand of Protection, Ice Block, and Feign Death do 'work', but then the slimes will target someone else and they won't get the icon or the raid warning. Chaos!

Then we went and one-shot Maloriak, which was awesome. I decided to take a look at my performance for this guy, since it was kind of messy I figured there would be room for me to improve. I had some fun with my photo program, where I aligned my buffs cast with my healing done and the raid's damage taken.

Bossy Pally and the Giant Spoon has a great write-up for how to use WoL to track your buffs cast. It's a pre 4.0.1, but her directions for navigating logs are still spot-on.

Granted, these alignments aren't perfect but I think they are still close enough to give me a sense for how I was responding to the encounter.


First and most important, this is some weak healadin cooldown management. Could have gotten one more trinket pop, three or four more Ho-Sacs, two more Aura Masteries, and I don't see any HoPs or Salvs (though hops and salvs are situational).

What is this? Why did Beacon fall off for that long? How embarrassing.

I have been saving Avenging Wrath and Divine Favor for specific periods of heavy damage with Holy Radiance. I don't think this is bad, per se, but I could have squeezed out another 2 uses of AW and still had it available for those times I used it for burst raid healing.

Since I ended the fight with more than 20k mana (I think it was more like 40% mana but I don't remember for sure now), I am not too concerned that I did not Divine Plea much. Once 4.0.6 hits, this ability will be a little more usable... but then in an encounter like this one without a lull period, better to judge more and reserve mana than endanger my tank. I had thought these two uses came at a time when my assigned tank had less 3 or 6 adds and we had just recovered from a red phase, although according to the graph I timed the first plea very poorly, the raid was taking quite a bit of damage.

It's not listed above but I judged 34 times, or approximately once every 14 seconds. Not bad at all. I could push it if I needed to. I didn't include that graph, but I'm judging fairly consistently throughout the fight (though I could have judged sooner in the fight to get JotP going).

Our first death was a healer who had Consuming Flames. I could have helped prevent this by focusing him.

I potentially could have used Radiance more than I did, but I did manage to hit it during the four major raid damage spikes of the fight (the fifth spike was tank damage from the burn phase, and my healing spike was LoH from the looks of it).

A quick note on mastery: My mastery absorbs are a bit higher (less nonabsorbs) and make up more of my healing than the last time I wrote about it. I believe this is because my tank was assigned to adds, so the damage was coming in more often in smaller chunks. For bosses that do big hits on a long swing timer, our mastery will (in theory) shine less.

So there it is. I've certainly progressed from standing in Pillars of Fail, there's always room for growth. Hope you enjoyed my performance analysis!

2 comments:

  1. Wow am I behind in reading...but comment none-the-less!
    With regards to your Consuming flames comment, that person should not take ANY damage in theory, I am sure you have picked this up by now but they should actually be getting out of the way of any damage, or else they're pretty much toast (forgive the pun!)

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  2. Thanks, Morituri! Puns are always welcome.

    We did definitely have some problems with Consuming Flames while we were learning this fight but we are (more or less) doing better.

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