Previously, I discussed a three-step process on how to help prevent wasting time on boss fights. The process focused on explaining fight mechanics clearly, determining exactly what caused your last failure, and ensuring that the group has learned from said defeat. The more you can avoid making the same mistakes, the better - because there's an awful lot that can go wrong!
This particular post is focused on the times when the boss hit the enrage timer and then proceeded to obliterate your group. Obviously, there isn't much information to be gained from looking at the death reports in this scenario, and the defeat may cause more questions and finger-pointing than it does helpful feedback. The obvious solution is to 'do more damage', but if you leave it at that without looking into the 'how', you're relying on luck and the ability (or inability) of particular raid members to figure out what they did wrong and how they can improve. That's one risk of the game you don't have to deal with.
That all said, it is also important to realize that there are several issues that may prevent a particular player's damage or healing from being as high as other players on a given attempt. For that reason, it's important to look at more data than 'just' the last attempt when determining whether someone is slacking off or doesn't know how to play the game. So, before you're ready to /guildkick Bobby, have a look at the following.
You Are a Whole
Before you crack down on the guy who's in last on the damage meters by 0.5% DPS, it's important to realize that hitting the enrage is a failure of the group, not a failure by just that lowest player. If other players had been doing better - if the guy on the top of the charts used a second potion, had a food buff, or better-timed his cooldowns, it might have made the difference, and you wouldn't have even noticed or cared about that other guy being in last.
It is also important to realize that not all players are created equal. Some classes and specializations shine in some situations better than others (equipped gear can make a huge difference), and players themselves have a wide range of skill. For these reasons, it may be extremely unlikely - if not impossible - for Bobby to go from the bottom of the damage charts to the top on the next attempt. (Something to think about - if he did manage this, and you still wiped to the enrage timer, would you look at the new person on the bottom of the damage list? What about the next time?) Stay realistic with your expectations, and remember that 'nobody' is playing perfectly on a consistent basis. There's likely plenty of things that all players in your group could be doing better - the trick is in finding out which improvements will be the easiest and quickest to make, and focusing on the ones that may make the biggest impact.
Be sure to consider strategy changes that provide a benefit to multiple players - such as moving the boss around slower or less often to allow for higher melee damage - because these effects will likely be more significant than focusing your efforts on critiquing individual players' performances.
Use the Mechanics
The very first thing I look at when we hit an enrage timer is whether damage-increasing (or decreasing) mechanics are present within the fight. These might take the forms of buffs/debuff effects or fields that are gained at certain times (Hodir, Malygos, Blood Queen Lana'thel, Jin'rokh the Breaker, Jikun). It might also take the form of a buff/debuff that's present on the boss (Halfus Wyrmbreaker, Al'Akir, Lord Rhyolith, Wind Lord Mal'jarak, Horridon). Whatever the form, it is vital that your team recognizes these points in the fight, and that they coordinate their offensive cooldowns for the best periods of time to maximize their damage potential. Stress that using abilities immediately as they become ready may not be the best strategy! Emphasize the importance of acquiring the damage-increasing buff if it isn't automatically given.
Dead DPS = 0 DPS
One of the biggest things you can do to improve your group's damage is to increase your group's survivability. A dead player does not help you with enrage timer issues, and even if you are able to revive them midfight, that's time and resources that the healer could've spent elsewhere, which may lead to other problems. Additionally, the resurrected player will be missing various group buffs, which, even if reapplied, also take a little away from the buffing players' damage, healing, and survivability (clicking that out-of-the-way buff button 'can' lead to bad things). Lastly, if you were stacking a damage-increasing fight mechanic-exclusive buff (as mentioned above, such as the Primal Nutriment from Jikun), dying may clear that buff and really hurt your chances of completing the fight successfully.
In the case of extremely tight DPS checks where Heroism/Bloodlust has already been used and someone gets resurrected midfight, you can help gain back some of that lost damage by recasting it for the fallen player, but these situations are not very common.
Be Prepared
It's much easier to prepare well for a night of raiding than it is to play well for a night of raiding. Use the time before raid to ensure that your character has the optimal stats reforged, gear enchanted, and gems socketed. Come equipped with flasks, potions, and food. While this isn't usually something that can be quickly fixed mid-raid, if you're inspecting an underperforming player and half of his gear isn't enchanted, you know you're likely going to have a lot more problems.
Special Assignments & Situations
This really goes without saying, but I nearly forgot it, so here it is. If you have someone on a special assignment for a fight, chances are good that their overall damage (or healing) will be lower than other players. This is normal and to be expected - it is more important for the player to be putting out fires on heroic Ragnaros, or juggling light orbs on Blood Prince Council than it is for them to be maximizing their damage numbers on the boss.
That said, there are also some situations where a player's damage will be lower due to fight mechanics beyond your control. An example of this may be a group where you have only one ranged DPS, and thus, they get consistently targeted with a lightning orb that they need to kite.
Try to get the whole story before you assume that someone isn't doing their job correctly - they may be having trouble with things that you don't even know about. In this way, you may be able to change your strategy or group composition slightly to better address the problem.
Priorities, People
If, after all of the above, nothing seems to fit your damage issues, you may need to take a closer look at specific players' performances. Addons like Recount or Skada do a good job of tracking current information, but additional information can be obtained from using a site like www.worldoflogs.com. Using World of Logs, you can tell just how often a player has specific debuffs on the boss (such as DoTs), and by looking at these percentages of uptime, along with seeing their entire damage ability breakdown, you can usually get a quick idea as to whether they are playing correctly.
Encourage players to research their class/specialization, and to try new things. Additional addons such as WeakAuras or Mik's Scrolling Battle Text may help. Above all, promote communication. It's difficult to help fix a problem when you don't know about it!
Monday, May 6, 2013
Sunday, January 27, 2013
Identifying Cause of Death: CSI WoW-style
Before I begin, here's a shameless self-promotional link to my other blog, which is now listing development updates for a RPG I'm creating called Wrath of Gaia: http://www.wogroh.blogspot.com/.
That out of the way, I'm now going to talk a bit about how you can personally guarantee to make your raids or dungeons easier, requiring fewer pulls per boss kill. These tactics should be employed by your group's leader(s) for maximum effectiveness, but there is no reason standard members cannot use the following strategies (in such a case, it becomes that much more important that you communicate your information tactfully, so as not to step on anybody's toes). The concepts included within can even be applied to games other than World of Warcraft (though I will be using examples and terminology from that game to make the discussion easier). It's even only three steps long. Interested?
The following sections are going to assume you are going to have the appropriate number of players for the content you are attempting to do. Trying to complete PvE content with lower than the recommended number of players may cause certain fight mechanics to behave oddly, increasing the overall difficulty of the encounter and making evaluation that much more difficult.
That all said, let's get this running.
Step 0 - Determine Your Focus
This isn't really even a step, but it's worth mentioning before we get to the following parts.
Most groups tend to have a focus on dying the least amount of times possible (or spending the least amount of their time on the fight). The strategies contained below reflect that view.
That said, if the focus of your group is to experience new content for yourselves without spoilers - to be (unpleasantly) surprised by boss attacks/specialties, and to say, "Wow, that boss's attack really hurts! Now, how are we going to deal with it?" feel free to temporarily skip Step 1 below (I'm sure you'll be coming back to it if and when you decide you need to strategize). However, be sure that this view is shared by ALL members of your team - not just yourself. It's not a particularly common view.
On a side note, pay close attention midfight to see who in your group dies first. You'll want this information for Step 2.
Step 1 - Have a Plan (or Not)
Don't run into the fight blind, expecting to just shoot the baddie until he falls over dead. There's (almost) always going to be some special attack or mechanic that's going to mess you up if you don't know how to manage it.
Do your fight research. Understand what needs to be done, determine how you're going to accomplish it, and communicate the important parts that others need to know. Be direct, and try to focus on giving instructions out in relevant sections. For example, consider the following scattered, incomplete directions:
"Biggest thing we got to worry about on this fight is Sudden Death. Ranged players, stay spread out so that you guys don't have to move if you get hit with it. It will kill everyone near you if you're all grouped up. Melee, if you get targeted, run out of melee range. Stay away from the front of the boss, because he has a breath attack."
The problem with the above directions (although they may describe all of the fight mechanics), is that it's described in a poor order. Usually, fight strategies are much longer than this, and if you start with mechanics that only pertain to one group of players, other players tend to start tuning out your description, because it doesn't directly apply to them. For a specific example, when you address the melee, all they know is that if they get targeted (some of them might not even know by what, and may assume boss melee swings/aggro), they should run out of melee range. I can guarantee you that some of them will run out of melee range DIRECTLY ON TOP OF RANGED PEOPLE, because they missed the part where the mechanic kills any other players near you. Additionally, ranged players may attack from in front of the boss, and subsequently get killed by the breath attack, because they assume you're still talking to the melee players when you talk about not standing in front of the boss.
This is the sort of thing where usually if someone screws up, they learn, and you will not have that person doing that mistake again, but you still lose time having that person learn when the death(s) could have been avoided. If this happens multiple times for multiple people (especially for multiple mechanics), it can add hours onto the time you spend trying to defeat an encounter.
Below is a better pre-fight explanation for your team:
"Alright everyone. This boss does a frontal breath attack, so NOBODY stand in front of him at any time other than the tank. Also, he will mark players with a 'Sudden Death' debuff, that will kill any other players standing within 10 yards after 5 seconds, so if you get the debuff, move away from everyone else. Ranged, stay spread out so you aren't running all over the place. Melee, move out of melee range if you get the debuff so you don't gib the other melee."
As a closing note, in addition to keeping instructions organized and relevant like this, try to emphasize category words (such as 'everybody', 'nobody', 'melee', 'ranged', 'healers', 'tanks') by saying them slightly louder, or using caps, so that people who may be daydreaming get brought back to reality and hear what it is they're supposed to know.
Step 2 - Determining the Cause of Fail
Alright. You followed your plan of action (or lack thereof) and lost. The boss is laughing at your corpses and you're working on resurrecting your characters. Heal up and try again, right? Obviously someone messed up and now knows what they're supposed to be doing.
Hold up a minute.
In your group's defense, if you're the leader, chances are good they do NOT know what went wrong, and require someone else (probably you) to figure it out for them. So, let's run through the motions (as quickly as possible) of various scenarios that may have occurred.
I've found that the most useful information is usually obtained from the first people that die during the fight. If you have the option to quickly do so, after the fight, look at the players' death reports and determine what killed them. Problems tend to snowball after the first player dies, so that first death report contains some of the most valuable information. If you can't figure anything out from the information, talk with the player. See if they know what happened to them. They might have personally figured it out, and have adjusted their strategy, but if that information is relevant to all other (or to similar) players, you waste time by not sharing that information immediately, because everyone else would need to figure it out for themselves!
It is extremely important to keep in mind that a player dying does not automatically = their fault. "That melee guy got Sudden Death and ran up and hugged me." Additionally, someone may die from lack of healing, because the healers may be silenced by mind-controlled players, who should've used their silences on the boss immediately before the mind control happened so that their characters would not be able to silence your team's healers.
As you can see, the blame game can be traced a long way. In some ways, it pays to go back to your childhood days, where you kept asking "Why?" to everything.
Dead Guy: "I died."
You: "Why?"
Dead Guy: "I didn't get any healing."
You: "Why didn't the healers heal you?"
Healer: "We were silenced."
You: "Why?"
Mage: "I forgot to put Counterspell on cooldown before the mind-control."
Mage recognizes his problem, and that usually means he will fix it. Problem identified and solved. A lot of the time though, this won't be that easy.
As mentioned above, looking at the death reports for first deaths is a good start. Identify the ability that caused the most damage (not just the killing blow), and determine whether that damage can be lowered, avoided, or split better between different players. If it can, figure out how. If it cannot, figure out a better way to help block the damage (through shield-absorption effects or damage-reducing cooldowns), or a quicker way to heal it (healing cooldowns may be required here).
Consider the following when determining causes of death: missed interrupts, broken crowd-control effects, lag/disconnects, stacks of increased damage taken (or damage-over-time) debuffs, out-of-range for healing issues, boss's enrage timer, and emergency AFKs because the fishtank is on fire. Thankfully, a lot of these mechanics are not present on the same fight, so you're really only left with a couple to worry about at a given time.
I will go into a lot of these topics in much greater detail in upcoming posts.
Step 3 - Communicating What You Learned
It does the group no good if you keep everything you got from Step 2 to yourself, or if you assume that the others it is relevant to know about it already. You do not need to be overly vocal about your findings, saying in public chat, "Well Bob died because the healer couldn't heal him because our mage failed!" It's enough to send a whisper to the mage asking if he knows when to use his silence, and to check if he knows how to tell when the boss's mind-control move is about to happen.
Keeping spirits high is important to the group's success as well, so you should aim to minimize the alienation that occurs when someone is called out for screwing up.
And that's it! Knowledge in-hand and team prepared, you're ready to fight again, and die to something different. Good hunting!
That out of the way, I'm now going to talk a bit about how you can personally guarantee to make your raids or dungeons easier, requiring fewer pulls per boss kill. These tactics should be employed by your group's leader(s) for maximum effectiveness, but there is no reason standard members cannot use the following strategies (in such a case, it becomes that much more important that you communicate your information tactfully, so as not to step on anybody's toes). The concepts included within can even be applied to games other than World of Warcraft (though I will be using examples and terminology from that game to make the discussion easier). It's even only three steps long. Interested?
The following sections are going to assume you are going to have the appropriate number of players for the content you are attempting to do. Trying to complete PvE content with lower than the recommended number of players may cause certain fight mechanics to behave oddly, increasing the overall difficulty of the encounter and making evaluation that much more difficult.
That all said, let's get this running.
Step 0 - Determine Your Focus
This isn't really even a step, but it's worth mentioning before we get to the following parts.
Most groups tend to have a focus on dying the least amount of times possible (or spending the least amount of their time on the fight). The strategies contained below reflect that view.
That said, if the focus of your group is to experience new content for yourselves without spoilers - to be (unpleasantly) surprised by boss attacks/specialties, and to say, "Wow, that boss's attack really hurts! Now, how are we going to deal with it?" feel free to temporarily skip Step 1 below (I'm sure you'll be coming back to it if and when you decide you need to strategize). However, be sure that this view is shared by ALL members of your team - not just yourself. It's not a particularly common view.
On a side note, pay close attention midfight to see who in your group dies first. You'll want this information for Step 2.
Step 1 - Have a Plan (or Not)
Don't run into the fight blind, expecting to just shoot the baddie until he falls over dead. There's (almost) always going to be some special attack or mechanic that's going to mess you up if you don't know how to manage it.
Do your fight research. Understand what needs to be done, determine how you're going to accomplish it, and communicate the important parts that others need to know. Be direct, and try to focus on giving instructions out in relevant sections. For example, consider the following scattered, incomplete directions:
"Biggest thing we got to worry about on this fight is Sudden Death. Ranged players, stay spread out so that you guys don't have to move if you get hit with it. It will kill everyone near you if you're all grouped up. Melee, if you get targeted, run out of melee range. Stay away from the front of the boss, because he has a breath attack."
The problem with the above directions (although they may describe all of the fight mechanics), is that it's described in a poor order. Usually, fight strategies are much longer than this, and if you start with mechanics that only pertain to one group of players, other players tend to start tuning out your description, because it doesn't directly apply to them. For a specific example, when you address the melee, all they know is that if they get targeted (some of them might not even know by what, and may assume boss melee swings/aggro), they should run out of melee range. I can guarantee you that some of them will run out of melee range DIRECTLY ON TOP OF RANGED PEOPLE, because they missed the part where the mechanic kills any other players near you. Additionally, ranged players may attack from in front of the boss, and subsequently get killed by the breath attack, because they assume you're still talking to the melee players when you talk about not standing in front of the boss.
This is the sort of thing where usually if someone screws up, they learn, and you will not have that person doing that mistake again, but you still lose time having that person learn when the death(s) could have been avoided. If this happens multiple times for multiple people (especially for multiple mechanics), it can add hours onto the time you spend trying to defeat an encounter.
Below is a better pre-fight explanation for your team:
"Alright everyone. This boss does a frontal breath attack, so NOBODY stand in front of him at any time other than the tank. Also, he will mark players with a 'Sudden Death' debuff, that will kill any other players standing within 10 yards after 5 seconds, so if you get the debuff, move away from everyone else. Ranged, stay spread out so you aren't running all over the place. Melee, move out of melee range if you get the debuff so you don't gib the other melee."
As a closing note, in addition to keeping instructions organized and relevant like this, try to emphasize category words (such as 'everybody', 'nobody', 'melee', 'ranged', 'healers', 'tanks') by saying them slightly louder, or using caps, so that people who may be daydreaming get brought back to reality and hear what it is they're supposed to know.
Step 2 - Determining the Cause of Fail
Alright. You followed your plan of action (or lack thereof) and lost. The boss is laughing at your corpses and you're working on resurrecting your characters. Heal up and try again, right? Obviously someone messed up and now knows what they're supposed to be doing.
Hold up a minute.
In your group's defense, if you're the leader, chances are good they do NOT know what went wrong, and require someone else (probably you) to figure it out for them. So, let's run through the motions (as quickly as possible) of various scenarios that may have occurred.
I've found that the most useful information is usually obtained from the first people that die during the fight. If you have the option to quickly do so, after the fight, look at the players' death reports and determine what killed them. Problems tend to snowball after the first player dies, so that first death report contains some of the most valuable information. If you can't figure anything out from the information, talk with the player. See if they know what happened to them. They might have personally figured it out, and have adjusted their strategy, but if that information is relevant to all other (or to similar) players, you waste time by not sharing that information immediately, because everyone else would need to figure it out for themselves!
It is extremely important to keep in mind that a player dying does not automatically = their fault. "That melee guy got Sudden Death and ran up and hugged me." Additionally, someone may die from lack of healing, because the healers may be silenced by mind-controlled players, who should've used their silences on the boss immediately before the mind control happened so that their characters would not be able to silence your team's healers.
As you can see, the blame game can be traced a long way. In some ways, it pays to go back to your childhood days, where you kept asking "Why?" to everything.
Dead Guy: "I died."
You: "Why?"
Dead Guy: "I didn't get any healing."
You: "Why didn't the healers heal you?"
Healer: "We were silenced."
You: "Why?"
Mage: "I forgot to put Counterspell on cooldown before the mind-control."
Mage recognizes his problem, and that usually means he will fix it. Problem identified and solved. A lot of the time though, this won't be that easy.
As mentioned above, looking at the death reports for first deaths is a good start. Identify the ability that caused the most damage (not just the killing blow), and determine whether that damage can be lowered, avoided, or split better between different players. If it can, figure out how. If it cannot, figure out a better way to help block the damage (through shield-absorption effects or damage-reducing cooldowns), or a quicker way to heal it (healing cooldowns may be required here).
Consider the following when determining causes of death: missed interrupts, broken crowd-control effects, lag/disconnects, stacks of increased damage taken (or damage-over-time) debuffs, out-of-range for healing issues, boss's enrage timer, and emergency AFKs because the fishtank is on fire. Thankfully, a lot of these mechanics are not present on the same fight, so you're really only left with a couple to worry about at a given time.
I will go into a lot of these topics in much greater detail in upcoming posts.
Step 3 - Communicating What You Learned
It does the group no good if you keep everything you got from Step 2 to yourself, or if you assume that the others it is relevant to know about it already. You do not need to be overly vocal about your findings, saying in public chat, "Well Bob died because the healer couldn't heal him because our mage failed!" It's enough to send a whisper to the mage asking if he knows when to use his silence, and to check if he knows how to tell when the boss's mind-control move is about to happen.
Keeping spirits high is important to the group's success as well, so you should aim to minimize the alienation that occurs when someone is called out for screwing up.
And that's it! Knowledge in-hand and team prepared, you're ready to fight again, and die to something different. Good hunting!
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