The week Part 4 of LFR came out, we tried to get through it. We got up to and pulled Garrosh a number of times… I think we were up to 4-5 attempts when we just ran out of time. The group was pleasant enough but we just couldn’t attempt anymore, and the person who’d been leading it had put themselves in charge of the add on the side and missed it a few times, causing most of the wipes. I wasn’t particularly upset – just assigned one of our people to help after a couple of those. I mean, it was new of course – so no rage induced there.
I requeued later and got the most fantastic group I’d had up till that point. We walked through every boss with no more than a few wipes – 1 on Siegemaster, 0 on Klaxxi and 3 on Garrosh. Everyone was upbeat and excited about the content [an attitude that is contagious by the way though I suppose it would only work for new LFRs] and on Garrosh it was “Okay what did we do wrong? Okay let’s fix that!” I think we only had a couple people leave on the Garrosh attempts. And we had a leader who had done the fights before and knew how to boil it down.
After carefully listening and watching, I was pretty sure I could walk an LFR group through the Garrosh encounter if they’d obey mechanics and listen.
Wednesdays are typically our LFR night but we’ve had people sick and we’ve had to play catch up for a few people who missed earlier sections. So we caught a few people up in parts 2 and 3 and then hit part 4 last night. I have to admit, I was a little disheartened when we got to Siegemaster and asked which dps were doing the conveyer belt and got no responses. I can say I haven’t done that so I can’t explain it. I probably should sometime so I CAN explain it. I know one of the three adds has to die and it determines what other two abilities hit the raid. I know you can die if you get off the conveyer wrong or something, but I don’t know. Anyway, that aside, Ven assigned a couple of our dps in vent to take care of it. All good.
Random healer: “OMG CAN WE PULL ALREADY OMG THIS IS TAKING TOO LONG”
Irritation rises for a split second, but I push that away and ignore them. They’re one person and ironically died every fight multiple times and were by far the lowest on heals [perhaps because they died so much]. Suffice to say a healer we picked up on Garrosh outhealed them overall. We should probably have kicked them but I didn’t even realize it till after the run was over.
We one shot Siegemaster – messily but done. All good. We move on and kill all the Klaxxi trash and before we can blink, someone has clicked the crystal and the encounter is engaged. Probably would be wise to only permit queued tanks to click that. But no matter, we one shot it too. Ven and I threw out enough aoe in the beginning that we both ended up with a couple stacks of vulnerability to our respective targets but 20% extra damage taken didn’t prove to be fatal 🙂
We got to Garrosh – and by the way, the trash to him has been massively nerfed since we were last in there. Or we had amazing dps and healers. Or both. We were able to pull the humanoid packs and not die. Those reaper stuns are ANNOYING as a tank though!
We get to Garrosh and now it’s time to prove what I’d bragged to the hubby about. Here’s how I explained it, in case it helps any other LFRs.
I put two marks down on either of the center [where the little points come out] and told the dps and healers to stand on one until a weapon appeared, move to the other and dps the weapon down. Rinse repeat. Melee focus on killing the riding add [it heals the boss]. I had one of our dps assigned to the side add. I did forget to mention that the melee should mind the fel iron star, but they seemed to learn after the first one or two.
When you get sucked into the scenario, run to the end, kill all the things, don’t stand in Garrosh’s smash aoe.
In Phase 2 and 3 don’t be off by yourself. The boss will MC three people and they will start to MC the raid. DPS them out and interrupt. [We almost lost control of that once but the raid recovered very well].
Other than that… don’t stand in bad. I think that was pretty much it.
We lost a few melee to that first fel iron star and lost one person in a scenario who managed to hit every one of Garrosh’s aoe smashes… how I’m not overly sure. Because of battle rezzes we ended the fight with two dead and one shot it.
Maybe that’s not a big feat because as people tell me, it IS LFR but my alting friends in vent were saying they don’t want to go back without us there leading it. The truth is ya’ll were there to back us up and take those utility roles that might kill your dps. Group effort!
My point is that a little leadership and organization can really make or break these LFRs. Ideally you shouldn’t have to, but at times it’s been the choice between suffering a horrible extended floundering run or adding just a touch of organization [raid permitting] to just get it done. And I’ve organized Lei Shen kills on a healer and a dps. I admittedly haven’t done much Siege on alts but I think the principle applies. And I’ll grant, if you’re not a tank you don’t automatically have marking and the tools to lead. And if people won’t listen, it doesn’t really matter what role you are. And by leadership I don’t mean bossing people around – I mean giving the raid what direction it needs. Some LFRs need very little beyond a mark on the floor and clarification of that and some require more handholding.
You Yank It, You Tank it: Blog of a Tanking Death Knight Lady 
Depending on the LFR (and more often than not), I will wind up giving instructions that are terse by my standards but way too verbose for many (they would prefer something like, “shoot all the things, profit”). My biggest problem is that I don’t know off the top of my head how many stacks the tank need to switch on for any boss. I can do DPS instructions, and I can do heals (HEAL ALL THE THINGS), buuut I just don’t remember that key bit of info for tanks.
As far as the conveyor belt goes, you need a minimum of two good DPS who alternate going on the belt. (This is true of normal, where I think you get a debuff after being on the belt – not 100% positive about LFR, where you may be able to get away with one competent person.) There is a low pipe on the circular platform that you need to *run into,* not jump. For the love of Gawd, don’t jump, because somehow you will always miss. This pipe will drop you onto the conveyor belt. In LFR, I believe you gotta kill one of the things on the belt. You must do this while dodging the FIRE that’s pouring down on the belt – each hit is like, 100 to 200k, so you can be dead quick. Speaking of quick, you gotta kill the thing quick – if you miss one of the two pipes at the end of the belt (again, run into them, not jump), you are EFFED and instadead.
Sounds like you had a lucky group. I’ve always DPS’d since vanilla and recently got bored of it so have been playing alot of my resto sham / prot pally – I find in LFD there is alot of healing/tank trolls whilst playing on either character “pull more” “go faster” “noob tank” etc Just last night I was getting called a noob tank as I wasn’t tanking adds that were untankable in one of the MOP instances cant think of the name sha of doubt boss i think although in reality the healer just sucked. LFD/LFR although good in some ways has ruined the game in others I feel with the old system “LFM Naxx Need 1 Tank 2 healer” or w.e seemed to work better and even more so without inter realm. Sure it took longer to create a group but you could psyically inspect people speak to them etc before inviting them to made a judgement if they are a competent player or not and if they did fuck up/troll/ninja/obnoxious the hole realm would find out about it and they would struggle to find groups/guilds in future. I really miss the raiding days of TBC now everything seems so rushed and people are very inpatient 😦 GJ nonetheless though.
The first time i went in with my guild, the second time with a pug. i haven’t been back but I agree, just a tiny bit of leadership makes it better – but it’s not just leadership its people FOLLOWING the leader that helps too! 🙂
Agreed! All the leadership in the world can’t make a group follow mechanics.