Raiding - Thoughts on Kromog

I didn't really like Kromog on Normal when we did it on Sunday, even though we killed it. Though the fight itself was rather interesting, it seemed to be a lot of healing.  And I mean A LOT.

When we first walked in on Thursday, I remember everyone saying "Oh, it's another one of those half body bosses." Do we have to DPS his arms or something?


Close.  It turns out Kromog is the groping king and he has lots of little hands popping out of the ground everywhere just dying to grab you and also likes to squish you between his hands as well. Oh and avoid the sound rings that emanate out from the boss as well.


We wiped all night on this boss, even though everyone said it was easy.  There were a number of reasons why I think it wasn't easy.

We were trying to do it with 4 healers for 19 ppl.  Koda, myself, Nok and Yuuda.  Yuuda is a  little bit undergeared for it but he knows the fight, having done it as melee.  Crooked switched to healing halfway through the night.

We are also melee heavy.  Which means when they take that slam there's a fair bit of healing to do in that direction.

Tanks were also taking a pounding.  They were swapping at 3 stacks but the slam still hurt them a buttload!

People were DPS'd out of the hands a bit early and got hit by clapping hands or something.  You take less damage from clappy hands when you've been gripped.

And of course we were learning mechanics so people kept not getting into a rune, or they were hit by Reverbs, or the slow rock force wave that the boss does or during the Stone Breath which is a raid wide AoE damage which happens every 30 seconds or so.  So I need 6 healer cooldowns to be able to get through each stone breath.

We just died all night.  Lots.  Poor Hwired was getting frustrated and a lot of people were too, it just felt like an impossible wall and that we were missing some simple mechanic somewhere.  We tried moving the tanks closer.  Ranged were moving to the left.  Ranged weren't stacked up enough IMO, but that wasn't so bad, really.  Healers were tunneling a little bit and getting smacked by avoidable stuff.

There was an uncomfortable moment where there was some yelling, and I felt bad about that.  But it was officers yelling at each other - we can take it.  But I bet everyone else felt a bit AWKWARD /whistle

So what we DID do well was that we were using half the room instead of being spread out all over the room.  That made it easier for DPS to break us out.  Unfortunately, the cleave damage people weren't spread out in a nice line to distribute damage so there were some spots where people got out really quickly, and others where they got out really slowly.

It frustrated me that I didn't know when to time the cooldowns and I really wanted to learn.  So after the raid, I went to queue up in Group Finder looking for Heroic Kromog.

I got into a PuG and they wiped a few times (and eventually killed it) but there were a number of things that I DID learn from that PuG which were quite important.

  • Tanks can have Hand of Protection and run around in that groping hand phase and not die.  In fact, I think even a normal person can have that too.
  • You can 3 tank it.  With three tanks they took 2 debuffs each and therefore less damage overall.  That would put less strain on the healers, because the tanks seemed to instant die a lot.  They used a DK, monk and warrior tanks.  And that worked REALLY WELL.
  • They used 6 healers for 20 people.  Ok, so I was really short changing myself with healers.  Bish, where the hell were you!  They had 2 druids, 2 disc priests, 2 shamans.  Whereas I was trying to do it with 3 druids, 1 shaman and 1 monk.
  • The ranged were stacked up reasonably tight.  And they avoided the mechanics better - I was bad on the kill attempt I must have been hit by 5 bloody rock waves.  I guess that will improve with practice.
  • People were spread out to the far corners of the gropey hands but they managed to live and get broken out. I don't want to do that though but it was nice to see that it could be done like that and not be absolutely detrimental to the raid.
  • There IS an enrage timer.  Enrage is at 9 minutes.  But it's a very generous enrage timer. Someone told me that it doesn't have an enrage timer.  But it does, I saw it!
  • Deterrence does not save you in that groping hand phase if you didn't get groped.
  • The melee and tanks can stand how we had them in our raid without issue.
So I am really pleased that I did that PuG because now I understand the fight a WHOLE lot better.  It really is just avoiding stuff and not dying.  And judicious use of cooldowns.  If I have Bish, Koda, myself, Yuuda, Nok and Crooked then we should have enough cooldowns to cycle.

Aimei said to me that the average number of wipes on Kromog was 19.6 before a kill.  Well we just hit 19.  So I hope that we won't be too far beyond par.  I think that the once we all know which rune to take for our gropey hand so that we don't take each other's, and cycle our healer cooldowns better it will be much better.  And we can do the three tanks thing... damn it, Cptsars and Arelion are moving house!  It would be cool if they were both on, because then we can easily 3 tank.  Guess it will have to be Kyjenn in the meantime then.



Comments

  1. I told you we need a c/d for every breath! fjasfasfakaf.

    Sorry, wasn't in the best of moods last night.

    - Hwired

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    1. I know you did BUT we didn't have the cds for it! So I was trying to figure out WHICH ones are the least heavy ones so we could time it better. It's alright, I think everyone was scared to see officers arguing. With extra healers I don't have to skimp on CDs.

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  2. Hi Navi. I found your WarcraftLogs Guild page and had a look. WL is a great tool to look at things that are going wrong and has a built in "problems" tab which makes it easy to see key areas for improvement.

    With all 19 of your wipes selected, and the problems tab selected, you can see that theres a LARGE number of avoidable damage going out. Damage from reverberations should ideally be zero, or very low. You had quite a few raiders taking damage from it. Similarly nobody should ever be hit by Rippling Smash. There's plenty of time to move out of the way when he turns and starts casting.

    Hwired is right, should ideally be using a cooldown for breath, and/or people should be saving short cooldown personals for that ability as it does really hurt.

    I don't really like the concept of 3 tanking anything - tanks do take a significant amount of damage on this fight, but if you have the tanks on one side of the room and the melee dps on the other side of the room, the damage taken from Slam should be greatly reduced - and you can have one of the tanks run out when he casts slam (since it does less damage if you're further away) if its still an issue. Also if you cut down on the general avoidable damage the raid is taking, there should be more healing to put into the tanks.

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    1. Hi Soralin, thanks for the feedback! Yes, I saw the problems with the avoidable damage - but healers were under a lot of stress with tanks taking a lot of spiky damage - and we were running with one undergeared healer and two offspec healers - so healer tunnelling was a massive problem for us.

      3 tanking is not a new concept for us - we did it for Dark Shamans in Siege of Orgrimmar and that was with 10 ppl.

      My avoidance of stuff was horrible. After practicing it again in a PuG I think I've gotten a lot better (though I still took some stupid bubble damage) - but it was also with a much more generous healing assignment than we were trying for ourselves.

      We were tight on cooldowns so I didn't use them for each. If we had one for each, it would be a lot better, especially with 20 people.

      ONe can only practice and it's easy to tell people to avoid stuff, but people are trying - just it takes some people longer to get the hang of it. But thanks for looking and I can only hope this new raid week will be better.

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  3. Hwired - I was more concerned that something had been said to you because your anger seemed out of the norm and I hope whatever was upsetting you was not game related :( You are such a calm raid leader.

    The 19.6 attempts is that with a better set up of 6 heals vs what we have been juggling? Not that our alt healers aren't perfection in their own right, but if groups already have 6 healers/3 tanks and are doing 19.6 attempts I don't think you should compare us to what others have done.

    I don't see why we need the negativity - we know what we are messing up - we aren't all completely stupid...crap happens though...I would do one perfect attempt and then the next one someone would move to the wrong spot or the hand would be in the wrong place; I would muck up...it happens...I don't feel we need to constantly berate people for making honest mistakes (mistakes actually meaning the true sense of the word here!)

    Anyway...that's my two cents

    Dragonray
    xoxo

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    1. I agree, I know I'm making mistakes and I'm trying to fix them, it's not like I'm doing it on purpose! Understanding that and finding ways to fix that is what makes a good teacher - constantly harping on how easy it is to do and how anyone can do it, without giving an alternate solution of method which will help the person do it is pretty useless. I have some ideas for our raid members who are constant offenders with the avoidable mechanics, and I'll just tell them individually some methods to improve.

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  4. Thanks for going over this. If we ever get Flambender down with our normal group, this is the next boss. Knowing about 3 tanking is probably good, but I can feel the mocking coming my way as soon as I suggest it simply because our Heroic raid leader is always willing to jump up in numbers of tanks and I always resist. I will still hold strong on refusing to 4 tank Gruul. Yeah, I wasn't there the night they started that strategy. But whatever works for them, Anyways, thanks! Also if you haven't come across it before, the Line of Sight 2-minute tips videos on youtube usually have some good advice.

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    1. Glad it was helpful DriP! Oh 4 tanking Gruul? I had to laugh because that is REALLY lazy :D I shall check out that LoS 2 minute tips thing.

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  5. I just downed this on Aman'thul Oceanic Alliance as paladin. We had the healing problem too, we had to go 4 healers for 7 dps. It was 'Tish can you swap over to holy please', yeah sure with my unenchanted 645ilvl spellpower mace, still I must have helped as we downed him... on to the Iron Maidens!

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    1. Gratsies! I hope we can get it soon! Thanks heaps for visiting and posting a reply, I love hearing how people are going in raids :)

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