Heigan, Hunters, Hit Capping

Kvasira's post made me wonder about hit-capping again. I mean, I know it's important, and I'm told I should stack it above everything else, but ... how much am I really missing by missing? I wanted to do the math myself.

Looking at the web stats, I can calculate the following --

Even with a draenei in the raid, I missed 1.6% of my auto shots. 0.1% was mitigated, but let's just ignore that, because it's too small of a percentage to work with. This means, since I landed 317 shots, 5 of them missed. Average damage was 859 on non crits, and 1682 on crits (14%). This means I missed on average 3694 non-crit damage plus 1177 crit dmg.

For my steady shots, I missed 0.5%, with 0% mitigated. This means out of 201 shots, 1 (JUST ONE) of them missed. Average damage was 1167 on non crits, and 2571 on crits (18%). This gives a probable damage for this shot of 1173.

So we have...

• Auto Shot: 308,597 done, and 4871 that I could have gotten if I were hit-capped.
• Steady Shot: 284,060 done, and 1173 that I could have gotten if I were hit-capped.

Now, what my Cheeky's (now Shandara's) spreadsheet tells me by modeling my gear and buffs from the exact raid setup I had then, is that Poached Northern Sculpin will buff my pet DPS by 5 and my hunter DPS by 12, as opposed to using no food at all. My pet was useless in the Heigan fight, so let's ignore the 5.

My time in the fight dps'ing was 706 seconds. My DPS was 928. Adding 12 dps to that and multiplying by my time in the fight gets me 8,472 that I could have gotten by eating AP food. Getting to the hit cap gives me 6,044, or 8.5 dps that I could have added.

• Eating cheap BC Hit cap food: 8.5 dps increase, or
• Eating mammoth 60AP food: 9 dps increase, or
• Eating expensive 80AP food: 12 dps increase

So missing only 1 steady shot and 5 auto shots in a 14 minute fight is roughly equivalent to 60AP lost!

Once again, the clear conclusion is... get ye to your hit cap, hunters. A little bit of hit is worth a lot of DPS.

(The postscript is, hug your local draenei.)

Zul Aman: Initial Excursion

Well. For the first time, I led a raid that I knew going in would wipe multiple times. I was a bit nervous about it. I went over the fights again and again (even though I'd done them a bunch of times already), and got all set up to roll.

I brought Abs in, because I totally screwed up and managed to get Pos saved to ZA the day before. I blame Blizz. The timer went from 12 hours to reset to 2 days overnight. Needless to say, I was a bit peeved on that one. Kathe filled in awesomely, as always.

I had a friend of mine, a Healadin, come in for heals. She'd been interested in joining KoU so I figured, what a good way to get her to meet the group. I told her it was progression. I told her we'd run 2 hours. Well, 1/3rd of the way through, after our 2nd wipe on the last pull before Nalorakk, she sent me a tell "If we wipe again, I'm leaving" well, we didn't wipe again, and she left anyway, as soon as we downed the first boss without a word.

I wasn't exactly happy. Although, I kept it to myself. I won't be grouping with her again anytime soon.

Anyway, our crew.... Owaru and Kathe as tanks. Two of the best healers ever in Boon and Orzag (although one of them has an ego problem, and one is as humble as.... umm.... who's really humble?) DPSers: Absitively, Ravensfire, Neshura, Wolfinme, Harikin.

We only had real problems with the last pull before the bear boss (Owaru kept dying, I blame Boon) once we had it down, and I seduced, we were alright. We one shotted Nalorakk, with one awesome move by Owaru, who bubbled with Kathe's taunt was resisted.

Just... <3 his mad skills.

Ravensfire got a new belt (yeah, maybe I'll link it eventually), but I'm lazy and I'm tired tonight... and K wants more posts.

Then, we ran the gauntlet. I completely messed up my explanations to people on what to kill and such, I don't think I was quite clear enough.

We got to the top our first attempt, but just got overwhelmed as a couple people (myself the aoe-er included) went down.

Second time, I tried to give out new orders, but, yeah. I sucked at that too.

Third time, I got everything right, and we kicked ass. It felt smooooooooooth

Then we tried the Eagle boss.
We got him to 54%, but our DPS was a bit on the low side (3 money DPSers were there, 2 of our Kara ready but-not-kara-Geared dpsers were there at that point)

We pulled Kathe out of tanking, and made her heal. In retrospect we might've brought in Kikidas instead, but we didn't plan ahead for that.

3 wipes, and we ran out of time on the boss, and the gauntlet respawned and we called it.

It was a good learning experience. I'm excited for our next run.

I plan to go for the first timed chest from the first boss. Which loot is amazing!

Being a Raid Leader...

First off... like the new logo? Been playing with Photoshop and wow-model-viewer lately.

I've become my guild's raid leader. Admittedly, we aren't running much new content, just Kara as of right now, with a push to go into ZA on the horizon.

I haven't had many problems being a leader, now, maybe thats because of how I am. Maybe its because our guild is so small, there's no drama. Maybe its because we've only run trivial content.

Every raid, I am a bit nervous. Every raid, I try to delegate certain responsibilities: If I'm tanking, I won't master loot. That's a DPS's job. I'll mark, pull, and go over basic reminders for boss fights.

If I'm DPSing, I leave the marking to the tanks, I play loot master, and I try to keep the raid moving... "Everyone but me, go start the next trash pulls while we figure out loot"

I'm especially nervous now about ZA. I'm worried that this group of people, who's used to rolling through Kara will get frustrated when we try to pull off a 'progression' type of run.

I think I can keep it together, though. What I'm most worried about it getting talked over. Getting 87 different suggestions on strategies. I'm worried I'll have to lay the hammer down. "This is how I want it done, so lets do it that way."

I'm a dynamic person and up for suggestions, but, sometimes, they just aren't viable. a 2-healer approach for Netherspite has to be different than a 3-healer one.

I get to see, soon hopefully, how well our guild can perform with progression fights.