NSC 2.7 & 2.8

[Kayleezah]

http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/nx98mhk468o4s1i3/sum/damageDone/

2.8
http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/6bku8pc15vg5ubzw/sum/damageDone/

[Taleos]

Aha! I found it!
I knew she'd stuck the logs up here somewhere....

Night 1 was routine. Lots of wipes on Rotface. With 2-3 new people it was a lot of relearning of the fight.

Night 2 was different!
Finally got Rotface again and then moved on to one-shot Festergut in a quite epic fight. Battle-rezzing one tank while the other tanks him with 9 stacks on. Got him taunted back just in the nick of time.

Then we moved on to something different. I'd had quite enough slimes for a while.
So, Valithria Dreamwalker was next on my hit list.

First of all, let's talk about the hallway leading up to Dreamwalker.
We had never done it before, had never read anything about it, and pretty much just went in totally blind.
What a frustrating and fun way to do that!

The trash can hurt! One of them has a stacking debuff they put on the tank that can really, really hurt. Whirlwings are bad. And you can't cc much.
One thing I noticed is that you can stun the stacking debuff mob to reset your stacks. However, you can only stun once the warlord is dead, so get him dead quick. Disarm and related abilities REALLY shined bright throughout this encounter.
All things considered, the mini-boss fight at the end of the hallway was one of the most fun encounters in ICC so far.

Dreamwalker was a really fun encounter too.
The healers loved it, that's for sure. I don't know if it was just doing something different, or getting to swim through the emerald dream, but this was the first time I'd ever heard a dpser go "I wish I was healing"!
As for our performance? Well.... Um.... We've done better.

We can handle the ever-increasing waves of adds, OR we can heal up 5 Million health on the dragon. But doing BOTH was a little hard on us.
We kept getting to a point where raid damage was severe enough that we didn't have anyone left healing the dragon. :/

Couple of things we can do to influence things a long a bit:
1) DPSers into the portals. Yeah, I whiffed on this one. I knew healers wanted to go in. (Though not all at the same time.) But I forgot about the dps buff. We should be making use of the spare portals to buff ourselves up and kill things faster.
2) The suppressor plan we had at the end was working and kept them off the dragon. That worked well. Suppresors are untankable, BTW.
3) Those stupid worms are evil. Bad, bad, bad. They were what kept killing Willowbear every time. We may need to consider rotating cooldowns on him when he's picking them up. (Oddly, they didn't seem to hurt Caell as bad. I'm not sure why. Maybe I was just not as good at picking them all up.)
4) Positioning was good towards the end.
5) Anything else someone see?

Caell

[Sarasein]

I was thinking a rotation of suppressor and swimming dps. that way the extra person killing suppressor, knows when to cover a side.  So A and B have set sides and C would cover when they were gone.  they were not hard to kill.  And would we send in 1 dps and 1 healer?  Set up a rotation for each group?

[Willowbear]

This is just speculation, but I'm wondering if a warrior's blocking mechanic helps with the worms similar to the adds in Anubarak.  I was popping cooldowns right and left to survive them.  I was focusing on controlling them because the feed back at the time was that they were chewing folks up.  I need to check the logs to see exactly what those worms were doing.

Understanding the trash waves on this fight will contribute a lot to doing better.  For example the putrid horrors(?) explode just like the two we encounter before we do the dogs.  I was attempting to pull them clear from the group when they would get low on health.  But we may also want to use ranged dps to finish them off.  That's an example of the type of adjustments we probably need to consider in addition to dpsers going into the portals.  Other things to consider with the trash is what mobs we can group up and aoe down vs which ones need to be kept out.  What coordination can the tanks do in regards to positioning the mobs to improve.

I think we should consider two healers in the portals in the early phases when the waves are smaller.  I'm getting a sense of deja vu with the Rotface fight.  When we were working on that fight we were hitting a wall at a certain point in the fight where everything would fall apart quickly.  As soon as we made a couple of adjustments to boost the dps and get his health down faster we were a lot better off.  I was seeing similarities with that last night.  In this case the adjustment may be to boost the hps on the dragon.

[Deren]

Gluttonous Abominations Abilities
Gut Spray
Inflicts 14,138 to 15,862 Nature damage instantly and 3,000 every 1 second for 12 seconds. Also increases Physical damage taken by 25%.

This maybe taken into account after block

Blistering Zombies Abilities
Corrosion
Applies Corrosion every time a hit lands on a target. Corrosion inflicts 2,500 Nature damage every 3 seconds for 6 seconds and reduces armor by 10%, per application. Stacks up to 5 times.

I found this is what causes me to take the most damage from the worms.  It may be better not to tank Blistering Zombies and Aboms at the same time.

Note also, you get a debuff per mob in most cases, on there own slot. So tanking 2 of the same only makes it worst.  I jsut remeber having a ton of debuffs at the end of the fight

[Camyy]

If we do go to sending in One dps and One healer into the dream world, the dps to pay attention to which healer is going in with them. Once the dps started to join us, I ran into the problem where I had to stay outside of the dream world for an extra global CD to help keep willow and Caell alive before I could jump in. But, a dps came and stole my portal!  Making me miss my rotation inside! This is just what I noticed near the end.