I have two weeks of patch 5.04 Dragon Soul heroics under my belt; most of it as Survival. Mistakes were made, bosses were killed, and so were we.
If I hadn’t been in such shock at the time, I might have had the wherewithal to take a screen shot of our raid tumbling off the back of Deathwing with less than 10% health remaining on the final tendon. The plate rose, the tendon was exposed, everyone was alive, and then epic fail ensued. It was a kill, or at least it should have been.
If ever there was a justification for a nerd rage moment, it was this. Surprisingly everyone remained calm, because we all got it. Even though we didn’t defeat Spine we effectively beat the encounter. There are two lockout lefts, so we’ll be extending ours and hope to finish off Spine and Madness next week.
The break will give me time to evaluate logs and make adjustments to my UI. I’m primarily running as Survival, and while the core rotation remains intact there are a lot more buttons to press and a lot more things to track than ever before.
Raiding right now feels a bit like it did back in ICC when you had Deathbringer’s Will and we’re waiting for the Crit. proc so you could line it up with a Crit. potion, Rapid Fire and other things. There’s a lot of watching and waiting happening with Hunters right now. If you feel like you’re suffering from information overload, rest assured, you’re not alone.
Going in I need to know how long is the encounter going to be. Once the pull the starts I need track if Dire Beast and A Murder of Crows are attacking the target. Am I under the effects of the Rapid Fire buff? How long before Serpent Sting falls off? Has Serpent Sting fallen off? Is the Black Arrow debuff on the target? And then I need to know what’s on CD and for how long.
In short, I need to know what the hell is going on out there, because there’s a hell of lot going on out there. The driving force behind all of this monitoring is Readiness and DoTs. Readiness is on a five minute cooldown so knowing the length of the fight is crucial to determining how many times it will be available to use.
Likewise Readiness will reset the cooldown on most Hunter abilities including Dire Beast and A Murder of Crows. You don’t want to activate these abilities if they’re already up and attacking a target. For example if you cast A Murder of Crows and then pop Readiness, you want to wait until the first set of crows finishes before you use the ability again, and the crows last for 30 seconds. Same for Dire Beast (see comments) and Rapid Fire. You don’t want to pop a second Rapid Fire while you’re under the effects of the first one.
Right now we’re just talking about monitoring some basic things. If you really want to go pro then you should pay attention to other things like you internal CDs, weapon proc CDs, and then try your best to line up as many these as you can.
It’s challenging and there are tools like Kneed to Know and Tell Me When to assist you, but it takes work to master. Those who do of course will be rewarded by big numbers and phat lootz.
So far I’m just trying to keep track of the basics and get DS Heroic cleared without my head exploding. Elune willing it will happen on Tuesday.
What/how are you tracking Dire Beast uptime?
Dire Beasts stay up for 15 seconds. the CD is 30 seconds. Halfway through ( Readiness -> [insert higher priority abilities] -> DB
No idea waht happened with my comment there. Meant to say:
1) Dire Beast lasts for 15 seconds, dissappearing halfway through the CD (15seconds left)
2) You can sometimes just see it
3) You can have multiple Beasts up at once, using readiness.
You’re completely right; for some reason I was convinced Dark Brew was right when he intimated that one Dire Beast would “overwrite” another on.
Thanks for the reply.
Sorry, I didn’t realize that was the behavior, but indeed Pathemeous is correct.
As far as tracking it goes, I do it with the NeedToKnow addon. Here’s a script from Kheldul at Hunter DPS. It works quite well.
bv1:{Typ=CASTCD,Aura=Dire Beast,VOn=true,sIc=true,BCl={a=0,r=0.90196078431373,g=0.85490196078431,b=0.88627450980392},Clr={b=0.78823529411765,g=0.43921568627451,r=0},TF=Fmt_Float,sCt=false,VEx=”15″}
Anyone else think the set bonuses are pretty weak?
Nothing to apologise for, I, too, thought Dire Beast worked the same way as Murder with regards to its interaction with Readiness. Thanks for the script, though.
We got H spine and madness down last Friday night. If we did it, you guys certainly can. 🙂
I ran BM for the first half and then switched to SV for the 2nd half since the KC bugs were still a problem.
Not sure what we’re going to do tonight and I don’t really care anymore. Heroic DS is done for me! Even won the mount with a 100 roll!
Just finished a full H DS clear. We one shot everything but madness. I think people were just getting tired at that point.
I went BM the whole time except for SV on Blackhorn. Pet pathing is still really buggy on Madness but I didn’t have problems on the other bosses. It wasn’t this bad before the patch. Honestly, it reminds of the bugs we had at the beginning of 4.3… If you’re comfortable as SV on Madness, I’d say go for it and save yourself some frustration.