Pookies Is Not A Bear

They say that Steelbreaker is a mad DPS race. But just how mad is it? I tried to find numbers for normal mode online, but nothing came up. So while I’m sure that someone has considered this already, here’s my rendition of the calculations.

Tank damage and Overwhelming Power

First, let’s talk about how we’re going to factor tank damage into the equation. Estimates for tank damage in a fight usually range from 0.4 to 0.5 of a DPS. That’s all well and good, but how do we factor Overwhelming Power into the equation?

Well, let’s look at the tooltip for Overwhelming Power first to see what it even does.

Overwhelming Power
60 yd range
Instant
The target becomes overwhelmed with power increasing damage done by 200% and causes a meltdown after 1 minute

You have to look closely at the wording here to determine that whoever is under the effect of Overwhelming Power is dealing three times normal damage. (That’s right. The target has his damage increased by 200% as opposed to dealing 200% damage.)

The math here is important. We’ll use some simple calculations involving fractions to determine just exactly how many effective tanks we have (in terms of tank damage dealt) for P3 in two different scenarios.

The first scenario is a two minute P3. In this scenario, your first tank picks up Steelbreaker and tanks him for one minute with Overwhelming Power before running off and exploding. Near the end of the first minute, the second tank taunts Steelbreaker to give the first tank time to get away and gains the debuff, tanking Steelbreaker for the second minute. For my calculations, I am assuming that we had a Soulstone or battle rez available for the first tank and that the first tank comes back to DPS immediately.

So for the first scenario, we have:

1) tank 1 dealing triple damage for the first half of the phase and then dealing normal damage for the second half, and
2) tank 2 dealing normal damage for the first half of the phase and then dealing triple damage for the second half.

If we take the damage of a tank to be T, then:

1) (3* T * 1/2 + T * 1/2) for tank 1, and
2) (T * 1/2 + 3 * T * 1/2) for tank 2.

Combining these two equations yields a total of 4T damage from our tanks in the scenario of a two minute P3. Note that if you do not have any kind of combat rez available in your raid, then you will have to make do with less 1/2T (total of 3.5T tank damage). Now, this calculation is very intuitive. Of course if you have a tank doing triple damage for each half of the fight while the other does normal damage, your total tank damage will be four times base tank damage. However, hear me out.

There is a second scenario that requires the use of a combat rez. The first tank gets up immediately, rejoins the fight, and then tanks Steelbreaker again after the second tank dies. In this case, we don’t assume the presence of a second combat rez to bring up the second tank after he dies. Also, the fight now lasts up to three minutes instead of two.

The calculation is a straight-forward extension of the one already done for the two minute P3 scenario. The result is 11T/3 (7T/3 from the first tank and 4T/3 from the second). This means that we have T/3 less contribution to damage on the boss, but because of the extra minute of fight time the DPS requirement from the rest of the raid is far more lax.

Steelbreaker’s health

Steelbreaker begins the phase healed up to full health. In normal mode, this is 3 000 000 hit points.

One thing that we can not ignore is that every time someone dies—which includes deaths by Overwhelming Power’s Meltdown—Steelbreaker will be healed by 15% of his maximum health. Ouch. The heal-blocking effects of Mortal Strike, Wound Poison, and Aimed Shot work here, meaning that the healing on Steelbreaker can be reduced to 7.5% per death.

The calculation here is simple. Take Steelbreaker’s base hit points, count up the number of tanks you expect to die (1 or 2), and then add 15% or 7.5% to Steelbreaker’s base hit points for each death depending on whether or not you’ll have Mortal Strike, Wound Poison, or Aimed Shot in your raid.

For reference (this is also a very straight-forward calculation), the value of heal-blocking in this phase is 1875 DPS for a 2 minute fight and 2500 DPS for a 3 minute fight. These numbers will vary slightly (increase) as you shave seconds off your kill time from the minute milestones.

Finally, some answers

From total health comes total required raid DPS, and with our tank-DPS equivalents we are ready to see some DPS numbers.

In order to determine how much DPS each DPSer in the raid must put out, we simply divide Steelbreaker’s total health by the fight time (in seconds!) and then further divide that result by the number of effective DPS we have available.

For my raid, I expect that we will run 2 healers (6 DPS) and have the DPS to finish Steelbreaker off in two minutes. I will assume that we do have some kind of heal-block in the raid. I am also going to assume that each tank can do 40% of the DPS of a DPS raid member. First, we calculate the DPS contribution from the tanks:

DPS(tanks) = 4T = 4 * 0.4 = 1.6.

Now, we can figure out how much DPS we need for one DPS raid member to put out:

DPS(each) = Steelbreaker’s total hit points (as damage) / fight time (in seconds) / no. of DPS available;
DPS(each) = 3 225 000 damage / 120 s / (6 + 1.6) DPS;
DPS(each) = 3 635 DPS per DPS.

So the DPS required for this hard mode actually isn’t that high and should be easily achievable by all classes even in T7 quality gear. Remember the assumption I made about tanks. Each tank is expected to help out with 40% of the DPS of a DPS raid member. This works out to 1 454 DPS in this scenario (before the effect of Overwhelming Power is applied), which is a pretty conservative number when you consider what most tanks in this content are capable of putting out.

Refer to the chart below for an extension of this calculation to the different possible scenarios.

Limitations

Remember that we have made some oversimplifications, particularly in the seconds that we lose or gain here and there from tank swapping and the delay before the first Overwhelming Power is cast after the second Assembly member dies. Who knows, this may all balance out. Or maybe the errors are being compounded. Does it matter? Who wants to do the sensitivity test on the variable T? Not me.

Also, these calculations do not take into account the proficiency of your healer-tank team in keeping the tanks alive through Fusion Punch and the raid alive through the now relatively potent Steelbreaker AOE (2 250 damage every 3 seconds to each member of the raid). Cooldown coordination will probably be required by the time your second tank is tanking.

Last night we decided to take a short break from our regularly scheduled Ulduar romp and went to try and cheese Sarth 3D. Now, this strategy typically relies on heavy raid stacking in order to burn Sarth down before Shadron lands. Most strats say, “Use all melee.” We did not. Our build:

• pally main tank
• shaman healer
• physical DPS: shaman, paladin, rogue, hunter
• caster DPS: 2x lock, priest, druid

Not ideal at all. We did a bit of experimentation with when we used Heroism and asking our shadow priest to go discipline for Power Infusion and Pain Suppression.

We found that Heroism used immediately following the first wave gave us the most bang for our buck because burning through the lower part of Sarth’s health was more important than burning through his health when he was almost at full health. After the first wave we would typically be under 70% health.

Although we had more longevity when our shadow priest respecced to discipline because of the extra heals and Pain Suppression, we found that we didn’t have the DPS we needed even with Power Infusion. Shadron would join the fight, and Sartharion would go immune to all damage.

In the end we found that with our mixed group and the DPS we were pulling, a kill would hinge completely on a bit of RNG love in the form of ranged not having to move for lava (especially our healer for the second lava wave).

We got the kill. Congratulations to Monedra on winning the Reins of the Black Drake. Here is a parse from the fight. Our ret paladin’s DPS is so low because he was using a HoS+DS combo towards the end of the fight.

Well, it’s been a while (again). Those of you loyal readers who are reading this: I love you to bits. I have been checking up on you guys as well when work slows down.

EoTS has been sticking to 10-mans. I think that 10-man is where it’s at for us. Although there are many of us who do wish to do 25-man raids again, progression-wise it would set us back severely. At the moment we are working on hard modes. Our hard mode progression has looked something like this:

FL+1 -> FL+2 -> XT -> Freya+1 -> Thorim -> AOI Molgeim -> FL+3 (post nerf)

For the Ulduar meta we’ve also done Disarmed and we were 10 seconds shy of the 4 minute Ignis kill last night. 4 minutes Ignis was very much within reach last night as we actually had a DPS death and I spent a good ten seconds looking for the corpse to battle res, but the raid was ending so we just killed him for this week to focus our efforts on other Keeper-related endeavors.

The challenge is convincing people that it is worth it to focus on hard modes instead of blazing through to Yogg-Saron every week. Now that our resto shaman has the Algalon discs, it will be important to get Thorim down again for him as well as work more diligently on Hodir, Freya+2, and Freya+3 before finally trying to tackle Mimiron.

Killing Yogg-Saron+0 every week is simply not progression and should not be our goal. If we forgo Yogg-Saron in order to make a leap in progress in another part of the instance, I say that it is worth it. Unfortunately, not everyone agrees.

If there are still any of you out there, I am still alive.

Since my guild isn’t really doing 25-mans anymore and we’re hardly attempting hard modes on normal, I felt like I haven’t had a lot to talk about (Lootviathan 1 tower lulz.)

I am a chicken most of the time nowadays. This is for two reasons: 1) We have the 2-3 healers we need to run a 10-man group, and 2) boomkins are caster raid buff extraordinaires and we are often missing those raid buffs otherwise.

We finally took Yoggs down last night in 10-man, which was an accomplishment (IMO) considering that we had only worked on him for about four hours total. They say that P2 is the hardest phase, but for us it turned out that trying to manoeuvre around those damned clouds in P1 was far more difficult. Melee rocked P2 (we were split rogue/druid/paladin and hunter/priest/druid for DPS), and P3 was a simple burn after we switched our rogue to Guardians (to interrupt Drain Life) and put our shadow priest on Yoggs.

We got the Drive Me Crazy achievement, but to be honest I can’t see how this fight is even possible any other way on normal mode. If you lose one person you are pretty much boned.

Anyway, first full clear of Ulduar FTW. Now it’s time to try some hard modes … any recommendations?

Yesterday was a holiday in Ontario, so I didn’t have to go to work. What did I do with my free time? You know I’m going to tell you. I spent about 500g enchanting, re-enchanting, and regemming all of my balance gear.

The last time I used my balance gear I had to stick straight-up hit gems in every gem slot (i.e., my meta wasn’t even activated), and I still wasn’t anywhere near the hit cap. A couple of heroic Naxx runs later, and there I was sitting at around 13% yesterday with all of my available hit pieces equipped.

Feeling overwhelmed, I went crying to my guild’s resident warlock (funny how we had five in TBC and we only have one or two now) and he gave me a hand. Since I had enough hit pieces to reach my hit caps without gemming for hit (9% and 10% for alliance moonkin, by the way), he told me to build my sets around those pieces and get rid of all of my hit gems. Since my 4-T7 bonus is awesome, I knew I wanted to keep that. A couple of hours later, I was good to go. I was even reglyphed. And EoTS made its foray into two healing EOE and OS.

Malygos was a bitch because of all of the Vortex-related downtime and the off-healing I did during Vortex really fucked my mana pool. What was awesome though? 26k Starfire crits. Zoh. Mai. Gawd.

In OS we didn’t end up getting 2D (our tank kept on getting gibbed after Vesp landed), but when we scaled back to 1D at the end of the night I was able to sustain 3k DPS throughout the fight. Not too shabby, but much room for improvement…

I may get to stay moonkin for some of this week depending on who we have show up to heal.

Last night was supposed to be a fun night for us. We were going to go plow through BT like we did last week. Unfortunately, we only had eight people in the raid. We did not feel that we had enough DPS for a comfortable clear.

So we decided to hit up Naxx and try to get the achievement The Dedicated Few instead.

Raid composition was whatever we had available:

• prot paladin MT
• unholy DK (DPS-specced) on OT duties
• resto shaman and resto druid healers
• MM hunter, ret paladin, aff lock, fury warrior DPS

Most of the raid was geared with heroic raid gear. We’re not fully decked out in BiS items, but we’ve been running heroic raids for a couple of weeks now. Pookies is at about 2200 healing unbuffed in tree form.

Obviously, there is little room for error in some of these encounters. In normal mode you’re usually okay if one or two people die during a boss encounter. But what if you’re already down two raid members? Obviously some fights such as Heigan are completely doable even after losing more provided that you have at least the tank and a healer (and a shit ton of time!). This is not true for every fight—especially the DPS races! If any of you remember Matticus’ post about “that guy”… “that guy” is exactly who you do not want to bring along for this achievement.

A lot of the encounters are exactly the same as you would do ‘em with a full group…just a tad slower. Or, if you’re dropping your shittiest DPS, maybe you won’t even notice the difference! Here’s how it went for us:

Military Wing

• Razuvious: Same as with 10 people.
• Gothik: Same as with 10 people.
• 4H: Our setup had our hunter with myself tanking the two horsemen in the back. (In 25-man we usually stick the hunters with our MT on Rivendare since it’s hard for them to stack properly when on Kor’Thazz.) Our MT tanked Rivendare solo, and our OT and the rest of the DPS were on Kor’Thazz with the resto shaman. It took our DPS just about four stacks to get Kor’Thazz down (with Heroism/Bloodlust), during which time our MT was able to survive Rivendare without heals (we got this just in time, the next stack would have killed our MT). If you don’t think your MT is capable of holding out solo, then give him an off-spec healer for the fight and rotate horsemen. Alternatively, if you are running with a holy priest, a Lightwell would serve your solo tank well. This strat has always worked for us for two healer clears, but there are other more/less dangerous strats out there if you can’t get this to work for you.

Construct Wing

• Patchwerk: Same as with 10 people. We used Heroism and had a lot of leftover time.
• Grobbulus: Pretty much the same as with 10 people as far as mechanics go. Due to people being injected at the same rate as with 10 people, your healers may struggle with the way this fight gets stretched out. Hopefully you have Replenishment and some grasp on mana management…
• Gluth: For this fight I healed the MT in the front, while our shaman healed our DK OT who was kiting adds in the back (DPS spec, tank set). We started out having the ret paladin kiting the adds, but he got owned hard (he didn’t have his tanking set on him). We had our fury warrior taunt Gluth when our MT had to let the debuff fall off (any plate-wearing class will do here). If you don’t have a hunter to Tranq Gluth’s frenzy, then I’m not sure how manageable healing your DPS OT is going to be. You may have to plan your debuff dropping around the frenzy. Or maybe I’m just being a drama queen.
• Thaddius: I thought this fight was going to be a clusterfuck, but we managed to finish well within the enrage timer even with our DK not making the jump the first time around (lol?). Obviously, your raid has to have a good handle on the basics of the fight. We just got Shocking! last week, so I knew we were in good shape. After we made it to the platform and engaged Thaddius, I healed and our resto shaman was on DPS full-time.

Spider Wing

• Anub’Rekhan: Same as with 10 people.
• GWF: Same as with 10 people. We elected to kill the adds to dispel the frenzy so our healers would have some breathing room.
• Maexxna: Same as with 10 people: either you can heal it, or you can’t. Between four HoTs and Poison Cleansing Totem for our MT, we never have any worries on this fight.

Plague Wing

• Noth: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA…seriously, I had our shaman DPSing full-time again on this boss. Don’t neglect to decurse.
• Heigan: Same as with 10 people. Our DPS was good here, and we got him down just before his second Teleport. Also, I got The Safety Dance last night (most of the raid had it from before)!
• Loatheb: Like Thaddius, I thought Loatheb might be an issue with respect to DPS. He wasn’t. Same as with 10 people.

Sapphiron

• This fight was a bit of a challenge because I started getting lag after Loatheb that lasted until about 2/3 of the way through Sapph. To illustrate, I would get behind an Ice Block during Sapph’s air phase, then five to seven seconds later I’d see a cloud of green numbers on my screen and everyone would be back in position around the boss. I tried everything my raid suggested to try and fix the lag to no avail. Luckily my awesome resto shaman partner is very quick with the decurses and was able to pick up my slack there.

  Lately, my Sapph healing strat has involved heavy raid healing (against the AoE DoT) using Rejuv (this is a strat I read about over on PlusHeal.com). In normal mode assuming a certain level of gear on your MT, just throwing some HoTs up now and then should suffice even if your partner is completely neglecting him (which mine wasn’t).

  I find the damage on this fight to be very manageable now, even with two healers. We have actually suffered very few deaths on Sapph ever since everyone got the hang of air phase and hiding behind the Blocks.

  The fight does get drawn out quite a bit with eight people (at least, that’s what I found to be the case). Again, mana may be a problem for your healers, so they should plan accordingly from the get go. I believe I just used Innervate and didn’t need a pot.

Kel’Thuzad

• We pulled some risky shit and got into some sticky situations, but we got this on our first try.

  We had our DK—who was to OT adds in phase three—DPSing KT in phase two. We don’t usually run this way because of the risk of Frost Blast-related death, but we figured that we really needed the extra DPS. And we did, because I got machine gunned by Detonate Mana. It was ugly. I was in mana conservation mode for a large portion of the fight, which was stressful (basically keeping just Lifebloom and Rejuv up on the tank and trying to get O5SR as often as possible while waiting for Frost Blasts to hit).

  The shit hit the fan right off the bat when one of our melee groups managed to chain Frost Blast on to the MT. Our resto shaman and I are both on top of Frost Blast healing, so we didn’t lose anyone to that Frost Blast (which was amazing) or to any subsequent Frost Blasts.

  One of our melee DPS did go down to a void zone thingy just as phase three was beginning. I had my brez available and used it then.

  In the last 300k, our OT got owned. I really have no idea how this happened, but I suspect that it was a void zone because he really went down in an instant. Adds ran rampant for a while, killing both healers.

  It’s in these situations that you have to keep cool. You could call a wipe, but, really, does anyone want to suffer through phase one again? No. Our MT coolly picked up the adds, I used the soulstone I had on me, and our resto shaman Ahnked. With the situation under control, our DPS managed to finish KT off.

It took us just under four hours to clear the instance, at which point we all gave ourselves a pat on the back. Although most of the instance is just as trivial with eight raid members as it is with ten, it’s in those do or die moments that your group really shines. The efficiency of our progress through the instance and things such as no one dying on Heigan are just icing on the cake. I was very impressed with everyone in attendance and made sure to voice that sentiment!

EoTS is still picking up a couple of DPS PUGs for heroic raiding each week. But our numbers are rounding out nicely. By running heroic PUGs, we’ve managed to convince some decent DPS to join our ranks.

Last night was also our first one-night heroic Naxx clear. It took us just under four hours. I thank the extra DPS slots we had from bringing less healers and a high level of organization (both leadership and response).

We started out by shooting for six healers for heroic raids. We’ve been scaling back since grabbing PUG healers is so difficult (especially grabbing skilled PUG healers) and we’ve been finding that the healing load was too easily managed with so many healers. Last night we did most of the instance with four. Four! We had a second resto druid for Military and Plague, but then lost him from Construct onwards.

For a healer, there is nothing like the thrill of pushing yourself to an output level you didn’t think was possible. On Saph I managed to hit 5k HPS, which was nice to see.

I also got my T7.5 helm which, while not BiS, was a nice upgrade over my T7 helm.

As the weeks go on, I am constantly impressed by EoTS’ strong raiding core and strong leadership. I’m vey happy that, through our heroic PUGs, outsiders are catching a glimpse of this as well. Tell your friends.