ProCo’s T11 Normal Report Card

Status Updates:

One reason for a lack of consistent updates is now publicly available here. I am in the process of trying to move some of my more generalized guild/raid management information over to the World of Matticus site.  It will get a much larger audience over there and will therefore hopefully be more helpful to more people.

Roksi has also had a whole lot going on in her non-WoW life recently and so she hasn’t had the time or energy to worry about blogging.  I am going to keep this blog up, but it is likely going to start drifting more toward guild specific updates that I will probably use to complement what I am writing at WoM with things like actual post below.

Evaluating ProCo’s Progress:

Production Company managed to kill Nefarion and finish off all of the normal modes a couple of weeks ago and actually managed our first Heroic Halfus Kill last night. I was a little disappointed we didn’t get him before all of the nerfs (we wiped at ~5% on our best attempt) but I’m happy with the kill none the less.

I have been thinking and writing a lot lately about what characteristics define a progression raiding guild.  What is the difference between a progression focused guild and a “casual raiding guild.” More importantly, what are the different ways that we might be able to measure, or evaluate, how successfully our guilds are progressing when there are no standards or conventions that any of us seem to agree on.

Being that I work with statistics and spreadsheets on a pretty regular basis, I naturally turned to trying to collect some preliminary data to at least see where our guild stands quantitatively.  The following is what I was able to put together, you can see it in spreadsheet format here.

Time Spent Raiding:

If you read my post on raiding efficiently, it should be no surprise that one of things I was interested in is how much time we have actually spent raiding and how much of *raid time* we actually spent “raiding” (defined here as time spent in combat)

To kill all normal mode bosses, Production Company spent roughly 45 and a half hours in a raid.  We spent 22 and a quarter hours actually combating bosses and trash. That means that we spent about ~49% of our raid time actually playing our characters and we spent the other ~51% of the time talking, passing out loot, buffing, running back from a wipe, or taking our nightly break.  From what I have seen looking through other guild’s logs, that actually puts us quite a bit ahead of most progression guild’s when it comes to efficiency.

Number of Attempts Required to Kill Bosses:

Here is the list of how many attempts it took us to complete each encounter the first time:

Boss                                      Number of Attempts

Omnotron                           28

Magmaw                              18

Conclave                                6

Chimaeron                         27

Atramedes                            5

Halfus                                      4

Valonia & Theralion          4

Ascendant Council          13

Cho’Gall                                16

Al’Akir                                  23

Maloriak                                 3

Nefarion                               91

Here is the list of how many times it took us to kill each boss the second time:

(Nefarion’s second kill wasn’t included in the linked spread sheet, but it took us 9 attempts to kill him)

Boss                                      Number of Attempts

Omnotron                              1

Magmaw                                 4

Conclave                                1

Chimaeron                            2

Atramedes                            2

Halfus                                      2

Valonia & Theralion          3

Ascendant Council            3

Cho’Gall                                  2

Al’Akir                                     1

Maloriak                                 5

Nefarion                                 9

Summary:

All told, it took us 245 boss “attempts” and 34 boss “kills” over the course of 45 1/2 hours to clear all of Tier 11 normal mode content.  For the most part, we usually average about ~9-10 wipes an hour when we are working on a new boss.  Sometimes that drops down to ~5-7 if there are a lot of things to work out or we seem to just be completely stuck.  The data shows that we average ~9.8 minutes per boss attempt/kill for whatever that is worth.

Al’Akir was the only real example where we would have benefited from taking a break mid-raid to look through the logs or do some research or have a discussion among the raid.  No one really picked up on the fact that you can see the clouds appear ~3-4 seconds before you start taking damage from them and so the whole raid was taking at least a tick or two before moving out of the cloud each time. After the raid, we were able to look through the logs, see that damage from the lightning clouds was what was killing us, and do some research on youtube to find some videos where we noticed that you can see the cloud appear in time to avoid taking any damage at all.  We went back in the next raid and killed the boss on the first pull.