First Kara Run. Woot!Follow

This weekend was a rather good weekend for me. My one goal was to get my epic flying mount. Which I had done on friday. I was extremely happy about that. It was a huge weight off my should(it is extremely hard to be sitting on 4500g and not buy enchanting mats or whatever else I may want).

To add to that joy, our guild decided enough was enough when it came to waiting. We decided to get a kara run going. We agreed that saturday at 6 or 7 we would form up a Kara group.

I had mixed feeling about the endevour. I knew that as far my gear was concerned, I had some things I needed to improve but overall I was good to go. I also knew that some other people were good to go as well.

My one concern was a very big one. I knew we lacked skilled tanks. The one tank we have is barely geared to handle Shattered Halls. His skill is in question when it comes to that as well. But we were in the process of helping him out, in both gearing up and trying to work on how he tanks in general. But even with this set-back we went forward with our Kara run.

The day arrives, I've got all my consumables, and hand out all the pots and elixirs and food that I have been stockpiling for the event. We have 7 of the 10 required to run Kara from the guild. One of our healers wasn't online and hadn't been online for 2 nights so he had no clue we were even running. One of our DPS was missing because he had to work. And the one position we never had in the first place was a second tank.

We scower our friends list and fate was very kind to us that night. We found ourself 2 priests and a druid. One Holy and one shadow priest and a feral druid. Fate was kind because that particular Feral Druid was in a raiding guild that I believe is raiding Hyjal Summit. So we had ourselves a main tank that was well pre-paired for Kara.

So what I had orginally saw as a run that might be able to get the Huntsman down, was just turned into a sucessfull looking raid. We go in, start heading for the stables. Moving a little slow, getting our bearings and fealing out the area. Get to the boss... and whipe.

Our off-tank couldn't grab Attumen fast enough and he was bouncing around and took out a healer before you could blink and it went downhill from there. With that bit of error out of the way, our feet were wet, cherries popped, we went back in. Cleared the trash that had respawned. Worked our way back to Attumen. This time I had MD duties, as soon as Attumen poped I MDed him to the off tank and went to town on midnight. It was a cake walk.

On to Moroes. He was oneshotted. I got the 5 minute bleed on me and it was an awe inspirring thing going on, watch a DoT tick for 1-1.2k and watching multiple HoTs tick keeping healed well above the bleeds damage. It was pretty amazing. Moroes and his guests went down rather easy.

In the end we downed Maiden, and the Romulo and Julliene(that was a really fun fight, with only 2 warriors able to stop her healing, it was a tough fight, but we one-shotted them) opera event. We tried Curater once, and we whiped. It was getting pretty late, so we called it quits. In the end I would say it was a very very successful run.

I was a little curious about my personal DPS though. According to Swstats I was putting out about 420 DPS. This was, however, through the whole run. So I don't know exactly how accurate it was. Considering I died for the last 25% of Maiden. There are some people that like to shoot the critters(thus putting the group in combat and starting the DPS clock). So to be honest I really don't know what my Boss fight DPS actually was.

But to the point. I have a spreadsheet from elitist jerks, that I can't link, but basically it has a tab that works out the DPS for various shot rotations. And my personal rotation that had the highest DPS output, was auto > arcane > auto > steady > auto > steady > auto > arcane... Doing that serverly drained my mana, even with a shadow priest, so I had to go with the 1:1 auto/steady rotation.

Anyway with all that description out of the way, my question is rather simple. For Kara bosses, what DPS should I be aiming for. I can figure out where and how to improve anything, be it gear or playstyle. It's just I would like a number for a goal to shoot for.

I find that on prolonged fights, I'll pop a mana pot at about 50% mana, and then if it's still dragging on I'll switch to AotV at about 20-30% mana until pots are off cooldown. I'm not sure what my overall dps is in a given Kara run, but I just installed Recount so I'll have a better idea this Friday night. I know our MT was surprised as hell when I burst 1200dps (sustained) on Shade (right up until we wiped ; ;) My raid buffed and crit adjusted tooltip dps is somewhere around 420-440 for auto-shots only, so I'm guessing with Steady Shot and Arcane I'd be aiming for somewhere in the neghborhood of 850-900 dps. Keep in mind that the AoE trash pulls really ***** us over in the dps department...even with Explosive Traps, Volley, and Multi-Shot I fall behind the mage/boomkin/warlock in the raid groups on those fights and that would impact my overall dps.

Grats good job. Soon you'll be clearing Kara in one night. I consider some heroics harder than kara. ;p

You should be potting when your mana drops low enough so that the pot will just fill it up. They aren't that expensive.

A damage meter for a whole raid is interesting but not very useful. Focus on the boss fights. Armory is down so I can't say, but I think with a pet you should be able to do 500-600 on a simple boss fight such as attumen or maiden with lvl 70 dungeon blues.

Recap is a good damage mod that keeps track of your dps only when you're fighting (takes into account if you're dead). It also will keep track of what shots you fired, and stats about all your damage and where it comes from including misses, crits, dodges etc...

Edited, Jan 2nd 2008 1:21pm by Xsarus

Gonna have to disagree with you on that one. If you've got two of your better dps on the last flare, that's two of your better dps not on Curator for as long as the other three dps in the group. What we've found is that it's much, much better to have all five dps (assuming that's how many you run with) on the flares until they're down, then everyone switch to Curator. The biggest difficulty we've had with this is reigning in our dps when Curator evocates. The flares go after whoever is doing the most damage, which means dps classes with cast timers on a lot of their dps abilitieslike mages, shaman, druids, and hunters are going to get a flare in the face, knocking back (or possibly even interrupting) their casts. If one of two dps classes you leave on the flares happens to be a Hunter and that Hunter grabs aggro, their dps gets completely narfed when the flare closes to melee range.

We've always found that it's better to keep all of our dps on the flares until the last one is down, then all dps switches to Curator. We've managed to get him to enrage after only two Evocations using this strategy. Compare that to those times when our dps got super-crit happy and 2-3 of them switched to Curator as soon as evocation started, we usually wind up going through 3-4 Evocations before we get him to enrage (and we've even wiped because of it).

Ran it again last night. And I thought I had a good weekend, last night blew that out of the water. I was sitting in LFG on my warrior, when it pops up, LF3M for Kara. Curious, I ask if it is a pug or a guild run looking for some fill ins. It was the latter, so I tell them that I would go, but I have to log in on my Hunter.

Log in, get the invite, head that way. To my dismay(that dismay didn't last very long as you will find out soon enough) it wasn't a full run, they had already cleared most of it. I was hoping for another shot at Attumen and his schematic, but oh well.

They have cleared a good portion of it. We teleport up to the library and start off at the chess event. Which is very wierd for a beginner, but seemed extremely easy for the prizes awarded(of course it could just have been the group I was with). After that we take down Netherspite, Nightbane, and Prince(not in that order). We whiped on Netherspite, it was glitching the blackholes on the ground weren't appearing for anyone and people were dropping and didn't know why. The second fight, the same glitch happened but after the 1st phase shift they started appearing on the ground.

Nightbane and Prince were dropped easy. Again it was really due to the group I was in. There guild is pretty much on farm status with that. But to the story, when we downed prince, not only did Helm of the Fallen Hero drop. (Which I could take it or leave it having the Surestrike Goggles v2.0, but it would be nice to say I have a piece of T4). But also the Sunfury Bow of the Pheonix dropped, and I won it. I was so very happy.

The story isn't over yet. Running that Kara was just enough to push me to 25 Badges of Justice and buy Blood Knight War Cloak. After that I went to do my dailies, headed to Ogri'la, picked up a group to do the 3 5-man group quests. After downing the 1 dragon, someone had suggested we kill the other 3 dragons to make the cloak. So we down the last dragon and the item to create Crystalhide handwraps drops and I get that too.

It was an epic night(bad pun intended lol). A guildy needed attunement for Kara, so even though it was pushing midnight and I needed to sleep I wanted to help him out to see what I was capable of with my new gear. It's amazing, truely amazing. I'm loving it.

Oh as a side note, while running Kara I had the awareness to reset my Swstats before each boss fight and I was pushing out around 810-860 DPS on the boss fights(before the gear upgrades obviously). So I guess I'm on target as far as numbers are concerned.

I'm just a lil bored, so please don't take this as an attack or me being argumentative.

Pet growl as a means of controlling the flares and keeping them at range would only be effective if your dps on the flare was atrocious, you were bringing a boar to a raid (sort of like bringing a knife to a gun fight...), or the person who recommended pet OT as part of the strategy was pulling ideas out of their ***. Raid buffed, I've got a 2 in 5 chance of spiking 1000+ threat/second. If the objective is to burn down the flares as soon as possible, there's no way a pet is going to hold aggro.

Moreover, if you do the math and break it down, having all of your dps on Curator for 15-17 seconds is going to put out more damage over the course of that Evocation than having 3 of your dps on Curator for 20 seconds and 2 of your dps on him for 10-15 seconds.

When push comes to shove, if it's working for you and your raid group then that's all that matters. I prefer things a little more simple than all of that.

For me being a shadow priest i try to hit the curator as early as possible. if that means im not dpsing a flare than so be it.

Mostly because my mana and life returns to my group are 300% better with evocation. so i want to squeeze as much outa it as possible. also a shadow priest takes a few seconds to get a good full on dps cycle going.

Vamp embrace,trinket,vamptouch,swp,mindflay,

It takes a bit of time for those initial dots to tick and so you need to be on the curator about a second before he even goes into evocation.

If your group does not have the dps in them to get the last add down without one dps'er than they have bigger problems to worry about.

Kinda off topic but ya thats my experience.

pretty much if you have high dps.. you can have folks drop and take out the curator during evocation..

if your dps is mid to low.. you want a full flare kill first.. then dps on curator.

sometimes a happy medium where ranged goes after curator and mele goes and finishes flairs can be good..

or if you have a rouge he can blade flurry the last add down and damage curator at the same time.



Edited, Jan 3rd 2008 10:10pm by Slammerofkooter

Best tip for our guild was making sure that all ranged do NOT move while in their position in the semi-circle.

Also, if you have an owl on curator, take the screech off or it will start sparking the astral flares and the tank will take more damage, as will the pet of course.

We are trapping at trash? Why would we do that?

How much I'm asked to trap depends a great deal on who is tanking for a particular run. When our guild's normal MT is running with us, we hardly CC anything. When he's burned out on tanking and we bring along someone else, my traps can often get quite a workout, starting with the trash leading to Attumen and continuing right through to Maiden. A lot of our dps is still geared for early progression, so it's not at all uncommon for me to have to re-trap trash. That's just the way it goes.

Hunters in early progression through Kara would do well to be prepared to trap rather frequently.