How to Beat Boss Fights

I’ve noticed that a lot of people seem to struggle with boss fights in World of Warcraft.  I’m sometimes one of them!  But you can improve your chances of successful boss fight encounters by realising a few basic facts.

1. Once you are completely comfortable with how to play your class and role, you no longer have to think about it – and this is half the battle won already.
2. The majority of boss fights are based on exactly the same mechanics .. once you know how to deal with those mechanics, fights are MUCH easier.

The first point may seem obvious – you wouldn’t go into a raid boss fight (I hope) healing for the first time.  But there are levels of being comfortable with your role.  You want to be at the stage where you can carry out most of your role without having to squint at a certain addon or pile of buttons on your screen, to the exclusion of all else.  If you’re not looking at the fight itself, you can’t react to it.

You also need to know when and how to use those “oh cr*p” buttons – the ones that you may not necessarily use regularly, but that will dig you out of a hole in a pinch.  EVERY class has them – learn them, get used to what they do and remember to actually USE them!  If you are a raging altaholic, I’d suggest having your “oh cr*p” buttons in the same place across toons – it makes it easier to remember – just do remember which character you are playing or you may end up using an unexpected spell!

DON’T blame others for your failures.  In fact – don’t blame others full stop (only the raid leader should be doing that, and then in private).  If everyone is honest with themselves, they KNOW when they’ve mucked something up and don’t need someone else pointing it out to them.  If someone is regularly failing and asks why they are failing then, if you regularly play that class and role and know what the problem is, feel free to speak up.  Most raid members who know their job should be fully aware of why a failure happened and will usually say so.

Compare your output – upload fights to a site such as World of Logs (or access your guilds logs, if they upload regularly).  Check to see if your output is similar to another of your class and role for the same fight, in other guilds.  Obviously take into account the level of the character you are comparing to – if the average dps of your group is 15,000, then you can’t expect to have the same output as a group with an average output double that – but you can check spell rotations, damage taken, up time, etc.  If there are major differences between your and theirs, ask yourself why.

Moving onto the second point – it may seem odd, but a lot of boss fights are based on exactly the same mechanics.  Once you no longer have to concentrate on one little part of your screen in order to carry out your role, you are able to concentrate on everything going on around you.  Some of the basic fight mechanics that you will regularly come across, and should get used to dealing with are:

• Stuff on the ground.  In the majority of cases, stuff on the ground that is not cast by your team is BAD.  Get out of it .. move move!  Do not wait until you’ve finished casting that 2 second spell, don’t sit in it because “the healer can heal through it” – bloody well move!  It doesn’t matter if you’re the tank, a dps or a healer … you do no good to anyone dead, and even less good if you’re using up all that healing yourself, rather than someone who knows how to move.  This is the most basic requirement of a boss fight.  If you can’t manage to get yourself out of cr*p on the ground, you’re useless.  You’re either dead, or worse, you’re using unnecessary healing power that should be directed elsewhere.  There comes a point in a fight when, from a healers point of view, it is a relief when a non-vital raid member dies .. because it takes a huge amount of strain off them.  Please don’t be THAT person.
• Airborne AoE.  Very similar to the point above, only in the form of a blizzard or fireballs or flying poison, etc – unlike a lot of “stuff on the ground”, you can often see it coming more easily – the boss will turn and aim or you will see something flying through the air towards its target, or there will even be a target painted on the ground where it is going to hit.  Again this requires you to be full aware of the indicators of the fight, and to move!
• Fighting dragons.  A lot of dragons have special abilities such as flame breath and tail swipe – which means anyone other than the tank should avoid the front of the dragon, and everyone should avoid the tail.  There are exceptions, so you will need to learn which these are.
• Stacking up.  A standard machanic regularly used is stacking.  Either because someone gains a buff or debuff that everyone needs to share, or because extra nasties are going to be targeting a random raid member and you want to try and guarantee where that nasty is going to arrive.  Learn the indicator for that mechanic (a buff or debuff icon, a raid marker or some other boss indicator).  Often a raid member will be assigned to shout up when stacking is required, but you should learn when to move without being told regardless.  You also need to learn where everyone will be stacking.  This could be on a specific person, or in a specific location in the room.  Be aware of where that target is at all times during the fight, and especially when the stacking-up phase is due.
• Spreading out.  Similar to Stacking up, only in reverse!  The difference here being that everyone will need to be a certain distance apart.  Be aware of that distance and, if you can, pre-set it in your range finder (ie, type /range x, where “x” is the minimum distance you need to be from everyone else).  Ensure you stick to it!
• Positioning.  Especially for melee, you need to be sure you position yourself well.  You should not be fighting side by side with the tank .. you should ideally be behind the boss (if there is a hunter or warlock, etc, in the group, stack with their pets as they automatically position themselves at the back of the boss).  The only exceptions to this are “stuff on the ground” that makes it impossible to stand there and dragons with their tail swipe ability.  Standing in front of the boss is inviting a quick death from various cleave abilities bosses tend to have and increases the damage the tank may take, as some bosses can have abilities that increase their attack power if they manage to dodge an attack – if you are melee and stood in front of the boss, you increase the chances he can dodge your attacks.  They cannot dodge attacks from behind.  Therefore, it not only benefits you because you take less damage and increase your dps, but it also reduces the damage the tank takes too.

Obviously these don’t cover every possible mechanic .. but these are the ones seen time and again, often together in one fight.  Once you know instinctively how to react when certain things happen, without having to be told that you’re stood in pixellated death, for example, you are much more likely to succeed (and be given the opportunity to do so!).

If you find that you are struggling to cope with a specific mechanic (for example moving out of puddles) go find something patrolling generally out in WoW that has the same mechanic – plenty of the higher level mobs around the Firelands area, for example, will put stuff on the ground, throw things at targets, create close range AoE, etc.  Instead of standing still and taking it, challenge yourself to avoid all incoming damage of that type.  As the old saying goes … “practice makes perfect” … and once you are used to dealing with all of these types of mechanics with no problems, everything else is just icing!

Running round in Circles shouting “Wibble” …

Sometimes I feel like I’m going all out, full steam ahead, doing stuff constantly, yet not actually getting anything done. There is an email that has been doing the rounds for a while that is basically “a day in the life of” … joking about someone having an organised list of stuff to do, yet in the process of attempting to do them gets sidetracked doing other things and ending the day with exactly the same list as they started. That’s me.

Yes .. some things get done – but they’re all things that will have ceased to exist or have meaning within a few hours of having done them – hoovering, ironing, tidying – jobs that you do, you feel pleased having done them, yet you turn around soon after and discover exactly the same crumby carpet, pile of ironing and rubbish piles as were there shortly before.

Sometimes I find running a guild is similar – there are certain jobs that have to be done all the time, yet never disappear – adminstering to the guild vault, sorting out applications, organising raids, maintaining the website, keeping the guild roster maintained (notes about holidays, alts, promotions, etc).

Most of the time, I’m happy to do it – most of the time I break each bit down and do it as a matter of course as regular as possible. Sometimes though, things get in the way – it only takes one tiny thing to cause a complete knock on effect.

Take today. A fairly new guild member, still on the lowest rank of the guild, sent me a message via the in-game post system, asking how the promotions worked. He had asked a few members in guild and was a bit confused by the answers.

We do have this information readily available on our website, but I replied the same way expanding on the rules and stating that I would review his rank next time I did the roster check in the near future. As a result, he quit the guild, stating that a serious guild would take their own rules seriously, wouldn’t “forget” about guild member promotions and would treat guild members better that that.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I haven’t taken this to heart – I’m not horribly upset that he’s gone – he was a new member, he didn’t cause a fuss, we organised a guild run in a low level instance for him to get a drake mount, but that was about the only time we really saw him on during an evening. Apparently he was on more during the day, but most members are evening people so perhaps we weren’t the best place for him anyway.

Unfortunately though, this had a knock on effect.

I was actually overdue to sort out the roster – he hadn’t fulfilled the requirements for promotion the last time I’d done a roster review, but he would probably have been due a promotion this time around so, as I was early back from work this afternoon I took the opportunity to log in with the intention of carrying it out.

Then I saw his message. Therefore I had to reply apologising he felt the need to move on and wishing him the best. I then had to analyse precisely why he felt the urge to leave and act on it. This resulted in a rethink about the wording of the guild rules for that particular rank (basically, the first rank is a probationary rank and new members must be there for at least two weeks prior to being promoted, in order to assess whether or not they are right for the guild).

The original wording could have been taken to mean that after the two weeks is up .. bam! … you’re promoted. Of course, most people would employ common sense at this point and realise this will not happen, however … *shrugs*. So I’ve now changed the wording to state that if they fulfil all of the requirements, they will then become ELIGIBLE for promotion.

Then I had to add another paragraph explaining that promotions didn’t happen on a daily basis, or even every week – it just simply depended on a number of things, including workload.

After that, I had to add messages to the other officers explaining what I had changed, and why.

After that, I had to add a news item to the website alerting guild members to the guild rule changes (not least because it was worrying that apparently the person who left was given 3 different answers regarding promotions).

So, instead of spending an hour sorting through the roster, updating it and posting the results to the website, I spent two hours doing the above – all because of one in-game message.  And I still haven’t sorted out the roster.

Of course, none of that matters if I don’t do my job properly and, as the ex-guild member rightly stated, stick to the guild rules – even if he did take them more literally than intended.  So I shall have to make more of an effort in future to integrate this particular duty into my routine.

It would just be nice, occasionally, for those who intend to spend 10 minutes of their life writing me a message telling me what a crap job I do, to actually spend that time instead considering that I have a life too, that I spend perhaps 50% of my free time that most would spend playing WoW simply organising the guild and guild website – and wonder if perhaps their complaint is a tad selfish considering the time I put aside to make their play time more enjoyable.

/whinge off

New Recruitment Addon

Patch 4.1 brought a new interface option in the form of the “Guild Finder”.  This could potentially make recruiting and finding a new guild much easier than in the past – where you had to basically go for word of mouth, trawl the realm forums and basically do a lot of donkey work.

In reality though, this simply gives a slightly easier way for guilds to make their recruitment presence/needs known, and a head start for someone looking for a guild (unless they’re not particularly fussy).  It is very restrictive – you cannot see if any of those who have applied are online at the time you are viewing their applications, you can only “accept” an applicant if they are online at that time and the option to “send message” simply sends them a whisper … which again will not work if they’re offline.

Our guild, like a lot of others, is happy to recruit new members, but will not do so in-game.  We have been burnt in the past by inviting anyone who asked for it – you potentially end up with completely unsuitable people for your guild type, leading to drama and bad behaviour.   We request that people who want to join us first check out our website, get a feel for the type of guild we are before even thinking of applying.  Once they are happy that we are suitable for them, we ask they fill in a short application form so that we can assess if they are suitable for us.

This method of recruiting, although it may have excluded some that would have fitted right in, has lead to a much happier, calmer guild.

This doesn’t mean that we cannot use the Guild Finder though.  We have simply included in the notes that anyone wishing to join, should apply via the website.

Of course, people being people, this request doesn’t always work (and it wasn’t helped by the recruitment text we type to advertise ourselves being cut short on the actual guild finder) – the first week has seen more than two dozen applications through the guild finder – many of which included no information about themselves whatsover other than their level and role.

To begin with, I simply created a standard template that I copy/pasted into the in-game mail, sending each one of them a message thanking them for their application but that we only accepted applications via the website, and directing them there.  Then each one was individually removed from the guild finder applicants list.

This was slow and unwieldy, however, so I was rather pleased to discover a new addon has been created for just this problem – “Recruitment Enhancement“.

With this addon, it will tell you if an applicant is online whilst you are viewing their application, you can create multiple templates and choose which one to send an applicant (you need your “mailbox” open for this to work – something that took me nearly half an hour to work out!!), you can delete individual applications or all at once, you can view previous correspondence you have sent via the addon – even if you have removed the applicant from your list.

In short, it does what the guild finder should have done in the first place and is invaluable for those of us who would rather not spend hours corresponding with people who can’t read a simple advert, but are not mean enough to just refuse applications without a reason.

What is DPS?

Whenever you group up with other people in WoW, in the vast majority of cases you will have people fulfilling one of three roles – tank, healer or dps.

Tanks are the guys that stand at the front and taunt all the bad guys to hit him. He’s the guy often wearing a tin can and his main job is to have everything attacking him.

Healers, conversely, stand at the back, trying desperately NOT to be noticed by the bad guys, whilst keeping everyone alive.

Tanks and healers, generally, fulfil exactly the same job on every encounter – they often have fewer spells or attacks to learn and once they know how and when to use them, they can pretty much do their job “on the fly”.

The final role to be filled in a group is the DPS – the damage dealers. In any group you have more of this role than any of the other two. They are the guys who actually need to know which target to attack first, which targets to incapacitate, which to run away from, which groups need single-target attacks and which groups can all be hit at once.

The onus is on the damage dealers to ensure they do not gain the attention of anything they are shooting – yet if they do, react quickly in either misdirecting back onto the tank, using any talents to remove that attention or using a talent to incapacitate (crowd control) the bad guy.

Damage dealers also have to be aware of everything around them, especially the location of the healer, to ensure they are always within range of heals and to be ready to help the healer or other team mates if it looks like they are in trouble.

When the party is attacking a larger (or hard hitting) group, the damage dealers are often called upon to “crowd control” (CC) – a method of temporarily taking individual bad guys out of a fight whilst everyone concentrates on killing the rest. Different classes of your party will have different types of crowd control – the onus is on each of them to know how their crowd control spell works, what it actually works on (ie beasts, elementals, undead, humanoids, etc) and how long it will work for.  They should also be ready to reapply any crowd control when it wears off, until the tank is ready to take it on.

But the main job of the damage dealers is to kill the enemy. Every fight is a race against time – the more damage can be dealt out, the faster the bad guys die. Conversely, the longer a fight lasts, the more damage everyone in the party takes, which means more healing needed – at some point in every fight, if it lasts long enough, the healer will run out of mana and no longer be able to heal – very soon after that the bad guys win!

How do you know how much damage is being doled out?  Most people use a damage meter addon such as Recount or Skada. These will track how much damage is done per person, per fight, and on an overall basis. You could also use a website such as World of Logs to upload combat logs to – this will break down your full combat log and enable you to analyse individual elements of each fight.

Do you need to know how much damage you’re doing?  No – not really.  At the end of the day, as long as you do enough damage to kill the bad guys before they kill you, it doesn’t matter.  I know a lot of people feel that it is the be all and end all – even the name of your role reflects that.  However, it does depend on what you want to do.  You wouldn’t say that, just because you could swim a few lengths in a swimming pool, you would be ready to swim across the channel from England to France – it is a matter of knowing your current limits and your targets.  The same goes for doling out damage – there are certain known “estimates” in place for various types of encounters.

You do have to bear in mind, however, that certain expectations are in place when you join a group of others.  The others in the group expect that you are able to fulfil the role you signed up for, to the best of your ability, and without them feeling they are compensating for you in some way.  If their damage meters are showing that you are doing less than you should be for any particular encounter, consistently, and it is causing problems for the group as a whole, this will cause bad feeling and may result in either the group splitting, or your removal from the group.  Being consistently average in a group is not a problem – being consistently bottom with a group that fails in encounters is a problem.

In order to know if your output is good enough for the type of encounter you wish to do, you put an imaginary group of people who have identical motor skills, reflexes, abilities and output as you into that encounter.  If they win – you’re ready.  If they don’t – you’re not.

Some raid encounters – those that require a group of either 10 or 25 people to do them – have time limits.  For example a raid boss may “enrage” after 5 minutes, basically meaning that if the group doesn’t kill it within those 5 minutes, the full group dies.

As we know how much health those bosses have, and how long we have to kill them, and how many people in any given raid group will be damage dealers, it is then fairly easy to work out, on average, how much damage each of those raid members need to do in order to successfully kill the boss.  Once you have that figure, you know what to aim for, and whether or not you’re ready.

So … what is dps and what does it mean?  In the strictest translation – it means “damage per second”.  It is the amount of damage you can give out in a second.  Now obviously this is not literal.  Encounters often require movement, and a lot of classes cannot do a lot of damage whilst moving.  A lot of spells cannot be cast once every second, and a lot of them will not do a massive amount of damage when they hit.  So in the true meaning of the phrase, it actually means the average amount of damage you can do, over a long fight.  Basically, the longer the better.

You can test it approximately on a “target dummy” – one of those inanimate objects in most main cities where you can throw your spells all out without retaliation.  In order to test it fairly you should do 3 seperate tests, each time starting with full mana or focus and keep attacking for 5 minutes, during which time you would use your big cooldowns, your focus/mana regeneration abilities, etc.

If you can, set your damage meter to show your damage as it is happening during the fight – at the end of your 5 minutes you may still have damage over time spells ticking on the target dummy, which will slowly reduce your “damage per second” figure until they wear off.  This of course wouldn’t happen on a boss fight, as at the end of the 5 minutes (or the end of the fight), the boss would be dead so there would be no spells ticking over on him anymore.

Whatever figure you get – don’t take it as gospel.  Bear in mind that it may go up in a good mixed group due to the number of extra buffs you will receive; but it inevitably will also go down as the majority of encounters require a lot of movement, changing of targets, crowd control, etc.  If the amount of damage you do on the target dummy is approximately the same as that you can do overall in a 5 man heroic dungeon run then, congratulations, you probably know your class well, the encounters well, and are good at anticipating what types of attacks and movement is needed.

How do pets fit into it all?  Most damage meters will actually include your pet into your damage shown (assuming you have that option selected).  Some may not (currently, mainly the shadowy apparition for shadow priests).  Basically your DPS is quantified by the amount of damage in total you (and your pets) do to a target, divided by the length of the fight.  However, if you die prior to the end of the fight, your damage meter stops “averaging” at that point – so if you did 10,000 damage per second on average, but died only halfway through a fight, the damage meter would still show you did 10,000 dps.  In effect though, your actual dps would only have been 5,000 damage per second – as for half of the fight you were not dealing any damage whatsoever.

This also relates to pets.  If you are a hunter, for example, your pets damage can automatically be included into yours.  If your pet dies halfway through a fight, then suddenly you are no longer getting the benefit of that pets damage.  As you are still alive for the rest of the fight, however, the damage meter will average out the amount of damage until the end of the fight, thus taking into account the pet’s death.

Unfortunately, as mentioned before, some pets are not currently included in damage meters as part of your damage – notably the shadowy apparition.  These little guys are basically a shadowy version of the priest in question – they turns up randomly if you have a specific damage over time spell running, slowly walking towards the target and then exploding when it gets there.  Whilst one is around, there is a higher chance for another to turn up.  Now if you watched one of these “pets” and physically worked out it’s damage per second from the time it appears to the time it disappears, you would realise without having a damage meter tell you, that its damage per second is low – depending on how far away from the target you are, it takes a long time to reach it, say between 5 and 10 seconds.  The resultant damage it does must therefore be divided by the amount of time it was actually around for.  It’s damage per second as it relates to yours must also then be factored in considering the amount of time it is there, compared to how long the fight is.  If only one apparition appears throughout an entire 5 minute fight, then the damage it does has to be divided by the full length of the fight.

Looking at shadow priests specifically, there is a way to roughly estimate how much damage you are doing overall, including those apparitions – which is to make the amount of damage an apparition does on average a percentage.  Having tested it myself, and having looked at other logs for much more accomplished shadow priests than me (ranging from around 10,ooo dps to 32,000 dps), it appears that this particular pet does somewhere between 2% and 5% of a shadow priests total dps.  So – if a shadow priest is doing 10,000 dps in a raid, then you can add on (being generous) another 5% to take into account the pet (at least until this particular problem is fixed), making a total of 10,500 dps.

In conclusion …. “DPS” refers both to the role of damage dealer and the amount of damage they can do.  As long as a damage dealer knows how much damage at a minimum is required for any particular encounter, and knows that they can do more than that consistently, whilst still carrying out all other role requirements (crowd control, movement and positioning abilities, etc), and can demonstrate that to others consistently, then it doesn’t matter how much damage they do.  Basically, they must be able to “hold their own” compared to others carrying out the same encounters.