As you know, my new guild only does 25 man runs three days each week, and tonight we stepped in for our second full night on Lich King. Two hours in, and we had him down to 9%, but we wiped for unknown reasons.

We were so disheartened that we simply released and ended the raid.

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Lets talk about that fight for a bit…

So, Arthas is a really, really fun fight. Lots of things happening, very little room for error, and a constant pressure to maximise your damage, perfect your rotation and… well, not fail. I went to look at World of Logs after it was updated, because as with everything else, I want to see where I do wrong and where I can improve. On overall damage, I placed 13th on the meters. But lets not start an outcry for buffs just yet – I want to take a closer look at it.

There is a lot of potential for splash damage on this fight and sadly, we don’t have that much of it. Throughout phase 1 half of the raid will be able to do splash damage on several targets. In phase 2, you can spread splash damage on the valkyrs, if the raid controls them correctly. Phase three is a haven for anyone who can AOE the vile spirits in the air. We are resigned to an occasional starfall and typhoon in phase 3. We should also keep in mind that this was the first kill, so things will probably change for the better once we get a little bit more comfortable with the fight.

What I like to do, is to look at how my DPS compared to the general raid – this is really where you find your standing against the rest of the group. I have taken a screenshot of my DPS (orange) versus the average raid DPS (less-orange-more-yellowy).

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  1. General phase 1 nukage. It is expected that a moonkin would be lower on this phase, as we only really have starfall to do some splash damage on the adds.
  2. Phase transition, general nukage, doing just fine.
  3. Start of phase 2, being grabbed by a valkyr. Only dots ticking here. After this, a long period with limited movement from defiles and nuking down valkyrs. There is a small drop shortly after, which I think was the a-bit-too-big defile that had us moving around a little bit.
  4. Fondled by Valkyrs again. The blue marking shows bloodlust during the second phase transition.
  5. Really quite baffled by this drop. I’ll have to wait for the fraps to see why my DPS dropped that low in this segment.
  6. Another unexplained drop. Could be me looking at Vile Spirits, waiting for them to start moving down, unable to DPS the Lich King if he was behind me at that point.

Generally, I don’t think this is bad. On average, my DPS goes up and down in accordence to average raid DPS, and with our minimal splash damage, I would expect that while we are relatively low on the meters, our contribution is just the same as most other DPS classes.

Also – and I’ll have to wait for World of Logs to update – I think I placed as the 50th highest moonkin damage on Arthas. Fun stuff.

TL;DR: Moonkin damage is fine! ;)

- QQ