Hi guys,

We were running ops both Tuesday evening and Wednesday evening and the first night we were in EV normal, something we normally breeze through, this time we had a few deaths and possibly even a wipe or two before stopping for the night before Soa.

Last night we did Soa with some dificulty and after that went into KP and had BoneTrasher hand our collective behinds to us several times.

This group was made up of 7 people who's been running those ops for weeks now and one new person who hadn't been in there before but has plenty experience from other games.

Wednesday night we started looking at what the problem was after putting it down to consentrating on having fun on Tuesday and noticed that everyone accross the board had a lot less crit hits than we usually do.

No one has made any gear changes to explain this so I was wondering if anyone has noticed something similar?

/Yks

Is crit that important for raid bosses? I would of thought just having decent sustained DPS was more important? but that is just pure guessing on my part.

Crits make up a considerable part of damage in this game though. Usually you'll have an unmodified crit chance of around 25-30% and a crit modifier of around 75% with quite a few talents raising these values to even higher amounts for key abilities. I haven't noticed anything myself, but I haven't played enough to really say.

Ahh I see, thanks for clearing that up for me.

I also heard that crit and surge give diminishing returns after 30%. But again im not sure what that means, is that like the more you crit, the less chance/damage you have for the next crit?

About Crit

For my money as long as you're down in the 10-15% it's not a huge factor and not something I'd count on for fights.

In our group most of us healer/DPS have 30-35% Crit and 70-75% bonus on the abilities which is just before diminishing return starts hitting you heavily.

This translates to a roughly 25% increase in DPS/HPS with the added bonus that crit hits gives access to various abilities like my free consumption from innervate that helps me keep force up for healing.

/Yks

From the same group/guild as Yks - 4 of our guildies inc myself were in Black Talon prior to raid, and were thrashed to a inch of our lives by the end boss of the zone whereas normally she's a breeze. At the end of the night which we spent 3 hours trying to kill Bonethrasher easy mode, I was pulling my hair out trying to figure out where we were going wrong. Each time we went in there before we get him down first time normally, the mob we struggle on atm is the Fabricator.

If no ones noticed anything from their own experiences, I guess we just got to pick ourselves up and head back in.

Jagganath

Here's something to consider:

Sometimes people have bad/off days. You're just more derpy than usual. Everybody has them. Maybe that's the problem and not something else.

As for crit, my %'s are the same as they've always been. Maybe the difference in your numbers is because of having or not having the Agent buff of 5%? Combine that with the Inquisitor buff of 5% main stat which will provide you a little more crit, and you're looking at a pretty big fluctuation. Then add whether you were stimmed or not, that's a little more crit from main stat... I'd expect that's more likely to be your issue than some stealth crit change.

Do you use a fixed positions strategy for Bonethrasher or do you have everyone running around doing whatever they feel like?

Both are viable for normal mode but obviously, people running around cleaving others and other DPS having to move out of their way all the time adds up.

Unless you have a really odd raid setup you can split the healers left and right, ranged between them around the edge and a few melee in the middle. Ranged stand 10-15 yards or so away from the edge so they dont get knocked off and just stand there (using defensive cooldowns) if bonethrasher targets them. If he targets a melee, they face him to the middle and the other melee move behind him. That way only one person gets swiped and the raid doesn't have to move all the time, boosting DPS.

I've only seen it on nightmare the last few weeks but the last 2 weeks we did him seemed a lot more buggy than usual. People getting swiped behind him, faster than normal agro drops etc. Probably just a bit of server lag but it made it a bit more interesting.

As written we did put it off to a collective off day on Tuesday, but looking at the actual numbers and amount of procs while in there on Wednesday we all noticed lower numbers for both DPS and heals.

once thing I have been considering is if they have fixed a bug there, since I could cast an inntervate with 35% crit and in 90+% of the casts I had it crit either right off the bat, in the middle of the cast or when the spell hit, I was putting it down to the 3 seperate times it might pop up.

And we use the "Running about like headless chickens" tactics and also noticed people getting swiped while in the rear 90 degrees of his arc.

/Yks

As written we did put it off to a collective off day on Tuesday, but looking at the actual numbers and amount of procs while in there on Wednesday we all noticed lower numbers for both DPS and heals.

 

once thing I have been considering is if they have fixed a bug there, since I could cast an inntervate with 35% crit and in 90+% of the casts I had it crit either right off the bat, in the middle of the cast or when the spell hit, I was putting it down to the 3 seperate times it might pop up.

 

And we use the "Running about like headless chickens" tactics and also noticed people getting swiped while in the rear 90 degrees of his arc.

 

/Yks

Innervate hits 4 times so if you have 35% crit you should be getting at least one crit 82% of the time.

I kind of noticed the same thing in Karaggas last night. Someone went AFK before fabricator and I started spamming a heal on someone for fun. Got 2 crits in 20 casts with a 35% crit rate, not completely outside the realm of a RNG, but not exactly close to what my char sheet states.

We had another poke in there last night and the problems we had seem to have been eliminated.

I tested beforehand as I noticed a small patch on the way in and while I wasn't quite back to the old percieved level of critting it was up by a factor of 4 compared to my last test.

I guess I'll never know if it was just 2 collective off days or they had a small issue in that patch.

/Yks