Theorycrafting things

Hi,

While people are leveling their chars, it might be good to start doing some theorycrafting on the fights.

We know that Ulduar can be cleared in blues on 10 man (due to http://greedygoblin.blogspot.com/2009/08/ungeared.html). Combat logs are http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/udDazqi2wXRKtVKY/ and http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/Dng5rUzDWwDJy49j/ .

As far as I see it there are two parts of the challenge.

1) finding the right tactics for the fights (both 25man and 10man depending on the size of 'end' group)
2) finding the best gear/rotation/etc for all characters

Part 1: the right tactics.
If I understand correctly, we can devide into two 'types' of fights:
*) fights with an enrage timer
*) fights without an enrage timer

The fights with an enrage timer have a hard limit (that we can calculate) on the needed dps. From that we can work out the minimum amount of dps people needed and what this means for the amount of tanks/healers we can bring to a fight.

For the fights without an enrage timer, it doesn't matter 'at all' how much dps we bring. If the fight lasts an hour or not, we succeed when the boss is dead in the end. No matter how we get there.

Ofcourse it is not all that simple, but I guess it's a simplified way of how to look at things and to get some constructive discussion going.

Some bosses will have certain abilities (i.e. hit very hard or often) that requires the tanks to have a certain amount of health and stuff. I'm not sure exactly how 'deep' detailed the strategy can be thought of upfront, but I can imagine on a 25man to try and have the boss trying to hit (a large number of) tanks in a 'sequential order' in order to heal them up before the next round.

Part 2: the right gear/rotation/etc.
It is probably not the 'best' indication for our purpose on what is possible, but I had a look at http://www.codeplex.com/Rawr and made a filter that only uses "all rare uncommon" gear and tried to find the item combination that would give the max 'overall' dps. For the test subject of an Shadow Priest with a couple of raid buffs it gets near the 2.8k dps of the shadow priest in the Ulduar 10 Blue run. I believe some of the models in Rawr make certain assumptions about rotation, but I think you can tweak that depending on the specific model. Anyway, it is a tool that supports a set of different classes so it could be a starting point in some way. For more detailed tuning and calculating rotations that are not 'standard' you would probably still end up working with a spreadsheet or something. One way or the other, we will need to model things in a way in order to predict the best gear/rotation for our purpose.

Since the theorycrafting is probably generic (non EU/US related), it might be good to have a seperate forum on character/fight discussions?

Good idea to create a theorycrafting forum.

However, as a healer from Blue Ulduar run, it wasn't really a "tanks jumping between 100 and 10%". Mostly we wiped because too much add spawned or someone thought AoE is good idea before the blue weapon tank can build threat in all.

Of course Gormok 25 can be really nice to tanks. I guess a discpriest is a must for shields, and probably 2 prot warriors to put vigilance on each other. I don't know if vigilance stacks with blessing of sanctuary, both would be nice.

My guess is that in the first times this thread will be bit deserted. As soon as people reach 80 and start figuring out rotations, it will get alive.

Well, I tried to make a filter the exluded epics, but i kept seeing the some of the epics. Can you help me set it up...?

Tools -> Edit Item filter -> New filter
In this box set max item quality to Rare

Now uncheck everything in the "filters", except your new filter

Had done exactly that and change the min quality from "Temp" to "Poor", I undid that and now it's working

I'm beginning a series on the guild blog concerning the theorycraft of hard-mode raiding. Please comment on the blog or in this topic if you want to contribute anything to the discussion.

The first post can be found here.

I guess a discpriest is a must for shields, and probably 2 prot warriors to put vigilance on each other. I don't know if vigilance stacks with blessing of sanctuary, both would be nice.

a discipline priest provides raid-wide buff similar to Vigilance / BoS, they dont stack.