Some Advice for Gates of Retribution

So I've been spending a fair amount of time in Siege of Orgrimmar on various toons at this point.  I also managed to get an 8th toon geared for the place with the addition of my monk, getting some good drops in ToT as well as some Loot Island love and now being officially all ready to go.

At this point, barring some corrections coming out of today's maintenance, I have to admit that the 2nd wing of LFR is not my favorite thing in the world.  I've run it four times so far on various toons, and each time it has taken right around 4 hours.  Not something to be taken trivially.

In almost every case, the problem had nothing to do with either our dps, the amount of heals or the gearing of our tanks.  In each of those cases, multiple wipes on each boss was almost always the result of the fact that the majority of the people who had queued had absolutely no understanding of the fight mechanics.

When did it become OK to queue for a fight without doing at least a little bit of research?  After all, it isn't really all that difficult to pop over to Icy Veins and spend 5 minutes doing a quick read through of each fight. Hopefully this wing will get easier as more folks experience it and start to learn the fights, but for now, it has really turned me off of LFR.  I just don't have that kind of time to invest at each go.

So here are my quick and simple pieces of advice for LFR groups on the various bosses in Wing 2 of LFR:

Galakras.  Set up your Tower Team before the pull.  Kill adds.  Don't stand in fire.  Wait till the demo is down to head up the tower. When Galakras drops, everyone stand in a straight line behind him.  Whoever gets the fire ball, just go straight backwards.

Iron Juggernaut.  Pop a defensive cooldown and stomp on mines occasionally.  Make sure you don't have the Laser Burn dot before doing so.  Don't stand in bad stuff.  During the siege phase, put your back to something and move out of bad stuff.

Dark Shaman.  Holy crap blizzard.  Maybe a little less trash here?  (Unless you're an elemental shaman, in which case, squeeeeee!!!)  Kill slimes, ASAP.  If you can't kill them at range, stay the hell away from them.  Don't stand in bad stuff (do you sense a theme here?).  Tanks, keep the bosses moving, but not too fast, so people aren't forced to dodge lots of bad stuff.

Trash before Nazgrim: run right up to the demos in the drag and take them out ASAP.  On the shaman in the drag, pull one out of group one at a time, mark him, and burn him down, to keep them from healing each other.

Nazgrim.  Kill adds.  Kill adds.  Oh yeah.  Kill adds.  Stun.  Silence. Watch for the whirling ax and don't stand in it (see theme above).  Melee - just stay the hell away from the Bonecrusher guys and let the ranged take them out.  Go deal with the other adds instead.

So I've gone back to working on leveling other toons.  So the long-neglected Joar army of Alliance toons, (which all happened to be named variations of Mel instead of Joar for reasons that completely escape me) has been getting a small bit of attention.  No mass moves in leveling, but I've rediscovered some of what I enjoyed about just leveling toons in the first place.

I also started an elemental shaman on Thrall to get started on the next batch of Horde toons.