Raid Summary 01/26-01/27 2015
primesuspect
Beepin n' BoopinDetroit, MI Icrontian
HEROIC KORAGH DOWN
Absolutely fantastic progress for IC this weekend: We are now 6/7 heroic highmaul and we are very nearly at phase 4 of heroic Imperator. Sunday brought us all the way to Koragh with many one-shots along the way. It's clear that we have most of heroic Highmaul on farm. Koragh went down on our last attempt of the night—a fantastic way to start Monday's raid.
Tonight we had several attempts on Imperator Mar'gok, learning a bit more each time. Towards the end we nearly got him to the final phase but just couldn't pull it together.
Excellent progress this weekend, IC!
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Impregnator says, "Look upon the tools of your demise! The ancient stones grant me unimaginable power!"
^^ This is my Brian Moment (tm) -- makes me giggle every time. (ok, especially at the end of the night when I'm exhausted, lol!)
GRANT 'EM BACK DEN
i fail a lot last night
Guys, it was our first time ever seeing heroic Imperator. Let's not get too down on ourselves. It's a very hard fight. We learned a ton, we'll go back and get it next week
We're now in territory that about 1% of the game sees, and even less finishes. It's difficult. It's designed to stall your progression. Chin up, y'all, we'll be OK.
Was good time, but there is nothing wrong with seeing you made a mistake and wanting to be better.
We'll keep getting gear on the rest of the run, people will get better at mechanics and we'll get it.
I don't know about this. I was perfect. Absolutely perfect. You are all holding me back! I could really be someone!
On an actual note, I do feel like I'm starting to get my single target rotation down a bit better. It still vexes me...
(Hekili)
I triggered three mines last night over the course of our runs. Sorry, guys. I blame one on a delayed blink.
And my DPS is just awful. I've been reading up on rotations, but the movement kills me. Going to switch things up a bit more for next week. Don't want to hold you guys back. 
Let's just remember that Imperator is not a DPS fight. Obviously the more DPS, the faster we can kill him and the fewer mechanics we have to deal with but ultimately this is a personal responsibility fight... DPS #1 goal is to stay alive and do DPS as a secondary consideration (a very important, close secondary consideration), but for me personally this means stopping a lot of casts, losing my big ramp-up spells sometimes (Insanity ticks? Yay! Time to murder! Oh but wait, I have to move), oh well, I lost insanity for another 30 seconds, but ultimately staying alive. I noticed last night a couple of casters soaking mines because they were casting. It can be difficult to cancel your cast just to move, because you might think "ugh, I just need .6 more seconds and THEN I'll move..." but obviously this fight is designed to punish that behavior.
So if your DPS numbers are low, don't sweat it too much. The things we need to work on are ballet, positioning, and timing; execution. Then rotation.
If we DPS faster do we actually miss some of the mechanics? I thought they were triggered at %s which means we still need to get through all 4 phases. If so, since there is no enrage on this jackass, DPS is most certainly secondary to staying alive cue 70's disco music.
But if we don't dps hard enough for certain things (purple-pulsing adds, orgy mages, little white men, REAVER (OMG KILL THIS MOTHERFUCKER)) then we end up with everything just being harder. Every second the purple guys are up is way more damage to the entire group.
Yeah, it just means that the things that kill us stay longer and we have more chances to screw up the dance.
As one that have him on hc farm now and we always one-shot him unless ONE stays in a mine and explode it. There is no way to recover from that. Yes, you will see healers ( i am a healer) heal you up most of the time, but the mana drain doing so is too great. In the last phase, all healers will be oom if one mine is exploded. Basically, thats the whole mechanic, everyone suffers from the same thing. Mine, big add (always super focus on that, he hurts raid) and use 5,5,7,5 for the stacks to run out. Run out when you get 5 of them for the first 2 phases, 7 on the third phase and five on the last.
More DPS means less incoming damage, means less mana used by healers too. But it really shouldn't be the focus.
As someone who understands the fight and knows when the mines are coming out, I still hit them. There's so much going on and trying to dance and keep everyone alive / maintain a DPS rotation is difficult. Its a lot to take in and deal with, and focusing on eeking out every bit of DPS only creates a situation where we are more likely to hit mines, or have take damage that makes a healer focus on saving someone rather than avoiding a mine, etc.
Tl;dr: Avoiding damage (everyone, tanks, healers, DPS) > getting the best DPS numbers.
I'm going to change the Phase 3 strat slightly and we'll see if that helps.