After Action Review

In the volunteer fire department, we had a thing called an AAR, which is an After Action Review, which involves reviewing your actions after they happen. Appropriately named, yes?

Whether to determine how well command and communication worked, or how various safety issues were handled, or just to see who had the biggest hose, its a valuable tool for extracting learning out of an experience.

After my Kara run on tuesday, nobody wanted to stick around and discuss, but I went and did a little mini review myself, in the form of internal reflection, and a WWS report, staring Amava in the role of Titan.

To start off, the DPS of the whole team was 2041. I personally had 650 DPS, and did 23% of total party damage.

The 650 I'm happy with. I don't really have a good baseline to compare it to as this is my first time in there for real, but I seem to remember Fio, the GM of BRK's guild, saying on some conversation thread that he's happy with solid team players who put out 5-600, and they're much further progressed than we are. So maybe that's a poor comparison off of a blurry memory of a comment taken hugely out-of-context, but either way, I'm happy and bunk on you if you want to bring me down :-) Either way, I'll keep trying to gear up with BoJ stuff and Heroic drops.

The raid DPS of 2041 for the overall instance, 2101 for the Attumen take down, and the distribution of total party damage is not something I'm happy with. I think we'll be able to handle the stables and Attumen again without too much fuss, as the trash isn't too tough once people get used to the 10-man setting and coordination, and the boss encounter isn't that bad once the team gets a hang of picking up Attumen when he shows up. As for Moroes, its just not enough. Trying to burn down the more dangerous of his guests just takes us too long. Sure there's some fancy footwork the tanks can do to hold Morose under better control, which was lacking, but I really think that the DPS is the place we need the most work.

Ok, nuff about them, back to my favorite topic...me.

Going in, my bow skill was 350, and I'm not 100% sure of my 2H Axe skill, but I think it was in the 320's. My hit rating was 112.

I missed 2 auto shots, 2 steady shots, and 2 wing clips.

Ok, so the wing clips were my own damn fault, as I haven't really put any effort into improving that since I got my new Arena axe two weeks ago. No excuse, and missing wing clips like that can mean the differnce between a resisted trap being handled elegantly, or a party wiping. Get to work, buddy.

I'm still on the fence regarding my ranged hit rating. At 112, I was eating Warp Burgers for +agi on the trash, and Spicy Hot Talbuk for +hit on the bosses, putting me at 132. I can't tell from the WWS report whether my misses were on trash or bosses.

I have no basis for this decision, but going in, knowing I wasn't hit capped, I told myself that if I missed more than 3 shots, I'd do something about it. So 4 > 3, therefore I want to do something about it. Needing 10 points to get hit capped with well fed bonus, I have 4 red gem slots that currently have +6agi red gems, which can be replaced with +3hit/+3agi orange gems. Sounds like a plan. Of course, this decision was made prior to seeing BRK's write up of the balance between hit and other stats. I'm pretty happy with all my stats besides stamina and intellect for this stage of my progression, so I'm willing to take a stab at hit capping via gems and buff food for bosses.

Next thing, from the report, I was doing Auto & Steady shots at a roughly 3:2 ratio, with Arcane shots being mixed in mostly while I was on the run moving from one trap location to another. I normally like to do Auto/Steady at closer to 1:1 ratio. This was largely due to aggro issues, and some mana issues on the Attumen take down. I found myself just sitting on auto shot with no specials during lots of the trash to keep myself below the tanks on the threat meter. Going forward, I need to (A) be more proactive with my feign deaths, and (B) talk to the tanks to see if they want to discuss what happened, and if there's anything we can do together to make it better.

My last observation is that I need to get a better raid frames addon. I currently use Perl Classic unit frames. Works great for seeing my party and my focus (main tank) and my target. But the other 4 members (since focus came from other group) are missing, most notably, the off tank. I'd love to easily see his health and his target. Some research is needed.

That was more or less it from the critique angle. All in all, pretty nice job as a team in our first raid.

/golfclap