Ranged DPS and Healers have the advantage of being spread out throughout the vast majority of the room.

Melee is at the disadvantage because even if they are all at max melee range, they're still within 6 yards of each other plus the tanks. This makes for a large window of death around the boss where we are all huddled in. All the melee cannot fit on the stairs/platform. If they tried, then they'd kill each other and be dangerously damaging the tanks.

One suggestion (from our Archimonde days) is the every shaman redrops Tremor 1 second before the fear. This ensures a quick break before the Blood Bolts hit.

A second is that if you have a defensive cooldown to use, then use it during the air phase. AMS, Deterrence, Dispersion, Bubble, Ice Block, w/e...The most dangerous survival phase is the air phase. If you have the cooldown, you should use it.

Another is that people need to take account for who is around them. On our first night of BQL, during an attempt, I told Treebarc to go left, and I'd go right during the blood bolts so we wouldn't kill each other. Yet when the fear went off, I was forced to go left, and he went right. Instead of panicking, we just went with it. We stayed on opposite sides and looked out for melee. If you see someone in 'your' zone, just adjust.

The fear isn't long enough to send you sailing to the other side of the room, melee or not. I think you're worrying needlessly. :D

I believe that's why we're assigning positions?

I'm pointing out an issue that will occur when assigning melee positions (especially if we use the stairs/platform as the primary spot).

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Also Tree, I figured out how you died on that one air phase.

During Air Phase we're still linked, and we stood on each other to avoid melee to each side. So you took your blood bolt damage, my splash damage from blood bolt, and blood mirror damage.

But we're assigning positions so that melee aren't huddled together. Yes? Maybe I'm the only one assuming that melee assigned positions only apply during air phases? I feel like I'm missing something.

And lol @ Tree.

I was just clarifying what Morf was trying to say.

Last night Thad told the melee to stay on/near the stairs so that the ranged/healers spread out throughout the room. Of course melee assigned positions won't be clumped up, I'm saying they were clumped up last night. So we can use the positioning strategy to fix the clump issues.

Melee won't have assigned positions during the ground phase, since it's just a giant cluster anyways. The problem will occur when they bolt as BQL takes off: do they get feared into a ranged clump or do they get feared directly toward their assigned position?

I moved away from you! You were in the middle and i was left you moved on top of me and i moved away and was hit. You killed me!

but anyways I figured that is what happen that time.

Could the ranged dps/healers be positioned based on the shaman in their group? There were enough shaman last night to have a tremor totem cover every group, but I suspect that some people weren't close enough to the shaman in their group for tremor totem to work. If we assigned each ranged shaman a position and then the people in that group made certain they were by the shaman in their group that would ensure that everyone in that group was in range of tremor totem.

I also noted that both Mateus and Flinn were close to the melee last night, and since we have more than 4 melee they could be used to cover the remaining melee/tanks with tremor totem if needed.

Please keep in mind the tremor pulses every three seconds and the cycle is no longer "predictable" so dropping (again) just before air phase will not change anything.

That's a change that has eluded me in my time away from my shaman that is now a level 70 sunwell geared bank alt

Melee do have a much harder time spreading out than ranged, because they are bunched up to begin with.

One way to mitigate this is to have melee start getting to their safe spots just 2 seconds earlier.

We already did this on some attempts, and it was good.

Good idea. Yes, we will be basing positioning with respect to each groups' shaman totems.

I made a picture for the bite order. Groups are shown around their respective totems for clarity: this is not where you'd actually stand in the fight!

Marlucia will tell us who the first person to be bitten is in each group.
He will also tell us the second person in each group.
The first person getting bitten is in group 4 in the picture!

H is for healer
D is for dps
T is for tank
Little colored circles are shaman totems
Red numbers show the bite order in rounds, as it spreads. So the first thing that happens is red number 1. The second set of bites are labeled with a red 2. The third set of bites is labeled with a red 3.

Updated picture on Wed, Feb 3! Moved a healer from group 5 to group 1.

Biting aids and mods!

Below is a screenshot from the Blood Queen fight. I have 2 mods configured that help a lot.

The first is a nameplates mod called Aloft. http://www.wowinterface.com/downloads/info10864-AloftBeta.html
Aloft does a ton of stuff, but I have 95% of it turned off. All I want are names and healthbars colored by class over each person's head. And I want them small and partially transparent. Also, Aloft has a tiny cast bar that only shows up when necessary.

What makes Aloft so good? Well, it's MUCH easier to find people in the room when they all have "name tags" like this.


The other mod is Grid. My little grid display is in the lower left. I set it to put a big pink box and pink corner dot on any person who is a vampire. (I also use it just like this for penetrating cold on anubarak.)

Grid makes it REALLY easy to look at my group or the raid, and see who is available to bite.

(Click on the image a few times to see it full size.)

Before everyone runs off and gets Aloft I want to point out that it is a resource hog. So be wary of what you can handle before you get install it. It is geared towards high customization and layout design. Tidy Plates is a low CPU alternative if you can live without the customization.

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For Luci,

I'm not sure if you have seen this addon, but I came across it during my curse.com browsing.

Vamp

It claims to be able to help automate the bite orders for you. Whether or not it does this well enough to warrant its use it an entirely different matter. It does seems to provide quite a bit of functionality such as cross group biting and whispers to new bite targets.