My thoughts on this raid

[Balshor]

Frankly, I still have trouble believing that we did this. For months, Hamidon has loomed over me like the fruits of Tauntalus -- the goal that we cannot stop striving for but seems impossible to reach. Pinnacle server has never made me more proud, and I am honored that you all put your trust and faith in this raid to achieve such a victory.

The main goal of this raid was to gather information about Hamidon that would allow us to defeat him on a subsequent raid. The fact that we beat him on our first run out there does not mean that we didn't learn a whole lot from this experience. It will take a few days for me to gather my thoughts, but I'll post what I feel worked well and what I would like to improve for the next raid. Feel free to contribute your thoughts in this thread.

[Night0wl]

I too had my moments of doubt and concern over the raid succeeding. But not due to the fear of failure, but due to possible discouragement on later raids.

I have learned a multitude of information on this, things which will be thought upon and worked upon until Hamidon dies once again. And then we will continue the process of learning and progressing.

I was proud to be a participant in this raid, and more so proud to see it succeed. Thank you one and all.

[SoulStrike]

I for one cant beleive how fast we did it. 3 hours!! on a pick up raid of 155!!! That is, hell i dont know how to say how insane that is. Prevous raids never even come that close and they didnt beat him in the end.

Ok granted this was highly planed with a full leadership group. I'd say about half of everone wasnt even sure what was going to happen, But most everyone followed orders and used great teamwork. Aside from beating Hami, the best part of it all was being called sir and "waiting on your orders" from my teamleaders. I just got a kick out of that ;D

Anywho with that out of the way. Having the main group split in 2 helped greatly. It seemed to me that with somany ppl bunched togather the server would decrease the range of targeting to compensate or something along those lines. Like at first when everyone was togather I couldnt target Nuke Reactor unless i jumped high enough to get in range but when i landed he would go out of range again. even with the 2 groups it was a little bothersome.

Another fun fact i noticed was it didnt seem to matter what order the mitos were taken out. Maybe that was for the fact that once everyone had the right target they dropped like flys and due to the lag you realy cant see the mitos for long let alone any mitos that was on the otherside, but i figured I'd throw that out there.

Once again fantastic job to all and a thanks to Balshor for showing us that a server raid on Pinnacle can win.

[Balshor]

I think that if anybody didn't have doubts that we would succeed, they were very overconfident or knew something I didn't. After a bit of reflection, here are some initial thoughts in no particular order. Please, if you have any ideas of what went well or, more importantly, badly, contribute them so I can change the plans accordingly for the next raid.

A brief summary of what we did

Heroes gathered in Eden, where they organized into teams and were briefed on the plan for the mito clearing stage. We moved the main raid into the Hive to clear out monsters while the rads and healers were briefed by their respective coordinators on their specific duties. At this stage, the distraction team also moved in to tank Hami.

After the monsters were cleared, we gathered on the staging rock and sent our two healing teams in to establish a healing bubble. It ended up that we really didn't need any complicated leapfrogging or anything...the healers just moved in slowly, established a position, and the rest of us ran in to them.

At this point, we started clearing mitos. However, due to the massive number of heroes involved, the mitos and assists were derendering like mad. After a few frustrating minutes for many heroes who couldn't find anything to shoot at, we pulled back to the staging area to revise tactics. We had managed to take out several mitos by this point, though.

The group divided into two fire teams, each supported by one of our healing teams and one of our buffing teams. We hit the north and south sides simotaneously, and the reduced number of heroes present reduced the derendering problem. Each group was often tackling multiple mitos simotaneously, but this wasn't too big of a deal due to the sheer quantities of firepower we had present. When we were down to only a few mitos left in a small area, we tried to pull the south team out to improve client performance for the north team.

We regrouped at the staging point after all the mitos were down. After a short period of reorganization, we sent in a couple of regen scrappers to try to tank Hami. Apparently, this didn't go so well, but the controllers that were right behind him didn't get hammered too hard and managed to establish a hold on Hami. The signal was given to the general raid to run in and start attacking the big blob.

At this point, network lag spiked incredibly. Powers would often take a minute or two to fire after you tried to activate them. The game slowed to a slideshow. Interestingly, the chat seemed to keep up just fine, and if you could get a target on Hami, you could see his hit points going down. Even after Hami went down, it took a good 5 minutes for the zone to catch up to normal speed.

Things in the plan that went well

From my perspective, the command and communication set-up we had worked very well. I think that the best indication of this is that when we had to reorganize on the fly (splitting the main attack into two separate teams), we had absolutely no issues making sure each team had enough healers, debuffers, assists, and coordinators. Really, I can't say enough good things about my coordinating and advising staff.

The healing umbrellas were wonderful. I've never seen a Hami raid (including those where we stayed at max sniper range) with fewer deaths.

I think the main complement that could be given to the distraction team was that I pretty much never noticed them. They did their job well and seemed to attract enough attention that our healers never had an issue keeping up with the damage.

Things that could be improved for the next raid

I don't think we need explicit outrider teams for the next raid. No monsters wander close enough to Hami to be an issue when we're attacking, and whenever we retreated to the staging area it wasn't a bit deal taking out the monsters that spawned there.

Using a single dedicated healing team for each fire team was enough to mitigate the damage coming in at us. Extra empaths should be spread around the group, and their primary duties should be buffing and rezzing.

The distinction between ranged and melee teams was really not that necessary. Kineticists should be spread around with primary duties being to keep IR up on the scrappers.

Targetting during the mito clearing was definitely an issue. We should encourage the use of the /assist command (which targets your current target's target). Perhaps it would be best for attacking teams to assist off their leader, and the leader to choose the target via the /assist command off of the main assist. With the amounts of firepower involved in an open raid, we could easily handle the multiple-mito targetting that we ended up getting.

Group sizes should be optimized to prevent derendering. Turning up the character detail to maximum helps with this. I believe this setting controls how many mobs (heroes and villians both) the client will render as well as at what level of detail they should be rendered at, and the client will always choose to render closer mobs over ones farther away. Thus, when we had 150+ heroes all in a clump, the client would render 100 heroes and none of the mitos that were at range. With 75ish sized groups, finding a mito to shoot at still required playing with the camera quite a bit.

The one question I have about the organization is whether the coordinators were able to manage the heroes under them well enough. I suspect that if we planned to break the group into two from the beginning, I wouldn't have even noticed this, but as it was, having a more detailed picture of the heroes in the Hive would have made the on-the-fly reorganization a bit smoother.

We need a better way to put people on teams. However, who is on which team is actually not nearly as big of a deal as I thought it would be, except for a few specialized functions. For future raids, I suspect that we'll just have people form their own groups, except for the healing groups responsible for maintaining the umbrella, the distraction group, and possibly the debuffers.

Roughtly 75 people signed up on the Hami boards, and some of them didn't make it. 150+ people showed up. This was more people than I had planned for (I expected in the neighborhood of 100), but I will definitely have contingency plans for the next raid in case attendance is that high again.

The enhancement redistribution at the end was a bit suboptimal, but I honestly don't think it could have been improved upon in an open raid setting like that.

[FashionSense]

Some thoughts on the raid...

- The most serious problem during mito clearing was Hami aggro. Regardless of whether people were attacking him (intentionally or not), we need a more solid way to keep aggro off the main force. Maybe taunt + phase shift? Splitting up into multiple mito-clearing groups helps but dilutes the healing available at each group.

- Everyone knew who the main assist was...the problem was who to fall back on when we lost target on the main assist. Also, to borrow a tip that developed on the fly in another raid, having the main assist spam "new target" in request when a mito drops is really handy.

- It might be handy to have one person as a "group anchor" who controls the changes in position for each mito-clearing group. People on the ground could put themselves on follow to that person.

- Now that we have succeeded, it would not surprise me if we get MORE people next time. So we need to be flexible enough to handle some ridiculous number like 200 players. If we had that many, we could have 3 or even 4 separate groups for mito clearing. When it comes down to just Hami, the lag is going to be even worse but I can't see how to improve it without telling 100 people to just stand back.

- For the melees, I wonder if Group Fly would be better than Inertial Reduction. We'd need a fair number of people with GF though. Could have the rads use RI in addition to EF to compensate for the acc penalty on group fly.

- Getting latecomers placed on teams and told what to do was a big issue, although past a certain point it really didn't matter if a person was on a team. I think having specialized teams is useful because people can just follow along with what their team is doing. The problem is if a coordinator gets 3 team leaders plus leads his own group...what do you do when the 33rd person comes looking for a team and you're all full? The coordinator has to be prepared to promote someone and get a new group started.

- Enhancement distribution was way better than I expected for an open raid. Sure there were people who scammed the system (some of them pretty obvious about it) but quite a lot of enhancements got distributed to people who didn't get drops. I gave up my 4 extra (thanks to inferno) and I know of several people who also gave up significant numbers.