Valithria

Everyone please watch this video over and over before Sunday.

A few poorly articulated thoughts before bed:
I think we can make huge improvements on this fight with a few chages.

- If we stand in the middle rather than break into 2 groups, we can do the encounter with 1 tank. Ranged will be burning down mobs on both sides from the center area, there should be fewer range issues with heals, and AoE will be more concentrated because more of the adds will be in one place.

- The DPS in this video is not that high: even with AoE, most of the group is below 5k. So it's about precision and strategy, more than output. With everyone standing in the center, we can direct all dps to one side or the other as needed. I can ranged-taunt a mob on the opposite side, and by the time it gets near me, the current one should hopefully be dead. This is more efficient, and will hopefully yield much less damage taken, than having 2 smaller groups trying to burn things down, with help from ranged DPS split between them.

- This fight probably demands more research from DPS than anything else we've done; they will have to know what to kill first without having to think about it. Repeated watching should make it easier to get used to being able to nail the correct priority order in response to visual input (as opposed to names & descriptions or Vent instructions).

- If there's nothing of higher priority in need of killing, be prepared to interrupt the casters (frostbolt volley). Peeve only has 1 interrupt (12 sec CD) that's not on the GCD, and that 1.5 sec window can be prohibitive for efficient interrupts as he button mashes, fails to hold aggro, and accidentally goes into berserker stance.

- The DPS in this video manages to take very little damage. I don't know exactly how they do it, but I'm sure it involves some of the strategy changes I mention above. See if you can figure out more from watching.

To improve your awareness and understanding of where the damage is coming from: after every wipe, go to Recount and scroll to "damage taken". See where you stand, and what you took the most damage from, and consider how you might be able to bring that number down.

Please do this for every fight with massive raid damage, e.g. Rotface. Also, keep in mind that healer mana regen will be getting a significant nerf in Cataclysm; the explicit reason is to prevent them from having the resources to heal DPS through unnecessary raid damage. The intention is that DPS will have to die, rather than simply overtax the healers.
It's as (often more) important to have situational awareness and a mastery of one's survival tools as it is to maximize DPS output: Unless the fight is trivial for healers or we're only beating the enrage timer by a few seconds, 4500 DPS and 5% of raid damage taken is preferable to 6000 DPS and 12% of raid damage taken. This point becomes more serious as the healers are unable to keep DPS alive: 3000 DPS for 5 minutes is much better than 5500 DPS for 40 seconds followed by a death because you stood in the wrong place or had aggro from attacking the wrong adds. Sometimes the problem is just being aware of your own health pool (ever die and have no idea it was about to happen?), so be sure you action bars and health bar are somewhere in the middle of the screen so that you can monitor both while watching the fight. If you need help making this happen with addons, don't be shy about asking.

- We may benefit from dedicating more heals to the group and less to the boss: Vaile on the raid, Hyprying on the raid and the boss, Elewe on the boss. Or something.

- Lore's target-bar addon is awesome (aggro indicator with Lore's % of threat).

- Heroism.