Friday Night Pug Raid.. Absolute Win! and a New Mount

I finally got my Snowfeather Hatchling pet up to the point where I had to go and kill Ursoc with it, so I decided to pug into a group rather than go through LFR as it’d give me more AP.. I swear I’m an AP junkie at the moment.

I found a guild heroic EN run through the group finder and signed up but didn’t pay much attention to what realm it was. When I jumped on their discord I was really surprised to hear mostly New Zealand and Australian accents. The guild was from Jubei-thos which is an oceanic realm so it instantly felt really comfortable.

It was a really fun raid with super friendly people and I was healing with a Shaman from the guild that was running the raid, and we kept having competitions to see who could outheal the other.  He started streaming the raid from Dragons onwards so I watched along as we raided. I’m was super excited to find a new streamer to watch.. https://www.twitch.tv/vexationmits if you want to check it out. Language warning though.

Toco came online for right as we got to Xavius and snagged himself an invite by using the new bnet function to request an invite through me which I didn’t even realise he could do. So then both the Shammy and I were on discord screaming about Toco outhealing us both.Turns out Toco was listening to us shout about his healing via the stream lol.

I picked up a nice amount of AP from the raid and ended up with 2 new bnet friends, the Shammy and a really funny Mage, maybe I’ll end up pugging some more with them. I do love when pugs turn out so much better than expected!

Once I finished in the raid, I started the last quest for the Snowfeather hatchling. It was to defeat 3 world pet battles with the Snowfeather hatchling and 2 undead pets. Thank goodness for multiple alts as I had already done all the pet battles on Z and my Priest. Luckily my DK had a set of the pet battles up (funny enough my Hunter didn’t) so I headed off.

The 3 pet battles I had up were All pets go to heaven, Only pets can prevent forest fires and Rocko. The teams I used:

All Pets go to heaven – Snowfeather Hatchling, Unborn Val’kyr, Spectral Spinner
Rocko – Snowfeather Hatchling, Mr. Bigglesworth, Ghostwolf Pup
Only pets can prevent forest fires – Unborn Val’kyr, Snowfeather Hatchling, Creepy Crate

And then it was time to take the hatchling home! The quest was quite heartwrenching when I got him back to his mum but it worked out in the end and I have a new pretty mount. That’s 1/4 down.

Pretty good Friday night on wow tbh 🙂

 

 

 

 

 

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Down go the Dragons.. 4/7M now

We choose Dragons as our 4th boss to work on and it was actually much easier than I was expecting as we killed it on only our 3rd attempt.

The fight was incredibly chaotic and messy with loads of adds but we managed to work around it. I stayed outside for the duration,  I asked Jul our monk to go in the portals each time as he has really good movement and I figured he’d be able to make his way across to the different portals quickly and he did great.

I was working on us using our healing cooldowns during tank/dragon swaps as that’s when we’d have both the debuffs on us, but to be honest it was that chaotic that we ended up using our heals at own discretion. Given we were 65 yards apart at most times and it was pretty much rng what damage would go out where, if one side got volatile infection for example, it was really just two little healing teams rather than 1 so I relied that each team could talk to each other if needed.

Next up is Il’gynoth who has the reputation of being the worst boss in there.. according to two healing friends who have both killed him on Mythic, so it will be interesting to see how we go. After Dragons we had a few pulls on him. We initially tried staggering killing the first 8 blobs (in mythic the damage of blobs dying is huge so you need to stagger their deaths) by killing them in 2 groups but we died on the 2nd attempt of that strat so I suggested we blow up all 8 adds in one go and pop all the healing cooldowns. That worked much better than I was expecting and by the end of the evening we had managed to progress through to wiping at 2nd phase rather than wiping at the start. So hopefully we’ll have him down next week.

It’s bittersweet to know we’re so close to having had this raid cleared on Mythic before Nighthold, if we had just got the extra raiders a few weeks earlier, but at least we’ll be going into Nighthold with a strong team.

Watch this space and fingers crossed for a dead eye boss next week.

And Ursoc makes 3

Tonight was first raid after the Christmas break and we had the full roster of people log on so we headed straight into Mythic EN. We didn’t have the cleanest of starts but we got Nyth and then Elerethe down fairly quickly and went to look at the 3rd boss we had chosen for progression, Ursoc.

I swear I must have been still been in Christmas mode because my ability to stay alive in any fight tonight was ridiculous. Including on both Nyth and Ele which are technically farm bosses (well maybe not Ele as this was only our 2nd kill).

And I was fully responsible for wiping the raid twice in our progression attempts on Ursoc, both when I had focus gaze and Ursoc charged at me. The first time I blinked to the left of the ranged group so the momentum debuff that comes as part of the charge didn’t hit anyone which results in massive raid wide damage, and then the 2nd time when I blinked perfectly behind the range group so they all took the charge.. except I was meant to be behind the melee group as the entire ranged group still had the momentum debuff. I was really cross at myself. Luckily I got focused a third time in our kill and pulled it off perfectly and there was no wipe but then I managed to die for ages in our actual kill attempt, which is a really horrible feeling. Brez came off cd literally at 2% of his health left so at least I was alive for the kill.

I was honestly expecting to spend probably a couple of nights working on him but it ended up being our 3rd mythic kill in a surprisingly short number of attempts.

We 5 healed it with 2 druids, 2 monks and a priest. Having 5 meant we could cover most of the roars and charges with cool downs especially with a 2min cooldown on my tranquility instead of 3min with Inner Peace.  I had asked all the healers to get Angry Assignments for this week as it makes it much easier to put a visual note on everyone’s UI of what order to use their cooldowns in, it also stops me having to call every cd which frees me up from watching timers as much.

We did find that the cds on Roar 3 and 5 were really not needed, even as mana savers, so we stopped using them. I’ll take those notes out for next week. Next raid night is Sunday and we’re going to be down a few so I’m not sure if we’ll be pushing another mythic but I should probably get onto researching healing strats for Dragons and Il’gynoth just in case.

After Ursoc died we went over to Heroic ToV and cleared Odyn and Guarm. Amazingly I stayed alive on Odyn and did good healing numbers but managed to screw my colour up on Guarm and spent most of the kill dead.

Deadline assign a group to a side and then whatever colour comes up first on that side is the colour you go to for the rest of the fight, which means if you have multiple pulls, you can end up taking a different colour each pull. The other guild I’ve been raiding with assigns groups to a colour and you stay in that colour no matter how many times you pull the boss. I like that strat so much better as you know you’re always going to be X colour no matter how many times you pull the boss. It’s just one less thing to think about. Anyway we wiped on Guarm, and on the 2nd attempt, I took the first colour on my assigned side and then completely lost my head and on the second time he breathed out the colours, I went to my previous pull’s colour. Insta death. So I spent the rest of the fight on the floor very very angry with myself.

I’m super happy with the mythic kill because we’re finally killing bosses yay but it was well and truly tainted with my stupid screw ups. Let’s hope next week is a better week.

Rades/Twice who plays as a Demon Hunter now was recording a couple of our kills tonight and uploaded our videos for Elerethe and Ursoc. I never realised until I watched them just how much he zips around the place as a DH. The videos look really good though, it’s awesome seeing the same fight from someone else’s perspective.

 

 

2 new progression bosses, I’ll take that as a Christmas present!

Raiding is going really well, we seem to be setting in with all the new people and getting to know each other. The feel of the raid team is a little different with so many new personalities but so far nothing too jarring so hopefully it keeps going that way. The only thing that is concerning me a little  is that our new tank has a tendency (in my opinion) to sound snappy quickly at times. But this could really just be my perception, I know when dispels don’t go out on Helya fast enough, I can sound snappy which I don’t mean to, so it very could just be the same sort of thing. Other than that he is really good and brings quite helpful strategies and advice to sticking points.

We headed into Heroic ToV first  on Wednesday and cleared through Odyn and Guarm pretty easily. The nerfs don’t feel overly noticeable, but both died really quickly and cleanly compared to a few weeks ago so they are probably helping a fair bit. Both fights are much easier though with larger raid sizes. Then we decided to go look at Helya. We haven’t even attempted her before so can’t say how the nerfs felt but we killed her which was awesome. Even nerfed, the kill wasn’t the cleanest and I was dead through bad placement of where to run my final corruption orb. Kills when you’re dead suck, but a kill is a kill in the end yay.

Then we went over to EN. We actually had to sit a dps to be able to drop down to Mythics. We have about 6 healers now but haven’t had to choose which ones to make go dps or sit as at least 2 have consistently been away since we picked up all the new people. Once all 6 are back on after Christmas, sitting healers is probably something I’m going to have to consider as most fights seem to recommend 4 healers.

Mythic Nythendra dies so easily now, it’s funny to look back at how difficult she was when she’s an easy one shot now. The 2nd boss we went to was Elerethe. We were really close to killing her last week, wiping at about 6% so it only took a couple of pulls for her to die this week. I really like this fight, especially as the damage comes in really predictable places so it’s easy to line healing cooldowns up with.

Completely forgot to get a guild photo of the mythic kill.

The next boss we’re going to look at will be Ursoc but with Christmas and New Years falling on raid nights for the next 2 weeks I’m not sure how much raiding will be done.

I’m not particularly happy with my druid healing at the moment. I really struggle with mana a lot but after having a really good look at my logs from the other night I can see that I’m casting a lot more regrowths than I’m getting clearcasting procs. Like nearly double on Elerethe. I really need to be swapping those non clearcasting regrowths out for rejuvenations or even wild growth. I was looking at the logs at a lot of druids that were healing more than I was for that fight and was surprised by the amount of rejuv’s they as a whole were putting down compared to me and wondering how they had the mana/time, until I started noticing how many hardcast regrowths I’ve been using. I’m also wondering if I really need to be moving efflorescence as much as I do and if more rejuv’s would cover the same amount of healing for less mana on movement heavy fights like Elerethe and Helya particularly.

I really need to play around with my gear a bit more too. The majority of my gear that has haste on it, also has mastery so even in raids I’ve been running a fairly heavy haste/mastery build so I really need to start pulling out more crit gear and see if that helps. If I’m not putting 3-4 hots per person (as what my mastery needs to actually kick in), I need the 1-2 hots they’re getting to have a better crit chance. I think a lot of the crit gear in my bags has versatility on it though so I’ll be dropping slightly in haste and bringing up a not so useful stat which is why I’ve resisted swapping the gear out. I guess only trying it will show if it’s beneficial or not. I really think training myself not to regrowth outside of clearcasting will give me the biggest results though, as I should have more mana to play with.

 

First raid as a Hunter!

The guild alt raid went ahead and I went along on my hunter which was awesome. We had a mix of alts and a couple of people brought their mains for the run and we pulled in a few extra people.  It was a normal run so it wasn’t too difficult, though we had a few wipes at the start getting everyone coordinated. The funny thing was we have too many healers in our main raid but we had to pull in healers from the group finder as none of us rolled a healing alt. I had to keep restraining myself from trying to coordinate the healers as I’m so used to doing that in our main raids. Elandrix normally heals with me on a Holy Priest but came along on a ret pally.

We were really lucky that all the people who joined were pretty friendly and most of them stayed around for the whole time. A couple put Klor on bnet so hopefully they’ll come back next week and I found another druid to talk healing to. They normally raid as feral in their guild so might come back and resto with us as they were a pretty good healer.

We cleared 7/7N and my hunter got a couple of upgrades which were really welcome. I’m not sure if we’re planning on taking our alts through heroics but given we cleared the normal raid pretty easily it’s something we can probably look at.

Being on a hunter was incredibly fun and I probably enjoyed it just as much as healing which is pretty huge as normally I don’t like dpsing. I think I offended Klor by raving about how much easier that raid was as a dps over a healer, because he then spent a lot of time afterwards trying to justify to me about all the things he does in raids that proves he has a very busy and important role. He was tanking on his DH in our al raid which went really well.

I’m not sure if the hunter love will wear off, but for the moment it’s going really strong.

 

 

 

 

 

Thinking about Innervate as a raid cooldown and not a mana saver

I have to admit since I realised that you could self-cast Innervate on yourself I have been operating under the assumption that it gives me a bit of a mana saver and throwing it on myself on long fights on CD. It’s free healing for 10secs and while I can’t usually can’t burst out a ton of healing in 10secs  I can use it to move efflo, cast a wild growth and squeeze in a couple of hard cast regrowths, all of which are fairly mana expensive heals.

But then I read this post over at Raid Advice and I realised that Innervate in a raid setting can be thought about in a whole new light. If it’s placed onto a class that can burst out the heals if they don’t need to be concerned about mana costs, it can actually make a really effective raid cool down.  It’s been playing on my mind so I had a talk with  Elandrix, our holy priest before raid a few days ago and asked him to think about what sort of healing he could do if he had 10 secs to go absolutely crazy in and I decided to try this  the other night on Cenarius.

On Cenarius when the corrupted drakes get to 50% they start a large pulse aoe and it seemed like a good idea to line it up with that. With Innervate on a 2min cd, we used it really early and then again later into the fight. His healing while Innervate was active was  amazing, it was far exceeding what I thought we might get out of it and basically worked as well as, or better than me putting down a proper raid cd like tranq.

We have 3 druids in the raid group, 2 resto’s and a balance druid so that would basically give us 3 Innervates to play with. Looking at the logs though, I can see our other druid self-casts innervate on cd as well, so it may take a bit of discussion to see if he’s happy to pass it out but given the massive spike in Elandrix’s healing, it’s really beneficial and we have a range of other healers that we can try it on in different settings.

I forgot to tell our Raid Leader about my healing strat trial and he got a bit concerned about my constant calls to Elan that I had Innervated him (we’ll work on a weak aura to keep vent more clear of something that can be easily tracked) and started to question Elan’s mana issues until I let him know what we were trying.

I’m really glad I came across that post. Though, now that I want to start playing with Incarnation and the way self-casting Innervate can allow me to cast instant mana-free regrowths while it’s up it, it might be a bit of a juggling act. That’ll all come down to if Tree is actually viable at times or if I’m better sticking with other talents on the same line which alternate between Prosperity + SoTF for the buffed aoe heals  or Cultivation for a  nice extra hot on really damaging fights.

 

Heroic Emerald Nightmare as a Resto Druid – Bosses 1 – 3

We’re progressing through EN at a pretty steady rate, given we only raid 2 night a week and we’re sitting at 5/7H so far. I’m really looking forward to next week when we have two full nights on heroics as last night was our last time in Normal. We delayed starting full time heroic progression so we could all finish the quest handed to us by Malfurion. We’ve been working on Wednesdays as normal clear and as many heroic bosses as we can get through before end of raid and then Sunday has been progression.

Raiding only 2 nights is a bit of a pain because it is only a short time (we raid 7.30pm to 11pm ST) and when we have a few people leave early (not always the same people) it cuts down on our chance to keep going for that last half hour. I think I’d really like to be raiding 3 nights a week but a lot of people can’t make that schedule. Unfortunately there’s also very much a we’re a casual raid team attitude that comes out at times which seems to give people the  leeway to muck around, or take their time on things, or turn up unprepared (food/flasks) which is a little frustrating. We are a casual raid team/guild but it shouldn’t be an excuse to do the above.

The below talent list is more of a reminder for me to remember what talents/gear I take on the fights. I’m well aware that some of the healing talents I’m taking at the moment, aren’t the most recommended but they suit my healing style and resources I have at the moment. Not sure about other druids, but I’m really feeling mana pinched in some of the fights.

Nythendra

This is a relatively easy fight with movement that can be minimized most of the time so Efflo can be used to it’s full potential. I love the dance you can do with Rot patches on the floor when Nyth is in her sleeping phase. They don’t all get pulled into her at the same rate so you can move between the patches and all damage can be avoided if done correctly. Mmost of the damage on this fight is avoidable so it’s a fairly easy healing boss.

Talents

• Cenarian Ward – extra hot. Since I take SoTF, prosperity could be useful here to reduce the cd of Swiftmend by 5secs but I do like the extra hot.
• Displacer Beast – this talent never changes, the mobility is too useful
• Guardian Affinity – nice for the 10% passive damage reduction
• Typhoon – I generally never spec out of this as resto, I use to it push mobs away from me and back towards someone who can take care of killing them
• Soul of the Forest – buffs the next heal with haste
• Spring Blossoms – adds extra healing to anyone healed by my Efflo. In this fight with the limited movement Efflo is down long enough for the extra healing to be of use
• Flourish – timed with a SoTF buffed Wild Growth just about to expire gives a free buffed wild growth.

Ursoc

This is a real movement heavy, aoe damage heavy fight. We’re constantly running around on this fight to either go stand on his butt to help absorb his charge when he sends out Focusing Gaze, or running in to stack for Roaring Cacophony, then running away from Miasma. The movement and the heavy aoe puts my mana under a lot of strain in this fight.

Talents

• Cenarian Ward
• Displacer Beast
• Guardian Affinity
• Typhoon
• Cultivation – puts an extra hot on a person with rejuv when their health drops below 60%. Rejuv on people as barreling impact is about to hit, means this procs on a lot of people
• Inner Peace. We move too often for Efflo to be moved every time or it strains my mana too much and by putting tranq on a 2min timer means it can be used for the heavy damage from barreling impact twice giving us the change to heal with less healers = more dps on Ursoc as he’s a fairly steep dps check. Our healing order for raid cds is:
  • Soak,  Soak, Tranq, Divine Hymn, Aura Mastery, Healing Tide Totem, then  tranq’s up again and can be used to smooth out the last few seconds of the fight.
  • When we have two resto druids we change the order a bit to soak, tranq, soak, tranq, divine hymn, aura mast, tranq, tranq. The extra tranq means this fight is much smoother when Drew is in the raid too.
• Flourish – used to buff all my hots on people as much as possible

Dragons of Nightmare

I really like this fight, the mechanics of not wanting to get 2 sets of dragon debuffs on each person means we split the raid into two distinct groups and keep them more than 40yards apart so it means I’m focusing on a much smaller group. Last night I only had 8 people in my range so it felt much more like dungeon healing then raid healing.

One thing I’ve done is set up Vuhdo to make the Defiled Vines debuff on affected people turn their panel bright red to make it really stand out from other debuffs so I know who is a dispel priority.

Nothing really stood out for me on this fight about needing to change talents for. I have a feeling I might have actually done last night’s fight with Inner Peace because I forgot to change it after Ursoc.

Talents

• Cenarian Ward
• Displacer Beast
• Guardian Affinity
• Typhoon
• Spring Blossoms
• SoTF
• Flourish

That covers the heroic bosses we did last night. I’ll write reminders for me for the rest of the bosses on Sunday night after we do them and I make a choice on what I feel is better for me. Comments are welcome  😀

 

 

Emerald Nightmare – First Night

I have been so excited all week that raids were starting back again this week and last night we finally got to go in and have a look at the Emerald Nightmare for the first time.  The raid itself is perfect for a druid. It’s all druid themed, even if it is corrupted druids, and a really pretty raid. It’s all purples and reds and pinks, a far cry from the fel colours of HFC.

It was great seeing the main core back together (minus a few really missed faces who have either moved to different realms/factions or stopped playing altogether) and there were tons of new (to me, a lot are friends of other raiders who have come and joined us) faces. Raids are always awesome with so many people in the one place. I’ve always said I’m lucky with my guild, everyone is pretty awesome and we mix well, which given the range of personalities that come with such a large group, is a feat in itself.

The healer line up is fairly different from Warlords but luckily for me, Drew who used to heal with me on his priest is still there but  now raiding on his druid! Which is awesome as I have someone to chat Resto Druid secret stuff with.

It’s been ages since I’ve healed with another Resto druid and we look like we’re in a good place healing wise this expac 🙂

We decided to start on Heroic Nythendra to see how the fights would go. It was awesome fighting a dragon again. I really like raids with dragons, and dragons in general, so it’s soo good to have them back as raid bosses.

We originally tried keeping groups together but it turned out relatively messy. As soon as a person got Rot on them, everyone in 8 yards would also take a tick as well, no matter how fast they ran it away,  and the dot stacks on people really quickly started adding up. We spread everyone out around the room and the fight got a lot tidier with less extra dot damage to heal through on people and it meant there was more room to see the exploding bugs that came out during Heart of the Swarm phase.

I really liked this fight and the mechanics were pretty cool  but true to form, the game decided to give me a heroic ring (yay) with perfect stats for a Feral kitty (not so yay). I’m really sensing a theme here, for quite a while my feral spec was higher ilvl than resto with amazing upgrades on agility trinkets and feral relics.

 

Klor took a lot of the photos of our kill shots( thank you!) as I’m still having trouble getting Z’s camera to zoom out far enough. No idea what’s going on there but I’ll have to look into this. Big thanks to my patient guild that lined up after each boss for screenshots. The trials for raiders in a guild with a blogger is real!

After killing her on heroic, we flicked it back to normal to clear through it and see the fights and 850 loot is still an upgrade for pretty much everyone in there.

Once you kill Nythendra you run up a pathway to a section with 4 portals and can choose the order of the next few bosses. We decided to go:

Ursoc

Dragons of the Nightmare

Il’gynoth

Elerethe Renferal

Being first raid night, we were expecting a ton of disconnects and we were right. I was really lucky I was really stable the first boss but it went downhill from there.. By the end of the night I was getting super sick of dcin’g mid-fight and then having to reload as soon as I got in as Vuh-do vanishes on a dc and I need to reload UI to get it back. The dc’s meant there was a lot of non-healing time for me /sigh. Let’s hope Sunday is a smoother night.

Being 1/7H and 5/7N on the first night of raiding even with the constant dc’s is pretty awesome, hopefully we keep going well throughout the rest of this raid tier:)

Seriously, how pretty is the scenery, even trash fights are gorgeous! 

I’m pretty sure Klor was having daydreams of getting to tame another Dinosaur when we came across this little cutie.

All up, it was a great night and I can’t wait until Sunday to go back and clear normal and start on heroic’s. Fingers crossed we’ll end up raiding mythically this expac as well. I’ve already decided I’m not going to pull Z out of Deadline to go chase mythic like I did in the lull last expac, but it would be nice to challenge ourselves and work on the higher level.