Mythic Elisande down! 9/10M Squee

We killed Mythic Elisande last night on our 3rd prog night, making her even faster than Star Augur. It did help that there were a few changes to her health and mechanics the 2nd night we were on her. Clipping a ring went from being an definite death to something that might not kill you if you had enough health and we were quick to top that person back up.  

I was dreading this fight at the start but it ended up not being too bad at all. The changes to the mythic version felt almost minimal, especially compared to the changes Star had. However dps had a few extra things to look out for – killing the adds at the right time and interrupting a lot more; you’d notice pretty quickly if interrupts didn’t happen as damage would skyrocket. Dodging the 2nd set of rings wasn’t as bad as I was expecting and it turned into a smooth little dance; we’d run either to the right or left of the blue slow time orb into the gap and then spin around to face to boss again and pick the gap as the rings spun back out. As spanning singularity targeted a random ranged/heals, we needed to go stand on the edge of the wall right before singularity came out to make sure it dropped there and out of of the way. That was actually a much easier change to just having it drop anywhere as we didn’t need to move around it during the fight.

I really wanted to take spring blossoms on this fight as we were pretty much stacked on top of each other for most of the fight and the talent would have been awesome, but I found a 2min tranq lined up better for me with the Delphuric beams in P2 and P3. There was one refresh of the haste buff,  that speeds up my cooldown timers, I missed  a few times because it expired not long after a ring came out and sometimes I was too far away depending on the path I took to dodge back through the incoming rings.  I think if I made sure I refreshed my haste buff each time, I could probably have gone to spring blossoms as the remaining CD on tranq when the beams came out in p3 was only about 20 secs or so.

I am incredibly glad that we were able to 4 heal this fight because when I was researching it, a lot of guides were still suggesting that you could take 3 heals. It annoys me no end the lack of consistency between fights, because when fights are tuned so tight around a dps check, it can be easier to drop a healer to skip a damaging mechanic and bring in an extra dps. Obviously the easier answer is to make sure your healers can dps as well as a dedicated dpser but I don’t think there’s anyone in our healing team that could pull equivalent dps numbers; I know I couldn’t. And while I’m super excited to be standing in front of Gul’dan now, because of the mechanics being so punishing to ranged dps, we’re in the same predicament now of sitting one of the ranged for an extra melee. We’ll all eventually get the kills we’re missing and it’s part of mythic raiding to be pulling in the classes/roles you need but it’s still a little frustrating. It would be nice to be able to take the same amount of roles from start to finish.

Gul’dan’s fight looks freaking chaotic and insane but we have about 6 weeks until Tomb comes out, so we have a fairly good shot at getting him down in time. We spent the rest of last night, after Elisande, on him and were starting to get a bit of a grip on P1. It was originally a 16 min fight but the recent changes that were made to him too, have brought it down to around an 11 min fight. Learning the different phases is going to be quite the journey. I am so freaking excited about this!

Today is exactly 2 months since I joined Misanthropy. If you had told me 2 months ago that I would be progressing on Mythic Gul’dan while it was still current, I wouldn’t have believed you. And the best part.. not only is the raiding great, I really like the guild too, I’m so lucky to have found awesome people to be doing this with.

Fingers crossed for us.

 

 

 

 

Cathedral of the Eternal Night Achievements

Cathedral of the Eternal Night  is the new dungeon that came out with Patch 7.2 today and you can’t queue or walk into it until you  have unlocked the Broken Shore world quests and completed all 4 world quests that were initially up and then you get a quest to go in and kill the last boss.

After raid tonight a few of us decided to go in and complete the 3 achievements that are in there on mythic difficulty. There were no guides on wowhead so we had to work out the achievements ourselves. It was a really fun run as we ended up taking Naz and I, and we both decided to stay in resto spec, Impurityx and Rix as bear tanks, and Overpowered came on his DK. It actually worked out really well having Naz and I both healing because we had to drag the fights out while we worked out the achs and having 5 people with brez’s was just awesome.

The first achievement is Boom Bloom, where you have to defeat Agronox after fulminating 4 budding flowers in the Cathedral of Eternal Night on Mythic difficulty. We worked out there were small budding blooms around the room and when we were targeted by the fulminating lashers, we had to run on the budd and let the lasher detonate on you. It was actually a crap ton of damage that the explosions put out. We messed it up the first time and just had the lasher detonate on the actual flowers that were around. Luckily we could run out after we finished the other 2 and reset it for another try.

The second achievement was the most fun and it was a Steamy Romance Saga. The ach here is to defeat Thrashbite the Scornful after all party members have read the entire Steamy Romance saga. There were 4 bookcases around the bosses room and he randomly chooses a person to charge. That person needs to hide behind the bookcase so the bosses charge destroys the bookcase and one of the 4 novels needed to be read will fall to the ground. They’re numbered 1 to 4 and every party member has to all read them in order to get the totally tantalized buff and then you can kill the boss.

The last achievement was to defeat Mephistroth, the end boss, after blocking 20 Shadow Blasts with the Aegis of Aggramar on Mythic difficulty.  Rix took the shield here and intercepted 20 of the shadow balls the boss threw out from random places around the room.  

Because we ran through it so quickly with the main aim of being in there to work out the achievements, I really didn’t take any time to look around the dungeon. I can’t wait to go back in there and just sightsee because from what I did see, it looked really awesome.

Random Tuesday Mutterings

Random Tuesday Mutterings is the perfect place to put the random assortment of what-nots I’ve got up to in Azeroth each week.

I’m rather excited that 7.2 is out tomorrow. I’m planning on going to bed early tonight so I can jump up early and do the scenario and initial quests before work. I feel a bit unprepared in knowing exactly what I should be doing in 7.2 but I’ve completed the pathfinder ach, have all the reps at exalted and have been stockpiling order hall resources on Z for quite a few weeks now to be able to use for the new order hall advancements that are coming. So we’ll see what happens.

This week I  finally finished my Shaman order hall campaign. I’m still disappointed there’s no more achievements after finishing 5.

I was stuck for ages looking for the last Blood of Sargeras to hand in for the last order hall quest.. only to find that while the quest text says you need 10, the hand in amount to the quest guy was only 5. I feel that updating the quest text would have been a nice addition to a hotfix sometime in the last 5 months!

She also got flicked to Resto to head off and do some dgns as I had a few quests in there and I got seriously sick of waiting for dps queues. I think I’ll stick with her as resto now and start dropping the rest of the AP she gathers into the healing weapon. I really love the restoration weapon, the shield with the waterball is just gorgeous.

Hell affix week turned out to not be quite so hellish as you only needed to do a mythic plus 10 not a 15, to obtain 905 gear from the weekly order hall chest, due to the transition between 7.1 and 7.2 tomorrow. So both my Druid and my priest went off to complete their 10. My priest in particular was incredibly lucky this week, getting a ton of achievements and getting a pair of 910 gloves out of the weekly bonus cache and then picking up 2 legendaries only a few days apart.

Huge thanks to E, Dys, Gimme and Juls who came along with me to my 10 depleted Vault just so I could get the achievement before the level of the mythic increase tomorrow. Utterly cheating I know.

I nearly cried when the first legendary she got was the Velens trinket, because I’ve wanted that on Z for ages. The second was a belt which apparently is quite useless but as I can’t equip 2 legendaries anyway it doesn’t really matter and when I can, I’ll be replacing an 850 belt with a 940 so not a complete loss.

Z hit Prestige level 1 and got a little pet out of it which was awesome. Now I’m on a prestige hunting phase and spending a bit of time ducking in and out of battlegrounds.

But omg queuing bgs on my own makes me sooo  cranky. I was healing a demon hunter who had the flag, in the flag room of Warsong Gulch in one of my bgs and he had 4 chances to cap the flag and he didn’t cap even once and we lost the match. I was pretty much shouting at my screen the entire time. I’m sure he must have been an alliance queuing with the buff to make him look like a horde.

And I found out that my new guild records their kills on our fights too. Naz linked our Spellblade kill to me with comments about how excited I sounded at the end ;p

See you all in 7.2 tomorrow!

Mythic Spellblade deaded

After the guild got Krosus down last week, Spellblade was the next boss up in progression. We started a fresh raid on Wed and cleared the first 3 and then we tried to get Krosus down but our priest was away so we were healing with 2 druids and a pally and there just wasn’t enough direct heals with the two of us druids so we decided to go to Spellblade and start progression,  instead of beating our heads against Krosus. We were managing to consistently get to the end of the 2nd phase on the first night. Then Thursday night was a heroic clear so we didn’t go back to Spellblade.

Fast-forward to tonight and it was a whole night on Spellblade. We got to a heartbreaking 0.4% wipe, then a bunch of terrible early phase wipes, then a 2.7% wipe and then we had the last attempt where it all came together and her health was inching down with a ton of people still alive and then she was dead. For pretty much the entire last 10% of her health I had the absolute jitters.

Out of all the bosses I’ve seen so far, Spellblade is my favourite fight. It’s a glorious juggling act of making sure the right 8 people get and keep the mark of frost between themselves, drop the pools of frost and fire in the right places and then dodge the balls. It was probably the most intense healing fight I’ve done in a really long while too. The sheer amount of damage that goes out with high stacks of mark was phenomenal. I absolutely love guardian affinity here for the frenzied regen healing.

And to make the night even better, I was made core raider at the end of tonight which was really exciting. I was hoping I was going ok, but each time my healing would be lower or I’d die on a mechanic I was sure I’d get the “thanks but you’re not what we’re looking for’ talk. But nope, I got in. This I’m really excited about.

Tomorrow night we start on Tichondrius. We probably won’t be getting Gul’dan down before Tomb comes out but hopefully we’ll get a bit closer. So far for the last 3 weeks there’s been a progression boss die each week so that’s a really good start.

My god, I love raiding and I’m really excited I’m at 5/10M (6/10 when I get to go in on Krosus). I’m so glad I took a chance and came to try this guild out. Thanks to all the lovely people who listened to me ruminate over what to do.

14 Boss night!

Last night was first night of raid after the reset, and marked the start of my 2nd week in the new guild. Neuro and I were talking to the Naz the GM about trial periods and he said they were typically for 3 weeks and we’d be told what we need to improve on if needed. So far, I’ve only received good feedback on my healing and not told to step up with anything, so I hope that means I’m going ok.  My healing’s fairly competitive with the other 3 healers, normally I sit 2 or 3rd on the meters out of the 4 of us though there are fights I’m last. Usually these are the fights where I’ve only used my tranq once compared to the others using their cds twice so I don’t feel I’m struggling healingwise.

I’m starting to feel more comfortable in the guild and learning voices so I know who is talking on discord without having to look at their name, but outside of running a mythic plus with some of the guildies, I haven’t really talked much to anyone apart from Naz. Once I feel familiar with people I don’t generally shut up but getting to that point takes time.

Naz had been talking about selling our heroic run this week to get gold into the guild for cauldrons and repairs. He decided to offer each spot at an amount of gold which I thought was ridiculously astronomical for a heroic run so I really didn’t think anyone would want to pay that for a raid but come last night he had 4 people in the run that had taken up the offer.

We cleared the first 2 and the last 2 bosses with only the main team so we could run master looter as there was a few specific trinkets people needed and then we pulled in the buyers and re-cleared the entire place on personal loot so they could get gear as well as the clear. 3 of the 4 seemed really new to the place and died relatively early on most fights  (or were asked to sacrifice themselves early on bosses that had mechanics that could wipe the raid  if not done well). The 4th did really well and was essentially as the same gear level as most of us which was interesting. I haven’t considered the idea of buying a run before, especially with the introduction of cross-realm group finder, getting into normal and heroic runs are quite easy now but I guess there are people who find this a viable option?

Even with the extra bodies, it was still a fairly quick run and awesome that we could clear 14 heroic bosses in one raid night (4 before and then the full 10). I managed to get two small upgrades; Neuro picked up tier shoulders, which were an upgrade from the ones I had on and as he didn’t need them, really nicely passed them over and I bonus rolled a relic from Botanist which was a small upgrade as well.  I’m really not that happy with the relics I have so they’re my biggest priority for upgrades at the moment.

We’re going into mythic prog tonight so fingers crossed that Chron and Trill both hand over relics and then hopefully Krosus will die tonight. There’s a new warlock trial in the guild and his damage last night was really good, so hopefully 3 healing and with his damage should mean enrage timer isn’t hit again.

And in really good news, Deadline has found a guild that they can potentially merge with and keep raiding. After Neuro and I left,  a couple more raiders said mythic wasn’t their thing and decided not to keep raiding and the GM decided he wanted a long-term break and wouldn’t be coming back either. I was feeling a bit disappointed they were having even worse roster troubles and facing a leadership problem but hopefully this will work out great and they can all kill bosses still mostly together.

So everyone keep your fingers crossed that I can say we’re one more prog boss up tomorrow. If not, I’m sure I’ll find something else to ramble about.

 

 

 

Mythic Botanist down!

I’ve been with the new guild for a couple of days now and so far they seem quite nice. Pretty noisy on discord which is fine and usually has me laughing a lot behind the scenes.  Outside of raid I haven’t really done much with them apart from running the timewalking dgns with one of druids from the raid team (there are 7 of us! 2 guardians, 2 resto, 2 balance and a feral!) which was a good introduction so at least at our first raid night I already knew one of the guildies a bit.

The first raid night on Wed we started mythics straight away and I was in for the kills on Skorpy and Chron (yay new ach) and then I sat for Trill as we were dropping a healer for Botanist progression (we had been 5 healing Chron) so they had me sit out so the healer that was sitting had a chance to raid for a bit as they wouldn’t be coming back in for the rest of the night.

They had Chron on farm for quite a few weeks now so I felt like it was pretty much a carry though my tranqs were needed during power overwhelming.  They have the raid set up so if you’re moved into group 5, you’re sitting for that fight. I might need to make vuhdo hide group 5 because it changes the size and direction of my panels once there’s more than 4 groups and it’s distracting having it show a group that isn’t actually in the raid.

We spent the rest of Wed night on Mythic Bot. Botanist was interesting, it’s a freaking chaotic fight at the best of times and mythic version just gets worse. You start with all 3 bosses up and when one dies, the other 2 reset to full health and the abilities that boss had is combined into the other 2 bosses abilities.

The team pretty much had P1 and P2 under control so for them the real progression was on P3 but for me, P2 onwards was completely different (P1 is the same as P3 on Heroic, just hits harder). I picked up the changes for P2 pretty quickly though a few times I touched a spore and got the debuff and got called out for it. You can bet that not touching spores became a huge priority! (as the night went on I realised I wasn’t the only one that was getting called out for it but I didn’t want to hear my name on vent for that reason again). P3 scared the hell out of me because if you get the call of night debuff you have to go kill yourself on the spores in a specific spot and I was so nervous about being in the right spot at the right time.

I felt like the biggest idiot when on one of our best attempts I dispelled the wrong tank and we wiped. I immediately apologised and the healing lead said it was fine, they had all had a lot of wipes/practice compared to that being my first night. After that a specific healer was assigned to dispel as they knew the voices. I had discord sitting open on my other monitor so when ppl spoke I could match voices to names but not everyone has the same discord name as their toon so it’s going to be a guessing game for a bit.

We didn’t end up getting him Wed night so on Thursday after clearing through a few heroic bosses we went back to Botanist progression. We were consistently getting through to P3 which was great and then we had an attempt where everything went really smoothly.

There’s so much to look out for; make sure you’re standing at the right marker with a person if you have call, avoid all the crap on the floor, stand next to spores but don’t touch them and I think for most of the attempts I was holding my breath. I ended up getting the first set of call of night debuff on the  kill attempt which meant I had to go kill myself in a patch of spores to avoid triggering a mechanic and to clear spores so it was great in a way that meant I could watch the fight but crap because being dead for so long I look terrible on the healer meters (I’m so competitive /sigh) but it was sooo exciting seeing his health just steadily dropping and then the ach come up.

I ended up bonus rolling mythic titanforged boots which were a massive 20ilvl upgrade! It’s exciting to have my first piece of mythic loot.

I asked if the guild takes screenshots after kills which they do, but rather than the line up I’m used to they tend to pop toys for the photos.

I love all the green bears! The two tanks are Guardian and both use the artifact skin that turns them bright colours. One is neon purple and the other is neon green so it’s very easy to pick them out in the middle of a fight.

Next boss up in the progression chain is Krosus and I’m fairly sure we’re only going to be 3 healing so a good chance I’ll be sitting, but I still better have my head around that fight by Sunday and then after that it will Spellblade. Most of the guilds on our realm that are 4/10M have killed Krosus as their 4th. Hopefully by killing Botanist which is harder,  it means Krosus should die quicker which would be a big boost to the guild.

All I hope now is that I actually make it through my trial and keep being a mythic raider because it’s an awesome feeling and I’ve really missed it.