Mythic Gul’dan makes 10!

I went in with the new guild last night for a re-clear of Nighthold and stayed in for the Gul’dan fight. Even though I had seen up to the last part of Phase 2 before, I was still so terrified I’d really screw something up and be asked to sit. It ended up being no where near as bad as I was thinking, P1 and P2 were exactly as I had seen and P3 ended up being a lot easier than I thought.

It was an awesome feeling to finally get the goal I was determined to get but bittersweet in a way because it almost feels like I didn’t earn this as this wasn’t the team I progressed through all the other bosses with. I’m so incredibly glad I did get the kill and the Cutting Edge achievement on him though after spending so long working my way through all the bosses. I’ve seen a whole lot of Nighthold across the 4 different levels of difficulty:

• 46 Skorpyron Kills
• 43 Chromomatic Anomaly Kills
• 41 Trilliax Kills
• 42 Spellblade Aluriel Kills
• 40 Tichondrius Kills
• 39 Krosus Kills
• 38 High Botanist Kills
• 33 Star Augur Kills
• 37 Grand Magistrix Elisande Kills
• 16 Guldan Kills

Those numbers equal a hell of a lot of time spent inside the one place. It helps that Nighthold is so incredibly beautiful so it’s a great place to spend many hours.

Killing Gul’dan marks the end of this tier and it took 3 raid teams and 2 factions to get here but now with 2 weeks before Tomb comes out, it gives me a bit of time to enjoy not being in Nighthold as much and time to start looking at the next set of fights.

I’m really excited to see Tomb next but I really wonder where I’ll be by the end of the next tier. My new guild seems quite nice but it hasn’t grabbed me the way both Deadline and Misanthropy did right from the very start so who knows what the future brings. Hopefully a whole lot more raiding though.

 

Moving onto M Elisande

It feels like forever since I’ve blogged (it’s only been 5 days, but you know.. Forever).

We started Mythic Elisande last night. The raid team got Star down last week but there was a healer change at the last-minute on the 3rd night of progression, going with a priest/pally/druid combo rather than pally/druid/druid. We got it to 1% with me in there on the 2nd night of prog so it wasn’t a healing issue but we had a new pally come in and the priest had been sitting out the other nights so there was quite a bit of healing team shake up. At least he died and we’ve only got 2 bosses to go now and 7 weeks to do it!

I was the most worried about the rings on Elisande because in mythic, once they come in, they swirl outwards again and you have 2 sets to dodge. I spent a lot of time watching kill videos over the weekend and found that most of the people I was watching play with their camera in a really top down view. It’s not how I usually play, (though on Star I needed to a bit), but top down really does make seeing the gaps in the rings much easier and dodging them didn’t end up being too much of an issue. By the end of the night we were getting consistently into the 2nd phase so hopefully it won’t take too long for us to learn that bit and start getting into 3.

Starting this fight is just shades of Star fight and the crappy camera view all over again as we stack hard up against the wall to bait the first Spanning Singularity pool of goo out of the way.

I did manage to pick up  tier legs from our last run through heroic (thank goodness for so many druids in our raid as our tank didn’t need the ones he looted) so I could  equip my ‘selfish’ legendary chest without losing my 4 set bonus.  Ekowraith buffs both my passive (mostly self) healing and the damage reduction that comes from Guardian Affinity by 75% which is helpful for learning the fight but does nothing for boosting my healing, so it will get swapped back to a proper legendary as we get closer to phase 3 and a potential kill.

I spend a lot of time looking at logs and so many of the druids ranking above me on fights are running the Aman’thul shoulders/Velen’s trinket combo. After looting my 8th resto legendary on the weekend, that just leaves Aman’thuls and Velen’s to drop for me.  It’s rather ironic that the last 2 are the only 2 I really want, especially the healing trinket.  Naz (the other resto I heal with) also doesn’t have it so we console each other each time we see yet another alt in the guild loot it, even my bloody priest alt has Velens! It was just on 2 weeks between looting my 7th and 8th, so I’m hoping that it won’t be too long before these last 2 turn up, so I can test them out and see if they are as good as they appear together.

The other perk of when I get the last 2 resto legendaries mean that I can turn my loot spec to boomy for the first time in nearly 8 months and I can also start taking my priest alt along to our heroic farm nights/weekend older raid AP runs.  I do everything on Z I can to keep her legendary chance ticking along, which means I won’t get on an alt if I don’t have to.  Same goes for AP, once I hit Concordance of the Legion, it’s all going to get pumped into my boomy weapon and/or I can take the time to play more on another toon.  Blizz have done a really good job of making alts a really tough decision to play in this expansion.

Having said that though, I did spend time on my priest over the last few days and got her enough order hall resources to finally let her equip her second legendary and pick up a bit more gear (invasions + nethershards =win). She’s still going to need a bit more work before Tomb as her ilvl is sitting around 882 which is going to be too low if I do want to use her for alt/split runs.

More raiding tonight so we’ll see how our second night of prog goes.

 

 

Mythic Tichondrius makes 7/10! Resto Druid perspective.

Mythic Tich officially took over from Spellblade as my favourite fight so far. It’s a much more fun fight and I really think way easier (from a healing perspective anyway) than Spellblade. I don’t know why he isn’t earlier in the list of bosses to kill. We ended up killing him on our second night of progression on him and with about 20 less attempts than on Spellblade. He does have a couple of one shot mechanics which I guess make him mechanically more difficult because you can’t muck them up.

From my point of view there really weren’t any huge changes from heroic to mythic. We decided to hold onto our brand circles rather than pop them to avoid the massive raid damage and green pools of bad they drop and this made that mechanic easy. We had a lot of ranged though so there were points where we could have easily blown them up by overlapping so it did mean you had to be really aware of where you were standing compared to other people. It got a bit juggly in the  part where we had to hide behind the pillars as we had 5 people behind each pillar which is the amount of people needed to stack to pop the circles, so we had to be really careful we weren’t all tightly stacked on each other but spread out in a line behind it.

The only really scary place was in the night phase when the bats come out and they drop orbs which you need to run over to pick up and which give you a debuff. The debuff is actually more like a buff because it gives you huge mana regen and damage bonus. The tricky thing is, if you don’t have that debuff when the phase ends you die instantly. It meant that our dps had to be really quick about killing enough bats to drop enough orbs so we could all find and pick up one.  This was where I ended up tranqing because we had a few brands pop as we were all jostling to get our orb of death prevention.  We ended up getting much smoother at this part by having all the melee clear right out once they killed the bats and picked up their buffs so ranged could get in.  I set vuhdo to turn bright red once a person got their debuff and there were heaps of heart stopping moments where the phase would be about to end and there’d still be a ton of people not red on vuhdo. It was the best feeling once everyone turned red as I knew we’d come out with enough ppl left for the next phase.

Mana was awesome for the first and second phases because I could blow all my mana and then get pretty much all of it back with the bat orbs. It was only in the 3^rd phase where the healer only debuff went out and the big add came up that mana got really tight. On the kill, I was watching innervate like a hawk, willing it come up early because I was running on fumes. We did have 2 healers down coming out of the final bat phase so I think if they were up, mana would be pretty much a non-issue for that final part too.

By not popping brands, most of the damage was really only concentrated on the few people who had carrion plague, and especially the people who were soaking the seeker swarm. We alternated our tank with our rogues and DH’s as they could immune and live through the massive hit but still ended up with huge ticking damage on them. I swapped to Germination so I could double rejuv, especially as I was only concentrating on a few people at a time and there really wasn’t enough raid damage going out regularly enough to need a shorter tranq anyway.

I really need to level up my enchanter and JC because I ended up buying a ton of gems and enchants and mastery food mats before the raid to swap my stats around to a heavier mastery/vers build for this fight, and then replacements to put me back to a crit/haste build after (We re-killed spell after Tich so I didn’t have to change back straight away as she favours a germination build too). But I don’t want to be doing that each week.  I was over the moon that  I won tier shoulders off him and they warforged to 910. I have been incredibly lucky with mythic pieces war/titan forging and it’s so exciting.

Naz was recording our kill which is so good to go back and watch because there’s so much of the fight I don’t really see because I’m focusing pretty much on my bars and watching the immediate people around me.

So now we have 3 bosses to go and really tight timeframe to get them down before Tomb releases. It’s been a prog boss a week for the last month, wonder if we can keep that up.

 

 

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.

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.

Skorpyron.. our first Mythic Nighthold kill

I was really nervously watching the guild numbers tonight just before raid time and had my fingers crossed that we would have 20 log on. Luckily we did and then the next finger crossing was that we’d actually look at mythic before going to heroic. It’s probably no secret in my guild that I’m rather impatient to be working on mythic bosses, so I was utterly delighted that we did end up turning it to mythic and going to look at Skorpyron. And I’m so glad we did because he died! So now we’re 1/10M and I’m a very happy raider at the moment.

He is a much more interesting fight on Mythic;  instead of just one type of crystals that fall off him that you use to hide behind for shockwave, there are 3 different ones. Blue which act the same as in normal, green which do ticking damage to the raid and red which pulse and do aoe damage if you get within 5yards and which do large amounts of aoe to anyone in 15yards when the crystals are hit by shockwave.  There’s also an extra type of add that drops green goo pools on the ground. And the tether that the tanks have to deal with lasts longer so they have to dance around that more.

Despite the differences, he really wasn’t that much harder and we downed him fairly quickly. I was hoping that we’d go look at mythic Chronronmatic (of course I’d be hoping that) but other raiders were really worried we’d not clear heroic this week so we turned it to heroic and cleared up to Elisande. On Sunday we have the last 2 bosses in Heroic and then, fingers crossed depending on how many log on, some time on Chron.

Hopefully, everyone will actually look at what needs to be done on Chron. I was pretty surprised (and annoyed) that some people hadn’t looked at Skorpyron’s changes given we knew we’d be at him at least sometime this week. It’s the little things like not looking at boss fights that make me wonder if everyone’s priorities are all on the same page when it comes to raiding. Skorpy was obviously easy but moving forward they’re not going to be that easy and since we only raid 2 nights a week, people need to know what they are doing before they step into the raid so time doesn’t have to be wasted explaining fights. Hopefully that attitude changes as we go forward and people do the preparation.

I’m starting to sound like a negative nancy sometimes about my guild’s raiding mentality and it’s driving me nuts, I should just put the negatively aside and be super glad of our first mythic kill, which I am! But now I want the second one.

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.

Well it was a week of being busy in both WoW and the Blizz universe. I went and did 15 games in Heroes of the Storm with Wingy for the Primal Flamesaber. I really don’t mind Heroes of the Storm as a game, though even at level 30 I still don’t feel confident  enough to want to play with real people, so I was really glad that we just did our matches against the AI.

And I dug and dug and dug and got a beautiful new archeology mount. I really like spectral models and this one is no exception, he is just so gorgeous.

I finally finished the Balance of Power questline. I was wondering why everyone in the raid group was getting their achievements and I wasn’t until I realised that one of the quests in my quest log that  I had been ignoring for weeks was from the quest chain.

The achievement unlocks some really lovely skins for the artifact weapons.

Resto

Balance

Guardian

Feral

I can’t wait until I get the skin for doing 100 dgns with a hidden appearance and then I can start using the Balance of Power skin for Resto. The colourway I like the most comes from doing a mythic 15 in time but it’s blue and finding a transmog to match it might be a bit tricky because I don’t have any blue dresses for a leather wearer.

There was a world quest in mythic COS at the same time that the emissaries were for Nightfallen so Twice and I popped in there to make it count as one of the emissary quests,  and we randomly got an achievement for overhearing the conversation between Elisande and the final boss. I don’t know why I’m only getting it now, I’ve done that dgn so many times. But it’s one achievement off the list of dgn ones for Legion hero so I don’t mind. Now that we can duo mythic dgns, hopefully we can finish some achievements off and work towards the mount.

Twice’s comment relates to his glaives – I really really like that appearance but he’s telling me they come from the balance of power questline. I doubt my DH will be in Nighthold anytime soon so probably won’t get them.

My Demon Hunter hit 110 with a full week of February to go!

Now I have to choose a new class to level, I think it might be the Mage for March.

The love dgn run has been fantastic for catching up with friends quickly. I jumped into a few queues with Cinder the other night when she logged onto some horde characters. Another year down and no mount but there’s always next year!

Twice created a new video for Nighthold:The Movie.  It’s such a beautiful raid, I love watching his videos  because I get to see so much that I miss during the actual fights. I am so blown away by  the Star Augur fight! I honestly have never looked out of his platform before watching the video tonight, so the 3 different planets we go and visit were brand new to me.

I can’t get over the planet taken over by the old gods and covered in void tendrils. Imagine if we could go see a world like that. And now, the fight also makes a lot of sense why we go through different phases, they line up with the 3 different planets we visit.

Seriously though this raid has got to be the most beautiful one in the game and Twice has taken some gorgeous shots of it. Well worth watching 🙂

And that was my random week in WoW. How was yours?

Moving through Nighthold, Elisande makes 9/10.

We walked in tonight straight onto Elisande and  we managed to get her down on the 2nd attempt. It was awesome to get her down so easily, I think a few of us were concerned we’d be on her for a while. A great upside of her dying early meant it would give us a lot of time to work on Gul’dan.

Her fight is really interesting but so damn chaotic, running around dodging rings of death and swirls of doom on the floor and popping in and out of bubbles. I ended up making a button bar that has just Bear form, frenzied regeneration and ironbark on it. I put it up next to Vuhdo, since my mouse is there, because I’m clicking those abilities. Having Guardian affinity for that fight was really handy because if I stuffed up dodging the ring of orbs, I could drop into bear and pop frenzied and it would heal me up for a decent chunk of the damage I had just taken.

We then spent the rest of the night on Gul’dan and our best and last attempt of the night had him at 13%  so fairly decent progression on him in one night but I was so hoping we would get him down. An extra raid night was put on the calender for tomorrow night to see if we can gather enough people to go back and have another look at him again before the lock expires but I don’t know if there will be enough interest.

After coming along with us via cross-realm for a couple of weeks, Neuro properly realm changed and rejoined our guild. It’s really great having Neuro back raiding with us. But it’s bittersweet under the circumstances he’s rejoined (Neuro’s friend/raid leader passed away and while the guild is moving forward, I guess for Neuro the feel without him is too different) and I know he’s probably missed back in Frostwolves. I’m trying to be cognizant of the reasons he’s back and not get too excited about how good it is in case I make him sad. But I love having him back, and I get to talk druid chatter to him as well which is especially great now that Drew has decided that Final Fantasy is more interesting and I lost my druid healing buddy.

Fingers crossed next week will see a full clear of Heroic NH but I’m not 100% sure if there is the same level of interest for moving into mythics across the whole raid team so that’s possibly going to have to be a bridge we cross when we get there. After the difficulty we had finding 20 for Emerald Nightmare, losing people now because of lack of interest is going to suck big time.  First though, Gul’dan has to fall over.

 

Tier Bonus or Upgrade or BIS.. where should the loot priority lie?

We’re 8/10 now with Star Augur falling down on Sunday (I forgot to blog), so only Elisande and Gul’dan remain for us to kill for a heroic clear. 

This week we reached up to Elisande on the first night of raiding for the week and in the 3 attempts we had on her before end of raid, we got her into 3rd phase so hopefully with a full night on her on Sunday we’ll kill her and be onto Gul’dan soon.

The further we go into Nighthold and the more tier that drops the more I wonder what is the best way to share out loot. Passing out loot is such a balancing act, you want what is the most fairest to everyone while at the same time ensuring pieces go to where they provide the biggest upgrade which should result in the most improvement for the good of the team. It’s really a balancing act between needs of the many vs the needs of the individual.

We’re currently running loot council in our raid team which as a system I don’t really like. It’s not that it’s more inherently flawed than any other system, all distribution systems have their pros and cons, but it’s certainly a more time consuming system as so many factors in who gets what loot needs to be considered, so it’s not a simple case of highest /roll wins and move on to the next boss. I often find myself really undecided on where to put my vote. As we move further into Nighthold I’ve been considering what you need to take into account when trying to pass out tier.

At the moment we have a mixture of people who are doing extra raid nights and regularly clearing normal and then you have others that haven’t killed Gul’dan yet so that means there’s a bit of a disparity between those who are pushing towards 2/4 sets  and those who are still lacking sets because they just aren’t in the content as often.

So how do you prioritize gear when you have a situation like that? Do you base it solely on bonuses and pass out tier to people who will be reaching their set markers of 2/4 regardless of how that tier is made up or do you look at ilvl; i.e the piece is an upgrade even though you could be replacing normal tier with a heroic tier but not be getting any new bonus. Which is more important – passing tier to people where the new piece will complete a set or where the piece is an upgrade despite what it gives them in terms of set bonuses.

Can you simply focus on the idea that 2/4 set bonus is always going to be stronger than a simple upgrade. Is it always stronger?

My 4 set bonus is pretty situational, it looks good on paper; each time rejuv heals it has a 1.5% chance to jump to a new target at full health… but in many fights it could just be a pure wasted heal. You can’t control who it jumps to and there’s a very good chance it may just overwrite an existing rejuv or go on a full health person.  So to me getting the 4th set isn’t as relevant as making sure the pieces I do have are the upgrades I’m not going to be swapping out until mythics. However, you have classes like Demon Hunter’s where their 4 set is incredibly strong and something that should be aimed for getting towards asap.

So to properly hand out tier if the focus is getting as many people their set bonuses, do you need to have a detailed understanding on which classes have very strong bonuses and which ones aren’t and you can then prioritize new sets to the strong?   And then, on top of all that, do you need to have an idea if the token a person is rolling on is for their optimal tier set. There are 6 possible tier slots but you only need 4 pieces, so are they going to be using that piece until the next ilvl of tier drops or is it an off-piece they are simply wanting to build their 2/4 set as fast as possible and then will be swapping out for a different tier piece when something better comes along. Should loot even be micromanaged down to that level or should a more laissez-faire attitude reign with the emphasis solely on building sets?