A Violet Spellwing for me!

I honestly have amazing WoW friends.

Since I started playing WoW again, one of my friends from my old Deadline guild, Kublas has been talking about getting me in one on of his heroic Antorus runs so I could get the Argus quest mount before it goes away in BFA.

He and quite a few of my friends from Deadline are still raiding together and are going well; up to Mythic Argus so heroic is on farm for them now but I didn’t expect to pulled in, my little priest in his guild is only absolutely tiny at only 918 ilvl  with no experience in Antorous.  But  Kub’s guild pulled me in tonight and utterly carried me so I got the achievement for ahead of the curve and the really really pretty Violet Spellwing.

What an awesome surprise! I really am lucky with lovely friends in WoW.

Black Temple the Time Walking Way

My guild went into Black Temple last night as a group to run through it.It was a fun way to spend a Friday night. I even dressed Zee up in clothes from the era.  I didn’t plan too far ahead so actually had no idea what bits and pieces I had in my appearance tab were pre-Black Temple so I threw on a PvP set I love and the staff from Nightbane in Kara. Maybe not chronologically correct but at least from that expansion.. it’s the thought that counts right?

I’d heard heaps of comments about crappy lock outs and fights that were pretty hard but it was hot-fixed before we went in there so we didn’t have to worry about the lockout bit, though I wasn’t sure what the fights were going to be like. Post hot-fix the fights seemed to be a little under tuned to be honest. I was sort of expecting it to be rather current raid like in difficulty and it really wasn’t. We did have 3-4 healers for just under 20 people but really most of time it was the trash mobs that hit harder than the actual bosses.

I really liked the Reliquary of the Lost fight, that seemed to have the tuning fairly on point and it was great to see the three different debuffs in action. The middle face, Essence of Desire, had a debuff that dealt damage back to anyone that damaged her so it was rather funny seeing people open up on her and then take the corresponding damage back. To counteract this, the debuff allowed healing to be increased by 100% but the trade off was a mana drain over time. I loved this mechanic a lot, it was a bit of a juggling act managing mana and putting out heals to cover people taking the damage from doing their dps.  Shade of Akama though in comparison, was so ridiculous for healers. There was so little damage going out, every person pretty much remained at full heal throughout the whole boss fight. Was it like that back in the day I wonder?

Illidan himself was really interesting and it actually took a few goes to figure out the mechanics. And the fight went long enough that I could see the full 3 phases that you really miss going back in there at higher levels. It wasn’t until seeing his full fight that I realised just how many of the mechanics in the Nighthold Gul’dan fight are inspired by the Illidan fight. Makes sense really but was cool to see in action.

While it’s a nice idea to go see the older content without it being completely trivial when running through at max level, the current incarnation is a little boring because even with the scaling of items down, we still seem too overpowered. Compared with more modern fights which have pretty interesting mechanics, most of the fights were just stand still tank and spanks.

I did pick up a few items I didn’t have for transmog and seeing them pop up to 900 was cool but even at that ilvl they headed to the vendor so I don’t really need to think about going in there for gear.  Reading a few blogs I can see the thought about why do it more than once floating around and to be honest I don’t think I would need to take my main through more than once but there has been new gear added for the 4 classes that weren’t around in BC to allow them specific transmog sets reminiscent of the BC era. If your account has the Warglaives of Azzinoth achievement and you defeat Illidan you can also unlock an account wide ach to give your demon hunters a new artifact appearance.

It was fun and if it only rolls around once every few months, it’s probably something I would consider going along. Not being as difficult as I was expecting was a little disappointing but the trade off would be making it more challenging and then no one really wanting to invest the time learning fights and mechanics that you only see for a brief period every few months. Not an easy balance to achieve.  Overall I think it was probably pretty well done. I wonder if we’ll see more Time walking Raids in months to come.

 

 

Heroic Kil’Jaeden down

Goes without saying that this is a bit of a spoiler post if you look at the photos,but since the patch has been out for a week it’s probably unlikely you’ve missed seeing spoilers, but beware about reading on  if you are trying to miss them until you’ve killed him 🙂

We finished the regular week’s amount of raiding at 8/9H on our mains, achieved through 2 split runs. We had all come back together on mains on Monday night to work on Kil’jaeden but we just didn’t get him down, so a decision was made to come back on Tuesday when hopefully everyone was a bit fresher. Monday was a huge night of raiding, we spent a good bit of time on Fallen Avatar on the first split run and then when he was down, worked from the 3rd boss back up through to the 8th, raid was longer by an hour and half for the 2nd night in a row to make sure it was all done. I don’t know about anyone else but I was really mentally tired from being in there on 2 different healers for a bit, so I was more than happy to come back the next day.

Walking back in on Tuesday was much better, but it still took a bit of time to get all the mechanics under control, there’s a lot of stacking and spreading and running to specific spots.. sounds like a normal boss fight really 🙂 You fight him on his spaceship and I was a bit worried about falling off into space but the platform was actually quite big, phew.

The fight actually wasn’t as difficult as I thought he would be, for a long while the first 1 or 2 on Mythic have generally been harder than the last on heroic but it didn’t feel like that this time. Maybe because everyone was pretty geared from NH and Mythic plus runs. We ended up having to take an hours break with the brief shutdown for restart but we got him down not long after it came up.

This is the first time I’ve collected the Ahead of the Curve achievement in the same week a raid has gone live. It’s pretty good getting it so early as that means mythic can be started on that bit earlier. Time to start watching a lot more videos on changes.

Once KJ dies, you get to watch the cutscene that’s been floating around for the last week or so, then you get teleported down to Azsuna. It’s still part of the instance so you can’t leave and you can catch up with Illidan and Khadgar for some congratulations and from then on Argus is floating above Azeroth.

 

The image of Aegwynn is there in Azsuna and you can talk to her to be sent back to the ship where you fight KJ and you can get some really good close up views of Argus.

It looks phenomenal and scary, I cannot wait to go there.

As to how I’m going in my new guild/raid team, I really don’t think that well. They are really good raiders, and I’ve done a couple of mythic plus with a few people but it’s not a super friendly guild. Well I don’t think so and I’ve been in there a month. And my healing is horrid, I’m not coming near the other healers in healing numbers. It doesn’t help that we are 5 and 6 healing heroic/normal for only 26 people but the other main healers seem to push out phenomenal numbers even with that amount of overhealing and I just don’t. I do have some good numbers; I have really low damage taken, and really low deaths and higher dps on bosses.. but none of that is raw healing numbers and I feel inadequate.  I really don’t think I’ll end up raiding mythic with this guild, with 4 other really fantastic healers I can’t see there being too much room with an extra.

But for now I’m still raiding and that’s pretty cool, we’ll just have to see what mythic brings.

First look at Tomb of Sargeras

First impressions is that this place is enormous!! The rooms are huge and there’s caverns to run through and winding twisting passageways. I can see a lot of getting lost for the first couple of weeks. I didn’t take anywhere near as many photos as I wanted to have but hopefully when we finish clearing the place out this week I can go back in and photograph to my heart’s content.

It’s certainly not as pretty as Nighthold, but there’s lots of little details that make me want to explore it so much more. We came across a really cool little room which had chairs and bookcases in it, I really wanted to stay in there and poke around but my guildies were rushing through, so I’ll come back!

The plan last night was to take all the main toons through normal together and then when it was done we’d break into our first heroic split run which is half alts, half mains and clear as far as we could with the alts, then everyone would swap – alts to mains and vice versa and restart.

The fights on normal were pretty quick but they did give help to give a look at the fights even if we didn’t get the best idea of what the mechanics were as we pushed a little too fast.The fights are different enough from NH that it feels like a real change and not just more of the same. I absolutely loved the fight that has a whale leap out of the water and had to keep an eye on the watery floor for bubbles to move out of it. Dec was chanting ‘bubbles bubbles’  throughout that whole fight and making me wonder what the heck he was talking about until I saw the water bubbling for myself.  I never saw the whale though which doesn’t surprise me at all, I tend to miss a lot of things in raids when I’m staring at my healing bars.

We got up to the Maiden as the 7^th boss right before scheduled maintenance so we only had a few attempts on her which was interesting. Her mechanic splits the raid randomly depending on a the colour you get assigned – light or fel and coming into contact with a person or ability that belongs to the other colour  puts a bomb onto that person that explodes with raid wide damage. You can minimize this by jumping into the hole in the middle of the room and exploding down there and the bomb then throws you back up and out. Our raid was exploding with people everywhere.. it was hilarious to watch but it’s going to be a pain if that isn’t sorted out lol.

I was lucky with the legendary upgrade drops and could pop back to Dalaran mid way through the raid and upgrade my Velen’s to 970! That was a huge upgrade to it. Next one I’ll do will probably be Prydaz as I know I’ll be using those two legendaries a lot. I’m not sure what ones I’ll do next, if I get more Haste/Mast gear it’ll be shoulders but I don’t like how they feel with my current stat/gear set up so I’m sticking to Prydaz/Velens at the moment. I really want to get the new ring which grants me Soul of the Forest and luckily it’ll come at 970 when I eventually see it so I won’t have to upgrade.

After the shutdown, the door to the Maidens room was locked as if we hadn’t cleared through to her so we couldn’t finish the normal run.  We decided to start the first split run on heroic and as my Shaman is rostered on the first run, she got to see heroic bosses before my Druid did! We ended up getting the first 3 done on heroic before raid was finished. My shaman was lucky enough to bonus roll (alts can’t roll on raid loot) a 920 trinket which was a big upgrade as well as completing the quest to make her first legendary  to 970 so her ilvl jumped over 5 points in one run. She only has 2 legendaries so lucky I don’t have very many to have to upgrade. Maybe she’ll see more as I’m doing more content on her regularly. I’m starting to feel a bit more confident on her and more gear will definitely help her healing numbers.

I haven’t looked at what affixs are up this week but really hope I can manage to drag her through a mythic 15 this week for the 930 loot out of the cache. It might be a death march so hopefully I find some patient people in pugs. That’s the huge downside of being Alliance,  there’s just not enough Ally on my friends list that are into mythic plus dgns to run with. I need more Alliance friends!

Tbh I actually am a little homesick for Horde and my Horde friends a lot. Alliance has some really great points but Horde still feels like home.  Every time I put my teleport cloak on, I always think I’m heading to Orgrimmar and usually get a surprise when I see the Stormwind loading screen come up. After nearly 5 years Horde, how long is it going to take for me to get used to Alliance?

We don’t go back to ToS until Sunday night but hopefully I can sneak into Normal and poke around the parts we’ve already done and get some nice photos.

 

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.

 

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.

 

 

 

 

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.

 

 

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.