Trying something new

This raiding thing has really been taking up a lot of my attention, I haven’t really even felt like blogging that much because pretty much all my time has been spent in a mental tug of war over what to do; stay with friends or go looking for the raiding I want.  But I made the decision that since I’m obviously not that happy in my current raiding situation, I could either sit there and be unhappy (even surrounded by guildies I liked) or I could go try something new. So I did.

I had whispered a few guilds over the last few days that had interesting looking ads, but while the people I was talking to were friendly, their existing team set up didn’t really grab me as being a good fit.  I had noted on my profile on wowprogress that I was looking for a new raiding guild and the next day I got a whisper from a guild looking for a healer. I jumped onto discord to have a talk with them and it went pretty well. The team sounds like what I’m looking for, I’d make the 4th dedicated healer (and they’re fine I don’t do raid level dps on my OS). They lost a healer a few weeks ago to real life stuff and have been having one of their dps fill in as heals which is handy as it means they already have a decent swing healer in place.

The GM is also the healing lead and is another Rdruid so he and I spent a while on discord talking druid chatter which was nice. I said I’d missed healing with another druid and he said the same. Apparently, the rest of the healing team is girls so I’m a little excited about getting to be in a guild with more girls again. For ages it’s just been me in Deadline. I just hope with the difference in our ilvl I’m not going to look really horrible against them. The guild is 3/10M currently so I did point out that I’m a bit lower ilvl/progession and offered to link logs for him  but he said he’d looked at my logs and was fine with them. I was surprised he’d already checked up but he said he wouldn’t have whispered me if he wasn’t happy with what he saw.

Last night was my last raid in Deadline and I was hoping we’d finish off Elis/Gul’dan and move onto Chron for mythic prog. But we ended up with a team of 13 in the raid group… People just do not turn up to progression on Sundays which was frustrating as it meant no working on mythic and it made killing Gul’dan, even on heroic, difficult as with such a tiny team there is just no room for error. It was horrible to tell the team, that’s already having roster problems, I was going but the frustration over the last raid made me sure that I’m making the right decision looking for something closer to what my expectations should be. Even if the new guild doesn’t turn out to be what I’m looking for, it’s a step in the right direction. My alts are staying in Deadline so I’ll still see my friends a lot as I’ve got a lot of levelling of alts to do still.

I ended up swapping guilds after the raid. I was actually doing a mythic + with Deadline guildies after the raid and made the swap part way through. It was really weird to have a different guild name after so long in Deadline.  I didn’t go alone though. Neuro came with me and is going to trial as well. Hopefully we both go well in our trials and find what we’re looking for. Guess only time will tell.

 

 

Stepping outside my comfort zone.. I’ve done it once, can I do it again?

I’ve realised that across my time of playing, the main reason I’ve left guilds is because of raiding. The first guild I joined and left, was in Cata after hitting max level and finally understanding that the guild I was with, while raiding, wasn’t doing it at the level that I knew was out there. So there was a guild split between those who wanted more and those who didn’t. It was messy and I lost people I thought were friends. Setting up a new guild on a small server was horribly hard and the new guild despite having all the best intentions just couldn’t pull it together. I was really lucky at the time because one of our tanks was in our runs on an alt, and his main was a healer in a much more progressed guild and they had an opening so he suggested I come heal in his guild and it was awesome finally killing bosses and at a much higher level than I had ever dreamed I’d be doing.

Stepping away from a guild which held the only people I knew in WoW to a whole different faction where no one I knew could even play with me, as no one had horde alts, was a massive step out of my comfort zone. But it was incredibly rewarding. Right up until the guild culture changed and eventually the thrill of killing the highest level of  bosses stopped outweighing how little I enjoyed sitting in vent with people whose attitudes I really couldn’t stand.

So I found Deadline, through Cinder, and it turned out to be a guild with people I really enjoy hanging around with. But the reality is, the interest in how much mythics are chased has always fluctuated wildly between the core raiders. Each expansion has pretty much started out with a high level of enthusiasm and then the same people tend to taper off through the expansion and then come back with renewed interest and talk of wanting to push raiding again and each time I’ve stayed and hoped it would get better and that the interest level would remain this time.

We’ve had some changes in the guild lately, people stopped playing completely, others only logging on for raids and the GM/RL has just taken a 2 week break to see if they come back  with a renewed desire to  actually keep playing. In their absence, there’s been a lot of talk about guild identity and it’s pretty clear there’s a bit of a issue with different expectations. Some members want to push harder, even if this means changing raid nights (Sundays are so damn annoying as people just don’t turn up) or adding an additional day, other’s don’t want to change or even would be happy if an even more relaxed pace was taken. Faced with such structural issues it’s a really difficult choice. If changes are pushed through then some long-time guild members get excluded and essentially the whole guild changes so in this case would it even be the Deadline I’m being nostalgic about?  And in this case, how long until people are sorted through into a tight-knit team again.  I think in this case finding like-minded people is better than browbeating people into accepting a new version than what they signed up for.

But taking that step is so scary; what if I find a guild that looks great on the outside but inside it’s terrible. Or one that despite appearances faces exactly the same roster issues or lack of cohesion. What if they just don’t like me or me them? What I’m if not as good as I think. Or what  if the raiders left in Deadline do end up making the changes the guild needs and starts raiding at the higher level I want to see and I’m finally not there after waiting for so long. And what if leaving hurts the raid team? I don’t think it would but  3 guildies have all independently said another departure of a leadership/officer so soon after 2 officers taking a break could weaken it to the point where it finally falls. While I don’t think that would happen, I don’t want to think I would be responsible to adding to further hardship, especially as a lot of our issues stem from people/roster issues as it is. Maybe its selfish to want to leave, rather than continuing to build on what we have.

I’m so damn terrible at decisions. Often they end up getting made solely because I do wait for so long things end up happening, not always the choice I would have wanted either.

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?

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?

The Loot Game and a Raiding Question..

Here’s a question for you.. if you had a raider that’s very vocal about hating their class and they’ll be changing to a different class as soon as they can but have said that’s probably still quite a few weeks away.. would you  consider them for loot in your heroic raids on the class they say they hate??

That’s the situation we have in our guild at the moment; since the changes to a class in 7.1.5, one of our raiders has been really unhappy with their current main and wants to change away as soon as they get an alt up. The issue is what do we do about gearing them in the meantime. My personal opinion is that they shouldn’t be rolling on gear at all, not if they’re going to be winning loot against other members in the same armor type or tier token that haven’t expressed thoughts about changing toons or classes, making the likelihood of them leaving much lower.

It’s a tricky situation because you don’t want to hinder the group as a whole by either giving gear to a person that is vocal about leaving  and disadvantaging those who stay but by not passing out gear to a raider that could be around for a while a you could be disadvantaging the group as a whole as their ilvl and damage drops further behind the average.

Compounding the issue in my mind is the class they’ve picked as their replacement, is not one they’ve raided on before so who is to say they won’t hate it in a raiding situation? Levelling a character is a completely different game to raiding on it at max level. A big concern in my mind is they’ll change to that class, raid for a bit, decide they also hate that one and want to swap again… Quick Edit in here to make it a bit clearer as Spanky brought up the idea of habitual toon changing in the comments.  In the 3 years I’ve seen them in the guild, they haven’t changed toons for raiding so regular toon changing isn’t a thing that I’d associate with them. My concern about the toon hopping is they’ve chosen an alt that they don’t appear to have any raiding experience on, making it more likely that the toon won’t turn out to be the bee’s knee’s they think it will be.

They’ve also picked a class of which we have a lot of raiders already both on that tier token and armor type as opposed to their current one which is least amount of raiders on both token and armor type. Maybe that isn’t the biggest issue but I think it’s still one that should be taken into consideration as we now have even more competition to gear up raiders. The only redeeming factor is at least they’re not changing role.

I really see this as a juggle between what’s good for the raid as a whole and what’s good for the individual player. You obviously don’t want a raider so unhappy on their chosen class they are hating raiding and being miserable and angry about their class but you also don’t want to be losing loot that other raiders could be using and which will help the group in the longer run.

It’s something I’m really thinking about because we changed to a new loot system with Nighthold. We moved to loot council, and as part of the guild leadership I’m expected to vote along with other officers on who gets what drops. It’s something I feel we’re going to have to address, uncomfortable as that conversation may be to find out just how serious they are about changing..

So lovelies, given I know a lot of really experienced raiders/players read my blog.. what’s your thoughts on the most diplomatic way of addressing this elephant in the room?

Nighthold, visiting Guldan

Warning: Some of the photos are spoilers, especially the Gul’dan ones so be aware if you keep reading 🙂

It’s been a while since I’ve raided 3 nights in a row but it was really awesome there were enough people in the guild that were interested to keep coming back until we cleared Nighthold and could see the full raid.

We went back in the night after the official guild raid and got the 7 of the bosses cleared through on normal. We flew through the first 3 as we had already done them on heroic and we knew the fights and the damage/mechanics were a lot easier on this difficulty. Spellblade Auriel went down really easily compared to her heroic counterpart who had caused us trouble, but we used a different positioning for her fire adds which should help in heroic. We placed them in a semi circle around her, rather than off the side, so melee dps didn’t have to take time out to run to them.. which would have been awesomely easy compared to where we had been stacking them in heroic except we found in normal the adds don’t stay in the one place but instead run around once they spawn. Oh well, at least the pools they spawned from were placed nicely.

I loved the Krosus fight, but didn’t take any photos, no idea what I was distracted by. But you’re on a bridge that he slowly demolishes side by side, so it’s a lot of ducking back and forth across it and avoiding a laser beam he shoots out. He kindly telegraphs which side he’s going to shoot it out by raising his arm so you have lots of time to move. He’d be no good in poker with such obvious tells I think.

Tichondrius was quite fun too, we all stayed stacked up on once side until carrion plague went out and then the plagued people ran away to the other side and stayed there so they didn’t infect us and then we ducked behind pillars he spawned at times. Apparently the pillars are more fragile in heroic so you have to be aware of how many people are stacking behind each one but in normal there wasn’t restrictions so we all just clumped together. Tich also has a healer only debuff in phase 3 which summons an add when dispelled. I didn’t end up getting it once so it seems it wasn’t healer wide.

My absolute favourite fight was the Star Augur. His room was really beautiful to begin with before the fight and then during the fight the walls drop away and we’re up among the stars. It’s so gorgeous and the fight mechanically wise was probably one of my favourites as well.

We came back the third night and started at Botanist. Turnout was a bit lower and we had a raid of 10 at the start. I forgot how much I love smaller raid sizes (I used to only raid with 10 way back before flexible raids were a thing) and it was just 2 tanks, 2 heals and the 6 dps. There was a lot of movement in this fight and we had all melee with us, I think it would be a lot easier with some ranged to help run over and soak the spores that spawned. But we got it down even with this set up. The garden the Botanist fight is set in was another beautiful room. I seriously can’t get over how gorgeous this raid is. It’s definitely first place on my list for beautiful raids now.

Then it was onto the final two bosses. I was so excited going through the portal to see Elisande. She really plays with time in this fight summoning adds that drop bubbles that can slow down time which were handy for the rings of orbs that spawn, more orbs to find gaps for..

And then Guldan. I was so excited when we were finally standing in front of this boss. He took us a few goes to get the mechanics right. During the fight he does a knock back to a few people and tethers them to the ground and to break the tethers you need people in there with you to absorb the damage when the bonds break. We found pretty quickly that you can really easily be knocked off the edge if you’ve not got your back to the centre and you get targeted. He was probably the most damaging fight, which is what I’d expect from the end boss, so I think on heroic we might be on him for a bit.

The cutscence once he died was absolutely amazing. Toco had told me on Wednesday that I was going to love the Guldan cutscene and he was absolutely 100% correct. Omg I am so excited for the rest of the expansion to unroll.

Another really cool benefit of killing Guldan was I could go talk to Occuluth in Shal’aran and get a quest for my Arcanists Manasaber as part of finishing the Insurrection quest line. This is the same model that my Druid turns into in travel form when masked in Suramar city but with one huge difference… it can fly!

I really loved seeing all of this raid, the fights were really interesting, and really varied which is great given how many bosses are in there and visually it is a stunning raid. By far one of the most beautiful raids I’ve seen. Given we’ll be in here for quite a few months to come, I’m really glad of the gorgeous scenery we’ll be surrounded by.

 

 

Nighthold, our first foray

I didn’t think I was that excited about a new raid but I found it really hard to concentrate most of yesterday because I kept thinking about what we might see that night, so maybe I was a lot more excited than I realised.

We decided that we’d go in on Heroic and progress as far as we could and if need be we’d turn it to normal. We ended up staying on heroic all night, and we’ve added in an extra raid tonight to go in on normal.

The first 3 bosses are set order so we went to Skorpyron first. I really like the way the raid is laid out. We start out by sneaking in through the sewers and each boss we kill lets us progress higher and higher. It’s a lot like Throne of Thunder in that regards, and actually the 3rd boss reminded me a little of Primordius in the way we trailed around the outside of his room avoiding pools he dropped.

We had the full 6 healers online which was too many as we only had 21 in the raid. I asked Monkfest to go dps and found out that he is happy dpsing as he mostly went healer for his old guild. He’s actually a really good dps so I’m glad he doesn’t mind being the swing healer as I was a bit worried he was getting annoyed being asked to swap all the time. That’s one concern solved.

One of the main things I noticed with this fight was the damage was nowhere near as high as I was expecting on heroic. I know I screwed up at one point and didn’t hide behind the crystals for Shockwave which meant I got thrown back into the outer ring and spawned adds, and I’m pretty sure I wasn’t the only one, but even with extra adds come in, we still got him down really easily.

I decided that I’d run Inner Peace for the night as the reduced tranq time would help with incidental  damage that we might take learning the fights. With so many healers Germination isn’t really that useful as most of the extra rejuv converts into overheal. The talent change tomes have been really nerfed in mat costs so changing talents from now on won’t be such a pain.

The 2^nd boss, Chronomatic Anomaly was just hectic. I knew there were waves of  Temporal Orbs to avoid but I don’t think I did a very good job. I was expecting a lot bigger gaps between the lines. Luckily the damage wasn’t too much, it probably will be on Mythic, so I’m going to have to figure out exactly how I need to slip through the gaps or see if there is actually a bigger gap somewhere.

I love the colours of this ooze guy, he reminded me of the rainbow you get on an oilslick. I know there’s a few slime pets but I’m pretty sure there aren’t any with this colouring, it would be cool if there was a pet with his colourway hiding away.

The 3^rd  boss, Trilliax was really awesome. I absolutely love that as part of his fight he throws actual cakes out that people need to run over and absorb. Every time Z ran over one, she got  a huge slice of cake in her hand, I’m going to have to try to get a screenshot of that.

As part of his mechanics he would run to the centre of the room and then put a beam out that he slowly moved around the room and then after a bit he changed the direction it was moving. I really liked that bit as it turned into a bit of a dance. I was trying to pick if it was random when he swapped directions or after a set rotation but I couldn’t decide.  Killing Trilliax gave an achievement for downing the first 3 bosses. Achievements are always lovely!

It was on this boss that Kub asked if we were taking screenshots for my blog because I had completely forgot so we have a proper screenshot of all us. God I love that my guild is so patient with all the rigmarole I put them through for this blog.

The last boss we saw for the night was Spellblade Aluriel. She pats around the terrace area so it made sense to make her the 4^th so we didn’t have to dodge around her. The raid started to get really pretty around here and look more like Suramar City proper. I can’t wait to see the rest of it  and then when it’s finally clear I can take a stroll through and look around and see all the little details I haven’t had time to see.

Aglea and I had combined our Angry Assignment notes as the start of the night; he had done dps  notes and I put in healing ones and I had been tinkering with them throughout the night, adding and removing bits and pieces depending on what the fight actually looked like. On this boss particularly,  I kept tweaking where we were using cooldowns.  There were quite a few parts I was expecting “light” raid damage and it really needed CDs to cover.

This fight has a huge emphasis on add management and debuff management. It didn’t take too long to get people to know where to go depending if they had the Frost or Fire debuff on them but putting the adds close enough to each other to be easily dps’d down but not so close that they buffed each other took a few attempts. Then we were consistently getting to the 3rd phase were it was just a big game of dodge-ball with her Arcane Orbs. We had lost  Drew, our other Druid to a black out, so Monk came back to healing with us. I was really glad of my tranq and 2 revivals  as we could chain them and still move. We ended up getting her to 18% on our last attempt before raid night was over.

Hopefully with the normal run tonight we get to do a clear through. It’s not an official raid night though so I’m not sure how many will turn up. Our next Heroic raid night is on Sunday so hopefully I’ll have more pictures then 🙂

 

 

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.