BlizzCon: Day 1 – Wednesday

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It’s been six years since I’ve last been to BlizzCon. Had to get up at 4:30 AM to take the train and get to the airport. Only takes about an hour, so chalk that in the “good to know” list for future travels. The flight from BC to Los Angeles is generally quite smooth and it was sunny from takeoff to landing.

Airport security has changed so much. The gate agents didn’t even ask for my boarding pass. All I had to do was look at a camera and it had everything. Biometrics have made some serious advancements.

It is a little scary.

Once I landed, there was a little trouble with the jet bridge. Maybe it ran out of gas? They couldn’t connect the bridge to the plane and it took them a few minutes to get it going. Once I stepped off, I was immediately roasted with what felt like 40 degree heat (that’s Canadian temperatures, by the way).

Arriving to the main Convention grounds, everything felt familiar. This will be my 12th BlizzCon. But many of my former guildies and past friends will not be. I don’t know if my friends and colleagues from Blizzard Watch will be here. I’m experiencing a new BlizzCon with several community members from Death Jesters and Zeroes to Heroes. I did run into some of the fine folks from WoWHead while I was at the bar here watching the NFL season opener. It was nice just exchanging war stories about past BlizzCons and how the site community has been evolving (or in some areas, stayed the same).

We both agreed that we never look at the comments section, ever.

The community parties and get togethers have vanished. No community WoWHead party, or Con Before the Storm, or any of the other old gatherings. It’s inevitable that the past organizers have moved on to other priorities and other projects but those were definite community staples and will be missed. You think you can live these experiences repeatedly, but nope. All good things do come to an end. Those were the days and some of my favourite memories.

Let’s get to some predictions (and wishes).

BlizzCon Predictions

  • StarCraft: There’s way too much smoke for there not to be fire here, especially with the ARG stuff going on at the StarCraft website. Some kind of Co-op or team based shooter would be great. I’m hoping for something like Helldivers. It could be single player. I have low odds for it to be a battle royale of some type (very unlikely). An RTS announcement on top of this would be unexpected, but well received. Look how well Age of Empires 2 has been doing.
  • World of Warcraft: Maybe a look at 12.2? I’m sure there’ll be some more Classic stuff, like yet another new game mode. Nothing interesting for me there to look at. I’ve got odds on Plunderstorm making a return on a new map. Will we see a combined Warlords and Legion Classic even though we just had Legion Remix? Is there even going to be another Remix in the near future?
  • Warcraft: Can’t see there being any new developments on the RTS side here, either.
  • Diablo: Dark horse for announcements. I’m hoping for two new expansion announcements, but maybe we’ll get one. Lord of Hatred just got released a short time ago though so maybe it’ll just be a Season 15 look instead, along with Immortal updates.
  • Hearthstone: It needs another refresh. I’m not sure how. The last big feature that was a hit was Battlegrounds. Can they spin up another new mode here instead of yet more new expansions?
  • Overwatch: I haven’t kept up with Overwatch in years. Lost all interest since the announcement of Overwatch 2 and the quiet rebrand back. Not sure what the plan is here and I can’t even begin to speculate, but I hope it’ll be a fun one for the fans.

More of the squad is arriving tomorrow. But for me, my plan is to just catch up with people I haven’t seen in a really long time, then watch some more football. Rams and 49ers in Australia will be a watch.

If you happen to find me and recognize me here at BlizzCon, you may need to reintroduce yourself. It’s been six years and I haven’t been able to keep in touch with everyone.

Why Patient Raiders Win: The Catalyst Charge Trap

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Every tier, the same decision shows up in the first week of raid: you get a catalyst charge, and you get to decide when to use it. Do you convert a piece the moment it’s available, or do you sit on it and see what the raid actually gives you?

This tier, we told the team the answer up front in our orientation. Don’t use your catalyst charges yet. Not on day one, not before we’d even stepped into the raid.

Six players used them anyway.

Sadness ensued :(.

So what happened?

Before we’d cleared a single boss, six players had already catalyzed a piece into their tier set bonus. Not because the guidance wasn’t given. It was, clearly, to the whole team. They used the charges anyway, mostly because the option was sitting there and it felt like free power.

Actually, one of them checked in with us first and due to his raid standing and position in the depth chart, we ultimately agreed to go with it. With scheduling uncertainties, he didn’t know if he’d be able to stick around in the long run, so under that context, it made sense.

The reality is that we didn’t need the tier bonuses to get through normal raid. We cleared it without much trouble. The real value of tier is what it does for heroic, where certain damage or healing checks are tuned with the expectation that you have your set bonuses online. That’s where being deliberate about catalyst charges actually pays off.

The Math Nobody Thinks About in Week One

Catalyst charges can feel like a personal decision.

But they’re not.

They’re a roster-wide resource problem, and using one early can quietly take options away from other people on your team.

Here’s a simple version of what can go wrong. Say you have four mail wearers. Two of them catalyze their pieces into shoulders right away. That leaves two players who could still use a shoulder token. One of them runs a Timewalking dungeon and gets a Champion track shoulder token as a reward. Now you’re down to one player who can use a shoulder drop.

Now imagine after the first day of normal raid, there are two mail shoulder tokens in the same week. One of those tokens has nowhere to go. It’s wasted, not because the loot didn’t show up, but because the catalyst charges already used up the slots that token could have filled.

Wait instead, and that same set of drops and rewards could have built a full four-piece bonus for two players in the opening weeks of the tier. Immediate gratification cost the raid a completed set bonus and burned a real drop in the process.

Vault Selections Count Too

The same logic applies to Great Vault choices. If you’re sitting on one or more tier selections in your vault, using a catalyst charge on the same slot before you’ve seen what the vault offers can put you in the exact same bind. You end up with duplicate coverage on one slot and a gap somewhere else, when a little patience could have let the vault and the catalyst charge fill two different pieces instead of competing for the same one.

None of this is complicated. It just requires waiting long enough to see the whole picture before committing a limited resource.

Is This a Leadership Problem or a Player Problem?

I don’t think any of the six players who catalyzed early were trying to hurt the raid. They saw an option, it felt good to use, and they used it. That’s a completely normal instinct. It’s also exactly why guild leadership has to be explicit about resource sequencing, and why “explicit” sometimes still isn’t enough.

Telling the team once isn’t the same as the team internalizing why it matters. If the instruction is “don’t use your catalyst charge yet,” the follow-up has to be “here’s exactly what breaks if you do.” People respect a rule more when they understand the mechanism behind it, not just the directive. In the future, I’ll need to bake this into our raid orientation about Catalyst charges and illustrate some hypothetical examples.

Going forward, this is a conversation I need to have earlier and in more detail: not just what to do with catalyst charges, but why the timing matters and what it costs the roster when someone jumps the gun.

But we can still make allowances for exceptions. If it’s a truly harder tier or if someone can make a strong case for breaking their 4 piece early for a 2 piece, we have to keep our options open and at least hear out the player’s logic and reasoning.

The Broader Point

Patient resource management is one of those unglamorous skills that separates progression teams from teams that stall out. It’s not exciting. Nobody screenshots a Great Vault decision they didn’t make yet. But holding a resource for one more week, until you actually know what you’re solving for, is one of the cheapest ways to buy your raid more options later.

Immediate gain feels good right away. Delayed gratification wins heroic checks.

Season 1 Last Call Postmortem: So Close to Midnight Falls

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We threw everything we had at Midnight Falls this last week. Extra hours, an extra day, and on Monday we got Lura down to phase 4 more than once. Our best pull took her to 14%. We didn’t get the kill.

It’s the closest thing I can compare to a Game 7 loss in overtime. We did everything right to get there. We gave it our best shot when it mattered most. And it still wasn’t enough.

By the time we called it, we’d logged 560 pulls on Midnight Falls. For comparison, Death Jesters killed the same boss in 404 pulls. That gap tells its own story about how this season went for Last Call, and it’s worth sitting with before I get into the why.

A Season of Constant Turnover

Over the course of our Lura progression alone, we cycled through roughly 32 different characters. Not 32 pulls with a few swaps here and there. Thirty-two different characters who sat in a raid slot at some point during that fight. One of our locks switched to a Disc Priest because we were down a healer. A Hunter couldn’t make it, so we had to pull in a hunter alt from DJs. A crystal carrier had power issues, so I had to ask for someone else to get it while we grabbed a Ret Paladin.

We never had back-to-back weeks with the same roster walking in the door. Every single time I had to sub a new player in, it cost us about 20 minutes of problem-solving just to get phases 2 and 3 re-assigned and moving again. That’s not a one-time tax. That’s a recurring tax we paid over and over, week after week, on top of actually learning the fight.

I’m genuinely proud of the team we had. But it’s hard to build momentum on a fight that demands precision when you’re constantly rebuilding the roster around it.

Where We Excelled, and Where We Didn’t

Progression-wise, this team is really good at fights that reward preparation. Crown of Cosmos went down in a reasonable number of pulls because that’s the kind of encounter where our strengths show up: strict timelines, scripted assignments, everyone knowing exactly where to be and when.

Beloren was a different animal. That fight demands individual accountability in a way our other kills didn’t. Ball soaks, quill soaks, interrupts, all resting on players managing their own responsibilities in real time instead of following a script. It exposed the skill ceiling of some of our newer mythic raiders, several of whom were tackling serious mythic progression for the first time in their raiding career. We got through it, but it took longer than I wanted, and it was the first real sign of what was waiting for us in Midnight Falls.

The GM Introspection

This is the part of the postmortem that’s less about the boss and more about me.

Every season, it comes back to personnel. Did I have the right players in the right roles? Did I hold onto players too long instead of cutting and evaluating quickly enough? Those are the questions I ask myself every time a season wraps, and this one is no exception.

Recruiting doesn’t make this easier. We raid Sunday and Monday, the last two days of the week, which is not exactly a popular slot for players shopping around for a new guild. It narrows the pool right when we need it widest.

On top of the roster churn, we lost one of our top healers right before Midnight Falls progression started. I also changed my own class mid-season, moving from Shaman to Evoker. Any one of those changes on its own is manageable. Stacked together in the same season, they added up.

A handful of our weaker performers joined midway or late into Season 1. They’ll get another look in Season 2, but with expectations set clearly from the start this time. That’s on me too. Clear expectations from day one would have saved us some of the harder conversations we had later.

Heading Into Season 2

Here’s the strange part: I’m much more optimistic heading into Season 2 than I probably should be after a season like this.

We’ve parted ways with a number of players and brought in some new faces. Some of the new additions are what I’d call project players, people who’ve historically capped out around mid-mythic and are looking to push past that ceiling. That’s exactly the kind of mentality this team needs more of.

Our systems and strategies are already in place. We know how we prepare, how we assign, how we approach a new tier. What’s left is execution. Season 1 taught us where the cracks are. Season 2 is about not letting the same ones open back up.

We fell short of Midnight Falls. But a Game 7 loss doesn’t mean the team is broken. It means you know exactly what to fix before next season starts.

Matt’s Notebook: Midnight Falls Over!

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It’s finally over! Death Jesters has cleared Midnight Falls and finished the tier at US 324. That’s a big drop from our previous tier (Manaforge Omega), when we were in the US 190 range.

What a relief to finally get it done and over with. In the end, it took us exactly 404 pulls. We can jump into the details below.

  • Our Raid Leader didn’t have internet. He tried to play by hotspotting his phone, but the connection was too slow, so we had to sit him. Poor guy missed the very first interrupt. Raid calling duties were split.
  • Roster boss was real for this last boss. I firmly believe if we had a consistent 20 (or even 22), we would’ve killed it earlier. We went through two Evokers before mine was brought in. I’m fortunate enough to have had crystal reps earlier on when we were learning the fight. Might even make the Evoker a change for me next season. Less emphasis on keeping damage up, so I can just focus on buffing the raid and addressing mechanical needs that the encounter demands.
  • With this week, we have some players that will be stepping down and moving on. Some are looking to pursue higher ranks, and others are retiring from raiding altogether. Ultimately, this will be the largest roster turnover we’ve had in quite a few years. We’re looking to recruit a Warrior, a DPS Death Knight, and some any ranged DPS or healers. Come apply here!
  • Over in Last Call, we too have been struggling on a week-to-week basis playing roster roulette. It’s not fun. Every single substitution leads to around 30 minutes of additional work. It means positions changed, new interrupt macros need to be made, and other cascading effects that lead into intermission, phase 2, and phase 3. Even something as minor as switching a range DPS for a melee DPS throws things off. Now I have to move a healer back from the inner ring on intermission to the outer ring so that the melee DPS can take that spot over.
  • The overall raid preparation has been okay, but I’m a little frustrated with some of the individual aspects. We had a healer who kept scooping up crystals on phase 2 when the crystals were deliberately dropped in the middle after I previously emphasized that players (non-crystal holders) had to fight the pull-in to not accidentally pick them up. Over the span of 8 pulls, it was picked up 5 times by the same player. Naturally, this led to unnecessary splashes that needed to be soaked. But still, I can’t help but be annoyed. It’s no longer enough for CE players to have an intimate understanding of what they need to do at an individual level, but they have to have a larger comprehension of what is happening at a phase-by-phase level. A bigger picture, if you will. Even if they’re not assigned a crystal, they need a fundamental understanding of why and when crystals are dropped so they don’t put themselves in positions where they won’t get it. This is an area of comprehension that separates mid-level mythic players and CE players.
  • I haven’t started deep diving into the next season’s roster yet, but by all accounts the next tier is rumoured to come out in early August. We’re going to have some turnover ourselves in Last Call with some players whose schedules are changing and others who also want to move up. I’m planning to open recruiting for another healer, some extra ranged DPS, and maybe one more melee. But I’ll need to schedule end-of-tier talks with everyone to determine their intentions.
  • It’s too early to say right now, but if I were to do a post-mortem, Bel’oren is where we lost some time and progress overall. I benched myself for the first few nights because of my damage (or lack of). I wanted to give more reps to the others that were there, and I focused more on the 21st man side of things, calling the raid. I can’t help but wonder if we would’ve killed it faster if I was in there instead. Ultimately, the raid buffs and other things pushed character power to the point that we had to fundamentally change our start. We used to hold 2 minutes for the first egg phase, which felt really bad. Instead, we decided to go with lust on the 2nd egg phase instead (and just use CDs as they came up). We found that we struggled a lot if we got to the third dive on the second phase 1.

Normal PTR testing will be starting up this weekend, and we’ll be stepping into it. Can’t wait to give it a go!

Matt’s Notebook: The Midnight Edition

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We’re almost through to the end of June, and that means the weather is going to be insanely hot for the next while. Made some great progress in both teams, but here’s where we are and what’s been going on these past few weeks.

  • Death Jesters reached phase 4 for the first time. Always remember, stars go left-right-left. Don’t be the guy who went left-right-right and wiped the raid. We saw about six Phase 4 pulls, and any of them could’ve been the kill. All we had to do was stay alive as we did reach the enrage. There’s some type of aura of buff where when you’re alive, you just happen to deal extra damage.
  • Last Call finally crushes Belo’ren. I was a little disappointed it took us longer than the average. I felt we should’ve killed it weeks ago, but between the power creep of Sporefall and the extra raid buffs, it threw off our damage math. Eventually, we settled on going with lusting and using potions on second egg phase. We were sending our 2 minute CDs as they were coming up. First egg phase resulted in Belo’ren going below 60%. It also meant that we could force our 2 minute CDs on the second phase 1 on the various adds. Our goal here was to get Belo’ren down quick to avoid the fifth Dive (or fifth set of adds appearing). But it worked.
  • Last Call started working on Midnight Falls. It took us the first hour just to test our interrupt macros and UI elements with the memory game stuff, but it worked.
  • There’s been some discussion about replacing underperforming players (whether it’s damage out or just mechanical play or early deaths). This is probably the time to do it, but it’s hard to find people to come in now for it. It also almost feels like a disservice to those who’ve been playing with us from the start of the tier. The problem is that the encounters from Paladins onwards to Alleria and Belo’ren have really exposed the skill gaps and skill ceilings.
  • The new Sporefall raid debuted earlier this week with flex raiding. I’ve tried it from 15 ranging through to 25 with just pug mythics, and boy, it was an absolute nightmare over the week. I felt like I logged about 8 or so hours just trying to pug it and use as many rolls as I can. Most raid groups go with adds on the boss and adds in the middle. I saw one raid group go with the left foot and right foot positioning for adds, and that one felt much better. You could assign 2 ranged players to focus the remaining add on its own.
  • The release date for the next raid tier has been allegedly leaked, and we’re looking at August 11 for Race to World First to begin. That’s too early. I was hoping it would be after BlizzCon in September. With that timeline, there is no way we’re going to be able to clear Midnight Falls and give everyone a mount. We’ll have to come back to this later in the expansion.
  • Speaking of patch information, upcoming class changes and tier set stuff have also been released. I’ll post some more thoughts on it later on in the week. The big focus seems to be on smoothing out the burst and spiky damage (especially for Elemental Shaman) with the goal of making damage more consistent. I like that philosophy because I’ve historically been awful at playing classes with those DPS windows (including Shadow Priest and Shaman). I should’ve played an Aug or a Mage instead.
  • This is my official last week of work before my contract ends. I’m a little scared of what’s next. The job market’s been awful for the past year and I worry that I won’t be able to find anything that I can contribute to.