I know, I know, I’ve been slacking on the writing. It’s been a busy time. I’m not getting as much ice time due to a slightly busier weekend schedule so it doesn’t make much sense for me to log progression hours into Echo or Sark, but hey we did it! Echo of Neltharion has been crushed and we’re now officially 8/9 Mythic.
Pretty good loot right?
Okay, let’s get into the highlights. There’ll be a lot of them since I’m in many different raid groups.
- Echo of Neltharion thoughts: I hate this encounter. Not really for the mechanics but the requirements for it. I’m usually in favour of Weakauras to help with information management but this exceeds it. The primary keys to Echo is tracking your debuff number, the location assigned to each debuff, and then getting yourself over there (see below). All of that mental calculation needs to be done in under a second. That’s just phase one. Once you get to the last phase, players are all assigned grid locations. You have to run to your corresponding number and if it isn’t there, you take a letter as a backup. It was so frustrating because we had issues with people not calling their plan B locations and we’d miss certain grids to the point where our raid leader yelled at someone for messing up multiple times (More on this another time). I’m just relieved we managed to get it down. Now it’s full speed to Commander Sark and we finish the tier!
- Raid Departure: No, not DJ’s. On a more sombre note, my weekday raid team transferred off and switched servers. They were part of a guild. I don’t know the full story or details and don’t really need to. These guys took me in during Shadowlands when Proper Villains ceased raiding and gave me purpose before I moved to full-time commitment to DJ’s. During Dragonflight, I levelled a second Priest to raid with them during the week because I was grateful for what they had done for me and I wanted to pay it back by contributing to Mythic raid goals with raid strategy and diagnostics help. Once I discovered they had left and they didn’t tell me about their plans or asked me if I was still interested in raiding them, I felt kind of abandoned and maybe a little hurt. The reality is that I knew I was on borrowed time. After all, once I secure a full-time job, I would have to step back. I still felt that I could have at least served as a bridge healer option until the team found a stable healing replacement. I would have committed to staying until the end of the tier. It was my fault though. I was showing disinterest in constantly heroic raiding with alts, but I wanted to be there for Mythic content. I’m sure they’ll do fine. In any case, I want to find another weekday Mythic raid team so I can maintain a state of readiness. Since DJ’s is all-in on Sark, it’s unlikely I’ll see any first-team reps as I’ll be away 2 out of the next 4 raid nights and I don’t want to get too rusty from not healing anything challenging.
- New raid team: A new raid team joined the DJ’s community making it our 9th Warcraft raid group. That’s a lot. I ended up joining them last night because they needed an extra body and I was able to help get them two new progression kills on mythic Assault and Amalgamation Chamber. Great bunch but not a long-term fit since one of their raid nights happens to correspond to a rehearsal night for me.
- Raid attendance: This is going to be hard to keep track of, but my third raid team (they raid Sunday/Monday nights) is on the verge of just sticking to Heroic and calling it for Mythic progression for the remainder of the tier. Summer attendance has been impacting them too much. Every raid night has led to a shortage of anywhere from 5 to 2 players. I wonder if Sunday and Monday raiders are just hard to come by. I’m also questioning people’s devotion to pursuing Mythic or if they’re just along for the ride. I wrote about making the jump from Ahead of the Curve to CE a while ago, but the intermediate step is making some kind of progress in Mythic. The worst thing that can happen is stalled progression. Once you start stalling, players start asking questions or decide to flat out leave the group to find another raid team that can help them. You can only run so many heroics with player alts sprinkled in before people get sick of it and annoyed. For me, I set aside my time and decline certain social obligations because I commit to raiding with my designated character. I got frustrated when I showed with my Elemental Shaman to discover there’s a few alts in there because “players don’t need stuff on their main”. Great, I don’t need stuff on my main either. I’d rather take the night off and catch up on keys or help the team run some keys if they haven’t been able to get their weekly dungeons in yet. I haven’t quite figured out what to do yet. I’ll still keep my Shaman in there but if we can’t get at least 3/9 Mythic done, I may just stop raiding on the Shaman altogether or find a different group. Hard for me to justify setting aside Sunday and Monday nights that could be time spent doing other things.
- Recruiting: We said goodbye to one of our hunters this past week as he received a raiding opportunity he couldn’t turn down. Check us out and apply! You may not get in much action until we start reclears however. We’re looking for the following:
- Hunter
- Shaman (DPS)
- Warlock
- Mage
- Warrior
- Balance Druid
Thanks for joining me this week! I’ll try to get back to more frequent updates when I can.