It’s been quite the productive week for us. We’ve jumped up something like 20 item levels from the previous week when we first entered Amirdrassil. On the first night this week, we cleared normal and defeated Smolderon. This was where we ended up in week one so it was nice to get all that progress in right away. On the second night, we secured AotC after defeating Tindral and Fyrakk and we still had about two hours left to put in some shots on Mythic. Luckily, I had a good feeling we were going to get in there, so I ended up preparing defensives for Mythic Gnarls and Igira.
Going into this tier I was a little apprehensive about our roster and our performance. We’ve already had some early attrition and dropped from 30 players to about 25, so to get to and defeat Igira certainly exceeded my expectations. More on this later.
Gnarlroot
This guy felt easier compared to Fyrakk on Heroic. Way more damage is involved but it’s manageable. This is a good communication check for players. Players with the big circle of fire need to signal which way they’re going to try to activate the plants and the treants. It’s useless for two players to run in the same direction. Assigning priorities for players during phase 2 when you’re lighting roots on fire is beneficial since so many of them exist. In our cases, we had our melee players light up roots closer to the tree and ranged get the roots closer to the ends, away from Gnarlroot.
Igira
I sat out this one and rotated with our other priest. I ended up being the 21st raider for it. It was my first time assuming that role, and I had to figure out quickly what to call. I did start with calling everything but slowly stopped calling things like Blades. I still felt it was beneficial to alert the raid of incoming Spears.
One of the issues we ran into was the healing absorbs. I set aside Divine Hymns and Revivals for them, but maybe we popped the orbs too early (or simultaneously). We might need to use something aside from those to help clear them or just have our healers single target them quickly to clear the absorb.
Roster Updates
We picked up a Mistweaver Monk which has been amazing! I underestimated how strong they would be going into this tier. Our GM decided to go from Holy Paladin to Ret for easier raid calls. Our other Priest decided to switch to Holy for now because they were having challenges with Discipline. We also promoted some of our trials that joined our team back when we were winding down progression in Season 2 (Aberrus). We did have a few DPS players who decided they couldn’t sustain our raid commitments, and we said farewell to them. For now, here’s our immediate needs:
- DPS Warrior
- Disc/Shadow Priest
- Enhancement Shaman
- Balance/Resto Druid