Yeesh. I haven’t written a post in a month and a half. The stress from work has been taking a toll, and I haven’t been able to keep up. Not only that, my practice time has gone down because I’ve lost some of that motivation. It’s really hard to focus and practice without a private teacher.
Right, but aside from that, Amirdrassil progression is still ongoing. I’ve been resting on the bench ever since Smolderon was defeated. We managed to take down Tindral in about 320 pulls (or 242 if you believe Raider IO). Apparently, that’s quite a feat, especially with some guilds going up to 750+ pulls and then disbanding. It’s received a few more nerfs since then to the HP pool which lets teams with high DPS skip some of the more damaging overlaps towards the end of the encounter. But ugh, the amount of pass fail mechanics in there is insane. We had to really math out when DPS cooldowns were to be used and ask for individual spec changes (from an AoE focus to single target focus) as we were getting through because it wasn’t as needed once our flyers were getting better at dive-bombing roots.
We’ve since started progressing on Fyrakk and I’m on the sidelines but helping with various clipping duties on stream if we need to analyze any wipe causes or catch positional errors. There’s been some Weak Aura issues early on that led to problems with consistency during the first intermission with the orb assignments and everything. We’ve been using Northern Sky’s weak aura set for it but even though we assign one player to the right, sometimes it tells them to go to an orb on the left and they have to haul over there. Our best pull so far has been 53% and it still takes a while to get back there. I notice most of our real progression tends to be on Saturday as Friday is everyone relearning how to play the encounter again.
I’ve also noticed communication has been lazy at times especially when we need everyone to telegraph where they’re standing for their circle drops (usually it’s a left, middle, right). If no one says anything and they stack on top of each other, it’s a death. I can’t believe we’re nearing the end of the tier, and we still have a handful of people who are mic shy. I don’t know what I can do to instill on them that they need to say something. It’s been a process. I’ve also been worried about our tanks, as I can see some of their frustrations visibly boiling up to the surface because they keep getting asked to change things up or modify their movement and their Fyrakk placement.
“Guys, you told us to move <this> and we did it, and now you want us to change it?”
That’s kind of the point. As leaders, the first idea isn’t always going to work. We have to adapt to what’s in front of us, and sometimes new information comes to light that requires a change. I’ll pick on the tanks, but in a case where corrections have to be made, it’s not always their fault. Tanks are high pressure roles and they’ll absolutely carry the brunt of the feedback but that only goes to show how key their positioning and movement is. When tanks are asked to make changes after what could be perceived as unfair criticism, it’s almost one of three things:
- The tank executed the movement incorrectly.
- The intended movement or strategy wasn’t communicated properly.
- Both the tank executed and the idea was clearly stated, but the result didn’t quite pan out.
It happens to us healers as well. We get so used to commiting cooldowns and positioning during a specific part of the encounter but then we have to change it up because it’s no longer needed in that spot or we need it for some other far more dangerous situation that’s about to happen later. I can sympathize a bit that strategies always change, but as CE raiders, we have to be in a position to adapt to situations. It isn’t until we get to the final stages of the last phase that we can finally lock everything in and say there’s nothing else we need to do other than take down the boss. So I don’t really know what I can do to help assuage them. It might just be stemming from weeks of buildup and the toll from constant progression extensions from Smolderon, to Tinderal, and now Fyrakk. We’re getting there, but we need to find some ways to manage our mental fortitude as a unit.
As for recruiting, we don’t have any hard lookout requirements, but we’re just passively scouting for a tank and maybe another healer. Range DPS are always welcome to check us out. We’ve picked up a new Ret Paladin and Rogue lately but we’ve essentially locked our Fyrakk roster. No one new is going to be getting time in until reclears. So if you’re interested, check out our Raider IO page and you can apply from there.