Matt’s Notebook: Broodtwisting Fundamentals

Welcome back to a new week! It’s been Pumpkin Spice Panda season for a while now and we’re into October which means I need to figure out what kind of scary transmog look to run for raids. Not a lot of big news other than the previously announced class tuning changes. We do have a drop date for the 20th anniversary content that’s coming out later this month.

  • DJs Broodtwister Progression: Big leap here our first real night on Brood was getting used to assignments and cooldown usages. By the end of the night, we were getting to the 2nd container break and 1st ad set before we would shortly wipe thereafter. Think we need to modify some cooldowns here to help with sustainability. I wasn’t in initially, but I got drafted in on the second half of the night and we ran a double Holy Priest, and Resto Shaman setup. That’s not the final composition as we’re experimenting with other 3 healer setups. It might be Holy Priest, Disc Priest, and Shaman, or a Holy Paladin, Disc Priest, and Shaman. Alternatively, with the raid buff next week, that allows us to open with 4 healers instead. In the meantime, we focus on tackling each set of egg breaks and spawns.
  • Last Call Progression: Day 1 was a normal and a heroic clear up to Queen and day 2 started with us seeing some meaningful progression as we continued ironing out the phase 1 elements. Now, we’re starting to enter intermission with a few platform views. We’ve almost caught up to some of the other raid teams. Since it’s a newly formed team, our goals are quite tempered. We have a good shot of just getting through to 4/8 Mythic for the season. Aside from that though, most of my time here is going to be on developing foundations and building a strong process for how we do things. I’ve got to implement some organizational system and eventually get some extra help on management. It’s been a while since I’ve sat in the Captain’s chair here. I’ll have to write a future blog post about the checklist and what it takes to start a team from scratch though. It’s much more different now than it was years ago. In the meantime, for recruiting needs, I’d like to snag another Warlock, a Holy Priest, and a Devastation (or Preservation) Evoker. Our mana here is progress, not perfection. You can find us over here on Guilds of WoW under the Last Call raid team.
  • Ulduar Time Walking: Ugh, I forgot how much of a slog the first part of Ulduar is. Also, in half my runs, someone inevitably activates hard mode and then the group just splits and falls apart because we can’t defeat it. Ended up getting a helm with a socket for my Paladin which replaces the unsocketed helm so I suppose that’s something.
  • Diablo 4: There’s also a new expansion out! I’ve only played all of an hour so far. So much to do! I am digging the Spiritborn class so far. It really does remind me a little of the Monk. I’ll do my best to squeeze in what leveling I can, but it’s going to be a challenge while maintaining multiple raid characters.
  • Upcoming Post Ideas: I’ve got so many ideas for posts right now that are just marinating still. I wanted to put together a more in-depth guide for Queen Ansurek plus a few of the earlier Mythic bosses. As mentioned earlier, I also wanted to add one on my experience on bootstrapping a new raid team and things to consider now. And how does a recruiter handle friends of already established raiders applying?

Tomorrow is a new day!