We’re approaching the halfway point of our raid season, and it’s been a most productive week for both teams. Death Jesters has been hard at work progressing through Mug’zee, and we had our first few sub 15% looks. Alright, let’s move on to the notes and observations from this week.
- Mug’zee continues to be painful progression as there are so many things going on. We have a 20 page raid plan put together that tackles precision movements on each stage of the encounter. The team’s buoyed, and they expect to Mug’zee down this weekend. After that, we’re moving onto Gallywix. I’ve still been on the sideline this whole time. Although I was offered the chance to come in for Mug’zee progression, it makes more sense to roll the best possible players right now.
- Revisiting our One Armed Bandit progression, we had an interesting incident between the players involving blown assignments. We had a range player who was assigned to kick the melee add second, even though they were still told to DPS the range add. However, the player took it upon themselves to shift damage to the melee add anyway. This resulted in a DPS imbalance which led to inconsistency in bringing the adds down. Somehow, this led to an hour-long discussion after that raid because they simply could not understand why it was that big of a deal. Eventually, our raid leaders were able to get through to him. It’s more impactful if he stays DPSing on the assigned target. We can easily stick another player to interrupt the melee add instead. It was a particular situation that had a chance of escalating. I can see how irritating it could’ve been had they not completely understood what was happening.
- Death Jesters is still sitting at 5 healers. We did try out a healer, but he didn’t last longer than a day after he decided this wasn’t the right type of environment for him (Basically got called out by the raid leader and didn’t enjoy it).
- Last Call conquers Stix Bunkjunker after 85 pulls. Things were getting dicier at the end and the pulls aren’t as clean as I’d like them to be. The team was still periodically missing Scrapmasters and running into bombshells. There’s a great Discord resource where you can run your log through it, and it’ll output which players committed errors. This will help your team diagnose any missed assignments and help with learning.
- We moved on to Sprocket with an hour left in raid, and it was painfully clear which players did not do their preparation ahead of time. Even as something as foundational as how mines operated and how to tackle colours was missed. Our team had shared a few videos and a raid plan ahead of time that went over it. I don’t expect perfection or memorization of the entire sequence, but I was hoping that the basic concepts were there. I could’ve done better here by warning the team in the previous week to start looking at Sprocket information ahead of time. Doing the pre-planning and self-study ahead of time is the only way we’re going to be able to secure CE, since we have around 12 weeks left, if the rumoured raid patch is accurate. It cannot be expected for the team to have their hands held. We can share our resources, assignments, and everything ahead of time, but the team needs to meet us in the middle and start proactively learning. The clock is looming, and that gives us around 3 weeks per boss, assuming the timeline is correct.
- Another question is how we plan our activities next week, as we have a few new players to trial. We can go back and secure some farm kills, but every minute spent on previous bosses is time not spent on progression. We’ll have to see and decide how we balance our time.
- Speaking of obstacles, we’re in the process of recruiting a new tank. One of our current tanks is unable to commit to the schedule any longer and has opted to switch to DPS so as not to be detrimental to the team’s progression. This is a significant setback because having to recruit and work with a new tank midway through a tier is not a great position to be in.
- This past weekend, we had 3 out of 6 healers call out. We had to pull in a healer from one of the other teams to help keep us going. Without his help, we wouldnt’ve been able to get our new progression kills. Naturally, this also necessitated recruiting another healer who happens to be a Mistweaver Monk. This gives us a crowded field since we now have 3 Monks healing. I can’t think of a world where we would bring in all 3, except maybe Mug’zee.
Let’s have a good week. Lots to do!