Productive week 2 for both of my teams. It’s also been crazy hot outside, and I’ve just been raiding in sauna-like conditions.
- Death Jesters crushes three mythic bosses this week. Loom’ithar took a bit longer as we were wrestling with the final phase. I was surprised at the simplicity of both Plexus and Soulbinder. They didn’t take us more than a couple of pulls each.
- DJs is looking to add another ranged DPS. We tried out a new Death Knight last week, but we just have too much in melee right now that it makes it difficult to add anymore melee classes into the roster.
- In Last Call we made some great strides. We cleared our previous week’s progression in a day, which gave us more time to work on Nexus King and Dimensius. Nexus King Saladbar took us extra shots, and I had to readjust our placements of the stars.
- We’re still trying to optimize our timing when it comes to loot distribution. We used to loot as we go, but some items took up more discussion than others, which led to dead time while waiting. Then we tried a different method where we would scoop up all the heroic loot drops and hold it until there were about 20 minutes left in the raid before distributing it then. That still took us around 30 minutes. This is a process that should get faster over time. I prefer this method of waiting to the end because, realistically, we don’t need that loot to help us kill the first six bosses. Plus, knowing the entire pool of drops available, we can make a more educated decision when it comes to completing set bonuses (especially with non-set pieces and catalyst charges), distributing trinkets, and pairing any weapon and trinket combinations together.
- We did not have a good on Dimensius progression. We saw Phase 3 a handful of times, but didn’t really get enough pulls into it. We had one really healthy pull with almost everyone alive (one of our Evokers was dead), but we seemed to have rotted out mostly in phase 3 due to a handful of positioning issues, such as players not playing the rings properly, or getting dragged through Dimensius (or a Black Hole).
- The biggest factor that stood out to me was that I felt our healing wasn’t where it needed to be. A few struggles were had in phase one just keeping the different sides alive. I had to ask one of our DPS players to switch to a healing role to help stabilize it. I just knew we were going to lose a healer somewhere between phase 2 and 3, and this was my way to hedge and keep an extra healer around. I think last night definitely exposed our healers significantly. I need to look at moving them around (I had two on one side, and three on the other, and it was the side with three healers that seemed to struggle with deaths). I’ve got to find another one to add. I am not happy about that, and I need to find a way to fix it.
- I could have done a better job of trimming the raid size to make it easier. 5 healers with 25 players might’ve been too much of a stretch, and our bottom-end damage was too low. This would’ve helped accelerate our Nexus King and Dimensius progression. I ended up dropping one DPS player and switching another to healing, but that might’ve been too little too late. I actually lost some sleep over this, as I kept second-guessing my decisions after the raid last night, knowing it cost us a week, ahead of the Curve. I have to be more aggressive with raid size trimming, especially if I feel it’s going to help us progress. It sucks for the players who get sat. I’ve been there, and it’s an awful feeling, but it just makes the fight easier for reclears on the following week. Instead, I tried to do the “right” thing by hoping for a team victory with everyone involved and it was insurmountable. Even in DJs on our first AotC week, we ended up sitting some of our helpers and weaker players to get Dimensius. Now, though, we have a 3% buff entering this week, plus assorted upgrades from the vault, and a Catalyst token.
- Is it time to take Normal off the rotation? It seems like the upgrades there are getting fewer. It takes us about an hour to cut through normal. I’m of the opinion that the hour is better spent on learning and on progression because while the gear upgrades help, the repetitions on the boss are much more valuable.
Still a lot of work to do for this week. Good luck in your vaults!