Matticus

What a solid start to the week with the new raid and everything that comes with it. Both of my teams took and hit the ground harder than most. I’ve some quick notes about our progression followed by other thoughts. Wasn’t an entirely smooth week though with some server hiccups earlier in the week, but it hasn’t affected our weekend teams.

• Death Jesters exits the week at 1/8 Mythic and 6/8 Heroic. This was a strong opening start to our raid progression. There is so much damn trash in the instance that we resorted to using non-car mounts to get to each boss. We burned it all down real fast or died then resurrected with the trash resetting behind us. Our normal raid was cleared in 65 minutes from end to end. On heroic, we were able to push up to Mugzee before we simply ran out of time, but we also allotted some pulls for Mythic Vexie (which we felt was easier than Heroic Mugzee or Gallywix). They have since made some nerfs to Mugzee, so it should be substantially easier on this go around.
• On the other side, Last Call had some new faces and a slightly larger roster (including a new tank). We cleared 5/8 Heroic and ended up short 3% for One Armed Bandit before enrage. So far, the team seems to be working well but it needs a bit more polish. I feel a little more alone here at the leadership level, and I wish I had some more help with CD planning and other raid assignments. I originally recruited an Aug Evoker, who switched to an Ele Shaman, before settling on a Shadow Priest. It was definitely irritating to start because they were recruited to do one thing, and it impacted my recruiting strategy with the class changes, but he’s performed well since then. Speaking of recruiting, I’m looking to add a Warlock, a Windwalker, and a Balance Druid to help the team. If you know any, send us some!
• Illnesses did wash over the team slightly. One of our priests succumbed and could not raid on day one, which set us back, but I was able to pull a friend in to help heal and take over. I’m a bit annoyed about the at because I did insist that they rest earlier in the week and not stay up too late trying to do keys. We really need to coach players to take care of themselves or something. I can handle a few early days of missed keys, but grinding those keys at the cost of burning out of being able to raid is even worse in my mind.
• I don’t have any clearcut favourite bosses yet in the new raid, as most of them seem pretty fun. Stix took a bit of time for our team to get though but once the trash balls were figured out, it made it much easier. I’ve prepared the Last Call team as best as possible with video clips of key mechanics and how to respond to them along with raid plans, but there’s still a lack of awareness or preparation of how to respond to certain things. Even so, most of the team did their homework ahead of time, which affected our progress in a good way.
• The dungeon grind has been surprisingly much smoother. I timed my first 10+ key earlier this week. It feels nice early on to sit at the 6 to 8 key range and get Hero gear and gilded crests without having to fight to slam 8s to 10s.
• The ilvl gap between top to bottom in Last Call is quite wide, and I’ve been trying to help people with their keys at the lower range (in 6s and 7s) and teaching through all the mechanics (both bosses and trash pulls). I want to set these guys up for success so they don’t have to be as reliant on me or the other dungeon veterans.

Yup, this is an exciting week.

It’s been a while since I last updated everyone on our progress. Over in Last Call, we succeeded in clearing Silken Court on Mythic. Each attempt was getting progressively cleaner, and before we knew it, we were pushing consistently into phase 3, and we were able to clear the stuns and dispels successfully.

When we got to Queen Ansurek, we spent some time working on phase 1. My own experience taught me that phase 1 would be the most challenging part to master and understand since in DJs it took us a few pulls to get through. Ultimately, when Blizzard announced the patch drop and raid release date, we had only begun getting over intermission and just starting work on platform phases. Based on the time remaining, we felt that we wouldn’t have time to challenge for a Race to World Last kill of Queen. I’m sad because with just a few more weeks, we would’ve had a real shot at getting CE in our first tier together as a team and I felt like I let them down. There was simply too much to overcome. We also ran into our share of roster issues and skill issues. Concepts weren’t being properly handled and abilities were just running over our team. Silly mistakes were happening repeatedly on pull 90 when it should’ve been second nature like avoiding those poison waves or web wraps. At the same time, the initial goal for the team was to claim 4/8 Mythic. Securing a 7/8 Mythic kill when we formed almost a month after the season began is in itself a feat.

And yet, I feel as if I didn’t do enough despite all the preparation and recruiting I tried to pour into the team, it wasn’t enough. I spent the past week on a massive recruiting binge and we were able to staff back up to 26 players. We still have room for a mage and some other range DPS. Our roster compliment is sitting at two tanks (with two additional tank backup players from other roles who can fill in), 6 healers, and assorted melee and range DPS. We did recruit another tank (a Demon Hunter) who was a referral, and this moves our current Death Knight tank to a DPS role. Normally, I’m not a fan of this because I don’t like walking into a complete brand new tier with an unknown variable (a trial tank, essentially), but since it’s a referral, we can roll with it. This also puts us at three total Demon hunters. Our healers are in an okay position, and we added a second Mistweaver Monk. This might be the first time in my personal history where any raid team I was in would feature two healing Monks, and I confess, I’m not quite sure how to best maximize them. Did I mention that I wanted more mages?

As we enter the first week of the patch, there are so many things at a leadership level that still need to be done.

• End of Tier Survey
  • We wanted to get a raider sentiment of how the team felt overall. Were there any strengths they thought of as a whole? Any weaknesses? Is there anything the leadership could’ve done better or should improve on for the next season? These are all answers that will help govern the last bullet point. It’s a good way to take the temperature of the raid group.
• Boss strategy raid threads
  • This includes videos, raid plans, and other material for the upcoming raid bosses.
• Team Patch Notes
  • This would be a list of any policy changes or other significant moves that will affect the team going forward. For instance, we’re changing up from a one required key per week to at least four required keys to make sure that the team’s character progression is moving up. Some of your changes might be influenced by the results of the End of Tier Survey above.
• Orientation
  • Ours is scheduled for next weekend. In our case, orientation is a giant Discord call and presentation where we go over some of the answers listed in the survey. We’ll follow it up with team patch notes and then reminders for what players are responsible for in the upcoming season (including getting their Wishlists and WoW Audits updated weekly). It’s also a good way to list any leadership or officer vacancies for responsibilities. I’d love to get a few more players involved with Loot Council, so we will have a slide on that and what it involves. Depending on the length of orientation, you can also include quick boss summaries for each encounter in terms of broad concepts. Deeper boss dives can be done later or in boss threads themselves.

I would recommend every raid team (at least, the ones with a foot in Mythic) to go through a similar exercise and audit for their teams.

With Death Jesters, we finished the tier and secured mounts for all of our regular raiders. We had a few trial players just start out with us and we weren’t able to help get them mounts. Because of the time remaining in the season, we felt it best to trial new players anywhere in the first six bosses. Due to the complexities of the last two, we shortened the bench to just our veteran players (plus, they still needed to get their mounts). This also had the added benefit of shortening our raid week to just one day. It was a nice relaxing reprieve heading into season 2 that was capped off with a week off from raid. This upcoming week with the new patch, we’re going to head back into raid again. Our suspicion is that some of the classes (or the raid itself) are going to be broken. Our recruiting is done and there are no more classes for us to add. We’re standing ready at this point and just waiting for the raid to open.

Enjoy patch week!

First raid of the New Year had some mixed success. Unfortunately due to attendance and technical issues, we couldn’t get the Queen reclear this past week in DJ’s. It was just the perfect storm of everything happening. A couple of quick hits for this week to start:

• Last Call is now 6/8 Mythic: With Broodtwister defeated, we start work on Silken Court. The PTR for the next patch has been released, and it looks like it’ll be here to stay for at least another 6 weeks. We have to decide now if we want to make a play and commit to defeating Queen for a chance at CE. If we do, that means no more reclears because that takes up at least 45 minutes of our time per week and for a team that raids 6 hours a week, that’s some serious time. We’ve already accomplished our team’s goals when we formed which was originally 4/8 Mythic. I’m still looking for some more late mythic and CE driven players to join our team. Check us out here.
• Death Jesters misses a Queen: This one was an unfortunate miss by us. Our bench was missing due to technical issues and absences since it was the first week of the New Year. We came within 50 million HP of killing it, and I feel terrible. The decision was made to put me in as Shadow, but not only was I still not versed on Queen, but playing Shadow is my off-hand, and I haven’t had a whole lot of opportunities to play it in a raid environment. We’re starting to have informal discussions about our season 2 roster, although nothing is official yet because it’s all pending PTR information and testing. We did add 2 more returning players, and this increases our healer roster now to 7. Many of our players have opted to return and continue with us for next season.
• Season 2: Speaking of season 2, I’ll try to have a post up later talking about roster changes and goals. It’s an interesting variance in philosophy between an already established CE group in Death Jesters and an emerging CE team with Last Call. The PTR looks fantastic though and I’m glad there’s a weekend scheduled with just normal raid testing to try out things and function as a preview.

It was a big week across the Death Jesters community. We saw the new patch come out with the new rings and a preview of the next patch class changes (which I will have some thoughts on). One of our weekday raid teams defeated Princess, another team conquered Broodtwister, and Death Jesters knocked out Mythic Queen, which is good for US 173. Not to be outdone, Last Call didn’t want to be left out in the dust either, and we enter the holiday week with a Princess kill. That’s four new progression kills in the community. Most of the other raid teams will be on a holiday break since their schedules roll over Christmas and New Year’s, and that gives us a good shot at helping to close the distance with the other teams and put some serious shots on Broodtwister.

• Death Jesters completely closes out the tier with the Mythic Queen kill. I wasn’t in on this one but I did get a few reps in on phase 1 to help out. The last phase goes really smoothly once you get the hang of it. You can watch our kill video here. I felt the phase 2 platform and portal assignments were the trickiest.
• Over to Last Call, I was pretty choked about our pulls in the previous week. We took Princess down to 0.2%, which was something like 12 million health remaining in the final intermission. We did have around 3 people dead going into the last phase 1. Had we been able to get through it with everyone alive and not use early battle res’s, it would’ve been an easy win. The fact that we logged over 280 pulls is insane to me especially when the median number is around 100. Thankfully, we walked in there with our rings upgraded and with the gems implemented and that helped put us over the top. Our group dealt enough damage and stayed alive long enough where we didn’t even get to the last intermission at all, with about five or so players dead in the last 20 seconds.
• Holy Priest thoughts:
  • Loss of Holy Word: Salvation and Circle of Healing sucks. I am going to miss these two, as they played a great part in the toolkit in earlier expansions. Salvation gets partially tied into Divine Hymn.
  • Renew has more involvement as it can proc off a variety of spells and talents with Holy Word: Serenity and Sanctify. Empowered Renew adds a 12 second cooldown to it and reduces the cooldown of Sanctify by an extra 6 seconds (I guess this means you can’t just Renew spam to get Sanctify available earlier).
  • Prayer of Healing changes: Synergizes with Lightweaver is a plus, despite the increased mana cost, cast time, and healing. Prayerful Litany also buffs the primary target of Prayer of Healing with an extra 75%.
  • Divine Hymn changes: Shortened channel time makes it a consideration in high-movement or dungeon environments. Divinity plays with it now where Apotheosis makes the next 3 Prayer of Healing casts instant and an additional 25% heal. The choice node to make it a 2 minute cooldown compared to Gales of Song (with the extra Prayer of Mending stacks) is neat. Faster cooldown compared to a more impactful healing. It’s like stuffing Salvation into a Divine Hymn burger.
  • Need an Interrupt: If we’re going to be expected to help keep our party healthy with the emphasized healing, then let’s go all the way and add the option to prevent the incoming damage in the first place! We’re still the only healer class without the ability to interrupt. At least give us back Shining Force for a displacement, maybe as a choice node or something. I’m sick of watching Ret Paladins, Warriors, Rogues, Shamans, and Rogues completely whiff on big single-target bolts aimed right at me and then instantly die as a result of it.
• Feat of Strength change: Have you seen this below change in the notes?

Completing the Feat of Strength for achieving Keystone Master, or 1600+ in rated PvP, or killing the final raid boss on Heroic or Mythic difficulty now grants one additional Catalyst charge as a reward.

• Developers’ notes: This previously awarded a token for one set armor piece. We feel that the time has come to move on from earning and redeeming class set armor tokens at their vendors for a desired armor variant. Players will now want to find an eligible Veteran-track or higher armor piece to convert at the Catalyst, and these can be acquired from many sources around Undermine.

• Reaction: I am not a fan of this one. It used to be a guaranteed piece of loot. The point of hitting the 2000 rating early on was getting that Hero track set item. Now we have to modify our loot and reward economy to award a heroic track item specifically for it to be catalyzed. This is a terrible change. It feels good getting an omni-token as it’s a flexible piece for the player. As it stands, it will turn into a useless change for our alts later on in the season since we will have enough catalyst charges anyway. I can’t imagine this change being a net upgrade for anyone. A heroic item in the slot of my choice is much more coveted. If the issue concerns where to put the tier vendor, just park them by the Catalyst console. I hope this one gets reversed.