Matticus

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.

Silken Court has been finally cleared and we are now 7/8 Mythic! It’s time to knock over the Queen herself. It was a much needed positive week since we endured roster turbulence the past few weeks due to tech issues and travel for the US holiday season.

• Court Thoughts: The last finery buff helped pave the way to a win by allowing us to skip the lethal charge into dispel combination in phase 3, but just barely (You can watch it in the video below). Court is one of the more complicated raid encounters of all time to execute, and it’s not exactly a fan favourite for me. But it serves it’s just as the gatekeeper boss quite well (amongst such previous titans like Tindral and Echo of Neltharion). There are so many different ways to wipe or for the pull to go wrong at any point and you have to play with absolute precision. Intermission is my least favourite as I hate having to move and heal. I have to keep spacing in mind due to the blue ball drops and ensure we don’t double up in one spot while spreading out at a speed where I wouldn’t fall behind. The second intermission wasn’t as bad since speed is not a considerable factor, just survivability. You can check out the full kill video below with both the red and blue side. The red side is from a Ret Paladin’s perspective. I figured we didn’t need a two-healer look. The loot was pretty good as we scored a Mythic Spymasters that I clearly did not receive.

• Court Dispels: There are five dispels that need to go out and we are not consistent enough with the second one since this occurs around when the boss teleports to the middle. This means the second player gets sidpelled during that move transition and risks a dispel bounce. In other cases, it’s a healer that whiffs and misses their dispel call to begin with.

Here’s an example of what that situation will look like when we enter this part of the fight. We have a series of five dispels. We’re using Liquid’s WeakAura package for this, but we extracted Northern Sky’s version of debuff management instead because we felt it was just better. On the left, you can see how each afflicted player has a healer’s name next to it that shows which healer is dispelling which player. In this situation, I need to know who my dispel target is and be ready for them when it’s their turn. The second thing I need to do is assess the field and keep the debuffed players healthy. I need to prioritize 3 since they’re a little weak. 5 is not in my range, and 1 should be in position to get dispelled momentarily anyway. This is where I would unload Serenity’s and boosted Heals. Once the first dispel goes off, I wait or cast maybe one instant spell because I don’t want to risk a GCD lock. I’m waiting for the count down to go because these players have 3 seconds to get into position.

• Onward to Queen: Our first full night of progression went well. We did get a few good looks at intermission and are at the point where we have moved Heroism to try to bust the shield. Our focus now is on web drop placements during that shield phase while staying healthy. I’m inactive for the pulls here since I don’t have a lot of reliable ways to break roots.
• Shadow Arc: I did finally score a Heroic Spymasters out of my vault. This means my villainous Shadow side can begin! Look out, world. I’m about to deal some consistent damage!
• Princess Ky’veza: On the Princess front, our learnings here have been slower than I’d like. Players didn’t quite pick up the concepts of standing on the marks or running behind their images. I fear we’re close to hitting the ceiling with the group. To top it off, I had a player who left the Discord server and ghosted us without saying anything. Yes, I’m frustrated by it, but I can’t well on it too much so now I need to go look for a Death Knight or an Enhancement Shaman. We did add a new Warrior and a new Ret Paladin (who will be switching to an Enhancement Shaman). Yesterday was much more promising as we were starting to cleanly enter intermission 1 and had more looks at the second phase 1. It feels like we have eclipsed 150 pulls now. I do need to take a step back because we’ve achieved our goals that we initially laid out when we first formed the team. Our position was that a 4/8 Mythic team was quite doable for a first time raid group and we’ve accomplished that. Anything beyond that is a bonus. Our next steps now is reinforce the foundation for what the group should look like entering the next raid season.

It was an interesting week with the Warcraft Direct stream taking place just yesterday. I watched it live and had a chance to collect my thoughts. Before we get there though, I wanted to summarize our week so far.

• Mythic Rasha’nan Down: Last Call is now 4/8 Mythic. The first kill wasn’t always the cleanest and I had to miss out on it since I had a concert rehearsal that same night, but I’m delighted th at the squad was able get it down. Our biggest problem throughout the night was Enveloping Webs. We need to do a better job of avoiding those by sticking together and baiting them properly. There ends up being a few players who just get caught by it and we have to waste time clearing them out.
• The All In that Almost Didn’t Work: You can see this one in the clip below. I made a call here to get the raid to simply control the ads while we focused the boss. It almost didn’t work. The Hatchlings were coming in closer and I was hoping for more Frost Novas or Typhoons or other assorted knockbacks to control them better but that didn’t quite happen so I ended up bubbling myself and surviving through until the end. Next time, I’ll need to make the kill the Hatchlings then switch to boss.

• Mythic Silken Court Phase 3: The team managed to get into phase 3 and see a few of the earlier parts there. We’ve gotten a lot of that consistency going on in Court for the first phase, the first intermission, and the second phase. Still need to get a better handle on second intermissions. Our dispels worked a lot better when we switched to the Northern Sky dispel package over Liquid’s. Holiday season’s coming up soon and our attendance is going to be impacted.

Let’s discuss Warcraft Direct now and some quick thoughts.

• Warcraft 1 and 2 Remasters: That’s nice. Played them when I was a kid, but I don’t see myself replaying them again but it’s great for a newer generation of players to try it out and go back to where it all began.
• Hearthstone x StarCraft: Completely unexpected and I am here for it. Glad that it’s a miniset and not a full expansion for the Great Dark Beyond. I’m also surprised that Hearthstone announced all 3 expansions in the next year and we get to revisit Un’goro!
• Warcraft Rumble: Glad that it’s coming to PC as I could never get around to playing it on my phone often at all. It launches December 10th and it’ll give me something to do while waiting for queues to pop up.
• Mists of Pandaria Classic: Figured this one was going to happen sooner or later. I do like the new introduction cutscene. I’m not planning on playing this one, but again, I’m glad there’s a new generation of players who will get to pull weeds and pick turnips on their farm.
• Warcraft Classic Classic: Ah yes, new realms! Players can do the grind yet again with a new Hardcore realm.
• Undermined: I’m sold! A new Goblin raid with 8 bosses, a new dungeon, and we get our own kart! Any chance of a Siegecrafter 2.0?
• Player Housing: Never thought I’d see the day but it’s been under wraps and under development for over 3 years. Hopefully it delivers something that everyone can agree on. More on this in the future about player housing and what I’d like to see come out of it.

That’s it for this week! We’re still looking for a Warrior in DJ, and Last Call has room for Evokers, a Warrior, and an Enhancement Shaman.

We’re about to reach the crescendo of our progression here shortly. We’ve had some more success this past week on both raid teams followed by some setbacks.

• Princess Defeated: Whoo hoo! I hated the Princess fight at first, but the straightforward movement and coordination required might make it a healer’s favourite. One of the things I struggled with during the intermission was that I moved too early into pie slices. But you can’t wait too long to finish a cast; otherwise, you’ll get caught and get crushed. The learning curve on this is much shorter and less intensive than Broodtwister. With the Finery raid buffs and the gear check, it might make more sense to go after Princess first instead. Broodtwister continues to be a cluster of Weak Auras and DPS or interrupt assignments with knockbacks, which will take a lot of initial coordination to set up. I ended up using those potion bombs and throwing it on our DPS to help them out more just to eke out that much more damage. We’ve already put together a tentative road map in place and it looks like it will take us to the end of December for a potential Queen kill.
• Play to your forehand: One of our mages who specialized in Fire switched to Frost on our first day. He wasn’t used to it, and that’s where the faulty logic comes into play when you try to chase what logs are saying. If sims say that Frost is top, but you’re more fluent and comfortable on a different spec, and you try out a spec that you’re unfamiliar with while progressing a boss, you’ll make more compound mistakes. Sure enough, there were a lot of deaths during day 1 of progression just trying to get familiar with it and paid the price because he had to spend a lot of cognitive energy on rotations, proc management, and surviving. Had he stayed fire, much of that would’ve already been ingrained habitually or as muscle memory. He ended up switching back on day 2, and that’s when Princess went down.
• Last Call: Not going to sugarcoat this one either, as we played like absolute crap on the first half of day 1. We had maybe 8 or so wipes to Ulgrax and another 10 on Bloodbound. One of our main tanks was away that weekend so there was a little reprog involved there as our healer took over that tanking spot. I had to partially chew out and remind the team they were better than that after we killed Bloodbound. We also had exactly 20 players with no margin for relying on our bench depth or to rotate underperformers out. There was a moment when I asked if it was even worth trying to go after Sikran with the way we were playing. But no, it was decided that reps were just more valuable and to get pulls in and accustomed to it especially for players who missed out on the previous week of Sikran progression. But once we arrived at Sikran, we started the pull, and everything went somewhat well. Sure, we detonated an image because of proximity, but we survived through it. In fact, we played just well enough to defeat her on the first pull of the night much to my amazement. I was delighted but also quite confused because I don’t know where this came from.
• Roster Issues: We had one healer whose alarm didn’t go off. We had another player who just flat out didn’t show up at all or provide any advance notice of them being away. This put us at 19 players on day 2 and we ultimately went back to clear heroic and try to patch in some missing gear. But we added another Mage (a DJs alternate even), and now another Warlock to help stabilize our depth. Our current needs continue to be an Evoker and a Rogue.

Less than two weeks before my concert performance! I feel quite comfortable going into this one actually.

Had another big week last week as we entered the final days of October. It’s also much darker outside these days in the morning. Must be getting close to a time change. Shall we dive into it?

• Broodtwister Cleared: This took much quicker than expected. It felt like we defeated Brood in under five attempts when we got there on Friday before putting shots on Princess. Much of that time was just spent getting accustomed to the pattern recognition and movement required. That kill looked extremely smooth. We’re 5-healing this one for safety. We need to rely on using defensives as much as possible just to survive. Our best on the weekend was around 22%. My biggest problem is during intermission where I’ve caught myself twice now moving early into a pie slice as it’s finishing the cast and getting myself killed. I need to be more patient.
• Done with Heroic: The day has finally arrived where we’ve rotated Heroic out of our raid schedule. No Spymaster’s for me. Our raid gear average is now in the 630 range. This means that we will be starting raid extensions soon in a matter of weeks to finish out the rest of the tier.
• Bloodbound Cleared: Over in Last Call, we pushed over Bloodbound and cleared that one before starting to make progress on Sikran. Got that Captain down to 9% as our best. We still need to work on our movement and circle recognition. I have a crew of heroic players that I must find a way to mold into mythic players. I fear some of them might be reaching their skill ceiling soon. We’ve had a lot of friendly fire incidents from player image drops being too close to each other (player) or other images.
• Last Call Roster: A lot of that is also due to us starting to get a bit thin. We’ve gotten about four resignations or notices to be bench players because of time constraints and inability to fulfill the necessary requirements. Need to find ourselves a Rogue, Evoker, and Warlock to help reinforce our team.
• Annulet: Speaking of greatest hits making a comeback, there appears to be another ring coming in soon with the next patch. Signs point to it being an annulet-like ring again. Wasn’t a fan of it last time, so who knows what changes they make to it in this iteration.
• Still no Horsemen Mount: 20 years and no sighting. I don’t think it exists at all. Everyone else has clearly photoshopped their mount or something.

Alright, back to the grind!