Matticus

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!

Happy extended maintenance today! This week was another solid week for both teams. It’s the big 20th anniversary patch today and some classes are in tears while other classes are ecstatic. Today we give our condolences to fury warriors. They ate well the past few weeks, so at least they had that. No big changes for Priests, which I suppose is good news. Anyway, let’s jump into it.

• Mythic Broodtwister: Definitely on the cusp of falling over for DJs. Our best pulls towards the end of the night pushed well into the sub 3% phase. We were trying everything possible to maximize damage as much as we could, even dragging Broodtwister all the way to the back of the room between the first and second container break just to make him have to travel more before going to the third break. We made a switch at half time with me tagging out and Holy Paladin coming in. With another vault slot this week, we’ll have the ability to punch through for sure and move on to Princess.
• Mythic Ulgrax: I had to bring in my alternate Priest for this one since we were missing a healer. Good thing I did though! We ended up killing Ulgrax in two pulls before moving onward to Bloodbound. I ended up making not one, but two life saving plays there. We managed to get Bloodbound down to about 30%, but we had some players who had to drop early unfortunately and we didn’t have the roster to push through. Recruiting for this roster is going to continue being a challenge here. We’ve also begun increasing our minimum requirements (item level minimums need to go up, along with enchants and gems being rank 3). Not only that, at least one level 10 key done per week.

• In DJs, positioning is one of the gameplay concepts we stress the most. You can underperform and naturally improve, but if you’re in the wrong position, you risk wiping the team which is a far greater offense. I haven’t had that talk with our Last Call guys yet on the importance of positioning. This isn’t a group of CE raiders yet, and positioning continues to be one of those raiding fundamentals that everyone needs to be on the same page for or else progression will be quite limited. So that talk might have to come up sooner or later.
• BRD Raid: The new raid is coming out this week and we’ll have it available for the next few months. How does your raid team plan on handling it? For us, it won’t be on the main schedule for either of the teams (DJs or Last Call), but it’s something that can certainly be done outside of our normal scheduled hours. I have a new source to gear up my alts though!

I’m really hoping for big progression kills next week for both teams. We’ll see. Speaking of next week, the new Dragon Age is being released! I can’t wait to try it out.

Like many of you, I continue to be frustrated at the state of Mythic+. Healing continues to be not fun. Last week was not exception because it was supposed to be a healer affix depending on who you ask. Never mind talenting into Cleanse or Decurse or something as DPS players, right?

But that’s not it.

There’s also the state of tanks who like to pull everything and then decide to blame you when they go splat because they overestimate their own capabilities now compared to season 4 when they could just buy all the trinkets and stuff they wanted. The more mobile ones especially just like to run ahead of everyone before collapsing when we’re all trying to catch up to help them.

But no, that’s not it either.

For me, it’s far more irritating.

It’s the players who sign up for a key, then promptly get invited, and summoned, and on the ready check say, “Hang on, brb” followed by some variation of:

• Making a coffee
• Need to use bathroom
• Cooking mac and cheese
• Need to finish my taxes
• Have to fix my hair

Buddy, could you not have done all of this before queueing up for my key? We are all here, literally ready to go! Why couldn’t you do all that bullshit before looking and applying for keys? That’s what that break was for! We would’ve absolutely taken someone else and you could use that time to get all your stuff done! There’s been times I’ve let my coffee sit cold and I have a microwave to reheat it again if I need to. I’ve waited for a cut scene before sneaking to the bathroom real fast. My mac and cheese can hold out on the counter! It’s not even tax season! And no one’s even looking at you right now to comment on your hair!

Look, some of us have a limited time to play, and we need to squeeze every ounce of key time in as possible to chase those GIlded Crests so we can upgrade our loot so that our raid leader doesn’t give us the death stare!

I’m asking you from the bottom of my ice cold heart, and please go do all of your pre-dungeon tasks before applying for a key so we can minimize waiting and blast keys that much faster and so that my food, flasks, and mana oils don’t tick because I really don’t want to prop up the Pausing Pylon cartel.

This was another great week for both raid teams! Our pulls on Broodtwister and on Queen had as much variance as the weather in Vancouver. A series of nerfs were announced specifically on Queen which will go a long way to help out teams who still have consistency issues on that phase 1. We’re something like four weeks into the raid season now, and everything’s moving forward as expected.

• Broodtwister Progression: My efforts here continued to be stymied by performance related issues and FPS loss. This mostly happens during egg pops when my frame rate drops so much and it’s a wonder I didn’t die as often considering I was top 5 in swirly damage taken (but I didn’t die). I had to play around that by pre-moving and applying defensives early on to buy myself as much time as possible while casting what Heal bombs I can. We did make some serious progression through the 2.1 egg set. The first eggs in the second part of the room always gave us a lot of trouble because we couldn’t keep the raid sustained through it but we had a few strong attempts where we moved some cooldowns around to help. I delayed my Apotheosis to that set as well, and made sure Halo was ready to go around then too. I took over our Evoker’s Time Spiral for Divine Hymn so I could continue moving around while casting. We were rewarded with a couple of looks into phase 3. We’re at the point now where Broodtwister is now in kill range for this week.
• Lightweaver: Speaking of struggles, this Lightweaver style of healing continues to be a problem. I’m not satisfied with my ratio of Flash Heal to Heal. I installed some Weak Auras to help. My partner Holy Priest on the team got so fed up that she installed an Air Horn Weakaura that blasts out her speakers whenever she’s sequencing her spells incorrectly. I’m not there yet because I’m not prepared to give up my sanity. Even with the empowered, and sped up Heal, I think my haste is too low (about 6%) so it seems like I can’t get those spells out enough which means I’m defaulting to Flash Heal because of the perception that I need to get faster healing out to wipe as many absorbs as possible.
• Last Call Progression: For the Last Call club, we made some big strides. Our raid team on the weekend was at around 22 players and we didn’t have a Warlock. We’re still looking for one of those, but the team was determined to not let that stop them. Our second time entering phase 3 on Queen Ansurek saw us wipe at 5% and it was then we knew that we had it in the bag. The next few pulls we moved a few raid cooldowns back (like Spirit Link) so we had to get accustomed to that new configuration but it helped greatly on certain ability combinations on phase 2. Sure enough, a few pulls later, the Queen was defeated and we squeaked in a kill on our 50th pull securing AotC. We had 30 minutes left in raid and we could’ve called it early, but I wanted the team to get a few looks on Mythic. We quickly zoned out and back in while I sat myself and watched the stream. My intent here was to get the team used to the soaks since we have to split the group in 2. Ideally, we’d have Warlock gates deployed here to help with that, but we don’t, so we will need to scheme up a Warlock-less strategy which is absolutely possible. We also need to review and look at talent changes to help address AoE during intermission since those bugs are tough and didn’t seem like they were going down much at all.
• Expectation setting: We’ve modified and changed up our expectations since a good portion of the team is still missing enchants and sockets. Some of them aren’t even aware that Jewelcrafter’s Magnificent Settings are even a thing, much less that two of them can be equipped per jewellery item. I’ve given the team a week to start making progress towards that. Starting next week, we’re also going to begin mandating at least one Mythic 10 key to help progress their vault options. Since we’re on a limited schedule, we also need to plan out what bosses to clear on normal and heroic. We’re still scheduling the last two bosses on normal, but we’re at the point where we can start phasing that out soon. Even some of the heroic bosses aren’t as necessary anymore, but will still maintain that for the next week at least while we continue to evaluate.
• Preparation and Time: I need to make a better effort on time management with the team. We didn’t start our first pull this week until 20 minutes into our raid time. The first few minutes had people struggling on getting th eir loot wishlists in place and installed on WoW Audit. We’ve had the whole week for players to get their lists in, so I’m quite irritated that players waited until the very last minute into raid to ask these questions and get them in. That being said, I could’ve done a better job reviewing the list and manually harassing players to get their submissions in ahead of time if their names were missing.

All that said, solid week for both teams and we’re moving forward onwards and upwards. No recruiting needs for DJs at this time, but we’re still looking for a few players on Last Call (Change that dropdown to Last Call).