Matticus

On Sunday night, we encountered some turbulence during our Broodtwister reclear. While it’s not a difficult fight, it’s still a delicate encounter where small mistakes can snowball into wipes. My Weakauras were acting up due to a combination of Heroic and Mythic markers targeting me (think two different sets of markers), but I managed to troubleshoot and resolve the issue the next day. During the raid, I had to quickly identify my mark and move to it, which wasn’t a big problem since I instructed the team to get to their markers first, and I’d fill in the remaining spot as a Ret Paladin with plenty of mobility. Still, we had a few wipes due to miscommunication and panic, despite having previously killed the boss twice.

The main issue arose during the second canister break. Our original strategy called for breaking four eggs (two worms and two parasites). However, we found it challenging to manage interrupts on worms and handle parasites at the same time due to our group composition lacking enough knockbacks and grouping abilities. To address this, we adjusted our strategy to break only three eggs (two worms and one parasite), which was far more manageable and had worked for us since.

Unfortunately, one player decided to freelance during that egg break, opting to go for the fourth egg instead of following the plan and standing off to the side.

Fortunately, our raiders were skilled enough to adapt, and we managed to destroy the worms and quickly rotate to the parasites, finishing the encounter successfully. I think the adrenaline and focus fueled by the unexpected change helped us power through. However, despite the success of that pull, I immediately addressed the freelancing issue after the fight, instructing the player to never deviate from the agreed-upon plan again.

The player pushed back, arguing that their actions had “saved” the pull, which resulted in us killing the boss, so what was the issue? The problem was not the outcome—it was the process. The team simply played better during that pull, and their freelancing did not solve the core issue. Deviating from the strategy causes unnecessary chaos and confusion. A raid plan is not just about what can work once; it’s about creating a repeatable structure where everyone knows their role and can execute reliably, week after week so that it becomes routine. As a musician, I know that when things get committed to memory repeatedly, it becomes a habit and your mind can focus on other things.

When running a raid, I don’t need players going off on their own. If there’s a flaw in the strategy, I’m open to feedback, and I can make adjustments—outside of raid time or in between pulls. What I can’t tolerate is someone deciding mid-encounter to abandon the plan. This isn’t just about that one pull; it’s about building trust. If I can’t rely on someone to follow instructions in a Heroic fight, how can I trust them during a high-stakes Mythic encounter?

This isn’t about punishing mistakes, but about understanding why we have a strategy in the first place. Strategies are designed to minimize risk, keep the raid organized, and ensure that everyone is on the same page. Freelancing in the middle of a boss fight puts that at risk and can throw off players who are following the plan. Just because it worked once doesn’t mean it will work again, and it’s not a sustainable approach to raid progression.

I always encourage open discussion and strategy tweaks—just not in the middle of a pull. If anyone has questions or suggestions, bring them up outside of raid time, or in between pulls when we have time to pause and discuss as a group. These discussions help refine our approach and build a better raid team, but sudden changes mid-fight only cause confusion.

Yes, Cutting Edge players can adapt to on-the-fly changes, but we are not there yet as a team. It takes time to develop that level of synergy and trust, and we’ll get there. For now, the key to our success is consistency, following the game plan, and building the foundations of reliable execution.

After the raid, I reiterated that we can always discuss strategy changes. However, we can’t afford to improvise during live encounters. If we can’t trust everyone to stick to the plan on Heroic, it will be impossible to progress in Mythic. My ultimate goal for this group is to push into mid-tier Mythic content, but we need the right foundation and teamwork to get there.

For anyone interested, Last Call is looking to add a Warlock and a Holy/Disc Priest to our roster. We raid Sundays and Mondays from 5-8 PM Pacific. Feel free to check us out here on Guilds of WoW.

Welcome back to a new week! It’s been Pumpkin Spice Panda season for a while now and we’re into October which means I need to figure out what kind of scary transmog look to run for raids. Not a lot of big news other than the previously announced class tuning changes. We do have a drop date for the 20th anniversary content that’s coming out later this month.

• DJs Broodtwister Progression: Big leap here our first real night on Brood was getting used to assignments and cooldown usages. By the end of the night, we were getting to the 2nd container break and 1st ad set before we would shortly wipe thereafter. Think we need to modify some cooldowns here to help with sustainability. I wasn’t in initially, but I got drafted in on the second half of the night and we ran a double Holy Priest, and Resto Shaman setup. That’s not the final composition as we’re experimenting with other 3 healer setups. It might be Holy Priest, Disc Priest, and Shaman, or a Holy Paladin, Disc Priest, and Shaman. Alternatively, with the raid buff next week, that allows us to open with 4 healers instead. In the meantime, we focus on tackling each set of egg breaks and spawns.
• Last Call Progression: Day 1 was a normal and a heroic clear up to Queen and day 2 started with us seeing some meaningful progression as we continued ironing out the phase 1 elements. Now, we’re starting to enter intermission with a few platform views. We’ve almost caught up to some of the other raid teams. Since it’s a newly formed team, our goals are quite tempered. We have a good shot of just getting through to 4/8 Mythic for the season. Aside from that though, most of my time here is going to be on developing foundations and building a strong process for how we do things. I’ve got to implement some organizational system and eventually get some extra help on management. It’s been a while since I’ve sat in the Captain’s chair here. I’ll have to write a future blog post about the checklist and what it takes to start a team from scratch though. It’s much more different now than it was years ago. In the meantime, for recruiting needs, I’d like to snag another Warlock, a Holy Priest, and a Devastation (or Preservation) Evoker. Our mana here is progress, not perfection. You can find us over here on Guilds of WoW under the Last Call raid team.
• Ulduar Time Walking: Ugh, I forgot how much of a slog the first part of Ulduar is. Also, in half my runs, someone inevitably activates hard mode and then the group just splits and falls apart because we can’t defeat it. Ended up getting a helm with a socket for my Paladin which replaces the unsocketed helm so I suppose that’s something.
• Diablo 4: There’s also a new expansion out! I’ve only played all of an hour so far. So much to do! I am digging the Spiritborn class so far. It really does remind me a little of the Monk. I’ll do my best to squeeze in what leveling I can, but it’s going to be a challenge while maintaining multiple raid characters.
• Upcoming Post Ideas: I’ve got so many ideas for posts right now that are just marinating still. I wanted to put together a more in-depth guide for Queen Ansurek plus a few of the earlier Mythic bosses. As mentioned earlier, I also wanted to add one on my experience on bootstrapping a new raid team and things to consider now. And how does a recruiter handle friends of already established raiders applying?

Tomorrow is a new day!

We’ve been firing on all cylinders this past week as we added another 3 new mythic bosses to our kill count. I didn’t think we’d be in this position already in two weeks of mythic progression, but here we are. The hard work is going to be in maintaining and getting these rekills again. Broodtwister, despite the nerfs, is going to be our first big wall here, and I don’t even know if we have the composition to tackle it appropriately.

• Mythic Skiran: I was tapped to help heal this one. It did feel a bit tricky since there were now more images being placed compared to images being broken. We basically drop two sets of four images now before they would get cleared by lines. Tanks did a fantastic job maneuvering the boss around although the last section on our kill attempt was a bit tight. I ended up straying too close to someone and dropped. We can’t stack our images or be too close to another player with them because it would inflict extra damage. Pretty fun encounter to heal since there’s a ton of incoming damage and placement absolutely matters.
• Mythic Rashanan: We started our first set of attempts here with 4 healers before we realized early on we needed another one and I was slotted in again to help keep the raid healthy. Lots of position specific things had to happen here which meant players with web drops and the raid needed to move into opposite directions. Those green line waves now occur in 3 different directions and you have to be able to process them real quickly to move to the assigned spots. We did have raid leader designate big moves or big space (if a green line drop had to be even further out) to ensure we had room for any nasty overlaps.
• Mythic Broodtwister: Even with the nerfs that’s come out, this is going to be a bigger challenge since we’re missing a few of the group compositional pieces to really challenge it. We might be stuck here for a while. Most of the time spent on the last hour of raid night was spent ensuring our WAs and tech was functional (especially with markers, callouts, and maps).
• Trial Stories: Sometimes, we get an applicant who seems like a possible roster candidate but is missing a few things (like recent logs). Maybe they are a long time returning player who had raided at a high level but took an expansion or several tiers off and don’t have recent, applicable logs. In situations like that, promising players are extended a 1 day walk-on trial where they can come in and raid with us on a Heroic clear. It gives them and us updated logs and provides them a glimpse as to our raid environment. It can be thought of as a pre-trial trial, so to speak. We had a Druid come in recently and they performed above average, but once we got to Queen Ansurek (who is still a challenge even though we cleared it last week), we ultimately had to trim the raid again (including both the trial and a few of our other players who hadn’t been playing that well). We did defeat her and managed to get another set of Ahead of the Curve clears for the ones that missed out last week. Of course, in my follow-up communications with the trial, where I thanked them for coming in, they didn’t respond the first time. I tried again today and they said it was “crraazzy [getting dropped from raid] when our raids were the ones causing the wipes”. Which is true, but we drop a few of our raiders who weren’t performing. Not the response I was hoping for. Ideally, what I wanted to see was some reflection or questions on what they could’ve done to improve or any ownership on some of their mistakes and how they could get better for the future. But that’s okay, that time and effort was saved when I was immediately removed from their friends list. But that’s how recruiting goes, y’know? Sometimes not everyone is willing to put in that time to worry about their own play — instead, they worry about how others play. How caring, right? I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again for all new applicants and trials. Shut out the other people and work on your own gameplay first and foremost.
• Dungeons: Still a massive pain. I’m not sure how people are timing 10s, but I’m definitely stuck in another week of no leavers just to get my four Mythic 10s in for the week. I did get a Mythic Unbound Changeling out of my vault this week so there’s that at least.
• Last Call Raid Team: A new raid team has been formally submitted. It’ll operate on Sunday and Monday from 5 PM to 8 PM Pacific. I’m assisting with several of its leadership aspects. There’s definitely a diverse skill gap among the current players, though, ranging from people who have never stepped into heroic before to mythic-level players. Our goal for the first season is to just get to 4/8 Mythic, and long term, we want to push and get CE once this expansion. We’re looking for everything right now (except tanks). Right now, I’m playing a Priest on this roster, but I’m entertaining the idea of changing classes to something else like an Evoker or a Ret Paladin. I need something where the rotation is easier so I can shift mental bandwidth to other raiding duties.
• Personnel Updates: On the DJs side, we said goodbye to two of our players who felt they could not keep up with the expectations for raid (since they also raid on other teams), and consequently have both stepped down. This frees us up for some room as we’re looking to add another solid Evoker to the mix (Devastation or Aug). We remain capped at melee, though, since we just don’t have any more room.

It’s going to be another busy week, that’s for sure.

This was another strong start to the tier with another fast Ahead of the Curve clear! Wanted to summarize my thoughts from our first week of stepping back into Mythic progression even though I wasn’t necessarily in on it. I also made the dumb decision of joining an additional two raid teams (one in the DJs community and a friend’s team).

• Queen Ansurek: I took a lot of L’s on this one. I was in the wrong soak for the first few pulls (but another player who was assigned to our group was erroneously assigned to popping another green circle so it worked out). There was a definite roster imbalance until we troubleshooted it, but it I should never have been in that situation. I had a hard time finding a right spot to cast Divine Hymn in that first phase. The platform ascending phase felt good except for the one pull when I took a blue beam right up the tail since I was hard-focused on trying to outrun the web pull-in. Phase 3 felt amazing largely because I knew exactly what to expect and how to respond to everything.
• Silken Court: We need to be a lot better in the first phase of this. Absolutely none of our web teams were successful in stunning Anubaresh which meant our kill here did not involve any damage amps. Credit to the healers and raider defensive usage for carrying us through all of the damage coming out here. It’s nice to know that we are able to recover from situations like this, but we as a team need to not place ourselves in this hole to begin with. While I wasn’t assigned to web teams this week, I’ve been practicing for it in our community runs. You can ask anyone I’ve played with, I almost never ask for a mechanic responsibility, but I feel good about this one. I’ve found what worked well for me was verbalizing which web to for facing the boss (Center right, far left, far back left, boss’s back right leg, etc). While pinging is another option, the reality is the ping can get lost in visual clutter especially with two web teams fighting for it. A combination of visual and audibles would work best. The last option is as a Priest. I can grip my partner to me, and call for an Evoker Time Spiral and reset the cooldown for the second set of webs.
• Mythic Ulgrax: I took a seat here and missed the first kill. I deferred to our other Holy Priest (who is a solid 10 item levels below me but has already killed it on her main), and she still crushes me pretty hard on throughput. The big changes here involve extra ads that have to be killed, but otherwise, it does appear to be an easygoing encounter. I expect the 1st boss of Mythic to often be easier than the last boss on Heroic, but this one was a gear and throughput check, especially on the endurance side of things. Our poor Holy Paladin guild leader started the kill with 50% mana because he was distracted. There’s a ready check for a reason! Let this be a lesson: If you’re not ready, don’t hit ready!
• Raid Healing: The current build right now for Holy is Lightweaver. What I’m not accustomed to is sacrificing and not using Circle of Healing and Prayer of Healing. Those have been staples in the toolkit forever. It’s taking me some time to get used to it, but after a few pulls on Ansurek, I had to switch back due to the amount of movement going on.
• Dungeon Healing: I’m switching to Shadow full time for keys. I’m struggling way too hard with healing keys right now, and the amount of focus required constantly from pull to pull is too high in the bigger key levels. At least during raids, I can mentally break after a wipe or a pull.
• Recruiting: Our roster still currently stands at 28 players. Our last addition was a Demon Hunter recently, who is a prototypical meat and potatoes player and has quietly performed well on his first day. Those are the best types of opening performances. We’re still shopping for Warriors though and I did interview two of them. I’m just waiting for the rest of the team to figure out how to best move forward since I’m not the best evaluator. Our biggest need right now is an additional Warrior, but we could look to add a Devastation Evoker as well. If you think you’re an asset, you’re encouraged to apply!
• The Shaman’s Raid: I’m playing an Elemental Shaman in a friend’s one day AotC oriented team. It’s in a fun spot but my damage is just bad. I still have to fight the urge to cast Lava Bursts when it glows, and we came close to take down Princess on Heroic.
• The Last Call Raid: Since all raid teams in the community are full, another community leader and I decided to reboot a 2-day Sunday-Monday raid group. It’s aimed at being a mid-mythic level team. I’m unsure if we’ll get there this season, but the foundation is there. We just need to develop it more. We’re missing a lot of essential classes (Warlocks, Evokers, etc). We did manage to clear 5/8 Heroic (with Princess down). We’re still waiting for the team to be formalized in the community but once it does, I can bring the recruiting up to full speed. It would benefit from having another raid-leading veteran in there who can help with raider development, though. I’m definitely going to need some help on that front.
• Family Just Got Bigger: Speaking of new raid teams, I wanted to wish a warm welcome to a new raid team that’s joined the DJs and ZTH community. Gravity has recently joined us as a CE focused team and I wish them nothing but success for their season. We’re doing what we can to make them and their raiders feel at home.

What an eventful week. In the past, I discussed the value of having a raider orientation for the veterans and new trials joining your raid. We held ours this past weekend on Saturday. Anyway, here’s a small roundup of my thoughts before we jump into Delves and Mythic zero dungeons.

• Orientation Day: The energy in the room felt good. Even being on Discord, I could tell there were hints of quiet anticipation and eagerness in the air. This might be the most prepared we’ve been in a while. We covered the usual expectations and went through some early film of all the raid bosses, plus how we intend to handle specific boss mechanics.
• Roster: We’re standing pat at 27 players confirmed with an additional player as 1 day trials (walk-on trials) to see what they’re made of. Both of those players were referred and recommended to us but the raid experience isn’t at the level we’re expecting so this is a way for us to gauge what their ceiling would be and what their raid fundamentals are. I have a future post planned to address how to handle applicants who are referred to us by players on the team. We’re still looking for some more DPS players, though! This has been a great team though as I’m fortunate enough to raid with players where I’m okay playing with everyone. In some previous raid groups, there were people I would just flat-out avoid socializing with, but I don’t have that impression here.
• Nerub-ar Palace: Went through normal and the first five bosses on heroic on day 1. Day 2 saw us knock out the next 2 bosses (Broodtwister and Silken Court). On Queen, we were able to get to first intermission with most of the raid up before we succumbed. Some of these later bosses do instill FPS issues for me but that’s also because I have a 6 year old PC.
  • Broodtwister: Great healing encounter. So much to do. Might be in the running for the Rashok of the tier.
  • Silken Court: Similar feeling, and there’s definitely a lot going on here. Communication is important here and we had a few players with audio issues that didn’t realize it (Spikes, or poison). Had a heartbreaking 0.55% wipe early on and our newly minted Blood Death Knight could not solo it at the end.
  • Queen Ansurek: Great end boss encounter on normal. Much more accessible then previous tiers, I thought. The tuning and balance team knocked it out of the part here. On heroic, it’s quite a big step up. The first phase is the hardest part of the encounter for sure. Much of our efforts was trying to balance the knockups. We opted for overlapping venn diagrams for the two green circles and having the raid stand in between them. Harder intial learning curve, but we believe it’ll help us out more on the long run.
• Dungeons: With the Mythic season opening up soon, this was a great week to get a feel of all the different dungeons. There’s no real dungeon that I’m dreading.
  • Grim Batol: I like the changes to it. Wish the bombing run part was longer, but I understand why it was shortened. Last boss is a doozy and took us a bit to figure out. I wish the safe zone was a few yards wider. It’s a tight fit for a panda.
  • Mists: I miss this place. It’s like comfort food.
  • Siege of Boralus: Mixed feelings about it, but overall not too annoyed at it yet. First boss is a bit of a challenge for players who’ve never played during this time and aren’t familiar with how it works with the explosives.
• Priest play: I need to get my Prayer of Mending numbers up. I used to have a Sonar ping when it was off cooldown but it was disabled and I forgot to re-enable it. I’ve gotten a little better on Fade usage, and I also need to be more liberal with my Desperate Prayer usage. Pretty satisfied with week 1 healing though on the Holy Priest. Lightweaver spec is the way to go right now and I never thought I’d say this, but I do miss Lightwell. I had grown accustomed to it from last tier.
• Delves: Bit of a yo-yo experience here where the Delves were buffed to an extreme high where groups couldn’t proceed as easily as they could earlier in the week when Tier 8 Delves opened. Then Blizzard rebalanced it back. I’d like to see an extra life per player per checkpoint added though. The damage and health pools of the mobs are fine at this point but extra learning chances would make them more forgiving at the +8 level.
• Exploit bans: This one regarding the renown ban seemed a bit too heavy-handed. Our community was affected as we had players who were issued temporary bans because they had linked accounts amongst different family members. None of them were overturned so they lost out on some playing time. I don’t agree with that ban, but I would’ve gone for delayed rewards and had them not activate for another week or two if the players had over some arbitrary number of Renown (like over 17).

Thanks for taking the time to read and I hope you have great Mythic+ week! If you’re still looking for a team to raid with, you can learn more about us on our Raider IO page and apply using the form link in the profile.