Mists of Pandaria Remix!

Are you kidding me?! Blizzard just announced a limited-time event where players can level through Mists of Pandaria in an express manner. I am actually really stoked about this. Even though I’ve had no interest in Classic or Season of Discovery or any of that, I am definitely intrigued by the Pandaria Remix. I guess it’s because it’s only for a limited time, and there’s speed levelling mechanics involved. Not only that, but the various raids are opened up earlier in the leveling process, which means I can step into it earlier. I’m going to look at assembling a weekly raid group just to step into those Panda raids. Some of my favourite encounters were in that expansion.

  • Tortos
  • Spirit Kings
  • Blade Lord
  • Durumu
  • Malkorok
  • Blackfuse

I just can’t help but wonder if they fixed that unskippable Tortos cutscene yet or not. Maybe they fixed it to be twice as long.

I’m not sure what class to level yet, but maybe a Priest. Or I could level a DPS character, but I’m not sure what was great around this time.

Anyway, aside from Pandaria news, we are continuing to recruit for Season 4 and beyond! Ideally, what we’re looking for right now are players who we can immediately slot into Mythic Fyrakk (as in, there’s no reroll or regearing needed and they’ve had a few pulls in there). For players with experience that isn’t quite there yet, I’d encourage them to apply later on in Season 4 or before The War Within.

For classes, we’re primarily looking for another tank and ranged DPS. Come check out our Raider IO page and apply via the link in the profile.

Back to CE Reclears!

I can safely exhale.

We’ve recleared Fyrakk a second time. I still standby my statement that 2nd clears of a boss can often be harder than first kills. This past week was our first raid week in a while where we stepped back in against Gnarlroot and Igira (and the first time I raided in months, especially with the new Holy Priest changes). The last time we took down those two was back in 2023 since we started extensions shortly thereafter! Things looked a little rough on Smolderon and Tinderal before the team flipped a switch, powered through, and followed up with a nice finish on Fyrakk. That led to two more mounts for our Holy Paladin and our Demon Hunter tank. I will say I was a little worried about our reclear because we had to borrow a tank to come in.

Yup, our main tank completely ghosted and left the community on the same day of raid with no notice. I recruited them in myself and supported them as best as I could, but it clearly wasn’t enough and I’m still pretty livid about it. In our guild, accountability is something we hold everyone to regardless of their role, their tenure, and so forth. For someone to say that they want to see accountability and fairness across the guild and then simply tuck tail and leave when things get demanding means they have their own insecurities to work their way through. We always ask the team to make an effort in raid, and we’re honest about what we need the team to do and how to do it.

Maybe the problem exacerbated itself when I was asked to look for a third rotational tank, and they took it as an affront or a sign that they were going to be outright replaced. We run a pretty deep roster that ranges between 22 to 28 players throughout the course of the season. We have 6 healers and as many as 18 DPS because we raid on the weekend, and we understand that things come up. But to only have two tanks puts us in a precarious situation in case something impacts them. Our tanks sacrificed concerts, vacation time, and other activities just to ensure that we could raid. Personally, I don’t want them to make a tough decision like that on a recurring level. There are so many guilds out there that have folded and ceased due to a lack of raiders and I don’t ever want that to be the reason why we stop. It’s my role as a recruiter to make sure we’re never in that position and that if we decide not to raid, it’s because it’s a holiday. Everyone needs the away time to reset and reenergize themselves or have a date night or self care weekend. I respect tanks, and I understand the high pressure that comes with it. It is not an easy role to play and progress with.

It’s another thing to quit the guild with no notice, but to do it on a raid night is just blatant disrespect. If you’re feeling miserable and awful about the raid team you’re in, maybe talk to an officer or the guild leader for an honest conversation about what you’re feeling and why. Is it something that was said? Is the raid atmosphere different? It’s okay to feel insecure, but how a real team works is by collectively talking about the problem and discovering if there is a solution. If nothing’s working, then separation can be discussed without burning bridges. We’ve had players who were with the roster years ago and left to take a break or play with their friends and then when an opportunity came up, they returned. We’ve had trials come in only to realize that this was way beyond their comfort level and needed some more seasoning in other less strict teams before they came back after they received additional experience. This is why I stopped trying to get close to and have lasting friendships with raiders on the team. I get hurt way too much, and I can’t do that anymore. Never again. I’ll help the team do keys and other raid-relevant activities, but I’m done outside of that. I can go back to Deep Rock Galactic Survivor or jumping into Helldivers.

We have an immediate tank vacancy, and I’m looking to pick up another CE oriented tank for the Fated season and for the next expansion. I’m also looking to sign an Aug Evoker (with a Preservation offspec) along with either a Mistweaver or a Resto Shaman. You can find out more about us here. Our plans for Fated are to focus just on Fyrakk clears. We might look back at some of the other instances, but the priority remains on the mount.

Mythic Fyrakk Cleared: Dragonflight CE Complete!

It’s finally done! Fyrakk has been defeated and the Dragon Isles are once again safe! Death Jesters finishes Realm 8th (US 242). Our expansion tier finishes showed growth and improvement across each raid instance:

InstanceUS RankServer Rank
Vault of the Incarnates36314
Aberrus3009
Amirdrassil2428
I did feel like the odds were stacked against us when we entered Dragonflight seeing as we had primarily been an AotC guild when Shadowlands finished. We only finished half of Mythic in Sepulcher. That feeling rose up again after we cleared Aberrus and we lost a significant amount of players from that roster. I thought we would have finished further back outside of the top 300 US spot, but I was pleasantly surprised. We had a few new first time CE’s at the end of it so I’m thrilled for those guys. Here’s the final few seconds before the kill via Twitch.

https://clips.twitch.tv/OutstandingShinyLaptopNotATK-DNdsZZgXyyzKuBOJ

So what now?

Our plan is to continue farming mounts until everyone on the team gets one. We have a systemin place for determining the mount order distribution. It’s either that, or we completely random roll it every time. I’ll have a future post on this because I can see how everyone would have different opinions on how mounts get distributed and what’s fair. Even with Fated coming out soon, I think our plan is to continue our focus on Amirdrassil until our mounts are complete. Though if we happen to clera and use the skip early, we can revisit the other older raids. Rumour has it there won’t be one rotating fated raid every week this time around. I’m looking ofrward to seeing what this new season looks like.

Let’s talk about Fyrakk because some of these phases are intense.

  • Communication during Mythic soak drops are absolutely critical. We had a few early wipes if they were missed. Always communicate left, mid, right for drop offs to minimize that overlap. At this level, everyone has to be vocal since we’re not all psychic.
  • Intermission orbs is where we did a lot of our learning. Immunities were assigned towards the end of it, and anyone who didn’t have one needed to say that someone else could cover it at the end.
  • Phase 2 cages seem finicky. There were a few times where some players that should’ve been freed weren’t even though they appeared well within the graphic.
  • Phase 3 was the home stretch. Our tanks picked up and held their corrupted seeds the entire time. We also burned two of Amirdrassil’s seeds right away with the first breath to minimize the chance of a fourth seed detonating and jeopardizing the raid later. We had more than enough damage to push by using just three sets of seeds.

Full Kill Video

That’s our kill video from our Mage’s perspective

Anyway, that’s it for us! We get to relax a bit and try out new games (like Helldivers and Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor). I’ll still be recruiting for the team heading into Fated and Season 4. Current class needs:

  • Tank (Maybe a Prot Paladin)
  • Evoker (Augmentation)
  • Demon Hunter (Havoc)

Check us out and apply if you’re interested!

Fyrakk Progression Begins

Yeesh. I haven’t written a post in a month and a half. The stress from work has been taking a toll, and I haven’t been able to keep up. Not only that, my practice time has gone down because I’ve lost some of that motivation. It’s really hard to focus and practice without a private teacher.

Right, but aside from that, Amirdrassil progression is still ongoing. I’ve been resting on the bench ever since Smolderon was defeated. We managed to take down Tindral in about 320 pulls (or 242 if you believe Raider IO). Apparently, that’s quite a feat, especially with some guilds going up to 750+ pulls and then disbanding. It’s received a few more nerfs since then to the HP pool which lets teams with high DPS skip some of the more damaging overlaps towards the end of the encounter. But ugh, the amount of pass fail mechanics in there is insane. We had to really math out when DPS cooldowns were to be used and ask for individual spec changes (from an AoE focus to single target focus) as we were getting through because it wasn’t as needed once our flyers were getting better at dive-bombing roots.

We’ve since started progressing on Fyrakk and I’m on the sidelines but helping with various clipping duties on stream if we need to analyze any wipe causes or catch positional errors. There’s been some Weak Aura issues early on that led to problems with consistency during the first intermission with the orb assignments and everything. We’ve been using Northern Sky’s weak aura set for it but even though we assign one player to the right, sometimes it tells them to go to an orb on the left and they have to haul over there. Our best pull so far has been 53% and it still takes a while to get back there. I notice most of our real progression tends to be on Saturday as Friday is everyone relearning how to play the encounter again.

I’ve also noticed communication has been lazy at times especially when we need everyone to telegraph where they’re standing for their circle drops (usually it’s a left, middle, right). If no one says anything and they stack on top of each other, it’s a death. I can’t believe we’re nearing the end of the tier, and we still have a handful of people who are mic shy. I don’t know what I can do to instill on them that they need to say something. It’s been a process. I’ve also been worried about our tanks, as I can see some of their frustrations visibly boiling up to the surface because they keep getting asked to change things up or modify their movement and their Fyrakk placement.

“Guys, you told us to move <this> and we did it, and now you want us to change it?”

That’s kind of the point. As leaders, the first idea isn’t always going to work. We have to adapt to what’s in front of us, and sometimes new information comes to light that requires a change. I’ll pick on the tanks, but in a case where corrections have to be made, it’s not always their fault. Tanks are high pressure roles and they’ll absolutely carry the brunt of the feedback but that only goes to show how key their positioning and movement is. When tanks are asked to make changes after what could be perceived as unfair criticism, it’s almost one of three things:

  1. The tank executed the movement incorrectly.
  2. The intended movement or strategy wasn’t communicated properly.
  3. Both the tank executed and the idea was clearly stated, but the result didn’t quite pan out.

It happens to us healers as well. We get so used to commiting cooldowns and positioning during a specific part of the encounter but then we have to change it up because it’s no longer needed in that spot or we need it for some other far more dangerous situation that’s about to happen later. I can sympathize a bit that strategies always change, but as CE raiders, we have to be in a position to adapt to situations. It isn’t until we get to the final stages of the last phase that we can finally lock everything in and say there’s nothing else we need to do other than take down the boss. So I don’t really know what I can do to help assuage them. It might just be stemming from weeks of buildup and the toll from constant progression extensions from Smolderon, to Tinderal, and now Fyrakk. We’re getting there, but we need to find some ways to manage our mental fortitude as a unit.

As for recruiting, we don’t have any hard lookout requirements, but we’re just passively scouting for a tank and maybe another healer. Range DPS are always welcome to check us out. We’ve picked up a new Ret Paladin and Rogue lately but we’ve essentially locked our Fyrakk roster. No one new is going to be getting time in until reclears. So if you’re interested, check out our Raider IO page and you can apply from there.

7/9 Mythic Amirdrassil Recap

We did it! On exactly 100 pulls, we managed to smash Smolderon back into the ground. Progress on Smolderon started in earnest during the first weekend of 2024. We still had a few players who were away and missing some key pieces. Much of our work on the first night was getting accustomed to handling orbs and both the Weak Aura and the macro. For us, we’ve been using the Northern Sky ones for Amirdrassil with the below macro for orb handling:

/run WeakAuras.ScanEvents(“NS_PA_MACRO”, true)

I had a really rough Friday night this past week with a lot of deaths. Nothing seemed to go right (or left) for me when they needed to. I was asked to pick up a speed enchant for my boots, but with natural 7% speed (My Pips trinket has a speed bonus on it), I felt the extra stamina enchant on my boots remained the better choice to help buy me extra time to live against the various ticking damage throughout the fight.

Spatial Paradox from Evokers are amazing here. Being able to move around while channelling Divine Hymn with tornados flying in my direction was a big bonus. We had to incorporate Paradox into the cooldown setup.

Here’s the video below! I had two deaths in there. One was from a tornado that caught me off guard, and I just lost track of it. The last one was a gate back that I completely forgot about. Both were just mental lapses. Ultimately, we were able to secure the win, and now we move on to a post-nerf Tindral.

By the way, we’re still recruiting for our final push into the last bosses of Amirdrassil! What we’re looking for:

  • Rogue
  • Disc Priest
  • Demon Hunter
  • Any amazing DPS

Come check us out!