All Stories

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!

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.