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Matt’s Notebook: 4/8 Mythic with Forgeweaver Cleared!

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This post got off to a late start this week. Largely because much of my time was spent on recruiting and interviewing players. It’s also the first week of classes, so I’ve had to deal with that for work.

  • After a soul-crushing wipe with 6 million health left on Forgeweaver, we managed to clear it in Death Jesters about an hour later after that fateful wipe. Lots of coordination required here, including DPS placement to really maximize that multi-target damage. The next step is Fractillus before we drop back to Soul Hunters. Looks like I’m drawing into the lineup for Soul Hunters. I’l have to start looking into that one closer as it seems to be more of an endurance encounter than anything else.
  • Over in Last Call, we’ve passed a few trials and also released a few trials. We’re onto the next round of new players with the addition of two healers to help bolster our healing room. I wasn’t exactly happy during our first night on Plexus Sentinel. An hour later, with slow progress, I really wanted to get it down, and we went from 4 healers to 5 healers to really work on keeping the raid healthy. It took a bit longer as a result to get shields down and everything. Then we moved on up to Soulbinder and were able to clear that within a few pulls. I forgot to update our raid plan maps so our placements were slightly off, and I had to run the team through it real quick. Last thing I want to add is a Paladin who can play both Ret and Holy.
  • This week, our goal is to clear Loom’ithar and get some pull info on Forgeweaver. I worry we’re going to reach my limits when it comes to the planning of CDs, groups, and CC usages. I might need to get some additional help with it here.

Let’s have a great week!

Matt’s Notebook: 3/8 Mythic in DJs!

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Productive week 2 for both of my teams. It’s also been crazy hot outside, and I’ve just been raiding in sauna-like conditions.

  • Death Jesters crushes three mythic bosses this week. Loom’ithar took a bit longer as we were wrestling with the final phase. I was surprised at the simplicity of both Plexus and Soulbinder. They didn’t take us more than a couple of pulls each.
  • DJs is looking to add another ranged DPS. We tried out a new Death Knight last week, but we just have too much in melee right now that it makes it difficult to add anymore melee classes into the roster.
  • In Last Call we made some great strides. We cleared our previous week’s progression in a day, which gave us more time to work on Nexus King and Dimensius. Nexus King Saladbar took us extra shots, and I had to readjust our placements of the stars.
  • We’re still trying to optimize our timing when it comes to loot distribution. We used to loot as we go, but some items took up more discussion than others, which led to dead time while waiting. Then we tried a different method where we would scoop up all the heroic loot drops and hold it until there were about 20 minutes left in the raid before distributing it then. That still took us around 30 minutes. This is a process that should get faster over time. I prefer this method of waiting to the end because, realistically, we don’t need that loot to help us kill the first six bosses. Plus, knowing the entire pool of drops available, we can make a more educated decision when it comes to completing set bonuses (especially with non-set pieces and catalyst charges), distributing trinkets, and pairing any weapon and trinket combinations together.
  • We did not have a good on Dimensius progression. We saw Phase 3 a handful of times, but didn’t really get enough pulls into it. We had one really healthy pull with almost everyone alive (one of our Evokers was dead), but we seemed to have rotted out mostly in phase 3 due to a handful of positioning issues, such as players not playing the rings properly, or getting dragged through Dimensius (or a Black Hole).
  • The biggest factor that stood out to me was that I felt our healing wasn’t where it needed to be. A few struggles were had in phase one just keeping the different sides alive. I had to ask one of our DPS players to switch to a healing role to help stabilize it. I just knew we were going to lose a healer somewhere between phase 2 and 3, and this was my way to hedge and keep an extra healer around. I think last night definitely exposed our healers significantly. I need to look at moving them around (I had two on one side, and three on the other, and it was the side with three healers that seemed to struggle with deaths). I’ve got to find another one to add. I am not happy about that, and I need to find a way to fix it.
  • I could have done a better job of trimming the raid size to make it easier. 5 healers with 25 players might’ve been too much of a stretch, and our bottom-end damage was too low. This would’ve helped accelerate our Nexus King and Dimensius progression. I ended up dropping one DPS player and switching another to healing, but that might’ve been too little too late. I actually lost some sleep over this, as I kept second-guessing my decisions after the raid last night, knowing it cost us a week, ahead of the Curve. I have to be more aggressive with raid size trimming, especially if I feel it’s going to help us progress. It sucks for the players who get sat. I’ve been there, and it’s an awful feeling, but it just makes the fight easier for reclears on the following week. Instead, I tried to do the “right” thing by hoping for a team victory with everyone involved and it was insurmountable. Even in DJs on our first AotC week, we ended up sitting some of our helpers and weaker players to get Dimensius. Now, though, we have a 3% buff entering this week, plus assorted upgrades from the vault, and a Catalyst token.
  • Is it time to take Normal off the rotation? It seems like the upgrades there are getting fewer. It takes us about an hour to cut through normal. I’m of the opinion that the hour is better spent on learning and on progression because while the gear upgrades help, the repetitions on the boss are much more valuable.

Still a lot of work to do for this week. Good luck in your vaults!

Matt’s Notebook: Bumpy Reclears

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Why are reclears so damn hard? Mug’zee took us all night!

We switched to a 3 minute Mug’zee strategy. We had enough firepower to overwhelm and skip the 3 Gaol set altogether.

We had to bring in a DJ’s alt because of some absences and technical difficulties. One player whose power went out earlier than our tank’s internet went down. We ended up killing Mug’zee on the last pull. I felt it shouldn’t’ve taken that long. We were still making some questionable mistakes, and these are mistakes I don’t want to see. These are things like hitting the wrong button, or being out of position, or not knowing where front left and front right are on the 4 Gaolset despite having the diagrams shared ahead of time. It’s people panicking and not understanding their assignments. We had a Paladin who hadn’t done the mine pops before, so that took some learning with the cadence of the bomb pops.

Healing wasn’t ideal as I didn’t have enough externals for the second rocket target, so sometimes they would die if they didn’t have a personal defence available. I know we ended up killing it in the last pull of the night, but we have to be better. Even some of our veteran players who did kill it with us the first time made some mistakes too. It’s a struggle for me to get things through and get them to stick in people’s minds. There’s a lot of stuff going on everywhere, but I try to keep it simple, even if it isn’t easy. The reclear nights have really exposed the inconsistency and the overall skill ceiling that players have.

This made me worried about how our Gallywix reclear is going to be like. Thankfully, yesterday night we were able to get cleared within 15 pulls. We had some new people who hadn’t killed it with us but learned alongside us as well. Had to get a new bomber assigned, which meant a lot of new and unfamiliar roles for a few players.

We’re still in the process of finalizing our roster and the last few pieces I need are a strong healer and a DPS Death Knight to round out our roster for next season.

Matt’s Notebook: Notes from the Frontline

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Now that we’re officially entering summer, all eyes are on the upcoming raid. Over in Death Jesters, we spent part of our raid night diving into PTR testing and previewing boss mechanics for the new tier. If you missed it, check out the full preview post here.

  • Last Call had a heartbreaking 1.3% wipe on Gallywix last night due to a missed interrupt (on a VIP, no less). I’ll take full ownership of that one. Originally, I was assigned to interrupt the edge add and it was working fine. But we decided to try having a Warlock pet handle it instead to align with our range DPS ad assignments. In hindsight, that swap was unnecessary. I’m floating left side anyway and saving Ascendance for that group. Should’ve just kept things simple.
  • I’ve been wrestling with whether I’m micromanaging too much or not giving players the freedom to make their own judgment calls. We tend to thrive on heavily scripted fights (Sprocketmonger comes to mind), but really stumble when a boss demands individual decision-making and fast adaptation (like Stix, or now Gallywix). Watching players get knocked out of soaks or misstep simple mechanics is rough. It’s not just performance disappointment, but it’s realizing that not everyone has years of CE raiding reps under their belt, and this might be their first time at this level.
  • Honestly, I might be more frustrated with myself than anything else. Am I communicating the plan clearly enough? Am I making the strategic vision obvious to the team? Smart players don’t always need to be told what to do every second, but they do need to understand why. If we get that right, they can often figure out the how on their own. Right now, it takes us about 20 pulls to bake a mechanic in. I’d love to bring that number closer to 10. For comparison, DJs usually lock things in under 5.
  • Offseason planning is on hold until we clear Gallywix. I want a clear view of where we stand before evaluating roster changes and free agent targets. That said, we’ll likely backload raid nights to farm later bosses and get people their mounts and achievements, with earlier boss cleanup afterward. We’ve already got a few strong recruits waiting in the wings, especially from teams that couldn’t finish out the season or players looking to move up.
  • Last but not least, another raid-wide buff drops today, and we’re seeing an upgrade to the D.I.S.C. belt. That extra push might just be the edge we need to skip the fourth set of adds and finally bring down Gallywix once and for all.

Crests and Flightstones Need to be Alt Friendly

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With the upcoming The War Within expansion for World of Warcraft, we’re getting some cool new features like Warbands and reputation consolidation (at the cost of Human Diplomacy, sadly). But if we really want to make it easier and more fun to play with our alts, we need to take another look at how we gear them up. Right now, the system for Crests and Flightstones is a massive pain, especially if you’re trying to gear multiple characters.

The Current Problem

I’ve got a Priest and a Shaman both sitting at item level 527, which is pretty close to max (barring some vault upgrades). But when I think about levelling up my Paladin, Mage, and Evoker, it feels like an insurmountable grind. Running endless dungeons to collect Crests just isn’t appealing. To make things worse, Crests and Flightstones can’t be sent to your other characters, even though other in-game currencies can in TWW. This really slows down progress for alts.

Some Ideas to Fix This

Discounted Upgrade Crests and Stones

A great solution would be to offer discounted upgrades for Crests and Flightstones for alts. We already have something similar for gear upgrades. For example, if you get a new belt, you can upgrade the ilvl of it to match your current belt at a cheaper rate (no Crests, just Flightstones).

Why not extend this to our alts?

Imagine if once your main character fully upgrades their gear set to a certain level, like with the The Awakened Aspects achievement, your alts could then upgrade their gear more cheaply. This would reward your hard work and make gearing up alts a lot less painful.

Exchange Rates for Crests and Flightstones

Another idea is to let players buy Crests and Flightstones for their alts using an exchange system. Many of us have loads of Crests and Flightstones just sitting there unused on our main characters. I think my Priest has like 450 Aspect Crests just collecting dust. If we could trade them at, say, a 3:1 ratio, it would make those extra resources useful again. This way, we wouldn’t have to grind so much to gear up our alts.

Better Boss Drops and Incentives

On a completely different note, we also need to talk about raid rewards. Right now, the last two bosses in any raid drop the same level Crests as the earlier bosses in the instance. But bosses like Raszageth, Echo of Neltharion, and Sarkareth are a lot tougher. In Heroic raids, for example, it would make sense for these bosses to drop higher-level Crests like Aspect Crests instead of just Wyrm Crests.

This change could also keep players interested in completing entire raids. Right now, when I join pickup raids, I notice many players quit after getting their weekly vault rewards from the first six or so bosses. If the final bosses offered better rewards, more players might stick around to finish the raid or decide to give it a few pulls just to see.

Wrapping It Up

This expansion is a perfect chance for Blizzard to make the game more friendly for players with alts. By adding discounted upgrades and an exchange system for Crests and Flightstones, the game could become a lot more enjoyable for those of us who like to play multiple characters. Not only that, by tweaking raid rewards to match the difficulty of bosses, Blizzard could keep more players engaged throughout the whole raid. We can do it with the power of… uh, friendship!

In the meantime, I’m going back to chain-running dungeons to try to max out my Paladin before expansion launch.