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We finished off this week with some mixed progression.

• In Death Jester’s, we did not secure the Nexus King kill as I hoped we would. With a few key DPS players out, we just couldn’t get through or over the top. This encounter really exposed some of the shortcomings that our team had from a personal awareness and responsibility standpoint. Our best was 12% remaining with a minute left towards the enrage and one of our star killers did not get to the right position which cost us the kill. The rest of the night was mired in various personal errors. It was a pretty disappointing night and we had hoped to kill it before the Hall of Fame nerfs arrived but it was too late. With the nerfs and some of our personnel back, we should be able to crush it quickly and move onto Dimensius this week. We committed two full days to Nexus King, so we didn’t get any reclear loot (although most of us did squeeze in a quick two-boss clear on Mythic).
• Last Call played better this week with the reclear of Forgeweaver, and we secured a new progression kill with Fractillus down. I felt we could’ve killed it earlier, but it took us above average on pull counts (30 pulls compared to under 25). One of our healers is looking to take a step back, so I’m back out on the waiver wire looking for a free agent healer/DPS hybrid to add. Having a Holy/Ret Paladin, or a Preservation/Devastation Evoker would be the preference here. Come apply!
• Legion Remix is out this week! I’m still undecided about what to play in Remix, but I’m leaning towards another Demon Hunter or potentially a Druid. I’ve got a low-level Demon Hunter somewhere, and that will set me up with the new spec coming out in Midnight, but I realized I don’t have any late-game leather wearers right now. I’m still on the fence here.
• Datamined Midnight stuff has also revealed that Shadowlands Timewalking is coming soon! I am not looking forward to Spires of Ascension or Sanguine Depths.
• Outside of WoW, I’ve been playing Diablo again. Season 10’s been enjoyable so far. I’m still leveling my Spiritborn. I think my goal with the game is to just finish the seasonal journey and get to max there before I say I’m done. I wish I could find some people to play Diablo with and party together on some of the endgame stuff especially late night once I wind down from WoW.
• It’s going to be another busy week out there and we have a long maintenance today. Welcome to October!

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!

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.