Hello to the late edition of Matt’s Misplays! It’s getting more and more difficult to find funny highlights and clips. I’m not sure if it’s because we’re playing better as aunit or if it’s because people keep making the same misplays and I don’t want to feature the same thing every week. I trust everyone had an enjoyable early access Diablo 4 weekend. I’ve only started playing myself on a Barbarian amongst a sea of Necromancers that happens to be my guild.
Quick thoughts
- The gearing system: Is it too fast? I’ve found myself at 441 ilvl on both Priests and my Elemental Shaman. My Ret Paladin is at 436 and my Evoker’s at 432. I’ll have more thoughts on this later, but something to ponder as we’re about 5 weeks into Aberrus and the Catalyst isn’t even open yet even though we’re a week away.
- Experiments: Secured my first kill on Experiments this past weekend. Honestly, it sucks and is not fun. The Mass Dispels are critical to remove the debuffs and having two Priests handle that is almost a requirement.
- Rashok continues: Unfortunately, we did not secure the kill this weekend. We got a few solid looks under 20% but we’re short DPS to get over the top. Hoping this week’s vault upgrades will get it done.
- Morning Mythic bugs: Today was a strange morning as we all opened our vaults to keys with no affixes. Honestly, it’s nice to roll into a naturally high key dungeon without any extra affixes or worry about Tyrannical or Fortified and see how much everything hits harder or lives longer as is.
- Recruiting: No change here. Still looking to add a Warrior, Death Knight, Balance Druid, or any other big-time DPS player to help reinforce us for the summer. Come check us out.
On to the misplays!
Imagine this. You’re trialling for a new guild and it’s your first day of raid. On the very first pull of Rashok, you get targeted with a Leap and inadvertently Disengage backwards away from the intended direction to go. Embarrassing right? This happened to our newest Hunter and they absolutely got roasted for it but they took it in stride. It did feel a little laggy over the weekend. I blame all the Diablo 4 players.
Everybody has to be prepared to soak a puddle. It is everyone’s job to look around and make sure there’s coverage. Not a misplay, but I just wanted to highlight the speed of this particular Panda. Watch as he splits the initial lava balls that come through and turns around to speed back into the left soak. Two players happened to have gone to the right and double-soaked that one. This pull could have ended badly.
There are two things wrong in this clip of Kazz. We’ve altered our strategy to spread out and utilize more of the room, but aside from that, the breath mechanic does not change in any of the difficulties. You can see boss timers for abilities and there are many indicators and telegraphs that breaths are incoming. At this level of raiding, you cannot tunnel vision and greed your spells because there is always a chance you’ll get punished for it which is what happened here. Our poor Warlock gets burnt to a crisp (extra crispy, even). On the other hand, I was in a good position and was situationally aware enough to recognize that Kazz was about to breathe fire and I tracked the direction that breath was going. I easily could have fished them out with a Life Grip but I simply chose not to. I should have though. I hate having to be in a position where I have to bail people out of easy situations like this because it builds bad habits on their part. Your boss timers should be somewhere prominent on your screen that you can quickly glance at to see what’s coming up next and try to prepare for it, like the rearview mirror on your car. If you find yourself being blind to timers or not checking them regularly, that’s a sign that you need to reposition it to somewhere more in your peripheral vision so that you can catch it. I’ve seen some players (healers) put it above their raid frames. I’m unsure where DPS would place them other than offset or maybe above their class HUD (if they use any).
Speaking of Panda blunders, watch what happens here. It’s quite subtle but makes a big difference. On Experiments, when bombs get dispelled they spawn and generate mobs that need to be killed. Our strategy involves having all affected players stand on circle marker before Mass Dispel gets cast. I’m the one dispelling here. As the time was coming up to get in position for Dispel, there were two things that crossed my mind:
- Favouring speed: Get in position (a slightly loose stack) first to stack, then Dispel
- Favouring position: Get directly on the mark even if it means taking an extra second or two before casting Dispel
The mistake here is that I went with option 1. You’ll notice that I wasn’t directly stacked on the Diamond or the Circle marks that came in after. I was worried about being too slow or not getting Dispel off earlier in time so that I didn’t go all the way in. The consequence here is that when I did cast Mass Dispel, the AoE circle that I dropped extended closer towards the rest of the raid forcing the other two raiders to either veer off or fight that much harder and use a defensive to make it through without being hit. I learned that the timing wasn’t as important. Another second or two with the debuff wasn’t going to impact us seriously, but my being off position would have snowballed a bad situation into a worse one.
That’s all for this week! Enjoy Diablo 4, everybody!