Welcome back to another week of Matt’s Misplays! We progressed further into Aberrus this week after solving Experiments. This puts us at 4/9 Mythic and now the encounters get harder as we put in some work on Rashok. Our best work was just under 30%.
- Kazzara strategy change: We modified our approach to Kazz. Instead of slowly trying to maneuver the dragon around the room, we opted to keep Kazz in the center and drop pools off to half the room until it was filled before switching to the opposite side and filling up that area. We relied more on damage and bruteforce here instead of finesse which made the kill much more smoother.
- Experiments kill: Not sure what changed but we polished this one off in a few pulls. The critical part of the encounter is the last phase with both the bomb and dispel management. It’s a balance of knowing when to dispel and kill the ads.
- Rashok begins: I’d say this is the big healer check that raids will encounter the first time in. So many balls of fire have to be dodged. Just for fun, consider chain running Uldaman to get practice on evading that stuff but there’s so much to move around that you really have to position and plan heals ahead of time. There are also orbs (Shadowflame Orb) where targeted Searing Slam players must go to. Leap eliminates an Orb which means less damage we take and less healing absorbs to power through.
- Recruiting continues: Summer is coming and it is rearing it’s head. We’ve already lost a few players due to summer schedules and we’re looking to reinforce our roster. To be specific, we’re actively looking for DPS Warriors, Death Knights, Balance Druid, and a Mage. Check us out!
Let’s move on, shall we?
Took me a while to catch ’em, but we have our first tank blunder! Then again, it’s not entirely their fault. Rashok is a bit of a pain to maneuver and move around. We had just finished dealing with the third Leap and are trying to corral the boss into the middle. But he just decides to stop and then we all combust as a result from the Ancient Fury that gets cast to full. Whooooops! Someone cue that Benny Hill, please!
If you look closely, there are actually not one but two blunders being committed here. The major obvious one is the missed Leap. You see those floating orbs on the left and on the bottom right? One of the Searing Slams must get placed there for Rashok to jump on and neutralize it. This was early on in our pulls and our poor Evoker was still operating on muscle memory and habit in trying to take it out of the raid. Big oomph there! The second misplay is a bit more subtle. If you watch my Priest movement at the bottom, you can see that there’s a small lava wave that comes out and I end up running with it instead of away from it subsequently forcing me to evolve into my angel form. As a Panda Priest, I have practically zero mobility or speed so why I decided to attempt to outrace it is beyond me. Dodge these by strafing east-west instead of north-south along with the lava wave.
Not to be outdone by our favourite Evoker, our Warrior decides to actually click off his Intellect buff in an effort to show them who’s better! He gets targeted with Searing Slam and you can see him start cutting towards the orb on the left before Heroic Leaping away from it. I was so stunned that you can see my Prayer of Mending reminder is still up and I just gave up on the pull because I couldn’t believe what I saw and started cracking up. This is hands down my favourite clip of the week.
What an absolute donut of a Warrior though.
I can’t not hear Space Jam whenever I see this clip. Come on and SLAM! And welcome to the JAM! I had a feeling someone was going to make a blunder like this one because they’re so focused on getting the Slam to the right place that they forget that the Slam can’t touch an existing orb on the ground otherwise it just lethals the whole raid like in this example. Thankfully, this was the only such wipe of the night.
For this last one, if you look up the definition of “greedy” in the dictionary, you’ll end up with this clip. Here we are in heroic Sarkareth. Our resident Panda is downstairs gobbling up noodle shaped objects. He has 9 stacks and has seconds to get out. Why not go for 10 right? Except he can’t, because he’s a Priest and he’s super slow. He grabs the 10th (and 11th because not paying attention), and beelines it to portal 2 and promptly gets winked out of existence before even reaching portal 3. The lesson here is you don’t need 10 stacks of the Haste buff. You can get away with anywhere between 5 to 8 stacks as long as you exit the zone in time and don’t die the way this absolute wagon wheel of a Priest did. Someone definitely isn’t getting bubble tea for a week.
Do. Not. Be. Greedy.
Play it safe!
That’s it for the week and I trust you learned something from the various whoopsies shown above! We’re mortal too!