This was another great week for both raid teams! Our pulls on Broodtwister and on Queen had as much variance as the weather in Vancouver. A series of nerfs were announced specifically on Queen which will go a long way to help out teams who still have consistency issues on that phase 1. We’re something like four weeks into the raid season now, and everything’s moving forward as expected.
- Broodtwister Progression: My efforts here continued to be stymied by performance related issues and FPS loss. This mostly happens during egg pops when my frame rate drops so much and it’s a wonder I didn’t die as often considering I was top 5 in swirly damage taken (but I didn’t die). I had to play around that by pre-moving and applying defensives early on to buy myself as much time as possible while casting what Heal bombs I can. We did make some serious progression through the 2.1 egg set. The first eggs in the second part of the room always gave us a lot of trouble because we couldn’t keep the raid sustained through it but we had a few strong attempts where we moved some cooldowns around to help. I delayed my Apotheosis to that set as well, and made sure Halo was ready to go around then too. I took over our Evoker’s Time Spiral for Divine Hymn so I could continue moving around while casting. We were rewarded with a couple of looks into phase 3. We’re at the point now where Broodtwister is now in kill range for this week.
- Lightweaver: Speaking of struggles, this Lightweaver style of healing continues to be a problem. I’m not satisfied with my ratio of Flash Heal to Heal. I installed some Weak Auras to help. My partner Holy Priest on the team got so fed up that she installed an Air Horn Weakaura that blasts out her speakers whenever she’s sequencing her spells incorrectly. I’m not there yet because I’m not prepared to give up my sanity. Even with the empowered, and sped up Heal, I think my haste is too low (about 6%) so it seems like I can’t get those spells out enough which means I’m defaulting to Flash Heal because of the perception that I need to get faster healing out to wipe as many absorbs as possible.
- Last Call Progression: For the Last Call club, we made some big strides. Our raid team on the weekend was at around 22 players and we didn’t have a Warlock. We’re still looking for one of those, but the team was determined to not let that stop them. Our second time entering phase 3 on Queen Ansurek saw us wipe at 5% and it was then we knew that we had it in the bag. The next few pulls we moved a few raid cooldowns back (like Spirit Link) so we had to get accustomed to that new configuration but it helped greatly on certain ability combinations on phase 2. Sure enough, a few pulls later, the Queen was defeated and we squeaked in a kill on our 50th pull securing AotC. We had 30 minutes left in raid and we could’ve called it early, but I wanted the team to get a few looks on Mythic. We quickly zoned out and back in while I sat myself and watched the stream. My intent here was to get the team used to the soaks since we have to split the group in 2. Ideally, we’d have Warlock gates deployed here to help with that, but we don’t, so we will need to scheme up a Warlock-less strategy which is absolutely possible. We also need to review and look at talent changes to help address AoE during intermission since those bugs are tough and didn’t seem like they were going down much at all.
- Expectation setting: We’ve modified and changed up our expectations since a good portion of the team is still missing enchants and sockets. Some of them aren’t even aware that Jewelcrafter’s Magnificent Settings are even a thing, much less that two of them can be equipped per jewellery item. I’ve given the team a week to start making progress towards that. Starting next week, we’re also going to begin mandating at least one Mythic 10 key to help progress their vault options. Since we’re on a limited schedule, we also need to plan out what bosses to clear on normal and heroic. We’re still scheduling the last two bosses on normal, but we’re at the point where we can start phasing that out soon. Even some of the heroic bosses aren’t as necessary anymore, but will still maintain that for the next week at least while we continue to evaluate.
- Preparation and Time: I need to make a better effort on time management with the team. We didn’t start our first pull this week until 20 minutes into our raid time. The first few minutes had people struggling on getting th eir loot wishlists in place and installed on WoW Audit. We’ve had the whole week for players to get their lists in, so I’m quite irritated that players waited until the very last minute into raid to ask these questions and get them in. That being said, I could’ve done a better job reviewing the list and manually harassing players to get their submissions in ahead of time if their names were missing.
All that said, solid week for both teams and we’re moving forward onwards and upwards. No recruiting needs for DJs at this time, but we’re still looking for a few players on Last Call (Change that dropdown to Last Call).