Welcome back! It’s been an exciting weekend of raiding for both teams with some more serious progression and two new boss kills total for both of my raid teams. Here’s the latest update:
- Death Jesters came so close to getting Sprocketmonger Lockenstock before we finally crushed it on our 101st pull. It’s definitely a step up on the difficulty curve due to the orchestrated choreography required with the red and blue side mechanics. Unlike last season’s Silken Court, the sides are randomly shuffled throughout the fight, so players need to time their movements accordingly. The harder overlap is later in the fight with the wide black beams and the magnet pull at the same time. I had to really fight to cast and tap my movement keys to maintain control.
- Now that we’re onto One Armed Bandit, I’m effectively going to be on the bench for the rest of the tier. My Holy Priest is sadly not in the best spot to get included in any of the remaining progression bosses. With Sprocketmonger defeated, the decision has been made to extend until the rest of the instance is cleared. Our first day on One Armed Bandit saw our best pull at 64%. One of our hunters is also moving on from Death Jesters just due to lack of playtime. We’ve got an opening for some range or melee DPS, so feel free to apply!
- One of the side benefits of raiding in multiple teams is that I can still get some reps in on the encounter as a whole and understand what’s going on. Not to be outdone, Last Call also moved forward and defeated Rik Reverb and now we’re moving on up to challenge Stix Bunkjunker. Unlike Death Jesters, we modified our strategy here to go with 3 tanks and 3 healers instead to help trivialize amp management. We’re still looking for range DPS to help augment the team. Come check us out!
- I had to bark at the team during the night. We had players dying to the Sparkblast Ignition (the orange circles that appear when barrels spawn). This was happening on the first barrel set. I got extremely frustrated, and I had to let the team have it, saying that we were on pull count 50 at this point and dying to a visible orange circle on the ground within the first minute of the fight is unacceptable, is not becoming of a team with Cutting Edge aspirations. I wiped it right there after two deaths to them and said we go again. We all expect better play from each other. Sure enough, the team tightened itself up and we killed it within 3 pulls.
- In other non-Warcraft news, I have my spring concert coming up this weekend! I won’t be around for the first half of my raid as I’ll be on stage. My setlist includes Pirates of the Caribbean and Gladiator. I’m sure it’ll be fun but I did admit I’ve lost a lot of motivation for this season. It’s hard to stay motivated when you’re only playing half the pieces that the rest of the ensemble is doing. After this, we enter our summer season, and I’m on the bench for that one too, since we’ll be playing at a smaller stage. The junior strings won’t be performing there just due to the complexity of the setlist. I’ll still attend rehearsals and continue taking lessons. Sometimes you have to suffer a bit in the short term for the eventual payoff of being able to play the cooler, fun stuff later (like the Halo theme). I feel like I still made some major progress this term. I’ve gotten better in string changes and bow control, at least (and hopefully I don’t squeak as much).